Relics

by Mary Anna Evans

  ***

  There was a time when a man could get away with saying, “You’re cute when you’re angry,” but that time had passed before Adam was born. He might have said it anyway if Faye had stuck around instead of stalking off to watch her field team dig in the dirt, but God had saved him from his own honest mouth.

  Son, there ain’t no call to tell folks every last thought that runs through your head, his father had said more times than he could count. Maybe he had finally, at the venerable age of thirty-seven, learned to listen to the old man. His father had also warned him not to waste his time on stupid women, when the smart ones were so handy to have around.

  Faye sure looked handy in those olive drab cargo pants, the kind with extra pockets sewn onto the legs at about knee level. All Faye’s pockets looked to be full of things like tools and brushes and measuring tapes. You could go on a spur-of-the-moment picnic with a woman like that. Between the two of you, somebody would have a map or a roll of paper towels stashed in the glove compartment. And if you had need of a bottle opener or a corkscrew, one of you would have a pocketknife that sported the necessary tool.

  He could see that she’d misinterpreted his frustration over having to compete with handsome, rich, and dashing Brent. He’d been trying to tell her that when she’d seen past Brent’s façade, he would be there, but he’d pissed her off with his awkwardness. The lady had not dropped a dainty handkerchief; she had thrown down a gauntlet. When life returned to normal, she’d be waiting for him to ask her out. She had said as much. She didn’t, he had noticed, say that her answer would be “Yes.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Faye was used to the all-out fatigue born of physical labor. Hour after hour of stooping, digging, lifting, and hauling would sap anyone’s endurance. Laboring until the large muscles in her arms and calves and thighs trembled with overwork, then forcing them to work some more, fed her fierce and competitive drive. Other archaeologists were bigger and stronger, but none of them were tougher.

  She sat at the picnic table, digging through a pile of project paperwork and wishing it were a simple, uncomplicated pile of dirt. Keeping up with field notes and time sheets and triplicate acquisition forms made her weary in a way that physical labor never had.

  Elliott, Joe, and Ronya were washing up a big pile of equipment. Their cleanup of Raleigh’s site was, for practical purposes, complete. The backdirt was back in the excavations it had come from, so it technically wasn’t backdirt any more. The site had been restored to a safe condition—nobody would be breaking a leg by stepping in an open hole, and time would send a fresh layer of leaves to cover the disturbed soil.

  Faye was cold sitting out in the open, where the afternoon wind could get at her. She should be working in her office, which had two conveniences that would make her work go easier: a heater and a phone. Some of the university forms required her to provide budget codes, but nobody had seen fit to give her a list of the codes, and she needed to track them down. The lack of cell phone service in the settlement made it impossible to communicate with the world while working in the field.

  Suddenly, her busy hands stopped straightening papers and let them drop to the table. She stared blankly into the distance for a moment, then rose excitedly and looked around. Where was Adam?

  His truck hadn’t moved, but he was nowhere to be seen. She hurried toward the burned-out house. She knew he was drawn to it, despite all the hours he’d spent ferreting out its secrets, and she’d bet money that he was there. If anyone understood obsessive behavior, it was Faye. And there he was, walking up the path.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, which told her that her consternation showed on her face.

  “Jimmie’s cell phone,” she said. “We don’t have to wait for the police to track down whoever it was that called him at the library yesterday afternoon. The answer is in the cell phone’s memory. Was it found?”

  Adam shook his head. “No, there was no phone on the body.”

  “You don’t suppose it dropped out of his pocket when he fell? I remember that his jacket was torn.”

  “Could have. I’m sure the sheriff will send a deputy to look for it. Tell you what, though. It’ll be a nice trick if anybody can find it in that mess of kudzu. I wonder if there’s enough metal in that phone to—”

  “I know somebody who can find it,” Faye said. She took a few steps toward the shed where her crew was working and bellowed, “Joe!”

  Joe’s long-legged lope brought him to her side in seconds. Faye had seen him project the erratic flight of a fluttering bird accurately enough to drop that bird with a stone arrow shot from a handmade bow. Here was a twenty-first century use for his Neolithic talents.

  “Joe, if Jimmie’s cell phone dropped out of his pocket when he fell—”

  “Might’ve dropped out if he hit the tower struts on the way down. Or a tree branch.”

  The thought made Faye cringe. “Either way. Do you think you could find it?”

  “Well, there’s only so many places it could be.”

  Faye looked first at Joe, then at Adam, and said, “Gentlemen. Shall we take a hunting trip?”

  ***

  Joe stood high on a bluff overlooking the Broad River, beneath a mammoth tower, looking for a needle in a kudzu patch. Faye hadn’t said why she wanted him to fetch Jimmie’s cell phone out of the wilderness it might have fallen into, but he’d told her he would try.

  He began his search by standing at the base of the tower, looking toward the spot where Jimmie’s body had landed. He looked up at the tower. It rose like a weapon into the sky, making nature’s trees look squat and soft. In his mind’s eye, he could clearly see the arc Jimmie must have taken, plunging downward like an eagle diving for sunfish. If the phone had fallen straight down, it was only a matter of hunting through the undergrowth around the base of the tower until they found it. But if the phone had bounced off the tower struts or a tree, the search area would be much broader.

  Joe’s chest tightened when he thought of Jimmie’s fatal fall. It sickened him to think that the cell phone, and the information stored in it, was far more likely to have survived its flight. Its hard plastic shell had been designed to shrug off severe impacts in a way that the human body was not.

  He walked to the thicket of loblolly pines where Jimmie was found, a haven of green in the gray winter landscape. He doubted that the phone would have nested in the pines’ high flexible branches. The first branch it struck would have bent under its weight then, like a medieval catapult, flung it in an unpredictable direction, where it might have encountered a second tree limb, and even a third. It would eventually have hit the ground, but finding it would take some time. Having set in his own mind the most likely places where the phone might have landed, Joe divided the area to be canvassed between Faye, Adam, and himself. They began walking the ground, inch by inch.

  Two hours later, dwindling daylight forced them to give up the search and head back to the bunkhouse.

  ***

  The promise of a damp, freezing night sent Faye to Hanahan’s in hopes that Jenny stocked longjohns and flannel pajamas. Laurel went with her, and Faye was glad of the company, especially when the presence of Amanda-Lynne and Irene brought the evening chill right into the store. Faye felt her throat freeze shut. What could she possibly say to them?

  As it turned out, any conversation that Faye or the other sympathetic souls in the store might have offered would have been extraneous, anyway. Amanda-Lynne talked enough for everyone. She chattered about how Charles had been cooped up in the house for weeks because the cold bothered his rheumatism. She confided that she’d be glad when spring came, because it surely was a trial to live with a man who never left the house. She said that she’d left a chicken stewing in the crockpot, since Charles enjoyed chicken soup in the wintertime.

  Faye knew that everyone in earshot was gritting their teeth in anticipation of hearing her speak of Jimmie in the same way. If Amanda-Lynne were
to start musing over which of the colleges fighting over Jimmie should be the lucky one to win him as an entering freshman, Faye knew that her bottled-up tears would overflow. As it turned out, she was able to keep a solid grasp on her composure, because never—not once—did Amanda-Lynne mention her dead son.

  Jenny stemmed the flow of words by turning to Irene, who had stood silent through Amanda-Lynne’s torrent of nonsense. “Have you slept at all, honey?”

  “No, but I’m used to that.”

  Amanda-Lynne chimed in with an explanation that no one needed. “Irene’s mama is real sick, and it’s scrambled her normal day-and-night rhythms. Sometimes she’s up all the night long, and that means Irene’s up, too. She has to be, because if Kiki wakes up and there’s no one to stop her, she’ll wander the woods in her nightgown.”

  “The whole settlement lives in fear that we’ll find Kiki at the bottom of Great Tiger Bluff one morning,” said Jenny with a sigh.

  “Irene gave up her chance to go to college to take care of her mother, you know,” Amanda-Lynne said, putting a hand on the girl’s shoulder.

  There was an awkward silence; even Jenny had nothing to say.

  But Irene stepped smoothly in. “That’s right,” she said, taking Amanda-Lynne’s hand and leading her toward the door, past the stricken bystanders. “I take care of her. And I’ll take care of you now, too.”

  The door closed behind them, leaving the store under a pall of silence.

  Excerpt from an Interview with Irene Montrose, October 30, 2004

  Interviewer: Carmen Martinez, Ph.D.

  CJM: I was looking through a stack of documents that our genealogist gave me, and I couldn’t help noticing your middle name, because it’s so similar to my given name. “Carmo” is beautiful, but I’ve never heard it before. Has it been in your family a long time?

  Irene Montrose: It was my Grandmother Montrose’s first name, and she told me it was her Grandmother Lester’s first name. She said that there’s been a Carmo in her family forever. When I was little, the other kids laughed at my funny middle name, but I’ve always kinda liked it.

  CJM: I do, too. With a name that old, you’ve probably heard family stories about the Sujosa that will make this historian very happy.

  Irene Montrose: I don’t think so. (Interviewer’s note: She holds out her forearm next to mine.) Anyone can see that my personal ancestry’s a little murky. I’m hardly darker than you. Here’s the bottom line: My mother’s white and my father doesn’t talk.

  CJM: People are always surprised at how much they know, once they get started talking. Everyone has memories of their grandparents that are full of hidden treasures.

  Irene Montrose: Grandma and Grandpa Montrose were both dead before I was five. I didn’t know my mother’s family in Alcaskaki either. They never spoke to my mother after she and Daddy ran off. They’re dead now, too, and I’m not even sure when they passed.

  CJM: It’s sad to be cut off from your roots.

  Irene Montrose: I’m not so sure. Seems to me that roots keep you stuck in one place.

  CJM: So your father never talked about his youth?

  Irene Montrose: He used to, before my mother got sick. He was different then. Sometimes, he’d just sit and look at her, like he couldn’t believe how lucky he was. You can’t tell it now, but she used to be so beautiful. When Dr. Harbison told daddy she might die, it nearly killed him. Then he found out how Hepatitis C is transmitted. Mama only had one risk factor, and it wasn’t something Daddy wanted to hear. When he found out her disease was sexually transmitted and she didn’t get it from him, I think it did kill him. He just sits in front of the TV, leaving me to take care of my mother, while he waits for his funeral.

  CJM: None of your relatives talked of the old days?

  Irene Montrose: Well, Amanda-Lynne does. She’s full of tall tales, though you never can tell whether to believe them or not. (Interviewer’s note: Irene finally smiles, and it is apparent that her mother must indeed have been a great beauty. Irene had to get it from somewhere.)

  CJM: Do you remember any of them?

  Irene Montrose: Well, one story in particular comes to mind, since Amanda-Lynne says that it was my grandmother Carmo Montrose that told it to her. Apparently, people in these parts have always held Great Tiger Bluff as a special place. I guess you could even call it sacred. Maybe it goes back to the Indians. Lord knows I’ve found a pile of arrowheads in the woods around there.

  CJM: That certainly suggests that it was an important place, perhaps the site of a town or a favorite place to hunt. But why would you say that the bluff is sacred?

  Irene Montrose: Because they say that the whole earth was created right there, that’s why. The story goes that the whole earth was flooded once, and the water stretched from horizon to horizon, unbroken, except for a single turtle. It was a small turtle, nothing special really, but a muskrat swimming in the water was drawn to it, because there was nothing else solid in sight. He tried to climb up on the turtle’s back, and the turtle was okay with that, but the muskrat didn’t like sitting on its hard, slick shell, so he dived back into the water as deep as he could go.

  CJM: You may be right about this being a Native American tale. The earth diver myth is a famous creation story shared by many tribes.

  Irene Montrose: I thought so. It just has the sound of a story told by someone who lived very close to the earth. Anyway, the muskrat scooped up a big pawful of mud off the bottom of the sea and slapped it on the turtle’s shell, which made it a much more comfortable place for an animal to rest. Before long, he had a lot of company, because all the creatures of the land crawled out of the sea and joined him. They waited there until the water went down and the animals were free to scatter across the earth, but they weren’t ready to go far. They were all drawn to the crater where the muskrat had clawed the mud that saved them right out of the ground.

  CJM: That’s different from any earth diver tale I’ve ever read. It may be original to the Sujosa.

  Irene Montrose (shrugs): Maybe. The torn earth was striped brown and beige and red. As they watched, people walked out of the face of the bluff, and their skin reflected all the colors of the sacred soil. Each newborn human reached down into the green clay at the base of the bluff and they started molding all the trees and plants that bear food. The plant-eating animals were so hungry that they started eating the grasses and leaves as soon as they were made. The meat-eating animals watched them grow fat, then they got their first taste of meat. The people just kept making plants, because that was what they were born to do. Grandmother Carmo said that the Sujosa were meant to be farmers. Sometimes the work is a blessing, and sometimes it’s a curse, but we Sujosa aren’t happy unless our hands are in the dirt, and we aren’t meant to stray far from Great Tiger Bluff.

  CJM: Is that true? Do you think a Sujosa could be happy away from the land? Away from this valley?

  Irene Montrose: I don’t know. As far as I can tell, there aren’t many folks around here happy, as it is. But I’d have liked to give it a try.

  Chapter Nineteen

  As Faye approached the cash register with a set of turkey-red flannel pajamas, but, sadly, no longjohns, she found Dr. Amory waiting for her.

  “I found the reference for the song you gave me,” he said, drawing her aside so that they could talk out of earshot of the folks standing in the checkout line.

  For a moment, she thought that some of her brain cells must already be frozen solid, because she had no idea what he was talking about. “Oh. Oh, yeah,” she said as the memory slowly dawned. “Miss Dovey’s song. You found out where it came from?”

  He failed to suppress a very unprofessorial grin. “I know where it came from. I even know who wrote it, er, wrote them.”

  “What do you mean ‘them’? I only gave you one song.”

  “But it’s really two songs that the Sujosa, over the years, amalgamated into one. Look here.” He drew a sheet of paper, folded togeth
er in quarters, from his pants pocket. “I put Miss Dovey’s song alongside parts of the two old songs that her ballad was drawn from. Her words are on the right in italics.”

  The Kynge’s Ballad

  Henry VIII, prior to 1547 C.E. Miss Dovey’s Song

  Passe tyme with good companye Pass time with good company.

  I love, and shall until I dye; Grudge who will and none deny

  Grugge who wyll, but none deny, So God be pleased, this life will I.

  So God be pleeyd, this lyfe wyll I: I love and shall until I die.

  Song of Songs 1:4

  from the Geneva Bible, 1560 C.E.

  I am blacke, o daughters of Ierusalem, I am black, Jerusalem,

  but comelie, as the frutes of Kedar, Just as the curtains of Saloman.

  and as the curtines of Salomon. I am black, but comely, still,

  I love and shall until I die.

  Apparent amalgamation of A jealous love, but comely, aye.

  The Kynge’s Ballad and I’ll love thee best until I die.

  Song of Songs 1:4, with original Grudge who will, but none deny.

  motif of “a jealous love.” So God be pleased until I die.

  “Henry the Eighth.” Faye murmured. “I wouldn’t have picked him as the writer of moralistic jingles. How could he possibly ‘pass time with good company’ when he had to live with himself?”

  “Good question. But his ballad was apparently one of the greatest hits of the day. A book written in 1548, the year after the king met his maker—”

  “I bet his maker sentenced him to an eternity of punishment at the hands of his poor wives.”

  “An interesting proposition. I have a feeling the Almighty specializes in poetic justice, so you may be right. But,” Amory said, rattling his paper, “if you’ll let me get to the point—”

  “Sorry.”

  “Even back then, high moral standards were not a prerequisite for getting a song on the Top 40. A book written the year after Henry’s death mentions that “Pastance with gude companye” was quite popular in early sixteenth-century Scotland.”