Hunting Season

by Nevada Barr

  “You’re as bad as Taco,” Anna muttered.

  Shelly said, “What?” and Anna was glad the park aide hadn’t heard her impossibly grown-up condescension.

  “Let’s take a look,” she said. Taco bounded off as if English was his second language and he understood every word. Seeing the childlike look of delight on Shelly’s face, Anna wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d bounded off after him.

  “Maybe I should go into law enforcement,” Shelly said as she walked across the broken field between the garden and the edge of the woods, following the dog and leading Anna. “You guys get to do all the fun stuff, and you don’t have to work. I mean work work,” she added, glancing back over her shoulder to see if Anna had taken offense.

  She hadn’t. She knew what Shelly meant. It was one of the things she loved about being a law-enforcement ranger; the freedom to move, car to horse to hiking trail, not being tied to a minute-by-minute schedule or weighed down by a desk or a tour group that could not be deserted. And, the greatest freedom of all, freedom from supervision. By the nature of the work, field rangers made most of their own decisions.

  Anna’d always felt a mild guilt about the disparity in pay and promotional opportunities between park interpreters and park law enforcement, especially the seasonals. Interpreters were the backbone of the park service, yet by some twist in the power structure, they’d ended up near the bottom of the bureaucratic ladder.

  “Hey. Barth cleaned it up good,” Shelly said as she reached the edge of the cemetery. All that remained of the sign were the two upright four-by-fours. The broken and defiled boards were gone. “You know he had to do it all by himself. Mack’s like a zillion years old, kind of entered the feather-duster stage of janitoring. Barth told Mack, though, and Mack told me what the vandals did. You know the ... mess... they left. Major mondo caca.”

  “Well put,” Anna said with a smile.

  They stopped by the skeletal sign and stared into the trees. Fog robbed the trees of what scraps of autumn brilliance they still clung to. Spanish moss, a favorite Yankee image of the South, hung gray and apparently lifeless from the branches of cedars more black than green. “Cemetery” or even “graveyard” didn’t quite fit the picture. Unmarked, scattered, trees and shrubs choking the burial grounds, it put Anna in mind of that horrific crime scene where the evening news showed grim policemen carrying out body after body, excavated from shallow graves in serial killer John Wayne Gacy’s backyard. Irrational fear grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and shook her. Feeling hunted, haunted, female, and frail, she stifled the urge to look over her shoulder, move closer to the slight figure of Shelly Rabine.

  With an effort she shrugged off the image and the sudden hatred of slave owners it brought with it. Time had stolen the humanity of owner and slave alike. Before the Civil War, when the cemetery was in use, it wouldn’t have looked anything like this forlorn scrap of land. Trees would have been cleared, wooden markers erected, probably flowers planted by loving hands. Without money for stones of granite and fences of wrought iron, the love of the living and the names of the dead had been reclaimed by the land.

  Under strict mental discipline John Wayne Gacy’s grisly garden receded from Anna’s mind and with it the growing sense of creepiness.

  Undaunted by human megrims, Taco loped gleefully into the mist. Because he was alive and happy and his glossy golden coat shone with color, Anna watched him. Half of him disappeared behind the dark gleaming leaves of an oak hydrangea. Supported by his one remaining hind leg, his feathery tail wagged in ecstasy and the dirt began to fly as he dug madly. Soft yellow-brown dirt of broken ground. In this sacred and yet profane place the land was settled, covered in duff, undisturbed for countless years.

  “Taco’s got something,” Anna said, and remembering the last search the dog had accompanied her on when he’d led her to the corpse of a teenage girl, she moved into the dripping woods to investigate. Infected by Anna’s unease or the soul-sucking silence of the place, Shelly followed without her usual running commentary.

  “What the hell...” Anna took hold of the dog’s collar. Taco had been burrowing in what looked to be a new grave. Earth had been removed—clods of Mississippi’s hard clay littered the duff near the grave—then replaced. An attempt had been made to restore the ground to the existing pattern of the forest floor, leaves and needles raked back to cover the gout of turned soil. The camouflage might have worked had time and rain been able to do their work before the dog did. As it was, scars of a recent disturbance showed.

  “Give me a hand.” Anna began clawing the leaf and needle litter from around Taco’s dig.

  “Oh, gross.” Shelly didn’t move from her place half a body length from the site. “You don’t think...”

  “We’ll think later,” Anna said curtly. “All we’re doing now is looking.”

  Distaste overcome by courage or curiosity, Shelly dropped to her knees on the damp leaves and helped scrape away the duff.

  “Go easy,” Anna said when, caught up in the moment, the young woman began to exhibit the uninhibited fervor of the dog, flinging bits of woodland flotsam out behind her. “Could find something useful in this mess,” she explained.

  Shelly stopped all activity suddenly and sat back, her skinny little butt perched delicately on her pointy little heels. “Oh. Wow. Like a finger or an eyeball or something?”

  Anna laughed at the wondrous hope in Shelly’s voice. “I was thinking more along the lines of a dropped wallet with a driver’s license in it.”

  “That’d be good, too.” Shelly went back to work removing pine needles with the exaggerated care of an archaeologist.

  Within minutes they had enough area cleared to see what had been done. In a tidy rectangle, corners shovel-sharp and precise, a piece of ground six-foot long and three-feet wide had been dug out and replaced. As neat a grave as Forest Lawn could hope for.

  Hands dirty, both breathing hard as if they’d done a great deal more physical work than they had, the women stepped away. Anna seemed beset by media pictures this morning and for an instant she imagined muddy clawlike hands thrusting up out of the newly dug earth.

  “Barth, maybe? Working on his project?” Shelly suggested.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Do we get shovels?”

  “Shovels and strong backs to wield them,” Anna said. No use being a manager if one couldn’t delegate at least a few of the more odious tasks.

  10

  Using the telephone in the visitors center so her conversation wouldn’t be broadcast to all and sundry, Anna called the Port Gibson Ranger Station. Barth Dinkins answered. Barth had proved himself a good ranger with excellent instincts but preferred more scholarly—and sedentary—pursuits. Usually he could be counted upon to be sitting behind his desk.

  Barth knew nothing about the new dig they’d discovered except that it hadn’t been there Sunday, two days previously. Barth worked Sunday as did Anna and Randy. On Sundays law-enforcement rangers in all of America’s National Parks got holiday pay. Everybody wanted that little boost to the paycheck. Sundays were a bad time to commit a crime on park land.

  Agitated by news of further trespass on the grave sites, Barth wanted to rush to Mt. Locust. Anna managed to keep him on the phone long enough to give him a list of things she needed him to bring down.

  Three other calls had to be made: one to Chief Ranger Brown and, though Anna’s lesser self argued against it, one to Randy Thigpen. If this disturbance related in any way to the death of Doyce Barnette, she owed it to Randy’s new-leaf promise to include him. Brown wasn’t in. She left a message with the deputy chief. Thigpen unfortunately was in and would join them as soon as he’d dressed. Her last call was to Clintus. The sheriff and his under-sheriff, André Gates, would join them.

  Finally there was nothing left to do but wait. Anna and Taco returned to the slave cemetery. Shelly, against her will, was left behind in the empty VC, pouting.

  Anna used the time before th
e heavy-footed troops arrived to make a delicate and minute search of the area around the newly dug grave. The chill damp of the fog worked its way through her clothes; the dead silence worked its way through her mind, until she felt as if she had inadvertently crossed the River Styx with her faithful hound and dwelt in the realms of the dead. On those rare occasions when she tried to picture life after death, it was never the sunny shores on the far side of the Jordan portrayed in Gospel music but a place very like this: cold, damp, gray, silent, eternal.

  Oddly enough, an excellent place to look for clues. There were no distractions and the diffuse, netherworldly light illuminated without creating shadows.

  A shuffle of shod feet across the duff alerted her to another refugee from the land of the living: Mack, the ancient maintenance man, bringing the light leaf rake she’d requested before leaving the VC. Anna glanced at the feet that announced his arrival. Shod wasn’t quite the right word. The old man was wearing bedroom slippers. They were leather, roughly the right color—somewhere near cordovan—and had soles, but bedroom slippers all the same. She said nothing. Feet that had been in service as long as Mack’s deserved a break from the rules.

  Mack must have lied when he told Shelly he was pushing eighty. He was a hundred if he was a day. Maybe African-Americans really didn’t visibly age the same way their Caucasian counterparts did. Youthful looks clung to them much longer. When true old age was reached, they slipped effortlessly into the sere, elemental look of antiquity. Mack had shrunk and dried up till he looked to be made of petrified mahogany.

  He handed Anna the rake. “I’m going to want to put this back. You folks don’t put things back like you ought to.” Mission accomplished, he didn’t leave. Anna suspected he’d wait as long as need be to retrieve his rake and carry it back to its proper resting place.

  Mack didn’t squat or sit or lean but stood with his bones piled carefully one on top of the other. Anna suspected he remained upright to defy the grave waiting at his feet. He was old enough to be on a first-name basis with Death. As he stood he talked.

  “There’s places like this all around these parts,” he told Anna, his voice as papery and thin as the sound of the leaves underfoot. “They was marked one time but that’s gone. Rotted down. Or kids kicking ‘em down. Negro graveyards not even s’posed to have ghosts. Like that place in the yard where you bury old dogs. Not all, of course. Lots of family plots got slaves in ‘em. Now of course we got churches, and they write down where you’re at, and it gets put in the family Bible. Back then nobody owned the good book and couldn’t’ve written in it or read it if they did. So in the ground you went and ten years later it’s like you never was.”

  “Now Barth, he’s a good bloke—”

  Anna, half listening, lulled by the whispering breeze of words, looked up sharply wondering how the English slang word “bloke” had found its way into Mack’s vocabulary. Another layered Mississippi mystery she would never solve.

  “Barth’s going to bring these people home,” Mack went on. Like so much of humanity, Mack believed in the power of names. To name a thing was to own, control and understand it. Could Barth name the dead, they’d exist again, returned to their rightful places in the universe.

  Mentally she drew a line out from the southeast comer of the rectangle of disturbed earth, continuing the process of quartering an imaginary circle around the site. That done, she began her inspection. In the first quarter she found much stomping and signs of movement where the digger stood to work but nothing to illuminate who he was or what work he was doing.

  “Barth was saying lots of folks what had no kind of church got recorded maybe by the cabinet maker as built the coffin,” Mack said.

  Three more quarters of the imaginary circle revealed no secrets. Anna finally put Mack’s rake to use, neatly piling up the leaf and needle litter she, Shelly and Taco had removed from the grave itself. Later she would comb through it. That done, she began peeling back the forest’s skirts around the grave. The cushion of litter had protected the earth, and she found no useable tracks. One mark was of interest, a forty-five degree angle cut into earth, softened and disturbed by the shovel, that indicated where the digger or diggers had set a box. There was just the one and it was faint. The impression hadn’t been made by a box heavy enough to have contained any respectable corpse.

  Voices cut through the silence that had reknit around her when Mack stopped talking. Shelly was bringing Sheriff Jones, André Gates, Randy and Barth to the site. The little interpreter had inadvertently added Guide to the Realms of the Dead to her job description this week. From her bright eyes and pink cheeks, Anna knew she loved the excitement. Law enforcement might be right for Shelly. Anna made a mental note to talk with her further about it.

  The men carried shovels, which Mack eyed with proprietary disapproval.

  Anna was glad three of the four men were black. She didn’t give two hoots about what happened to her bones when they were no longer securely encased in a working skin but knew from long experience with the Navajo that people got exceedingly testy when the graves of their ancestors were defiled.

  Barth pushed his way through the others, effectively barring their way, and looked down at the peeled earth with its rectangle of newly dug soil in the center. His eerie gray-green eyes glowed with a light alien to the shadowless woods. “I hadn’t got this far out,” he said accusingly. “I don’t know where any of the graves are past that line.” He nodded to a scrap of orange surveyor’s tape tied around a young pine tree. A corresponding scrap was tied thirty feet away, the line between them falling three or four yards closer to the burial ground’s entrance.

  “By the look of this one, it isn’t one of yours,” Anna said soothingly.

  Anger pinched Barth’s well-shaped lips down at the corners. “Probably somebody chose here to bury a pig or a dog or garbage,” he said. Though he tried to mask it with the hard edges of anger, Anna heard the hurt behind the words, the exhaustion at a lifetime of slights he hadn’t earned. She turned away, ashamed to see the shame he carried for the sins others committed.

  The men dug. Anna let them. Her days of insisting on backbreaking labor merely to prove a point were past. André Gates had removed his uniform shirt, as neatly pressed as the sheriff’s, and hung it carefully on a branch. Anna noticed it had been tailored to fit close to the body. Then she took note of the body and dismissed the vanity. A man with a build like André Gates had a civic duty to share it with the world. After a few shovelfuls, face red, breathing heavily, Randy stopped, stepped back and lit a cigarette. Periodically, he gave the other three meaningless instruction to indicate he was not lazy but purely managerial.

  The dig was short-lived. Three men, soft earth, they completed the excavation in a quarter of an hour and found nothing. The hole wasn’t as deep as a proper grave, only two or three feet. The bottom was damp but hard-packed, the earth below obviously undisturbed for decades. When the last of the dirt was raked out and thrown on the pile, the five of them and Mack stood around staring into the pit for a few moments. Taco paced behind them, eyeing the soft dirt and emitting faint groans of canine frustration that he couldn’t dig in it.

  “I’ll need those shovels cleaned and put back where you got ’em from,” Mack said querulously.

  No one else said anything. Anna broke the silence after a bit. “I guess we’re done here,” she said for lack of anything intelligent to add.

  “Why dig yourself up such a spiffy hole and then not put anything in it?” Randy asked. He stubbed out his cigarette, then virtuously put the stinking butt in his shirt pocket.

  “Must have taken something out,” Clintus stated the obvious. As one they all looked at Barth, the accepted expert on the burial ground.

  “I don’t know who was buried here,” he said. “I don’t even know for sure this was a grave site. They might have been looking for something else.”

  Various possibilities were bandied about. When Union soldiers came, confederate families would s
ometimes bury silver, jewelry, things of value they didn’t want pillaged. But Mt. Locust was never a silver and jewels kind of place. It was an inn for travelers. Food was served off wooden trenchers, then, when things were prosperous, cheap crockery. The “silver” would have been pewter at best.

  “Maybe the slaves stole something. Hid it out here where the white folks wouldn’t be poking around,” Mack offered. Anna could tell he liked the idea and she said nothing to disabuse him of it, but stolen treasure would have been of no use to a people who couldn’t fence it, a people who could be put to death or beaten for spilling the wine while serving at table, much less pilfering from the master.

  “It’s a grave,” Barth said stolidly. “They been dug the same forever. Six by two-and-a-half feet. Around these parts they weren’t all six feet deep. Water table is too high. Somebody dug a grave here. More likely dug up an old grave and took whoever was buried here.”

  “What was left anyway,” Clintus added. André moved from the circle and pulled his shirt on, hiding his sculpted back and shoulders under the tailored polyester.

  “Whoever smashed up the sign,” Barth said. “Just desecrating the grave.”

  Anna didn’t think so. The earlier vandalism had shown violence, rage, disorganization. The defecating on the final mess smacked of psychosis. Had the same perpetrator dug up the grave, the remains would have been thrown around, skull smashed, finger bones snapped.

  “Barth and I’ll stay and sift needles and dirt, see if we missed anything. I guess you guys got dirty for nothing. Thanks for coming out,” Anna said, breaking up the party.

  As they stirred, she remembered her original mission. Since she had the primary players together in one place she said, “The local papers got hold of the details of how we found Doyce Barnette’s body. Raymond is up in arms about it. Anybody know how it got leaked?” Nobody did. Or nobody admitted it. Anna considered the subject closed. She wasn’t going any extra miles on Barnette’s behalf.