Orphan of Creation

by Roger MacBride Allen

  But the toddlers’ bright laughter wafted up toward her window again, chased her regrets away, and she found herself smiling at their adventures.

  She looked out toward the old slaves’ graveyard. Today was going to be her adventure. If she got away with it. If—If she dared go through with it. She drew herself up short. If she dared? She stopped, thought for a moment, and realized she was scared. Of what, precisely, she could not say. She suddenly felt as if she were on the edge of a precipice, stepping out on a bridge that might not hold. She looked again at the graveyard, and told herself quite firmly that there was nothing there to harm her.

  She scooped up her dressing gown and bathroom gear, stepped out into the hall, and headed for the shower before any other early riser could beat her to the hot water. She moved briskly, decisively, through the rituals of morning, as if that could banish her misgivings.

  But what was it that was bothering her? Barbara had always found the shower a good place to think. The routine and privacy of the moment, the luxury of steaming hot water, let her mind relax enough to focus in on the problems at hand. So what was it? True, there were several difficulties to be surmounted before she could get at the gorillas’ burial site—chief among them Great-aunt Josephine. Maybe Barbara was just reacting to Aunt Jo the way she would have as a child, a little girl who knew she was in big trouble and had to work up the nerve to face the music. After all, Barbara had broken into an old trunk—an offense that would have gotten her a tongue-lashing and a real hiding as a kid.

  No, Barbara thought to herself, she definitely was not looking forward to admitting her break-and-enter into Zebulon’s chest—and she was not looking forward to the endless fuss the relatives would make over the journal book. But that all paled before the formidable figure of Aunt Jo. How to get around the strong-willed old lady?

  And if she did win Aunt Jo over, what then? Barbara would have to come up with tools, assistants, figure a way to pinpoint the burials and log them in . . . She grinned to herself. Politics and logistics, soothing the local potentates, scrounging up hardware and help. This was going to be just like a regular dig. It occurred to Barbara that maybe she could use some advice. Well, if Aunt Josephine cooperated, she might try a phone call to one of her Washington colleagues.

  By the time she was out of the shower, dried off, dressed in work clothes, and had her hair in some sort of order, Barbara had decided the best way to handle Aunt Jo was head on. Time to take the bull by the horns, so to speak. Subtlety would be lost on the strong personalities around here. She glanced at the clock. 7:05. Aunt Josephine would be down in her kitchen working on breakfast by now.

  Barbara picked up the journal book and nervously headed downstairs, into the big, sun-bright kitchen. The warm, clean smells of fresh, hot breakfast being made flooded the air—biscuits, flour, bacon, coffee, milk, the tang of orange juice—all mingled with the comfortable fragrance of a kitchen cleaned and polished until it shined. The gurgle of the percolator and the sizzle of the frying bacon seemed the perfect background accompaniment to it all. Aunt Josephine was standing over the kitchen table, busy with her rolling pin and biscuit cutter, vigorously making up another sheet of her buttermilk biscuits.

  Aunt Josephine looked up, her dark, round face framed owlishly by her gold-rimmed glasses. “Well, come on in, child, and give a body some help here. If you’re going to stand around my kitchen, I might as well get some work out of you.”

  Barbara almost protested, but then decided it would be good politics to follow the path of least resistance. She carefully set the journal book down on the sideboard. The spare rolling pin was in the third drawer down, as always, tidily wrapped up in its canvas rolling cloth. She pulled a mound of dough out of the mixing bowl, dredged it with flour, dusted the rolling pin, and set to work.

  The fresh, warm fragrance of the dough took her back to her own childhood, to the first romantic days of her own marriage, when even making breakfast was special; to the early morning bustle she had even forgotten she missed. But this was not the time for such thoughts. She had to face that damned music.

  “Aunt Josephine,” she said slowly, “I think I might be in big trouble with you.”

  “You’re never too old for that, child. What is it?”

  “Well, I was up in the attic yesterday—-”

  “And you broke open the lock on Zebulon’s chest,” Josephine said matter-of-factly. “I was up there after you, to put away the Thanksgiving platter until Christmas. I could see it had been fussed with, and the lock hasp fell away in my hands when I touched it. I knew it had to be you.”

  “And you weren’t going to say anything?”

  “Well, I was plenty mad to begin with, but I got to thinking just how foolish it was to have a trunk full of memories up there, locked up and forgotten about. What’s the point of having things to remember a body by if no one can remember what the remembrances are?

  “Besides, heavens only knows where the key to that trunk has got to—someone was going to have to break it open sooner or later. It might as well be the family’s professional grave robber.” Josephine gave her great-niece one of her best stern looks for a full half second before breaking into a broad smile.

  Barbara smiled back and breathed a sigh of relief. She never knew what would happen when she crossed Great-aunt Josephine. The tough old girl might decide to let you get away with it, if your motives were pure or you were on her good side. Then she would struggle valiantly to find a good reason to forgive you. But she was just as likely to turn mule-stubborn in defense of her way of doing things, and then—watch out. Barbara guessed that Josephine was pleased enough by the rediscovery of Zebulon’s effects that she had decided to overlook the offense of burglary.

  Aunt Josephine went on with her work, setting down the rolling pin, cutting the biscuits out of the dough with the biscuit cutter. “After you were so careful to put everything back the way you found it, I looked through that trunk myself, you know,” she said mischievously. “There are some real heirlooms there. His glasses, the books he read. Some splendid things.”

  Barbara swallowed hard and set down her rolling pin. “There are more than just books he read, Aunt Jo.” She wiped the flour off her hands, took the journal down off the sideboard, and solemnly offered it to her great-aunt.

  The older woman cleaned her hands on her apron and took the leather volume. She opened it and gave a little gasp as she read the title page. She stood there, not reading further, but simply staring at the words on the page for a long time. Finally, she put the book back down, took off her apron, looked at her niece with shining eyes, and spoke with a strange little catch in her voice. “Barbara, you’re going to have to tend to the rest of getting breakfast for everyone. Mind the bacon doesn’t overcook. I’m going to sit and read this book for a bit.”

  Josephine picked up the book again and smiled to herself, at nothing at all.

  Barbara offered up a silent cheer. If Aunt Josephine stopped their conversation to read the book, that might cost Barbara some digging daylight, but the lost time would be more than made up if it got the family matriarch on her side when it came to the question of turning spade to earth.

  Josephine poured herself a good strong cup of coffee and headed out to the front porch with the journal, a very thoughtful expression on her face. Barbara busied herself in the huge kitchen, and got the last of the biscuits into the oven in time to tend to the bacon and keep it from vaporizing. About fifteen minutes later, just as she had finished putting the rolling pins and mixing bowls away, four of her cousins, each with a baby or toddler in tow, appeared through the back door. By getting cousin Shirley to agree to watch the biscuits, Barbara managed to hand off kitchen-management duty, and went outside looking for Aunt Jo.

  The solid old woman sat in her rocker on the south side of the porch, the splendid morning sky framing her in pale blue. She sat reading the journal, rocking slowly, her face a study in solemn concentration, her eyes hidden behind the light refle
cted off the well-polished lenses of her wire-rimmed glasses.

  Barbara went to her and leaned against the railing, watching her, waiting.

  Finally, she closed the book and looked up with a smile, her face happy, her eyes gleaming. “He was quite a man. A very good man. Thank you for finding this.”

  “Aunt Jo.” Barbara knelt in front of her aunt and took the journal. “I found something in here, late last night. I need to show it to you.” Barbara turned to the pages that dealt with the creatures Colonel Gowrie had brought to the plantation. “Read this part, starting here.”

  Aunt Jo adjusted her glasses and studied the writing on the pages carefully, almost reverently, as if she was considering the full worth of each word before moving on to the next. Barbara sat back against the railing and hugged her knees up to her chest, watching her aunt’s face for some sign of surprise, or bafflement, or shock, but her expression remained fixed and solemn, with only an eyebrow twitching now and again as a sign of her emotions. It was as if she were reading the holiest of holy tracts and was determined to maintain her dignity while doing so.

  Finally she closed the book and looked to Barbara. “That’s a very strange story, child. What on earth does it mean?”

  Barbara stared off across the field, and felt a cold weight in her stomach. “I think it means that damned old Colonel Gowrie tried to import gorillas or chimps to work alongside our ancestors, and it didn’t work. Then Great-Great-Granpa Zebulon remembered them as more manlike than they really were,” Barbara answered, her voice hard and cool. “Does that make sense to you?”

  Josephine knotted up her mouth for a moment and thought. “When I was just a young child, there were stories, the sort of thing you might tell around a campfire to throw a good thrilling scare into a body. All about wildmen lurking out by the river and in the hills, ready to gobble up bad little girls and boys. When I was a bit older, I remember Papa saying that there was something to it all, but even back when he was a boy, no one would ever talk about it.”

  Barbara turned back toward her great aunt. “Maybe the stories were about the creatures Zebulon saw.” She almost shuddered and her voice softened. “Brrr. Can you imagine, wild gorillas wandering free around Gowrie? The poor things would be frightened out of their minds, and sick from weather they weren’t used to, but they’d still scare me. But—Aunt Josephine—the truth behind legends isn’t what I’m interested in.”

  “What do you want, child?”

  This was it. The bull by the horns. Barbara felt her shoulders tense, the cold weight in her gut tighten. None of the older generations of her family had ever altogether approved of her chosen profession, and now she had to put them face to face with it. To a family of hard-edged black Southern Baptists, even to Baptists who wanted no truck with what the white fundamentalist preachers had to say, there was something clearly sacrilegious about the whole idea of digging too deep into the past. And Barbara knew only too well their attitude toward what many of them still referred to as “Evil-oution.” Aunt Josephine had been teasing, mostly, when she had called Barbara a grave robber, but Barbara knew that many in the family felt she was just that, nothing better, and possibly something much worse.

  It was only the Jones family’s rock-ribbed, unshakeable faith in the value and dignity of education and book-learning that made Barbara socially acceptable. She was a Doctor, and Doctors were to be respected. That was the tack to take. “I’m a paleoanthropologist, Aunt Josephine,” Barbara said, hoping the long word sounded impressive and learned. “That journal says the gorillas, the chimps, whatever they are, were buried by the crossroads. If that’s true—well, it could be very important. It could say a lot about how our people were treated, how slaves were regarded. If it’s true, it implies whole chapters in history—our history—that no one even knows about. Who traded for them? How? Was this the only place they tried it? Now, I know you won’t like it, but I want to dig for them, prove it all really happened. If you’ll give your permission.”

  The old woman turned and looked out toward the old burial ground, gazed out on the whitewashed marker stones turned golden ivory by the light of the rising sun. She seemed preoccupied, as if the history she held in her hands and the dead whose graves she looked upon were far more interesting than anything the present and living might offer. “I suppose those are good reasons for you. It might make you famous, let you announce a big science discovery. And it would be good to learn more of the history around here. But if you’d stop thinking like a fancy Washington scientist and started thinking like a member of the Jones family of Gowrie, you’d know I don’t want some herd of monkeys buried out there right next to my relations. So you go right ahead and dig up your monkeys. They’re too close to where our kin lie. Just clean it up when you’re done, and don’t bother me with it if you don’t have to. I’ve got more important things to spend my thoughts on. Like my grandfather’s journal.” She reopened the book, found her place, and recommenced her reading, dismissing Barbara with a wave of her hand.

  Barbara had thought this would be the moment she would stop being afraid. It wasn’t. She felt a chill wind blow across her soul, colder than any November. She was getting close to the fear, but she was not there yet.

  She suddenly realized how much she needed some advice. Without another word to Aunt Jo, she headed inside toward the phone.

  Chapter Four

  Barbara sat by the phone in Aunt Jo’s lavender-scented old lady’s bedroom, her address book at the ready, her bits of paper with her personal long-distance codes, so the call wouldn’t be charged to Aunt Jo, scribbled on them, her note pad and pen handy to jot down any advice she got. But for the life of her, she could not think of whom to call.

  It was not really advice she needed, although it would be welcome, as much as she needed a bit of hand-holding, some words of encouragement before she went off and spent time and hard-earned money on chasing an old family legend. She finally admitted to herself at least part of what was bothering her: The idea of gorilla or chimp slave-laborers dead and buried in Aunt Jo’s backyard had seemed a lot more believable in the middle of a driving midnight rainstorm than it did in the clear light of day.

  But that was just the problem. Who could she dare call at eight in the morning on the day after Thanksgiving to talk about such a crazy idea?

  She thought first of her husband. But it was safe to say that Michael would not be at his most supportive today, after spending Thanksgiving patching up people in the ER. Besides, they were separated now, and it wasn’t right to go to him for advice. Her boss, Jeffery Grossington? A kindly old man, but a very careful, conservative one. He was the one she would call if she wanted to be talked out of doing the dig. Besides, she would not dare call him at this hour, and she did not want to waste any part of her brief digging daylight waiting for what Grossington would think of as a civilized hour for the phone to ring.

  By process of elimination, that left her with Rupert Maxwell. Smiling to herself, she realized he was the one she had wanted to call all along. She shared office space with Rupert and two other paleontologists at the Smithsonian. Rupert was the new kid on the block, just arrived at the Smithsonian from his previous job at UCLA. He had named their jumbled-up, overcrowded office the Diggers’ Pit the day he had moved in, and the name had stuck. Rupert was that one person in every workplace who knew instinctively which rules he could safely ignore, who somehow got away with flouting the tribal laws without ever actually annoying anyone.

  Barbara and Rupert had had a few long lunches commiserating over each other’s divorces. Their talks had been the sort of personal discussion that was easier with a stranger in the same boat than it was with a close old friend. On the subject of unhappy personal lives, they spoke the same language. Maybe, Barbara hoped, they would also speak it when it came to work. Besides, Rupe lived his life off to one side already. He would surely lend a sympathetic ear to Barbara’s off-the-wall problem.

  She grabbed the handset off its cradle and d
ialed.

  <>

  The phone rang, or more accurately gave off a small electronic bleep. Rupert looked up at the wall clock, noted the time, marked his place in the book he was reading, hit the PAUSE button on the VCR to freeze the action on the football game he had taped yesterday—he had bet and won money on the game and wanted to analyze the plays for future betting reference—turned down the compact-disk player that perched atop the VCR, shutting off Bartok’s string quartet in mid-note—he was watching the game with the sound off—and reached around the mouse cage behind the computer—which was dormant, for once—to shut off the answering machine before it could cut into the call. Chairman Meow, snoozing atop the mouse cage, woke slightly to see what was going on, then closed his eyes again to dream of catching the mice once more. Rupert shoved the computer keyboard out of the way and pulled the phone forward, front and center. It was a crowded desk.

  “Hello, Rupert Maxwell.”

  “Rupe? Barbara.” The voice came through the miles, clear but slightly faint.

  “Hey, Barb!” Rupert grinned. “Happy Turkey Day or so. But I thought you were home visiting family.”

  “I am, Rupe. But something’s come up. I need your advice.” To Rupert’s ear, she sounded a bit hesitant about asking for it. “Nothing personal, this time,” she added with a note of hurry in her voice. “Professional advice. Digger to digger. Hey, I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  “Nope,” he said cheerfully. “Been up for a while, just puttering around. So talk to me. What’s up?” Rupert opened a desk drawer and fished out a pen and paper. He liked to keep notes on conversations related to work. FRIDAY 8:03 A.M. Barbara M. Re: pro question. B. sounds embarrassed.

  “Well, I found something, Rupe.” She quickly told him how she had come across the journal, and what she had read in it. Rupert started listening more and more attentively, taking more and more notes, speaking only to ask an occasional question on one detail or another. He immediately noticed that she was only telling him what she had discovered, not what she was doing about it.