Orphan of Creation

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “Anyway,” Barbara concluded, “what with schedules and money and whatever mood Aunt Jo gets in to change her mind, what it really comes down to is that this weekend might be my only chance to do the dig and see what’s down there.”

  “And you’ve got permission to dig if you want to?” Rupert asked, doodling with his pen.

  “That’s right.”

  Rupert made a sort of harrumphing noise into the phone, tossed down the pen, and thought for a minute. “Well, it’s a real interesting story,” he said, in a studiously neutral tone.

  “But what should I do about it?” Barbara’s voice asked, sounding almost querulous over Gowrie’s tinny, small-town phone lines.

  Rupert knew what to say, what she needed to hear, what he would need to hear if the roles were reversed. But he paused once again, not sure of how to say it. “Look, Barb. You and I are diggers—grubbers in the dirt in search of all the old truths, walkers on the past, whatever you want to call it. Call it something grand, call it grave robbing, it’s what we do. And we do it because we’re curious, no other reason, in spite of what we tell each other about history or knowing ourselves or whatever. You know and I know you want to dig those old ape bones up. What else could possibly occur to you when you stumble on a story like that? What you really want to know from me is if it’s worth the cost, the risk to go for it. Right?”

  There was a silence on the phone line for a long moment. “Well, yes, I suppose,” Barbara answered.

  Rupert sighed and stretched out a long arm to scratch Chairman Meow behind the ears. “Well, you know as well as I do, you’re the only one who can answer that question. But, look, you and I— we’re associates, just met, not bowling buddies or best friends yet. I don’t know you so well. Something’s bugging you here, I can tell that, but I don’t know what. So let me ask, try and save some time: You afraid of being wrong or being right?”

  “Huh? Why should I be afraid of being right?” The voice on the phone sounded surprised, a little defensive.

  Aha. Rupert raised his eyebrows, picked up his pencil, and began a small, tight patch of doodling on his note pad. “‘Cause what it sounds like to me, to make a quick prelim dig might cost you a few hundred bucks in equipment and labor. That’s cheap for knowing, one way or the other, every morning when you wake up for the rest of your life, that you did the right thing. And if I’m not getting too personal, if you take a chance and it costs more than that and you get a bit in debt—right now, no one else gets hurt. Take it from a fellow ex-married type—it’s much safer to take chances when you’re single. It’s no one else’s money, or time, or problem. So it’s no great shakes, really, to be wrong. You’d blow your weekend making a big damn useless hole, and maybe look a bit silly in front of your relatives. Are you afraid of that?”

  “Nooo. Not really. I wouldn’t like it, but I could live with it,” Barbara replied.

  “Then,” Rupert said gently, “that leaves being scared of being right. Are you?”

  “I—” Rupert listened intently. He could tell, from that one syllable, that she had been ready with a quick, unthoughtful “No.” But now she was pausing, reconsidering.

  “Barbara,” he said quietly, “are you really prepared for the grand fuss and scare that digging up gorillas imported for slaves will produce? Especially if they’re dug up by a black woman? This won’t be some piddly little scientific thing, a few huffy letters in Nature. This could raise six kinds of hell and get every newspaper and television station in the world down on your neck. I was small-time controversial at UCLA, you know. Sometimes I wonder if the real reason I came back East was to escape the heat. Being at the storm center can get rough. You ought to be afraid of it. Are you?”

  “Hell, of course I am!” she almost shouted back. “Who wouldn’t be?”

  “Everybody should be afraid of it. You shouldn’t go into it lightly. Good. Then all you have to ask yourself is: Are you more afraid of not knowing the truth about this wonderful story for the rest of your life, or more afraid of handling the truth for the rest of your life?”

  This time the silence on the phone lasted much longer. Finally there came a sigh, half resignation, half happy release. “Rupert,” Barbara said, “For a pain-in-the-neck know-it-all, you sure are a smart guy. I gotta go.”

  “Just keep me posted, Doctor. That’s all I ask.”

  They said their good-byes and Rupert hung up. He sat there and stared at the phone for a long moment, as if it held all the answers. Then he leaned forward in his chair, pulled a manila folder out of the desk, labeled it MARCHANDO DIG, and put his notes of the conversation in it. If anything came of Gowrie, he’d already have a start on a record of it.

  “Let’s hope that file gets much thicker,” he said to the cat, who purred back in reply. One of the mice started to climb up the bars of the cage, and the Chairman took a hopeful but unsuccessful swat at it.

  Rupert reached out a hand to switch his various machines on and get back to what he had been doing, but suddenly the football game, the music, and the book seemed a lot less interesting.

  He looked around his too-quiet efficiency apartment, as crowded and tightly packed and necessarily neat as a submarine. He suddenly wished he could be down in Gowrie. Down where the action was.

  <>

  Barbara hung up at her end, and felt much better. Yes, she was still afraid, but at least she knew of what. There was a strange, edgy thrill to seeing the danger clearly, heading straight for her from a far horizon, rather than lurking in shadows. Now, at least, she knew what she was up against.

  She also knew she needed help. Digging a real excavation, even a little prelim job, was no job to tackle single-handed. So who around here could she draft? Who around here would be any use at all?

  Livingston. Livingston Jones was the one relative who could be of even the slightest help. She headed back downstairs and started hunting for him. By now it was 8:15 and the various members of the family were starting to filter downstairs in force, but no sign of Liv yet.

  Barbara swore to herself. She needed time to think, to plan, but she was already suffering from the paleontologist’s greatest fear—losing the light. The days in late November were short enough at best, and an appreciable fraction of today’s working light was already gone—and she only had today and Saturday, and whatever tiny sliver of work she could get out of Sunday before it would be time to fly back. She knew that she could never get official permission to mount a dig on Smithsonian time—who outside the family would believe a nutty story based on the hundred-year-old report of an old man’s recollections, set down decades after the event?

  It could be months or years before she had this chance again, and by then Great-aunt Josephine could have changed her mind, and whatever bones there were left would be decaying even further all the while. This brief Thanksgiving weekend was definitely the magic moment, and Barbara did not want to waste a second of it.

  She tried the porch, the living room, and the dining room before getting smart and checking for Livingston in the kitchen. Bingo. There he was, digging into the bacon and scooping up big mouthfuls of scrambled eggs someone had cooked up. In the half an hour or so she had been gone, the kitchen had lost its air of quiet, domestic peace. It was a cheery madhouse now, with too many people cooking, laughing, talking, drinking coffee. The children were racing around, the littlest ones seemingly competing with each other to see who could put the largest fraction of breakfast on their faces instead of in their mouths. The sound of conversation now and again swelled up to a dull roar for a moment as half a dozen people raised their voices to be heard over each other, then faded away as fast as it had started once everyone talking had got his or her point across.

  Barbara launched herself into the sea of bodies, steered herself in next to Livingston, and managed to find a seat next to him. “Hey, Liv, how’s it going?”

  She had caught him with a mouthful of food, and he smiled and nodded at her in lieu of answering. She considered her younge
r cousin for a moment, sizing him up before making her sales pitch. He was twenty-three, and youthful-looking even for that age. He was big—six foot three, with a massive body, a wall of muscle. He was wearing a short-sleeved pullover shirt that threatened to burst at every seam, accentuating a solid, powerful body that didn’t need any accentuating. He looked as if he should have been playing ball somewhere. In fact, Liv had ridden a football scholarship to Ole Miss and played left tackle well enough to scare off plenty of guards.

  Back when Liv got the scholarship, Barbara had been concerned. Suppose he focused so hard on football that he ended up out of college when his five years of football eligibility were up, with a make-work degree in basket weaving—or maybe no degree at all? Suppose he was equipped to do nothing but play football, one of ten or twelve thousand graduating college players chasing the three or four hundred available jobs as pro ball players?. Too many young men, especially black young men, were left fighting for too few football jobs—football jobs that quickly left most of the players out on the street with bad knees and no job skills after only a few years anyway. And left tackles didn’t get much glory.

  Maybe it was because of a stats course Barbara had urged him to take freshman year, but in any event, Liv had figured out the odds against him and avoided the football trap. He had played hard, but never so hard that it got in the way of his major in biochemistry. He had graduated the summer before, and now was working at some sort of part-time job, waiting for his master’s degree program at the University of North Carolina to start up in January. He was going to do okay.

  But at the moment, he could undoubtedly do with a few bucks. He finished his food and pushed his plate back with one massive hand as he hauled in his coffee mug with the other, every movement setting massive muscles to rippling in his arms and under his shirt. “So, Barb,” he said. “Haven’t really had a chance to talk with you this time around. What’s up?”

  “Plenty, Liv. Grab a refill on your coffee and come outside where it’s quiet. I need to talk with you.”

  He shrugged. “Sure. Just let me hack through this crowd to the percolator. You want one?”

  “Yeah, cream, no sugar.”

  “Okay, see you on the back porch in a minute.”

  <>

  A few minutes later they were settled in on the porch swing. Livingston leaned his feet up on the porch railing and sighed contentedly. It was a good morning, and it was nice to have a private visit with Barb. She had always been one of his favorite cousins. “So what’s the situation?” he asked.

  “Liv, I’ve got a business proposition for you. I’ve stumbled across old Grandpa Zebulon’s diary. Aunt Jo’s around the other side of the house right now, on the front porch, reading it. It’ll be passed around all day, I guarantee that. But in it, there’s a mention of something really weird being buried on the family property here. I want to excavate, now, this weekend, and I need some help from someone who has some sense. It’ll probably suck up most of the weekend, but I’ll pay eight bucks an hour.”

  Livingston looked at his cousin and thought for a minute. “Aunt Josephine says okay?”

  “Yup.”

  “Then I’m in. I could use the bread. What are we digging for?”

  “Gorillas.”

  Liv raised his eyebrows and tilted his head to one side. “Okay, that’s different.” That was the nice thing about the Yankees—the Northerners—in the family, he thought. They could come up with a ring-tailed doozy of a story, like digging for gorillas, and at least you knew they were for real. The Southerners were another kettle of fish. If one of them had handed him that story, he’d be waiting for the punch line right now. But Barbara was for real. Nuts, maybe, but for real.

  “Okay, you’re on the payroll—and on the clock.” Barbara stood up and pulled her wallet out of her back pocket. Livingston could see how she seemed suddenly pleased to be in charge, in command of a team, even if it only had one member. She always had loved running things, even back when he was the little kid and she was the bossy teenager. “Here’s my American Express card,” she said. “We’ll need some stuff.” She dug a crumpled piece of scrap paper and a pen out of her pockets and handed them to Livingston. “Here, you’d better make a list. Hit the Radio Shack in Gowrie and come back with the best metal detector they’ve got.”

  “Metal detector?”

  “These gorillas are in caskets.”

  “Now that’s real different.” Maybe, Livingston thought, Northerners knew how to tell a tall tale too.

  “Well, they’re in packing cases, anyway,” Barbara conceded. “I hope with nails and hinges. If they were put together with wooden pegs, we’ll have to think of something else. Also, hit Balmer’s Drugs and pick up four or five rolls of Kodachrome. Thirty-six exposure, ASA 64 if they have it, but ASA 25 will do. Get me some graph paper and a clipboard too. Then stop at Higgins’ Hardware and grab a compass—the kind for finding north, not for drawing circles—and a tape measure, the longer the better—and marked in metric if they have one. Also a meter stick—I’ll settle for a yardstick. And some string and tomato stakes.”

  “This is starting to go past interesting to weird. All this on the level, Barb? I mean, I’m not going to end up at the end of this in some crazy practical joke, am I?”

  Barbara laughed. “No, ‘fraid not. That’s all just stuff for digging a real professional-style hole.”

  Livingston shook his head. Well, it was her money he’d be spending. “Okay, boss. What will you be doing while I’m on the scavenger hunt?”

  “Surveying the site. Now go. The stores should be open by the time you get into town.”

  Livingston gulped down the last of his coffee, fished his car keys out of his pocket, gave Barbara a mock salute, and got moving.

  <>

  Barbara went back to her room and grabbed her camera bag and tripod, brought along to take a group portrait of the family. She rooted around in her oversize pocketbook until she found a serviceable notebook and pencil, feeling happy and excited, at the start of doing what she did best. Just before she left the room she looked out the window at the kids who were back playing in the yard, and suddenly found herself thinking about her first dig, so many years ago. Back when she was twelve years old . . . .

  It all began one spring with her pet hamster, a rather surly brown-and-tan rodent by the name of Fuzzball. The foolish little thing escaped from its cage one day while Barbara was at school, and the cat caught it and killed it. Her mother didn’t want her child to see the broken little body, and by the time Barbara got home from school, her mother had gotten the tiny corpse away from the cat and had unceremoniously thrown it in the trash can out back.

  If her mother had hoped an invisible corpse would ease Barbara’s feelings, she was mistaken. Barbara was not only heartbroken at the death of Fuzzball and shocked at the cat’s homicide, but infuriated that her own mother could just throw Fuzzball away.

  Barbara insisted on giving Fuzzball a decent burial. Her mother, who had never much liked hamsters, and who had wasted the entire morning chasing a live hamster around the house and then lost the afternoon trying to pry a dead one out of the cat’s mouth, was exasperated enough to do whatever would give her some peace and quiet. She dug the hamster out of the trash, wrapped it in tissue, put it in a shoebox, and presented it to Barbara.

  Barbara, with a little girl’s ghoulish delight in the theater of it all, dug a hole in the little plot of untended ground behind the back garden, put the box in it, buried it, put a cross made out of two popsicle sticks over it, and said a prayer over the tiny grave. Then she laid a few dandelions on the little hump of earth, and went inside to dinner. By the next morning she had all but forgotten Fuzzball. She didn’t think of him for months. Summer vacation came and went.

  The following fall, Barbara returned to school and one fine day got a book on archeology out of the library. Its title was something like How We Know About Prehistoric Man. She picked it because of the scary-looking skull on
the cover, next to the pickaxe and shovel. As soon as her father tucked her into bed that night, she dug out her flashlight, burrowed under the covers, and began reading all about the famous scientists who dug up the bones full of secrets. Lying with her head buried under the covers, she read by the weak and flickering yellow gleam of dying flashlight batteries, all about the grand, romantic discoveries the great diggers had made. Her thoughts inevitably returned to the dead hamster buried under the brown earth of her own backyard.

  In her mind’s eye blossomed the image of that tiny grave, a smooth, rounded hump of earth, with no weed or blade of grass growing on it. She imagined the popsicle-stick cross still new and perfect, the pencilled inscription on it absolutely legible. She imagined the hamster’s earthly remains, and his intact, white-polished skeleton safe under the sleeping earth. She saw him there, sheltered from the elements by the shoebox, every impossibly tiny bone in place, gently pillowed in Kleenex, the minute bones of his forepaws folded on his chest, his gleaming skull grinning into the darkness of the grave. It was a perfect, compelling vision, and Barbara had to struggle with her imagination’s tendency to put in little ear-bones and whisker-bones, too.

  The next morning was Saturday. She dressed and ate breakfast in a hurry and rushed to the garage for a trowel, then to the rear of the back garden to dig up her prize, just like a real archaeologist—only to discover there was not the slightest trace of the grave. By thinking very hard, Barbara could just about remember roughly how far from the back fence and the dogwood tree she had buried the box, but there was no smooth mound of peaceful earth there, just a wide, weedy patch of mulch and dirt.

  She made her best guess as to where she had buried Fuzzball, and dug twice as deep as she recalled making the grave months before. There was nothing there. She dug another hole a little farther left. Nothing. She tried digging farther to the right, then closer to the fence, then closer to the house. Nothing. Maybe she had missed the grave altogether in the areas of ground between her excavations. She traded in her trowel for a full-size shovel that was far too big for her and merged all her holes into one huge, sloppy pit. Her hands were getting sore, and swelling with huge blisters.