Orphan of Creation

by Roger MacBride Allen

  By that time, she had churned up such a huge swath of ground that it was impossible to tell where one hole started or ended, or where the piles of dirt lay atop undisturbed earth. She surrendered to a fierce grumbling in her stomach, and retreated to the house for lunch—after first muddying the bathroom sink with the first layers of dirt off her face and arms. Perhaps recognizing the gleam in her daughter’s eye, her mother allowed Barbara to go back to her searching after eating.

  The search for Fuzzball was not a game anymore, but a challenge, a quest. Barbara, faced with the daunting, cratered mess that had been a little strip of ignored waste ground that morning, forced herself to sit down and think. She fought the temptation to pitch back into digging wildly. By now she was sure she must have dug in the right spot. How had the body vanished? What could have happened?

  Dirt was a lot messier, a lot damper, a lot dirtier—and a lot more alive—than she had imagined. The body could have simply rotted away altogether, or been gobbled up by the bugs and worms and creepers scuttling to escape the disturbance her excavation had made in their world. Or perhaps a larger animal—a possum or raccoon or a dog—had nosed out Fuzzball the same night she had buried him and dug him up for a quick snack. Maybe her father or mother had jumbled things up with some forgotten gardening chore in the intervening months, spading up the dead rodent in the act of putting some extra topsoil on the tomatoes. The shoe box would have been no protection: one good rain would have collapsed it, and it would have quickly rotted away.

  Or maybe, Barbara realized, she herself had dug up Fuzzball hours before without recognizing his few tiny, muddy-brown slivers of bone for what they were. There was not and could not be anything clean and ivory-white in this sea of brown. She could have reburied his bones as she threw her dug-up dirt to one side, trod them down and crushed them to nothing, then dug them up again when she started a new hole. She could be staring right at his invisibly small remains in the churned-up heaps of dirt in front of her.

  She looked over the huge mounds of dirt she had thrown up, and realized that she would need not a shovel, not a trowel, but a set of tweezers and a magnifying glass to sift through it all carefully enough to locate whatever bones were left to find. A squirrel scampered past along the back fence, and Barbara suddenly realized that squirrel bones had to go somewhere when they died. In all probability, there were dozens and dozens of small animal bones in this one patch of earth. Even if she did find some bones, she wouldn’t have the slightest idea whether they belonged to Fuzzball, or a squirrel, or a chipmunk, or a bird.

  She sighed, threw her shovel back down, and trailed disconsolately back into the house—only to be sent out by her mother to fill the holes back in and put her tools away properly.

  She never found the slightest sign of the hamster’s grave.

  That failure was a pivotal moment for her, the event that marked her, sparked her interest, told her what she wanted to be.

  In some strange way, she felt as if she were still looking for that silly rodent’s body. The small mystery of its disappearance was her first attempt to peer into the ground and the past. It was the first stage of her quest, the first clue that led her down the trail she was still on, tracking the endless mystery of life and its history, the great questions of how and why humanity, and life, and the world itself, were here.

  As an adult, she had often wondered what would have happened if she had found Fuzzball, if some series of chances had mummified his body, had hidden it from scavengers and insects, had led her to dig in the right place to find the grisly little souvenir. It was altogether possible that success, digging up such a smelly and grotesque little carcass would have disgusted her, made her throw the little body into the leaves, run away to wash the cooties off and forget all about digging up yucky things from the ground. Or maybe such an easy win would have bored her, and she would have gone on to find some other, seemingly greater challenge. Certainly success would not have inspired her to go back to the library and get out better books on paleontology and archaeology. Success would not have goaded her into asking her science teacher how bones vanished, how fossils were born, how to tell one bone from another; would not have led her to learn more than her teacher knew and go in search of more knowledge; would certainly never have pointed her toward archaeology and anthropology as a career, a life. The challenge of failure, the fascination of a whole little body being magically swallowed up by the earth, was what drove her on. Until the magic died out of it, she would never turn back.

  She had once held a three-million-year-old skull in her hand, had seen the marks left on the fossilized bones by the folds and convolutions of the long-vanished brain, had seen the seat of a mind that had smelled, looked, touched, tasted, listened, perhaps even thought thirty thousand centuries before. She had peered through a microscope at the marks on ancient hominid teeth and learned how to read them, and so had known what the creature had eaten all the endless years before. She had made the pilgrimage to Laetoli, seen the upright, bipedal footprints left in the sands of time by gracefully-striding creatures two million years before their distant relations would call themselves Homo sapiens.

  Such magic would never, could never, die.

  Chapter Five

  If the magic had started for Barbara with the Fuzzball dig, so had the lessons. Site survey, site preparation, careful record keeping, designing a precise grid-location system so every artifact could be precisely positioned relative to a prominent landmark, selection of a dump site for the overburden—the dirt removed to get at the study-objects—to allow for convenient sifting if need be; all of this required careful thought. Without planning and record keeping, a dig in this backyard would be no more professional than the dig in that other backyard, so long ago.

  Barbara stopped in the still-crowded kitchen for another cup of coffee and a yardstick. Then she left the house and walked the few hundred yards to the entrance of the burial ground. It was surrounded by a carefully tended picket fence, long and low, with a wide entrance made of two gatepieces hinged to swing open in the center. A worn gravel road led from the burial ground’s entrance to what had once been the plantation’s main internal road. It had led from the public highway around the main house and then to the working buildings, the storage rooms, stables, the blacksmith’s forge, the plantation’s depot for arriving goods and departing cotton.

  None of those buildings survived, but Barbara knew where they all had been. As a child, she had many times joined her cousins in scrambling around the slumped-over foundations, searching for old horseshoes and other bits of ancient ironmongery. Now the plantation road was merely a long driveway, paved over in dusty, aging asphalt, that terminated in a two-car garage, with a large garden shed set down next to the garage some years ago. A line of cars from half a dozen states were parked along the plantation road at the moment, relatives having cautiously pulled off the asphalt onto the soft, narrow, gravelly shoulder. Fortunately, the line of cars began at the front of the main house and worked its way back to the county road. None of them were blocking the excavation area. Barbara was eager to avoid explanations as long as possible. She didn’t feel like going through a big involved song and dance just to get Uncle Clem to move his Buick.

  Barbara crouched down by the side of the present crossroads, sipped at her coffee, and thought. The gorillas had in theory been buried at the crossroads, at the point where the plantation road met the path to the burial ground. She had to determine the exact burial sites from the clues in Zebulon’s journal, and from her reading of the land.

  The gravel road down from the burial ground was only a hundred meters or so long, and it ran straight as an arrow. Barbara smiled at herself. She was thinking in scientific meters already, instead of civilian feet and yards. Translating between the two systems was an automatic reflex for most American workers in the sciences.

  Though the burial ground road was straight, the old plantation road curved here and there, meandering over its leisurely present-day ro
ute from the house to the garage.

  That was the tricky part. Small country lanes and roads have a habit of moving around, shifting their beds in much the same way a river does, moving to one side for a rock or a tree or a building that might not be there ten or twenty or a hundred years later, the next time the road was rebuilt. A road might develop gullies or potholes, forcing traffic to shift left or right in a temporary move that might accidentally become permanent as erosion washed the gully out further. A flash flood might wash the road out altogether, to be replaced in more or less the same place, if at all. Then—as was the case here—a casual modern-day road builder might simply slop some asphalt on the beaten-down gravel, effectively sealing over many of the clues as to how the road had evolved, until erosion began its patient gnawing at the edges of the asphalt, and the newest road slowly sank into the old, beaten down and punished by the weight of traffic.

  The gravel road from the burial ground was strictly the shortest distance between two points and nothing else. It was too short, too straight, to have shifted much. Clearly, then, Barbara’s first task lay in figuring out where the plantation road had been in antebellum days. Then she could zero in on the crossroads of the past and know where to dig.

  She set her half-full coffee cup on the ground by the edge of the asphalt and stepped out onto the low crown of the road. She laid her aunt’s kitchen yardstick athwart the plantation road at the present crossroads, dug out her camera and tripod, and spent twenty minutes carefully photographing the undisturbed site from a half dozen angles, thoroughly describing each photo in her notebook. She finished off her remaining stock of film.

  Next step: ground survey. Read the earth and see what it had to say. But the grass was overgrown, making it harder to read the ground. There was an oversized rider mower in the garden shed.

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  When Livingston arrived an hour or so later, slowly threading his car past the line of visiting relatives’ cars parked on the side of the narrow plantation road, his cousin Barbara was just about finished with the mower. An area about the size of a baseball diamond was cut down to a pathetic stubble less than an inch high. The ground that had looked so smooth and level when hidden by the grass was revealed as rough and hummocky, much littered with road gravel, broken twigs, and other debris. It was a quick-and-dirty mowing job, with some narrow strips of grass simply trampled down or missed altogether. Barbara was by the garden shed, emptying the mower’s grass-catcher into the garden compost heap—for the fourth or fifth time, judging from the heaps of cuttings. Livingston parked his near-antique ‘73 Dodge by the shed, got out, took his purchases from the back seat, and set them on the rear deck of the car.

  Barbara dusted off her hands and came over. “Welcome back, partner. Just about ready for you. Get everything?”

  “Sure did, Barb. But you won’t like it when that American Express bill hits.”

  “That’s tomorrow’s problem. Let’s see the haul.” Livingston extracted the metal detector and shoved the batteries into it. Barbara took it from him and ran it over the grass by the shed until it started beeping. She bent down, scrabbled in the grass, and produced an old bottle cap. “Okay, that works.” She walked back to the car and checked the rest of the bags. “Film, notebooks, string, compass. Even a metric tape measure. Good. Okay, let’s get to work.”

  They found a good-sized hammer, a wheelbarrow, shovels and trowels, dumped everything into the barrow, and wheeled it over to what cousin Barbara was already calling “the site.” Livingston thought they would be getting right to it with some spade work, and was relieved to learn that evil moment was to be put off for a bit. Barbara explained briefly to him how a road could shift, and how the first order of business was finding the line of the old plantation road. So he relaxed at the edge of the cleared area, sitting on the upended wheelbarrow, happy to be getting paid by the hour, while she walked over every square inch of the ground, rarely taking more than one step at a time, frequently crouching down to examine a bit of stone or a handful of pebbles, scribbling down innumerable notes.

  Livingston watched her as she worked, and got the distinct feeling that she had forgotten him altogether. There was something almost otherworldly in her concentration, as if she was looking at a place that was not there anymore, a place no one else could see. With a start, he realized that was precisely her job description. He watched more intently, wondering what the rocks and clay and topsoil of Mississippi told her that was hidden from him. He started to follow her about, a pace or two behind, trying to see what it was she saw.

  She looked behind herself suddenly, realizing he was there. She smiled, and her face lit up with the light of some special secret inside. “Careful, Liv. You’re walking on the past.” She knelt abruptly and patted the ground with the flat of her hand. “The past is buried right here, if you know how to read it. All this dirt came from somewhere. The pebbles and rocks were part of mountains; the soil itself used to be trees and animals and air and rain, churned up and recycled again and again. The bones of creatures no human has ever seen, from a hundred million years ago, are beneath our feet somewhere, locked up in sediments that were formed before this continent was here.”

  There was a long pause, and Barbara seemed to be staring into the ground, through soil and rocks and strata made clear as glass, to look upon the ultimate secrets of yesteryear.

  As last she shook herself, stood up, and smiled again, this time in embarrassment. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I get so focused, so involved, that I forge t everything.” With a visible effort, she brought herself back to the job at hand. “Listen, load up the camera and photograph the whole area. I shot the whole site before it was mowed, and I might as well have a record of what it looks like now. What I’m looking for is the shape of the land—where the road is in relation to the burial ground and the house, that sort of thing. Grab a notebook and write down a description of each shot.”

  Livingston got busy with the camera, and shot most of a roll. He felt as if he had seen something meant to be unknown, hidden from view under the sheltering mantle of professional decorum. Barbara must be pretty spooked to open up that way. He got on with his picture taking.

  Now and again, Barbara would call him over to snap one little patch of gravel that looked like all the others to him. She was very excited to discover a little washout—evidence, so she said, of an intermittent stream that had run alongside the present road some years before. She traced the stream bed, wholly invisible to his eyes, right through the length of the site, and carefully noted its location in a sketch map she was making.

  Finally, she seemed satisfied and put away her notebook. “Okay, Liv, let’s break out the metal detector.” He got it from the barrow and handed it over. She started working the detector at one edge of the site, and Livingston followed behind. Almost immediately, she got a strike. She pulled her trowel out of her hip pocket and dug up an old masonry nail.

  Livingston bent down eagerly. “That it? You found it already?”

  Barbara didn’t answer. Instead, she shoved the nail in her pocket, stood up, and started again with the detector. She got another immediate find, this time an old bolt. In short order she had dug up a broken hinge, two more nails, a crumbled piece of wire, and a rusty tin can, all from a few square meters. She shut off the detector, squatted back on her haunches, and sighed. “I was afraid of this,” she said. “Junk. J-U-N-K junk. The whole topsoil is riddled with whatever fell off the cart going past for the last hundred and fifty years. I’ve got the metal detector set at minimum sensitivity as it is. We’ll never find the caskets with all this garbage over top of them.”

  Livingston groaned to himself. She was going to want all the topsoil scraped off, that was next. He very definitely didn’t want to dig a hole eight inches deep and a hundred yards across. He thought fast. “Look, Barb. Can we get rid of it with the rider-mower? I thought I saw some sort of tiller attachment, and maybe we could rig up some sort of drag-plow for it.”

 
Her face brightened. She didn’t think removing topsoil was fun either. “Hey, good thinking. Let’s get to it.”

  They actually got halfway to the garden shed before Barbara remembered all her early lessons about being overeager. “Wait a second, Liv. We’re about to make more work for ourselves.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “I’ve got a space maybe thirty meters on a side mowed down over there. That’s nine hundred square meters of topsoil, say 10 centimeters thick, to clear off. Do you want to move 90 cubic meters of dirt, even using a jury-rig plow?”

  “Ah.” Livingston had done some landscaping work as a high school kid. His muscles started to ache in advance. “So what do we do?”

  “We find the old crossroads point first, and just clear the area immediately around it.”

  She turned around and led him back to the site. Consulting her sketch map, she relocated a part of the old washout she had found before. She stood in the middle of the broad, shallow depression and turned to her cousin. “Okay, Liv, my guess is that this is the old road.”

  “C’mon, Barb,” Livingston protested. “This is a stream bed. You said so yourself.”

  “Yeah, but how did it get to be one? Where’s it running from? The land here is as flat as a pancake. I figure that the road was here—just a dirt road at the time, of course—and the wheel traffic wore down the ground level, scraped away the topsoil. Then the rains would come and the waters would funnel down to the lowest ground. A flood or two, erosion, and the road keeps sinking lower and lower. Happens all the time. When they first paved the road, maybe fifty years ago, by the looks of things, they said the hell with it and moved the roadway over twenty feet or so. Over the years, with no more traffic to keep it worn down, the gullied-out road filled itself back in. Most of it is already filled in completely. That all make sense?”