Orphan of Creation

by Roger MacBride Allen

  The odds were perhaps fair-to-good that at least one of those three clumpings of points on the grid represented the partly rusted-out nails and hinges that had once held together the packing cases Zebulon’s gorillas were buried in—unless they were the dump sites from the blacksmith shop, or even just random collections of rocks with extremely high iron contents.

  Or maybe there were never any burials in the first place. For all she knew, Zeb had been kidding all of them, or had unwittingly injected his first-person recollections into someone else’s tall tale. He could have heard the story a hundred times, each time a little grander, a little greater, his child’s imagination working on it, until the tale took on every bit as much strength as genuine memory. It happened all the time.

  She shook off her moodiness and doubts. They always hit her when she got close to the moment of truth on a dig. When it was time to make the decisions that would steer the rest of the project, Barbara invariably came up with plausible theories that showed her every premise was fatally flawed and that they might as well pack up and go home. It was her version of stage fright. She did her best to put her doubts behind her and think.

  Careful not to get tangled in the strings that marked out the grid, she crossed over to the now mostly empty lawn chairs and sat down. The only observer still present was her own mother, and she was fast asleep, a light blanket tucked around her feet, her faced calm and untroubled as she quietly snored in the gentle afternoon sun. The rest of the audience had drifted off to more exciting entertainments, though certain of the younger boys had extracted a promise from Barbara to let them play with the metal detector when she was done with it.

  And, for the moment, she was through with it, though none of the kids was around to lay claim to it.

  She knew that she had accomplished a great deal that day, though no one outside the profession would realize it. Using improvised materials, and procedures invented to make the best of the situation, she had avoided some traps that would have thrown the amateur or journeyman (such as assuming the road would not move), eliminated ninety-nine percent of a dauntingly large search area before she started to dig, and kept a record of her work that should silence any nit-pickers later on.

  But what to do now? She took a look at her watch, and at the sun. Two-thirty p.m., in late November. They were going to lose the light in another hour or two. The tedious work of digging out a grave, assuming every conceivable effort to preserve an accurate record of stratification and protect any possible additional artifacts could take a week, a month, easily. She had three potential grave sites, and at best two days—plus these two hours of daylight—left in which to deal with them. Obviously, she would have to concentrate on one potential grave, do it fast, and pray it would pay off.

  She looked again at the grid map. Alpha was the most obvious bet. It was by far the most concentrated and tidy grouping—but something made her shy away from it. Maybe just that it was the most obvious. But then she put her finger on what bothered her about it. Alpha was the closest of the three to the slaves burial ground. If the point of the crossroads burial had been to protect the sanctity of that hallowed ground, then it seemed to Barbara that the slaves who had done the burying would have wanted the psychological distance and barrier of the plantation road between the gorillas and their ancestors’ resting places.

  Livingston stood up from the last of his labors and stretched, his massive muscles straining under the fabric of his shirt. “Break time, by any chance, Barb?” he asked. “Haven’t eaten all day here.”

  Barbara suddenly realized that her stomach had been rumbling for hours. On the other hand, she knew what kind of eating her cousin could do. There had been jokes the night before about serving him his own turkey. Right now, there wasn’t time for that. “Okay, Liv, but we can’t waste the daylight. I want to be back out here in twenty minutes.

  Livingston moaned. “Come on, Barb, have a heart!”

  “Don’t you go starting a union on me, Liv. You can eat all you want after sunset. Let’s hurry.” She turned and gave her mother a poke. “Momma, we’re heading in for dinner. Don’t stay out here too long or you’ll catch yourself a chill.”

  Her mother shifted sleepily and opened her eyes. “Find any monkeys down there yet, child?” she asked with a smile.

  Barbara grinned back. “No, Momma, but we’re hot on the trail.” They all went back inside, Barbara and Livingston to eat, and Barbara’s mother to a more comfortable nap on a bed upstairs.

  It was a wash-the-first-layers-off, stand-up, eat-the-leftovers-fast meal, but even that sort of eating was better than a sit-down dinner in most houses, when you were in Aunt Josephine’s kitchen. The turkey sandwiches and apple pie were perfect. And with a generous helping of stuffing, they were filling enough for Liv to stop grousing. Then they were back at it, at the moment of truth. Barbara discovered that she had decided on a strategy during pie. Over a quick cup of coffee, she showed him the grid map and told him her plans.

  “Okay, partner, let me tell you how I see it. I figure this Beta area, a rectangle from E3 to G4, is our best bet at finding a grave.” She pointed at the area on the grid. “With the stuff we shaved off the surface this morning gone, we’re probably already below the 1850-era horizon—that is, the ground level for the time period we’re interested in. It’s purely the intrusive burial that we have to worry about anyway—there shouldn’t be much else down there of interest, so we don’t have to run every bit of dirt through a microscope just yet. I’m assuming that if our gorilla friends are down there at all, it’s in some pretty shallow graves—maybe only half a meter or so deep. I doubt a bunch of slaves who just wanted to get some rotting bodies underground and away from their ancestors would dig the regulation six feet down. So let’s go.” She was already halfway out the door, eager to get back to it. Livingston had to hurry to catch up with her, downing the last of his coffee so fast he burned his tongue.

  <>

  Barbara stepped nimbly over the strings marking the grid marks. “I want to see if I can hit the center of the grave first. We’re going to dig out the square formed by F3, F4, G3, G4 to thirty centimeters below current ground level, using spades, but going very slow and gentle, and saving all the overburden,” she announced. “We dump all the overburden into the wheelbarrow, then dump the barrow onto that tarp over there.”

  “Why save the old dirt?”

  “So we’ll be able to sift it later if we have to.”

  Liv thought that was going a bit far in planning ahead, but he heard a bit of his old college coach in her authoritative, confident tones and knew there wasn’t much future in arguing.

  Barbara went on. “Once we’re at thirty centimeters, we do another metal detector sweep and see if we’ve accounted for any of the hits. If we find out we’ve dug right past some ferrous rocks that fooled us, we can quit while we’re ahead. But assuming we’re still on track, we switch to trowels and go down as far as we can before nightfall. Hand me a shovel.”

  “Finally, we’re digging,” Livingston said as he walked less gracefully across the string lines. “I thought pick-and-shovel was all you guys did, and we’ve taken all day to get started on it.” He picked his spot and pushed his spade into the earth, almost relieved to get to the hard part after dreading it for so long. “Y’know, somehow or another, this whole thing reminds me of the old triangle trade. The traders went from Africa with slaves for the West Indies, bought rum and sugar there, then went to Europe with those goods, and back down to Africa with guns and trinkets to trade for more slaves. Slaves, rum, and guns. All those vices going around and around in a circle. Aunt Jo would love the symbolism for her Sunday School class.”

  Barbara looked at her cousin with an odd expression. “What’s all that got to do with digging a hole?”

  Livingston pointed down at the hypothetical bones beneath their feet. “Slavers brought these gorillas to Mississippi from Africa. You’ll take ’em from here to Washington if you find ’em. Then somebody or o
ther will get all stirred up and head back to Africa looking for sources, clues. Same damn old triangle, except the products are gorillas, bones, and curiosity. I bet Aunt Jo could teach the congregation some very apt lessons from that.”

  “You are a very weird guy, Livingston,” Barbara said. “You get back to your digging before you think of something else strange.”

  He grinned and stabbed the shovel back into the earth.

  With Livingston’s strength and Barbara’s experience, the first phase of digging went quickly. They paused once, to open up a few of the grid lines so the barrow could get through, and took turns doing the digging and running the barrow back and forth to the overburden tarp.

  Barbara’s biggest worry was keeping the sides of the little excavation from caving in. Livingston was better at getting the hole deeper than he was at keeping the side shored up. Albeit with a great deal of fussing, she managed to keep sides square enough to satisfy her professors.

  They found nothing more exciting than rocks in that first part of the dig, which made Barbara feel better. If the upper soil had been full of artifacts. the odds against the coffin nails being what had registered would have gone down. But with the dig a blank slate so far, there seemed no other possible explanation for the hits, except that something metal had been buried far deeper than people buried casual trash.

  The sun was showing signs of lowering alarmingly by the time they were near the thirty-centimeter level. When they ran a metal-detector sweep at the 30 cm. horizon, none of the previous hits vanished, meaning that whatever had made them was still below and not thrown up on the overburden tarp. Indeed, all the readings had strengthened and two more faint ones registered. A few of the readings had shifted their apparent positions, and seemed to be clustering in a bit closer to each other. Barbara was pleased, but not surprised. A lot of things could throw a detector off: moisture in the overlying soil, a misreading of the peak on the gauss meter—or Livingston getting his big feet in their metal-toed work boots too close to the detector head.

  As afternoon wore on into evening, Barbara had to use the flash on her camera to photograph the thirty-centimeter horizon with the restaked hits marked in.

  By an act of sheer self-discipline, Barbara decided to knock off for the day. It was a hard call because they were close. Both of them could feel it. Just below their feet, secrets waited to whisper their truths after more than a hundred and thirty years of silence. It was tempting to dig out just one more trowelful, because whatever-it-was might be waiting below the surface, a handbreadth away. But that could be disaster in the tricky, failing light of sunset. The shadows of twilight were filling the excavation, and a vital bit of bone could be missed. A precious, irreplaceable bit of the past could easily be stepped on unknowingly, thrown away in the gloom of on-coming night. Barbara even considered scaring up whatever lanterns and flashlights were about the place, and working that way, but eyes dazzled by a flashlight could be worse than useless, and light was no help when it merely turned shadows into glare.

  Reluctantly, they cleaned their tools, returned them carefully to their places in the garden shed and the garage, and took their sore muscles in to dinner and the last of the endless Big Games on TV. Barbara crept upstairs to a much-wanted shower and an early bed time—but she might as well have been eight years old on Christmas Eve, for all the sleep she got.

  <>

  The next morning, Saturday, she was in the excavation, shoring up the walls where they had slumped over in the night, before the last star had left the sky. Her muscles were sore from yesterday’s work, but that just felt good, a real sign that she had done something the day before.

  Livingston stumbled out of the house soon afterwards, carrying two steaming cups of coffee. Barbara took hers gratefully.

  The two of them started with the back-wrenching, tedious, careful work of peeling back the surface of the excavation. She drummed into his head just how fragile what they were digging for was. It would require exquisite care to remove whatever remains they might find.

  Livingston listened carefully as Barbara told him how to dig gently, and he set to work alongside her.

  It was long, slow work. They would dig down ten centimeters along one side of the excavation, no farther than a trowel could cut. Then they would work back toward the far side of the excavation, slicing down that same ten centimeters and no farther until they reached the far side, and the floor of the hole was exactly level at the new, ten-centimeter-lower level. Then they would start again. Over and over again, they cleared every bit of the work face to the new horizon—Livingston was picking up the trade-talk—before going farther down at any point.

  Start at the east side of the work face and work toward the west. Cut back the overburden east to west, whittling down a low ridge of dirt that slowly melted before their trowel blades. Slowly fill a bucket with dirt, slowly fill the wheelbarrow one bucketful at a time, empty the barrow on the tarp, and be glad for the chance to straighten up for a moment and get out of the hole.

  They were about halfway across on their sixth horizon, the excavation now about waist deep on Livingston, the sun high in the ten a.m. sky—

  When Livingston’s trowel hit something.

  Something, he knew instantly, that wasn’t dirt.

  Something that gave a little.

  <>

  “Barb!” he cried out, and threw down the trowel. Working with his bare hands, he scrabbled away the dirt, his heart pounding, fingers almost trembling with excitement.

  “Stop!” she cried out. “Don’t use your hands. Run and get a brush.”

  “A brush?” his hands stopped in midair over the whatever-it-was, and he looked up at her for a split second, as if he had never seen such a thing as a person before. Then he looked back down toward the ground. All he had eyes for was the invisible something beneath his feet.

  “A brush! A paintbrush! It’s the best way to clear the dirt away. Didn’t I remember to tell you to get—oh, the hell with it! Come on, there must be some in the garage!”

  Livingston got the idea. They scrambled out of the hole, and both of them nearly tripped over the grid lines on their way out. They broke all records getting to the garage, but there wasn’t anything remotely like a brush in any of the neat cupboards. They drew another blank in the garden shed, and pounded hell-for-leather through the breakfast crowd in the kitchen to get down to the basement to go banging through all the storage bins. In the last cabinet they tried, Livingston came up with a treasure trove of perfectly kept, good-as-new, soft-as-could-be brushes. Probably they had been right there since Great-uncle Will had last put them away before he had died, ten years before. Never mind. They were already outside again, racing for the site, leaving a trail of curious relatives following in their wake.

  They scrambled back over the grid lines again, and Livingston made ready to jump down into the pit—but Barbara grabbed at his arm and yelled “Stop!”

  Livingston looked back at her. “But—”

  “But nothing! We’re standing right here for a second until we catch our breath and calm down a bit, or we’ll screw it up for sure! Liv, you almost jumped right on top of whatever you just found—and I nearly let you! We’re really close, so let’s not foul up.”

  Livingston put up his hands in an apologetic gesture. “Okay, okay.” He turned away from the hole and squatted down on his haunches, doing the breathing exercises he had used to calm himself before a big game. Barbara leaned over and patted him on the shoulder.

  After a long, silent moment, she said, “Okay, let’s do it. Calm and cool.” Slowly, carefully, they stepped down into the excavation. Barbara handed her cousin one of the brushes. “Go for it, Liv.”

  Almost in a pose of reverence, he knelt down in front of the thing he had found. Barbara retrieved her camera and started to shoot. He started to brush away the dirt, and slowly exposed a tiny patch of a grimy, chewed-up-looking something, something with an oddly familiar, patterned surface. He drew back his hand
and stared at what he had found. His imagination tried to fit what he saw into some sort of pattern, tried to see it as mummified skin or something even ghastlier, something horrid and unknown dredged up from the past. His stomach quavered, and the excavation’s normal odor, the moldery smell of long-buried earth, suddenly seemed the stench of some evil thing long forgotten, something best left alone. “What is it, Barb?” he whispered.

  “Canvas, Liv,” she replied just as quietly. “It’s dirty, rotted-out old canvas. But what the hell is it doing here?”

  Almost reluctantly, Livingston resumed his work with the brush. The patch of canvas grew from a spot the size of his thumb to an area larger than his huge hand. A spot of red appeared, and he brushed away the dirt around it, to reveal a long, rusty nail lying atop the canvas, a few crumbling bits of wood barely attached to it.

  “That’s one of our hits, kiddo,” Barbara whispered. “That’s what led us here. One of the coffin nails, and what’s stuck to it is what’s left of the coffin itself. Here, let me see the brush. You take the camera and get some close-ups.”

  “You two finally find something?” a booming voice shouted down.

  Barb and Liv almost jumped out of their skins. They looked up to see the site surrounded by a row of expectant faces. “Yes, Aunt Josephine. Yes, we have,” Barbara replied. She turned back toward her work. “Take the camera, Liv.”

  With surprising speed, she worked the brush over the surface and cleared the dirt from a whole hump of pitted, crumpled, flattened, worm-eaten canvas, large enough that she could begin to trace the outlines of the body below it. “Looks like the grave subsided a bit toward the west,” she muttered in a fast, breathy voice, not pausing in her work. She found more and larger bits of wood, some still clinging to their rusty nails, and places where the canvas was crumbling away to nothing, barely held together by a few surviving threads. “They must have wrapped the body in the cloth before they threw it in the packing case,” she announced in a louder voice to no one in particular.