The Bone Yard

by Jefferson Bass

  Over the rumble and growl of the diesel engine, I heard a shout and looked up. Doug, one of the ten undergraduate students on my summer crew, was standing in the cut ten feet beyond me, pointing at the ground and waving his straw hat in excitement. I stood for a better look. By now the grader was nearing the end of the swath we’d marked with flags. Between where I stood and where the machine was slowing to an idle, the other nine summer students were dancing, pointing, and dropping to their knees in the dirt, clustering around another half-dozen faint circles, another half-dozen graves.

  I raised my trowel high above my head and cut loose with what I imagined to be the battle cry of a triumphant Arikara warrior. The students stared at me, then, one by one and two by two, they joined in.

  Unlike whites, the Arikara tended to bury their dead in a folded position, either sitting up or lying on one side, tightly tucked in a fetal position. The reason was simple: two hundred years ago, the Indians had only the simplest of tools. To dig graves, they used crude hoes, which they made by lashing a buffalo scapula to a stick or to a buffalo femur. These Bone Age tools were wielded by women, for burying the dead was considered women’s work. Try burrowing down through prairie sod with a buffalo bone and you, too, would surely settle for a compact, shallow grave, just as the Arikara squaw who’d dug this grave had doubtless done.

  Pulling rank, I claimed the first grave as my own private dig and began troweling into the soil. A few inches down, I came to a layer of crumbling wood, the remnants of the sticks and brush that had been put here two centuries before to deter scavenging by coyotes and rodents. Carefully I teased the wood fragments apart, setting them on a wire screen that would be used to sift everything that came from the ground.

  The dirt was soft and the work went quickly—“summertime, and the diggin’ is easy,” I heard myself singing—and before long I felt the tip of the trowel contact something hard. Probing gently for the object’s boundaries, I found that it was large and round, and a few minutes later, I was looking at the top of a cranial vault, stained a dull grayish brown from two centuries in the prairie soil. I used the trowel to lift powdery triangles of soil from around the skull, and then switched to an artist’s brush to dust the skull itself.

  The skull was that of a young adult male, large and robust, with a heavy brow ridge and prominent muscle markings. The left side of the skull had been crushed. By what, I wondered: a horse’s hoof? a cavalry soldier’s rifle butt? a Sioux war club? Reaching down, I touched the skull gently, tracing the edges of the gaping hole, brushing the intact bone surrounding it. As my fingers grazed the forehead, they encountered an unexpected roughness in what should have been smooth bone. Brushing away more dirt, I leaned down to inspect the forehead. In a crude arc from one side to the other, the forehead bore the jagged, ragged cut marks of a hasty scalping. A foe, probably a Sioux warrior, had sliced through the front of the scalp and then given the hair a hard yank, peeling the hair and skin backward, off the top of the head, and all the way down to the back of the neck. If the Sioux brave had survived the battle, he would have displayed the scalp triumphantly, boasting of his prowess, when it came time to count coup and tally the number of Arikara they’d killed.

  In my mind’s eye, I pictured the triumphant Sioux warrior, and then, in my imagination, I became the triumphant Sioux warrior. And at that moment—when the boundary between past and present, between South Dakota and north Florida, between reality and magic, turned shimmery and elusive and impossible to pin down—sleep finally caught up with me.

  Or so I assume, because the next thing I knew, my cell phone was warbling to tell me that it was 5:30 A.M., and the rattling, musty air conditioner was reminding me emphatically that I was in bungalow number three at the Twilight Motor Court. And the Twilight was neither dream nor vision.

  Chapter 22

  Day was breaking—oozing up out of the steamy ground of the panhandle, more like it—as we approached the turnoff to the reform school. The eastern sky was turning a watery gray, and by that hint of light, I saw the hulking yellow shape beside the highway. “Looks like maybe somebody up there likes us,” I said. Pulling ahead of the gear-laden trailer, we led the way down the blacktop to the school.

  Then, as we neared the faint turnoff of the dirt road that led past the cemetery and beyond, to the unmarked graves, I saw the strobing blue lights of a Miccosukee County sheriff’s car blocking the lane. “Somebody up there might like us,” muttered Vickery, “but somebody down here definitely doesn’t.”

  Angie pulled alongside the cruiser, and Vickery got out to confer with the deputy. He returned a moment later, his cell phone at his ear. “There’s good news and bad news,” he reported as he snapped the phone closed.

  “What’s the good news?” asked Angie.

  “The good news is, Sheriff Judson is on his way out here.”

  She made a face. “That’s the good news? What the hell is the bad news?”

  “The bad news is, I might have to arrest him.”

  “Ouch,” said Angie. “That could be ugly.”

  “Maybe I won’t have to. Riordan’s on his way out here, too.”

  The sheriff arrived first, parking his truck behind us with his strobes and his spotlights on us full force, as if we were suspects. He got out and approached the Suburban, his silhouette casting an immense shadow. Vickery drew a deep breath. “Showtime. Or showdown, more like. Y’all mind coming with me for moral support? Or to witness my demise? You can tell people I died bravely.” Our doors opened in unison; they closed in unison.

  “Morning, Sheriff,” said Vickery. The sheriff made no answer, so Vickery went on. “We’re anxious to get back to our crime-scene search, since you’d like us to complete it today. Any particular reason your deputy is blocking the access road?”

  “Doesn’t look like you’re here to search a crime scene,” said the sheriff. He pointed at the flatbed trailer and the massive machine it carried. “Looks like you’re here to build a damn highway.”

  Just then the silver Lexus arrived, and Riordan joined our conclave. He wasted no time with pleasantries. “What’s the problem, Sheriff?”

  “Problem is, I say you can have a day to dig up a few old bones, and you-all want to come in here and start cutting roads. That’s not the deal we had.”

  “We’re not cutting roads, Sheriff.”

  “Then why you bringing in the goddamn road-cutting machinery?”

  Riordan turned to me. “Dr. Brockton, would you explain why we need the equipment?”

  “Of course. Sheriff, the problem is, we’ve got an area half the size of a football field to search for more graves. We could probe and excavate the whole area by hand, but that would take days, maybe even weeks. Using this road scraper, we can peel back the vegetation and the top layer of soil, so we can see areas underneath where the ground’s been disturbed. When we find those, we know where to check for more bones.”

  The sheriff stared at me, then at Riordan. Finally he shook his head. “No.”

  Riordan tilted his head slightly. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

  “I mean hell no. This is my county. I am the law here. Nobody can fire me but the governor, and I have the authority to limit the scope of this crime-scene search. You can bring in all the shovels and fancy-ass PhDs, you want. For the next twelve hours. But get that damn machine out of here.”

  Riordan didn’t speak for a while; finally he shook his head and, just as the sheriff had done, said, “No.” He gave another, smaller shake—wistfully, I thought, regretting the clash of wills—then went on. “Sheriff, I’ve opened an investigation into these deaths—I have some authority, too—and I’ve got a warrant authorizing us to locate and excavate any graves on that piece of land, using whatever tools and equipment we deem necessary. I can’t fire you, but I can arrest you, and if that road isn’t open in sixty seconds, you and your deputy will both be charged with obstruction of justice.” He studied the cruiser that was blocking the way. “I think it’ll be i
nteresting to see what a road grader does to that car when it pushes it into the trees. Not what the machine was designed for, but I suspect it’ll do the job.”

  Two minutes later, Riordan was ordering the scraper’s operator to unload his machine and clear the road. I wasn’t sure the nervous-looking equipment operator would actually follow that order, if the prosecutor’s push came to the sheriff’s shove. Luckily—and surprisingly—the sheriff backed down. The Miccosukee County deputy killed his strobes and crept down the dirt road toward the Bone Yard. Our motley convoy followed: the Avalanche of the pissed-off sheriff, the Lexus of the prosecutor, our Suburban, and, bringing up the rear, the goosenecked lowboy trailer hauling the mammoth machine that I hoped would reveal how many graves—how many dead boys—were hidden in the Bone Yard.

  If we’d had more time, the sheriff’s mistaken idea—that we’d brought the equipment to cut a road to the site—would have been worth carrying out. The tractor trailer had no trouble negotiating the mile of cracked and weedy blacktop that led to the ruins of the burned school. But progress slowed to a snail’s pace after that, when the blacktop gave way to dirt and the dirt to ruts through the woods. The low trailer bottomed out more than once on the uneven surface, and as it crept around bends in the road, scores of saplings bent, tore, and snapped. The mile to the school had taken less than five minutes; the first half mile toward the Bone Yard seemed to take forever. It took nearly an hour to reach the halfway mark—the clearing with the eleven graves marked by metal crosses—and when he learned that the roughest stretch was yet to come, the driver parked the trailer and unloaded the scraper, and the machine lumbered the last half mile under its own steam.

  By the time the machine was in position it was nearly 9 A.M., and the rumble of the idling diesel sounded more and more like the ticking of a clock. I’d stuck survey flags in the ground to mark the initial path I wanted it to follow, and Angie had sent the remaining techs scurrying ahead with metal detectors. Their search yielded a small midden of objects, but as evidence, the only crime they seemed to point to was redneck littering: beer cans, bottle caps, Vienna sausage tins. As soon as Angie gave me the all-clear signal, I walked toward the scraper and beckoned it forward. With a roar and a billowing cloud of diesel smoke, my Florida earthmoving experiment began.

  The machine I’d used in South Dakota had been called a Tournapull, a clever word that managed to combine the name of the inventor, R. G. LeTourneau, with the suggestion that the scraper—a two-wheeled blade-and-hopper assembly towed by a tractor—was highly maneuverable. Its latter-day Florida counterpart, manufactured by Caterpillar, was not a Tournapull; the operator had indignantly informed me that it was an “open-bowl scraper.” To me, that didn’t sound like a macho earthmoving machine; to me, “open-bowl scraper” sounded like the rubber spatula my mother had used when she was frosting chocolate cakes. But I didn’t give a fig what the machine was called, so long as it worked.

  Behind the blade of the behemoth was a vast, bellylike hopper, slung so low it nearly dragged the ground. The dirt removed by the blade would be collected continuously in the hopper, which would need to be emptied regularly. As I gave hand signals to guide the operator, the scraper eased forward and the blade eased down, a fraction of an inch at a time. When the depth of the cut reached two inches, I signaled the operator and he locked the blade in position. The machine crept across the ground, ripping up ferns, leaves, sticks, scrub growth, vines, and shallow roots. Just as I’d done a quarter century before in the South Dakota prairie, I walked behind the scraper, this time in a Florida live-oak forest.

  The first pass was the slowest, the gnarliest, the most debris-laden. As the machine bulled and tore a path beneath the spreading canopy, a windrow of limbs and shredded brush piled up alongside the cut. When he reached the end of the hundred feet we’d marked off, the operator circled back and shoved the debris farther to the side, to give the machine and us a bit of breathing room and make it easier to monitor the depth of the cut.

  The second pass—which bit down another two inches, as would each successive pass—proceeded more smoothly, with less ripping and grumbling. The machine chewed forward and downward, a ponderous, insatiable beast, feeding upon the very earth itself.

  By the third pass, the hopper was filling, the topsoil was giving way to clay, and I was giving in to serious worries. What if the technique that had worked so well in South Dakota couldn’t simply be transplanted to Florida? What if I’d unintentionally sold everyone a bill of goods? If we failed to find more graves, there would surely be hell to pay. The bill wouldn’t come to me, of course—I could simply tuck my tail between my legs and slink back to the safety of Tennessee—but Sheriff Judson would doubtless find a way to wreak vengeance on Vickery, possibly on Riordan, and perhaps even on Angie as well: the three people who embodied the invasion of his county and the challenge to his authority.

  There was another possibility, of course. It was possible that no matter what techniques or technologies we harnessed, no matter how much time we invested, we’d never find anything more, because perhaps there were no more graves to be found. Perhaps the dog had already done a thorough job. And shouldn’t I be hoping for that, after all: hoping that only three boys were buried here, no more? And yet, though I felt a tingle of shame, I scanned the ground avidly for signs of another burial.

  At the end of the third cut, instead of making a U-turn and starting a fourth pass, the operator raised the blade and made for a briar patch at the far end of the site, where we’d decided we’d dump the dirt. There was a slight chance, of course, that we were dumping dirt atop a dozen undiscovered graves, but that was a chance we’d have to take; the dirt had to go somewhere, and putting it at the farthest edge of the site seemed a reasonable gamble. When he reached the briar patch, the operator opened a pair of large doors in the machine’s belly—like bomb-bay doors in a B-52—and dropped the load. Then he looped back and resumed where he’d left off.

  I was waiting for him. Anxiously waiting. He lowered the blade again, farther, bringing the cut to eight inches, a depth I confirmed by measuring the wall of the trench. As another layer peeled from the ground, the coolness of the underlying earth caused the moisture in the air to condense, giving the clay a moist sheen in the glinting light.

  Barely twenty yards after the grader had resumed its course, the blade snagged and yanked at the remnants of a root that had pushed its way down into the clay. But then, as the machine tore the root from the ground, I realized that the soil clinging to the root wasn’t pure clay; the clay was mixed with darker, looser topsoil. That same mixture, I saw with mounting excitement, extended well beyond the spot where the root had burrowed in. As I drew close and leaned down, I found myself peering down on an oval patch of disturbed soil, roughly two feet by four feet, Roughly the same dimensions as hundreds of Arikara Indian graves I’d excavated so many years ago in South Dakota. Silently, so as not to raise doubts about my sanity, I raised a triumphant war whoop.

  Late in the morning, a Winnebago-like RV lumbered and scraped its way into the site—a mobile command post, Angie informed me. I wondered what Sheriff Judson thought about this latest development. Actually, I had a pretty good idea what the sheriff thought about it, since he chose to boycott the scene. What I didn’t know was what cajoling or threatening Riordan had done to get the command post onto the site.

  Shortly after noon, a siren whooped from the direction of the command post, followed by a loudspeaker announcement that lunch was available in the tent. Tent? What tent? Then I noticed that at some point since the command post’s arrival, a big canvas canopy had been raised beside it, and underneath the canvas were tables loaded with food and drink.

  I hadn’t realized I was hungry, but I ate ravenously—two smoked-turkey wraps, three bags of potato chips (which helped replenish all the salt I’d sweated out), and half a dozen peanut-butter cookies, washed down with a quart of milk. I consumed all that food, inhaled all that food, in the space of ten minut
es, then went out to put teams of forensic techs to work excavating the first three graves.

  Angie, as the ranking forensic analyst at the site, was serving as the crime-scene coordinator, but she had delegated the excavations to me, asking me to supervise the teams that would recover the bones from each grave. I assigned three people to each grave: one person to wield the trowel; one to photograph each bone as it was recovered; and one to list, label, and bag the evidence. Fortunately, three of the forensic techs had received basic osteology training—Rodriguez; Raynelle, a pale young brunette who drawled her words as if she’d grown up in Miss’sippi but who pierced her ears and nostrils as if she’d toured with a heavy-metal band; and Thad, an African-American man who said little but seemed to notice everything. The supplies on the FDLE crime-scene truck included Tyvek sheets for collecting hair and fiber evidence, and I spread one beside each of the graves. “As you recover the bones, lay them out in anatomical order, as best you can,” I said. “I’ll check in periodically and answer whatever questions you’ve got.”

  Angie was quick with a tape measure and good with a sketch pad, I’d noticed at the cemetery. But now, confronted by a search scene that was half the size of a football field, she’d gone higher tech. From a nylon bag and a hard-shelled case aboard the crime-scene truck, she unpacked a sturdy aluminum tripod and a black instrument that appeared to be a pint-sized mailbox, with a small LCD screen in one end and what looked like a rifle scope on top. The scope was a laser, and the rig was a laser mapping system, a twenty-first-century version of a surveyor’s transit, capable of measuring and charting distances and positions with pinpoint precision. Angie set the tripod at the center of the site, in the small patch of unscraped ground that lay between the graves Jasper had uncovered, and screwed the mapping system to the top. Once she’d powered up the system, she sent Whitney scurrying across the site with the prism, a collapsible measuring rod fitted with optical reflectors at one end. As Whitney paused briefly at various landmarks—the three graves within spitting distance, the live oaks that marked the site’s borders, the additional grave uncovered by the scraper—Angie pressed buttons on a keypad, saving the coordinates of each point. Later, the system’s software could be used to create a 3-D map of the entire site, including the overall layout, the locations of the graves, even the location and depth of bones or other pieces of evidence as the graves were excavated. The laser system took more time to unpack than a tape measure and a sketch pad, but once it was up and running, the two women worked as a fast, efficient team: Whitney moved efficiently from spot to spot, holding the prism within the laser’s line of sight and radioing details to Angie—“grave two”; “skull”; “pelvis”; “left hand bones”; “thoracic vertebrae”; and so on. Angie deftly swiveled the laser to track the prism, pressed buttons to capture data points, and added labels from a drop-down menu on the computer screen.