copies? Do you have a set I can copy so that I don’t have to handle these? If I have my own set, I can take notes right on the pages and you’ll still have yours for your work.”
Carson turned away. He walked silently to one of the bookshelves that lined his living room walls and gathered an armload of three-ring binders, each of them completely filled with paper.
Putting them in another dusty box, he said, “These are my copies. You’ll see years of my notes in the margins, but I left her handwriting just as it was.”
“If you tell me where to go to make another set, I’ll do that now and bring yours right back.”
There was an awkward pause. Faye could almost see the man’s thoughts. He knew that her request for his copies was justified. Considering that she was working on a murder investigation, he obviously should give them to her, but he hated doing it. He didn’t want to risk not getting them back.
If Faye let him down, who knew when Cloud would release the originals so he could make another set? Besides, it was a hard thing to swallow, sharing something so central to his work with someone who had barged in and taken it over.
He made a decision and it did not involve handing the copies over to Faye.
“We’ll need to run these through a copier so you can have a set. The copy shop’s downtown. We’ll go together.”
***
Downtown Sylacauga was a single line of storefronts along a six-block Main Street. A row of squatty brick buildings faced the north side of the street. Most of them had green awnings, with a few renegades sporting brown ones or even no awning at all. One of them had a bay window framed in wrought iron that had once been painted black. It protruded from the store’s bricked front, its dulled metal shone dimly in the sunlight, and it sagged, all at the same time.
The Depression-era buildings housed locally owned diners and shops that had survived because McDonald’s and Walmart were not interested in a town the size of Sylacauga. Who wants to drive an hour for a hamburger or a tube of toothpaste?
Across the street from Main Street’s businesses, a railroad track ran past a white-painted feed-and-seed store and a cluttered salvage yard as it hurried out of town. At the city limits, the boarded-up depot had been waiting for years for one of those trains to stop.
Only storekeepers with a certain entrepreneurial spirit were to able survive in Sylacauga, and that spirit was on display all along Main Street. Someone was running at least two businesses within any given storefront, with the most prosperous-looking buildings housing three. Wayne’s Signs, which Wayne ran out of the feed-and-seed, seemed to be making good money on signs big enough to accommodate the businesses’ unwieldy names. Shelly’s Dress Store and Coffee Shop sat next to Max’s Shoes, Dry Cleaning, and Alterations. Beyond them was Dottie’s Drugstore, Floral Designs, and Cell Phone Repair.
A long row of parking spaces ran in front of the row of shops, and more of them were occupied than Faye would have expected. Sylacauga’s merchants were reaping the benefits of a captive audience.
Donna’s Hair Salon had a sign in the window advertising a copy shop and the services of a notary public. Faye decided that this must be where Carson was taking her. How many copy shops could there be in Sylacauga?
The massive wooden door to Donna’s Hair Salon glowed warm and brown beneath years of shellac. It opened into a large space floored with about a million tiny black and white tiles. The smell of acrylic nails and hair dye completely swamped any trace of copier toner, but a sign saying “Copies this way” told Faye that they were in the right place.
The sign led them to a small wood-paneled room holding a single copy machine, which was in use. A business-suited woman with shoulder-length ash-blond hair looked up from her work and said, “Hello, dear. I’ll just be another minute.”
Carson said, “No worries, Mom. Take your time. Is the law firm’s copier on the fritz?”
“You know I don’t use the company machine for personal things.”
“Mom. You’re a partner. It’s your machine.”
“I only own a third of it, and you know how Larry and Sue feel about this.”
She held up a flyer with the heading, “Eight Reasons Why Archaeology is Cultural Appropriation.”
Carson was too irritated by his mother to remember to introduce Faye. He gave the flyer a dismissive wave of the hand and asked, “Does anybody sitting in our current legislature know what cultural appropriation is? Or care?”
“That one is for universities. This one is for the legislators.”
She held up another flyer that read, “Eight Reasons Why Archaeology is Bad for Business” and Carson laughed out loud. Faye had to admit that the woman had style.
“Mom,” Carson said. The woman didn’t look up from her photocopying. “Mom, it hurt my feelings that you sent a bunch of flunkies yesterday to protest my dig. My work isn’t offensive enough for you to come yourself? Do I need to be more aggressive about appropriating culture if I hope to get your attention?”
“It’s your own culture you’re mucking about in, dear. You should care. I would have been there yesterday, trying to make you care, but I don’t have time to be a hands-on protesting radical walking the picket lines. Not any more. I can have more influence as a hands-off lobbying radical. I was at the state capitol yesterday, trying to get the legislature to pass some laws that will annoy you to no end.”
Carson finally remembered Faye, jerking his head in her direction. “This is a colleague of mine, Dr. Faye Longchamp-
Mantooth.”
The woman looked up from her photocopying and extended a hand. “I’m Alba Callahan, Faye. It’s very nice to meet you.”
Faye didn’t know how she had expected Carson’s mother to look, but it was nothing like the woman in front of her. Alba Callahan did not look like a genteel old lady who spent her time musing on how proud she was of her son and his PhD. She looked like an attorney at the peak of her career who had no plans to slow down.
Alba Callahan moved like a woman who had played basketball in high school and still made it a point to keep herself in shape. Her blond hair was streaked with white, but Alba made gray hair seem stylish and intentional. She looked as if she’d gone to a salon and gotten silver highlights. Her black suit was well-cut, with long straight pants, a petal-pink silk blouse, and a jacket that nipped in at her trim waist.
Faye had not expected a woman who was the mother of a forty-year-old man and who lived in Sylacauga, Oklahoma, to make her feel so frumpy.
Carson took the box so that Faye could shake his mother’s outstretched hand. Faye could have sworn she saw the woman check the ring finger of her left hand.
A flicker of disappointment crossed Alba’s face, and then she said, “Wait. Did you say Mantooth? Are you young Joe’s wife? I heard you were coming to town. Everybody’s heard, actually. Sly hasn’t talked about anything else for weeks. He cornered me at the pharmacy last Tuesday.”
Instead of letting Faye’s hand go, she clasped it with her other hand, too. “I’m so happy to meet you. Patricia was—” Her voice cracked and she covered by squeezing Faye’s hand hard. “She was a lovely person and my good friend. We used to volunteer at the school library together. My goodness, that was a long time ago.”
Her hands unfolded, palms up, as they slowly released Faye from their grasp. Even Alba’s hands moved like those of a dancer or an athlete.
“I still miss her,” Alba said. “I’m so happy Joe found you. Patricia would have loved to meet you. I know all your good points already. Sly made sure of it.”
Faye had changed her clothes and boots when she left the site, but Alba’s effortless elegance made her want to look down and assess the cleanliness of her soles. No matter how hard she tried, Faye was almost always a little bit dirty.
Alba squared up her stacks of paper and slipped them into her briefcase. “The copier’s all yours.
” As she passed Carson on the way out, she stopped for a hug.
Alba must have seen Faye cringe as her son’s sweaty arms crumpled the expensive suit, because she said, “It’ll wash.” When she released Carson, there was a petal-pink smear of lipstick on his cheek.
She waved a languid hand as she left, saying, “So nice to meet you, Faye.”
After the copy room door closed, Carson said, “Just so you know, Mom fought the Sylacauga project tooth and nail. Mom believes in protecting the ancient sites, and I do mean protecting them from people like me. She’s against anything that poses any risk of disturbing cultural items or, God forbid, human remains. That means she would prefer that we never build a road in this county, not ever again.”
“What did she do to try to stop your project?”
“She lobbied the legislature. She took out ads. She went door-to-door with a petition. She argued with the Creeks until the very minute they gave me a budget for the job. You name it, she did it. And remember, these are my employers that she’s harassing.”
“Having met her, I can’t say that I’m surprised to hear that she sticks to her principles.”
“She made me look bad in front of my boss and she nearly sank my project. My own mother. She tried to stop it the first time, too, all those years ago. She’s lost this battle twice now, and she doesn’t lose many.”
Faye could believe this.
“She believes in protecting the ancient sites,” Faye said. “So she represents the Creeks? She’s their lawyer? No, that doesn’t make any sense. They gave you a budget to do the project. They want this work done.”
Carson shook his head. “No, she doesn’t represent the Creeks. She is Creek. An enrolled member, in fact. She just doesn’t agree with the tribal government when it comes to excavating on tribal land. Or any government excavating on any land, for that matter. Mom doesn’t think there’s any reason good enough to risk disturbing the dead.”
Faye’s head turned involuntarily toward the copy room door where she’d last seen the light-haired, light-skinned, light-eyed woman who was, despite appearances, a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She knew better than to make presumptions, but she’d done it.
“I can’t picture your mother standing outside in the sun long enough to protest. She’s so…well, elegant is the only word for it. Did you see the heels on those pink shoes?”
“Mom wasn’t so polished when I was a kid. She had a serious punk phase in the eighties. Nothing but torn jeans and band t-shirts. I was seven before I saw her wear any color that wasn’t black. But anyway, yeah. She’s done her share of standing outside in the sun, protesting stuff. I’ve done my share of standing out there with her, wondering why my mom was so angry. Back in the day, she held sit-ins. She chained herself to fences. Stuff like that. I’m told that her one face-to-face conversation with Sophia Townsend went very, very poorly. Dr. Townsend had my mother arrested.”
Faye tried to imagine how a face-off between the two women would have gone. She wasn’t sure which one would have been scarier. “Civil disobedience didn’t get her the results she wanted, so your mom decided to go to law school?”
“Exactly. When I started middle school, she started law school. She still works for social change. These days, though, she works like a lobbyist, shaking hands and calling in favors. She hasn’t been back to jail since she lost her bid to stop Sophia Townsend from ripping up history.”
“And yet you chose to be an archaeologist.”
“I was a really well-behaved kid. When I decided to rebel, I did it in a big way.”
That statement made Faye snicker. She pulled the top off the box of binders. Running into Carson’s mother seemed to make Faye only the second most annoying woman Carson had seen that day, and that had made him friendlier. She took advantage of this chance to ask him some questions. “What about you? Are you a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation?”
“It’s complicated. To be enrolled, you have to be a blood descendant of someone who was listed as Creek on the Dawes Rolls, which the government compiled more than a century back to make it clear who was a member of what tribe. As time passes, it gets more and more likely that an enrolled Creek might look like Mom. Or me, I guess,” Carson said. “I could be enrolled because of Mom, but Dad’s not Creek and they didn’t raise me in the culture. It would feel dishonest. What people consider themselves to be has less to do with what they look like and more to do with their upbringing. And their level of interest, I guess. Joe knows way more about the traditional ways than I do, but he taught himself, which I respect enormously. Did he ever fill out the citizenship forms?”
“There are things Joe doesn’t talk about and that’s one of them. I always thought he wasn’t a member because his mother was white.”
“Guess again. Joe’s mom could trace her family all the way back to the Dawes Rolls, and that’s been the gold standard for proving membership for a really long time. Even when he was my little buddy, Joe didn’t care for paperwork and government stuff. I think that’s why he never applied.”
Faye opened the top binder and pulled out a chunk of pages. Putting them in the photocopier’s feed tray, she pressed the big green button.
The chunk-chunk of a copying machine at work filled the little room. Faye hoped that Carson’s resentment of her was gone for good, but she doubted it. More likely, he was able to rise above that resentment because he enjoyed sharing his local knowledge. Some people would have called it gossip.
“Kenny’s not enrolled, though he’d love to be. He’s very proud of his heritage, very traditional. His whole family is, but they don’t have the paperwork to prove it. Maybe my little buddy’s right about how much those papers are worth.”
“How do you know everybody’s business?”
“Around here, people just know.”
The shushing sound of paper exiting the copier was a white-noise backdrop to their conversation.
“Emily?”
Carson snorted at the idea. “Nope.”
“Roy Cloud?”
“Enrolled, and related to half the government of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Just so you know who you’re dealing with.”
Faye felt a little wistful that she didn’t have the paperwork to connect her to her Creek ancestor, her great-great-great-great grandmother Susan Whitehall. Given that Susan was born in the Georgia wilderness before the American Revolution, the necessary papers had never existed. She knew even less about her African ancestors and, given the clean break with Africa brought about by slavers and slave ships, that would never change.
The chunking sound stopped and she fed the copier another stack of paper. “Do you have insider knowledge of anybody else’s bloodlines?”
“Sophia Townsend. She was Creek and she spoke the language.”
Faye was so surprised that the words “Get outta town!” fell out of her mouth. “All this time we’ve been talking about her, nobody ever said she was from here. I had the impression that she was an outsider.”
“Just because she was Creek didn’t mean she wasn’t an outsider here in Oklahoma. She was from Alabama. I think that may be why Roy is so dead-set on shadowing the FBI on this case. Just because the federal government has decided it’s in charge when it comes to violent crimes, it doesn’t change how Roy feels about Sophia getting murdered here, among her people.”
“Did she come from a traditional upbringing? Do you know?”
Carson shook his head. “I don’t know a thing about her family or even whether she was enrolled in the Creek tribe there. I just know how she sounded when she talked. You can hear it in the way a person pronounces their vowels. Nasal sounds are different. So’s the…I guess ‘tonal range’ is what you’d call it.”
“I think I know what you’re saying. Roy Cloud’s voice has that sound, doesn’t it?”
“Yep. It’s a quiet, calm way to speak.
When I went away to college, I missed that sound a lot. Does Joe speak the language?”
To Faye’s ear, her husband and Roy Cloud sounded nothing alike. “Joe didn’t grow up speaking Creek, but he taught himself a little after he left home.”
“I didn’t think I could hear it in Joe’s voice, so that makes sense. But I certainly did when Sophia Townsend talked. After all these years and all the time I spent studying her work, she still fascinates me.”
“Why? I mean, other than that we just dug up her grave.”
Carson delayed answering by stacking the first batch of copies more neatly than they strictly needed to be stacked.
“It’s a hard thing,” he said, “navigating a traditional upbringing and a career in archaeology. Not many try. The ones that do? I think they either struggle every day to do the right thing and honor their ancestors. Or they just do their work and try to forget where they came from.”
Faye remembered a Choctaw man in Mississippi who had found his own way to honor his culture and still pursue his love for archaeology. It hadn’t been easy. “How do you think Sophia dealt with that conflict?”
“I was just a kid and I didn’t really know her. From what I’ve heard, she was the kind who spent every waking minute trying to forget where she came from.”
They fell silent, each of them taking a stack of pages and loading it into a binder. As the pages passed beneath her hands, Faye saw black smears marking the copies where faint remnants of red clay had lingered for so long on the originals. They gave her hope that a forensics lab could tease a fingerprint out of those smears of dirt, though what Cloud could do with it was anybody’s guess.
The smears also reminded her of how hard it is to completely remove red dirt from absorbent surfaces. Slick surfaces like metal and glass were easily wiped clean, but paper? Unfinished wood? Bone? Human skin? These things hang onto red clay. They stain.
Sometimes scrubbing will take off the stains. Sometimes heavy-duty soaps or detergents can do the trick. But there are situations when nothing will remove the stain but time.
Burials Page 13
