Slave Graves

by Thomas Hollyday

A slight cracking noise woke Frank. His habit, learned during the war, was still there. He could wake up with the slightest noise. He looked at his watch. Three in the morning. The night was black. In patches of sky through the overhanging trees, he could see some of the late night summer constellations. Only a bit of starlight filtered through the leafy overhang of branches and into the side of the porch where he had put an old mattress from the house. Maggie’s light on the second floor was off. She was still asleep. Strangely, there was no insect noise. Something had interrupted their night talk. As his eyes adjusted to the starlight, he could see shapes of bushes and shrubs. Then he heard the noise again. He recognized the sound. Dry twigs snapping. He saw light flicker off the leaves of a large tree far by the riverbank. He could not see the ground beneath the tree because the great boxwoods were in the way.

  He remembered the paper they had found yesterday. He decided to investigate quickly, to see if he could catch someone tampering with the excavation. He stepped off the porch into the darkness, making no noise. He was dressed only in his thin underwear shorts. The dew felt cool under his bare feet as he moved carefully towards the site, toes feeling the way, slugging against the blades of the tall grass. As he drew close to the box bushes, he smelled burning wood. He saw a few sparks of light traveling into the night and coming from the riverbank at the far end of the site. He dropped to his knees and crawled, gradually pushing his head through the tall grass until he saw the campfire. It was a tiny blaze, flickering, crackling. The fire was fueled with twigs and small branches, with only enough energy to send weak shadows. A man stepped from the dark behind the fire. Even in the darkness and the distance of more than a hundred yards, he could recognize Soldado’s tall figure.

  The old man faced the site and raised his hands in an arc from his thighs until his fingers touched over his head. He was silent, wordless. The firelight flickered across his body, naked except for a short cape drawn over his shoulders. A strange metal shield designed in the shape of an orange jaguar’s face hung by a gold chain across his groin. For a few moments he moved slowly towards the wreck. Then he stopped and stared directly at the spot where Frank was hidden in the tall grass. Sweat suddenly ran down Frank’s face. Frank did not move, trembling slightly with the fear of the unknown, an anxiety he had not felt since long ago nights in Vietnam. Frank could see Soldado’s face, the intensity, and he could see brilliant colors on the man’s chest and face. There were streaks of shining paint, wide swaths of brilliant yellow, black and white, changing in the shimmering light from moment to moment as the small fire sparked.

  Then the old man looked away. Frank could not tell from the man’s movements whether he had been detected. Soldado held two small wires, one in each hand. He brought these wires down to a level with his waist and slightly in front of his body. He moved ahead. With the fire directly behind him, he cast a long shadow out in front. He was black against the fire and Frank could not see the details of his face anymore.

  Soldado held the wires in his hands pointed forward, his multicolored body glistening at the edges where the firelight reflected from it, his feet finding their way without error among the tiny stretched white surveyor twines that Maggie had so carefully measured over the wreck. The tempo of his walk followed a rhythm that Frank easily sensed, the footprints in the earth like soft animal paw prints brushing a taut drum skin, yet without noise. Frank recognized the costume, ancient Mayan. His mind sensed the primitive unsung music, like a beat he might have studied that derived from Africa or early America, even Asia. He thought of Soldado as an improbable yet very much in the flesh witch doctor, like an ancient native making his prayer or magic with fire and nakedness and shadows.

  After a few steps the rods trembled in Soldado’s hands and crossed each other. Soldado stopped and with the toe of his right foot drew a mark of crossed lines on the muddy soil. Soldado then continued moving forward. In a few minutes the rods moved again. He repeated the marking with his foot at another spot. Soldado reached a far point in the site area, turned and raised his hands again to the sky, the rods pointed directly over his head. He remained this way for a few moments, very still, the firelight illuminating the front of his body, luminescent with the multicolored paint, terrifying in the power he seemed to exude.

  Soldado dropped his arms and returned to the fire. He sat down cross-legged, his back to Frank. He stayed in this position for another half hour, swaying from side to side. Then Soldado stood up and pushed some earth into the small flames with the side of his foot. The fire sparked and died and the night was dark again. The weak starlight was unable to penetrate the blackness of the overhanging great trees around the site.

  Frank felt an insect crawling under his stomach as he lay flat on the ground. He twisted his back silently. He did not want to scratch for the bug, did not want to alert Soldado. Eventually the insect found its way back into the earth and the irritation ceased.

  Frank listened. In a few moments he heard Soldado wading through the shallow river water towards his boat moored out in the darkness. The footsteps in the water made a wet sound like fish jumping. Finally he heard creaking wooden floorboards in Soldado’s boat. There began the slow throb of a workboat engine, and Frank heard the craft rippling the river water as it eased into the channel. The night quiet returned. He stood up and began to walk slowly back to the porch. His exhausted mind tossed with images of orange and black butterflies dancing with yellow witchdoctors as he drifted off to the few hours of sleep he had left before the summer heat began again.

  At six AM the noise of Maggie and Pastor working at the site woke him up. Frank pulled on his shorts and walked over. The Pastor had brought some food, prepared by the people at his church. While he sipped a cup of coffee Frank glanced out at the river. Soldado’s boat was nowhere in sight.

  “Soldado woke me up out here last night,” he said, “The old guy was out by the site, singing and walking around naked carrying dousing rods.”

  The Pastor grinned. “He calls his ritual the song of a thousand men. I’m acquainted with folks who tell me he has talked to their dead family members. Myself, I’ve seen him sit up all night saying his Mexican words,” said the Pastor. “Nobody around here can understand what he’s saying.”

  “His body was painted and he had a cape over his shoulders.”

  “His mother made up that Mexican costume for him. He says it’s from the Yucatan. You’re right. He’s close to naked in that rig. Soldado makes a little money finding water. When a person wants to dig a new well, they get Soldado to come up to their farm and locate the best spot for the well. ‘Course he don’t get painted up for that.”

  “I’ve never seen dousing rods,” said Maggie.

  “Some of our archaeologist colleagues swear by them,” said Frank.

  “How do they work?” asked the Pastor.

  “The dousing rods are supposed to vibrate if they are near water or metal.”

  “Why?”

  “Some people think they work like our electronic finding devices, forming some kind of relationship with metal or magnetism in the ground below the surface. Nobody knows for sure.”

  Maggie inspected the cross marks left by Soldado. She pounded a white stake into the center of each mark. Then she precisely plotted these locations on her site plan.

  “He marked two of my probe areas. Location H and Location Q.”

  “H is the foremast area, isn’t it?” asked Frank. “Q, that’s in front of the mizzenmast, the big cargo area. Interesting. If the dousing works, something metal has probably been identified in those spots. We’ll see.”

  Frank turned to the Pastor. “Pastor, can you dig with us today?”

  “Sure.”

  “If Maggie concurs, you can start test pit M halfway down the port side of the wreck, about twenty feet off the left of the main mast location. I’d like to explore as much as I can about the shape of the hull. If she’s an early wreck, she’ll be in a fish shape, what they used to call codfish and mack
erel, wide beam at the bow and narrow at the stern like a fish. That test pit should tell us something if we are lucky. Maggie and I can teach you what you need to know about excavating procedures.”

  “It’s all right with me,” said Maggie.

  “Maggie, why don’t you try Soldado’s location T? That’s near the captain’s quarters which could have many artifacts. I’ll work on Grid I off to the right of the foremast to see if there is more information there about the shape of the bow. We’re looking for a round apple cheek curve to determine if she was built in this fish shape.”

  Frank and Maggie showed the Pastor some of the simpler digging techniques. Frank was working his digging tools into the soft earth of the Pastor’s spot when Maggie laughed. He looked up at her.

  “What?” he said.

  “You’re using the same old trowel you had years ago.”

  “I guess it is.” Frank looked at it. “I never thought about it. It doesn’t seem to wear out as much as the other ones.”

  “This job will finish it off. I think the stink of the marsh is worse this morning,” Maggie said.

  “Yes,” said the Pastor. “It gets that way sometimes.”

  “Like rotten soil in your garden,” said Maggie. “Strange how so many beautiful flowers grow in stink.”

  The sun heated the site quickly as they worked. Its glare was everywhere and glinted off the bits of silica in the soil and the white oyster shells that appeared everywhere as they dug. The pump hammered away, keeping barely ahead of the constantly seeping water.

  “It’s like the earth itself is alive,” said Frank.

  “Oyster shells are from the ancient Native American feasts around here, remains of their eating,” explained Maggie.

  Down about a foot into Frank’s pit, he reached a conglomerate, a stone hard chunk of rusted and chemically fused material, mostly soil but with some rusty items showing in the soil. It was a large oblong object that stretched out from the shipwreck, a few feet from what might have been the side of the ship, extending also beyond the white twine lines that Maggie had designed. The conglomerate was heavy. Frank could not move it.

  “Come look at this,” he called.

  Maggie and the Pastor squatted beside him.

  “I want to get this out of the ground. Let’s get some photographs first.”

  Maggie went up to her car behind the farmhouse and got her camera and tripod. She also returned with a black and white scale and a small arrow for referencing the direction north in the photographs. She photographed the object from directly above. Then, for a few minutes they worked along the sides of the artifact, digging out the space around it, expanding the excavation. Knowing time was short they used shovels instead of trowels to hollow out beneath it so they could judge its circumference and length. They were able to determine that it ran out from the line of the marker twine about another ten feet and that it was about thirty inches in circumference. Frank moved his hand over the artifact.

  “Unfortunately, conglomerates take forever to study,” he said. “You can’t just hack them open. You have to chip at them carefully.”

  “Sometimes all you end up uncovering is a pocket of air with all the original artifact disintegrated but the shape still impressed in the conglomerate,” said Maggie.

  “We can make plaster molds to see what the original object was. It’s very tedious. Usually on these projects we have remote sensing electronics to look into the ground before we dig to see if anything is there and how it is oriented.”

  “Yes, that’s when we have the equipment,” said Maggie not smiling. “How do we get it out?”

  “There’s that truck up in the shed.”

  “You’re right. She’s got a hoist,” said the Pastor. He smiled. “I’ve driven those M37 trucks. Plenty of power.”

  “We got truck driving in common, Pastor,” grinned Frank. “I’ll get the truck.”

  There was a smell of oil and canvas as he opened the door of the truck. He put the windows down in the hot air and pushed the old canvas top back. The engine started fast and ran well as Jake had said it would. Engine heat soon panted in hot gusts at Frank’s bare feet, seething up at him through the steel floor with its ragged holes from some forgotten battle.

  In a few minutes Frank had the truck backing towards the site. The grass at the edge of the site parted in front of the back end of the old military vehicle. The engine rumbled as the large rubber cleated tires tortured the earth, inching back toward the test pit. Maggie stood beside the artifact, her arms signaling to Frank. Finally, Frank positioned the large arm of the bomb hoist directly over the object.

  “Well done, soldier,” smiled the Pastor.

  Frank grinned and signaled the Pastor the thumbs up sign. He reached into the bed of the truck and pulled out a yellow lifting strap.

  “Let’s see if we can get this strap under the object.”

  “Put it under the center,” said Maggie. The Pastor placed several two by four timbers along the conglomerate to spread the tension of the strap. Frank passed the strap under the artifact. The Pastor reached for the strap on the other side and brought it up to the top. Then Frank slipped one end of the strap through a loop in the other end and snugged it up into the air. The Pastor had loosened the hoist chain and pulled it toward the loop that Frank held. Frank hooked the loop and they were ready to hoist.

  “How much do you think we can lift with that hoist?”

  “The winch on this truck was designed to lift heavy bombs for aircraft. It should have the power we need to get the conglomerate out.” Frank went back to the cab of the truck and climbed in. He increased the speed of the old Dodge engine.

  “Ready,” he yelled, over the unmuffled engine noise.

  “Pull away,” called Maggie.

  He eased in the winch and the cable tightened. When the cable was fully taut, Frank locked the winch and climbed out to look at the job. “Looks all right,” he said. “You folks stand to the side in case the strap lets go You’ll get hurt if it breaks and whips at you.” He started the winch again and the truck pulled down on its rear axle. The engine strained. The front end of the heavy truck began to lift upward, its big wheels rising inch by inch into the air.

  Suddenly, the conglomerate let go with a ripping noise, dirt and brown water flying into the air. The front of the truck crashed back on its axle. Frank eased the engine and the crane lifted the object effortlessly, higher into the sunlight.

  “Good enough,” said the Pastor, signaling Frank to start slowing the gears.

  “Wait. Stop the winch,” yelled Maggie, stepping towards the object.

  “What is it, Maggie?” hollered Frank as he immediately halted the winch.

  Maggie squatted down and looked up at the underside of the object as it hung about four feet off the ground. “There’s something dropping out of it.”

  “What?”

  Maggie tried to get her cupped hands under the object to catch a small stream of soil that was falling.

  “It’s coming out of a small fissure in the conglomerate.”

  They crowded around her as she held her hands out. The soil caught in her hands and glinted yellow in the sunlight.

  “It looks like gold dust.”

  Frank bent close. “It is gold,” said Frank, in a restrained technical manner, as he tried to get a better look.

  “Gold dust,” said the Pastor, excited. Maggie moved her hands cupping the gold back and forth in celebration. A piece of black material broke free from the artifact and fell into the bottom of the pit. The Pastor reached down and picked it up.

  “It looks like the remains of a pouch, probably someone’s moneybag,” said Maggie, calming down.

  “Hardened leather, petrified almost,” said Frank. “There’s some of the dust still caught in the mouth of the pouch.”

  “Maybe there’s more gold inside the pouch,” said the Pastor.

  “If there is, it is not much.” Frank felt the pouch. “Not enough weight for
there to be much. What do you think, Maggie?”

  “You’re right. There’s not much gold.” They both knew that the real importance of this pouch was in helping date the wreck. If the use of this were as someone’s money pouch, that would date the ship at an earlier century. There was a time when people did not have currency and they used gold dust to buy things. The trick would be to tell how this pouch was used.

  “Gold or not, let’s get this conglomerate off the hoist before something breaks.” Frank climbed back into the truck. He shifted the transmission and eased out the clutch. The truck crawled forward in low range, the object swinging slightly in the air. The Pastor walked on one side of the artifact and Maggie walked on the other, both of them with their hands on the large cluster. They tried to keep it from moving too much and straining or breaking the strap. They walked along in the tracks of the truck wheels as the old military vehicle ground towards the boxwood and high grass at the edge of the site.

  Frank finally stopped the truck. “We need blocks under the conglomerate to keep it off the ground.” The Pastor found two short pieces of construction wood nearby and set them on the ground for the artifact to rest on.

  “You got your blocks,” he said.

  Frank then eased the winch and the object dropped slowly towards the wood. When it was on top of the timbers, they removed the cable and put the strap back in the truck.The three stood around the artifact.

  “We should try to find some time to chip some of that hardened clay off the thing. It may show something then. If not, we’ll have to wait into we can get it into a chemical bath.”

  “Let it sit for awhile,” said Frank. “The wet soil can dry on its surface. I think in this case it will be easier to inspect if we can take the muck off in chunks.” He sat on the ground in front of the artifact.

  “You folks have to work right hard in this archaeology business,” said the Pastor, joining him on the ground.

  Frank smiled at Maggie.”It’s a lot better than some things I have had to do in my life,” he said.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” said the Pastor.

  “You in Nam too, Pastor?”

  The Pastor nodded, “Army Chaplain.”

  A butterfly flew softly in front of them and for a moment rested on the conglomerate. “Tell me about them,” said Frank, pointing at the orange and black insect.

  “The Monarch butterfly migrates directly through a spot on Allingham Island,” answered the Pastor. “I guess they been doing this for centuries. Jake Terment’s father never bothered them, but Jake himself used to kill them. I remember when he was a little boy that he’d see how many he could kill. In their migration, big clouds of them landed on a few old trees near the big house. Jake would go out there and swat as many as he could all day long. Then he would bring buckets of the dead butterflies into the house to show his father. I never saw the old man kill one of them himself.”

  “Matter-of-fact,” the Pastor went on, “Not long before he died, Mister Terment began to get pretty close to the environmental folks around here. People like Mrs. Pond. They used to have meetings up there in the big room at Peachblossom Manor. The whole group of them took field trips out in the Wilderness Swamp.”

  “Jake was away making money during this time, building up the Terment Company in different areas of the United States, building skyscrapers, developments, planned cities. He made his money by finding slums he could buy up cheap, then evicting the residents, taking down the houses. He was always big on bulldozers. Then he’d resell the land as prime industrial property.”

  “I thought there were laws against that,” said Maggie.

  The Pastor smiled. “I guess laws presuppose the will to enforce them. You don’t see much law being enforced in places where they want the land for the big companies.” He continued, “The old man retired from his real estate business and all his other business. He never did much outside of River Sunday and some small projects here on the Eastern Shore. Jake’s father, Mister Terment, he was a big man in a small town. Funny thing though. Jake’s father was tough and most of the time, pretty smart. His son was wasn’t so much smart as he was tough and lucky. Jake would do anything to anyone long as he made money. Always was that way.

  “That’s why most of us were surprised when we found he had come back and was intending to put all this money into the island. We always figured he would concentrate on big projects far away from here.” The Pastor winked at Frank and Maggie. “There is a rumor Jake was short on money and the bankers up in New York made him come down here and do this project, put up his own property, so to speak. What I hear from the servants who work up at Peachblossom, they overheard his phone calls to New York. He didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want anything to do with working on this bridge. Makes sense. I always thought once he got out of this place, he wasn’t ever coming back here. Those New York bankers, they’re pretty smart.

  “Jake almost didn’t have any property to put up. Way things were going with all his father’s interest in wildlife, folks thought that Mrs. Pond and the birdwatchers were going to get the old Peachblossom farm and any of the old man’s properties on the island. People assumed the Terment land was going to be preserved for a park, for animals, and especially for the butterflies.

  “It didn’t turn out that way. Right after his daddy’s funeral, Jake and his lawyer produced a will that stated Jake owned the property as the only heir. Of course Mrs. Pond and all her people went to court but they could get nowhere. She did not have a will that said any different. It was her word against Jake’s word. All that she could do was argue that the old man promised her and the others the land for the animals. That did not cut any water with the judge.”

  “So there have been bad feelings ever since,” said Frank.

  “You got that right. Every chance she gets, Mrs. Pond and her people take on Jake and his people. Jake just wears them down. He has the law on his side every time. He is great for showing up with the police. That’s the way he always does. You watch him how he operates. Just quietly stands there with a whole lot of his police friends like Billy beside him.”

  There was a loud popping sound. The artifact split open at that moment and pieces of the conglomerate split like the pieces of eggshell breaking loose when a bird is hatched. It broke in half lengthwise and parts lay on the ground. Revealed was a rusty metallic tube about nine feet in length and about eight inches high with ridges around its circumference at different lengths of the tube.

  “It’s a cannon tube,” said Maggie. “The sun must have heated what’s left of the old metal, expanded it to break up the aggregate.”

  “It’s a very early cannon,” said Frank, hastening to look.

  “Probably Eighteenth Century,” said Maggie.

  “How can you tell?” asked the Pastor, enjoying the excitement of the two archeologists as they peered at the old weapon.

  “You look at the raised areas on the tube, Pastor.” Frank leaned over the gun, sighting along its barrel. “This was how the gunner would aim it. The design of these old guns changed over the centuries. Cannon historians can tell from the ridges around the barrel about when and where the gun was made. Sometimes there’s a maker’s mark but I don’t see one on this gun. Even if we knew when it was made, that still does not tell us all we want to know. Sometimes they were recycled in later ships, captured and used, or simply bought from gun warehouses in London to outfit merchant ships.”

  “It’s iron,” said Maggie. “Strange it hasn’t rusted more. These were not the best cannons. The best were bronze. Iron tubes were used on merchant ships, where they would be fired only occasionally and not for war as would be the case on a military ship.”

  “However, even iron cannons are usually salvaged,” said Frank, thoughtfully.

  “Why?” asked the Pastor.

  “Anything valuable in shallow water is likely to be salvaged. Think like the people who were here when this ship was wrecked. Why would they leave something valuable?”
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  He continued. “There’s something else. A schooner carrying wheat to Baltimore doesn’t need a cannon.”

  She nodded. “This might rule out Terment’s idea of the wreck being a wheat schooner.” She touched the metal. “If this was an old wreck, why wasn’t the cannon brought up?”

  “Sometimes these old wrecks were left alone because of disease. People were terrified of plague,” suggested Frank. “One good guess might be that this ship was burned because of plague on board. Ships were burned in those days to control disease.”

  Maggie looked at him. “Plague. Yes. That might explain people’s fear. Their leaving the cannon. Maybe the reason the ship was covered over with earth too.”

  “I must admit, this is a little more than I thought I would find at this construction site,” Frank said.

  The Pastor chuckled.

  “What?” asked Frank.

  “I was just thinking how this old cannon, we fix it up, might give them Confederate boys a run for their money one of these Heritage Days coming,” he smiled.

  Chapter 5