Slave Graves

by Thomas Hollyday

Maggie had dug to a depth of almost three feet below the topsoil. Above this was the mass of unrelated soil that Frank agreed had been brought in from another area of the farm. The cannon and the clay pipe had been found in soil contemporary to the one Maggie was searching.

  She looked up from her work and winked at Frank. He smiled back.

  “Nothing?” he asked.

  “Nothing yet.”

  “There’s got to be more than this man and child,” Frank said.

  The Pastor agreed. “We have to find it.”

  “I just don’t want to find more children,” said Frank.

  “I know what you mean,” said the Pastor.

  They heard the engine of Soldado’s boat.

  “He’s letting us know, making sure we don’t stop working,” said Maggie.

  “This project starts up and we see a lot of him,” said the Pastor. “For years, since his mother died he’s barely talked to anyone.”

  “Soldado!” Frank greeted the solitary man walking up from the river. Soldado looked up and smiled at hearing his name, as if the saying of it were a welcome he had not expected, or more, a human kindness that he had not received for a long time.

  As Frank scraped at the soil, he thought about this old man and his influence on the whole project. From the beginning Soldado had been one of them, gently directing their hands towards the promising spots, divined by old fashioned water finding gear. There was the trace of Mayan magic in Soldado’s history that gave him a kind of power, an authority, that Frank heard and considered, even though Frank’s scientific skepticism taunted him. Maybe, he found himself thinking, the old man really did descend from Mayan magicians. Maybe those ancient priests did have special insight into the world of the dead. Frank dropped his trowel and as he reached for it he realized his fingers were suddenly shaking. He picked up the trowel and the shaking disappeared.

  Soldado stood in the shadows by the site.

  “They kill the animal?” There was sadness in Soldado’s voice as if the cat were an old companion.

  Frank explained what had happened.

  “Well,” said Soldado, “I guess I should feel sorry for the poor lady but she ought to have known better, getting hooked up with somebody like Jake Terment.” He looked behind him at the barge and pile driver. “Jake get mad and wreck his toys?”

  “The barge just started sinking,” said Frank. “Jake was angry long before that crane fell over. He made sure to tell us that he’s coming here tomorrow morning with his bulldozer crew. We have a few hours of light left and I guess that’s going to be it for us.”

  “You don’t have to quit,” said Soldado, his body tense as if he were ready to fight.

  “I’m not sure we can hold back a bulldozer.”

  “You can do anything you have a mind to do,” said Soldado.

  “It’s not that simple,” said Frank.

  “Well maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,” said Maggie.

  There was a metallic sound. “Hey, guys, I think there’s something here,” said Maggie, working faster with her digging tools.

  “Let’s take a look,” said Frank standing up.

  Frank climbed into Maggie’s dig and squatted next to where she was kneeling, her face close to the soil, picking at the small sliver of color in front of her.

  “What do you think it is?” asked Frank.

  “It’s metal. I’m sure of it. Good metal too. Corroded but no rust. Maybe it’s brass or bronze.”

  “Pastor, what do you think of this?”

  The slender preacher climbed down and squatted next to Frank. “Looks like a piece of round metal, curved metal.”

  “Maybe a tankard or a pot of some kind,” suggested Maggie.

  “Something like that would not be this big, would it?” said Soldado.

  “No, you’re right, “said Maggie. “Here. I’ve got the side done. It starts to curve back in the other direction. “

  “That looks like a diameter of about fifteen inches.”

  “It curves the other way too, look, see?” said Frank.

  Soldado stood at the edge of the pit and watched them.

  “I know that shape,” he grinned. “You folks have found yourselves a bell, a ship’s bell.”

  “Soldado may be right,” said Frank.

  “I know I’m right. I’ve seen enough of them in my day.” Soldado bent down and pointed at the object. “She’s an old one too. Lookee, there’s a tiny spot of clear metal. Fancy work, too. Lot nicer than the equipment we had on my last ship.”

  “They found a bell like this in the Whydah shipwreck up at Cape Cod,” said Frank. “Had the name of the ship right on it. It was the only sure way they could identify the shipwreck. There was almost nothing of the original ship’s hull left, just small pieces of wood and metal like we have here. “

  “Whydah. Sounds like a spider,” said the Pastor.

  Maggie said, “Whydah was the name of one of the early slave ports near Nigeria.”

  “Can we get this bell out of the ground tonight?” asked the Pastor.

  “We can try,” said Soldado.

  They gathered on all sides of the bell and worked. It went quickly. In an hour the bell was completely exposed.

  “Let’s clean this up for some photos.” Frank said as he went for the black and white scale and the camera.

  Soldado called after him. “Doctor White, you better get that truck back down here on this thing. Having that hoist will make the lifting a lot easier.”

  “Good idea.” Frank climbed into the canvas bench seat of the old war truck. He looked behind him at the heavy bomb hoist. He set the carburetor choke and pressed the starter button. The old truck started up with a roar. He adjusted the choke and throttle and the engine settled into a steady idle. Frank shifted into low range for the four wheel drive and put the truck into reverse. The machine crept toward the site.

  The Pastor guided him back. In a few minutes the hoist was above the old bell. They ran out the cable and attached it to boards stuck beneath the object.

  “Just a starter pull and she will be free,” said Soldado.

  Frank revved the truck and eased in the hoist gears. The bell lifted easily from the soil. They gathered around it as it hung suspended from the bomb hoist, slightly swinging in the air.

  “Keep it there,” said Frank. “We’ll walk it right up to the house. Maggie, you come here and drive the truck.”

  Frank lifted the bell against the cable. “It’s heavy.”

  When they reached the porch, Maggie stopped the truck and they lowered the bell to the ground. Soldado and Frank steadied it as the Pastor disconnected the cable. The soft earth and clay fell off . The curves were still obscured by the encrustation. There were even some pieces of rotten wood and rusty iron sticking from the remaining muck.

  “Let’s get it into the farmhouse,” said Frank.

  Frank and Soldado lifted the object again and carefully walked it toward the farmhouse.

  “We can work on it later tonight if we have time,” said Maggie.

  They carried it inside and let it down on the floor in the kitchen. It fell the last inch with a thud, the moist surface hard to hold in their hands.

  Maggie looked at the object closely with her flashlight.

  “It’s too corroded to see any letters on the metal,” she said. “We’ll have to do some work at the lab.”

  “One thing for sure,” said Frank.

  “What’s that?”

  “A bell is the best clue we’ve found yet on this site. That bell may tell us what this ship was, what she was doing here, why the giant was here, maybe even why the fire.”

  “That’s a lot,” said the Pastor.

  “Every wreck I’ve worked on where there was a bell found,” said Frank, “We were able to establish the history of the wreck. The bell is like a tombstone over a grave. It gives you the name of what is buried there. With that name we can go to the records in England. There’s going to be som
ething somewhere that will help us. I’ve seen all kinds of helpful records develop from family histories, newspapers, port records.”

  “It has to be cleaned very slowly,” said Maggie.

  “If we can find any identification on it,” said Frank, “we can check it with my friend in Massachusetts. He has a listing of these old ships that were lost at sea. I could call him and see what he can tell us.”

  “Could he tell us anything over the telephone?” asked the Pastor.

  “Sure. The data’s all on his computer.”

  Soldado disappeared again, saying that he had business to take care of. They worked harder. The evening shadows were deep and time was running out. Frank looked at the river for a moment as he worked on the skeletons in his grid. Beside him the Pastor dug with fury, as if the lives of his congregation were at stake. To the stern of the wreck, Maggie was digging again below where the bell had been, bits of soil still scattering, the look on her face dogged, determined.

  Frank smiled, thinking how he must look and what his students would say. They had seen him in these last minute finishes when grant money was running out, when the project was in danger of being shut down and just before the carefully excavated soil was tumbled back again into the holes, all so the landowner would not be angry and would allow them to come back another day.

  The landowner would allow them. That was a strange idea here, he thought. That presupposed a friendly property owner and Jake Terment was certainly not that. As he scraped past the strata he trembled for a moment in the heat. He knew it was his responsibility and his fault if his small team, Maggie, the Pastor and himself, were the only ones, the last ones, to study what was becoming quickly a very rich and important archeological find.

  Frank’s mind wandered with exhaustion. He knew, perhaps he always known but had not accepted, that he was promoted not because he was a great archeologist, but because he followed the president’s directives better than any other person in the archaeology department. It had taken many years, many defeats of his own convictions to convince him that it was better, easier, less naïve, to follow some other person’s conviction over his own. An occasional reward was better than no reward at all. However, he had become a man that Jake Terment referred to as “one of them.” Here in these hurried hours with Maggie and the Pastor and the stink, he was realizing that “one of them” was far from what he wanted to be.

  Perhaps this surrender of convictions in his own life was what drew him to admire Maggie, the Pastor too, but especially Maggie. It was her refreshing spirit, unwillingness to give way to others, that he liked. He thought that he must like her because he felt strengthened by her, like he was gaining a will, a power he had not had for a long time. Even with his self-searching, he had some respect for himself because she respected him.

  He thought about his job, about his not following the president’s order to close the site. He was in trouble and he knew it. Causing any displeasure on the part of Jake was a mistake. He might be fired or significantly demoted. He knew his textbook was already in trouble. Yet at this moment he did not feel lost or despondent. He felt strong because he was here with Maggie and the Pastor doing a good job on this site.

  He thought about his life since Vietnam, how little love there had been. Of course, recently there had been Mello. He sensed that her love came to him based on his success at the school and that if he was not chairman of his department, he would not have Mello. He remembered the war. There had been a woman during the war, an Australian, an intense love, powerful, at that time all he thought he would ever desire. He was on Rest and Recreation, the R and R trip to Australia. He thought about her, the thoughts easing the exhaustion in his body as he worked.

  He remembered the mobs of people standing alongside the buses taking the American soldiers from the airport. These Australian crowds were waving United States flags and cheering for them. It was different from the reception he knew he was facing when he returned to the States. He and his lover met simply. There was a restaurant. He was with other American soldiers. There was a glance and then conversation that led further. They slept together that first night and every night afterwards for the whole ten days of his leave. At the airport, when he flew out of Sydney to return to Vietnam, they cried in each others arms and swore to meet again when he was free of the war, discharged. They wrote letters, full of memories and plans for the future. He made arrangements to be discharged in country so he could go immediately to Australia to hold her once again.

  He remembered the heat of the Vietnamese sunlight that day when he got her letter. She wrote she was pregnant with his child. He wrote back with love that same afternoon, scratching a note and putting it in the simple Army envelopes that were there for GI letters home. He was happy that something was purposeful at last in his life.

  Like everything else in Vietnam, his happiness was not permanent. On another day her letter came that she had aborted their unborn child. There were many things left unsaid in their letters after that. In Australia, they had read each other’s thoughts with a glance. He did not understand the words in her letters. In time their love affair was over. When he left Vietnam he went directly home to the United States. It was the final dishonor in his war. He went to war to help children, he was almost killed by a child and in the end he felt he had somehow helped to kill a child himself.

  Here, today, at this moment, he suddenly wanted to tell Maggie about this. He looked at her. She noticed him and smiled back, then returned her eyes to her dig. He felt close enough to her to share these memories, to get her advice, to get her aid as a strong person helps a weakling to stand until he is strong enough on his own.

  Chapter 16