Slave Graves

by Thomas Hollyday

Frank awoke just after dawn. Maggie was still asleep, her body against his on the seat of the truck, her breasts flecked with cinders and exposed in his ill fitting shirt. They had climbed into the truck, exhausted after the last fireman left almost two hours ago. He smiled at her, sensing a closeness with her, as though they were two comrades who had fought an enemy side by side and survived. He moved his fingers softly against the side of her face. Maggie slowly opened her eyes and smiled at him. She turned and moved closer to him, her eyes closing again.

  He kissed her lips. He wiped a smudge of the soot from the fire that had landed on her nose. Her eyes opened. “Do that again.” This time their lips touched with a passion that surprised them both. When they drew apart, he said, “We’ll have to explore that when this is all over.”

  She smiled. “Yes.”

  “I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things,” he said. It wasn’t just the kiss. He knew that Mello was out of his life forever.

  She touched his lips with her finger. “I know.” Then she said, “You have a little mole on your forehead, right with the freckles.”

  “My Mom used to say it gave me wisdom.”

  “She was right, your Mom. I wish I could have known her.” She smiled as she pulled up the neck of the tee shirt and then looked inside. “There’s room for both of us in here.” She looked around, holding her head just above the steel dashboard. The truck still had its military panel of switches and dials, the stark faces and numbers contrasting with the softness of her hair and face.

  Frank sat up.”We need to get out on the site and see what we can preserve.” He looked through the windshield at the desolation of the burned house.

  “My God,” he said. “Just like Tet was. Everything busted up.”

  She touched his arm.

  “There’s no doubt in my mind that Jake did not care whether he killed us last night,” Frank said slowly. “He wanted to get rid of the artifacts and he didn’t care who got hurt.”

  She looked at him, her eyes asking him what to do.

  “The Pastor’s got the right idea. Only trouble is he’s not here yet. I’ve tried not to take sides but Jake’s forced me. I’ll stand in front of the bulldozer myself. Jake’ll have to run that yellow bulldozer right over me,” said Frank. He climbed down from the truck, his skin and cutoffs coated with sticky bits of black ash.

  Maggie climbed out of the truck. “I’m going to stand there with you,” she said. He took her hand and they walked toward the house. The sky was clear blue, with a hot orange red sun rising big above the treeline and cornfields. Insects buzzed in the morning dew. There was, however, the unpleasant smell of smoke and steam from the wet charred stud wood. Scorched tarpaper hung in long sheets from the exposed frame members of the house. Windows had fallen out on the ground and timbers, bricks and pipes hung without order and with no resemblance to the once weathertight construction.

  Frank’s skin itched from the embedded soil and cinders. His left foot still ached from slipping off the underwater limb last night on the way to the bridge and his side felt bruised where the briars had shredded his underwear. His toes felt the damp soil and the grass that was smashed down from the heavy tires of the fire trucks. Some of the boxwoods had been broken in half by the trucks. The fire engines had left great tracks in the grass where only a few hours ago people had stood with cocktails at Jake’s party.

  He looked toward the site, beyond the remains of the boxwoods. He could see the top of the bulldozer. The crowd had pulled the canopy from the machine. It was upright on the ground, its mounting poles up thrust like a great dead beetle.

  As they got closer to the house, Frank noted the muck that was splattered on what little grass was left, the soil that the heavy tires had brought from the lane with its new ruts and deep potholes full of black water and broken charred timbers. The house itself had fallen inward for the most part, the remains of the roof collapsing with the layers of asphalt shingles spilling into the first floor. Large sections of sodden plaster bent forward from sections of walls, the plaster still held together by fragile electrical wiring and water pipes.

  Maggie’s car was a blackened ruin. Its cloth upholstery still steamed. Broken glass was sprinkled on the ground, tires were flat, and a pair of her shorts and various of her digging tools were scattered on the ground outside the wreck. The grass under the car’s gasoline tank was blackened in a large circle.

  They circled back to the front of the house and started toward the site. Much of the honeysuckle had been torn out of the hedges by catching against the fenders of the fire trucks. The broken vines were dying quickly in the morning sunlight but even with the dank odor of the wet burned wood of the house, there was still a faint smell of the sugar of the honeysuckle.

  Suddenly Frank smelled burning tobacco and looked behind him expecting to see someone standing there with a pipe or cigar. There was no one. Maggie stopped and looked at him. The smell was overpowering. He felt like he was choking on the fumes. He reached for his throat. He began to cough. Then the odor disappeared. He looked around again, remembering what the Pastor had said about the tobacco legend.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “That tobacco smell.”

  “You better watch out,” she smiled.

  “There’s not much more can happen to us,” he answered. “I’m going over to the site.”

  “I’ll want to look around the house,” she replied.

  As he approached the site he noticed the sifting pile, the heap of soil that they had run carefully through Maggie’s screen as they excavated it from the various pits. This hill was several feet high and surprisingly untouched by the vandalism. The screen itself had also been left alone.

  A few feet beyond the pile he saw what remained of the excavation. He noticed first that the carefully established marked sections were all destroyed, the twine torn down and the markers pulled out in the rampage of the previous night. The several pits had become one large hole, the carefully measured and staked walls or balks between pit areas, all tumbled in the frenzy of the crowd.

  Then he saw the horror, a sight that made his stomach heave with disgust. He stopped and kneeled in weakness. His eyes moved to the center of the area where the white datum stake had been. There was a great pile of bones and skulls with the skulls stacked on top in grinning frenzy. Sadly, most of the skulls were small in size. He knew that his worst fear, and Maggie’s and the Pastor’s too, that there had been many slave children burned here, was indeed true. The pile stretched from the middle of the wreck area to the edge of the site on the farmhouse side. Towards the road a few boxes were still upturned where the merry makers had apparently sat and tossed the skulls and bones at the pile.

  The site was changed in another way. Much of the frame of the shipwreck was visible. Wood frames strutted above the soil, exposing sections of the ship’s ancient flooring. Rising from the boards were rusty iron rings, coupled to long chains which were entangled with dozens of skeletons, almost all of them children.

  “Maggie,” he called back to her. “It’s beyond belief. The spectators cleared out the loose earth when they were walking on the site. We were proceeding so carefully, so slowly. Their feet hurried up the whole process. In trying to destroy our work, they actually helped bring the wreck out of the ground.”

  He heard her rushing through the bushes from the house. He climbed down quickly into what had become a large rectangular trench. The sides of the trench waved and sloped with the soft earth. In the center of the great pit, the pile of jumbled bones stuck above the ship wreckage like a fat white mast.

  “There must be hundreds of small skulls here,” Maggie said from behind him. She kicked at the soil, trying to punish it.

  He reached back for her hand. She walked forward and squatted beside him.

  “Let me just look at this for a moment,” he said.

  He jumped up and moved toward the bow of the wreck where some boards were showing. He knelt and looked
closely at the boards, talking quickly. “We’ve got to study this, and this has to be done right. Help me.” His voice shook as he fought to control himself, the nausea at seeing the remains of the murdered children.

  He spoke carefully, the technical terms helping him to control himself. “First of all I see some ochre colored boards. Below them are a section with boards with tar in between. That tar system we know was a Seventeenth Century way of protecting the hull from worms. The outside board was eaten and the tar stopped the predators from getting at the inner board. The ochre was the color they painted most of these old ships. Made the hull look like strong new oak so pirates would not think the ship was easy to destroy with cannon fire.”

  His knowledgeable fingers traced the board edges. “It’s definitely the British and American style, the bulging beam near the bow like a fish, the stern real narrow.”

  He looked up at her.

  “New York,” she said. “The old merchant ship wreck they found there.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  Frank walked to the stern area and stopped at a board protruding vertically from the earth. “Look at this.”

  Maggie moved to his side.

  “See the little curves to the top of the rudder,” he said. “That means she’s Chesapeake built. I can spot the rudder trim anywhere. Same as the wreck in New York. Let’s look at the bow again.”

  Walking forward again, they kept spotting fragments and showing them with excitement to each other. At the bow there were pieces of wood with carving and what remained of two shapes that might have been some type of figurehead. One shape looked like a hand holding a ball.

  “Those figures. They remind me of something. I’ll think of it,” Maggie said.

  “The carving is all early,” said Frank. “Definitely Seventeenth Century. Nobody could afford this work in the later ships.”

  “Come see what I found at the house,” Maggie said, new energy in her eyes.

  They moved back up toward the wreck of the house, she holding his hand and pulling him along gently, the two of them walking through the remains of the high grass, the insects noisy around them, coming out from hiding after the inferno of the previous night. Maggie led Frank, turning anxiously from time to time, hurrying him along. They reached the remains of the porch and stepped through the ruined black wood into the space where the kitchen floor had been.

  “Careful. Your bare feet. The nails,” said Frank.

  “Seeing those children has made me tough,” she said.

  He followed her into the jungle of broken wood. Her excitement, her impish figure like a wraith, a spectral and physical presence amidst the awful holocaust wreckage, was cheering to Frank.

  “Look at this,” she said.

  “The ship’s bell. I thought it was lost in all that heat,” said Frank

  “Look at it closely,” she said.

  The ship’s bell lay in the midst of the wreckage, several pieces of plaster resting on top of it. He scratched his neck.

  “I see what you mean. The aggregate has been burned off. There’s raw metal left,” he said.

  They bent over the object, no longer survivors, but scientists and scholars again.

  “It’s got some letters on it,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, excitement in her eyes.

  “Let me move some of this wood.” He pulled at one of the fallen studs that was resting on the bell. As he shifted it, a piece of plaster fell backward, crashing into the rubble with a huge cloud of black soot. Maggie and Frank were both showered with some of the gray and black fire dust.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Yes,” he answered, impatiently brushing off the clinging flotsam. They moved closer to the bell. The metal was clear on all sides of the object.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Frank.

  “Look at the scrollwork up at the top where the bell hanger is.”

  “This was very expensive to cast,” said Frank. He tipped the bell upward. “Still pretty heavy.”

  Maggie leaned over and pulled on the object with Frank. They tipped it further and Maggie got her hand around the bottom lip of the bell.

  “There’s conglomerate inside.Can you get your hand around it to help me lift it?” Maggie said. She was bent well over, her feet close to the lip of the object.

  “Watch out for your toes,” said Frank.

  “You too,” she said.

  Frank stepped ahead, his right foot along the opposite side of the object, his left hand bracing himself against the ruined timbers of the old kitchen wall.

  “OK. I’ve got it,” he said.

  They lifted the bell and moved it, walking backward out of the broken timbers. Then they stood on a patch of scorched grass, the bell on the ground between them.

  “Let’s get it over to the truck in case this building collapses any more,” said Frank.

  Frank placed a remnant of porch flooring under the bell and they skidded the object along the ground to the truck. He opened the tailgate and cleared a small space near the hoist.

  “Do you think we can lift it up or do we need the hoist?” asked Maggie.

  “Let’s try it. One, two, three,” Frank counted off and they hefted the object up on the truck.

  “It must be a couple hundred pounds at least.”

  “It’s heavy all right,” agreed Frank. “Let’s see if we can make out any of the letters.”

  “They are very fancy letters. I think that one is an ‘A’ and this one is a small ‘d.’

  “We’ll try a little water on it.” Frank took his shirt and dipped it in a puddle. He looked at Maggie. “We’re supposed to use a clean special conservator’s cloth.”

  “I’m sure the association of antique metal conservators will not mind this one infraction,” Maggie smiled.

  As he wiped the surface the letters started to come out more clearly. “Adam is the first word. Another is Eve. Underneath there is another word, the port I think. London. I’m sure it’s London.”

  “I think you’re right. Adam and Eve, London. No date. We can guess at that. Probably early Eighteenth Century or late Seventeenth judging for the design of the bell.”

  She stopped talking. Her face lit up. “That’s it. Those figures on the ship bow. The one holding a ball. It was Adam and Eve with the woman holding the apple.”

  Frank looked at her, his eyes wide.

  “What?” she said.

  “The old blind preacher, remember that Mr. Johnson described. Maybe it was the ship that he was referring to.”

  She realized what he was saying. “All those years of living in fear,” she said. “Some of the Terment slaves must have seen the fire. Their code for the horror, for the dead children, was Adam and Eve.”

  There was a sound of a tool hitting a sheet of steel. “What was that noise?” he said. The metallic sound clanked again behind the boxwoods.

  “Let’s take a look.”

  A small yellow truck had arrived quietly and was parked near the large bulldozer. The broken canopy from the tractor was already loaded in the back of the truck.

  “Somebody is repairing the bulldozer,” said Maggie.

  “We haven’t got much time left,” he said. “Come on.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We’ve got some fortifications to build.”

  He looked at Maggie. Her eyes said yes.

  Frank explained as they ran back toward the shipwreck. “The best defense is a structured site. That will be our fortifications. There’s got to be something for him to destroy. It will take him more time. If Jake runs it down, he has to run down all our measurements, and not just a field of bare earth.”

  She nodded. “Anything to slow him down.Let me start with restoring the dig area. You try to remeasure what you can of the survey lines and grids. There are a few posts that were not destroyed. The datum stake is gone but the crowd did not move Soldado’s markers. “

  The
two white stakes stood vertically from the site marking the spots that Soldado had discovered in his wild dance. There was evidence that someone had tried to pull one of the stakes out. The top of the stake was broken off but the base had remained secure as if it were locked into the marsh.

  “We can work from his locations,” said Frank.

  Moving as fast as she could, Maggie pounded in each new stake and restretched the white twine. Frank helped on some of the longer sights, holding a post while she sighted it by eye and guided him back and forth until they had a fix. Meanwhile Frank tried to rebuild the excavation. He started with the Q dig area. Most of the bones in the great pile had come from this original pit. Frank noticed the remnants of blue cloth in the side of the pile. The bones of the Federal soldier had been thrown into the pile with the slave and sailor skeletons.

  During this time the two of them also kept glancing at the workman at the bulldozer. The operator in turn looked at them occasionally as he continued to service the tractor, adding grease to its grease points and its tracks . He also ran a hose from the large fuel drum on the back of his truck to the bulldozer fuel tank and pumped fuel over to the tractor.

  After stretching the surveyors twine over the new stakes, Maggie and Frank started the difficult task of restoring the bottom of the pit. Although the ship was more exposed and beams and planks of the wreck were in evidence, much of the wreck was in disarray, changed by the crowd into a mass of twisted bones and wood rather than the orderly pile that nature had preserved in its original form. They worked as quickly as they could, placing the parts of the wreck back in places where they were sure the parts had originated. They used water marks and shapes in the soil strata to place the parts. The walls of the enlarged pit showed more definitely the strata and indicated more fully the large amount of fill that had been brought into the site sometime in the past to cover the shipwreck.

  “Someone sure did a lot of work to cover up this old wreck,” said Frank.

  As much as they could, they tried to remove the trash that had fallen or been thrown into the pit, the beer cans and the human vomit and excrement. Minutes, then an hour, went by as they worked. The sun inched higher. The mechanic tapped his way to his conclusion, the start of the tractor engine. As Frank had wanted, the marsh changed gradually into a restored site, what Frank referred to as his fortification.

  The scholars and the mechanic gradually faced each other across a dead area, land heavy with tire ruts and debris from the fire, on one side of the area the sharp bulldozer blade, on the other, a battle line of white twine and wooden stakes.

  Chapter 20