Orphan of Creation Read online

  “Yeah, okay, I get it,” Livingston said, his voice betraying a hint of excitement. He was getting caught up in the mystery-solving, the detective work of the job. “But let me guess. We can’t see where the old dirt road crossed the path to the slaves’ burial ground because they—I guess we—kept the path in repair, filled in the washouts as they happened. Right?”

  Barbara grinned, squinting a bit. “Right. We’ll make an archaeologist out of you yet.”

  “So what we’ve got to do is locate every inch of the washout we can to get the best fix we can on the crossroads, then start scratching away the topsoil,” Livingston said.

  “Go to the head of the class. So you grab a bunch of those tomato stakes and walk the washout south of the burial ground path. Mark both sides of the washout every two or three meters or so, every place you see it. I’ll do the same to the north side.”

  Livingston went to the wheelbarrow and collected an armload of the tomato stakes, then walked to the far end of the site and started searching for the faint marks, the slight depression in the earth that betrayed the old course of the road.

  At first, he couldn’t see a thing, and was frustrated to look up and see Barbara pounding stake after stake. College football left a man with a real competitive streak, and falling behind goaded him to greater efforts. Finally, he spotted a flattened little notch in the earth about in line with the stakes his cousin was driving, and drove home one of his own. He bent low over the close-cropped grass and studied the earth. With a little grunt of triumph, he spotted the other side of the washout, and drove in a second marker.

  Suddenly, his eye seemed to know what to look for, and he was reading the ground, pounding in stake after stake. Even as he spotted another trace of the road, he marveled that he was seeing Barbara’s lost world, the signs of ways people had lived before his grandmother was born. He was catching the same bug Barbara had caught twenty years before, in search of a vanished hamster.

  Finally, the last of the stakes that could be set was pounded in. Barbara examined his work and was basically approving, though she adjusted the position of two stakes slightly. She drew the stakes-points into her rough sketch map, and then photographed the entire area yet again.

  Livingston was getting a bit tired of such relentlessly methodical procedure. “Barb, why are you working so hard to document all this? What’s the point of taking three pictures of everything?”

  Barbara picked up the tripod and moved it to a new position, Livingston trailing behind. She thought for a moment and spoke. “Liv, suppose you thought you were going to break the class record for, say, the fifty-yard dash—run it a half-second faster than anyone else in your school that year. A coach and a pal with stopwatches would be enough. Everyone could accept that. But suppose you were a complete unknown in track, just one guy out of thousands, and thought you might take three seconds off the all-time world record. Would two guys with stop-watches do it? Would the Guinness Book of World Records or Sports Illustrated settle for that?”

  “Hell no. There were a couple of guys chasing state track records back at Ole Miss. They arranged to have the attempts filmed, got the watches calibrated, and made sure the judges were impartial.”

  “Okay, then. If there really are gorillas buried here, I’m going to turn a lot of American history upside down. I want every step of the effort nailed down. I don’t want anyone to say that there was any way I could have faked it, or gotten it wrong, or spoiled the evidence. So let me take my pictures.”

  Livingston smiled. “I get the point. Tell you what, though. It’s getting kinda warm. I’m gonna see if I can scare up some lemonade or something. You want anything?”

  “How ‘bout a Diet Coke?” Barbara said absently as she peered through the viewfinder and fiddled with the focus.

  “Right.” Livingston turned and headed back to the house.

  He came back about ten minutes later, drinks in hand. “Took me a while to escape,” he said. “The whole mob is gathered around Aunt Josephine, listening to her read aloud from that journal you found. They all wanted to know what you were up to, and Aunt Josephine skipped ahead and read the passage you showed her this morning. I think we’ll have an audience in a minute.”

  Barbara shook her head. “Wonderful. Nothing I like better than sidewalk superintendents. C’mon, let’s get back to it while we still can. I’ve sketched in all the markers. If you sort of connect the dots and extend the line from the places you can still see the washout, it looks as if the old road curved a bit, sort of looped a little bit closer to the burial site than the present one does. Grab a few more stakes, will you?”

  They walked down the present-day plantation road to the point where it crossed the burial-ground road. “Okay, partner,” she said cheerfully. “Now we work from the sketch map and the line of the old road we’ve staked out and figure out where it crossed this path. Wish I had a surveyor’s transit, but I think I can manage on eyeballs. Gimme one of those stakes.” She stared back along the lines of stakes running north and south, muttering to herself, tracing the old roadline. She took the stake and walked to the closest south-side stake, then backed up the way she had come, dragging a stake in the dirt. She marked her line across the burial-ground path and met up neatly with the closest stake on the north side, then repeated the performance with the line of stakes marking the other edge of the old washout road. She had now, she hoped, relocated the shifted landmark of the crossroads, under which the gorillas were supposedly buried. “Grab the tape measure, Liv,” she said. They used the measure, four more stakes, and a few tricks in geometry to mark out a square exactly eight meters on a side, with the theoretical fossil crossroads at its center. “That’s it, Liv. Our prime search area. Now let’s get that rider mower out here and see if we can’t rig up some sort of bulldozer blade.”

  Either Aunt Josephine had an altogether exaggerated fear of southern Mississippi snowstorms, or the mower salesman was most persuasive, but they didn’t have to jury-rig anything. Put neatly away in the rear of the garage was a perfectly good, purpose-made, never-been used ‘dozer blade attachment for the mower. In twenty minutes, they had the old crossroads scraped clean of the top ten centimeters of soil, and, hopefully, clear of most of the casual litter that would jam the metal detector.

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  Aunt Josephine, sitting on the far side of the wraparound porch from Barbara’s work site, surrounded by a crowd of relatives listening to her read from the journal, was growing more and more restive. For starters, she had been sitting in one place, reading to herself or aloud, for hours now, and she was an active, busy person. Her excitement over finding the treasure trove in the attic was expressing itself in the form of nervous energy. She felt a great need to bustle, to do things, not so much for the sake of doing them, but more as a way of soothing herself. Not only that, but she had gotten a constant stream of reports from some of the teenagers who had wandered over to watch Barbara and Livingston at work. She could hear the growl of her brand-new power mower again. In point of plain fact, she was getting a bit worried about just how big a hole that fool girl Barbara was fixing to dig. It sounded like they’d be halfway to putting in a swimming pool by the time it was all over. It was high time she got over there and took a look for herself.

  With a start, she realized she had been reading aloud without hearing the words herself for a page and a half. The same thing had happened back in her teaching days, when she was preoccupied. That settled it. She closed the book, looked up, and spotted someone to whom she could give an order. “Leon, take over, honey. My voice is getting tired and I need a stretch.”

  She handed her middle-aged nephew the book and stood up. Taking a shortcut through the interior of the house, she passed through the front parlor room where a squad of the more sentimental aunts was going over the other things—the bedside library, the clothes, the glasses—that Barbara had found in the trunk. Aunt Josephine made her way into the foyer and back outside. She shielded her eyes and peered out acro
ss the yard.

  There the two of them were, crouched in the middle of a huge patch bare dirt that sat like the squared-off bulls-eye in the center of an even larger patch of ground that had been mowed—no, shaved, within an inch of its life. Lord help us all, Josephine thought, this yard was never going to look the same again. Now the two of them seemed to be spooling out lengths of string across the plowed patch, working carefully with a tape measure as they paid out the taut lengths of twine. She shook her head and headed out across the lawn. She stalked over to the two kneeling figures, and glared down at them. “And just what are the two of you doing now, as if you haven’t done enough damage already?” she asked in her best school-marm voice.

  Livingston looked up, his voice bubbling with enthusiasm. “Setting up a reference grid, Aunt Josephine.” He pointed to the stakes at the corners and along the sides of the plowed-up area. “Those are exactly a meter apart. We run these lines from one side to the other, ten centimeters off the ground, and we can get an exact grid reference on anything we dig up.”

  “You two aren’t planning to dig up this whole yard, are you?” Josephine asked, getting a bit alarmed.

  “I sure hope not,” Barbara answered. She looked up from her notebook and grinned. There was a big smudge of dirt on her nose and another on her forehead, but she didn’t seem to notice. “We’ve got a metal detector that should let us zero in on the caskets, if they are still here. We’re just about ready to get to work with it.”

  “Hmmph. I see. Well, before you do one more thing to my poor side yard, Livingston Jones, you run and fetch me a chair. I’m going to set right here and keep an eye on you two before you put a whole underground subway in here.”

  Livingston stood up and brushed the worst of the dust off his trousers. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and got going.

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  Livingston felt a distinct sense of relief as he headed toward the house. Aunt Jo was putting up with them. The words might sound a bit severe, but Livingston had caught the slight tone of indulgence in Aunt Jo’s voice. It was the voice she had used back when he was a kid visiting during summer vacation, when she had caught him reading a worthwhile book after bedtime. When he had been caught with a comic book, there was hell to pay.

  He found an unused garden chair on the porch, but before he could make his escape, Barbara’s mother captured him and demanded to know what was going on. He confessed that they were getting to the interesting part.

  The result, of course, was that a whole parade of aunts and uncles and children and parents were soon on their way to the site, carrying chairs and parasols and cool drinks, settling down to watch Livingston and Barbara at work, peppering them with questions, making jokes, then wandering off to watch a frisbee tournament or a pick-up football game between the younger set, or check on the progress of the Big Game blaring from the sitting room television, then wandering back to ask the same questions and make the same jokes. The dig quickly turned into the focal point of a family carnival.

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  Barbara looked up from her work and suddenly realized just how many of her relatives had gathered around. It was all too familiar to Barbara, though she would never dare say so to anyone here. At every dig she had ever been on, the locals had wandered in to make a nuisance of themselves.

  Every anthropologist knows that all groups of humans have words, idioms, phrases, contexts, that identify members of the group as the insiders, the true people—and that there is always a second set of words and ideas that define the outsider as something lesser, foreign, foolish, dangerous, ignorant. It held true even for the cosmopolitan, egalitarian world of the paleoanthropologists, where half the greatest names were not formally trained in their craft, where the very nature of the work absolutely forced one to know that all humans are one kind, the same marvelous breed the world over, that all men and women are the same in their uniqueness within the kingdom of life. Even the paleoanthropologists had the names—for them, it was the “diggers” versus the “locals.”

  Barbara remembered the Spanish Neanderthal caves where the local Basque separatists had popped up. At first, they apparently were concerned that the diggers were with the Guardia Civil searching the caves for weapons caches. They had stayed on as self-appointed guards against no known threat—they themselves being one of the primary dangers of being in the region, getting the locally-hired diggers, and some of the foreigners, drunk on the local wine every night, keeping everyone up with their loud singing, and, on at least one occasion, using a dig-site cave as a campsite, seriously damaging the excavation.

  There were the Kenyan villagers who had reached the conclusion that the rich white people were crazy, far from an uncommon reaction. They could not make Barbara out at all. The diggers’ camp cook had single-handedly wrecked the local economy by buying a goat a day for the camp workers’ meals, thus inflating the price of goats, pumping too much cash into a primarily barter economy, and all but wiping out the local meat and milk supply.

  There were the South Africans and their endless supply of police enforcing apartheid, one or another of them barging into the decades-old Sterkfontein cave sites to check on the reports of a black woman there without a passcard. The local blacks prized their access to jobs at the site highly. They complained constantly about the outsider, obviously a big-city person, and worse, a woman, who was working there, seemingly taking one of their jobs. Barbara nearly wore out her passport and visa papers proving she was an American and a legitimate scientist. The police always ended up very nervous and deferential. Everyone knew a foreign black was a person of high status. In other words, they could get into deep trouble harassing an American.

  Hilarious tales of how one dealt with the locals was always one of the prime topics when a gang of diggers got together over a beer. Somehow they always got around to the half-legendary, huge, impressive, flowery, colorful, and quite meaningless certificates and requests for permission some diggers allegedly would produce in order to convince the local leaders, who nine times out of ten couldn’t read English anyway, to cooperate. “Dago-dazzlers,” the things were called. One tale that never died was of the high school diploma pressed into service as a dazzler. The digger in question was from Tennessee, and he had swiped a blank somehow on a visit to his alma mater and filled in the appropriate name. The illiterate chief to whom it was presented kept it and hung it proudly on his wall, much to the confusion of later visitors who wondered, but dared not ask, how the chief had come to be a graduate of Daniel Boone High School.

  But the locals, anywhere, anytime, were more than just the butt of the diggers’ jokes. For this far-flung tribe of paleoanthropologists, paleontologists, archaeologists, and all the other kinds of diggers and diggers’ allies, the locals were the outsiders, the strangers who did not speak the language. The locals did not understand the diggers’ hidden dreams, did not understand the diggers’ fiercely competitive clan, and did not realize how abruptly the intramural backstabbing could end when the diggers needed to close ranks against an outside threat.

  And now Barbara’s own family were the locals, the foreigners, the barbarians.

  It made for a strange feeling inside, strange as the knowledge, when she felt alone in the world, that her own name was rooted in the word “barbarian.” She tightened up the last of the grid-mark lines, and heard Aunt Josephine and her own mother laughing at some joke about the grid lines being the perfect height for string beans.

  The jokes ran both ways, for all people laugh away the discomforting feeling of seeing what they do not understand, what they are not a part of. Barbara felt a strange, deep sensation in her gut. It was the first, faint crack, splitting the scientist in her away from the person. She found herself wondering which side would win.

  Chapter Six

  The metal detector’s meter quivered again, just barely. “Make that a point oh-three, Liv,” Barbara said. She pointed down, and swung the detector’s head out of the way, then picked up her clipboard and carefully marked th
e point on her graph-paper grid-map of the site. Meantime, Livingston knelt down and poked a small stake into place where the detector’s head had been. Using the meter stick, Livingston carefully noted the distance from the edges of the grid block and logged that and the metal detector’s reading-intensity into the notebook. Finally, he bent over to write the same figures on the side of the stake itself. Relentlessly thorough, endless record-keeping.

  Dr. Barbara Marchando wiped the muddy sweat from her forehead with the back of a grimy hand and considered their handiwork so far. She had marked out the grid square in columns A to H labeled east to west, and rows 1 to 8 numbered north to south, then had started a survey of the entire grid with the metal detector. They were now finishing up in H8, the last of the sixty-four grid-squares that defined their eight-meter-by-eight-meter prime site.

  Livingston had logged in 37 hits from the metal detector. A glance at the grid map showed that three-quarters of those hits were clustered in two zones—the squares B2, C3, B3, C4, and another cluster spread somewhat more diffusely through F3, F4, G3, G4, H3, H4, with some slopover into Row 5. She took out her pencil again, circled the two concentrations of hits, and named them Alpha and Beta respectively. Barbara had done her best to center the prime search site on the crossroads itself. Her best guess was that the burial ground road had run pretty much straight along Row Five, as it presently did, and the old plantation road had run at a slight diagonal from D1 to E8. It looked more and more as if she had spotted the fossil roads correctly. If she had gotten that part right, it would put Alpha to the northwest of the crossroads, and Beta to the northeast. She noted the far vaguer collection of hits in the southeast edge of the grid and marked it Gamma?