About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory (35 page)

“But long before that …” He was pausing now, gathering the documents in his mind. “… long before the Muskogee, it might have been Aztecs who were here. Before that culture had either name or notoriety among the Spaniards, before they were a horror for the Mixtecs to behold, they might have been living right here on these creeks, tending their gardens, worshiping the sun.”

He looked at me, to see how I was taking it in, gauging his next remark.

“A man named Whittier, from the university up at Athens, has been down to see Mr. Drewpierce. He wants to excavate along the river there at the edge of his fields. He believes Aztecs once camped there. Now, Mr. Drewpierce, he has no strong feelings about this yet—either way. It’s in a state of negotiation for him. Mr. Drewpierce reads his Bible closely on this and other matters though, so Mr. Whittier, you see, might not be able to dig there. We may or may not learn anything more of this campsite beyond what Mr. Drewpierce’s man Otis found last fall, a few bits of pottery. He may decide to take a six-bottom plow to it, you understand.”

I nodded yes. Yes I would not bring up the subject in Mr. Drewpierce’s presence; and, yessir, if Mr. Drewpierce brought it up and suggested I go down to the site while you talked together I would go (and this, certainly, was why my uncle had brought me here). And, yessir, I wouldn’t touch or take anything.

“Do they teach you these things in school?”

“Yessir.”

“About the Aztecs?”

“Yes, I’ve heard of it, heard of them.”

“I don’t remember it well, just that the Aztecs came in from the north and conquered the Mixtecs and others, and then the Spaniards slaughtered them.”

“And they had a great empire.”

“Yes, they did. They were great builders and mathematicians. When you walk along the river, think about these people, how they started out on these creeks. Mr. Whittier is impassioned to prove his point, you understand, which could be a mistake—archeologically and with Mr. Drewpierce.”

He looked at me with an amused smile. I basked in the level of his confidence in me.

M
R
. D
REWPIERCE WAS
a tall man and I thought him disdainful at first. He wore a clean white shirt under a fresh-laundered pair of Union bib overalls and greeted us in a quiet voice. He
steered us to a gather of green-and-white metal lawn chairs on his porch and called to his wife to bring us some lemonade.

I drank my lemonade in silence while the two men spoke, a light conversation of gossip, weather, and anecdote which I knew often preceded serious conversation in such a setting.

“Boy, I believe I know where you might interest yourself for an hour or two,” said Mr. Drewpierce.

I glanced across at his long face, not meaning to stare at the way his dark eyebrows rolled down into the corners of his eye sockets.

“Yessir?”

“You see that fence running yonder?”

“Yessir.”

“Well, you go out there and follow that fence down to the river, and then you walk on up there about five hundred yards, to where the river comes on a bend, and right there in the crook of it is some mighty interesting things washing out of the sand.”

I looked to Gordon, who nodded approval of a plan he was pleased to have helped fashion.

The morning heat and humidity had now become oppressive. Crossing the fields and walking the fence I began to sweat, a scent attractive to mosquitoes and, I suspected, chiggers. Canebrake rattlers lay in the field rows here and cottonmouth water moccasins were in the river. The country seethed with the threat of violence from small animals. I watched anxiously, too, for poison ivy. I was relieved when the banks of the river appeared at the end of the fence and I felt a faint, fitful breeze off the water.

I found the bend with no trouble, and saw the first potsherds before I’d walked a dozen feet. I squatted down on my haunches to study them: gray and reddish shards, some incised with stylized patterns resembling the impression of leaf fronds, some looking blackened by fire. I brought my fingers hesitantly into contact with their gritty edges protruding from the soil.
Aztecs
. I stood and walked farther along the curving bank. I discovered concentrations of potsherds in two more places, and nearby found glistening flakes of quartz, a sign of worked stone. I began a
diligent search for arrowheads. That I would take nothing from this place had been my faith, but I felt now a need beyond all restraint and thought. I could not understand how taking a single arrowhead might matter at all.

I searched for nearly an hour, looking for any object that suggested weaponry or adversity. I found nothing. Disappointed, I instead pulled two potsherds from the soil to examine more closely. One looked as if it had been broken away from the smooth rim of a bowl or jar. The other was intricately hatched with fine lines. I washed the sandy red soil off both in the river. They glistened like fish in my hands, and now seemed very valuable. I pushed them deliberately into the pockets of my shorts. What Aztecs had once held, I now held. The thought worked on me that the confluence here was preordained, a cabalistic power was inherent in this simple act. In taking possession of these two pieces of pottery, I had transcended the intrusive nuisance of insects and heat, the threat of snakes and poisonous plants. I felt ownership.

I walked back along the fence to the Drewpierce place. My eyes cooled when I rested them in the pine-straw shadows of a loblolly copse, the Drewpierce woodlot. The light on the muddy surface of the river had been fierce, predatory.

They were still talking. I sat on the ground beneath a weeping willow, studying how the fabric of my shorts might disguise the shape of what was in my pockets. I hated having to wear shorts, that I was not old enough for pants.

The men talked on. I felt hungry. I began to imagine how I would explain what I’d found to my brother, tell him how I, myself, had located this obscure site, had discovered what once had belonged to Aztecs, and had carefully removed only these two pieces of pottery. If he reacted with jealousy I would offer him one. Or maybe just give him one on his birthday, anyway.

My uncle hailed me to the porch, and we said good-bye before Mr. Drewpierce would feel obliged to invite us for lunch. We drove east in the big car with the wind blowing through the open windows. We stopped at a family cafe in Marshallville for lunch.
They all knew him. They called him Mr. Holstun when we walked in.

My uncle asked if I’d had a good time, but he did not ask what I had seen. Sitting there at the Formica table, I could not fit the desire to share my excitement to any story I might confidently tell. Riding in the car I felt a piece of pottery, its outline clearly visible, stabbing me in the leg. When I showed no inclination to discuss the site or Mr. Whittier’s ideas, I felt sure Gordon knew I’d stolen something.

On the way home Gordon said the river site might not be Aztecan. He said he respected Mr. Whittier’s views and hoped Mr. Drewpierce would allow Mr. Whittier to carefully examine what was there, but he believed the pieces of pottery now sitting on the Drewpierce mantlepiece would prove to be Mayan. The Mayans traded vigorously and extensively north of their homes in the Yucatán Peninsula, he said. Some of their pottery, he told me, had been found in sites as far north as New York State.

“These are all theories,” he concluded. “Just speculation. Someday men will have the tools to confirm what they believe happened here”—he gestured out the window—“before we came along. And then in another time they will talk about us, about what we did, or what we might have believed. We make sense of ourselves as a people through history. That is why we should make no modifications in records of the past, you see, but only speculate.”

On the long ride back to Thomaston I searched beyond his words for the power that had been undeniable and true on the riverbank. An angry silence, for me, grew up between us, as if he had ruined something.

That night I lay wide awake, succumbing finally to shame and stupidity. The boyish fascination with notoriety that makes being any kind of outlaw attractive was gone now. I felt the false step, the bad faith, that ultimately makes the outlaw an outcast among his own people. I couldn’t continue to deny it with bravado. If the house had not been asleep, I would have gone upstairs and asked Gordon not for absolution but to listen to my explanation, to the intelligence I had arrived at on my own
through shame. I knew that night that I was on the verge of the territory of adults.

In the morning, my thoughts were jumbled and I said nothing to him. The act was ineradicable and I lived with it.

G
ORDON DID NOT
enter the race for a congressional seat, although he seemed assured of winning it. He didn’t want it. I continued to see him once a year or so after that, until he died in 1976. We enjoyed many fine and complicated discussions while I was in college, and in some ways I came to reflect his sense of values. The incident at the river, though we never referred to it, formed part of our understanding of each other.

Twenty-five years after that day on the Flint River, walking in a remote area on the west rim of Marble Canyon in northern Arizona with two archeologists, I came upon the ruins of an Anasazi dwelling, a structure about eight hundred years old. Scattered all around it in the dust were hundreds of potsherds, some beautifully decorated with red-on-black designs, others finely incised with a fingernail to accentuate a corrugated pattern in the clay. With the permission of the archeologists I moved several of these shards to photograph them against a background of sunlit canyon walls and white cumulus clouds floating in a bright blue sky. When I was finished I returned each piece to its cradle of dust.

It occurred to me, of course, to take a potsherd as a memento, but I had no such desire. I agreed with my companions that the shards formed part of a historical record, that they should be left for some other mind to come upon and to interpret after we are gone. I had no desire to take anything, either, because of the esteem I had for my companions, my regard for their profession and for our friendship. I couldn’t shake a feeling, though, which had clung to me since I’d moved the potsherds, that something was wrong. Something was unfinished.

That evening I sat on my sleeping bag working up the day’s notes by the light of a fire. Across from me one of my companions, Bob Euler, was cleaning our dinner dishes. He was older
than me by about twenty years, a professor of archeology, a former university president.

“Bob?” I said. He looked up. “I want you to know that even though I picked up those potsherds back there to photograph, I didn’t pocket them. I haven’t picked up anything on these sites. I just want to tell you that plainly. I don’t do that.”

“Yes,” he said, “I noticed.”

I
T IS CUSTOMARY
in a book like this, which brings recent essays and new work together, for the writer to thank the editors with whom he or she has collaborated. I want to do this here in an explicit way because skilled and sympathetic editors play a pivotal role in a writer’s work over the years. I do not mean solely by offering a pat on the back or by a willingness to support a writer in the exploration of a place or an event that takes hold of his imagination. The editors who influence me most put the story itself and the reader first. They elicit from the writer greater precision, a more eloquent language, and a more concise narrative to achieve that end. In the search for clarity, it takes a remarkable editor to protect both the spirit of the story and the reader’s interests.

Over the past twenty years I’ve benefited from the astute editorial attention of many good people, foremost among them Lewis Lapham, Charis Conn, Janet Wondra, Robley Wilson, Chip Blake, John Rasmus, Paul Perry, and Laurie Graham, who for many years was my editor at Scribner.

When I started selecting essays and planning additional work for
About This Life
, I began a collaboration with a new editor, Robin Desser, at Knopf. I quickly learned that I was working with someone who understood, sometimes better than I did, what I was up to; her empathy made many decisions easier. I want to express my gratitude for her guidance in bringing the book and several of the essays to their final form.

Janet Wondra at
The Georgia Review
edited “Searching for Depth in Bonaire” with me. The essay is reprinted here in virtually the same form in which it appeared in the magazine. Both Sarah Ferrell and Michael Leahy at the
New York Times
worked with me on “A Short Passage in Northern Hokkaido.” Robley Wilson, the editor of
The North American Review
, where I have been a contributing editor since 1977, helped sharpen “Orchids on the Volcanoes.” (On this and subsequent trips to the Galápagos I received the generous and genial support of Bill Roberson of Inca Floats.) Gerry Marzorati, then at
Harper’s
, took the lightest touch of a pencil to “Informed by Indifference.” (It is a pleasure to thank Guy Guthridge, manager of the National Science Foundation’s Artists and Writers in Antarctica Program, for his unstinting support and accommodation on several trips to Antarctica, and Peter Wilkniss, former director of the NSF’s Office of Polar Programs, for his friendship and facilitation.)

Lewis Lapham and Charis Conn at
Harper’s
, where I have been a contributing editor since 1984, worked on “Flight” with me. (I would like to thank Jon Austin at Northwest Airlines, who understood, as relatively few in media relations do, the level of detail some writers require in order to write the story that interests them. Also Mary Jean Olsen at Boeing, for arranging for me to see the assembly of the 747–400 freighter at Everett, Washington. Odette Fodor and Pits van der Hoeven provided assistance on KLM’s international routes. Paul Omodt of the Airline Pilots Association helped at several points with important information.)

Peter Stine at
Witness
along with special-issue editor Tom Lyon edited “Apologia.” John Rasmus, then at
Outside
, edited “In a Country of Light, Among Animals.” Robert Atwan provided
editorial guidance when I was writing “The American Geographies” for a collection of work he was editing,
Openings: Original Essays by Contemporary Soviet and American Writers
(University of Washington Press, 1990). Chip Blake and Emily Hiestand at
Orion
also helped in editing this essay. “Effleurage: The Stroke of Fire” was also edited by Charis Conn and Lewis Lapham.