Orphan of Creation (10 page)

By an act of sheer self-discipline, Barbara decided to knock off for the day. It was a hard call because they were close. Both of them could feel it. Just below their feet, secrets waited to whisper their truths after more than a hundred and thirty years of silence. It was tempting to dig out just one more trowelful, because whatever-it-was might be waiting below the surface, a handbreadth away. But that could be disaster in the tricky, failing light of sunset. The shadows of twilight were filling the excavation, and a vital bit of bone could be missed. A precious, irreplaceable bit of the past could easily be stepped on unknowingly, thrown away in the gloom of on-coming night. Barbara even considered scaring up whatever lanterns and flashlights were about the place, and working that way, but eyes dazzled by a flashlight could be worse than useless, and light was no help when it merely turned shadows into glare.

Reluctantly, they cleaned their tools, returned them carefully to their places in the garden shed and the garage, and took their sore muscles in to dinner and the last of the endless Big Games on TV. Barbara crept upstairs to a much-wanted shower and an early bed time—but she might as well have been eight years old on Christmas Eve, for all the sleep she got.

<>

The next morning, Saturday, she was in the excavation, shoring up the walls where they had slumped over in the night, before the last star had left the sky. Her muscles were sore from yesterday’s work, but that just felt good, a real sign that she had done something the day before.

Livingston stumbled out of the house soon afterwards, carrying two steaming cups of coffee. Barbara took hers gratefully.

The two of them started with the back-wrenching, tedious, careful work of peeling back the surface of the excavation. She drummed into his head just how fragile what they were digging for was. It would require exquisite care to remove whatever remains they might find.

Livingston listened carefully as Barbara told him how to dig gently, and he set to work alongside her.

It was long, slow work. They would dig down ten centimeters along one side of the excavation, no farther than a trowel could cut. Then they would work back toward the far side of the excavation, slicing down that same ten centimeters and no farther until they reached the far side, and the floor of the hole was exactly level at the new, ten-centimeter-lower level. Then they would start again. Over and over again, they cleared every bit of the work face to the new horizon—Livingston was picking up the trade-talk—before going farther down at any point.

Start at the east side of the work face and work toward the west. Cut back the overburden east to west, whittling down a low ridge of dirt that slowly melted before their trowel blades. Slowly fill a bucket with dirt, slowly fill the wheelbarrow one bucketful at a time, empty the barrow on the tarp, and be glad for the chance to straighten up for a moment and get out of the hole.

They were about halfway across on their sixth horizon, the excavation now about waist deep on Livingston, the sun high in the ten a.m. sky—

When Livingston’s trowel hit something.

Something, he knew instantly, that wasn’t dirt.

Something that
gave
a little.

<>

“Barb!” he cried out, and threw down the trowel. Working with his bare hands, he scrabbled away the dirt, his heart pounding, fingers almost trembling with excitement.

“Stop!” she cried out. “Don’t use your hands. Run and get a brush.”

“A brush?” his hands stopped in midair over the whatever-it-was, and he looked up at her for a split second, as if he had never seen such a thing as a person before. Then he looked back down toward the ground. All he had eyes for was the invisible something beneath his feet.

“A brush! A paintbrush! It’s the best way to clear the dirt away. Didn’t I remember to tell you to get—oh, the hell with it! Come on, there must be some in the garage!”

Livingston got the idea. They scrambled out of the hole, and both of them nearly tripped over the grid lines on their way out. They broke all records getting to the garage, but there wasn’t anything remotely like a brush in any of the neat cupboards. They drew another blank in the garden shed, and pounded hell-for-leather through the breakfast crowd in the kitchen to get down to the basement to go banging through all the storage bins. In the last cabinet they tried, Livingston came up with a treasure trove of perfectly kept, good-as-new, soft-as-could-be brushes. Probably they had been right there since Great-uncle Will had last put them away before he had died, ten years before. Never mind. They were already outside again, racing for the site, leaving a trail of curious relatives following in their wake.

They scrambled back over the grid lines again, and Livingston made ready to jump down into the pit—but Barbara grabbed at his arm and yelled “Stop!”

Livingston looked back at her. “But—”

“But nothing! We’re standing right here for a second until we catch our breath and calm down a bit, or we’ll screw it up for sure! Liv, you almost jumped right on top of whatever you just found—and I nearly let you! We’re really close, so let’s not foul up.”

Livingston put up his hands in an apologetic gesture. “Okay, okay.” He turned away from the hole and squatted down on his haunches, doing the breathing exercises he had used to calm himself before a big game. Barbara leaned over and patted him on the shoulder.

After a long, silent moment, she said, “Okay, let’s do it. Calm and cool.” Slowly, carefully, they stepped down into the excavation. Barbara handed her cousin one of the brushes. “Go for it, Liv.”

Almost in a pose of reverence, he knelt down in front of the thing he had found. Barbara retrieved her camera and started to shoot. He started to brush away the dirt, and slowly exposed a tiny patch of a grimy, chewed-up-looking something, something with an oddly familiar, patterned surface. He drew back his hand and stared at what he had found. His imagination tried to fit what he saw into some sort of pattern, tried to see it as mummified skin or something even ghastlier, something horrid and unknown dredged up from the past. His stomach quavered, and the excavation’s normal odor, the moldery smell of long-buried earth, suddenly seemed the stench of some evil thing long forgotten, something best left alone. “What is it, Barb?” he whispered.

“Canvas, Liv,” she replied just as quietly. “It’s dirty, rotted-out old canvas. But what the hell is it doing here?”

Almost reluctantly, Livingston resumed his work with the brush. The patch of canvas grew from a spot the size of his thumb to an area larger than his huge hand. A spot of red appeared, and he brushed away the dirt around it, to reveal a long, rusty nail lying atop the canvas, a few crumbling bits of wood barely attached to it.

“That’s one of our hits, kiddo,” Barbara whispered. “That’s what led us here. One of the coffin nails, and what’s stuck to it is what’s left of the coffin itself. Here, let me see the brush. You take the camera and get some close-ups.”

“You two finally find something?” a booming voice shouted down.

Barb and Liv almost jumped out of their skins. They looked up to see the site surrounded by a row of expectant faces. “Yes, Aunt Josephine. Yes, we have,” Barbara replied. She turned back toward her work. “Take the camera, Liv.”

With surprising speed, she worked the brush over the surface and cleared the dirt from a whole hump of pitted, crumpled, flattened, worm-eaten canvas, large enough that she could begin to trace the outlines of the body below it. “Looks like the grave subsided a bit toward the west,” she muttered in a fast, breathy voice, not pausing in her work. She found more and larger bits of wood, some still clinging to their rusty nails, and places where the canvas was crumbling away to nothing, barely held together by a few surviving threads. “They must have wrapped the body in the cloth before they threw it in the packing case,” she announced in a louder voice to no one in particular.

Her heart was racing, and she felt as if all her senses were working in overdrive, amplifying all the messages that went to her brain, making her vision clearer, her finger more nimble, her ears alert to the sound of every grain of dirt as it moved. To her, the damp, dismal odor of the excavation was bracing, an invigorating wind to a sailor too long apart from the sea. The moment filled her with the gladness of coming home to her own world. She felt more alive than she had in years.

It was again a distinct effort to stick to the job, to use approved procedure, to remember that rushing could still ruin this dig, that there were very good reasons for the dull, relentless routine of standard digging. She forced herself to be calm.

Livingston, watching her, was plainly astonished that she wasn’t digging the find out, but simply clearing the overburden from over and around it as far down as the base of the current horizon. She finished quickly, and then, even more incredibly, turned her back on the find and started clearing the rest of the horizon.

“Aren’t you going to dig it out, after all that fuss, darling?” Barbara’s mother demanded as she leaned in over the hole.

“Not yet, Momma. If we just go straight down, we might miss something, or stab a trowel through it. We have to dig
around
it on all sides, make sure we’ve got the whole find cleared before we go any farther.”

Livingston set down the camera and silently shook his head. He could see how excited she was, how much this meant to her. How could she be so controlled? Well, if she could . . .

He picked up his trowel and knelt down beside her again, and the two of them carefully cleared the last of the existing horizon.

<>

A half-hour later, there was at least the satisfaction of knowing the careful procedure was worthwhile. The excavation was rather small, two meters by two meters, about twice the area of a good-sized dining room table. It did not entirely encompass the find. Once the horizon was completely cleared, they could see that the hump of canvas extended well past the grids they had been digging out, and seemed to be pitched downward a bit as well, as if it were a submarine diving down into the E3 grid. The top of the canvas was a mass of knotted wrinkles. To Barbara, who had seen such things before, it looked as if they had dropped the body onto the tarp, then used the tarp as a sling to lift the body and drop it into the coffin. Once the body was in the coffin, the remaining canvas had simply been shoved down on top of the body any which way and the lid nailed down.

Barbara sent some of the younger kids for an old bed sheet, and they came racing back in record time. Barbara and Livingston gently laid the sheet down over the grimy hump of canvas, and Livingston set to work opening the E3 and E4 grids. Working as fast and as carefully as he could, he dug it out, doing his best not to dump too much dirt onto the grimy treasure he had found. He even took a perverse pleasure in keeping a professional-looking side and corner on the new dig. In short order he had brought the new digging nearly down to the level of the old.

They pulled the sheet and its dusting of dirt off Livingston’s discovery and set to work again, first with trowels and then with the brushes again, clearing the dirt around the pathetic little mound. Finally, they had a two-meter by three-meter grid cleared, with the find lying more or less at its center.

The canvas was not as well preserved over the parts of the body that had sunk into the ground a bit, mostly in the E3 grid. As Barbara brushed the dirt from one patch, it crumbled away, and the dirt that had seeped under it generations before collapsed.

There, exposed to her eyes for the first time, was a bit of leg bone, the lower end of a femur.

She looked at it, cried out—and her heart worse than broke. It felt as if she had been flying and had suddenly crashed into a brick wall.

It was a
human
femur, not a gorilla’s. It was all for nothing, nothing in the world.

She had dug up some perfectly ordinary human burial, one of millions, billions in the world, an old grave some poor bastard had been thrown in, under the crossroads where they buried murderers and thieves, and a story had grown up about it. That one glimpse of bone meant all her work, all her planning—all her Christmas money spent on hardware and on paying Liv—had gone toward making a fool of herself in front of her family, a wild goose chase after a fable some old man had scribbled down a hundred years before.

She dropped her brush, squatted down, leaned against the wall of the excavation, and fought back the tears.

“Barbara!” her mother cried. “What’s the matter, baby?” The old woman, unmindful of the dirt getting on her good clothes, let herself down into the excavation and reached for her child. “Baby, what’s happened? What’s wrong?”

“Oh, Momma, it’s a
human
. Look at that bone. Human as you or I are. It’s not old Zebulon’s goddamned imported gorilla, just some regular person they put in the ground here. I’ve wasted the whole weekend, and spent all that money, and torn up Aunt Josephine’s garden, and it’s all for nothing.”

“How can you tell from that little bit of ugly bone sticking out?”

“Momma, I went to school for
six years
learning how to tell the difference! Damn, damn, damn.” By now the family members standing along the edge of the dig were shifting around uncertainly, not quite sure how to respond.