Orphan of Creation (6 page)

Back when Liv got the scholarship, Barbara had been concerned. Suppose he focused so hard on football that he ended up out of college when his five years of football eligibility were up, with a make-work degree in basket weaving—or maybe no degree at all? Suppose he was equipped to do nothing but play football, one of ten or twelve thousand graduating college players chasing the three or four hundred available jobs as pro ball players?. Too many young men, especially black young men, were left fighting for too few football jobs—football jobs that quickly left most of the players out on the street with bad knees and no job skills after only a few years anyway. And left tackles didn’t get much glory.

Maybe it was because of a stats course Barbara had urged him to take freshman year, but in any event, Liv had figured out the odds against him and avoided the football trap. He had played hard, but never so hard that it got in the way of his major in biochemistry. He had graduated the summer before, and now was working at some sort of part-time job, waiting for his master’s degree program at the University of North Carolina to start up in January. He was going to do okay.

But at the moment, he could undoubtedly do with a few bucks. He finished his food and pushed his plate back with one massive hand as he hauled in his coffee mug with the other, every movement setting massive muscles to rippling in his arms and under his shirt. “So, Barb,” he said. “Haven’t really had a chance to talk with you this time around. What’s up?”

“Plenty, Liv. Grab a refill on your coffee and come outside where it’s quiet. I need to talk with you.”

He shrugged. “Sure. Just let me hack through this crowd to the percolator. You want one?”

“Yeah, cream, no sugar.”

“Okay, see you on the back porch in a minute.”

<>

A few minutes later they were settled in on the porch swing. Livingston leaned his feet up on the porch railing and sighed contentedly. It was a good morning, and it was nice to have a private visit with Barb. She had always been one of his favorite cousins. “So what’s the situation?” he asked.

“Liv, I’ve got a business proposition for you. I’ve stumbled across old Grandpa Zebulon’s diary. Aunt Jo’s around the other side of the house right now, on the front porch, reading it. It’ll be passed around all day, I guarantee that. But in it, there’s a mention of something really weird being buried on the family property here. I want to excavate, now, this weekend, and I need some help from someone who has some sense. It’ll probably suck up most of the weekend, but I’ll pay eight bucks an hour.”

Livingston looked at his cousin and thought for a minute. “Aunt Josephine says okay?”

“Yup.”

“Then I’m in. I could use the bread. What are we digging for?”

“Gorillas.”

Liv raised his eyebrows and tilted his head to one side. “Okay, that’s different.” That was the nice thing about the Yankees—the Northerners—in the family, he thought. They could come up with a ring-tailed doozy of a story, like digging for gorillas, and at least you knew they were for real. The Southerners were another kettle of fish. If one of
them
had handed him that story, he’d be waiting for the punch line right now. But Barbara was for real. Nuts, maybe, but for real.

“Okay, you’re on the payroll—and on the clock.” Barbara stood up and pulled her wallet out of her back pocket. Livingston could see how she seemed suddenly pleased to be in charge, in command of a team, even if it only had one member. She always had loved running things, even back when he was the little kid and she was the bossy teenager. “Here’s my American Express card,” she said. “We’ll need some stuff.” She dug a crumpled piece of scrap paper and a pen out of her pockets and handed them to Livingston. “Here, you’d better make a list. Hit the Radio Shack in Gowrie and come back with the best metal detector they’ve got.”

“
Metal
detector?”

“These gorillas are in caskets.”

“Now that’s
real
different.” Maybe, Livingston thought, Northerners knew how to tell a tall tale too.

“Well, they’re in packing cases, anyway,” Barbara conceded. “I hope with nails and hinges. If they were put together with wooden pegs, we’ll have to think of something else. Also, hit Balmer’s Drugs and pick up four or five rolls of Kodachrome. Thirty-six exposure, ASA 64 if they have it, but ASA 25 will do. Get me some graph paper and a clipboard too. Then stop at Higgins’ Hardware and grab a compass—the kind for finding north, not for drawing circles—and a tape measure, the longer the better—and marked in metric if they have one. Also a meter stick—I’ll settle for a yardstick. And some string and tomato stakes.”

“This is starting to go past interesting to weird. All this on the level, Barb? I mean, I’m not going to end up at the end of this in some crazy practical joke, am I?”

Barbara laughed. “No, ‘fraid not. That’s all just stuff for digging a real professional-style hole.”

Livingston shook his head. Well, it was her money he’d be spending. “Okay, boss. What will you be doing while I’m on the scavenger hunt?”

“Surveying the site. Now go. The stores should be open by the time you get into town.”

Livingston gulped down the last of his coffee, fished his car keys out of his pocket, gave Barbara a mock salute, and got moving.

<>

Barbara went back to her room and grabbed her camera bag and tripod, brought along to take a group portrait of the family. She rooted around in her oversize pocketbook until she found a serviceable notebook and pencil, feeling happy and excited, at the start of doing what she did best. Just before she left the room she looked out the window at the kids who were back playing in the yard, and suddenly found herself thinking about her first dig, so many years ago. Back when she was twelve years old . . . .

It all began one spring with her pet hamster, a rather surly brown-and-tan rodent by the name of Fuzzball. The foolish little thing escaped from its cage one day while Barbara was at school, and the cat caught it and killed it. Her mother didn’t want her child to see the broken little body, and by the time Barbara got home from school, her mother had gotten the tiny corpse away from the cat and had unceremoniously thrown it in the trash can out back.

If her mother had hoped an invisible corpse would ease Barbara’s feelings, she was mistaken. Barbara was not only heartbroken at the death of Fuzzball and shocked at the cat’s homicide, but infuriated that her own mother could just throw Fuzzball away.

Barbara insisted on giving Fuzzball a decent burial. Her mother, who had never much liked hamsters, and who had wasted the entire morning chasing a live hamster around the house and then lost the afternoon trying to pry a dead one out of the cat’s mouth, was exasperated enough to do whatever would give her some peace and quiet. She dug the hamster out of the trash, wrapped it in tissue, put it in a shoebox, and presented it to Barbara.

Barbara, with a little girl’s ghoulish delight in the theater of it all, dug a hole in the little plot of untended ground behind the back garden, put the box in it, buried it, put a cross made out of two popsicle sticks over it, and said a prayer over the tiny grave. Then she laid a few dandelions on the little hump of earth, and went inside to dinner. By the next morning she had all but forgotten Fuzzball. She didn’t think of him for months. Summer vacation came and went.

The following fall, Barbara returned to school and one fine day got a book on archeology out of the library. Its title was something like
How We Know About Prehistoric Man
. She picked it because of the scary-looking skull on the cover, next to the pickaxe and shovel. As soon as her father tucked her into bed that night, she dug out her flashlight, burrowed under the covers, and began reading all about the famous scientists who dug up the bones full of secrets. Lying with her head buried under the covers, she read by the weak and flickering yellow gleam of dying flashlight batteries, all about the grand, romantic discoveries the great diggers had made. Her thoughts inevitably returned to the dead hamster buried under the brown earth of her own backyard.

In her mind’s eye blossomed the image of that tiny grave, a smooth, rounded hump of earth, with no weed or blade of grass growing on it. She imagined the popsicle-stick cross still new and perfect, the pencilled inscription on it absolutely legible. She imagined the hamster’s earthly remains, and his intact, white-polished skeleton safe under the sleeping earth. She saw him there, sheltered from the elements by the shoebox, every impossibly tiny bone in place, gently pillowed in Kleenex, the minute bones of his forepaws folded on his chest, his gleaming skull grinning into the darkness of the grave. It was a perfect, compelling vision, and Barbara had to struggle with her imagination’s tendency to put in little ear-bones and whisker-bones, too.

The next morning was Saturday. She dressed and ate breakfast in a hurry and rushed to the garage for a trowel, then to the rear of the back garden to dig up her prize, just like a real archaeologist—only to discover there was not the slightest trace of the grave. By thinking very hard, Barbara could just about remember roughly how far from the back fence and the dogwood tree she had buried the box, but there was no smooth mound of peaceful earth there, just a wide, weedy patch of mulch and dirt.

She made her best guess as to where she had buried Fuzzball, and dug twice as deep as she recalled making the grave months before. There was nothing there. She dug another hole a little farther left. Nothing. She tried digging farther to the right, then closer to the fence, then closer to the house. Nothing. Maybe she had missed the grave altogether in the areas of ground between her excavations. She traded in her trowel for a full-size shovel that was far too big for her and merged all her holes into one huge, sloppy pit. Her hands were getting sore, and swelling with huge blisters.

By that time, she had churned up such a huge swath of ground that it was impossible to tell where one hole started or ended, or where the piles of dirt lay atop undisturbed earth. She surrendered to a fierce grumbling in her stomach, and retreated to the house for lunch—after first muddying the bathroom sink with the first layers of dirt off her face and arms. Perhaps recognizing the gleam in her daughter’s eye, her mother allowed Barbara to go back to her searching after eating.

The search for Fuzzball was not a game anymore, but a challenge, a quest. Barbara, faced with the daunting, cratered mess that had been a little strip of ignored waste ground that morning, forced herself to sit down and
think
. She fought the temptation to pitch back into digging wildly. By now she was sure she
must
have dug in the right spot. How had the body vanished? What could have happened?

Dirt was a lot messier, a lot damper, a lot
dirtier
—and a lot more alive—than she had imagined. The body could have simply rotted away altogether, or been gobbled up by the bugs and worms and creepers scuttling to escape the disturbance her excavation had made in their world. Or perhaps a larger animal—a possum or raccoon or a dog—had nosed out Fuzzball the same night she had buried him and dug him up for a quick snack. Maybe her father or mother had jumbled things up with some forgotten gardening chore in the intervening months, spading up the dead rodent in the act of putting some extra topsoil on the tomatoes. The shoe box would have been no protection: one good rain would have collapsed it, and it would have quickly rotted away.

Or maybe, Barbara realized, she herself had dug up Fuzzball hours before without recognizing his few tiny, muddy-brown slivers of bone for what they were. There was not and could not be anything clean and ivory-white in this sea of brown. She could have reburied his bones as she threw her dug-up dirt to one side, trod them down and crushed them to nothing, then dug them up again when she started a new hole. She could be staring right at his invisibly small remains in the churned-up heaps of dirt in front of her.

She looked over the huge mounds of dirt she had thrown up, and realized that she would need not a shovel, not a trowel, but a set of tweezers and a magnifying glass to sift through it all carefully enough to locate whatever bones were left to find. A squirrel scampered past along the back fence, and Barbara suddenly realized that squirrel bones had to go somewhere when
they
died. In all probability, there were dozens and dozens of small animal bones in this one patch of earth. Even if she did find
some
bones, she wouldn’t have the slightest idea whether they belonged to Fuzzball, or a squirrel, or a chipmunk, or a bird.

She sighed, threw her shovel back down, and trailed disconsolately back into the house—only to be sent out by her mother to fill the holes back in and put her tools away properly.

She never found the slightest sign of the hamster’s grave.

That failure was a pivotal moment for her, the event that marked her, sparked her interest, told her what she wanted to be.

In some strange way, she felt as if she were
still
looking for that silly rodent’s body. The small mystery of its disappearance was her first attempt to peer into the ground and the past. It was the first stage of her quest, the first clue that led her down the trail she was still on, tracking the endless mystery of life and its history, the great questions of how and why humanity, and life, and the world itself, were here.