Bone River (4 page)

His words were so solemnly intoned they raised gooseflesh. I forced myself to ignore him and looked pleadingly at Junius. I felt my husband measuring my resolve. He sighed. “I’ll think about it. But for now, let’s get it into the barn.” He looked at Lord Tom. “Will that ease your mind, old man?”

“It makes no difference,” Lord Tom said morosely. “The
memelose
will find a way to take her back, wherever she is.”

His dark gaze caught mine; again I felt a spooked shiver. But I was certain, too. She belonged to me—and as strange as that feeling was, it was stronger than Lord Tom’s warnings about the dead and their intentions, and I chose to forget his words as we took her to the barn.

Once there, I brought out the lantern, and Junius and I spent hours looking at her—long enough that I forgot supper, and we ended up eating raw the oysters he and Lord Tom had brought from the whacks, shucking them over a bucket in the barn, sucking them down like savages. Lord Tom had disappeared almost the moment Junius put the mummy on the makeshift table we’d made from two sawhorses and a plank.

“Moping about
skookum tomawanos
, no doubt,” Junius said when I mentioned it.

Powerful spirits.
“It’s a dead body. You know what his people say.”

Junius leaned close to her. “The cloth is so fine. It would have taken a loom of some kind. A factory even.”

I winced when he rubbed it between his fingers.
Don’t touch her
, I thought angrily, and then was startled that I’d thought it.

“Perhaps they were as advanced as we are,” he went on.

“To be wiped from the face of the earth so cleanly?” I asked.

“Not cleanly. We have evidence they existed.”

“But not their cities,” I persisted. “If they were as advanced as you say, there would have been cities.”

“We’ll find them,” he said confidently.

“I want to explore the bank where I found her. As soon as it’s light. Tomorrow. Perhaps there’s something to be found there. Something we didn’t see.”

Junius went quiet and still, his face took on that scolding teacher look, and I wished I hadn’t said it. “Lea...you’ve never studied anything this important before. It’s not a few bowls or baskets. This could change everything we’ve ever known, and—”

“I know that. Don’t you think I know it?”

“Baird’s got people who are trained to do this.”

“But if we send her to them, they’ll be the ones who discover where she’s from and who she is.”

“We’ll still be credited with discovering her.”

“But we won’t
know
, will we? And I...want to know.” I took a deep breath and looked down at her, the lamplight shining on that reddish-brown hair, the saffron of her dress. “I can’t explain it. I feel as if I’m the one meant to discover who she is.”

“Just because you found her doesn’t mean—”

“She’s
mine
.” I said it sharply, too intently; I knew it when I saw Junius’s surprise, the way he drew back and frowned.

“It’s more than that, Leonie. Baird needs this and so do we. Bowls and spoons, a few baskets here and there—he’s got enough of those things to fill ten museums. We have to send him something more important if I’m going to get any recognition at all in that exhibit.”

He was right, of course. The exposition’s ethnology exhibit was not just important to the Smithsonian, it was important to Junius. His chance to finally have the recognition he longed for, to be seen as an ethnologist of importance.

“I know. But not her.”

“Why
not
her?”

I could not bear to hear the words I knew he would say if I tried to explain what made no sense even to me.
You’ve too much imagination, Leonie.
So I said nothing.

“We’re not capable of studying it the way it needs,” Junius insisted in my silence. “We’re collectors, Leonie, not anatomists.”

“My father would have studied her himself.”

Junius sighed. “Sometimes I think Teddy did you a disservice.”

“He raised me to be an ethnologist, and that’s what I am.”

Junius gave me a thoughtful, measuring look that said what I’d heard a hundred times before, and not just from him. I’d had an uncommon education. Science, ethnology, collecting—even for men, the work was hard. And I was just a woman, and too sensitive for such endeavors. My father had said it even as he labored to teach me the theories he didn’t believe I could learn.

I said, “What if I could get you something else? Something just as big?”

“There’s nothing just as big. Unless you find another mummy in that bank.”

“What about Bibi’s canoe?”

“You know as well as I that she won’t trade the damn thing.”

Junius had been trying for a year to obtain Bibi Kafkis’s canoe—which had belonged to her late husband, called the Duke by the settlers in mockery of his status among his own people, and because his Indian name was unpronounceable, which were the reasons for Lord Tom’s name as well. The canoe was huge, a whaling vessel meant for twenty men, and decorated with carvings and paint. Bibi’s unwillingness to let it go was one of Junius’s greatest frustrations, because it was of great ethnological importance, and it was just rotting away where she kept it upended beneath the overhang of a tool shed.

“What if I could get her to trade it?”

Junius gave me a skeptical look. “She won’t.”

“Not to you. But I’ve never tried.”

“Well, you’re as canny a trader as a Chinook, that’s true.” Junius made a face.

“If I can, will you let me keep the mummy?”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I suppose it can’t harm to keep it for a few weeks. But only a few weeks, Lea. See what you can discover, but we’ll have to send it off eventually. I’ll write to Baird and—”

“You can’t tell him anything about her. Not yet.”

He hesitated, and then nodded. “I suppose if the canoe’s on its way, that will be enough for a while.”

“Thank you.”

He stepped up to me, tugging at my mostly loose hair. “Look at you. You look as if you’ve been rolling around in mud.”

“Not much better than you, Mr. Russell.”

He laughed and pulled me close. “Come on. Let’s go in.”

I pulled away, suddenly uncomfortable, cold to the bone. I glanced at the mummy. “I don’t like leaving her in the open. I’d feel better if I could lock her up. Why don’t you bring out that old trunk?”

“It will wait until tomorrow.” He turned to go.

I grabbed his hand, stopping him. “No, Junius, please. Bring it out tonight. She’s too exposed here.”

“We’ll cover her with a blanket.”

I felt panicked. “That’s not enough. Anything could come in here during the night—”

“The door’s closed, Lea. It’ll be fine tonight. I’ll bring the trunk out before I go tomorrow.”

I knew the tone in his voice. I would not be able to budge him. I said nothing more when he grabbed an old horse blanket from its hook on the wall and draped it over the mummy, but I couldn’t shake my discomfort, and I spent the whole evening restless, thinking of her in the barn, cold and lonely and alone.

But of course, she wasn’t any of those things. She was a mummy, long dead, long gone. She felt nothing. No more than did those masks on the wall or that basket before the whatnot or those cedar bowls on the table waiting for me to draw before we sent them to Baird. To think anything else was pure foolishness. It was not objective or scientific. Not at all.

I reassured myself of that as I went to bed. But still I was up a dozen times that night, going to the window, looking out at the looming silence of the barn, at the shadow of the cut in the bank, a dark hole now in the night, with the river rushing beyond it shining molten in the moonlight.

J
UNIUS WAS UP
with the dawn, moving the trunk I’d emptied to the barn. I went with him, watching anxiously as he put the mummy inside.

“Be careful,” I cautioned, and he gave me an annoyed look.

“For God’s sake, Leonie, I
am
being careful.”

“Perhaps...perhaps we should leave her out after all,” I said uncertainly. “I could do some work with her today.”

“I thought you were going to get to that cut in the bank.”

“I am, but—”

“It’s going to rain again. If you don’t get out there now, there may be nothing left to find.”

I knew he was right, but when Junius closed the trunk, suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I turned away quickly, nearly running into Lord Tom, who gave me a worried, anxious look, and I realized my hand had gone to my throat. Quickly I lowered it, and his gaze went beyond me, to the mummy.

“You will not rebury it?”

“It’s just a body,
tot
,” I said, as much for him as for myself. “You talk as if there’s some vengeful spirit waiting to pounce upon us, but she’s been buried in that bank for centuries. The
spirit’s crossed over. Why would it be upset? The body looks peaceful enough.”

“She is not peaceful,” he told me, and then he turned and went back into the house.

His words disconcerted me. I went out to the cut, determined to forget them, but when I stood at the edge of the hole and looked down at the water pooling at the bottom, the river already beginning to take it back, I was arrested by a sense of...of sacredness, I suppose. This was a burial ground, and though I had wanted nothing more than to get to it, to find the answers to who she was that I knew must be there, suddenly I felt as if I were trespassing. As if it were somehow wrong to dig here.

But if one believed the Indians, this whole claim sat on top of an ancient burial ground—perhaps even the one that had belonged originally to her people, though I’d never found anything but Shoalwater and Chinook relics, and I’d never felt this kind of reluctance before, as if something were physically keeping me from stepping into that hole.

A shiver went down my spine; I felt uncomfortable in my skin, as if something or someone were watching me. Carefully, I looked over my shoulder. There was nothing but the house beyond, the trees, branches waving gently in the chill breeze coming off the water. I was imagining things again, and what mattered were facts.
A physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle.
My father used to say that all the time. They weren’t his words, but his mentor’s—Louis Agassiz, who was a professor at Harvard—but they were Papa’s guide and his bible:
It’s facts that matter, Leonie. Not supposition. Not stories.

I let those words take hold and banished Lord Tom’s as I went to fetch the shovel and pick and pail, and then I set myself to digging with determination, ignoring everything but the process I knew so well. It was slow work, because every shovelful I put aside had to be raked and gone through by hand.
Observe first
, Papa had always said.
Construct generalizations later.
For now, I
concentrated on
finding
, and as I worked, I became myself again, the ethnologist I’d been brought up to be. I broke up clods of dirt looking for anything that might be a clue, something that could be as small as a bead. I found rocks and oyster shells and the odd root, but nothing else. As the hours went on, my back and shoulders grew cramped and tired and my skirt and stockings sodden.

It didn’t take long before I knew there was nothing here. My instincts screamed it. But instincts weren’t good enough—where did such feelings come from anyway? They weren’t proof of anything. One couldn’t trust something so nebulous. Junius would laugh if I came inside and said I
felt
there was nothing to be found, so I forced myself to keep going.

I was bent over another useless pile of mud and tiny rocks, sifting it with my hands, when I heard a call from the water. I glanced up, straightening when I saw a canoe coming ashore. I thought at first it was Junius returning from the whacks, but then I saw it was two people. And one of them was a woman. A short, squat woman who stomped through the shallow water and onto the shore without hesitating, her dark calico skirt dragging in the water.

Bibi Kafkis.

I stared in stunned surprise. Bibi never came out here; she rarely left her dilapidated old shack in Bruceport. I thought perhaps Junius had gone in to tell her I wanted to speak with her about the canoe, but I couldn’t imagine that would have brought her out. If she wanted to trade, she’d just tell him to send me to town.

I dropped the handful of dirt I still held and climbed out of the hole, pulling off my filthy gloves and dropping them to the ground. I reached the weathered gate at the edge of what passed for a yard the same moment Lord Tom did. He was frowning fiercely, his disdain for Bibi already evident. Lord Tom thought she was a charlatan, and that her play as a medicine woman reflected badly on their people, especially because it had been
her father-in-law who’d been the real
tomawanos
man—not even a blood relation. I thought Tom’s outspokenness about her fakery mostly a waste of time. Bibi was half-crazy, yes, but she was harmless. His protests did nothing but make her dislike him, which wasn’t helpful now that I needed that canoe.

I gave Lord Tom a look of warning just as the man who’d brought Bibi—Michael Johnson, who owned oyster beds near ours—approached, saying, “Afternoon, Leonie, Lord Tom.”