Effigies (18 page)

He pointed the flashlight beam at her wine glass. Engraved on the side were the words
Pearl River Resort
. “Surely you’ve noticed that they sell liquor at the casino. I found the souvenir glasses in a gift shop, but I couldn’t find a liquor store, so I just ordered the wine from room service. The Choctaws are a sovereign nation. The rules are different for them.”

“And you resent them for it.”

“Not so much. I’m glad they’ve had their opportunity for success. If anybody should have a shot at the American dream, it should be the Americans who were here first. But what about our people, Faye?”

Faye was strangely stirred by his use of the phrase “our people.” With bloodlines that reached back to Europe and Africa and North America and probably other places, too, she’d never felt right about claiming any one people as her own.

“What are you proposing? Should we get to build a few casinos, too?”

“What? You’re not inspired by the thought of the South Central Los Angeles Gaming Emporium? You don’t think we should build racetracks in Harlem or downtown New Orleans?” He allowed himself a small chuckle at the thought, and Faye liked the sound of it. “No, I’m talking lump-sum cash grants for Americans of African descent. Not a fortune, but enough to boost hardworking people into the middle class. Enough money to put a down payment on a house. Enough money to make an education possible for anyone who wants it. We’re the richest nation in the world, Faye. We can afford to make recompense for millions of hours of unpaid labor. And the government will be repaid eventually by the taxes those new middle-class citizens will be paying.”

Faye’s overly analytical brain usually dismissed such schemes as pipe dreams. Who would decide who got the money? How would they prove themselves to be the descendants of slaves? How many drops of African blood would it take? How much money was fair payment for the loss of an entire lifetime of freedom? More to the point, who would decide the answers to these questions?

Faye was never sure of her political opinions, because she was so good at poking holes in the logic of ideologues from either party. Tonight, though, it was refreshing to be in the company of someone who knew exactly what he thought.

“I pity the politicians who try to argue with you,” she said, taking another drag on the wine, which did, indeed, taste more expensive by the sip. “You’re such a good talker that I still haven’t told you why we’re here.”

“Or why we needed a flashlight.”

She took the flashlight from his hand and led him across the narrow road to a large sign that proclaimed the site to be Nanih Waiya State Park. Then she waved its beam back and forth over the mound of Nanih Waiya itself. It was so massive that she could only illuminate it a piece at a time but, as their eyes adjusted to the darkness, they found that starlight and the flashlight’s tiny beam were enough to give them a sense of its presence.

“The Choctaw believe their race was born here. This is their most sacred place,” she told him. “In the 1840s, government representatives came to deal with the Choctaws who had refused to go away quietly to the Indian Territories. Elderly Choctaws told them that they were born at Nanih Waiya. Not the tribe, but the individual Choctaws themselves believed that they were born here. They said that she was their mother and that they would not quit this land while she stood. It’s a miracle someone didn’t call out the troops to raze it.”

“Do I read that sign right?” he asked. “If this is a state park, does that mean the state owns it?”

“For the moment. The state’s been talking about shutting down this park, among several others. There’s no money for maintenance.”

“Maintenance of what?” He held out the flashlight and turned in a full circle. “I see a fence around the mound. A couple of small buildings. Some beaten-up picnic tables. A parking lot that nobody’s wasted any pavement on in a long time. Maybe never.”

“Somebody’s got to mow the grass and pick up the trash. And there’s another part of the park about a mile away, centered on a mound with a cave running clear through it. I tried to get a look at it but the gate’s locked. Closing that part of the park saved them the money that would be spent on cleaning the bathrooms and patching up the picnic pavilion. Maybe the park people want to spend their money on parks that get more use. We are way out in the sticks here.”

“No kidding. But if they’re going to close this place, why don’t they give it back to the Choctaws?” Faye could tell by his tone of voice that Ross’ political sensibilities were aflame. Perhaps the Choctaws were about to acquire themselves a new lobbyist. “I bet they’d take care of it. You said this was their most sacred place. How did the government get it away from them in the first place?”

Faye took a deep breath of the Bordeaux’s aroma. “Same way the Dutch got Manhattan, I guess. The Chief has said that the state should give Nanih Waiya back to the Choctaws, but I’m not holding my breath. Will New York give Manhattan back? Will the museums of the world empty themselves of mummies and return them to Egypt? It’ll never happen. I don’t begrudge the Choctaws a few casinos.”

Ross held the wine bottle out by its neck and waggled it at her. “Shall we have another glass and finish this thing off? I’ll warn you. I am a strict observer of DUI laws. If I have another drink, I’ll have to give my liver an hour to process it before I’m willing to get back behind the wheel.”

Faye felt like another glass of Ross’ scrumptious Bordeaux would be an excellent idea. “In your car, I have a purse. And in that purse, I have a chocolate bar. We could have a picnic.”

While she fetched the candy, Ross set the flashlight on a picnic table with its beam pointing straight up toward the night sky. Viewed with the right attitude, it looked rather like a candle, which gave a nice romantic glow to their picnic. Ross plunked the wine bottle down beside their makeshift candle, then Faye tore the candy wrapper open so that it lay flat under the chocolate bar, like a flimsy plate. They settled themselves in for an hour—more than an hour—of talking about his years in law school and her dream of earning a Ph.D. She told him how Dr. Mailer was urging her to specialize in lithics, so that he could supervise her dissertation.

“Lithics work is intellectually interesting. I enjoy it. I would be employable with that specialization. But my passion isn’t there. All my life, I’ve dug up the bits and pieces my ancestors left behind on my island. I’ve probed around in the foundations of slave cabins so long that I feel a real connection with the people who lived there. My own house is nothing but a huge artifact of plantation culture. I know so much about how it was built and how its owners lived that I could probably write a dissertation without stepping out my front door. But I couldn’t work with Dr. Mailer. And I couldn’t work with my dear friend Magda, who really made my education possible. I’d have to step completely into the unknown. Can I find a professor who’ll take me on? Will I find a job when I graduate? It’s a hard choice.”

“I could make more money in private practice—”

Faye cast the sports car a skeptical glance.

Ross laughed. “Really, Faye. I could. But happiness has a real value and you have to factor it into your calculations.” He responded to her sheepish expression by saying, “You have to realize how obvious it is that you treat all your decisions like math problems. You weigh the pros and cons, then you force the equation to balance. Don’t forget to include the intangibles in your calculations.”

“Like sipping wine and stargazing? Are those intangible enough for you?”

She showed him the North Star, and they lingered over their picnic so long that even Ross’ unpracticed eyes could see that all the other stars in the sky wheeled around that one.

The Mother Mound rested just a few yards away. Courtship, like the other way stations in the cycle of human life, was familiar to her, intimately so. While she watched, Faye and Ross sat under those spinning stars, eating cheap chocolate and washing it down with fine wine. Between sips, he kissed her, more than once.

Chapter Eighteen

Wednesday

Day 6 of the Neshoba County Fair

Faye spent a lot of time in property assessors’ offices, a fact that made its own poetic sense. History is inextricably bound into the land where it happened and where its relics lie buried. And the land is bound to the people who own it and farm it and pay the taxes on it. The offices of the folks who assess those taxes harbor an amazing amount of information, free for the asking.

Archaeologists might be known for dashing around the countryside digging up exciting artifacts, but a small fraction of their time is actually spent doing just that. Some of Faye’s colleagues spent their entire careers deep in the bowels of museums “excavating the collections.” Far more artifacts were uncovered during the glorious romantic years of the Victorians and Edwardians than could ever have been properly cataloged and interpreted. Much worthwhile work was being done by scientists who merely studied stuff that was already dug up.

There were some who used the overstuffed collections of the world’s museums to say that it was wrong to continue excavating. “If no one ever took the time to properly write up the excavations of the past, then what makes it necessary to dig up more artifacts?” they wanted to know.

It was hard for a thoughtful person to ignore their most persuasive argument: excavation is by its nature an act of destruction. Pulling dirt and artifacts and information out of the ground is like letting a genie out of its bottle. You can’t put it back in. If you miss a critical piece of information, it’s gone forever.

On the other hand, if you put a worthless piece of information in a governmental file, it’s preserved forever. Faye hefted the tax files on the portion of the Calhoun property under consideration for the road construction project. It was going to take her some time to sort out the useful information from the legalese. The aerial photographs, on the other hand, would be immediately useful.

She spread them out on a cramped work table in a corner of the file room, using a reference map to piece each one together in the correct sequence. The creek and the highway served as handy reference points to help her orient herself to the landscape she already understood on a human scale.

Starting at the bottom of the southernmost photo, she could see the roof of Oka Hofobi’s house and, across the highway to the right, the roof of the Calhoun home. Directly across from Oka Hofobi’s place, the massive presence of the ancient mound was unmistakable, though heavily shrouded in ground-level vegetation that masked the areas where Faye had seen wings and a tail. Noticing that the tree cover seemed lighter than she remembered, she checked the date on the photo. It had been taken within the past five years, so any difference she noticed was probably because the photo was shot in the autumn, as the leaves were starting to fall. This was encouraging. She wanted a good look at the ground.

The creek and its surrounding wetlands were obvious by the texture of the trees and vegetation growing there, even when the water wasn’t visible. She winced inwardly at the sight of a small clearing that was surely the spot where Carroll Calhoun had died. And nearby, just out of range of the photos and maps she’d reviewed in the trailer—maybe, maybe that might be a faint rise in the ground surface. And maybe it was more lightly treed than the surrounding area, which would make sense if this was the site of an overgrown old cemetery that had succumbed to neglect.

She poked Dr. Mailer’s cell number into her phone. “Hey—I’ve got most of what we need, but neither the geological survey nor the soil conservation service has a field office here. They have offices in Jackson, and I’ll eventually want to go there to talk to the people at Archives and History. In the meantime, I could probably grab some topos someplace where they sell stuff to hunters and hikers, but it might be easier to just pay a little more and download the ones we want. Joe does that for me all the time. I don’t know the quadrangle names, but this should get him in the neighborhood.”

She reeled off the UTM coordinates that bounded the area in question, and hoped Dr. Mailer would notice that Joe was useful for tasks that required more than a strong back or a preternatural understanding of ancient man’s toolmaking abilities. As she waited for him to write the information down, another thought struck her.

“You know, I think I could use some historical topos, too. They’re a good source of information on old structures that aren’t there anymore. Joe’s worked with several companies that can get their hands on old maps that aren’t available on the web yet. It takes some time, but they’ll go find the maps, scan them, and zap them right back to you in a day or two.”

She listened as he groused about the expense of such a thing and about the wisdom of taking yet another worker out of the field. Then, when he agreed—as she’d known he would—she thanked him, saying, “This is the kind of preparation that will make our project work stand out. It’ll make that proposal stand out, too, which is the way to win contracts.”

And,
she neglected to add,
the USGS very considerately marks cemeteries on their topographical maps.

Having gleaned as much information as she could on her first perusal of the tax assessor’s photos, Faye decided which ones she needed and put in an order with the clerk. While she was waiting for them to be duplicated, she pulled the title information out of the files, and adjusted her mind to the numbing process of reading legal documents. She had found important and unexpected information in such files before. Once, she’d even found evidence of criminal activity. If she could just get over the presumption that she was headed for an hour of boring reading, she might learn something.

Within fifteen minutes, she was certain that her presumption had been wrong, which reminded her yet again not to be presumptuous.

Mr. Calhoun’s ancestral land wasn’t. Ancestral, that is. He had owned the land surrounding his house for many years, it was true. He had inherited it, along with the marijuana field and the peanut field where the mound sat, from his father, who had inherited it from his own father.

At the time of his death, he had owned everything in the immediate vicinity, on both sides of the creek. Acres and acres of land bore his name, extending far north of the roadway that served as its southern border, but he didn’t get it from his father. He had bought it, piece by piece, over a period of nearly forty years. The most recent purchase was less than two years old.

Faye, who was a storyteller at heart, constructed a tale of two neighbors, a successful man and, right next door, a man who had reeled from one disaster to another. And each financial setback had cost him a piece of the legacy left him by his parents. This being agricultural country, “next door” was a relative term. The unfortunate neighbor’s house was more than a mile down the road. And his name was Kenneth Rutland.

Faye was sad for Neely. In a sense, she’d watched her father decay all her life. Long before his mind and his body failed him, fortune had failed him first. Whatever had caused his financial reversal (poor crops, medical bills, poor business decisions—the possibilities were depressingly endless), he’d had to give up his land, acre by acre. Over time, Neely would have become aware that the creek and woods where she’d played weren’t hers any more. No wonder she was so protective of her father.

All Mr. Calhoun had done was buy land that was for sale but, since Faye hadn’t liked him all that much, she resented him for it. Probably Neely’s family did, too, but property sales that were legal and above-board and necessary didn’t seem worth killing someone over. Still, Faye wondered who else the prosperous Mr. Calhoun might have bested in a business deal. She was stuck in this office while the blueline printer disgorged a big pile of the photos she’d ordered. Perhaps she should spend that time looking into the Calhouns’ property holdings.

She thumbed through the legal documents that described Mr. Calhoun’s business life, but found no other purchases or sales. As she thought about it, she realized that the dead man probably had much more dangerous business associates that would never surface in any governmental file. When you’re found dead in a field of marijuana, a field that you yourself own, the presumption would be that you were a criminal, and that you associated with criminals. Drug deals were so much more deadly than real estate transactions.