Effigies (3 page)
Friday
Opening Day of the Neshoba County Fair
Faye and her buddies were sweating before they turned over the first spade of dirt. It was July and it was Mississippi, so the early morning air was not cool. The only good thing that could be said about Mississippi mornings was that they were cooler than Mississippi afternoons.
There were no trees overhanging their work site. In a sense, this was a good thing, since there would be no tree roots garbling the near-surface stratigraphy. Sad to say, the lack of trees meant that there would also be no natural shade. Dr. Mailer planned to hang some awnings, but Faye was taking no chances. She could hardly be seen under the broad brim of her sun hat.
Chuck’s workspace was out of the sun. It was even air-conditioned, though Faye would rather work out in the elements than be locked up with him. The project had paid to move a rented trailer to the site, so that their tools and their finds could be secured. It was divided into five rooms, a storage area, three offices for the project’s three Ph.D.s—Dr. Mailer, Oka Hofobi, and Chuck—and a communal workspace for everybody else. A table piled with flint flakes, magnifiers, and a powerful lamp marked Chuck’s domain. Since he would be working in the trailer day in and day out, Dr. Mailer had put him in charge of keeping the storage space organized, too.
This assignment was probably a good use of personnel; Chuck was renowned for his attention to detail. There would be no time wasted looking for tools that had been piled in the corner of the storeroom, unwashed. Unfortunately, it meant that Faye, along with everybody else, was forced into daily contact with Chuck. She dreaded the day somebody failed to clean every speck of dirt off a trowel.
Faye was happy to let Chuck have his cozy lair. She might be out in the sun’s full glare, but she’d enjoy the breezes. As soon as there were some.
The roar of heavy equipment pierced the quiet morning again. When Faye had first arrived, Mr. Calhoun had been out early, as farmers tend to be. He’d seemed to be cutting down the overgrown vegetation between the soybean field and the great mound.
“Cool,” Bodie had said. “Now we can get a better look, even if we never actually set a foot on it.” He informed his co-workers that the correct word for what Mr. Calhoun was doing was “bush-hogging,” which Faye found to be a poetic term.
All bush-hogging activity had ceased shortly after Faye arrived, and there had been little noise beyond the morning birdsong and the voices of her colleagues since, but it had been unreasonable for Faye to hope that the pastoral silence would never be broken. The narrow pavement running in front of Oka Hofobi’s house was classed as a farm-to-market road, which meant exactly what it sounded like. It was a critical artery for trucks rushing produce to market. Since larger farm operations were more likely than small ones to beat the law of averages and prove successful, most local farmers owned as many separate parcels of land as they could afford, and many of them were strung out along this roadway. Their equipment—tractors, bush-hogs, harrows, harvesters—was forever being driven from one plot to the next.
Faye rose from her work and cocked an ear toward Calhoun’s property. She couldn’t see the mound any more—the Nails’ house was in the way—but he seemed to have started bush-hogging again. The motor was much louder than it had been that morning, murderously so, and it didn’t seem to be getting anywhere fast. Maybe he was trying to clear some land that was more heavily vegetated. She needed to stretch anyway, so she walked around the corner of the house, just to see what in the world was going on.
It took her ten seconds to find her voice.
“Oh, God—y’all come see, this man has lost his mind!” she hollered as she sprinted toward the road. Her co-workers, who may have thought she’d lost her own mind, came running.
The tractor, a tremendous beast with an enclosed cabin, was powered by tracks big enough to crush an economy car. Fitted with a broad blade, its engine roared and screamed as it forced down a tree.
Then it backed up and began an assault on the mound that Dr. Mailer had tried so hard to get a look at the night before. The blade bit into the mound’s sloping flank, and hundreds of pounds of earth were peeled away.
She presumed Mr. Calhoun was locked inside the air-conditioned cabin. His words echoed in her ears: “If that mound wasn’t standing over there, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, now, would we?” He might as well have paid Western Union to telegraph what he intended to do.
“Call 911!” Faye cried as she ran across the road, with her colleagues trailing after her. “Call the National Guard, call anybody that can stop him. He can’t do this!” But she wasn’t actually sure what he could or couldn’t do. How did cultural protection laws apply to sites on private property? All she could do was try to stop the destruction until someone figured it out. Cell phones beeped out a chorus of cries for help.
The engine whined as it forced the behemoth against a tree that didn’t want to go down. When it yielded—and it had no choice but to yield—its rootball surfaced, dragging any artifacts tangled in those roots up to the surface to be crushed.
They reached the far boundary of Mr. Calhoun’s soybean field, then paused, uncertain of what to do. What could seven puny humans do to stop a man armed with a machine the size of dinosaur?
Did Dr. Mailer realize that this was his fault? Farmers like Mr. Calhoun could be excused for feeling besieged by the government. They owed taxes every year on their land, whether it made them any money or not. Pesticides that they believed might make the difference between a good crop and a disaster were heavily controlled or outlawed. If the government decreed that a road needed building, a strip of fertile land could be condemned and taken, whether the farmer felt he could do without it or not. Mailer should have known that this man might not respond well to even a faint possibility that some arcane historical protection law might hamper his ability to use his own land.
Calhoun’s tractor took another bite out of history, and Faye felt it in the pit of her stomach. Another wad of soil, still wet from the night’s thunderstorm, slumped to the ground without Calhoun’s help. How could Faye and her friends stand up against that many horsepower?
Calhoun backed up for another assault, and Faye ran forward, taking the opportunity to place herself between him and the mound. Within seconds, she felt Joe at her elbow and Chuck at her back. The rest of the project team filled in around her. They surely provided a formidable barrier in the sense that few humans would be willing to bulldoze that many lives. Mass-wise, however, they represented far less of an obstacle than even the smallest tree lying uprooted at their feet.
“Mr. Calhoun!” Dr. Mailer cried. Faye reflected again that this relationship would be more effective if someone had asked the man his first name. “Your property is yours. Your property rights are yours. There’s no need to destroy anything. We’re on your side.”
The cabin door opened and Calhoun’s head poked out. “Bullshit. I’ve seen it happen, more than once. Somebody finds a few arrowheads or an endangered worm. Then the law comes in and tells the person paying the taxes on the land that they can’t farm a little spot. ‘Just to protect the arrowheads or the worm,’ they say. Then they bring in a bunch of experts who basically tear things up and get in the way. And then they write their report that says there’s endangered worms or arrowheads all over the damn place, and the farmer’s left paying the mortgage and the taxes on land that can’t be farmed, ever again. I figure I’d better tear this thing down before you experts tell me it’s so special that I need to go bankrupt to save it.”
“It’s not just special. It’s irreplaceable,” Oka Hofobi called out.
“You wouldn’t know that if you hadn’t sneaked onto my land when you were a delinquent kid, now, would you?” He revved the engine. “I got work to do. Step away.” He slammed the door shut, closing himself again into the cabin.
The seven archaeologists stood firm.
The tractor started rolling. Its progress was slow, perhaps to show that he didn’t want to mow them down, but it was inexorable. Soon, everyone involved would have to make a decision.
Bodie blinked first, taking a step out of the tractor’s path. It took a moment for Toneisha to follow him. Faye wasn’t sure how long she could hold out, but she wasn’t ready to cave in yet.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Dr. Mailer stoop down and put a shoulder into Oka Hofobi’s chest, knocking him off his feet and out of harm’s way with the residual skill of an aging halfback. He tried the same move on Chuck, without success. The two men were well-matched in size, and Chuck was twenty years younger.
Faye was distracted from her own peril. Chuck had already shown himself to be passionate about his work and eccentric to the point of abnormality. He might be capable of letting himself be crushed to save this mound. Faye was not. But she couldn’t save herself and just watch Chuck die, either. She weighed all of a hundred pounds, but maybe she was big enough to help Dr. Mailer save Chuck.
One step and one millisecond into her rescue plan, something hit her left side with the force of a brickbat. Joe, who she knew had never played football, had stiff-armed her with a move that would have merited a twenty-yard penalty, at least. Airborne, she flew out of the tractor’s path and landed hard on the exposed roots of a downed tree.
With every cubic centimeter of air knocked out of her lungs, all Faye could do was fight for breath and watch three big men try to knock each other down. Did being large all your life completely destroy your instinct for self-protection? Chuck was staring down the tractor as if he thought it incapable of crushing a man his size. And Dr. Mailer and Joe were pummeling him into submission with more deliberation than she thought the situation merited. They were certainly big enough to overpower him, but could they do it before all three were mashed to jelly? The tractor continued to roll.
Then the air was split with racing engines and honking horns and excited voices. Brakes squealed as cars and trucks were driven off the road and their transmissions were thrown into park. A throng formed as bodies boiled out of the vehicles. They arrayed themselves in front of Calhoun’s tractor and, though he didn’t cut the engine, he did cease his forward motion. Yes, he could crush a few of these people but, given their sheer numbers, he’d sooner or later find himself pulled out of the tractor’s cabin and yanked limb from limb. The cavalry had topped the hill, and the day was saved.
Still lying flat on her butt, Faye studied the crowd. Dressed in businesswear and overalls and blue jeans and well-worn housedresses, these people had obviously dropped everything and come running. Their distinctive dark faces were calm and full of resolve, and the sun shone hot on their glossy black hair. Faye reminded herself never to trifle with the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians.
In the forefront of the fast-moving crowd was Davis Nail, urging them onward. If Faye had to choose a leader out of that mass of humanity, it would be him. Sometimes, one person can move a crowd into doing something that, without him, would have simply remained undone.
She wished Mr. Calhoun would open the tractor’s cabin door. Constructive negotiations begin when you put a human face on your adversary. You can’t reason with a tractor.
A second flush of vehicles disgorged a second throng of people. Apparently, Faye was going to meet every Choctaw left in Mississippi. The newcomers gathered behind Calhoun, and Faye felt a shiver of apprehension. Animal instincts surface when human beings are surrounded. It might not be wise to make Calhoun feel cornered.
Then Faye searched the faces of the people gathering behind Calhoun and her own animal instincts bubbled up. These were not Choctaws. They were white people and black people but, on this day, their races were unimportant. Their way of life was everything. Judging by their clothes, she’d guess that these folks had been called away from their field work to stand up for the rights of the small farmer. And, in her heart of hearts, she couldn’t blame them any more than she could blame the Choctaws for defending their own heritage. This situation had the potential to get ugly fast.
She struggled to her feet. Squarely between the two factions, she and her friends stood a good chance of being trampled if a riot broke out.
Joe helped her up. “You okay?”
“Oxygen would be good.”
A voice from deep in the crowd shouted, “Calhoun’s got every right to do what he wants to do on his own land. You people want to stop him, you need to pay him a fair price for his property. Even then, it’s his call whether he sells it to you. It’s his land.”
Half the crowd rumbled in agreement. Through the buzz of all the voices, Faye could make out, time and again, the two critical words: “His land.”
“Yes, it’s his land,” Dr. Mailer called out. “Nobody wants to harm Mr. Calhoun or his livelihood. But history belongs to everybody. I think we can work this thing out.”
The crowd didn’t agree. When the words “history belongs to everybody” passed the professor’s lips, the farmers’ hot button was firmly pushed. If they were so unlucky as to own a piece of land that harbored “history”—and, in the end, who wasn’t?—then they might lose the ability to plant that land in soybeans. And, with prices being what they were, the loss of a single field might well mean the loss of an entire farm. Calhoun’s supporters surged forward.
There were too many people. Faye was shoulder-to-shoulder with people. Her chest was pressed against someone else’s back, and her back was being crowded by the chest of someone behind her. Actually, the belly of someone behind her. She was shorter than everyone in her vicinity, which meant that she could see absolutely nothing. Panic whispered in her ear.
The crowd moved forward again and Faye had no choice but to go with it. Then she found herself hanging horizontal in the air.
Joe had tucked her under his arm like a football, and he was making for high ground. Gently pushing people aside, he hauled Faye to the nearest safe place, which was behind the archaeologists and the Choctaws, atop the mound that had caused all these problems.