Mighty Old Bones (24 page)

The blue glass tumbler is older than the bones. It matches others made in Wales in the 1100s exactly, down to the maker’s imprint, made by a family of artisans in Gwynedd. Perhaps it had been an heirloom, handed down through a family of mariners, just as their seafaring ways had been learned from craftsmen of Viking and Irish descent, and then passed down through generations.

The tablet inscription and those on the stick found in Cal’s box of notes and sundries have a less definite history. A small number of these sticks have been found in North America. Some historians believe they are records of lost native tribal histories, recorded in a type of shorthand. The shorthand is taught to each successive chief, with each symbol a reminder of a particular event in the tribe’s history that is learned and then related orally to the people generation after generation. The faint carvings on the sticks are much worn, and therefore difficult to make a definite match.

Those that are clearer do match the smaller symbols inscribed at the bottom of the rock shelter overhang. And here’s the curious part: Those symbols closely match ancient Ogham engravings on stone, such as on the tablet found in our burial pit.

The practice of symbolic shorthand using Ogham can be found in use as early as the fourth century in Ireland, a country that in medieval times had strong connections with Welsh mariners, and was still found in use into the medieval period. If the inscriptions on the sticks were, in fact, ogham symbols, it meant that system might have been brought to America in medieval times by Europeans, quite some time before Columbus.

When we read these results and their implications, we sat without speaking for a time. At last, Michael said, “There’s no need to ask. I promise you I will never make this information public without your consent. We both know it is unlikely we’ll ever have conclusive results. And that even with the compelling DNA evidence we have, and with the corroborating artifacts, no self-respecting scientist will buy into the theory. Welshmen in pre-Columbian America have never been accepted as an actual possibility, or anything other than a complete fraud. Perhaps, in time, we’ll find more to substantiate. Or better, someone elsewhere does.”

He plans to return periodically. A thorough study may take years. It would not be so if we had only found old bones. The problem, and the wonder of it, is that we have discovered this was a burial room, not a kitchen as Michael first suspected. It is something neither Michael nor I can find a precedent for in recent history. The Anglo-Saxon site Michael remembered, in which bowls were found still hanging on the burial room walls, is in England and dates from the 600s. Like it, our burial room has remained covered and intact for many centuries. We continue to dig and research.

A
FEW DAYS AFTER OUR ADVENTURE ON
H
ALLOWEEN
, Phoebe and I each made casseroles for Ruby Alice and Reese. Ruby Alice, dressed that day in a maroon flapper dress and a cloche hat with a rhinestone pin set in the middle of the forehead, insisted I take a few of her tea concoctions. Phoebe led me round to the garden rock and instructed me on how to place my hand just so in order to get a wish.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be the one telling you how to do it,” she said. “My three wishes when we were here the last time haven’t exactly panned out.”

“Would it spoil the wishes to tell me what they were?”

“Don’t think so. If they were going to come true, they would have already happened by now. I wished that you, Corene, and I would each catch a man.”

“Your wish did come true,” I said.

She looked puzzled until she remembered how Draughn fell on her. She put her hands on her hips. “That’s not the kind of catching I had in mind. Corene’s didn’t work, either, but I know why. She called last night and I told her I’d used her hair comb. She said that wasn’t hers. It was Jenette’s. Yours should have worked. You certainly didn’t wake up about Michael like I asked for. Or you two would be man and wife right now. Honestly, Jane. He’s perfect. What more could you want?

Man and wife. Ruby Alice watched us from the kitchen door and smiled. The sadness I felt an instant before vanished on seeing small, gold, comet-like ribbons swirl above Ruby Alice’s head. If this was the sensation of having one’s mind read, I didn’t care at all.

Down the road, we could hear Reese singing when we got out of Phoebe’s car. He was nowhere in sight. As we walked toward his house, he called to us from his backyard workshop. “Over here, y’all,” he said. “I’m just about done.” White paint or plaster covered his hands. From the doorway, we saw that he worked at a table on a new building for one of his Bible Gardens displays. I stared at the interior scene.

“What?” Phoebe said to me. “You see a ghost or something?”

“No,” I said and laughed. “A painting.”

Reese, working his model into the right shape with his hands, looked up and beamed. With that movement, the scene clicked into perfection. I wondered if he could read my mind, too.

It was a Vermeer. Not an actual painting on the wall, you understand, but the real-life scene before me. On the left wall, the afternoon sun shone through a window, casting rays of white light over tables and hand tools. The right wall’s main features were two large maps, not new ones, but replicas of the very early maps showing oceans and crudely formed continents. Beneath them, an astrolabe sat on a long workbench amid bottles and models of ships. But it was the centerpiece, the image of Reese concentrating on his craft, highlighted by the declining sun and its shadows, which gave the scene its heart.

He moved to a sink and began washing the white mixture from his hands. “Something smells good,” he said.

“Chicken and rice casserole,” Phoebe said. “I hope I remembered right, that you like it.”

“I sure do. Thank you.”

“Oh,” I said as I reached in my pocket. “I brought you something also. I thought you might have a use for it.”

He dried his hands as he walked toward the door. I held out the gift in my palm.

“Oh, ho!” His face lit up with childlike delight. He laughed from the belly and motioned us to follow him.

He led us to one of the displays that were not related to a Bible story. This one had no people and no story written on a display card as at other miniature scenes, only a shoreline and a boat in the water. “Still working on this one, as you can see,” he said. “And look, isn’t it a coincidence that I brought this box out of the barn just today.”

He referred to a wooden box that sat on a small TV tray from the fifties. Compared to the other boxes of trinkets and glass pieces we had seen on our first visit, this one was quite small and had very little in it. The bits hardly covered the bottom. Yet what was there made me gasp.

From the shallow layer, Reese brought up an identical blue flower, tiny, exactly like the one I’d brought. He held them up in the light and admired them. “Now that I have two, I believe I’ll use them here, maybe on the ship.” He put one on either side of the hull to try them out. “Maybe. We’ll see. I’ll find a use for them somewhere.”

I looked into the box more closely. Perhaps he had more of the detached flowers in there. I didn’t find any, but did see something just as astonishing. “Reese, where did you get the flowers, and these?” I asked with a shaky voice. From out of the box, I showed him two sticks, wooden ones that were planed square where symbols were carved on the sides.

He shrugged. “From Mama, I guess. Or her family. Don’t rightly know. We’ve had them a long, long time.”

My mind reeled as I considered the stories from the books with a blue glow. The building of walls. The history of Wales. They didn’t sound so preposterous to me now.

“Reese,” I said. “I wonder. Might I have a look inside your barn? I saw something interesting there the other day.”

He walked with me and opened the big doors. The darkness inside made it impossible to see anything clearly. Reese leaned inside the door and brought out a flashlight. He clicked it on and handed it to me. “What are you looking for?” he said.

I shone the light on the large half-globe that hung on the wall near the back. It’s black paper-looking flaps moved as a light wind blew into the barn. “That. What is it?”

He laughed. “That thing is so old, it’s falling apart. I’d have broken it up and used its parts for something useful, but it’s the last one, so I reckon I’ll keep it. Worthless as it is.”

“It’s the last one? The last what?”

“Boat. Ah, really more of a canoe. We had several passed down in the family. The rest rotted. That one seems to like where it is. It’s holding together, so I just keep it.”

The scenery we passed on the ride home went by unnoticed. I hoped Dad Burn would call again soon so I could thank him, and Cal, for the tip.

Back in Cal’s woods, I have taken to sitting on the rock wall, at the corner overlooking the valley and, more importantly, the river below. I think of it as the watchtower, something it may have been when it was built long ago.

As with our other finds, the wall’s history is uncertain. Other similar walls in Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia have a legend attached. When Governor John Sevier of Tennessee asked Oconostoga, the chief of the Cherokee Nation in 1782, who had built the walls, he said the forefathers taught that the “moon-eyed people” who had come from across the great water made them. They were described as having white skin and blue eyes.

Another story is told of an expedition through Tennessee in the 1700s, in which the crew’s interpreters, who spoke many native tongues, couldn’t understand the language of a small band of light-skinned natives. Another member of the expedition stepped forth and was able to communicate with the natives. He was a trader from Wales who said they spoke an archaic dialect of Welsh. Similar stories, all debunked by scholars, involve different tribes but have the same themes of Welsh-speaking natives with light skin.

Many false claims of pre-Columbian discoverers have been made and debunked. Among them are the legends of Prince Madoc of Gwynedd, a Welshman who supposedly sailed to the Gulf of Mexico in 1170, returned to Wales, and brought ten more boats of settlers to the New World. The settlers, it is supposed, then traveled from Mobile Bay up the waterways through Alabama.

A stone fort in Desoto Falls, Alabama, is alleged to be identical in layout to the Madoc family castle in Dolwyddelan, which dates from the early medieval period. Other theorists say the Welsh explorers ended up near Chattanooga where they built the Old Stone Fort.

But who is to say that some of these medieval Welshmen did not turn left instead at the Tennessee River to a paradise of game and fishing, where the land undulates and echoes the landscapes of home, where they might have left scant reminders of the old country in teaching sticks and rock engravings, before their people fully integrated into native tribes?

The prevailing attitude toward such theories, as this one that our findings now suggest, is one of disdain. We will keep our secrets. Our discoveries may come to light one day, but for now I hold them close, the better to keep this place protected.

For myself, I need no further proof of scientists, nor corroborations of other sets of long-dead bones. My own proof confronts me occasionally, just as it first did the night Ruby Alice stood and danced atop the hidden bones, knowing they were there though no one had told her.

Phoebe said she saw a fog blow in from the overlook then. I saw something else, a blue shadowy figure, that of a man dressed in a simple tunic with a bow and a quiver of arrows on his back. I had seen him on the road that day of the storm, dripping wet as he walked the fields at the base of the mountain.

That Halloween night, he hovered next to Ruby Alice a moment, then he walked to the rock wall and stood on the watchtower, looking out across the valley to the water below, before dissipating into the fog.

Now, from the same spot, I look out over Tullulah and the world. Homer and I go there often to think. Certainly, we’re free to do so anywhere on the mountain with no worry of being disturbed. Still, there is something special about the lookout. As fall nights grow colder, the leaves’ varied and luscious colors stand out more against the chilly morning fogs. Soon, it will be too cold to stay very long. I treasure the moments while I can.

Boo sits with us on occasion. I see him seated on the wall, always near Homer. He rarely makes himself visible, yet I feel his presence in the house and am comforted by it. I adore him and always feel a certain warmth around my heart when he appears. We watch together, share a look of appreciation at the wonder of a hawk’s flight or the way the last rays of afternoon sun bathe the treetops and rock outcroppings in indescribable shades of red and gold. And though he doesn’t know it, his own beautiful face, so full of innocence and goodness, brings me just as much happiness as the glories of nature around us.

I do miss Michael, in spite of my conflicting thoughts. Phoebe would be quick to point out that, at my advanced age, Michael is surely my last chance for a loving relationship and I should pursue him in earnest. She’s probably right. Her exact words were I should “grab him while he’s hot.”

Still, I am not quite so advanced in age that I’ve stopped learning. The discovery of the bones and all its related experiences taught me several things. In regard to Michael, I’ve learned that no matter how wonderful a once in a lifetime chance is, its rarity isn’t reason enough to take it. It must be right, no matter what color the moon, even if it might never come round again. Whether Michael and I will develop a closer relationship, I couldn’t say. We would see.

As pessimistic as that might sound, I have also learned to be more open to possibilities. Phoebe once said that, though she had no proof, she believed she had a small amount of Indian blood, that it made no difference to her whether or not proof could be found of it in books or records. She feels it and that is enough.

I find the elements brought together by Cal’s box #2 make me more inclined to accept that. A fact that hasn’t been recorded on paper or in stone, or has been hidden for generations in deep woods worlds away from obsessive note-takers, is still a fact. In such cases, a telling blood may be all that remains of a fact’s history, with the only records in feelings imprinted deeply into genes.