Relics (7 page)
“He certainly thinks so,” Faye said.
“So, what do we do?”
“We’ll need to backfill the area Raleigh already excavated. I want to make sure he trained my crew properly, or we’ll be wasting our time, anyway. In the meantime, I’m trying to find a more likely spot to excavate.”
“Laurel said she heard there was an Indian mound up here on Lester’s Hill,” Joe said, pointing to the upstream bluff that had first caught his attention. “I can’t see it, but there’s a lot of trees in the way.”
Faye leaned over the photo Joe had picked out. There was, indeed, nothing much to see. Nothing of value, unless you found scrubby trees and meandering creeks valuable. “A mound would predate the arrival of the Sujosa in this area, so it wouldn’t tell us anything we need to know for this project. But it would be interesting to get a look at it, anyway. But wait a minute. Did you say Lester’s Hill? I saw “Lester” on the list of early Sujosa surnames. Sometimes settlers built their homesteads near, or even on top of, mounds. This is a real possibility.”
Faye became aware that something wonderful was assaulting her nose, and her attention was drawn to the package Joe had set on her desk. The foil was not up to the job of holding in the aroma of Joe’s pinto beans and rice. Peeking under the foil, she saw that he had loaded the beans with a goodly amount of smoked sausage. Praise the Lord.
She was suddenly hungry, but another knock on the door prevented her from unwrapping the plate and looking for a fork.
Dr. Bingham peered in. “Are you—” Flustered, he fumbled a bit for what he intended to say. “You weren’t at dinner, and I was concerned. After the events of last night.”
“Oh, thank you, but I’m fine. I just had some things I wanted to do.”
“She works when she’s upset,” Joe offered.
“Oh, I can understand that, since I’m so inclined myself,” Bingham said, responding to Faye’s welcoming gesture by coming into the office and shutting the door behind him.
“She works the rest of the time, too.”
“Well, yes. I guess Ms. Longchamp and I do have a lot in common. Except my office is festooned with pedigrees and genetics reports, instead of these rather interesting photos.” His eyes raked over the aerial photographs and Faye recognized a kindred soul: someone who was interested in everything, not just his own narrow area of specialty. It seemed natural to tell Bingham about her plans to change the focus of her investigation away from Raleigh’s supposed dump site.
“Why would you do that?” Bingham asked, drawing back from the photo as if it were a snake. “You saw how Raleigh reacted when Carmen, God rest her soul, wanted to change the thrust of her project. And he hadn’t had anything to do with her work. If you abandon his excavation, you won’t just be dealing with him as a principal investigator. You’ll be treading on his ego.”
“His ego’s the most substantial thing about him,” Faye said. “Too bad he doesn’t have the competence to go with it.”
“Oh, you must be careful. Raleigh has the power to do your career a great deal of harm. And you’re wrong about one thing. He’s not incompetent.”
“Well, what is he then? Stupid?”
Bingham winced, as if her rashness hurt him physically. “The project team is divided into two camps on that: those who think this project is too far outside Raleigh’s field of expertise, and those who think he’s sabotaging the project for political reasons.”
“What could he possibly gain by doing that?”
“Maybe he’s worried that the results will conflict with some of his earlier research. Or worse, from his point of view, maybe he’s afraid they will confirm the views of one of his academic rivals. Maybe he’s afraid of the truth.”
Joe looked confused. “Professors don’t build anything. They don’t sell anything. They don’t do things for people like waiters or housemaids or car mechanics. As far as I can see, they study things and find out the truth about them, then they teach other people about what they’ve learned. If Raleigh’s not interested in finding out the truth, what good is he?”
Bingham looked like he wanted to find a hole and crawl into it.
Faye asked him, “Do you know why academic feuds are so bitter?” then she answered herself. “Because the stakes are so low.”
***
A stomach full of comfort food—aided by the fact that her previous night’s sleep had been disastrously interrupted—put Faye to bed by nine. Unfortunately, she was awake again at midnight with a splitting headache. She took a couple of the painkillers Brent had prescribed for her battered skull.
To free up a room for Faye and Laurel, Dr. Bingham let the two women share the room he had vacated by moving into Dr. Amory’s room. Faye hated nothing worse than lying in bed, waiting for sleep, or for painkillers to work. Quietly, so she wouldn’t wake Laurel, she groped around for her briefcase and slipped out into the hall. Padding in her bare feet on a floor so cold that her toes curled away from it, she paused to grab a quilt from the hallway linen closet. It was so big she could wrap her whole self in it with enough left at the bottom to cover her feet when she sat down. The quilt was soft, and it smelled just as good as the blanket she’d slept under in the house where Carmen had died. The Sujosa might not have welcomed the project crew with open arms, but someone had made sure their linens were freshly laundered.
She’d heard that this house belonged to Ronya Smiley and her four brothers, and that their parents had lived there until they grew so frail that their children insisted that they move in with the eldest brother. The other house had belonged to the unfortunate Amanda-Lynne Lavelle, who had first lost her parents and now the house her mother had grown up in. It was clear that Ronya and Amanda-Lynne could both use the rental income the project paid for the use of their property, but Faye saw real kindness in the women’s efforts to make the old houses comfortable.
Wrapped in the quilt, she sat at the kitchen table and opened her briefcase to retrieve her notebook and some maps. When she set the briefcase down beside her chair, she misjudged the distance to the hardwood floor, and the aluminum case made a sharp thunk when it landed.
Try not to wake everybody in the house,
she scolded herself, then she turned her head to look at the briefcase again. Aluminum. Carmen’s briefcase had been aluminum, too, and she had brought it home with her on the night of the fire. Faye had spent all afternoon watching Adam Strahan’s work crew excavate the remains of Carmen’s bedroom, and she’d seen no sign of the briefcase. She couldn’t conceive of a house fire hot enough to melt aluminum and then vaporize it, leaving no trace. When Adam arrived at work tomorrow to continue his investigation of the cause of the fire, Faye would be waiting for his explanation as to how Carmen’s briefcase could have evaporated.
She returned to her slightly surreal occupation—“listening” to her dead friend’s voice through the transcriptions of Carmen’s interviews with Miss Dovey Murdock.
Excerpt from an Interview with Mrs. Dovey Murdock, October 27
Interviewer: Carmen J. Martinez, Ph.D.
CJM
: I see you have some of the same lovely gray pottery I’ve seen in several other homes. Do you all get it from Ronya Smiley?
(Interviewer’s note: Mrs. Murdock’s mantel is crowded with a gray pottery tea set, old family photos, a couple of duck hunting decoys, and an interesting enameled brass platter decorated with the moon and a scattering of stars.)
Dovey Murdock
: No, dear, my mama made those pots, although I’d say that Ronya does even finer work than Mama did.
CJM
: Mrs. Murdock—
Dovey Murdock
: You can call me Miss Dovey, child. Everybody does, ever since I took the settlement school over from Addie Winstead in 1938. I was thirty years old and I’d been married to Taylor thirteen of those years. It was plain to anybody with good sense that if God had been thinking on giving us children, He would’ve done it by then, so Addie came to me. “Dovey, dear,” she said, “you can only get so much satisfaction from keeping a nice house, and Lord knows you do that. Teaching children, even somebody else’s children, lets you reach out and put your hands on the future.”
Addie was right about that, but she didn’t mention the best part. There is nothing so sweet as a hug from an eight-year-old with a snaggletooth smile and a dirty face. I taught school until I was seventy years old, because I couldn’t get enough of the children. Would you like another cup of coffee, child? Or another egg or two?
CJM
: Can you tell me about the oldest people you remember?
Dovey Murdock
: Well, let’s see. I was my mama’s eleventh and last baby, the ninth one that lived. She was more than forty when I was born, so I reckon my grandparents were in their sixties by then. And I thought they were older than dirt! Well, why don’t I quit guessing and just check the Good Book?
(Interviewer’s note: Mrs. Murdock goes into her bedroom and returns with a large, worn copy of the King James Bible.)
CJM
: I’d appreciate the chance to copy any family history out of that Bible. I would be extremely careful with it.
Dovey Murdock
: Of course you would, child, and you’re welcome to copy anything out of it that you’d like. It belonged to my great-grandmother, and it has seen many years of careful reading. Let’s see…Mama was born in 1866, after my grandfather came home from the war. My grandparents were married in 1860, and my grannie was born in 1842. That must have been when my great-grandmother got this Bible, when her first child was born.
CJM
: Your grandmother was born in 1842—that was a very long time ago. Do you remember her?
Dovey Murdock
: Lord, yes. She sewed my wedding dress. You’re asking me the wrong question. You should ask me if I remember my
great
-grandmother. I don’t know exactly when Mamaw was born, but Grannie wasn’t her first baby. I reckon she was born sometime before 1820.
(Interviewer’s note: Must remember to ask Brent Harbison if he has accurate longevity data on these people. Hell. Must remember to find a hydrogeologist to search this valley for the goddamn Fountain of Youth.)
CJM
: So she was in her nineties when you remember her. Did she ever tell you any stories about where the Sujosa came from? Do you remember any songs she used to sing?
Dovey Murdock
: The old folks all used to say that God made us and put us right here in this valley. The Garden of Eden was no place for us—who’d want to live naked among the wild beasts with nothing to do all day? No, God molded us right here out of Alabama clay. He made us the same color as the dirt, so that when we died we could go right back where we came from, just as quickly as possible. And He gave us the dirt to make our living. ’Twould have been easier if He’d given us tractors right from the start, but I guess everybody has to earn their own way in this world.
CJM
: So your great-grandmother—your Mamaw—didn’t tell you any stories or sing any old songs that might have originated somewhere else? As far as she was concerned, the Sujosa never lived anywhere but here?
Dovey Murdock
: Sometimes she used to talk about the sea, though I know full well she never saw any water bigger than the Broad River. Nor have I. But when Mamaw talked, you could see the mast of a great ship high above you, brushing the sky. You could hear the ropes creak when the sailors tugged at the sails until they rose up and blotted out the sun. Even now, I believe I feel the floor rolling beneath us when I think about Mamaw and her old stories.
CJM
: Did she tell you where the ship sailed from, or where it was going?
Dovey Murdock
: I don’t know the answer, but Mamaw said the sailors had hair as gold as the sunshine and eyes as blue as the deepest sea.
CJM
: But she never saw the sea.
Dovey Murdock
: Nope. But once, long ago, some Sujosa must have seen it, or we wouldn’t be here. We don’t exactly look like the folks that were here before Columbus came. And we don’t have golden hair, either. Mamaw said that we weren’t sailors on that ship, nor passengers, either. We were cargo.
CJM
: Slaves.
Dovey Murdock
: Not the kind you’re thinking about. Not the kind people bought and sold. Mamaw said that we came from a group of women who had left home to walk to the nearest marketplace, carrying their water jars. The sailors were…lonely…so they kidnapped the women and hauled them away. They never saw their home again. I see the question on your face, dear. I wish I could tell you something about that home, but I can’t. Probably someplace where nobody has blonde hair and blue eyes, I’d guess, or the women wouldn’t have mentioned their looks when they passed the story down.
CJM
: Yet they survived, and their story with them. I wonder how they did it.
Dovey Murdock
: Mamaw said that one of the women was bigger than the others and bolder. After the sailors herded them all into the hold, she told the others to hang back and let her handle things. She waited at the foot of the ladder and when the ship’s captain stuck his head through the hatch—he would have gotten the first turn with the women, you know—she busted her water jar over his head. Knocked him right out. Then she took the sharp pieces of it and passed them out among the women. The sailors didn’t speak their language, but they figured things out right quick. The women showed that they were willing to slice the throat of any man that came close or, if need be, they’d slice their own throats before they would submit. So the sailors closed the hatch and locked it.
CJM
: They left them without food or water?
Dovey Murdock
: Yep. And let’s not be prissy. They left them without so much as a slop jar. For days.
CJM
: Good God.
Dovey Murdock
: I don’t know what God had to do with putting them in that situation, but He must have watched over them. I don’t know anything else that could have turned the hearts of men like that. Because, soon enough, they started lowering plates of food through the hatch, which would have been a good thing, except the women refused to eat it.
CJM
: Well, Miss Dovey, you’ve got me stumped. If those women starved themselves to death and rotted down in the hold of that ship, where did the Sujosa come from?
Miss Dovey
: My Mamaw said that they laid there in the filth and tried to die, but it takes a lot to kill a young, strong body. One day, they heard a noise that they later learned was the sound of the anchor dropping. The ship was still, without the rolling and rocking that had made the days such a misery. It was their first taste of the calm of a safe harbor. Then the sailors crept down the ladder with bowls of water and plates piled with fruits the women had never seen before. They fed them with their own rough seafarers’ hands, because the women were too weak by now to resist, and they sang to them in a language the women didn’t know. The men had fallen in love with their captives’ pride and spirit. In time, the sailors earned their love in return.
CJM
: I wonder if that’s where the Sujosa got the gene for blue eyes.
Dovey Murdock
: It might well be. But that’s hardly the important part of the story. My Mamaw told me to mark her words well: In the darkest of times, our women had the good sense to hold on to everything they had with them. ’Twasn’t nothing but their water jars and the clothes on their backs, but those jars held their salvation and their fortune. Mamaw said I should never go to a man empty-handed. A woman with property can’t be ruled.
CJM (who doesn’t want to be ruled and is thus sternly reminding herself to open up a retirement account)
: Do you remember your Mamaw’s songs? Lord, I’d love to know what those sailors sang to your ancestors.
Dovey Murdock
: Pshaw. Mamaw couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. But Papaw could. I should have told you about him, too. He was a year or two older than Mamaw. (
Interviewer’s note: Must remember to look for the fountain of youth, then funnel lots and lots of money into that retirement account.)
By the time I came along, Papaw didn’t do much but sit in a rocking chair and sing to himself. I just remember one of his songs, and only part of that. He called it Henry’s Song, but his name was Henry, so that might not have been its real name. I’ll sing it, if you like.
CJM
: By all means.
Dovey Murdock (singing)
:
Grudge who will, but none deny
So God be pleased, this life will I.
I love and shall until I die.
I am black, Jerusalem
Just as the curtains of Saloman.
I am black, but comely, still
I love and shall until I die.
A jealous love, but comely, aye
I’ll love thee best until I die
Grudge who will, but none deny
So God be pleased until I die.
Dovey Murdock (speaking)
: That’s a nice song, isn’t it, child? It gives a nice lesson, and there’s nothing an old schoolteacher likes better than a lesson. The world would be a nicer place if all people lived to please God and loved each other, too, while they were at it. Can I get you a slice of pound cake?