Relics (9 page)
A silence opened between them, filled only by a question that Faye was too chicken to ask. She decided to edge up on it sidewise. “You said yesterday that you were going to the autopsy,” she began, then she paused, not knowing how to broach the issue that threatened to become a morbid preoccupation.
“It was smoke inhalation. She didn’t suffer,” Adam said, further enhancing Faye’s opinion of his woman-reading skills. “A lot of times, house-fire victims wake up, realizing that something is wrong, and sit bolt upright in bed. They take one good breath of hot, toxic smoke, and it’s more or less over.”
Faye elected not to press him on what he meant by “more or less.”
“In Carmen’s case,” he went on, “I couldn’t say for sure that she ever woke up at all. If she did, you sure couldn’t tell it from her position in the bed.” He touched her gently on the elbow with the sturdy, dependable-looking hand of a fireman. “It could have happened to you. Instead, you kept yourself alive, and you saved Laurel, too. You said that Laurel’s screams woke you up. Why didn’t you hear Carmen call for help? Because Carmen was beyond your help. I know it’s hard to let go of the notion that you should have saved her, but it wasn’t possible.”
“How easy would it be for you to let go of a notion like that? How soon could you forgive yourself?”
“I was a firefighter for ten years before I got this job.”
It wasn’t an answer to her question, but it was. Adam’s simple declarative sentence held the despairing echo of other voices consumed by years of fires that couldn’t be fought.
Faye stood watching Fred, Elliott, Joe, and Jorge shovel soil like men who were serious about their work. She would have been happier if the soil had been traveling in the right direction—out of the excavation, rather than into it—but their work signified progress all the same.
Before they had begun backfilling the unproductive holes they’d dug under Dr. Raleigh’s supervision, Faye had given them a refresher course on proper archaeological technique—the rudimentary knowledge Raleigh should have communicated before he let any of them near the excavation site. First, she’d demonstrated how to use the flat-bottomed trowel that would enable each of them to keep the walls of his unit absolutely vertical and the floor absolutely flat.
“What’s a unit?” Fred had asked.
“The hole you’re digging, dumbass,” Elliott had said in his own tactful way.
She’d explained that they must clear away the soil in thin layers, each of them less than a centimeter thick.
“How big is that?” from Elliott.
“I don’t know, smartass, but it looks like you don’t, either,” Fred said, enjoying his chance to retaliate.
Faye asked them to hold out their pinkie fingers. Jorge held up his middle one, grinning, until he saw the look on Joe’s face. He quickly adjusted his hand to show the finger Faye had requested.
“Your pinkie fingernail is a little more than a centimeter long. You will always check each layer you excavate with a ruler, but that fingernail is a handy rule-of-thumb—”
“You mean rule-of-pinkie,” Elliott said, then doubled over with laughter, unable to resist his own wit.
She’d shown them how to pull back the tarps protecting the backdirt, in preparation for refilling the mud-lined units. Precisely why Raleigh had tarps protecting the backdirt, but none keeping the units dry, she couldn’t say.
They’d watched with interest for a few minutes while she sifted a few trowels full of soil through a screen, looking for tiny bits of residue like bones left from long-ago dinners. She’d hoped to discuss the flotation techniques that were so useful for separating lightweight things like seeds from the surrounding soil, but it was obvious that their limited attention spans had been exceeded, so she set them to work backfilling the old excavations. As they had fairly well destroyed any information the patch of ground might once have held, there wasn’t much more harm that they could do. By the time they’d put the site back the way they’d found it, Faye would have had several days to improve their field technique before they moved to the mound site and started doing some
real
archaeology.
As the late afternoon sun dipped low, Fred looked at his watch, as if to remind Faye that it was nearly quitting time. She let him stew while she walked past each worker one more time, since that seemed a supervisor-like thing to do.
As she stood watching Jorge, she noticed something that was too big in his pile of backdirt. If they’d used proper technique when they’d dug here in the first place, then the object would have been screened out of the soil. Whatever it was, she doubted it was pertinent to the goal of this dig, since it had come from a dump site that she believed to be less than seventy years old. Still, this was a teachable moment. She could show her crew how sizeable artifacts could be missed through sheer carelessness.
The palm-sized object had a pinkish-beige body, and Faye was certain it was man-made. Light-colored veins slashed across its surface, radiating from a single point. The sunlight reflected oddly off these radial imperfections, first red, then gold. Its surface had been coated with a glaze that probably owed its appealing white sheen to tin. Could it be made of enameled metal? Years in the ground would have been hard on an enamel coating; it was possible that the golden veins were simply areas where grains of sand had abraded the white coating, revealing the underlying metal.
Faye reached out a hand for the glimmery thing, but Jorge beat her to it. He snatched it out of the dirt and palmed it before she could get a good look at it.
“I’d like to see that, Jorge.” She held out her hand.
“I thought you said you weren’t interested in anything we found here. It’s way too new.”
“Nevertheless, I’d like to see it. Please hand it to me.”
“No,” he said, looking at her with his insubordinate eyes. She kept her gaze steady on his face and her hand stretched out toward his.
Jorge looked her square in the face and dropped the thing onto his trowel, where it broke into two pieces. Unsatisfied by that mutinous act, he used the heel of his boot to grind it into the ground.
There was nothing left but beige dust. Faye was at first struck dumb by the sheer, stupid destructiveness of his action, but she soon found her voice. “You’re fired. Take your things and go, right this minute. You have no business here.”
“You can’t fire me.”
“I’m sure I don’t know why not,” Faye said. “I can’t think of many things that would get a field technician fired any faster than intentional, pointless destruction of an artifact. Any artifact.”
“You can’t fire me,” Jorge repeated. “If you do, we’ll all leave, and nobody in the settlement will take our jobs. You and the Indian can’t get the work done without help.” Fred and Elliott walked over to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Jorge. All three were big men; if any of them were to stretch his arm straight out at the shoulder, Faye could have walked under that arm. If she lost her cool with these guys, she would look like a Chihuahua throwing a tantrum.
Sarcasm was her tool of choice when dealing with large people “That’s true,” she said in pleasant, even, measured tones. “I couldn’t afford to fire anybody who had been any help whatsoever. Fortunately that doesn’t apply to you. You’ve been no help at all. Jorge, please leave and don’t return. Fred and Elliott, you may stay if you’re willing to learn to do your job correctly. But if you leave with Jorge, you won’t be coming back.”
Jorge threw his trowel into the open excavation. Fred and Elliott threw their trowels after his, and they landed on it with two nerve-jangling clangs. “We quit,” they said, and they turned and walked away.
Elliott climbed into the passenger side of Jorge’s shiny, gunrack-adorned pickup, while Fred roared away on a motorcycle that had the speed and throaty roar of a Harley. Faye reflected that she may have been a failure as a first-time manager, but she was still an archaeologist. She grabbed a plastic bag from the shed and carefully gathered the tiny bits that remained of the artifact that Jorge had crushed.
She rushed to the cardboard box in the equipment shed. Grabbing one of the broken plates excavated before she arrived, she studied its glaze and the color of the clay that had formed it. Gray. The body had been made of a clay that turned gray when it was fired, and it had been given a decorative gray salt-glaze. The vessel that had been broken into this sherd had looked very different from the sherd that Jorge crushed.
She was most intrigued by the color-changing glimmer she’d noticed just before Jorge snatched the potsherd. It had looked like a lusterware finish of a type rarely made since machines had taken over the manufacture of everyday household ceramics—or since Columbus had crossed the ocean blue, for that matter. Finding a piece of pottery that had crossed the Atlantic with the earliest Sujosa would be an archaeologist’s dream come true, but it was simply too much to hope for. What
was
this lovely artifact that Jorge had destroyed?
It would be hard to tease a date out of the crumbs that remained of the sherd. It was possible that thermoluminescence analysis would help. Still, even if the analysis proved that it was lusterware and that it was very old, there was the issue of where it was found. When it had been dug it up and flung into a spoil pile, the potsherd had been completely divorced from its archaeological context. If she couldn’t prove where it had been found, it would be hard to link it to the eighteenth-century Sujosa artifacts she needed to find.
She shook the bag and let the particles of the ruined potsherd sift around inside it. Surely it was her imagination that made some of the tiny grains sparkle. Lusterware owed its metallic glow to a layer of silver or copper only a few molecules thick. She wasn’t sure any sheen could possibly be visible now that the sherd was pulverized.
Joe arrived, looking forlorn.
Pocketing the bag, she said, “We’re done for the day, Joe.”
“What are we going to do for help, Faye?”
“I reckon I’m going to have to hire a new team. Somebody will work for me, even if they’re getting paid in dirty ‘outsider’s’ money.” She started to walk away, but a new idea stopped her in her tracks and she turned around. “Do you remember which units Jorge backfilled?”
Joe nodded.
“First thing tomorrow, I’d like you to empty all those units, then screen the soil before you put it back in. And keep it separate from that pile of soil he was using as backfill, because I want you to screen that, too.”
“Want me to do any flotation?”
Faye considered his question. “No. We’ll do that at the mound site, but not here. Potsherds don’t float, and I can’t imagine we’ll find anything else useful here. Even if some interesting stuff floated to the top, what would it tell us? Raleigh’s scrambled the soil strata so badly that we’ve lost the archaeological context of anything we find here. The only useful artifacts he may have left us would be more pieces of that broken pot, so that’s what we’re going to look for. We could wind up screening the whole site.”
“No problem. It’ll take a while, though.”
“Never mind that,” Faye said. “I’m not making much headway on getting access to a new site, so we have the time.”
***
It had seemed politically wise to speak with Dr. Raleigh immediately. Far better for him to hear the story of how she lost her field team from her own lips rather than, say, from the lips of Jorge the mutineer. Unfortunately, she found that the Sujosa grapevine was faster than the Internet. In the time it had taken her to give Joe his assignment and walk over to the bunkhouse where Raleigh had his comfortable headquarters, the news had already reached her boss.
“You cannot fire those men,” he said in his maddeningly complacent voice. “The grant that pays your salary requires you to hire local workers.”
“Surely someone other than those three slackers needs a job.”
“You tell me that you fired one of them—Jorge, I think it was—and the other two quit in protest. These people are all related to each other. What makes you think that you can find three Sujosa willing to work for the woman who canned Cousin Jorge?”
“Well, I can surely try.”
“See that you do. You realize that I’ll be monitoring the progress of your excavation closely, don’t you?” These memorable words came from the lips of the man who had managed to work the crew for a solid month while accomplishing nothing. Faye didn’t trust herself to give him a diplomatic answer, so she walked away, leaving Raleigh behind.
But, however far or fast she walked, she couldn’t leave her frustration and uneasiness with him. Since the devil dummy had fallen from the trees in front of her car, everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. Without realizing where she was headed, she ended up standing in front of the few remaining timbers of the burned house. An acrid odor accosted her nose. How long would the burned-out house smell like charred wood, melted plastic, and death? Its presence was a scar on the small community, and the air was jittery with the unspoken words of people who craved resolution where none was to be had. The social codes governing behavior in the face of sudden accidental death were tenuous when the victim wasn’t a friend of long standing. Carmen’s parents lived far away, and they were strangers. Robbed of the chance to reach out to her bereft family, Carmen’s new friends were left with no place to put their grief.
Raleigh had fed the team’s uncertainty with his silence. He had hardly acknowledged Carmen’s death to her co-workers upon his return that morning. Work had resumed as if nothing extraordinary had occurred over the weekend. He had announced at breakfast that Carmen’s parents were planning a private memorial service in Miami after the coroner released the body. And that was all.
There was no eulogy planned for Carmen among the people who had worked with her for weeks. There hadn’t even been an alcohol-soaked evening when everyone shared favorite memories of their departed friend. There had been no effort to acknowledge and heal the grief of people who must somehow learn to function as part of a team that was irrevocably changed.
The day’s last red rays filtered through the bare branches and lingering seed pods of a sweet gum tree, and the dappled light glittered with reflected flames. Faye drew in a sharp breath full of fresh wood smoke, and panic wouldn’t let her force it out again.
Something was on fire.
She sprang into action immediately, before her body reacted with adrenaline and a racing heart and trembling legs. Nobody was going to burn to death today. Not if Faye could help it.
Sprinting to the edge of the burn site, she checked the blackened timbers for evidence that the fire had rekindled after nearly forty-eight hours. It was a cold shell. There were no other houses close enough to be the source of the smoke she smelled. Perhaps there was a storage shed nearby? She didn’t care if a storage shed burned slap to the ground, even if it were full of money, just so long as there was nobody inside.
Faye skirted the back of the house, covering the ground she had been too weak to cover the night Carmen died. She skidded to a stop near the place where Carmen’s window had been, but wasn’t any more.
Joe was crouched there beside a campfire, feeding the flames with sticks and dry leaves. A faint plume of tobacco smoke rose from his pipe and drifted upward to join the campfire’s heavy black wood smoke. A shallow basin full of water sat on the ground beside him. Varied leaves and berries had been scattered over the water’s surface, floating in a pattern as spare and beautiful as Japanese calligraphy.
Faye wondered whether Carmen, who was probably Catholic, would have liked the idea of a Creek-style send-off for her soul, because that’s what Joe was giving her. He had built the fire to carry his good wishes to Carmen’s everlasting spirit. She supposed that he had purified himself beforehand by washing his face and hands with water laced with ritual herbs, then drinking a cup of a purgative known as Black Drink, a noxious decoction made of water steeped in leaves of the
ilex vomitoria
species of holly. Joe was sending Carmen to her eternal rest in the only way he knew how.