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34
BK 194
by Celia S. McClinton “34 BK 194. It’s about 12 acres at the east end of what’s now a plant nursery worked by underpaid Mexican laborers,” Bobbie said. “It’s also called the Tangmere Site because that’s the family that owned it once, the Tangmeres. Plowed that river bottom and grew corn they made into whisky, bless their hearts, and did pretty well for themselves. The last of them sold out everything but what the archaeologist call 34 BK 194. He’s now selling tires and auto parts over in > Statesville.” “Bobbie,” Celia said to her cousin, a cynical girl of many fascinations, “how did you get tied up in this? You’re supposed to be studying ceramic engineering.” “Seems that jerk who’s my academic advisor failed to mention a little matter of my needing another humanities course. Only thing available this summer that makes any sense is ‘Field Archaeology.' Didn’t sound so bad. Figured I’d spend the summer in a nice cool lab taking notes on how archaeologists do things. Get A’s on the multiple-choice tests and leave all the wiser. Wouldn’t do me any harm. But, no, archaeologists have this bizarre idea that the way to learn field methods is by doing.” “My, how quaint,” Celia observed, raisings her eyebrows. “If you want to call slave labor quaint. For now, I am out in this abandoned pasture, sweating like a cow peeing on a flat rock, slapping mosquitoes, and digging in this trash dump.” “Trash dump?” “Yea, trash dump, only archaeologists have a fancy name for it. Kitchen midden, I think. Seems 34 BK 194 was a Catawba Indian village back in the Dark Ages. They’d dig these holes for storage. When the holes got too rank even for them, they’d fill ‘em with rubbish. Yard sweepings mostly. A lot of broken pots and burned pumpkin seeds. Now I’m digging it out. Looking for trinkets only archaeologists call ‘em something else. Ah, curios. No, that’s not it. Artifacts, I think. “And talk about being persnickety. Lord! Take out a little dirt. Prepare the surface. Photograph it a dozen times with three different cameras. Then sketch it down to the centimeter, survey it again as if that hole might have moved in the last hour, and finally, dig some more. Slow business and so trifling. With a bulldozer you could clean the mess out in an afternoon.” * * * Mortimer, a Macgilvenak as the McClintons were known when they left Scotland and came to Virginia, made his first trip into the wilderness in 1655 when he was 17. Twenty of them left Essex County with 68 mules and 9 horses in August and spent the winter exchanging whisky, beads and brass pots for deerskins. The Indians had no use for the pots but cut them into beads that Bobbie came to know as tinkle bells. There were plenty of them in her trash dump. The Indians got powerfully drunk on the whisky and would kill each other or maim themselves by passing out in the cook fires. What did the traders care? This was business, and they were in it for deerskins. He got back to Essex County in March, 1656, and with his profits and a Virginia land grant, Mortimer became a planter. He married well and there were children, many of them. Mortimer liked that part of it, making babies with Polly. He didn’t like the rest of it. The endless work. The uncertainty of crops. The social life of a planter, the music, the dances, the teas. Polly’s steady yammer and interminable worry about how things would seem to the neighbors. Hours devoted to religion. Hours devoted to civility and the endless politics of civilization. Hours devoted to fussing over recalcitrant slaves indentured servants. He missed the forests, and the hunts and the pleasures of the tawny Indian social girls, young girls whose only responsibility was to satisfy guests and visitors by whatever means it took. They leapt to their task with a hungry enthusiasm that mocked civility, and most of them could cook pretty well too. He liked the baked turtle with corn and beans and pumpkin seeds the most. Finally, leasing his plantation to his brother-in-law, he and four companions returned to the wilderness in 1664. And again in 1666. Then again in 1669 but staying this time for 18 months. Then he began going alone, and he really preferred that. One village, what would become 34 BK 194, was his favorite. Spaniards had lived there once but the Indians, losing patience with that Latin arrogance, killed and ate them all. But not before burning their houses to the ground. Near the burn scar Mortimer built himself a house in the Indian fashion that he shared with an Indian social girl. With her he fathered the first child whose name he would bother to remember. When he returned the next spring he brought the girl a baking dish that looked something like modern Corning Ware but was pitch-black and deeply inscribed with decorations of a remarkably complex geometric sort. It had come from somewhere in northern New York, or possibly Canada, and was absolutely unique among the Catawba. It gave the girl a peculiar prestige, and in it she would serve his favorite, that odd mixture of corn, beans and pumpkin seeds backed with thin strips of turtle meat. On this trip, his last into the wilderness, he slashed his left calf while hunting turkey. He doctored himself in the usual manner, but within three days the wound was badly infected, and he thought he had come to his end. His woman summonsed an old hag who knew about such things. She looked at the wound, shook her head, spit on her hands, spit in his face, and applied a concoction, holding it in place with a dressing of mud, turkey dung and oak leaves. As soon as the potion touched his wound, Mortimer gasped with the most exquisite pain he’d ever known and began hallucinating even before he passed out. He was gone for a month. Crippled dwarfs guided him through a maze of dark, wicked, grim deformities half hidden in a murky haze under an orange sky. Strange glistening beasts hunted on paths of rock as wide as rivers while others of their type ate forests and soils, biting far down into the bedrock. Black rain flooded the earth and filled its rivers with a torrent of celadon-green acid leaving behind only stinking eruptions oozing phosphorescent pus. Scrapping and quarreling, the dwarfs finally abandoned him on a featureless gray plain beneath a platinum sun, and he awoke. He knew he had seen a vision of the future, a terrible future he lacked the words in any language to describe. Prudently he didn’t try, but he knew he could never return to Virginia. * * * Celia and Bobbie both knew Mortimer’s story. Their grandfather repeated the family legend often. “Finally, he made his last journey into the wilderness. He never returned,” granddaddy would say. “What became of him?” the children asked, their eyes sparkling with an enthusiasm provoked by mystery, intrigue and great adventure. “Don’t know. More an’ likely, the Indians got him, one way or another. But his children, and his grand children, went on to great things, conquering the wilderness. In Tennessee and Texas, and Arkansas. Yes, sir, Mortimer was a great American who fathered generations of frontiersmen, men and women who made civilization from the haunts of beast.” Mortimer knew that civilization too well, knew what his descendents would create and cursed himself for having fathered them. He lived a long and successful life among the Indians and never saw another European. His Indian children, and their children after them, would die of disease and starvation where they were born or in places like Tennessee, Texas, and Arkansas. And finally there would be nothing. There was no one to mourn their passing but their common ancestor who had seen their future even as he gave them life and wept for them in his own lifetime. * * * The two girls, Bobbie and her supervisor, carefully worked that portion of the midden they knew as Section 4B, Feature 25. Bobbie thought of it as The Great Catawba Abyss, an infinity of black charcoal speckling a yellow-brown loam. She was just relishing the oppressive thought that all this was to be removed a teaspoon at a time when her trowel made the distinctive sound of metal hitting > stone. “Find something?” Emily asked. “Guess so.” She wrenched the trowel right and left to free an object that she handed to Emily without bothering to clean or inspect. “Another rock,” she grumped. “Bobbie, don’t be such a peevish bitch, please. You really could try to be a bit more interested.” “Yea, yea,” Bobbie muttered returning to the hopeless pile of dirt before her. Emily leaned back on her heels and cleaned the object. Then she rose, stepped carefully out of the pit and walked off with a sense of purpose. A few minutes later Emily returned with Dr. Cazaket, the excavation director that Bobbie called “the sandlot sultan.” A strange fellow at best. A scarecrow, he always wore a straw hat and dressed in threadbare work shirt he bought those in bulk at garage sales and flea markets. In a world that cared about many useless things, Dr. Cazaket cared only about archaeology. He thought of his wife simply as “what’s-her-name,” and while he could remember that he had children, he couldn’t remember how many even when he stopped to think about it, which he seldom did. “Bobbie, look at what you found,” Dr. Cazaket said. “It’s a shard. The handle and part of the side of a shallow dish. Probably used for baking. The markings would indicate it came from Canada. Probably Attiouandaronk but we’ll have to look it up. If so, it’s really important. It shows how far these people traded.” “No kidding,” Bobbie said as she reached out indifferently to take the piece, her fingers grasping it, feeling its cold darkness, her eyes glancing down as if to study its nebulous patterns etched in a black so intense it made her dizzy. The shock of it rose along her forearm and made the hair on the nape her neck stand on end. It dawned on her that this was all that was left of an insignificant people destroyed by the powerful and provocative. The only thing remaining was loneliness and rubble in an abandoned cow pasture. Sadness swept over her and tears welled up as she tried to avoid Emily’s gaze. “Why, Bobbie, what is the matter?” Emily asked. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” “Nothing, really. For a moment, I felt that way…. For a moment, I felt the touch of the woman who used this dish. She made her man baked turtle with corn and beans and pumpkin seeds, and they were happy. They knew better, but they couldn’t help themselves. And for a moment I though I knew them, the woman and the man.” “Ah,” said Dr. Cazaket. “That's the spirit. You’ll make a fine archaeologist yet.” “Yea, when bunny rabbits start eating alligators,” said Bobbie as she crouched back in her hole and took up her trowel. “Come on, Emily, there’s a lot of this left. Let’s stop the yimmer-yammer and get on with it.” But she touched her trowel to that old, worn, yellowish-brown earth with a new sense of urgency. * * * “So tell me, Bobbie,” Celia said, a slight sneer on her lips, “how do you really feel about doing archaeology?” Bobbie looked down for a moment as if she had to consider the answer carefully and then raised her head to meet Celia’s eyes directly. “Actually,” she said slowly, “it grows on you, in a mysterious sort of way.” |
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