Burial Ground Read online

  “You’re going to get soaked,” she warned.

  “I’m already soaked,” I said. “Besides, we need a fire. It’ll keep away the insects, and any boat that’s passing will see it. Then we can use the flashlight to signal.”

  “And the person that took the boat?”

  “I’m hoping they escaped in it,” I said.

  She looked up at me and nodded doubtfully, then pointed to her pack.

  “There’s something else in there,” she said. “An army survival manual.”

  “Where did you get that?”

  “It was my brother’s. He was in Desert Storm. I kind of held on to it.”

  I went to her pack and felt around until I found it, a small, brown paperback book in a plastic pouch. I glanced over the contents. How to tell directions without a compass, how to live off the land, how to make a fire … I slipped it back into the pouch and put the pouch back into the pack.

  “I’ll use it if I have trouble,” I said. “Right now, about all we can do is hope the rain stops.”

  I sat down next to her on the sand. A few seconds later she struggled out of her poncho and handed me an edge. “Put it over your head,” she said. “We can both fit.”

  I felt her warmth against me and listened to the steady patter of raindrops on the plastic. “I guess we should have left earlier, when you wanted,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “No use crying about it now,” I told her.

  “I just get so wrapped up in my work … I love archaeology. I really do.”

  “So do I. It’s a character flaw.”

  “But you’re a man. It’s harder for a woman. I had to fight every step of the way. How can you get men to take you seriously when you’ve got a name like Pepper? They all think it’s so cute. Pepper Ellen. What a nice little girl.”

  “You’re talking about people like Oldham. Well, we aren’t all that way. And sometimes, when we get the feeling somebody’s pressing too hard, well …”

  “Yeah.” She rubbed her ankle. “I feel like it’s swelling.” She started to unlace her boot.

  I helped her loosen the boot and touched her ankle. She flinched.

  “Can you move it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, but I saw her foot move slightly up and down and then from side to side.

  “I don’t think it’s broken,” I said. “The best thing to do is wait for the swelling to go down and then try to put some weight on it.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” she said with a grimace. “So what do we do if a boat doesn’t pick us up?”

  “I don’t know.” But I thought of our flight through the hills, with our unseen pursuer throwing things at us from above. I didn’t look forward to a repeat of the episode, trying to support her with one arm. “I’ll think of something,” I said. “Maybe Marx has a quotation for the occasion.”

  “Marx?” She turned her head to look at me. “Oh, I see: You think from what I said last night about the slaves building the levees that I’m a Marxist.”

  “It was in fashion when I was a graduate student,” I said.

  “It still is in some places. And I think he was right about some things. But I don’t go much for isms of any kind. Besides, I was trying to get to you.”

  Her admission caught me by surprise. “Why?”

  “You seemed so together, so sure of everything. Like you thought you were my uncle, giving advice to this little girl.”

  “Your uncle?” I snorted. “I’ve been called a lot of things …”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you.”

  A small river of water coursed down a crevasse in the plastic covering and started to drip on my leg.

  “No insult.” I sighed. “I’m just feeling my age.”

  “You’re not old,” she protested. “Not more than ten years older than I am. Well, fifteen at most.”

  I sucked in my stomach without thinking. “More or less.”

  The pattern of raindrops on the river had become barely discernible. I held out my hand. The rain had subsided into a fine mist.

  I crawled out from under the cover and began to work on the pile of wood, trimming off the wet bark with the knife and trying to shave the dry places into tinder.

  “Want a suggestion?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Try my field book,” she said, reaching into her pack. “It has a lot of blank pages.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  It was a new surveyor’s transit book, the kind that costs fifteen bucks, with waterproof pages, but except for the first few leaves, the rest was blank and I ripped them out and crumpled them. I arranged my dry wood over them, small pieces first, and then got out one of her matches and lit the paper. The paper flared and I watched the bright flame eat away at the paper, then die into ashes. I cursed under my breath and lit another match. By the fifth match I was beginning to think it was useless, but then some of the smaller twigs caught and then the tinder, and in a few more minutes I had a small fire.

  “I’ll go get some more pieces of wood,” I said, taking her penlight. “It ought to be able to dry out if I put it closer to the fire.”

  She scuttled over to the side of the blaze and I sat down beside her.

  It wouldn’t be so bad, I told myself, if only we had some food. And if we could forget about the dead man a few hundred yards down the beach.

  “I feel like Robinson Crusoe,” she said. “Do you really think a boat will pass?”

  “I don’t know. All we can do is listen.”

  She shuddered. “This isn’t like the Charles River. This is so big it scares you. It’s almost like there might be things in the depths, things that are waiting to come up …”

  I didn’t say anything because I’d often had the same thought.

  Finally I turned to look at her outline, faintly limned by the firelight.

  “Pepper, why did you really come down here?” I asked.

  “I…” She started to answer then stopped and picked up a small twig and broke it.

  “It won’t do any good to tell me it was because of some economic analysis you did. You knew what a hard time you’d have before you ever got down here, am I right?”

  She nodded silently, like a child caught out in a lie.

  “So what was it? You running from a bad love affair? It’s understandable, you know. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “It wasn’t that,” she said in a voice almost too low to hear. “I’m not running away, I’m looking.”

  “Looking?”

  She nodded. Something plopped into the water and I saw her flinch.

  “I was born in 1964,” she said. “Just before the Vietnam War got going good.”

  She drew a haphazard line in the sand with the twig.

  “He went to the war,” I said softly.

  “Yes. In 1969, when I was five years old. He never came back.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks. It left me and my mom and my brother, Chad. Chad was two years older than I was. We were close. He always looked after me. He was affected by dad’s death worse than I was. He always said he wanted to join the army, be like him.”

  I waited, listening.

  “His chance came in 1985, when he finished college. He went off to the service and took airborne training. He came home on leave and he seemed to like what he was doing, almost like he was proving something. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait and we sent troops over to Desert Storm. He came back with a chestful of medals but he was never the same.”

  “Was he wounded?”

  “Not physically. But he had a wild look, a restlessness. Inside of a year he’d quit the army and was driving trucks. First we heard from him every few weeks and then we stopped hearing from him at all. When Mom died I tried to get the news to him but nobody had heard of him at his last address.”

  A breeze picked up and I heard the leaves of the trees rustle.

  “Did you try the company he worked for?” I asked, but I tho
ught I had a pretty good idea.

  “The last record they had showed he’d delivered his cargo to New Orleans and then got another driver to take his rig back. As for him, well, he just disappeared.”

  “Were the police called?”

  “They couldn’t do anything. People disappear all the time. They said it wasn’t criminal. He was an adult.”

  “So he just dropped off the face of the earth.”

  She nodded. “That is, until my third year in graduate school. That year, I got a postcard. It didn’t have a word written on it, just my name and address. It went to my apartment in Cambridge and I found it in the mailbox one weekend. It was mailed from Monroe, Louisiana, and the address was in his handwriting.”

  I exhaled. “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely. Besides, what other possibility is there? Who’d go to so much trouble for a joke? No, I’m sure it was from him. It was his way of letting me know he was still alive but for some reason he couldn’t make himself write any message.”

  “So when you finished school, you decided to try to hunt him up.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did your father die?” I asked.

  She swallowed hard. “I’m not sure. He never came back from Nam.”

  “And you’re thinking it had an effect on your brother.”

  She nodded.

  And maybe, I thought, you’re thinking whatever it is that made him crack, you may have it, too.

  “Is it stupid to feel this way?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “It’s not stupid at all.”

  I held out my hand. The misting had stopped and I pulled off the poncho and laid it on the wet sand. We moved onto it and I reached over and put another limb on the fire.

  “Now I understand why you’re in archaeology,” I said.

  She gave me a funny look. “What do you mean?”

  “Looking for your brother. It fits, doesn’t it? Hunting for things and hunting for people?”

  “I never thought of that. Anyway, archaeology’s a science. It’s …”

  “Yes?” I gave her my wise-owl look.

  “Oh, never mind. Maybe you’re right.”

  She really wasn’t as hard to take as I’d thought. Maybe all she needed was the guidance of a wiser colleague.

  “Not that it isn’t scientific,” I lectured. “But there’s a difference between being scientific and being a science. The New Archaeology …”

  “The New Archaeology is thirty years old,” she said dryly. “Just like hippies and antiwar demonstrations.”

  “I was only going to say it wasn’t all that new,” I huffed.

  “Well, I think I attended that lecture,” she said demurely.

  I shot her a venomous look and saw she was smiling.

  “You’re impossible,” I said.

  “Not impossible, just a challenge,” she said obliquely. “Now that you’ve heard about me, what about yourself? Why did you end up in contract archaeology? Didn’t you ever want to teach?”

  “I did once. University of New Mexico. But it didn’t work out.”

  “Trouble with your colleagues?”

  “No. With a woman.”

  “Mind if I ask who she was?”

  I shrugged. “An archaeologist. We met in Mexico on a project. I married her. But it didn’t work.”

  She was staring at me now. “So that explains it.”

  “What?”

  “I thought you just had a thing against women professionals. It’s really because she was an archaeologist …”

  The words rocked me and I couldn’t think of anything to say. My God, was she right? Had I struck sparks with her because of Felicia?

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I talk too much sometimes.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  She looked off into the darkness and I followed her eyes to where the flames cast dancing shadows on the looming trees.

  “Do you think this could really be an old Tunica cemetery?” she asked. “I can’t get rid of the feeling that they’re around us. It’s ridiculous, I know. I mean, it’s almost as bad as being superstitious, and I can trace the reasons for it. It’s just—”

  “It’s just that you’re like every other archaeologist in the world,” I said. “You have an imagination.”

  I stared into the trees, whose branches seemed to be beckoning as the shadows played their tricks.

  “For whatever it’s worth,” I told her, “I feel it, too.”

  For a frozen instant I thought I could make out the forms of warriors, watching, bows in their hands, trying to make up their minds whether these new beings with white skins were gods or demons, trying to decide whether the people by the fire were the future, and whether that future meant power to the tribe or its annihilation. For the briefest moment I was Tonti the Iron Hand, in search of LaSalle, and the shadows were people who had been dead nearly four hundred years.

  “Alan,” Pepper said, breaking into my reverie.

  “Yes?”

  One of the shadow-warriors moved and I felt Pepper stiffen beside me.

  I watched as he stepped out of my imagination and walked slowly to the other side of the fire.

  Only it wasn’t a bow he was carrying but a rifle. And I’d seen him before, this warrior, only yesterday.

  He’d been arranging artifacts in a display case in the museum on the Tunica Reservation. His name was Ben Picote.

  “Just stay where you are,” he said.

  NINETEEN

  Pepper’s hand clamped my arm.

  “What’s the gun for?” I managed.

  “I ask the questions,” Ben answered. “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting till morning,” I said. “Somebody stole our boat.”

  For a moment the only sound was the crackle of the fire.

  “I took your boat,” he said finally.

  “Did you kill the old man?” I tried to keep my voice calm.

  “I didn’t kill nobody. I saw him on the beach, though. How do I know you didn’t kill him?”

  “He’s been dead awhile,” I said. “We just got here.”

  “But you’ve been here before.”

  I nodded. “We were here when you chased us through the creek bed.”

  He tried to keep his face impassive but I could tell from the flicker along his jaw that my guess had scored.

  “Why?” I asked, but I thought I already knew.

  “You’re archaeologists,” he said. “You came here to dig up our dead.”

  I shook my head. “We came to find where the burial ground was, if there is one, but we told the land owner we wouldn’t dig them up. It’s against the law.”

  He spat on the ground, a tall, skinny kid trying to show his manhood. “When did that ever stop you people? Do you think we don’t know about the bones they keep hidden in that museum down in Baton Rouge? About the burials they dug up at Bloodhound Hill, at Angola? About what you did at Trudeau? Do you think I didn’t know what you were all about in the museum when you tried to bullshit LeMoine?”

  Pepper gave me a shocked look.

  “You know each other?”

  I nodded. “This is Ben Picote. He works for Frank Le-moine, the curator at the Tunica-Biloxi museum.”

  “Oh,” Pepper said, letting her hand fall from my arm. “Well, I understand your feeling. I mean …”

  “You understand?” His lip curled into a sneer. “How can you understand anything?”

  “I know what it is to feel incomplete because I lost something. My father left when I was very young …”

  “I’m talking about a million fathers. You people ran us out of this place, and now you want to come back and pull our dead out of the ground.”

  “Well,” I said, “we haven’t found any evidence that there are any dead here, except for old Absalom. Any idea who killed him?”

  “No, but I don’t care. He was stealing from our graves. Whatever happened, he deserved.”

  “You’d better
care, Ben,” I told him. “You just described a pretty good motive for killing him.”

  Ben frowned as if this had only just occurred to him.

  “How did you get here, anyway?” I asked, struggling for some kind of rapport. “Marksville’s a good little distance.”

  “I came by boat,” he said, and I detected a trace of pride in his voice. “I drove down to the Old River Control Structure and put in there. I got a fifty-horse on my skiff. I’ve crossed over here lots of times. I’ve been to Trudeau. I’ve even been inside the grounds of the prison, to Bloodhound Hill, and they never even knew it.”

  “That’s pretty impressive,” I allowed.

  “So what are you going to do now?” Pepper asked.

  His answer was a thrust with his gun. “Stand up,” he ordered.

  I helped Pepper to her feet and waited. He came around the fire, staying an arm’s length away.

  “Turn your pockets inside out,” he said.

  “You’re robbing us?” I asked, but I knew what he was really after.

  “Do what I said.”

  I reached into a pocket and showed him a handful of change.

  “Now the other one,” he commanded.

  I took a deep breath and turned out the other pocket. The little brass bell fell into my hand and gleamed in the fire-light.

  “Here.” He held out a hand. “Give it to me.”

  I handed it over.

  “So you haven’t found anything,” he accused.

  “That was lying on the sand,” I said. “We looked all over this afternoon, but we couldn’t find anything else. I think Absalom may have dropped it.”

  “You’re lying,” he said.

  “I told you, it was on the sand. That doesn’t tell anybody where the original grave is. It could be ten miles from here, on either side of the river.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said.

  “Look for yourself, then,” I invited. “But meanwhile I’d like my boat back.”

  He glared at me from under an old baseball cap. “You better hope you get out of here alive.”

  “You’re going to kill us?” I asked. “That wouldn’t be very bright, would it? I mean, first T-Joe Dupont, then Absalom, and now two more. Are you going to kill the whole world?”

  He thrust out his jaw. “I never killed nobody. All I ever done was run people like you off this land. Because it’s our land, and my people are buried here.”