Burial Ground Page 9

  “You see this island?” I asked, indicating the strip where P. E. and I had ended up.

  “Yah, I see it.” He turned his head to give me a puzzled look.

  “Any thoughts as to when it was formed?”

  “Yah, I got thoughts on that.” He squinted at me. “But why you want to know?”

  “Just a project I’m doing,” I said. “I need to know if the place is worth checking for sites earlier than, say, the middle of the last century.”

  Lars sighed. “This island is part of an old river meander. I think if you check your Mississippi River Commission maps from the last century you see that until 1886, the river was right against the hills there. Then it meandered west after that, during the flood of ’87. That left this area exposed.”

  He pulled out some blue-line maps and put them on the table, over my topographic sheet. I’d seen the maps before. They were issued by the Mississippi River Commission on a periodic basis, and I’d meant to check them before we went to the field again.

  I watched him compare two of the maps and saw that what he was saying was true: The island and the floodplain leading to the island had been part of the river until 1887.

  “Well,” I said, looking up. “I’m impressed.”

  “Yah, it’s kinda like I read your mind, yah?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Like I see you coming, I know from the map tube you got a project, but the right half your face is sunburned, so I know you been facing north in the afternoon. Now, from the scratches on your arms, I know you’re in briars, but the kind of scratches only match the kind that grows in a certain place in West Feliciana Parish. So, putting three and two together …”

  “How did you know, Lars?”

  He shrugged. “Because somebody else was in here right before, asking the same questions. That’s how I got the commission maps right here still: I was going over it with her.”

  “Her?”

  “Yah, pretty girl she was, too, and not married. I look for the fingers, you know, to see rings. None.”

  I took a deep breath. “This girl …”

  But Lars was fumbling in his desk drawer.

  “She give me a card. Here.”

  I didn’t have to look at it, because I already knew what it would say:

  Courtney & Associates.

  It took me ten minutes to make my way back through the body-melting heat so that by the time I got to my car it was just after four. I’d need another quarter of an hour to reach her office and I didn’t know if she’d still be there.

  I was too irked not to try.

  I took the road between the lakes, with the raised freeway on my left, and caught Perkins Road just before Stanford. On the maps of the last century, the road was shown as a track to Dr. Perkins’s Plantation. Today it’s a clogged ar tery leading east, from the outskirts of the Garden District to the new suburbs on the city’s eastern edge. About a mile along, on the right, in some land I remembered as woods when I was a little boy, an enterprising developer had built a small park of gray, wooden buildings that housed suites of offices. According to the sign, there was a home improvement service, an insurance office, and a clinical psychologist. I didn’t see any shingle for Courtney & Associates, but then I reminded myself that she was new. If she stayed more than a month she’d probably get around to it.

  As I pulled into the parking lot I glimpsed the white Integra a few doors down. I stopped next to it and saw that Suite 107 was the door in front of me. I took a deep breath and pushed it open.

  I found myself in a carpeted room with a front desk and a couple of plastic basket chairs. The paintings on the wall were generic rivers and mountains—only a step up from black felt Elvis. There was no one at the desk and no sign that anyone had ever worked there. To the left of the desk a door led into the rear of the complex.

  “Hello,” I said. “Is anybody here?”

  I heard a shuffling from somewhere in the rear, then steps padding toward me.

  “Who is it?” She materialized in the doorway, a manila folder in her hand, and froze as she saw me.

  “Oh. It’s you.”

  “Who did you think it was?” I asked acidly. “The world beating a path to your door?”

  “No, I thought it was the insurance salesman down the way,” she said coolly. “He keeps finding excuses to come in and orientate me.”

  “And you don’t like him.”

  “I don’t like the word orientate. And I don’t like being slobbered over by married men.”

  “I’d think you were safe,” I said and got a withering look in return.

  “So what do you want?” she demanded, folding her arms.

  “I want to know why you went to Lars Kjelgard,” I said.

  She stared at me for a second, as if trying to decide whether to retreat or brazen it out. Finally she shrugged.

  “I was curious about the landform,” she said. “I was wondering if there could possibly be anything old on that island or whether it would have to be recent.”

  “I see. You don’t understand yet that this isn’t your project?”

  “It seems to me that almost getting killed out there gives me some rights,” she said.

  “Our workers’ comp and general liability cover accidents to our people. When somebody else invites themselves along, it throws our legal situation into a cocked hat.”

  P. E. Courtney shook her head slowly and tsked.

  “I would have thought you could do better than trot out insurance technicalities. You sound like a lawyer, not an archaeologist.”

  I folded my arms.

  “Speaking of that, where are these famous associates that you’ve got on your business card? All I see here is a rental office with a nameplate on the door. Where’s your lab? Where’s your equipment? And don’t reach for your pack. I mean your real equipment, like your flotation tank, your water screens, your magnetometer?”

  Her lips pursed. “I can get all those things,” she said tightly. “But that isn’t all there is to archaeology. Without theory, without knowing what paradigm you’re trying to falsify, you’re just an antiquarian.”

  “Paradigm? Falsify? If you’d been out of graduate school long enough to get rid of that gobbledygook they foist on you, you’d know none of it’s worth Confederate money without fieldwork, without knowing how to handle yourself in the woods, to—”

  She pinioned me with her eyes. “I seem to have handled myself well enough today,” she said quietly.

  She had me there.

  “Look,” I said, carefully changing the subject. “You’ll probably do very well down here. I’m just saying you need some tempering, so to speak—some real fieldwork.”

  She nodded, turned suddenly, and started for the back. “Come back,” she said in a voice almost too low to hear. Curious, I followed.

  “Since you’re here, I’d like to get your opinion of something,” she said.

  I stared, nonplussed. “Sure,” I said finally.

  I followed her down the hallway to her private office, on the right. Once inside, I saw a big poster of the sarcophagus lid from the tomb of Pacal at Palenque. On the other wall was a framed photo of an excavation in progress, the earth neatly staked off into squares and people bent over in the half-excavated units. And below this photograph was a small bookshelf, within easy reach of the Formica desk. She took a volume from the shelf. I saw that it was one of the Peabody Museum reports, from Harvard.

  “What do you think of this?” she asked.

  I turned the work over in my hands.

  Excavations at the Polhugh Site, Kentucky (1992–1994), the title said.

  “I think everybody holds Paul Oldham in high regard,” I said, referring to the author. “I don’t know him well, but he does damn fine work. Why? Did you work with him?”

  “You might say that,” she said dryly. “I wrote the book.”

  “You what?”

  She nodded at the book I was holding. “I wrote it. I also ran the
field crew. If you look at the acknowledgments, you’ll see my name.”

  I turned to the first part of the book, which listed the people who had participated in the project.

  The author especially wishes to thank Miss P. E. Courtney, who ably supervised field operations and contributed both to the analysis and to the writing of the final report.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “No? It’s easy. Paul Oldham told me I could have this as a doctoral project. He got the funds and then came down maybe twice the whole time to visit the excavation. I did most of the analysis and wrote the manuscript, but when I saw the finished product it had his name on it. I was just the field supervisor.”

  “Christ.”

  She shrugged. “It happens all the time, professors stealing their students’ work. Only this was worse than most, because he was drinking himself into retirement after his wife died and all the other faculty wanted to ease him out without a big flap. So they asked me to go easy, not say anything, and one of them helped me change my dissertation to ceramic analysis, using the same data and bringing in some data from a few other sites.”

  I thought of all the times I’d seen Paul Oldham at meetings, giving papers to hushed and admiring audiences. Once I’d even been in the same bar with him, listened to his anecdotes about fieldwork.

  I frowned. “But I thought your dissertation had to do with contact period sites in the Yazoo Basin.”

  “My M.A. thesis,” she corrected.

  Leave it to Freddie St. Ambrose to get it all wrong, I thought.

  “So now you’re pissed at Harvard,” I said.

  “Some people there,” she agreed. “But that’s not why I’m here. I’m down here for the reasons I told you, and some personal ones.”

  I started to say something, but I had a feeling she wasn’t about to open up any further.

  “Okay,” I said, keeping my voice low. “But it’s still going to take more than a rented suite. You’ve got to understand: You can’t just show up one day and expect to get a slice of things. It’s nothing personal—”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No. I mean, what…?”

  “You Southerners don’t much like independent women,” she said. “Well, I knew it would take some effort to crash the good old boy network. I’m willing to take a few knocks. But don’t expect me not to knock back.”

  “Knock back? Seems to me all you’ve been doing is knocking, ever since you’ve been down here. You act like the world is going to open up and welcome you. Well, the profession we’re in isn’t glamorous, like being a university archaeologist. No slide shows to impress students. We make our living from clients that mostly consider us a nuisance. They don’t give a damn if you’ve got an office in Doctor’s Plaza, or if you dress like Panama Jack …”

  I saw her stiffen and knew I scored. “Most of ’em wish they didn’t have to fool with us at all, because we’re just part of a federal permitting process they see as a burden. But if they have to deal with us, they want only a few things: They want us to be cheap, they want us to be fast, and they want us to make the bureaucrats who review their applications happy. Most of our clients would level the Great Pyramid if they wanted to build a shopping mall there. So we go out and bake our brains in the sun and stumble through briar patches and when we come out some desk jockey at the Corps of Engineers wants to know if we did a shovel test in a place where there’s three feet of water, or they want to know why we didn’t use a screen when we’re in solid clay. Nobody’s ever retired from this field, because it’s too new, but a lot have dropped out along the way, or given up in disgust, or just plain gone bankrupt.”

  She stared at me for a long time, and I wasn’t sure what effect my lecture had had. Then she said quietly:

  “I don’t intend to fail. I can’t fail.” For an instant I saw her without the veneer of self-confidence, almost, well, vulnerable.

  “As for Panama Jack—” she began, but I cut her off.

  “I take it back.” I looked at the photograph on her wall and realized that one of the diggers in the picture was the woman in the room with me, three or four years younger, perhaps, and with dirt on her face. “But you have to realize it doesn’t go over so well when somebody starts trying to appropriate somebody else’s project.”

  “I told you, I’m not trying to appropriate anything. I was just doing research.” She put her hands on her hips. “I was trying to help.”

  I shook my head, not sure if any of this was getting through. “If you’d called me first …”

  And to my surprise, she nodded. “Yes. You’re right. I should have. I got carried away.” Her turn to shrug. “It’s always been a problem with me: too much enthusiasm.”

  “Well, it’s better than not giving a damn, I guess.”

  I turned around and started out. I’d gotten midway through the front office when she called after me:

  “What now?”

  “I dunno. Play it by ear, I guess.” I turned partway round to face her. “Look, I’ll give you a call.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Look, if this is a kiss-off, I’d rather you just said it.”

  “It’s not a kiss-off,” I said. “I just have to think.”

  She nodded, unconvinced. “I’ll be here,” she said. “But I want you to get one thing straight.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve never gotten my field clothes from Panama Jack.”

  TWELVE

  I woke up late Wednesday morning. When I looked in the mirror I saw scratches on my arms and face, and hollows under my eyes. I was getting too old for this work, but I wasn’t sure what happened to old contract archaeologists. Maybe, I thought, they got catalogued and stuck away on some museum shelf. More likely they just died in the woods and were left for the carrion eaters. Or … Digger poked with a cold snout, telling me to stop indulging myself when he still hadn’t been fed.

  “It’s easy for you,” I said, remembering the times I’d taken him out to the country and he’d bounded straight for the worst thicket.

  I checked in at the office and was happy to find there was no crisis and that Willie’s check had been honored, allowing us to make payroll. With the pressure lifted for another pay cycle, I drove to the hospital, where the nurse told me David was about to go home. I congratulated him and promised to call later. Then I drove up to St. Francis-ville.

  I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but it’s good procedure to check conveyance records when you’re surveying a piece of land. Conveyance records can strip away today’s smiles and reveal old feuds, lawsuits, and bankruptcies. Maybe there was somebody who had an emotional claim to the place. Somebody willing to kill T-Joe to validate that claim.

  The courthouse is a cool, stately old structure built in the first days of the century, when wagons creaked through the dirt streets. Oak trees shade the lawn and there are the obligatory memorials to lost causes. Inside, I went directly to the Clerk of Court’s office and was shown the conveyance books.

  There was nothing very mysterious about the Dupont parcel, though. It had been purchased nine months before, from Carter Wascom Jr., just as Willie said. The price was $1.25 million and the description was the usual:

  Twelve hundred acres in Sections 10 and 11, Township 12 North, Range 3 East, being that land bounded on the north by State Highway 24 and on the east by Greenbriar Plantation, and on south by the course of a certain bayou and on the west by the left descending bank of the Mississippi River, with the exception of four acres fronting on Highway 24, owned by Marcus Briney, and three and one half acres on Highway 24, and adjacent to the aforesaid Briney property on the north, owned by Carter Wascom Jr.

  I stared at the record for a moment, considering the implications: Absalom Moon didn’t own his property; he was a tenant of Carter Wascom.

  Then I looked up Briney and found that his own plot, consisting of ten acres, had been purchased from Carter and Eulalia Wascom in 1992, for the sum of five thousand dollars.
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  So when Eulalia had become sick, and there were bills to pay, Carter had sold a small amount of land to Briney but Absalom Moon hadn’t had the money or the credit to buy his own land. Much later, T-Joe Dupont had acquired twelve hundred acres, but there’d been another major sell-off before him. I checked under Wascom’s name, in the vendor list, and there it was:

  Fourteen hundred acres sold by Carter Wascom Jr. to the local utilities company in 1978. Price, $1.4 million.

  Then, eighteen years later, Wascom had been forced to sell more land.

  Where had the $1.4 million gone?

  I followed the property back to the last century, to see if there were others associated with the plantation. The Wascoms, however, had owned it since just after the Civil War, when Lucas Wascom had purchased it at a sheriff’s sale from Marie Clayton, the widow of the former owner who had apparently died during the war. Chester Clayton, her husband, had bought it in 1830, from one Juan Villa-real, who, according to the faded notation, had received it from the Spanish crown when West Florida was a Spanish possession. I wondered idly if the Wascoms were locals or carpetbaggers from the North who’d pounced on an opportunity. I checked the name in the index and found other Wascoms, so they must have lived hereabouts. Still, I thought, it couldn’t have made them popular, evicting a widow lady. But maybe, on the other hand, they had done her a favor. It was a common enough situation after the war. In any case, it was unlikely anyone around today knew or much cared.

  I left the courthouse, with the feeling of having left something undone. Something rubbed on me like a pebble in my shoe, but I couldn’t place it. I stood on the sidewalk, watching the cars creep past. Across the street, behind an iron fence, was the old Episcopalian cemetery, where the gentry of the last century were buried. On impulse, I walked over and made my way through the graves. The two Feliciana Parishes, West and East, were settled primarily by Anglos, during the brief British ownership of West Florida. When the Spanish had taken over in 1783, the Anglo settlers had at first accepted the change, but later had grown restless. By 1810, after the territory to the west and south had been accepted into the Union through the Louisiana Purchase, they had mounted a brief rebellion against the Spanish, with the result that after a few weeks the West Florida Republic, as they’d called it, also became a part of the United States. Many of these original settlers were buried in this cemetery, and I had in my mind that I might run across the Wascom plot.