M
AUREEN BENT OVER HER WORK. THE TEMPERATURE had dropped to ten degrees Centigrade, but the kiva bottom was warm, barely caressed by the breeze that blew above. Sunlight flecked the red sandstone walls with gold.
She used a sliver of bamboo to pick moist black soil away from the femur and tibia of what looked like a four-year-old child. The bones lay articulated, the epiphyseal caps still in place where the joints had come together. Above the leg lay a confusing mass of bone, as if several children had been piled atop one another. She had started on the single leg, deciding to remove it in order to have a place to sit while she worked on untangling the mess of intertwined bodies.
The mottled upper leg was dark, stained by the ash-filled soil. The lower limb, however, had been charred, the bone spalled in the characteristic pattern caused by the marrow boiling inside. The distal portions of the fibula, the slim bone in the lower leg, had been completely burned. Tarsals, or ankle bones, were badly calcined from the heat. The foot seemed to be missing.
“Why bamboo?” Sylvia asked as she knelt beside Maureen with a clipboard in her hands. She had pulled her brown hair back into a short ponytail.
“It doesn’t scratch the bone the way a dental pick does.” Maureen probed carefully and dug out around the bottom of the bone.
“So, what’s the latest?” Sylvia started sketching the bone on the draft paper.
“This child burned whole. That’s why the ankle and lower leg are in such bad condition.”
Sylvia studied the tangle of bones. “Do you think they were alive when the kiva went up?”
Maureen shrugged. “Hard to say. Without lab analysis, all I can
tell you is that they were either alive or hadn’t been dead for very long. The meat around the bones still had a lot of water in it.”
Sylvia’s nose wrinkled. “Gruesome.”
“Yes, it is.”
“I can’t believe it was an accident. I’ve dug pit-houses in Colorado that burned. We were pretty sure in those cases that a spark set the wooden roof on fire, and they couldn’t get out through the rooftop entry.” Sylvia gestured around. “This is an arid climate. Wood dries out. Sometimes a spark is all it takes, and
whoosh!
The whole thing goes. A fire turns the ventilator shaft into an inferno. Most of the skeletal material is in pretty good shape because when the roof collapsed, the dirt covered everyone and sealed the draft from the ventilator. These kids, though, God. I mean it must have been an awesome fire. Why would forty or fifty children be on the roof of a kiva?”
“Good question.” Maureen shook her head. “I don’t suppose we can ever prove it, but I’d say someone did this on purpose, set the fire with the intent to burn these children.”
Sylvia eyeballed the bone, sketched on her pad for a time longer, then said, “How could anyone do that? Most of these kids were under five.”
Maureen took a deep breath and paused to pull back several loose strands of hair that were tickling her nose. “I’ve seen it before, Sylvia. The massacres in El Salvador, Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda. Even the dead from Indian battlefields in America, like Sand Creek, Bear River, and Wounded Knee. It happens when people hate each other. In Russia, Nazi soldiers herded women and children into barns and churches and burned them alive.” She paused. “It’s part of who we are as human beings. One of the many images you see in your reflection when you look into a mirror.”
“Makes me glad I sleep with my baseball bat.”
“Yes, but on the other hand we’re the same species that spends tens of thousands of dollars to rescue beached whales, or to provide food and medicine to people halfway around the globe that we don’t know.” Maureen cocked her head, and her long black braid fell over her shoulder. “That’s the magic of anthropology, Sylvia. We get to study people in all of their many different forms, characteristics, their diverse cultures, languages, and their physical variation. But we’re all the same animal.”
“Kind of wonderful and horrifying at once, isn’t it?”
Maureen smiled. “Sounds like a description of Dusty.”
She used her bamboo sliver to pull dirt back as far as the femur’s
linea aspera
, the line of muscle attachment on the back of the bone.
“That’s for sure,” Sylvia replied, and her green eyes turned thoughtful. “Speaking of which, if you’re right that these children were torched on purpose, it would support Dusty’s suspicion of holy war.”
“Not necessarily. The children could also have been plague victims, or something similar. Sometimes, when illness breaks out, bodies are burned in mass graves. That’s also what this might have been.”
Sylvia made a face. “Maybe. But if that was the case, why burn the kiva, too? I mean, it’s the centerpiece for the entire pueblo.”
“Maybe there was an epidemic. They took the children into the kiva and prayed and sang over them, trying to heal them in their holiest place, but it didn’t work. One by one, the children died. Heartsick, they carried them all onto the roof and burned the entire kiva. They cremated their children to kill the evil spirits that had caused the illness. Then they abandoned the pueblo.”
“In an epidemic, the kids wouldn’t have died all at once, though. To prove it was disease, you would have to show that some of the kids had been dead for a while.”
Maureen nodded. “That’s right. I’ll try to discern that in the lab.” She resettled where her leg was going to sleep and continued whisking dirt away from the brittle bone.
“We haven’t found many grave goods either,” Sylvia pointed out. “If they’d died because of warfare or illness, somebody would have prepared them for the journey to the afterlife, left pots of food, new sandals, precious belongings.”
“Grave goods would definitely weight the evidence more toward a funeral than a massacre.”
A crow sailed over them, his black wings canted to catch the air currents.
Sylvia chewed her lip for a moment. “If the other sites in the area are any indication, it’s going to turn out to be a massacre site.”
“You think Dusty’s right?”
“I haven’t seen him wrong very often, Washais.”
Maureen frowned at the tangled bones. “I’m sure that’s true.”
Sylvia paused, then said, “You know, I don’t get you two.”
“How’s that?”
Sylvia shrugged. “You have a unique relationship, that’s all. After you left 10K3, Dusty was glum. I mean, really glum. He spent a lot of time moping. Then, after we packed up, and he went back to Santa Fe, I’d get calls. Maybe about once a week. You know, ‘How ya doin’?’ sorts of things. Then he’d ask, ‘So, you heard from Dr. Cole?’ as if it had just slipped into the conversation.”
Maureen hesitated, stopped what she was doing, and rocked back on her haunches to get a better look at Sylvia. “He could have called me, you know.”
“Not Dusty. It would have been an admission.”
“Of what? That he wanted to know how I was doing? My God, I was doing the analysis of those burials we found. It wasn’t like he needed an excuse. I thought the reason Dale was always calling for updates on the data was because Stewart wasn’t interested. That, or he’d get what he needed when I wrote the final report.”
Sylvia finished her sketch, set her clipboard aside, and sat down cross-legged. “I’ve never seen him this way over a woman before. I mean, when we cut this bone bed? He was practically phobic about picking up the phone to call you. Then, when he did, you heard him. He said hello, fumbled around sounding like an idiot, and handed the phone to me, for God’s sake.”
Maureen turned her head when a gust of wind whirled around the kiva. When she turned back, she said, “Dale called him a
Kokwimu
once. I had to look it up to discover it meant a Man-Woman. I don’t think Dale meant it, since Stewart certainly has a male body and soul.”
“Yeah, he just can’t get them together.”
“Because of his mother and father?” Maureen raised her face to the sun, thinking.
Sylvia said, “Dale told me that in all the years since Ruth Ann Sullivan left Samuel Stewart, she has never once tried to get in touch with Dusty. I think the fact that old Samuel committed suicide made matters worse for Dusty. I mean, God, talk about traumatic. He was a child.” She indicated the delicate bones spread around the kiva room. “Like these kids.”
“But he’s almost forty now, Sylvia. He should have figured out that not all women are Ruth Ann Sullivan.”
“Yeah, and I should have figured out that not all men want to hurt me; but outgrowing your childhood is tougher than normal people
think.” She shook her head. “Things that happen to you as a kid can really screw up the rest of your life.”
“Thinking about Steve?”
“No. Thinking about
him
—my foster father when I was four years old. I still have nightmares about his breath and hair. Isn’t that funny? That sight of all that black, curly hair on his chest terrified me.” She stared off into nothingness. “Each time I thought I was smothering. And the smell … of his breath … his body.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Only to you. I relive every moment every day.” Sylvia seemed to come back to this world. She gave Maureen a cautious look. “How about you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re haunted, too. Do you still have nightmares about your husband?”
Maureen nodded. “I have one dream. John and I are walking along the beach, it’s morning, and the waves are coming in off the lake and splashing. The water is turquoise. Gulls are hanging on the breeze, bobbing, and the sun is slanting in from the east through the clouds. I’m holding John’s hand, and dear God, Sylvia, I’m so happy, as if my heart is about to burst through my chest. Then I look into John’s face, expecting him to be smiling, happy, as full of life as I am at that moment, but I see his face as he looked lying on the kitchen floor, and I can smell the burning spaghetti sauce.”
Sylvia stared at her with kind eyes.
Maureen shrugged. “I wake up and there’s a huge gaping hole inside me. The empty feeling is so intense, I just lay there in the dark, in the bed I used to share with him, and ache.”
Sylvia’s eyes tightened. She stared out at the clouds on the southern horizon. “That sounds pretty lonely, Washais.”
They were silent for a moment, then Maureen leaned forward and resumed her excavation of the child’s leg. “I just about have this femur ready to be removed.”
“Okay. I’ve sketched the bone to scale. Let me get a photo and a box ready.” Sylvia retrieved the camera from the ammo box that sat on the lip of the unit and snapped several shots.
Maureen rocked the small femur back and forth with her fingertips to ensure it was loose, then lifted it free. Sylvia began wrapping it in tissue while Maureen removed the epiphyses and wrapped them.
“You’ve worked with Dusty for years, right?”
“Sometimes it seems like forever. I was just a student. Went to the Pecos Conference that year. It was being held back in Pecos, sort of a reunion kind of thing. I walked around the trucks and there was Dusty, drinking beer with Dale. I can still remember, they were arguing about contamination of a C-14 sample, and Dusty was reaming Dale for letting a big drop of sweat fall from the end of his nose onto this piece of charcoal. The date they got back from Beta Analytic said that their site had been built yesterday.” Sylvia shook her head, smiling. “I couldn’t believe I was standing that close to Dale Emerson Robertson! As an anthropology student, I was blown away. I kept wondering who the blond asshole was, and how dare he blame someone like Robertson for screwing up a C-14 date!”
“So you launched into Dusty?”
“God, no. I was just standing there with my eyes bugged out, when Dusty turned. He made this gesture with his hand. Like, ‘come here.’ I stepped forward and Dusty said, ‘Do you promise not to sweat into my charcoal samples?’ Well, Jeez, what would a sophomore anthropology student say? I answered, ‘Yes, sir.’ And Dusty said, ‘All right, you’re hired, Mary. We’re blowing out of here at noon tomorrow.’
“‘Sir,’ I said, ‘My name is Sylvia.’
“‘Okay,’ he answered, ‘whatever. We’re digging a late P-One site that they’re running a pipeline through. We’ve got three weeks. I’ll meet you at the old mission at noon tomorrow. You can ride out with me, or Dale, assuming you want to be sweated on.’
“‘William,’ Dale said in this imperious voice, ‘one drop of sweat wouldn’t have ruined your sample. They
wash
the material before they run it. I suggest that you see to how you record and package your materials before you send them off to the lab,’ and Dale stalked off.”
Maureen chuckled. “What an introduction.”
“Yeah.” Sylvia placed the wrapped bone in the box. “And there I was, hired onto a field crew. I asked Dusty, ‘What about my classes?’
“‘What about them?’ he asked.
“‘Well, they’re supposed to start in—’
“He cut me off, and said, ‘Kid, are you going to be an archaeologist or an academician?’”” She made a face. “It was the way he said ‘academician, ’ as if it was something really foul. Then he added, ‘Why didn’t you say you were still in school on your
vitae
?’”