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Howard Waldrop

THEM BONES

For Leigh Kennedy, who knows what it’s like not to answer the phone for a month.

‘Life can only be understood backward but it must be lived forward. ’

– Kierkegaard

‘I often think of the millions and millions of the denizens of time who do not share the time I live in. ’

– Claude Ray

‘Out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidence, fragments of stories, passages of books, and the like, we do save and recover somewhat from the Deluge of Time. ’

– Francis Bacon

‘The Past isn’t dead. It ain’t even past. ’

– William Faulkner

Bessie I

‘There’s a horse in the small mound,’ said Bessie.

Dr. Kincaid sat behind his camp table in the hot tent, his shirt off, smoking his pipe. The kerosene lamp on the table was turned up too high; its chimney was sooty.

On the Berliner Bijou phonograph, its brass horn only inches from Kincaid’s head, Louis Armstrong and His Hot Seven were honking out ‘Potato Head Blues’.

Kincaid, a tall man in his fifties, had been tapping a pencil in time to the music on his field notebook when Bessie walked in. He had only gotten as far as writing ‘June 17, 1929’ across the top of the page. When he listened to music he was oblivious of his surroundings – the heat, mosquitoes, the humidity, the sootiness of the lamp.

Bessie Level waited just inside the netting of the tentflap. She was dressed in jodhpurs, puttees, and khaki shirt and a pith helmet.

Kincaid put the pencil inside his notebook, closed and placed it on the folding camp table. A troubled look came across his tanned face. He stood slowly, reached over and flipped the resonator arm up off the spinning Okeh record, turned off the machine. Then he put the record carefully in its buff sleeve, took his pipe from his mouth, pulled on his white shirt and pushed the tails carefully into his canvas hunting pants. He clipped a black bow tie on his collar, pulled on a jaunty L. L.

Bean canvas hat and put his pipe back in his mouth. The whole operation was performed with great deliberation.

He took two long puffs on his pipe; those and the whisper of the kerosene lamp were the only noises in the tent. Outside, Louisiana swamp sounds drifted in – birds, a bullfrog chunk, gleepers, indeterminate mammalian grunts. Kincaid pulled the briar pipe from his mouth.

‘That’s impossible, Bessie,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But it’s a horse, it’s in the smaller mound, and William found it. He said, “Miss Bessie, I found a horse,” I said, “No, William, you didn’t” and he said, “Yes, ma’am, I did! Come look!” and I did. It’s a horse. ’

‘Let’s go see it then,’ said Kincaid. He lifted the chimney and blew out the lamp. They stepped from the darkness of the tent into the darkness of the night.

*

‘I’ve already sent William for the acetone,’ said Bessie.

Kincaid’s pipe glowed. The night around them was black, broken only by the ghost outline of the workers’ tent, the only light on the bluff, on whose walls the shadows of the diggers moved. Lightning bugs dotted the air. Bullfrogs roared off in the bayou. Bessie and Kincaid went down the path from the bluff, which stretched away to either side.