Bone River (3 page)

He groaned and collapsed upon me, his lips moving soundlessly against my shoulder. I stroked his back until he rolled off and wrapped his arms around me, pulling me close until I was spooned against him, his hands cupping my breasts, his breathing soft against my ear.

He was asleep within moments, though I never went easy into sleep when we were done, and tonight was no different. My skin felt charged. I felt again those spirits in the air, again that uncomfortable suspense.
Something was coming.
The words went
round in my head, twisting with Yutilma’s chatter, with the wild creak of the fir and alder and the slap of water against the shore. The house groaned, a loose shingle clattered. I stayed awake, listening.

The storm faded before dawn, before Junius woke for good, in time with the tides as though his body were a clock that told them. He rose, leaning to kiss me gently. “Happy Birthday,” he whispered, and when I started to get up, he shook his head and said, “Stay in bed today. It’s my present to you. Lord Tom and I can take care of the oysters.”

I didn’t object. It was cold and dark and the last place I wanted to be was on an oyster bateau in the choppy water after a storm. So I kissed him and fell back into sleep as he readied to go out to the whacks in the dark.

He and Lord Tom were long gone when I finally got out of bed. The world was quiet, but I still felt last night’s uneasiness like a whisper against my skin. I went downstairs to find the stove already fired and a pot of steaming coffee. I poured myself a cup and raised it in a toast. “Happy Birthday to me, Papa,” I said. “Can you believe how old I am?”

I never felt his presence more strongly than on my birthday, despite the fact that his things were always all around me, cluttering every surface and corner, each holding a story I never forgot: those Bela Coola masks hanging high up on the wall from Papa’s last trip north; those stone sinkers found on a day when Papa agreed with me how graceful the pelicans were as they flew low along the water. Wooden Chinook salmon hooks and spindle whorls, and strings of the narrow, cone-shaped dentalium shells the Indians had used as money, called
hiaqua
, piled in coils of clean white and smoky gray and hanging from nearly every knob. Suddenly I missed him so much, and all the hours we’d spent together, digging for relics in the mud, all the ways he’d been both mentor and parent, that twinkle in his eyes when he smiled at some lesson I’d learned particularly well...

How melancholy I was today. Birthdays always brought that out in me, but this year seemed especially bad. It was just the storm, I told myself, trying to shake it off, shoving my feet into a pair of boots and grabbing my old wool coat, along with a pair of thick gloves and my wide-brimmed oystering hat, and going out into the day.

The air was crisp and expectant. The storm had swept away the clouds, and the sun was shining, a brisk, chill breeze blowing off the water, summer’s warmth gone for good. Sodden leaves from the alders and maples scattered over the grass, gold and orange and brown. Fallen branches lay cracked and splintered all about. Edna grazed contentedly in the yard, already milked. I stepped through the clutter on the narrow porch, beaten old chairs and piles of nets and an old pair of long oystering tongs, and went down the stairs to the yard.

I was at the river before I realized I was heading toward it. I stared down into the churning water, the long grass of the bank trailing in its eddies, the currents at the shore lapping more roughly with the stirring up of the storm and the added rain. Usually I could see to the bottom here at the shore, but not this morning; it was murky and mysterious today.

It was then I heard the noise that had me glancing toward the mouth of the river where it plunged into Shoalwater Bay. There, only a few yards away, stood a great blue heron, ruffling its feathers—the sound I’d heard. I’d never been so close to one before, and I froze, catching my breath in surprise. The two of us stared at each other, his dark eye and long yellow beak, the shaggy feathered tuft of his chest. For long moments I didn’t move, but then, suddenly, he lifted his dark wings. I was so close the air they stirred pulsed against my skin. I watched him fly off toward the bay, and it was a moment before I dropped my gaze again, before I noticed the strangeness of where he’d been standing.

The bank had fallen away. This was not uncommon; the river was constantly eroding the banks. But this cut was large—at least
three feet of the shore had fallen into the river, and it looked odd, cleanly shored, as if the chunk had been cut away in one swipe of a knife, not bits and pieces falling and crumbling the way it usually did. I picked up the hem of my skirt—already sodden from the wet grass, as were my boots—and stepped down to see. The sheared clay bank did not look like clay, but something...strange. Beneath a thin layer of clay was something mottled, discolored, with light and dark striations. Hesitantly, I scraped it with my gloved finger. It didn’t give at all when I pressed it.

It was narrowly ridged, nothing natural. Something was buried here, and I was on my knees in the mud before I knew it, heedless of my skirts or the river, scraping at it gingerly at first, and then, as my excitement grew, scrabbling like an animal. I could not get at it quickly enough. I bent to dig around it, but there was no
around
. When I scraped away, there was more, and more, a wall of ridges and coils that stretched a foot and a half wide before I decided I couldn’t get at it with my hands alone.

I ran back to the house for a shovel and pick, half-fearful that it would have disappeared when I returned. But no, it was still there, no figment of my imagination. I took up the shovel and dug and scraped, as careful as I could be through my excitement, because I didn’t know where it ended and I didn’t want to do any damage. It began to reveal itself: reeds woven in a pattern of dark and light—an Indian basket—but a design I didn’t know. The damn thing was huge, the biggest basket I’d ever seen; there seemed to be no end to it. I was sweating in the chill; I took off my coat and laid it on the bank and kept going. I thought of how that heron had stared at me,
summoning
me to look, as if this was something he meant for me to find.

I was wet to my knees and filthy with clay by the time I had it half-dug out of the bank. I tried to tilt it loose, but it was caught fast, and it felt solid, which told me there was something inside. I tried to rock it, cursed when it didn’t budge, and grabbed the pick again. A shadow crossed the water.

“What
are
you doing, sweetheart?”

I glanced up. Junius stood there, hatless, his salted hair blowing into his face, one hand shielding his eyes.

“Look, Junius,” I said breathlessly. “Look at what I’ve found. The bank broke away...there was...a heron...and I found this. It’s a basket, but I’ve never seen its like. I think—”

He jumped down, sliding on the mud, splashing. His rawboned hands ran along the coils. “Damn right it’s a basket. Biggest one I’ve ever seen.” He shouted, “Tom! Lord Tom, come here!”

Lord Tom hurried over, peering over the bank. “What?”

Junius grabbed the shovel from my hand, and I stepped back thoughtlessly, too deep. The river spilled over the tops of my boots, and I slogged out, but Tom grabbed the pick and joined Junius, and there was nothing for me to do but watch impatiently as they dug it out. The two of them had the basket mostly clear in the time it had taken me to dig an inch.

Junius threw the shovel aside and rocked it as I had tried to do, and Lord Tom grabbed the other side and shoved, and between the two of them, they had it lifted from its clay bed and shouldered onto the bank. It was half as tall as Lord Tom, coming to Junius’s hips. Clay still clung to it in clumps. Junius brushed it away, revealing a beautiful, intricate pattern of geometric lines and figures, a combination I’d never seen, black against what had once no doubt been a creamy pale, but which was now discolored where the clay had leached into it.

Junius glanced at me. “Well, what do you think’s inside?” He took hold of the handle, jerking it, but it was lodged tight, held in place with compressed clay.

I pushed him gently aside. “You’re going to damage it.” I took hold of the looped handle and rocked the lid a little. I had to force myself to go slowly. Finally the mud crumbled; the lid loosened. I lifted it away just as the sun came from behind a passing cloud, illuminating the contents.

“Oh dear God,” I breathed.

It was a body, crouched in a fetal position, brown hair that looked almost reddish in the light. I looked up at Junius, who was staring over my shoulder.

“Christ. Who the hell is that?” Junius peered into the shadows of the basket. “Help me tip it over.”

Lord Tom shook his head and backed away, murmuring a string of words beneath his breath, none of which I recognized
.
June and I ignored him. The basket was not so heavy as I imagined, and we tipped it onto the ground easily and gently, and then Junius reached inside, grabbing the body by the shoulders, pulling it out, wincing as it scraped along the side, and I watched in fascination as it emerged, bit by bit, shoulders draped in cloth of a deep saffron color, very fine. She was so well preserved it was astonishing, bare arms and skin shiny and dry and stretched tight over the bones and the color of oak. Not so dark as Lord Tom’s skin, nor as pale as my own. A woman, her arms clasped about her knees, which were pulled up to her chest. Feet bare, fingernails and toenails still intact, but changed, too. Not human somehow, but alien, mysterious. Dry as a husk, hair down and flowing but...lifeless. The clothing she wore came away in places, a leather headband was peeling and cracking. A mummy. Unwrapped, but so many of them weren’t. She was like many I’d seen during those years Papa and I had traveled from one ethnographic site to another, except she was flawless.

I knelt beside her, pushing back the hair that fell forward to hide her face, and her profile came into view, eyelashes resting upon cheeks that had sunken into the bones, lips pulled back from what few teeth remained, which were brown and crooked, and I felt this strange sense of inevitability, as if the mud and the storm and the heron had all conspired to bring us together, to meet—

The idea startled me.
Meet?

“Mummification,” Junius said, breathing the word as if it were somehow magical, reaching out.

Lord Tom slapped his hand away. “
Kopet cooley.
”

“Why shouldn’t we touch it?” I asked in surprise.

Lord Tom was obviously shaken. “Rebury it,
okustee.
”

“Rebury it? After I’ve spent the whole morning trying to get it out?”

“
Mesachie memelose
.”

Lord Tom was as superstitious of the dead as all his people, but to call this a bad spirit was odd.

Junius ignored that, saying to him, “Did the Chinook know how to mummify?”

Lord Tom shook his head.

“Were there any legends among your people about it? Myths? Anything to indicate the method might have been known?”

Lord Tom looked sick. “No,
sikhs
.”

Junius looked back at me. “No Chinook Indian did this, Lea. Not the Chehalis either. They’re all too backward. Do you know what this means? She must be ancient. A people who knew how to mummify...they must have had contact with the Egyptians. She’s one of the Mound Builders, Lea. She could be what we’ve been searching for. Proof.”

I looked back down at the mummy. Junius, like my father, believed there had been an advanced culture here before the primitive Indians had supplanted it, though I had never entertained the theory completely, and I couldn’t really say why. Junius and Papa saw the whole of North America as a great palimpsest—groups overtaking other groups, never evolving, only new people coming in and wiping out the old.
No Indian made those things. There had to have been people here before them
, my father had told me—a dozen times or more. And Junius had agreed.
A civilized race, killed by savages. One day I’ll prove it, Lea. One day...

But there had not been any proof to find. Not yet. I was not certain this mummy was proof now, though she was proof of...something.

“This is no Chinook design. Not Bela Coola either. Or Kwakiutl, for that matter. I’ve never seen it before. If this is as ancient as I think it is, and not Indian...Baird will go mad for it. The Russell name will be famous, and—”

“No,” I heard myself say.

Junius frowned. “What?”

“We aren’t sending her to Baird.” My own words surprised me, no less than how fiercely I felt them. “She belongs to me.”

“Of course we’re sending her. I’ll make certain Baird puts your name on it too. He needs this for the Centennial Exposition, you know that.”

“I’m not sending her to him.”

Junius looked at me as if I’d sprouted a second head. “You can’t keep her, Lea. Not something like this.”

He was right. She was a rare find. I had no business keeping her. I should send her to the National Museum, where there were ethnologists who had studied many mummies. But I couldn’t bear the thought of letting her go. It felt so...wrong. Stubbornly, I said, “I want to be the one to study her.”

“You? You’ve never studied anything like this before. You don’t know how.”

“Then I’ll learn.”

“Lea, be reasonable.”

I looked back down at her, the reddish hair, the saffron cloth. And I thought of that heron on the bank, looking at me, waiting for me to look down, to see her, that inevitability I’d felt. Studying her was suddenly the only thing I wanted. I could not ever remember feeling so strongly about anything. I didn’t know how to explain it and I didn’t try.

“I’m not sending her to Baird. It’s my birthday, Junius. Give me this. Please. I’ll study her. I’ll figure out who she is and where she came from—”

“No.” Lord Tom spoke so loudly and suddenly both Junius and I started. When I looked at him, he said, tight-lipped, afraid, “You must rebury her,
okustee
. She is bad luck.
Mesachie tomawanos
. She belongs to the dead. Give her back to them.”