Orphan of Creation (4 page)

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So the first of the creatures died and were buried. The rest soon followed. Some number more were lain to rest in that small crossroads. A few escaped and terrified the vicinity until they collapsed from illness, privation, or the gun. The remainder died, in secret and quiet, at the Negro’s hand, the bodies never to be found. They were animals, we were not, and we did not suffer lightly being equated with them.

Colonel Gowrie was much affected as well, and from that time on, he would never willingly speak of the creatures that had cost him so much. As the town’s leading citizen—and the owner of most of it—he also saw to it that few others spoke of them again. The Negroes who traveled to town on errands reported to the rest of us that what should have been the grandest story and scandal of the day was scarce ever mentioned.

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Barbara closed the book and sat there for a long moment. Even then, no one had known. Today, the secret of those unmarked graves was as dead as the corpses within them. The secrets of that story had waited a long time for her. She rose and looked out through the flickering lightning toward the slaves’ old burial ground. The creatures, the gorillas, were still waiting out there, bones moldering in the ground, proof of a brief, peculiar, and never chronicled sub-chapter in American history.

She looked to the sky, and saw a star or two flicker to life on the horizon as the storm clouds retreated. Tomorrow would be clear.

Those bones would not have much longer to wait.

Interlude

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They locked her in at night with her kind, in the strongest, best-built hut in the village. She lived with the others in squalor and filth inside the well-made walls and solid roof. It kept the night out, kept them out of the night.

She wanted to be free. That much was in her, a solid sure thing, a part of her. Endless times she had tried to escape; endless times they had stopped her. The hut was made as well as it was, thanks to her.

Perhaps she should have been no more aware of her bondage than a fish is aware of the water it swims in. Bondage was her element, the old and only heritage of her line, back through the mists of all half-remembered times. She and her kind had never known anything else. But fish can sense the water—the currents, the smells, the temperature. And she sensed and resented her enslavement, knew it to be wrong, even if she could not understand it. She had no idea but away, no plan but now, no real awareness that time had a past, a present, a future, that today and tomorrow were different. She had only slowly developed the craftiness that taught her to wait until she was unwatched before she tried to run, that made her bide her time, that forced her to scheme and be secret in her efforts to be away.

Tonight, she would try the door again. It was a heavy wooden thing, made of vertical logs set close together with only the slightest of gaps between, hung on stout leather hinges and held shut with a series of thick leather straps firmly tied off from the outside. In the pitch blackness of the cell, she groped for the door, found it, and started chewing at the leather straps.

Part of her knew it wasn’t going to work, that dawn would come long before she finished, that the overseers would see what she had done and beat her again. She didn’t care. She closed her eyes and worked her massive teeth over the salty leather.

Away. Now.

Chapter Three

Dr. Michael Marchando staggered into the on-call room and flopped down on a bunk. He was exhausted. The Emergency Room had been a madhouse his whole shift long, an endless parade of car-wreck victims and gunshot wounds, seasoned with the usual Thanksgiving catastrophes—allergic reactions to unusual holiday dishes, burns from cooking fires, turkey bones lodged in the throat, excruciating indigestion and cramps brought on by massive overeating, and an upswing in drunk-driver injuries.

He shut his eyes and tried to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. Here he was up in Washington, while Barb was down with that damn family of hers in Mississippi. This was the first Thanksgiving since Barbara and he had split up. He thought back, remembering the holidays they had had together, and wondered what she was doing. Right now, she was probably sound asleep, just about to wake up after a happy day with her family and a peaceful night of rest. Mike had bolted down his turkey early in the day, and left his mother’s place to rush to the hospital and get up to his armpits in the sick and injured. It wasn’t fair.

He thought ahead to Monday. Barbara had agreed to meet him for dinner. He smiled humorlessly. He had managed to get a date with his own wife. They still spent the occasional night together, whenever Michael could pressure her into it, whenever he could escape from the hospital. It wasn’t any kind of a life. The more he thought about it, the more he saw how unfair it was.

He opened his eyes and stared into the darkness. It wasn’t fair at all.

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Barbara woke, not with the sort of disorientation she usually experienced when she found herself in a strange bed, but instead with a preternaturally precise knowledge of where she was. Without opening her eyes, she knew exactly how the covers were wrinkled, precisely how far down the window shades were drawn, just how far the sunlight had made its way into the room, just how many children’s voices she could hear outside.

She opened her eyes. The near-antique clock on the nightstand read 6:25. Good. Plenty of time left in the day. She had set the alarm for 6:30, and now she reached out to switch it off, pleased that she awakened before it went off. Nice to have a sense of minor accomplishment without even getting out of bed. But today was full of big plans. She wanted to get started on disinterring those one-hundred-thirty-odd-year-old gorilla bones. Today was Friday. She had the weekend to work with before it was time for the long ride back to the airport and the endless flight from Mississippi to Washington. There was little time, and she would need all of it.

Barbara threw back the covers, swung her feet out of bed, sat up, and looked out the window at the new, fresh-scrubbed morning. She heard laughter, looked down, and saw the children, four or five toddlers, tiny nieces and nephews and first-cousins-once-removed, wandering about on still-unsteady legs in the magically dew-brushed lush green of the lawn.

It was barely light yet, and the sunlight swept in a low, golden fan across the clean, bright day, all of it lovely. Barbara suddenly realized there was a lump in her throat, and she looked back to the tiny children, laughing gleefully because they were alive.

Barbara had no children, and never would. The doctors hadn’t quite come out and said that, but they had came as close as they could. Michael and she had tried everything before the collapse of their marriage. Probably, trying too hard had contributed to that collapse. Mike had not liked the thermometers or the precise timing that eliminated spontaneity, and, later, had liked even less the idea of storing his seed in the sperm bank for tries at artificial insemination. His sperm was still there, on ice, another relic of the ruined marriage no one quite knew what to do with.

But children. She watched the children play outside, discovering the marvelous world. Suddenly, the old sorrow washed over her, and it was suddenly one of those times, one of those brief moments, when she felt a sense of grief and loss for a person who had never been brought into existence. It made her world emptier.

But the toddlers’ bright laughter wafted up toward her window again, chased her regrets away, and she found herself smiling at their adventures.

She looked out toward the old slaves’ graveyard. Today was going to be
her
adventure. If she got away with it. If—If she dared go through with it. She drew herself up short. If she dared? She stopped, thought for a moment, and realized she was
scared
. Of what, precisely, she could not say. She suddenly felt as if she were on the edge of a precipice, stepping out on a bridge that might not hold. She looked again at the graveyard, and told herself quite firmly that there was nothing there to harm her.

She scooped up her dressing gown and bathroom gear, stepped out into the hall, and headed for the shower before any other early riser could beat her to the hot water. She moved briskly, decisively, through the rituals of morning, as if that could banish her misgivings.

But what was it that was bothering her? Barbara had always found the shower a good place to think. The routine and privacy of the moment, the luxury of steaming hot water, let her mind relax enough to focus in on the problems at hand. So what was it? True, there were several difficulties to be surmounted before she could get at the gorillas’ burial site—chief among them Great-aunt Josephine. Maybe Barbara was just reacting to Aunt Jo the way she would have as a child, a little girl who knew she was in big trouble and had to work up the nerve to face the music. After all, Barbara had broken into an old trunk—an offense that would have gotten her a tongue-lashing and a real hiding as a kid.

No, Barbara thought to herself, she definitely was not looking forward to admitting her break-and-enter into Zebulon’s chest—and she was not looking forward to the endless fuss the relatives would make over the journal book. But that all paled before the formidable figure of Aunt Jo. How to get around the strong-willed old lady?

And if she did win Aunt Jo over, what then? Barbara would have to come up with tools, assistants, figure a way to pinpoint the burials and log them in . . . She grinned to herself. Politics and logistics, soothing the local potentates, scrounging up hardware and help. This was going to be just like a regular dig. It occurred to Barbara that maybe she could use some advice. Well, if Aunt Josephine cooperated, she might try a phone call to one of her Washington colleagues.

By the time she was out of the shower, dried off, dressed in work clothes, and had her hair in some sort of order, Barbara had decided the best way to handle Aunt Jo was head on. Time to take the bull by the horns, so to speak. Subtlety would be lost on the strong personalities around here. She glanced at the clock. 7:05. Aunt Josephine would be down in her kitchen working on breakfast by now.

Barbara picked up the journal book and nervously headed downstairs, into the big, sun-bright kitchen. The warm, clean smells of fresh, hot breakfast being made flooded the air—biscuits, flour, bacon, coffee, milk, the tang of orange juice—all mingled with the comfortable fragrance of a kitchen cleaned and polished until it shined. The gurgle of the percolator and the sizzle of the frying bacon seemed the perfect background accompaniment to it all. Aunt Josephine was standing over the kitchen table, busy with her rolling pin and biscuit cutter, vigorously making up another sheet of her buttermilk biscuits.

Aunt Josephine looked up, her dark, round face framed owlishly by her gold-rimmed glasses. “Well, come on in, child, and give a body some help here. If you’re going to stand around my kitchen, I might as well get some work out of you.”

Barbara almost protested, but then decided it would be good politics to follow the path of least resistance. She carefully set the journal book down on the sideboard. The spare rolling pin was in the third drawer down, as always, tidily wrapped up in its canvas rolling cloth. She pulled a mound of dough out of the mixing bowl, dredged it with flour, dusted the rolling pin, and set to work.

The fresh, warm fragrance of the dough took her back to her own childhood, to the first romantic days of her own marriage, when even making breakfast was special; to the early morning bustle she had even forgotten she missed. But this was not the time for such thoughts. She had to face that damned music.

“Aunt Josephine,” she said slowly, “I think I might be in big trouble with you.”

“You’re never too old for that, child. What is it?”

“Well, I was up in the attic yesterday—-”

“And you broke open the lock on Zebulon’s chest,” Josephine said matter-of-factly. “I was up there after you, to put away the Thanksgiving platter until Christmas. I could see it had been fussed with, and the lock hasp fell away in my hands when I touched it. I knew it had to be you.”

“And you weren’t going to say anything?”

“Well, I was plenty mad to begin with, but I got to thinking just how foolish it was to have a trunk full of memories up there, locked up and forgotten about. What’s the point of having things to remember a body by if no one can remember what the remembrances are?

“Besides, heavens only knows where the key to that trunk has got to—someone was going to have to break it open sooner or later. It might as well be the family’s professional grave robber.” Josephine gave her great-niece one of her best stern looks for a full half second before breaking into a broad smile.

Barbara smiled back and breathed a sigh of relief. She never knew what would happen when she crossed Great-aunt Josephine. The tough old girl might decide to let you get away with it, if your motives were pure or you were on her good side. Then she would struggle valiantly to find a good reason to forgive you. But she was just as likely to turn mule-stubborn in defense of
her
way of doing things, and then—watch out. Barbara guessed that Josephine was pleased enough by the rediscovery of Zebulon’s effects that she had decided to overlook the offense of burglary.

Aunt Josephine went on with her work, setting down the rolling pin, cutting the biscuits out of the dough with the biscuit cutter. “After you were so careful to put everything back the way you found it, I looked through that trunk myself, you know,” she said mischievously. “There are some real heirlooms there. His glasses, the books he read. Some splendid things.”

Barbara swallowed hard and set down her rolling pin. “There are more than just books he
read
, Aunt Jo.” She wiped the flour off her hands, took the journal down off the sideboard, and solemnly offered it to her great-aunt.

The older woman cleaned her hands on her apron and took the leather volume. She opened it and gave a little gasp as she read the title page. She stood there, not reading further, but simply staring at the words on the page for a long time. Finally, she put the book back down, took off her apron, looked at her niece with shining eyes, and spoke with a strange little catch in her voice. “Barbara, you’re going to have to tend to the rest of getting breakfast for everyone. Mind the bacon doesn’t overcook. I’m going to sit and
read
this book for a bit.”

Josephine picked up the book again and smiled to herself, at nothing at all.

Barbara offered up a silent cheer. If Aunt Josephine stopped their conversation to read the book, that might cost Barbara some digging daylight, but the lost time would be more than made up if it got the family matriarch on her side when it came to the question of turning spade to earth.

Josephine poured herself a good strong cup of coffee and headed out to the front porch with the journal, a very thoughtful expression on her face. Barbara busied herself in the huge kitchen, and got the last of the biscuits into the oven in time to tend to the bacon and keep it from vaporizing. About fifteen minutes later, just as she had finished putting the rolling pins and mixing bowls away, four of her cousins, each with a baby or toddler in tow, appeared through the back door. By getting cousin Shirley to agree to watch the biscuits, Barbara managed to hand off kitchen-management duty, and went outside looking for Aunt Jo.

The solid old woman sat in her rocker on the south side of the porch, the splendid morning sky framing her in pale blue. She sat reading the journal, rocking slowly, her face a study in solemn concentration, her eyes hidden behind the light reflected off the well-polished lenses of her wire-rimmed glasses.

Barbara went to her and leaned against the railing, watching her, waiting.

Finally, she closed the book and looked up with a smile, her face happy, her eyes gleaming. “He was quite a man. A very good man. Thank you for finding this.”

“Aunt Jo.” Barbara knelt in front of her aunt and took the journal. “I found something in here, late last night. I need to show it to you.” Barbara turned to the pages that dealt with the creatures Colonel Gowrie had brought to the plantation. “Read this part, starting here.”

Aunt Jo adjusted her glasses and studied the writing on the pages carefully, almost reverently, as if she was considering the full worth of each word before moving on to the next. Barbara sat back against the railing and hugged her knees up to her chest, watching her aunt’s face for some sign of surprise, or bafflement, or shock, but her expression remained fixed and solemn, with only an eyebrow twitching now and again as a sign of her emotions. It was as if she were reading the holiest of holy tracts and was determined to maintain her dignity while doing so.

Finally she closed the book and looked to Barbara. “That’s a very strange story, child. What on earth does it mean?”