The Bog (2 page)

“I don’t know, honey,” he said in answer to her question.

“But Brad’s found a body, hasn’t he?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t mean that the site is important enough to become a major dig. Maybe we won’t find anything else there.”

Melanie sat up in bed and scrunched her knees up against her chest. Her expression was distant and troubled. “You will,” she said.

David looked at her skeptically. “Now how do you know that?”

“I just do.”

He shook his head. “You and your woman’s intuition,” he said as he lovingly stroked the side of her face. He tilted her head up and looked in her eyes. She was still every bit as beautiful as when they had married, almost a decade and a half before. On occasion she had what few gray hairs she possessed artfully lightened at some top-notch salon, but most of her hair was still luxuriantly blond, and her complexion flawless. She had also kept her figure, and possessed a frame that might, were she a few inches taller, be called voluptuous, and her clear blue eyes still flashed with all of their former fire. It was no wonder that David often observed his colleagues and even many of his students flirting with her.

He turned and looked at himself in the mirror, trying to assess if the years had been as kind to him. His brown hair was flecked here and there with gray, but he had been told that it looked distinguished, and he was still certainly as trim as he had been when they had met, his busy schedule saw to that. But was he still as handsome? He did not know. He had never really even thought of himself as handsome until, as a teenager, to h’is surprise and delight, girls had seemed to find him so. It was true that his features showed no great imperfection. His jaw was square, his cheekbones high, and his nose straight, but beyond that he was incapable of appraising his looks any further. He was not the sort of man who would.

He became aware of a sensation in his hand and he looked down to see Ben’s black head pushing up against his fingers as the retriever gently tried to recapture his attention.

“I’m going to take the dog out for a walk,” he said as he slipped out of bed.

Outside, Ben wasted no time taking advantage of his premature good fortune and quickly raced to a nearby tree. David gazed at the dog briefly and then surveyed the landscape around him. It was a chilly spring morning. The sun was just beginning to peek over the gray colleges and Gothic traceries of Oxford, and in the crisp cool air he found himself swept anew with excitement. He could scarcely believe it. It had seemed an eternity since he had first set out in his powder-blue Volvo and checked off on a map the sites that his intuition and keen eye had told him were archaeologically promising. Then he had waited for over a year for the funding to send Hollister out on the first wave of exploratory digging, and even then the most he had expected were a few promising artifacts. But the fact that Hollister had actually located a body during his preliminary explorations was more than David could have hoped for in his wildest imaginings. It was the fulfillment of a dream that had been a long time in the making.

In the archaeological world David had a reputation for being both brilliant and a maverick. Part of this was due to his unlikely beginnings. He had been born and raised in Chicago’s industrial South Side, and in a working-class family not at all appreciative of academic learning. In spite of this, he had always possessed an inordinate love of history in general, and archaeology in particular. As a result, at the age of sixteen, he had left his squalid and unhappy home life and set out to make his mark upon the intellectual world. After living a year in Illinois, moving from town to town and surviving any way that he could, he discovered one of the most remarkably appointed Indian burial chambers of the Hopewell culture ever found. When news of his discovery, and of his tender age and lack of formal training, became known, it set the archaeological world on its ear.

In time, scholarships poured in. He quickly finished high school by going to night classes, and by dint of good grades, luck, and his reputation as a boy wonder, he was admitted to Harvard. There, he excelled; he published a series of articles on the “new” archaeology, and under the auspices of various well-known archaeologists assisted in making a number of further important discoveries. It was on one of these field trips, at a dig at Haraldskjaer Bog in Denmark, that he saw his first bog body. From that first moment he was entranced. What intrigued him the most was that he had previously only known the people of the past through their bones. But in the bog bodies even the flesh was preserved. When one looked at one of them one was actually looking at the features of a person who had
lived
history.

What was strange about David’s life was that although he had assisted in a dozen such excavations since then, and had himself become one of the world’s foremost authorities on bog bodies, he had always worked on the finds of others and had never actually manned a research site that he himself had discovered. Part of the reason for this was that he had somehow allowed his earlier adventurous spirit to become sidetracked. When he was outside of the institutional structure, when he was young and had no guidance other than his fervid interest in archaeology, he had no recourse but to go out and scour the countryside on his own. But in becoming a part of the archaeological establishment he also became enmeshed in it. It was easy for him to accept positions working on the digs of other, more established archaeologists. And seduced by the comfortable embrace of academic life, he had allowed just a few more years to go by than he would have liked to. Now, however, he hoped all that was going to change. For the first time in as long as he could remember, it looked as if his dream were about to come true.

He looked at the refaced facades of the colleges just beginning to glow palely golden in the advancing sun. He would miss Oxford. It had been good to them for the two and a half years they had been there. And he would miss it, the distinguished features and vague eyes of the various dons whom he had developed rapport with, even the smooth, dull gleam of the academic poplin. Most of all he would miss old Burton-Russell, the silver-haired antiquities scholar whose thoughts were forever riveted on some aspect of ancient Mesopotamian culture. Like David, Burton-Russell shared an almost passionate enchantment with the past, and the two had spent many long hours discussing the intricacies of some ancient Celtic verb tense, or the psychological implications of some long-forgotten Babylonian ritual. He would miss Burton-Russell’s encyclopedic knowledge of history most of all.

Once again he became aware of Ben’s head pushing up against his hand, and he patted the dog lovingly on the neck. Ben gave a doggish smile in return.

“Come on, boy,” David said as he turned and walked back into the house.

On his way back to the bedroom he decided to look in on the children. He quietly opened the door to thirteen-year-old Katy’s room. The first thing he saw were the posters of Michael Jackson and Duran Duran illuminated in the morning light, and then Katy herself, asleep under her frilly French comforter. He smiled when he saw how angelic she looked. Fortunately, she had inherited her mother’s looks, and long, strawberry-blond hair framed a face that was still a little girl’s, but had a cast about it that was clearly on its way to becoming a woman’s. She was the apple of his eye, his firstborn, and although they shared very little of the world and possessed almost totally dissimilar interests, there was a closeness between them, a bond formed out of their great mutual respect and deep but often unstated affection for one another.

He closed the door and quietly padded on. Next he approached the room of his six-year-old son, Tucker, but when he opened the door he saw to his surprise that Tuck’s bed was empty. He quickly rushed in to see if Tuck had fallen out of bed, but when he got there he still found no sign of his son. Worriedly, he turned and went out into the hall. He looked in the bathroom and then the kitchen, but still no Tuck. Finally he walked toward the living room and felt a wave of relief when he saw the distinctive glow of the television set shimmering on the wall. He looked in to see Tuck sitting about four inches from the set with the sound turned down low, feverishly playing a video game.

“Tucker, what are you doing?” David demanded sternly.

Tuck turned around, startled. He had dark-chestnut hair and matching eyes and a gaze that might have seemed disturbingly wise had David not known him to be one-hundred-percent boy, an inexhaustible tornado of arms and legs, unyieldingly curious, and capable of producing a wide range of startling and unexpected sounds.

“I couldn’t sleep anymore, Dad,” he said guiltily.

David was angry about not finding Tuck in his bed, but couldn’t stare into his son’s freckled and guileless face long without melting. He had to force himself not to smile. “Well, try hard, Tuck. I want you to go back to bed and I don’t want to see you out here again until after seven o’clock.” He walked over, turned the set off, and lifted his son up in his arms. He allowed himself to smile only when he felt Tuck’s arms close around his neck. Tuck was also very special to him, in some ways even more special than Katy, for he was a boy and in David’s eyes, as with most fathers and their sons, this made him a little homunculus of himself.

He took Tuck back into his bedroom and once again drew the blanket up over him. “Now get some sleep. I’ll see you in a little bit.”

“Okay, Dad,” Tuck said amiably.

David shut the door to Tuck’s room and returned to his own bedroom. He found Melanie looking distant and deep in thought.

“You know what I found our son doing?” David asked, grinning, as he threw off his robe and got back into bed. Melanie seemed not to hear.

“He was playing a video game with the sound turned down low so that we couldn’t hear.”

Melanie turned to him. “Brad said that the body was in good condition?”

David looked at her sympathetically, realizing that she was still troubled. “Come on, Mel, I told you it doesn’t mean anything yet.”

This did nothing to assuage her.

“Are you trying to make me feel guilty about this?” he asked.

She smiled. “Of course not.”

“Because we talked all this out long ago and you said—”

“—and I said that it was all right, that I would go along with your decision.”

“So I don’t know why you’re doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Acting this way.”

“Listen, I said that I understood this move was important to your work and that I would go along with it. But, in turn, you’ve got to understand that I’ve got feelings in the matter too. I’m not totally happy about the possibility of pulling both Katy and Tuck out of school and moving to the sticks, but that’s my problem. You at least have to allow me my feelings.”

“Fair enough,” he said as he snuggled closer to his wife. At that moment, had he paid attention to it, a tiny voice in the back of his mind was telling him that there was more to his wife’s sullen mood than just her unhappiness over the possibility of their moving. But at the time too many other thoughts were crowding for his attention, and he failed to pay it any notice. Instead, he moved closer still and started to kiss his wife on the back of her neck.

Melanie could think of a thousand different reasons why she didn’t want to move. To begin with, being the wife of an Oxford academic was about as rustic as she wanted to get. Her father was a wealthy Boston Brahmin, and living on a professor’s salary had been a difficult enough situation for her to adapt to. She had been on digs before with David, and the thought of returning to the back woods was almost more than she could bear.

She had also never told David, but once as a small child she had been separated from her parents while on vacation and had been lost in the Vermont woods for a day and a night. The experience had left her with a deep and irrational fear of any tract of land that did not have pavement or stoplights within twenty feet of it.

Still, she knew there was more to her unhappiness than just reluctance to leave Oxford. She had successfully overcome such misgivings before, but this time something was different. Something formless had been troubling her for months now. She did not know what. She was only just beginning to realize that it was there, that she also had a tiny voice trying to communicate something to her. But she loved her husband and she still tingled beneath his touch.

“I think we can do something about your mood,” David said. She looked at him and saw that he had the devil in his eye. Suddenly he began to tickle her, and she thrashed wildly in the sheets, breaking into gales of laughter.

“Oh, stop it,” she cried. “We’ll wake the kids.”

“Then we’ll just have to be a little more quiet,” he returned as he kissed her again and drew her into his arms.

On the following Monday at nine o’clock in the morning David Macauley set out in his Volvo for Fen-church St. Jude. According to his instructions he was to meet Brad Hollister at an intersection of two roads known locally as Nobby Fork. The purpose of this, Brad had explained, was to protect David from getting lost, for although David had chosen the mile-long strip of bog where they were to dig, the precise location of the camp was deep in a labyrinth of country lanes in a valley that held both Fenchurch St. Jude and Hovern Bog and was known to geologists as the greater Devon basin. Although it was almost noon when he reached Nobby Fork, the sun had not yet cut through the cloud cover, and a veil of early morning mist still lay over the land. He found Brad standing beneath a tree, framed by a sheath of fog that made him look very much like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

The younger man spotted the car coming and waved. He was tall, standing over six feet, broad-shouldered, and slim but muscular, with a mane of shiny black hair and a neatly trimmed black beard and mustache. He might have looked Mephistophelian had David not known him to be one of the quietest, most gentle individuals he had ever met.

“Professor Macauley,” the younger man greeted him as he got into the Volvo.

“How are you, Brad?” David returned. “Boy, sure is spooky with all this fog about.”