Effigies (2 page)

He led them through the back door of the farmhouse, through a kitchen where a stout middle-aged woman with Oka Hofobi’s broad face hovered over a frying pan. Covering her gray business suit, she wore a blue gingham apron trimmed with chicken-scratch embroidery. A pair of black pumps had been kicked into a corner.

“Ma, I didn’t know you were home from work. Meet my friends. Toneisha, Bodie, Faye, Joe—meet my mom. And her cooking.” He dodged her spatula, snagging crispy yellow rounds of fried squash off the serving platter at her elbow and handing them around for everybody to taste. “This is why I live at home in my old age.”

“You live at home because you can step out the door and dig up a career’s worth of my ancestors’ house goods before breakfast. Then, because I don’t have good sense, I scramble your eggs before I go to work.” She shoved the platter in the general direction of her guests and handed them all forks. “Invite your friends to stay for dinner. Right now, I need to get out of this skirt.” She picked up her dress shoes and headed down the hall.

“Stay for dinner?” he asked the group. “I don’t know what she’s cooking, but most of it will be fried. And it’ll taste really great.”

“Sounds like your cooking,” Faye muttered to Joe, but no one else heard her because they were all accepting the offer with the enthusiasm of poor, hungry students.

A screen door slammed, and a tall Choctaw man with stooped shoulders and a lined face walked in. Mrs. Nail’s kitchen was spacious, in the old-timey farmhouse style, but it was crowded with chattering young people. Faye was struck by Mr. Nail’s economy of movement as he navigated through the crowd without brushing up against anyone, without making eye contact, and without speaking. Loosening his tie as he walked, the older man disappeared down the hall.

Faye looked uncertainly at Oka Hofobi, wondering what to make of his father’s behavior. The young archaeologist seemed determined to give her no clue.

“Come see my treasures,” he said, jerking his head toward a door that led into the farmhouse’s front room.

“I dug those up when I was a little kid,” he said, gesturing toward a stupendous collection of spear points and scrapers, “and I mistreated them royally. One of my favorite things was to strap the points to sticks and spear roly-poly bugs with them. I feel pretty bad about the bugs, these days. Good thing most of them were too fast for me.” Opening a glass-fronted display case, he pulled out some exquisitely incised potsherds. “Then I grew up a little, and I started reading about the right way to do archaeology. And I developed some taste.”

Each artifact was numbered, just as it would be in a museum. The stack of field notebooks stored with them gave Faye a weird pang of familiarity, as if she’d run into her best friend while traveling in a foreign land. She had display cases just like Oka Hofobi’s, filled with artifacts dug from her own family’s property. He even used the same brand of field notebook that she did. Except he’d spent his childhood digging up relics from the dawn of his own civilization, and she’d spent hers unearthing the slave cabins where her ancestors had been held captive.

Oka Hofobi’s mother showed Dr. Mailer and Chuck into the room, and the newly formed team enjoyed a good half-hour fondling the goods in anticipation of finding some treasures of their own.

When Faye noticed Joe moving toward the window, she wasn’t sure whether he’d reached the end of his attention span, or whether he was feeling crowded in a room with so many people, or whether the outdoors was simply calling him. Since she was the one who kept coming up with reasons for Joe to leave their Florida home on Joyeuse Island and be with strangers, she sidled over to make sure he was okay.

It turned out that Joe had been called to the window by a sunset made more splendid by a blue-black thunderhead that roiled bigger by the minute. But it wasn’t the colorful sky that held him there. Pointing with his chin, he silently called Faye’s attention to the flat-topped mound that rose from the property across the road from Oka Hofobi’s house. It stood on the far side of a soybean field at the edge of a heavily wooded area. Unlike Nanih Waiya, it had not been cleared of the trees that rose through its flanks. The underbrush covering the mound served as camouflage, so that it could hide in plain sight. It stood in full view of the rural highway that wound through this area, where many people surely saw this large and ancient structure every day without paying it much attention.

Oka Hofobi saw them peering out the window. “One day, I’d love to excavate that. My neighbor, Mr. Calhoun, caught me sneaking around over there when I was fifteen and he told me to get the hell off his land. It was a good thing he didn’t think to ask me to empty my pockets. Check these out. I found them in the rootball of a downed tree.”

He opened another case and pulled out two nondescript clay balls. They weren’t molded into a complex shape or thrown on a wheel. They weren’t incised with intricate patterns. They weren’t even pretty, but Faye took in a sharp breath while everyone around her erupted with exclamations like, “Hey!” and “Look at that!” and “No shit!”

The two brown lumps were cooking balls typical of the Poverty Point culture, which meant that they could be fifteen hundred years older than the Middle Woodland site that Oka Hofobi had mined for the other artifacts in the room. The cooking balls were so ubiquitous at Poverty Point sites that archaeologists called them PPOs, short for Poverty Point Objects.

Oka Hofobi handed one of the balls to Faye. It felt warm and comfortable in her hand. Perhaps three and a half millennia had passed since someone leaned down and scooped up a lump of clay, squeezed it into a ball, then threw it in the fire. She could feel the contours left by that long-decayed hand. Narrow depressions where slender fingers had squeezed the earth were divided by ridges formed where the clay had squished up between those fingers. This was the soul of archaeology for Faye—forging a human connection with the past.

“Now I can’t say for sure Mr. Calhoun’s mound is as old as we’re all thinking it is. All I’ve got is these two cooking balls. Maybe they came from somewhere else…”

“You’re thinking maybe they flew?” Toneisha asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe Mr. Calhoun’s great-grandfather traveled all over the state, building a collection of arrowheads and artifacts. Maybe when he died, his kids spread them over the mound in his memory.”

Every eyebrow in the room was raised in skepticism.

“Okay. Maybe they’re cooking balls and they were made right here, but they’re more recent than we’re thinking. My point is that out-of-context artifacts aren’t likely to tell us what we want to know. We just can’t know how old that mound is.”

Bodie spoke for them all when he lunged for the window, looked out at the mound, and said, “To hell with this site. Let’s go dig over
there
.”

Oka Hofobi was shaking his head. “Mr. Calhoun wouldn’t—”

“It wouldn’t hurt to ask,” Toneisha pointed out, reaching for the cooking ball in Faye’s hand.

Someone was out walking in the soybean field. Dr. Mailer’s face lit up when he saw the man who owned the coveted mound. “No, it can’t hurt to ask. And there’s no time like the present.” He grabbed his hat and was out the front door.

Oka Hofobi trailed him, explaining why this expedition was a poor idea. “He’s watching birds. That’s what he likes to do every afternoon, and we shouldn’t disturb him. He doesn’t take well to strangers, either, and…”

Faye could see that the poor guy might as well be talking to Mr. Calhoun’s birds. The professor was on a mission.

Faye, like Oka Hofobi, knew how to behave in a rural setting. Dr. Mailer needed to strike up a casual acquaintance with Mr. Calhoun, and he needed to do it when the farmer wasn’t enjoying time alone with his feathered friends. He needed to ask him to recommend a good catfish house, then he needed to go there with him and put away a nice little stack of fried filets, with creamy cole slaw on the side. Before he asked a favor this big, Mr. Calhoun’s dog should wag his tail when he saw the archaeologist coming. Dr. Mailer should know the name of the man’s dog. His wife’s name, too. As things stood, he didn’t even know Mr. Calhoun’s first name, but he was planning to introduce himself and then, in the same breath, ask for a major incursion into the man’s property rights.

Dr. Mailer was an intelligent and educated man, but he was born and raised in Houston. When it came to the traditional ways of rural Southerners, he didn’t have a clue. Toneisha, who was urging him on in his headlong quest to alienate the whole countryside, was a city girl from Memphis, so she was just as naïve. Chuck had already proved himself lacking in the most basic people skills, but the rest of them knew an impending train wreck when they saw one. They trailed after their supervisor, unable to stop him and unable to look away.

They crossed the road amid the flutter of multi-colored wings. Mr. Calhoun rose from a lawn chair carefully placed at the boundary between field and forest. Sliding his binoculars into the case hanging by its strap from the chair’s arm, he started walking toward them. A good-sized man in height and breadth, he still carried a lot of muscle mass for a man who looked to be seventy or more. He wasn’t smiling.

“Oka Hofobi,” he said, “you’re a smart boy. I didn’t think I needed to run you off my land but once.”

“No, sir, I learned that lesson a long time ago. I just thought you might want to get acquainted with my colleagues. They’ll be working with me across the road. On my family’s land.”

“It’s your daddy’s business what happens on his land. Though I don’t imagine the Choctaws will be any too happy to have these people mucking around in their ancestors’ bones.”

“I’ve never found a burial in all my years on that land. If I ever do, I know the law and I know my people’s ways. I went to school a long time so I’d know how to do things right.” He didn’t ask for permission to dig on Calhoun’s land, which Faye knew was the right decision. She hoped Dr. Mailer would recognize the wisdom of earning trust slowly.

Her hopes were dashed. The professor stepped forward and grasped the old farmer’s hand enthusiastically. “Sid Mailer here. You’ve got a beautiful place here, and that mound behind you is absolutely stupendous. Is there a chance in the world that we could talk about my crew excavating over there?”

“No.” The monosyllable hung in the damp summer air. The thundercloud overhead rumbled without dropping any rain.

Dr. Mailer rubbed his palms together and cocked his head to an angle that signaled how off-balance he felt. Faye wanted to warn him not to tip his hand, but he was an honest man. Nothing was going to stop him from laying his cards on the table and asking for what he wanted. This was the problem with being forthright. Once a man has forced his adversary to say, “No,” it becomes very difficult to find a face-saving way to get to “Yes.”

Dr. Mailer plunged ahead anyway. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind if we just walked over the mound? We wouldn’t dig. We wouldn’t take anything. We just want to look at it.”

Calhoun shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe such a smart man had painted himself into such a tight corner. Faye could hardly believe it herself. Surely the professor could see that the answer to this question had to be “No.” But that wasn’t the answer that came out of Calhoun’s mouth. Instead he said only, “If that mound wasn’t standing over there, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, now, would we?”

Then he slung his binoculars around his neck, folded his lawn chair, and walked away.

The archaeologists exchanged uncertain looks before turning to go back to the Nail house. As they skirted Mr. Calhoun’s soybean field, dusk spread through air that was oppressive with humidity. Spreading oak trees threw shadows over the Nail house, and Faye could see something flickering in those shadows. It was a lit cigarette, arcing through the air as Oka Hofobi’s father raised it to his mouth, took a deep drag, and lowered it to his side, again and again. He stood watching until his son led the archaeological crew across the road, then he disappeared into the house. He was nowhere to be seen when they trooped through the front door, and he never reappeared, not for dinner, and not during the high-spirited conversation that filled the dining room afterward. From time to time during that conversation, Faye noticed Oka Hofobi’s eyes stray toward the darkened hallway that must lead to the house’s bedrooms.

Chapter Two

Faye’s hopes that Mrs. Nail would cook some traditional Choctaw foods were quickly dashed. She’d had hominy once, cooked outdoors with pork and chicken, and she’d enjoyed its soul-satisfying taste. The very notion of
banaha
fascinated her. She’d been told that Choctaw cooks made
banaha
by mixing field peas and corn meal together, then wrapping the resulting mush into corn husks and boiling them. It was as if Mexican tamales had been transported to the Deep South, then adapted to available ingredients—and perhaps they had. The trade routes of America’s indigenous cultures had snaked far and wide. Why wouldn’t a tasty, nutritious recipe make its way across a continent?

But there was no
banaha
on the Nails’ table. Only a tremendous platter of fried chicken and a wealth of vegetables fresh out of the garden. Several chickens had given their all for this spread. And quite a few cobs had been scraped clean to fill the bucket-sized bowl of cut-off corn. Not to mention the bushel of squash that had been sliced, rolled in corn meal, and fried.

The table had been set for eight, but when Oka Hofobi’s older brother appeared, Mrs. Nail had hurriedly squeezed a ninth chair into place. The long, broad farmhouse table easily accommodated the crowd. Breathless, Mrs. Nail had said, “Davis, introduce yourself,” then disappeared into the kitchen.

Davis seemed taken aback to find a crowd of strangers at his mother’s table. He looked a great deal like Mr. Nail, minus the stooped shoulders and wrinkles. Tall and lean, the muscles in his shoulders and chest showed clearly through a tee-shirt that read
Choctaw Fire Department
.

Davis wasn’t a big talker. Mrs. Nail, who seemed to be the only big talker in her family, was busy in the kitchen, so Faye took it upon herself to break the awkward silence. “I’m Faye. Are you a firefighter?” she asked.

“Yes,” was his succinct answer, but Mrs. Nail’s voice wafted out of the kitchen. “And a paramedic, too.”

Academia was Dr. Mailer’s natural habitat, so he knew how to pick up this conversational ball. “Where do you train for that kind of career?”

“The Mississippi Fire Academy gives the introductory course. And you can take specialized courses like emergency medical care, if you want to move up.”

Mrs. Nail bustled in, plunked a gallon pitcher of iced tea on the table, and gave a meaningful nod toward several framed Fire Academy certificates hanging on the dining room wall. They were almost lost among several dozen framed family photos, mostly of round-cheeked, smiling children.

“Then he went to the community college to be a paramedic,” she added, taking her seat at the table. The comment was unnecessary, since Davis’ community college degree was prominently displayed. Faye also spotted Oka Hofobi’s Ph.D., and five high school diplomas. She felt like she knew Mrs. Nail very well, considering that they’d just met, because her own mother never saw a picture of Faye that she didn’t want to share with the world.

Faye poured herself a glass of tea and took a sip. There was so much sugar dissolved in it that a spoon could have stood upright, unaided, in the brew. And it was so strong that the tannins would have dissolved said spoon. Just the way Faye’s mama had taught her to make it. Maybe her mother and Mrs. Nail were twins, separated at birth.

She squinted at the high school diploma with Davis’ name on it. It had been issued by the Cherokee school in North Carolina. Another one with a similar design, but obviously older, hung on the far wall of the dining room. “I see you went to North Carolina for high school. What took you there? Did they have a program for kids who wanted to be firefighters?”

Davis glanced at his mother. “No. Ma wanted one of us to go to her alma mater. I was the lucky one.”

“I’m from Hickory. That’s not so far from Cherokee,” Bodie said, “but it’s a long way from here. What took you so far from home?”

“In my day, there wasn’t any other way to finish school,” Mrs. Nail explained. “The reservation school just went through the eighth grade. We weren’t allowed to go to local schools, either black or white, only to schools run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and they’re all far away. My folks sent me to Cherokee. It changed my life.”

“It changed Davis’ life, too,” Oka Hofobi said. His tone wasn’t brotherly.

Within five minutes, Davis had cleaned his plate and taken it into the kitchen. Like his father, he managed to pass back through the crowded dining room without making eye contact and without brushing against his brother or his mother or any of their guests. Without a sound, he disappeared down the same hallway where his father had staged his own retreat.

The dinner table conversation had stumbled after Davis left, but Mrs. Nail and Dr. Mailer were heroic talkers. They’d wrestled the conversation into submission.

Dr. Mailer had launched the first successful strike by admiring the colorful basket that had held a few dozen biscuits before Bodie and Joe got their hands on them.

“Ma made it,” Oka Hofobi volunteered, helping himself to two more biscuits and dousing them with sorghum syrup.

“Did she make all those?” Dr. Mailer asked, gesturing at the row of baskets displayed on a shelf that extended the entire length of one wall.

“Oh, no.” Mrs. Nail shook her head hard to emphasize her denial. “My daughters made those. My baskets are just—well, I use them. Jane and Sarah make baskets that are way too nice for that.”

“That’s because you carted them out to Bogue Chitto about a million times, so that the old women there could show them how it’s done.” Oka Hofobi was clearly enjoying his biscuit-and-syrup dessert.

“Could I see one?” asked Dr. Mailer, ever the scholar. “Do they use traditional methods?”

Mrs. Nail handed him a large basket with a lid, woven in a diamond design. The colors—red, black, yellow, brown, and blue—lit up the room. Toneisha leaned over his shoulder, running her fingers over its tight weave.

“Yes, they use the same methods our people have always used. They cut the swamp cane and split it into lots of thin strips. Then they have to dye the cane before they weave it. It’s getting hard to find swamp cane, but the university’s doing a study on how to plant it. The old women say the planted cane isn’t flexible enough. It won’t split right. I figure the scientists will keep trying.”

“Now, Ma. You left out one thing that’s not traditional, not any more.”

Mrs. Nail eyeballed Oka Hofobi. “You try dyeing cane with berries and bark and ashes.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Oka Hofobi grinned at Toneisha, who was still studying the basket and how it was put together. “When Rit Dye showed up in the grocery stores here, our women knew a good thing when they saw it. That was a few generations back, so I guess commercial coloring
is
a traditional method by now. It must be, because Jane and Sarah are all about Rit Dye.”

Chuck, who hadn’t spoken since they arrived, replenished the syrup on his plate of biscuits.

Oka Hofobi smiled at his mother. “Ma isn’t a basket artist like my sisters, but she knows the old stories. Do you want to hear some? You won’t have to ask her but once.”

They actually asked her two or three times, as Mrs. Nail tried to beg off, saying that she needed to clear the table and start on the dishes.

“Don’t be silly,” Toneisha butted in. “After you cooked this big meal? We’ll do the dishes. You’ve got to spread your stories around. It’s a shame to keep them to yourself.”

So Mrs. Nail gathered herself, folding her hands in her lap to lend a ceremonious air to the occasion. She was as gifted at storytelling as she was at cooking, so the hour grew late before her guests made good on their promise to wash the dishes.