Orphan of Creation (12 page)

<>

It is scarce worth mentioning the difficulties of the project I described. Any Reader who has traveled so far along in this Journal, indeed, any Person who has ever witnessed the behavior of the White Race toward the Negro, knows full well the catalog of indignities, the discourtesies and acts of violence both committed and threatened; the insidious and endless Legal tangles that might be thrown up in the face of a Negro audacious enough to purchase his former owner’s home. I had returned to my native town intent only on setting up a commercial stable, but when, on my arrival, I learned that Ambrose Gowrie had recently died a bankrupt and his lands and home were the court’s to sell as a means of satisfying the creditors, it occurred to me that I was the only person with a purse large enough to buy.

Indeed, I think it safe to say that scarce any Negro ever dared try any such a thing. Few to my knowledge did, and grim though the fact is, of that small number, I believe only I myself succeeded—or even survived.

The period of Reconstruction was a time of such great and heady chaos in this land that I myself can scarce credit all that I saw in my travels, both good and ill: Proud Negro soldiers of the Union cause; Shattered towns; Landscapes that, years after the battles that made their names immortal, were strewn with bleaching human bones, like so many hideous and infertile seeds sewn by the Reaper of Death.

I rejoiced to see the Slaves’ Auction Block destroyed, but the Northern Carpetbaggers were swarming over the land, forcing whatever agreements they wished on Southerners compelled at the point of a Federal bayonet, to the detriment of all citizens of either race. The Kuklux Klan ran wild, meting out its own rabid mockery of law and justice. In somewhat later years, Negroes (among them myself) from half a dozen Southern states were elected to Serve in the Congress of the United States, a body which could never decide whether to Govern the former Confederate States or simply to wreak vengeance against them. Then the Poll Tax, and the maliciously impossible Literacy Tests, the Klan’s intimidations and a thousand more subtle threats drove the Negro from the Poll, from the schoolhouse, from the Seats of government.

But I digress into bitter topics. Suffice it to say that it was against such a background of a world turned upside down that I bought Gowrie, and secured it. It took the entire fortune I had amassed in trading horses, and recourse to the hiring of a private army made up of discharged Negro soldiers eager to tangle with the Klan’s cowardly night riders.

And it also took an ally, one that I found in a most unlikely place—in the offices of the Gowrie Gazette. The local news paper was in those days a biweekly affair published by one Stephen Teems. Teems was that rare combination, a Southern native and an Abolitionist, a believer—at least in principle—of the equality of the races.

It was Teems, who was not only a publisher and journalist, but a lawyer trained before the War at Harvard, who searched the land titles, cleared my deeds, made each legal document a paragon of perfection, and used the law to compel the Federal occupiers who were not altogether willing to help.

<>

Livingston closed the old book and thought for a moment. Documents. That was it. Somewhere, somehow, in the old family records, maybe there were the deeds and receipts that would mention the creatures. One thing they were sorely lacking at this point was information. Maybe there were more surprises concerning those old bones lying around among the old family papers. He went off to find Great-aunt Josephine and pester her until she showed him where to look.

<>

When people think of the Smithsonian, they usually think only of the grand museums that bear that name. But the public areas of the museums are the smallest part of the whole. Behind the vast exhibit halls are endless scientific, scholarly, and artistic endeavors, from astronomy and stamp collecting to puppeteering and violin playing.

Even when people
do
think of the scholars and scientists who work in those grand museums and in the labs and offices behind the scene, they have a natural but totally erroneous tendency to assume that the grandeur extends beyond the public view. They think of gleaming labs full of astonishing equipment, of serene scientists in their ever-present lab coats, toiling over their experiments on acres of shining formica. They imagine imposing offices, control panels full of quietly blinking lights, and reading rooms of polished oak.

Barbara couldn’t speak for the whole endless establishment, but she knew just how far from the truth that image was for the Department of Anthropology. Anthro was jammed into part of the overcrowded third floor of the cavernous Natural History Museum.

There were strange things there, behind the scenes at Natural History. Somewhere in the building was a carefully caged and isolated colony of
Dermestidae lardarius
—alias museum beetles, alias larder beetles. Those strange and voracious bugs would swarm over a corpse and eat
everything
—except bone. They used the museum beetles for cleaning small animal skeletons. A dead carcass would be left in with the beetles for them to swarm over like insect piranha, and in a day or so nothing would remain but the gleaming bones. The staff taxidermists lived in dread of the beetles escaping into the exhibits and devouring all the mounted specimens.

Anthro had its own strange features. Long rows of shelves lined the hallways of the third floor there, running floor to ceiling. Endless identical wooden boxes the size of a small suitcase lined the shelves—each with a disarticulated human skeleton inside. All told, there were thirty thousand skeletons in the massive reference collection, packed away wherever they might fit.

The living, breathing scientists were packed in nearly as tight as the dear departed. The lower-ranking scientists were crammed in with each other, four or five desks stuffed into rooms intended for two. The main workroom was even worse, the desks there even more banged up and crowded together. A small, dusty table was wedged up by the window for the sorting and organizing of specimens. Bookcases sprouted everywhere, reaching for the old-fashioned high, white-painted ceilings, their shelves filled to bursting with papers, boxes full of bones from the reference collections, and of course, books. Books were everywhere. Books neatly put away, books stacked up precariously, books left open to a key page, books closed up and waiting forlornly for someone to come along and remove dozens of improvised bookmarks.

To such a place—scruffy, untidy, disorganized, full of the fruits of learning and learning yet to be sown, grown, and harvested, Barbara took the precious cargo she had carried from Mississippi. She set down the hatbox on the papers that hid her desk and started trying to clear some sort of work space on the sorting table. She paused for a minute and looked over the overheated, drafty, musty, dusty place. They called it the Diggers’ Pit, and it deserved the name. She smiled. It was nice to be back.

<>

Fifteen minutes later she was balanced on a rickety revolving-seat stool, perched in front of the sorting table. She was most carefully working a compressed-air gun over the pitted surface of the cranium, the compressor’s motor humming and throbbing a demented background rhythm. She wanted to be sure to blow out as much dirt and crud as possible before treating the fragile bone with a toughening preservative. The tricky part was in emptying the braincase, which was full of loosely packed dirt. It was slow, delicate work that required pure, focused concentration. That sort of work was good therapy, just what she needed right now. Small details drove the grand issues out of her mind. When she was trying to break up that last big clump of dirt, she couldn’t think of what finding this fellow meant, or what Grossington was deciding back in his office. The skull was lying upside down in front of her. She carefully eased the nozzle of the air gun into the foramen magnum, the hole at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord reached into the brain.

She hit the trigger, and with a rattling sigh, the cranium gave up a big cloud of compacted dirt. She lifted the cranium up, poured the loosened dirt out, and decided to work on the teeth. She re-arranged the soft cloth she was using to support the skull and set the cranium back down right-side up.

Once again she stared into the expressionless grin of the skull, and felt a warm, happy feeling inside. The search for a good specimen can take a lifetime, and luck is a tremendously important part of the job. A few shards of bone can be the only concrete results of a career, the sole source of a reputation, the single reward of a life of work wandering the world in search of our ancestors. Diggers develop an emotional attachment to their finds, and at times become rather sentimental about them.

There was a long tradition of nicknaming famous fossils. The Leakeys and his “Dear Boy” and “Mrs. Ples,” Johansen with “Lucy,” so named because someone in camp played a tape of the Beatles’ “Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds” the night she was found, all the way back to the first australopithecine ever found, Dart’s “Taung Baby.” It struck Barbara that
this
fellow needed a name. Her first impulse was “Zebulon,” but she realized that her family would take a dim view of naming some monkey after their ancestor. Then she thought of the perfect name: Ambrose. After Ambrose Gowrie, the slavemaster who had bought the poor creature. She could make a monkey out of Ambrose safely enough. That settled, she happily went on with her work.

She switched back and forth, between the compressed-air gun and a soft, worn toothbrush, as she cleaned all the convoluted surfaces of the teeth. It was her first real chance to get a look at the teeth of her new friend here, and for a paleoanthropologist, it was a breathtaking view. Because the teeth are the hardest part of the body, they are generally the best preserved—often they are all that a scientist has to work with.

Since they are frequently all that Mother Nature will surrender up, the teeth are the most commonly and thoroughly studied hominid remains. At times, a canine or a molar or two is all that has been known of a hominid species. Because teeth are scratched and worn as their owner lives his or her life, a scientist can read a large part of the owner’s biography off the pits and grooves worn into the enamel of a single tooth. Roughly how old the specimen was at death, what sort of diet it had, patterns of chewing, the power of the jaws that moved the teeth, whether chewing was side-to-side or up-and-down; all that and more can be divined from a single tooth.

All too often, those are the only clues available at all, for the rest of the creature—fur, skin, muscle, small bones, long bones, skull—is usually washed away in the currents of time, leaving but a few bits of enamel, a few grams of worn, grimy bone, as the only proof that any such animal ever lived.

And Barbara, working with her worn-out toothbrush, was face to face with the crown jewels of australopithecine teeth. By the size of the canines, their owner had probably been a male; by the notable degree of wear on the massive wisdom teeth, indicating they had erupted sometime well before death, a male of about, say, twenty-two, twenty-six years old. That much she knew at a glance. She longed to get these teeth under a microscope and examine the wear-marks, literally read the menu of Ambrose’s diet there.

It was a quiet, special, warm moment, in its own odd little way, a time of intimacy between Barbara and Ambrose the empty skull, the dead shards of bone whispering their secrets to the live person. It was such moments that made diggers say the bones could talk to them, as if some remnant of life, some fragment of spirit, clung to the fossils to converse with the stifled romantics who freed the fossils from their imprisonment in the earth.

It was slowly dawning on Barbara that Ambrose would take her into the history books. She stared at the relic of the past and saw the promise of a bright future. The naked bones and teeth seemed to take on a welcoming, benevolent expression. She touched that massive brow ridge again, and it was almost the sensation she had often felt as a child in church; of a kindly presence close but unseen, near at hand but unspeaking.

But then, suddenly, the door at her back bounced open, slammed shut, and the moment was shattered. “Good morning, Doctor!” a loud voice boomed out from behind her.

Barbara almost visibly drew into herself, winced, her stomach muscles tightening. She took a moment to compose her face before she spun around on her stool to face Rupert Maxwell, Ph.D., P.I.T.A. That was how she had thought of him when he had first arrived a few months before—as such a massive Pain In The Ass he
must
have studied, earned a degree in it. The more winning aspects of his personality had taken a long time to shine through, and his usual booming entrance was enough to make her forget everything nice she had ever thought about him. She forced herself to calmness, determined not to let his brashness destroy her good mood.

She put a smile on and turned to face him, keeping her body between the skull and Rupert. “Hello, Rupert. How was your Thanksgiving?”

He grinned from behind his mirrored sunglasses and laughed. He was a big, tall, birdlike man, with a surfer’s tan and short-cropped blond hair that stood up from his head bottle-brush straight. He was dressed in a white sport coat, a dark blue shirt and a microscopically thin red tie, black slacks, and cowboy boots. Barbara often wondered if his outfits were the result of careful thought in the art of clashing, or simply random selection from his closet. “Great Thanksgiving,” he said as he threaded his way toward her through the labyrinth of desks, “except for three leftover turkey TV dinners. Ended up eating Chinese with some friends instead. Only people in the restaurant.”