Trudy turned toward the Clovis display, the place where Peabody had housed nearly every major Clovis artifact he’d discovered, and I decided to move on before Peabody’s life’s work took another blow. But before I could move, Trudy and I locked eyes. She kept speaking to her class, but her gaze was directed at me. “Beyond the sexism, I ask you to notice the Nordic features these Clovis are imbued with. I needn’t remind you that when we speak of the Clovis we’re talking about the original Asian Invasion. And, of course, all of humanity came from Africa. In the end, this exhibit is more about the Northern European male who created it than the culture he thought he was depicting.”
I stomped down the stairs. Near the front entrance, I leaned against a vending machine and pulled on my blizzard overalls. My shoe wouldn’t go through the pant leg, and I hopped, frustrated, in place. Had I taught my graduate students no respect? Had they learned from me to mock their predecessors? I fell against the gaudy machine and nearly tore my pants.
The process shook a Snickers down from one of the racks, and I pocketed the candy bar.
Outside, the weather was changing again. Above, like a bank of fog, a snow front was baby-crawling toward us, like the drunk who would have to spend the night. I set off to find Eggers and his “bad news,” but my mind conjured the way Peabody had once described the sandstorms that swept across North Africa, weighty curtains of wind, laden with gypsum and bone dust and clay, these storms that hid Rommel.
Before he retired to Florida, Peabody and I spent some time in the field, walking old riverbeds and alluvial terrain. On such excursions, he described the great sites of Alexandria, of Egypt and the sub-Nile. This, to a person who as a boy, when his house felt lifeless, went down by the park and used a stick to wheedle through old Lakota mounds. There was nothing left of value, of course, but with every shard of stone or flute of bone, my imagination took one more step into a past world where a family like mine got along fine without soap operas, insurance meetings, and sales junkets. In this world, when a father went off across the plains to trade, his goodbye meant something, because he might not return, and he’d have to use every skill in his power to ensure he didn’t let his family down. And in this other mother’s eyes were signs she considered the unthinkable every time he left; in that way, he could never really leave her.
So I was a sucker for Peabody’s khaki pants and walking stick, his head of swaggering gray hair. He was a man of the field, restless in the classroom, perhaps restless in South Dakota, but he wasn’t leaving this place without a legacy. Like my own father, Peabody was probably a loner at heart, but he spoke my language and paid attention to me. In the semester between my arrival and his departure, Peabody dropped in on my digs and looked over my shoulder, out of sheer curiosity and camaraderie. He asked my opinion. He approved of my book. So, after his Hawaiian-shirt retirement party, and his plane flight to Tampa, when we never heard from him again, not even a postcard, it was in the Hall of Man that I felt he resided. I’ve tried to picture him on a Floridian pier, fishing in that blue aloha shirt we gave him, cigar in mouth, but I can’t really conjure it. He must be over eighty now, most likely dead, and I suspect I’ll never know his fate. But as you pick through the bones of the past, you have to keep in mind that you’ll never really know another human’s story. The point of anthropology is not discovery, but learning to tolerate the unknown.
By the time I reached Eggers’ lodge, the first flakes were dropping — so heavy and thick they seemed to stand in the air and let their shadows fall. Eggers didn’t exactly have a doorbell, and there was no place to knock. I cleared my throat a couple times. There was a rustling around inside, and then Eggers emerged.
“I’ve been waiting for you, Dr. Hannah. You won’t believe what I’m going to show—” Eggers stopped and stared at me. “You okay, Dr. Hannah? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
His long hair was completely frizzed from the bath that morning, and his skin whistled of Irish Spring. But in his eye I detected genuine concern.
“Oh, I was just getting nostalgic,” I said. “The past is a trap, my young friend, and we should only go there armed with shovels and torches.”
“Sure,” Eggers said, “sure.”
He was nodding his head, but the look of concern hadn’t gone away.
Suddenly the flap to his lodge opened, and a young woman appeared, face sooty. Her parka was wide open. She didn’t suppress her smile.
“See ya, Brent,” she said, and dashed off through the snow.
We didn’t say anything for a moment. Then I put a hand on Eggers’ bison poncho. “I understand that you’ve got this technology pact, but you are using condoms, aren’t you?”
“Dr. Hannah, please,” he protested. “She’s a journalism major. She writes for the school paper.”
I gave him one of my father’s grunts, and we set out across campus for my excavation van, which was a beauty — blue-and-white striped, with rear doors and blue-curtained windows all the way around. It had the total package — luggage rack, air-cushioned captain’s seats, and cup holders everywhere. I kept all my digging gear in it, and I had the thing rigged so I could live out of it for weeks.
Of course, going somewhere with Eggers meant driving three miles an hour while he walked beside. I found that turning on my hazard lights and driving on the opposite shoulder worked best. That way, my van shielded him from errant cars, and I could roll down my driver’s-side window and conduct a fairly normal conversation.
We crawled out of the university, and I had to honk ten times to get us safely through the downtown. Near the defunct mall, Eggers pulled out a piece of chert and began pressure-flaking some design, using a percussive back-cutting technique common to the Clovis of our area. My headlights were on, and there was enough snow to hit the wipers every now and then.
“God, turn the station,” Eggers said.
This was a familiar refrain. The country was too country, the pop too pop. I tuned the radio to a gospel broadcast and found the call and response soothing.
“You’re killing me,” he said, doing some delicate strikes with the antler tip. “Try KROK, eighty-nine-point-one.”
I turned it off.
“Eggers,” I said, “do you think Old Man Peabody was a sexist?”
Absorbed in his carving, he wasn’t even watching where he stepped, his furry boots trudging through snow and slush alike. “You mean the guy who made the Hall of Man and filled it with naked women?” Eggers shrugged. “I never met the dude, but you have to admit that he was an ankle man — that’s one thing that didn’t need to evolve, in his opinion.”
We crept along for a while, passing the farm-equipment dealership, and after this it would all be frosted fields of broken stalks and strands of corn silk frozen to the fence lines. Cars shot past us on their way to the casino.
“You ever try to make a fertility idol?” I asked.
“Clovis weren’t really into the fertility thing, were they? Isn’t that more up the Inuit alley?”
The visibility kept dropping. I had the van in low gear, so it idled at just the right speed. All I had to do was steer. I threw a foot up on the dash.
“Yeah, I tried to make one, a long time ago,” I told him. “It came out more like a rabbit — you know, short arms, big legs. Without the ears, of course.”
“This here’s a whale,” Eggers said. “You wouldn’t think it, but it’s hard as hell. A whale’s just an oblong thing, kind of formless. What’s to carve?”
“What’re you making a whale for?”
Eggers examined it closely — its shape was blocky and vague.