‘What are you going to do?’
‘We? We will dance up and down the River, bringing news of the coming of Lord Death to all who will listen. Eventually there will be many more of us, even on your side of the River. Death is here, Death like we have never seen. Perhaps it will take the Huastecas too, and they will join us in our dances. Perhaps we shall all die soon. It is the End Time. Will you join us in our dances?’
I thought of what the Woodpecker God had said, and looked at the dead village. I felt Took’s weight on my back.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Perhaps we will meet again. I have to give Took back to his people.’
‘A happy death to you, then,’ said Moe. He started to walk away, then turned. ‘Thank you for saving me from the slab so I could see the triumph of Lord Death.’ Then he rejoined the shuffling dancers – two steps left, half step, two steps right, his crying skull tattoos shining in the morning sun.
I found Moe’s canoe at the landing, put Took-His-Time in the bow and paddled across the water, every muscle aching, fatigue hallucinations jumping at the corners of my eyesight. The River was a bright sheet of mud. More and more buzzards were circling in the skies, west of the River. Perhaps the dancing of Moe’s people was keeping them out of the deserted village, maybe something else.
The people were easy to find. A few skin huts stood on a small bluff half a kilometer down and across the waters.
I put in to the landing where other canoes lay. Somebody blew a conch horn. I carried Took up the bluff across my arms. A small crowd gathered.
I saw familiar faces. Coming toward me in Sun Man’s robes was his nephew on his sister’s side. I looked past him to the far corner of the huts where a clearing had been made. In the center was a small mound covered with charcoal. Past it the three woodpecker effigies stood blank and silent.
I heard crying, and Sunflower came up to me, touching Took’s body with her hands. I carried him toward the charcoaled mound, still warm from Sun Man’s funeral. Sunflower helped me straighten the body. Others went to the hut and brought back a handful of Took’s unfinished pipes.
We arranged them around his head and on his chest. Someone brought a torch. We put a few dried limbs and chips on him, and dragged some brush over to the mound.
Then I pulled off the woodpecker outfit, beak upward, and placed it on top of Took-His-Time, and was handed the torch.
‘He told me to tell you,’ I said, and lit the costume which burst into flames, ‘that He is gone.’ I pushed brush onto the fire, then went to the woodpecker effigies. I pulled and pushed one and lay it across the flames. Then another and the other, straining and sweating under their weight.
Then we stood and watched the smoke and flames rise into the buzzard-dotted sky. Sunflower cried beside me. Sometime before the flames died down, six days and nights of fatigue crashed over me, and I slid down into bright blue dreams.
THE BOX XVII
Smith’s Diary
This will be it.
The diary goes in the box with the official stuff and the beacon. I hope someone finds it.
It is quiet out there, and a starry night.
They are out there, more of them than we ever thought there could be. They seem to have been coming for days, from all directions, and now they are ready.
They mean to kill us all, or make slaves of us – whatever it is they do.
I can’t blame them, but I don’t want to die either, so far away from everything. We will kill each other tomorrow.
Hennesey is ready. God have mercy on us, and them too. We can’t help being what we are. Neither can they.
We tried.
DA FORM 12003
18 April am
Pres dty
34
KIA
76
KLdy
8
MIA
13 B. F. Jones /M. Smith
MLDyAst Sta Chief /CWO1 RA
2 CIA /act Comm.
AWOL Civilian contgt/US Army Gp.
1
Bessie XIV
The Box lay on the table in the humidity-controlled room in the University museum.
The team slowly opened it around the cracked place, removing the chipped shellac and pitch until they could get to the seams and pry them.
The wood came off in slips thin and pliable as paper.
It took hours to get it open.
Inside was rot and maché. There were hard flat disks that could not be moved. They had become part of the box walls.
There was a book, its covers ghosts, its pages spiderwebs, but they could see words. There was a ream of paper solid as a butcher block. There was a small black box gone to sludge, with metal inside showing dimly through.
‘It’ll take months to dry the pages and separate them,’ said the curator.
‘We’ve got nothing but time,’ said Bessie.
THE BOX XVIII
On the side of the box, beneath the coat of pitch hardened to an amberlike material, and the cracked layer that had once been shellac, was a message in smeared grease penciclass="underline"
KILROY WAS HERE
and underneath, another hand had written
BUT NOT FOR MUCH LONGER
Bessie XV
Light cold rain pattered against the top of the bluff. The wind was from the north. Cold gusts whipped Bessie’s rubberized raincoat against her legs. The weather had changed. There would be sleet before nightfall, possibly snow by tomorrow night. The weather was as crazy as the rest of the year had been.
She looked down at the dark waters of the bayou. The top of the mounds was already under four feet of water – all the work of the summer obliterated as if it were a slate wiped clean. There was nothing left of the site but the specimens in the museum, her and Kincaid’s notes, the Box. All the trenching and leveling, the work, the coffer dam against the rising flood was down there, known to catfish and gar.
There must have been a last stand and a final massacre. Just over there had been where the Box was buried. Right down there were the mounds where the old chief had had their bodies piled and the heads taken home. It was also where they brought him back when he died and buried him some years later, on top of the dead in their mounds, next to their horses.
Two cultures must have clashed here, neither able to understand the other, or help the other. A small drama in the scheme of things. Now traces of both were gone, relics of two doomed groups. One wiped out by their ancestors, the ancestors themselves then swept aside by the roll of time.
Bessie shivered for the future, for all futures. She leaned against Captain Thompson, who was lost in his own thoughts.
‘None of it was fair,’ she said.
‘Of course not.’ He watched the sleeted waters of the bayou.
‘They should have let us find out more. They should have closed down the whole state. They should have let Baton Rouge drown. They …’
‘You know all of it, don’t you?’ he asked.
‘No! I want to find out why it happened. I want to understand!’
‘They killed each other. They couldn’t get along.’
‘No. The ones from the future, up there. Why couldn’t they have been wiser, kinder? Something? They came from a time when …’