1.
The mine had been abandoned for seventy years before it began to devour the cemetery. Weather is warmer now with more violent storms and rain eroded the edges of the open pit so that trees and bushes skidded down into the red crater. The lane leading to the bottom of the hole had washed away a generation earlier and the edges of the excavation were sheer, laddered with stony ravines cut down to the lake cupped in the mine. There, the water was stagnant, with no outlet, the festering algae floating on the surface pierced by small pyramidal islands of broken rock. No one descended into the open pit any longer, at least until the hillside at the cemetery collapsed and two old pine-wood caskets tobogganed down into the crater. The boxes split open and spilled some fuzzy-looking bones in torn rags across the slope above the pond. What was to be done? No one was sure and there were some who thought that the mess should simply be ignored. The graveyard was also abandoned and its record of interments thought to be lost and, probably, no one alive was related to the cadavers sprawled next to the shattered boxes in the hole. The town, Mount Iron, was poor – when the mines closed, things began to fail – and, so, there was no money to spare for the care and succor of the dead.
Coyotes had returned to the woods around Mount Iron and someone took pictures, posted on You-Tube, showing the animals worrying skeletal parts, femurs and clavicles, beside the filthy water in the crater. This was an outrage. A couple of local hunters took potshots at the coyotes, but they were swift and their fur the color of the landslide on which the coffins had skated down into the pit and the creatures escaped unscathed into the shadows of the ravines sculpted into the hillside. A mortician from a nearby town volunteered his services and. with the help of a power-takeoff on a borrowed tractor, winched the caskets out of the pit. The bodies were treated more gingerly, bones gathered into two black vinyl bags, and, then, dragged out of the crater by members of the volunteer ambulance crew. On the muddy overhang, knit together by tangled roots, a couple more coffins were partly exposed and the cornice of a concrete vault also protruded from the hillside. Common decency required that something be done to remedy the situation.
McGrand University, two-hundred miles away, offered a Summer field school for archaeology students. When a metropolitan newspaper picked up the story of the skeletons sliding into the open pit mine, the anthropology department at McGrand offered to dispatch a professor and crew of students to survey the cemetery and make recommendations. Perhaps, the hillside could be stabilized with a retaining wall or, maybe, the graves most threatened could be moved away from the eroding brink of the mine. If the cemetery was small (and no one knew its precise dimensions), the graves could be moved to some new location, the dead re-buried under new markers if feasible. However, in order to decide the best course, the exact extent of the problem had to be determined and this would require a
field study at the cemetery site.
Professor Willis met with the Mount Iron City Council. He offered the services of the McGrand University Center of Anthropological Studies, the organization through which students were provided with supervised field study opportunities – that is, elective credits that could be applied to a degree in either archaeology or anthropology. Prof. Willis presented a Power-Point to the City Council. Photographs showed students wearing hard-hats and orange safety vests standing next to trays of brown dirt on the site of old trading post, square-cut incisions in sandy soil next to a cold, lethal-looking river. The acronym for the field study services was MUCAS. These letters were embossed on the orange vests and hard-hats that the students sported in the pictures.
“It’s an unfortunate combination of letters,” Professor Willis said.
The City council members tittered nervously.
Professor Willis said that MUCAS specialized in grant-writing and that it was his reasonable expectation that funding through the State Historical Society and other agencies could be accessed.
“MUCAS is non-profit,” he said.
If they approved, work on the field survey could be initiated in May, Professor Willis said. Spring was many weeks away and the landscape was snowy and barren and the drive up to the mining country with its battered, small towns adjacent to red manmade canyons crossed vast tracks of frozen swamp and forest. During the City Council meeting, sleet began to rain from the sky, rattling against the windows of the municipal building, and ice snapped twigs from the trees on the boulevard and caused pickups to spin out at intersections Professor Willis couldn’t drive back to the Cities – it was too dark and icy and road conditions were uncertain. After the meeting, he checked into a motel at the edge of town on the highway. In the motel bar, Professor Willis watched a basketball game on TV and downed a couple beers. Some kids were playing pool and several young women still wearing their outfits from the nursing home where they were employed were gossiping in a booth, a basket of greasy wings in front of them mostly untouched. Professor Willis wondered if any of the people in the bar were the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of the corpses in the eroding cemetery. Who knows about such things? One of the girls wearing lanyard around her neck, turned her dark eyes on Professor Willis, looking at him inquisitively as if she somehow could imagine his thoughts. He turned away from her gaze and saw a basketball dropped cleanly through net and iron hoop.
2.
Prof. Willis was in a slump. He needed the gig at Mount Iron to fortify his resume against recent attack. In lieu of publications, grant-writing that generated revenue for McGrand University seemed his path to tenure. At present, he was on probation and consideration of his tenure was deferred. This was all due to an unpleasant contretemps, as Prof. Willis characterized it, a misunderstanding that had cast him in an unfortunate light.
In his introductory archaeology class, Prof. Willis lectured on the sorts of evidence that scholars might consider to interpret the past and its artifacts. One afternoon, he discussed liaisons with communities related in some way to the people thought to have left behind their traces in the archaeological record. Prof. Willis remarked that oral traditions as to the meaning of artifacts had to be regarded with caution. And he provided an anecdote to this effect.
Prof. Willis recounted that in 1802, Russian warships bombarded a Tlingit village at Sitka. A number of Indians were killed and their village set afire by cannonballs. Obviously, this was a significant and memorable event. But several generations later, when anthropologists worked with the Tlingit to assemble the tribe’s oral history, no one mentioned the naval bombardment eighty years earlier. It seemed that the event had simply been forgotten. Prof. Willis said that this showed that tradition and stories recounting the history of tribal peoples were often self-aggrandizing and highly unreliable.
One of Prof. Willis’ students, an earnest young woman from the suburbs, reported that this lecture was racist and demeaning to Native people and the traditions of their elders. Prof. Willis replied to this complaint, asserting that his remarks were not intended to generally deny the value of oral traditions – stories and legends, he said, had some importance in reconstructing the past but should be regarded with a healthy degree of skepticism. This seemed reasonable enough as a clarification. But Prof. Willis also said that one couldn’t deny facts that were well-established: the scholarly record, fundamental to the work of researchers and professional archaeologists, demonstrated beyond any doubt that the Tlingit had forgotten all about the Russian attack on their fortified village. By this time, the young woman who had made the complaint, had allied herself with faculty who opposed Prof. Willis bid for tenure. (Prof. Willis’ political affiliations were thought questionable, although no one dared mention this.) Through a spokesperson, the complainant said that the Tlingit undoubtedly recalled the catastrophic fire, the shelling, and their many casualties – however, intergenerational trauma prevented the people from speaking to outsiders about those events: why would you entrust this knowledge to your oppressors? Further, smallpox had destroyed much of the tribe and, so, oral traditions were, perhaps, attenuated. But, in any event, a challenge was issued to Professor Willis to produce the scholarly articles attesting to the bombardment falling into oblivion among theTlingit.
Prof. Willis said it would be an easy manner to present those authorities, although, he said, that undoubtedly they would be challenged as colonialist and racist. But, when he searched for the articles that he recalled on this subject, Prof. Willis was dismayed to find that he couldn’t identify a single source for the assertions that he had made so confidently in his lecture. He spent days looking for his source, but it proved elusive – there was nothing in the library, nothing in the professional journals, nothing on the internet to support the notion that the Tlingit had collectively forgotten about the bombardment and ensuing fire. Indeed, to the contrary, he found several pictures showing a totem pole photographed around the turn of the twentieth century that seemed to depict, albeit in highly stylized form, the attack on the village. To the contrary of what he had stated in his lecture, the Tlingit seemed to have a robust memory of the incident. Prof. Willis expanded his search to the histories of other Pacific Northwest tribes – perhaps, the event was a part of Haida history or had occurred at a Chinook or Salish village. Possibly, he had misspoken when he attributed the bombardment and its oblivion in tribal memory to the Tlingit. But he was no more successful with this research than he had been reading Tlingit anthropological accounts. In fact, it seemed that he had made up the whole thing, invented or hallucinated the anecdote and that, perhaps, this was, indeed, some sort of symptom of his own deep-seated racism.
Prof. Willis apologized for his error. Of course, the apology was deemed insincere and not accepted. But, after a couple of semesters, the controversy subsided. The damage had been done. Prof. Willis was discredited and the tenure committee’s considerations were put off indefinitely and, perhaps, some of his supporters (and he was well-liked among many of his colleagues) hoped that he would simply migrate to another position at another college before they would be put to the embarrassment of a vote on this issue.
To his surprise, a graduate student in his department, Tiffany Runs in Light. an enrolled member of the Big Lake Ojibway band, asked him to supervise her doctoral thesis. Prof. Willis was suspicious about her motives, but, during their first meetings, observed nothing unusual. She was cordial, reasonably respectful, and seemed enthusiastic about working him. With her assistance, Prof. Willis wrote several grant applications relating to the Mount Iron cemetery. There was money available through the State Historical Society, also funding on offer from a successful retail corporation with deep roots in the State. Prof. Willis even made an application to the State Arts Council. Perhaps, an oral history could be commissioned to tell the stories of the people buried in the cemetery; a play could be written or a dance company, its members representing the dead, could perform among the renovated graves. Prof. Willis said that the cemetery could be the basis for something like Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Tiffany Runs in Light didn’t know the reference and so Prof. Willis explained it to her.
Grants were approved in short order. The world is full of money waiting to be allocated to worthy causes. The Head of his Department was impressed with Prof. Willis efforts. It seemed that he was on-track again to have his tenure considered during the next academic year.
3.
Tiffany Runs in Light spent several days in the archives of the State Historical Society. Two newspapers had once competed for Mount Iron readers. Only incomplete records remained from those publications, stored on microfiche reels. Tiffany scanned the papers for obituaries. She inferred that a hundred and twenty-five years before the present, hard-rock miners from the underground workings at nearby villages had been recruited to process ore hacked out of the earth at the open pit mine. Most of those miners were immigrants from Serbia, although there was a sizeable contingent of Welsh and Sicilian workers. Workers died and were buried in the Catholic or Protestant cemeteries or at a place called St.Slava. Tiffany wrote down the names of people reported to be buried in that cemetery. On an old plat map, she found that the land next to the crater of the mine was designated as owned “St. Slava PCA.” Inactive business filings with the Secretary of State showed the incorporation of a cemetery association described as “St. Slava Perpetual Care Association.” The cemetery association was formed under legislation that superseded laws applicable to the governing bodies of graveyards founded before 1906. The new association under the revamped law was recognized in 1962; the name of the incorporator, a lawyer named Augustine Morganstern, appeared on the certificate of the association. Tiffany ran a computer search for Morganstern and found that he was still alive, a resident of an Assisted Living facility, the Willows, in Mount Iron.
Mr. Morganstern was hard of hearing and it was difficult to communicate with him by telephone. So, Prof. Willis and Tiffany Runs in Light requisitioned a college car and made the drive to Mount Iron to interview the old man. The snow was mostly melted in the fields but lingered in dirty patches among the trees. Films of greyish ice covered the lakes and made them opaque to the weak rays of light cast by the sun.
It was meal-time at the Willows when Prof. Willis and Tiffany entered the building. The air smelled of cabbage and roast beef. The corridors in the assisted-living wing were broad with old people posted outside of their rooms in wheelchairs or motorized scooters, some of them surveying the visitors with anxious red eyes as if they were on sentinel duty. Others were dozing like cats in bright spots where the hall was illumined through overhead skylights. Staff pushed carts bearing trays of food. Mr. Morganstern was expecting them and, so, he had propped open the door to his rooms. On a table near the entry, Prof. Willis saw the remains of his lunch, plates concealed under cylindrical stainless steel warming covers, some napkins and shakers of salt and pepper.
Mr. Morganstern sat in a wheelchair. He wore loose-fitting sweatpants with fawn-colored slippers. The front of his white polo shirt was spotted with food stains. The old man’s grip was firm and dry as leather. His face was a hard-edged instrument, all jaw and bony nose with a protruding brow over watery blue eyes.
The old lawyer asked them about their drive from the Cities to Mountain Iron. He said that he was only semi-retired (and that recently) from the practice of law. The town had been good to him, he said: “A village that can’t support one lawyer will make two attorneys wealthy.” Mr. Morganstern remarked that he was very busy in the assisted living facility spreading cheer among the residents.
“I am like a jovial Cesar Romero,” Mr. Morganstern told them. “I am here to provide a dash of elegance and savoir faire to the place. And I have so many clients among my neighbors.”
He gestured to a credenza against the wall lined with manila folders overflowing with papers.
“You must understand that I don’t need to be here. I’m perfectly capable of living on my own,” Mr. Morganstern said. “But this is where I can be of most service.”
In the hollow of another room, a TV was turned-on, but muted. Faces billowed up against the TV screen and, then, burst like bubbles.
Tiffany asked Mr. Morganstern about the cemetery association. The semi-retired lawyer said that he remembered that business quite well.
“It was one of the first things that I did after passing the bar,” Mr. Morganstern remarked. “Pro bono, a loss leader as we used to say in those days. My senior partner encouraged me to do the work.”
Mr. Morganstern told them that the change in the statutory scheme for cemetery governance required new filings and revision of the existing Articles of Incorporation. He said that most people called the graveyard something like “The Pioneer Cemetery” although so far as he knew there were no pioneers buried there – “just miners and their family members,” Mr. Morganstern said. “It had a view over the pit mine. People thought it was scenic. Can you imagine? ‘Scenic’?”
“I had a Board of Directors,” Mr. Morganstern continued. “But they were all very elderly. So, one by one, my board members died and no one was willing to serve as their replacements. No remuneration, you know. Of course, I was forty, fifty years younger than those old folks. After a while, I had nothing but vacancies, no board members and so no quorum. Couldn’t transact a lick of business. And, so, I let them thing go inactive.”
Prof. Willis asked about files and records. Mr. Moganstern didn’t hear him. Tiffany repeated his question. For some reason, the frequency of her voice was better tuned to the shell-like hearing aids nestled against his skull and he brightened when she spoke, inclining his head toward her.
“Oh yes, there were voluminous files. Records of interments, receipts for plots, all sorts of things. There had been caretaker for fifty years, but he was gone when I reincorporated the perpetual care association. He kept all sorts of things, but some of the materials were a bit...inaccurate...you know, irregular burials, bodies without death certificates, that sort of stuff. In those days, we had funerals maybe once a month and, half the time, the grave-digger would open the ground and find someone already occupying that space. Things were sort of out-of-control and, then, the caretaker died and I thought that it was maybe better not to have any new burials, you never knew what you’d turn up. It was a perpetual care association but the word “perpetual” really didn’t apply – I think we ran the thing for 15 years and, then, let it go inactive.”
“What about the files and records?” Tiffany Runs in Light asked.
“Oh those things,” Mr. Morganstern answered. “You don’t want stuff like that hanging around after the statute of limitations run. It just leads to mischief and so...”
“So,” Prof. Willis said. “You purged the...”
Mr. Morganstern didn’t seem to hear.
He said: “So I... no, I think there was a flood or, I think, it was a fire maybe. Or maybe both. But the files are no longer available. Regrettably, not accessible as least as far as I know.”
Prof. Willis told him that the anthropology department at McGrand had received funding to explore the cemetery and determine whether it could be restored. He didn’t mention the matter of the caskets tobogganing down into the open pit mine.
Attorney Morganstern shook his head and said that he couldn’t really hear what was being said.
“It’s odd,” he said. “Ironical you might say. I incorporated Saint Slava as a perpetual care association. But there wasn’t any care let along anything perpetual about it. I had a graveyard but no Board, no mourners, no families interested in the place, no quorum of any kind. So we just went inactive. Perfectly legit – that would be the thing to do. I haven’t thought about the cemetery association for thirty years. These little towns, you know, they lose their schools and, then, the clinic gets closed and pretty soon there’s nothing left at all.”
Tiffany said that it had been nice to meet him and that they would invite him to any gatherings convened when the cemetery was restored. “There will probably be a celebration,” she said. She put out her hand to shake with Mr. Morganstern but he reached out with both of his hands and clasped her fist tightly between his palms.
In the corridor, a woman in a blue uniform, probably a paraprofessional, said that it was very nice of them to visit the old man.
“He has no family,” the woman said. “No visitors. He was talking about your coming to see him for all last week.”
In the parking lot, Tiffany said: “A dead end.”
“Well you have to know what you don’t know,” Prof. Willis told her.
4.
The college van could comfortably seat eight. But there was equipment, the drone and ground-penetrating radar, some shovels and a package of little orange flags to mark their finds. Only three students were signed-up for the surface survey and, so, even with the apparatus it was roomy in back. Tiffany drove the last leg north of Duluth. Prof. Willis had his eyes closed, but couldn’t sleep. The students had run out of things to say to one another and two of them were napping. A plump girl with freckles leaned her head against the window and felt the rough surface of the road transmitted to her cheek and brow by the cold glass, the van rattling as it traveled the two-lane blacktop between the green, throbbing forests.
The edge of the cemetery sloping into the pit was marked by yellow police tape stretched between cypress trees. Beyond the yellow tape, there were drifts of orange mesh fencing, a safety barrier barring access to the undercut rim of the mine. Prof. Willis told the students to remain on the up-slope side of the yellow police tape.
“We don’t want anyone falling into the hole,” he said.
A few old, illegible gravestones stood among clumps of brush. The trees overhead were chattering with squirrels and black birds. Shallow pits made walking tricky. The ground was dented with weedy troughs where caskets underground had collapsed, boggy places impounding shallow puddles of soupy water. The air buzzed and hummed, foggy with black flies. The biting insects made work impossible and, so, they retreated to the Walmart in town, bought some bug spray and work gloves, also cheap plastic raincoats with hoods to cover their bodies against the onslaught of the flies. Then, they returned up the curving gravel lane to the graveyard.
Later, midmorning, the wind picked up and scattered the flies. By this time, their wrists and ankles were ringed with welts.
Prof. Willis launched the drone and it ascended above the trees, wobbling on the currents of wind above them. He engaged the LIDAR scan and flooded the thickets and tiny clearings below the drone with laser beams. The plump girl, now swathed in a tent-like khaki-green raincoat, asked Prof. Willis is the laser beams would hurt them.
“As far as I know, they are harmless,” Prof. Willis said. “But it’s a good question.”
The drone was so high above the cemetery that it was hard to see against the washed blue of the sky. Tiffany Runs in Light said that she sensed the razor’s edge of laser rays inundating the woods.
“I can feel it like a tingling on my skin,” she said.
“It’s just the bug bites,” Prof. Willis said.
Sun cut through the forest, dappling the golden rod and poison ivy and the lacy fiddlehead ferns growing in the thickets.
The three students walked side-by-side peering at the matted grass and tangled knots of weed under foot. Sometimes, swarms of black flies harassed them so that they hopped and sawed the air with their arms. Each of them held a GPS device and Prof. Willis was afraid that the biting insects would cause them to fling the trackers out of their hands and into the undergrowth where they would be lost. He was responsible for this expedition and so worried about things that might go wrong.
Prof. Willis brought the drone down so that it landed in the gravel next to the parked van. He downloaded the LIDAR data into his laptop and briefly verified that the surface study was displayed on the screen. Then, he dragged the ground penetrating radar on its four-wheeled chassis from the back of the van. He and Tiffany manhandled the GPR through the thickets. Sometimes, vines and thorny thistle wound themselves around the wheels and Prof. Willis had to use his pocket knife to cut away the tangles. The work was slow and, as the afternoon lengthened, the machine seemed to become heavier and heavier until, at last, it seemed a great unruly boulder that they pushed uphill and, then, fought again as it pulled down against their grip, wheels tugging and jerking against them as navigated over the depressions and matted hillocks in the shadow of the big, old trees. Flame-shaped arbor vitae stood in tentative files around the edge of the cemetery, green threshold that marked the limits of their labors.
Prof. Willis was downloading the data from the GPR into his laptop when the plump girl made a discovery. She squealed and, then, raised her hand as if to ask a question in a classroom. Tiffany hurried to her side.
The girl lifted a wrought-iron cross from where it was resting in a wreath of wild flowers and thistle. The object was too heavy to hold up and so she dragged it a foot or two so that she could lean it against an oak tree. The marker had two cross pieces welded onto a vertical pipe. A third cross piece was fastened to the pipe near its bottom, making a diagonal against upright iron. It stood about four-feet high, crusted with rust and clots of dirt around its base.
“I’ve never seen a cross like this,” the plump girl said.
“It’s an orthodox cross,” Prof.Willis said.
Tiffany took a picture of the plump girl her hood pulled up to show her freckles and red, smiling face. She had fly-bites on both cheeks and her eyes looked a little swollen. The girl pointed with a long index finger at the iron post with the three cross-members. Then, she made a thumb’s up sign, posing for the cell-phone.
“That might be disrespectful,” Tiffany said. But she took the picture anyway.
5.
The LIDAR data and ground penetrating radar showed 13 probable gravesites located in the unstable zone with its footprint like a horseshoe around the edge of mine. A couple of soil scientists from the County Extension and a woman from the geological survey marked out that part of the cemetery that seemed in the most danger of sliding into the hole. Another orange-mesh blizzard fence was tacked between trees defining the unstable terrain from which graves would have to excavated and moved to another part of the cemetery.
There was considerable morbid interest about the project now that it was known that graves would have to be moved, and Prof. Willis brought two vans full of student volunteers, all of them wearing MUCAS shirts and florescent-orange vests, to the work-site. Two weeks were allocated for the work, probably eight days considering that rain was possible and would delay their progress. A rented back hoe was on the site with contract operator. Willis had filed a plot map with the city council and the zoning administrator showing the graves that his team intended to move. Costs were calculated per corpse. Of the thirteen features identified by LIDAR and ground penetrating radar, twelve seemed to be graves, neatly oriented by compass west to east – when Christ comes, he will arise in glory like the sun in the eastern sky. The thirteenth feature was likely not a grave, but something else, aligned on a north to south axis. Willis had the proper exhumation orders issued by the county Court. Several local morticians were on-call and a stack of square wooden boxes had been unloaded to receive remains and other grave goods. Professional-grade video equipment was set up, powered by a small gas-fired generator. Prof. Willis thought that it would be prudent to open two graves a day, provide GPS coordinates for artifacts, and, then, box the cadavers pending a technical report on each site.
One of McGrand’s lawyers was working with local counsel to incorporate a new Perpetual Care Association for St. Slava cemetery. Several community leaders had volunteered to serve as Board Members. (They were mostly officers of the County Historical Society). The plan was to move the graves a hundred yards down the hill away from the collapsing rim of the open pit mine. The orientation and spacing of the graves would be mimicked in the new annex to the cemetery, a place on a hillside terrace where earthmovers had bulldozed some trees and prepared a half-acre tract for the re-interred bodies. Most of the St. Slava graveyard was covered in leaf litter from the trees, sprouting mushrooms and rank with deadfall and fern. Small vividly colored flowers were scattered through the underbrush. The new part of the cemetery would be sodded and kept mown. In all respects, it would be better managed and more neat and tidy than the rest of the derelict graveyard, although, of course, the Perpetual Care Committee had plans to clear the undergrowth untouched by the exhumations, identify surviving markers, and gradually, as funding permitted, renovate the landscaping throughout St. Slava.
Prof. Willis was surprised at the intensity of preparations required. He was also surprised that cemeteries were, apparently, rooted up all the time and the dead relocated. There were protocols, statutes, and regulations, even, professional services devoted to the activity. It was just a matter of following established routines, having the proper resources available, and documenting interventions. A Catholic priest had been consulted but he deferred to a leader of Russian Orthodox congregation in the Cities two-hundred miles away. In a resplendent black robe, hooded, and displaying a great cross pendant from his chest, the Orthodox priest said a prayer at the gravesite. Several boys swung censers leaking greenish-blue smoke that smelled of camphor and sandalwood. Then, the backhoe advanced into position and cut six inches of dirt off the surface of the cemetery. The students gathered around the incision in the ground and the videographer tilted the camera down to record the excavation.
As he planned, Prof. Willis and his students opened and recorded two graves. The dead were like pilgrims who had come a long way on foot. They rested where fallen, exhausted, it seemed, their clothing tattered and worn as if they had wandered for a long time in a wilderness of thorns.
6.
After work, the students gathered in the cocktail lounge in the hotel on the highway to Duluth where they were staying. The bar was called “The Woodshed” and it was gloomy place, tucked under the building that could serve as a “refuge” according to signs on the wall –that is, a space in which to hide in the event of a tornado or nuclear attack or wild fire.
The County Coroner had spent several hours each day at the dig. He was a chiropractor by trade, wearing heavy slick-looking rubber boots as he stood by the opened graves. The man had the shoulders and torso of a body-builder but his head was small and hairless. He spoke in an improbably high voice, almost a falsetto, and had a lisp. When he shook your hands, his grip crushed your fingers to pulp. After a few beers, some of the students began to mimic the coroner, walking to and from the station where the bartender was pulling draft lager, imitating his gait with small, mincing steps, head bobbing like a pigeon. Prof. Willis didn’t approve of any of this, but it wasn’t his place to intervene. And it was important that morale be maintained. When the air was still around the open graves and the black flies were biting and things smelled foul, a bit like a whiff of road-kill on the highway, the work in the cemetery could be unpleasant and tons of dirt had to be moved and sifted and Prof. Willis could see that some of the more sensitive students had tears in their eyes at times and complained of insomnia and, so, the beer and the jokes, the camaraderie was necessary. McGrand wouldn’t authorize payment for booze, but Prof. Willis told the students to put the charges on his room tab so that he could reimburse them from his own funds – it seemed a small price to pay for the volunteer work on the site. Prof. Willis thought it was best to leave the students to their own devices after hours. Of course, there were romances in bloom, cabals and rivalries. None of this was any of his business. So long as the students were out of the bar by ten p.m. and, presumably, in their rooms, he was satisfied.
Prof. Willis and Tiffany Runs in Light ate room-service food from styrofoam trays in the conference room that McGrand had rented from hotel. Photos were spread out on the table. Prof. Willis had a small ink-jet printer upstairs beside his bed and downloaded the pictures from his laptop. He wrote notes on a yellow pad describing artifacts and features encountered in the cemetery. Tiffany was more facile with dictation than Prof. Willis and so she spoke into the transcription device set between them on the table. When the kitchen worker brought their food on a round plastic tray, she gawked at the pictures of bones and broken caskets arrayed like Tarot cards on the conference room table.
“It’s an investigation,” Prof. Willis said. Best to give her a big tip.
At each grave, Prof. Willis had directed the students to shovel open the ground six to eight feet from where the casket was interred. This was the zone where mourners had gathered. Sometimes, people dropped things; perhaps, it was cold and their fingers were numb or they were in shock or blinded by tears and unable to retrieve objects fallen to the ground. Photos showed two rosaries, several pennies, a small leather-bound ledger book filled with number written in straight columns, a hat-pin and a key. What lock did the key fit?
7.
Rain fell in hard, wind-driven bursts on the day that the osteologist zoomed down out of the scudding clouds at the small airport in the forest. The windsock was animate, twitching with gusts that filled the orange sock and whipped it around. The Cessna skidded through puddles. The plane’s fuselage and wings were white as freshly laundered sheets.
Dr. Winslow Barnett was a busy man, renowned and much in demand. He had appeared many times on CNN and Fox news. The Cessna cramped him. He was much too big for the small kite of plane. For a moment, stepping down onto the runway, he seemed hunched, bent like pretzel, but, then, he expanded, squared his shoulders, and strutted across the tarmac, full-sized, to shake Prof Willis’ hand. The pilot trotted behind him carrying Dr. Barnett’s duffle bag, a big canvas sack with a vaguely nautical aspect. Dr. Barnett actually kissed Tiffany Runs in Light on the cheek as he put his arms around her in greeting.
Dr. Barnett said that he had just come from Ukraine where he was surveying atrocities as an adjunct to the United Nations.
In the car, Prof. Willis asked him: “What is Ukraine like? It must be terrible.”
Dr. Barnett replied: “It’s the big show. The world series of forensics. You have to be at the very top of your game.”
“But the country?”
“You don’t see the country. Just pits full of corpses. So far as I can tell it’s cold and dark there.”
Dr. Barnett was an alumnus of McGrand although he was presently employed as the chairman of the department of Physical Anthropology at the big land-grant university in the City. His offices were in the medical school building near the dissection rooms.
“Ukraine,” he said. “It’s the Olympics of forensics, if you know what I mean.”
Tiffany Runs in Light said that she thought she knew what he meant.
It was too wet and muddy to excavate at the cemetery. And there was concern that with the hard rain, more of graveyard might slip into the open pit mine. The ground was said to be unstable. The students had taken the van to Duluth to see a movie at one of the shopping mall cineplexes on the hill overlooking the harbor.
They drove into town. Dr. Barnett asked them to stop at the café on Main Street for a slice of pie and coffee. Then, they went to the mortuary where the boxes of bones were awaiting them.
The funeral home was a Victorian-style mansion, built shingle-style with many gables and towers with cone-shaped roofs. The porch wrapped around the front of the house behind a wet palisade of lilac bushes. The mortuary’s offices were in the renovated carriage house to the side of the building. A low-slung modern building stood behind the mansion, connected to the house by an enclosed walkway. The modern structure had bluish vinyl siding and rows of ventilators along its ridgeline and there were large, motorized garage doors opening onto the alley in the rear.
The mortician’s wife, also his bookkeeper, came from the carriage-house office and opened the garage. The square boxes of bone were arranged in two rows on the garage’s concrete floor. There was space for two hearses, but only one was parked in the garage. A funeral was underway somewhere out in the country.
Dr. Barnett put on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and stabbed a cigar between his teeth. The cigar was his trademark. He had begun puffing on big Cuban cigars when he worked the mass graves in Rwanda and Kosovo. His doctor warned him that the habit was bad for his health and, so, now, he just chewed the cigars, gnawing at the brown wrapper and tobacco until the thing melted and ran down the front of his chin.
Prof. Willis pried open each box so that Dr. Barnett could scrutinize its contents. Sometimes, he bent over to finger a skull or pelvic bone. Most of the time, he was able to provide identifying information without even touch the bones, just by staring at them and, then, muttering his observations. Tiffany Runs in Light held a notepad in front of her and wrote down what he said. Dr. Barnett also said that someone had to take notes for him because his handwriting had become illegible.
“The letters are all dissolved in my tears,’ he said. “No one can read a word I write. Not even me.”
Of course, Dr. Barnett was too important and famous to write notes for himself. Wherever he went, there was an amanuensis.
He made a leisurely tour of the bones.
“Number 1: adolescent female. Probably 17 or 18. No signs of trauma or child birth. Club-foot.”
Tiffany wrote down his words.
Many of the skeletons had been miners. Their bones had been broken but healed with malunions or knobs where plates had fused. Arthritic spurs were in evidence in the spines and joints. The men mostly died between 45 and 60. Some of the women were older. One cadaver’s skull had been fractured undoubtedly several years before death. “This fellow would have been disabled,” Dr. Barnett said. “Some one, or some several, would have had to care for him.” A woman was buried with an infant. “Childbirth mortality,” Dr. Barnett said.
The survey took about 45 minutes. Dr. Barnett said that his feet were aching and that he had to sit down. He was nearly seventy years old and couldn’t stand for long periods of time without pain. Tiffany found a folding chair and set it near the two parallel rows of bone-boxes.
“How much is left?” Dr. Barnett asked.
“Two features,” Prof. Willis said. “One more grave and, then, something else – it’s buried but the alignment is wrong. It might be a drainage structure or...?”
“You’ve made a good progress,” Dr. Barnett said.
“Can you tell nationality?” Tiffany Runs in Light asked. “Race or ethnicity...anything like that?”
“Nationality?” Dr. Barnett said. “They’re all citizens of one country.”
“What is that?” Prof. Willis asked.
“Death,” Dr. Barnett replied.
“You’ve always had a way with words,” Prof. Willis said.
Dr. Barnett told them that he wanted to go to his room, take a shower, and a nap. Then, they could eat.
“There should be roadhouse up here somewhere,” Dr. Barnett said. “A place where you can wet you whistle. The students can come with us.”
“I’ll ask at the front desk,” Tiffany said.
They drove back to the hotel. Prof. Willis walked Dr. Barnett to the door of his room.
“It’s pretty much a dump,” he said.
“Best available,” Prof. Willis said.
“So it is. I’ve been in worse. Once, I had to stay in a Holiday Inn in Fresno,” he laughed.
In the conference room, Tiffany was dictating the notes that she had taken at the mortuary garage.
“Do you think the students will be back to go out to eat with us?” she asked.
“Unlikely,” Prof. Willis said. “They’ll be bar-hopping down in Duluth. Anyway I want to keep Barnett away from the kids.”
“Why is that?”
“He’s a celebrity. His reputation precedes him. He’s known for messing with the co-eds.”
“The man must be seventy,” Tiffany said.
“That he is,” Prof. Willis replied.
8.
Prof. Willis said that it was wonderful that Dr. Barnett could restore their identities to the dead. Dr. Barnett ignored the compliment and looked glum. He was sulking because there were no students eating with them at the table.
Dr. Barnett said that, a few years earlier, the university where he worked had required all of its instructors to complete a course in CPR. (There had been a fatality at the campus field house when a student collapsed after running laps and no one knew how to resuscitate him.) Dr. Barnett told Prof. Willis and Tiffany that the CPR training involved the use of a rubber doll nicknamed “Annie.” The face of the doll was serene and pale with lips curved into an enigmatic smile.
“It was a woman because men might be reluctant to put their mouth on the lips of a male dummy,” Dr. Barnett explained. “This was quite awhile ago,” he added.
“I recognized the face,” Dr. Barnett continued. “She was modeled after a young woman who was fished-out of the Seine river around 1880, apparently a suicide. Because of her beauty, a morgue attendant made a plaster death mask from the corpse. The plaster cast became very famous and copies were distributed all over the world: the so-called L’inconnue de la Seine.”
Dr. Barnett spoke the French words with a flourish as if tasting the vowels with his whole mouth.
Tiffany said: “The unknown woman of the Seine?”
“Indeed,” Dr. Barnett said.
He continued: “I have often thought that if I were to discover that corpse today, even in a much-deteriorated condition, I would be able to identify her. I’m sure of that. Restore her identity.”
“That’s probably true,” Prof. Wilcox said. He continued that he thought he had read something about L’inconnue before.
“I remarked on this,” Dr. Barnett said, “when I was huffing and puffing into the doll, you know, ‘Resuscitation Annie’ and remarked that I was kissing L’inconnue. Someone replied that the doll didn’t look indigenous at all.”
“Indigenous?” Tiffany asked.
“Yes, the person heard the word as ‘in the canoe’ – that’s what he thought I was saying,” Dr. Barnett explained.
Tiffany said that she had to make a phone call and excused herself. Dr. Barnett asked if the students typically went into the bar for a night-cap.
“I think that sometimes happens,” Prof. Wilcox said.
Later, in his room, Prof. Wilcox opened his laptop and looked at a picture of I’inconnue de la Seine. The face floated on his screen as if surfacing suddenly above a deep pool of images. Eyes and hair and lips were white as the full moon. The trace of a smile shimmered over the mouth. The picture was like something remembered only indistinctly and from long ago, evanescent and a little indistinct.
9.
Geordie’s family owned a lake cabin fifty miles from Mount Iron. When the other students assembled for the dig went back to the Cities on the previous weekend, Geordie’s parents collected him at the truck stop near the highway motel and he spent his time off with them at the cabin. He invited a couple of the other student-volunteers to spend the weekend at the lake cabin. He told them there were jet skis and a motorboat and that the fish were biting. But the others politely declined the offer. Prof. Willis thought of Geordie as something of a Boy Scout; he seemed to know the names of different trees, carried an elaborate Swiss army knife in his pocket, and, on breaks, tramped around in the forest. At the cemetery, he pointed out patches of poison ivy and Prof. Willis sprayed the greasy, moist plants with orange paint in a can. “Leaves of three, let it be,” Geordie proclaimed. In his backpack, he carried a bottle of nail polish to soothe mosquito bites.
On the last day of the field study, when the final two underground features were to be explored, Geordie said that he had discovered a woodtick embedded in his left upper thigh the previous evening. Using the nail polish, he had eased the tick from his flesh but, then, something had gone wrong. After breakfast at the hotel, Geordie asked Prof. Willis to go into the restroom with him. Pulling down his trousers, he displayed a livid target-shaped welt near his groin. At the center of the welt, an inflamed blister was oozing a little pus.
“It’s infected,” Prof. Willis said. He asked if the tick-bite hurt.
Geordie was embarrassed. He ears and cheeks were as red as the welt on his thigh. “It feels hot and tingly,” Geordie said.
Prof. Willis said that they would have to drive him to the clinic in town. He considered asking Tiffany Runs in Light to manage this problem, but thought that this request might be construed as patronizing or worse. So he told Geordie that, after assigning duties at the cemetery, they would seek medical advice at the clinic.
Some local people had parked their pick-ups along the gravel lane that bent through the dark, shadowy woods on the slope below the cemetery. To maintain cordial community relations, townspeople were invited to tour the site before the excavation and disinterments began. Prof. Willis and Tiffany with Geordie in the backseat of the McGrand Suburban drove to the road-block at hundred yards from the cemetery. Birds were trilling in the trees and some big, luminous dragonflies were hovering over the flowering weeds. Geordie pointed out three deer ambling through the forest glade. It was still early, probably too soon to take the student to Acute Care.
Two middle-aged women who seemed to be sisters were standing on the foot trail leading to ramshackle fence around the old graveyard. In the shade of the big trees, some pale limestone blocks gleamed in the undergrowth. Several polished granite headstones studded the hillside, scattered at intervals among the smaller, more inconspicuous graves. In the distance, the orange mesh fence extending through a tangle of trees and shrubs marked the area of the study where the students were gathered in a ragged circle around Dr. Barnett. His loud voice and precise clipped diction, developed as a pundit on Cable News resounded among the tombs and sunlit clearings. It was clear that he was lecturing but his speech was too distant to be understood.
“What will you do with the poor folks that you dig up?” one of the sisters said.
“We’ve cleared a quarter hectare a little bit down the hill, away from the erosion,” Prof. Willis said. “Once the field reports are complete, we’ll determine if there are any surviving next-of-kin and will notify them. Of course, relatives can move the deceased as they wish. But if we can’t identify any kin, we’ll re-bury the deceased just as we found them, but in the new stable tract.”
“You won’t find any next-of-kin,” the other sister said.
“The people that are known are buried down here,” her sister said. She pointed to hillside, patterned in green shade and shimmering light, where the polished granite tombstones veined with flecks of mica caught the sunlight.
“Those graves are only fifty years old,” one of the sisters said. “There might be relatives but higher on the hill –“
The other sister said that on Decoration Day no one ventured up to the edge of the open pit mine and that the graves there were never marked with flowers or flags.
“Would you like to tour the site?” Prof. Willis saw several of the townspeople standing in the circle gathered around Dr. Barnett who continued to declaim loudly, raising his hands to make gestures as he spoke.
“It’s scary,” the first sister said.
“Gives me the creeps,” the second sister added. “We have people down here. Names that we recognize. We just came up here to see that no one was trampling on our family’s graves.”
“We’re very respectful,” Tiffany Runs in Light said.
The two women turned and walked back to the barricade where the vehicles were parked. Prof. Willis and Tiffany continued along the foot path. Prof. Willis could see that when Geordie’s trousers rubbed against the bite at the center of its ring of infection, the young man winced. He walked gingerly, with his legs spread, to keep his thighs from chafing against the wound.
Dr. Barnett had finished his lecture. The students stood in small groups waiting for instructions. Prof. Willis said that Tiffany Runs in Light would coordinate the morning’s field work. Dr. Barnett dug in his pocket, pulled out a fat, brown cigar, put it between his lips, and began chewing on it.
“This is our last day,” Prof. Willis said. The final unexcavated grave was marked by four small orange flags arranged around a shallow depression in the leaf-litter. The other north-south feature was also marked, although less precisely. The breeze stirred the tiny orange flags and made them wobble on their slender plastic stakes.
“We have a grave and an unknown underground feature that’s not aligned with the burials,” Prof. Willis. “We don’t know what that is.”
Over his shoulder, the second orange snow-fence ran along the precipice where small rivulets of gravel sometimes stirred as pebbles drizzled down into the big hole. The pit was dawn red at its rim but the depths of huge hole were grey and metallic-looking with shadow.
Prof. Willis said: “Let’s be careful today. Stay away from the edge. Keep alert as to where the backhoe is working. Give it a wide-berth. We don’t want anyone to get hurt on our last day.”
“Yes, be cautious,” Tiffany said.
Geordie put his head down and seemed ashamed. “I’ve got a little business to attend to in town,” Prof. Willis said. Then, he and Geordie walked back to the Suburban.
10.
The triage nurse at the clinic said that it was a busy morning. The waiting room was full of women with crying babies and old people. She told Prof. Willis to take Geordie to the Walk-in clinic at the grocery store on the highway to Duluth.
“I will send a text message that you are coming,” the nurse said.
At the grocery store, a couple of elderly men were waiting for vaccines. A whiteboard by the door leading to the suite listed “insect bites” as one of the conditions treated in the walk-in clinic. There was a fee listed, something like eighty dollars.
After a half-hour, Geordie was called behind the closed door. Prof. Willis’ phone rang.
Tiffany said: “We have something unusual. Please come back here as soon as you can.”
There was a pharmacy on-site. Geordie was prescribed an antibiotic. It took another half-hour for the prescription to be filled and so it was midday before they returned to the cemetery.
Work was stopped and the students stood around a hole carved in the hillside. Dr. Barnett was leaning over the pit and the videographer was at his side. A few yards away, the last grave had been opened, excavated down to some smashed planks of wood where a round, brown skull peeped out of the dirt. Next to the pit where Dr. Barnett was working, a conical heap of black soil was veined with earthworms that writhed as if the sun shining on them was abhorrent, even poisonous.
A scatter of bones was exposed in the trench, dug at right angles to the nearby grave. Jagged splinters of wood were embedded in the wet, stained-looking soil.
“This is different,” Dr. Barnett said. He spoke softly. The students strained to hear him.
Tiffany said: “This north-south feature is also a grave. But it’s atypical.”
“Atypical,” Dr. Barnett repeated after her.
One of the students said that she felt a chill up her spine. She backed away from the hole. Other students had already retreated from the four-foot hole cut into the ground.
Dr. Barnett said: “This body was buried face-down in a crude wooden box, something like a re-purposed trough for agricultural animals. There’s a ligature, two ligatures, with hands bound behind the back and ankles tied as well. The feet seem to have been broken.”
The edge of the grave was unstable. When Prof. Willis approached, dirt crumbled under his feet and slid into the hole. He saw two flat stones, the size of loaves of bread, one flattening the pelvic bone, the other bearing down on the mid-section of spinal vertebrae. The rocks were scabbed with dirt. Turned away from the light, the skull was a featureless knob of yellow bone, some shreds of reddish hair still clinging to the occiput.
“The body was interred with large rocks pressed down on the pelvis and thoracic spine,” Dr. Barnett said.
Tiffany Runs in Light said: “Someone didn’t want this person to get up out of their grave.”
“Obviously not,” Dr. Barnett said.
“The dead are all buried with heads to the West. That way, they can rise to greet Jesus when he comes out of the sunrise in the East. But this body has its head face-down and aimed to the North,” Prof. Willis said.
“What comes from the North?” Dr. Barnett asked.
Tiffany said: “Winter, darkness, cold. Sometimes, the Northern Lights. Death.”
“Death,” Prof. Willis said.
Dr. Barnett climbed out of the hole. His weight on the rim of the pit caused it to collapse and, for a moment, he staggered a little as if about to fall into the open grave.
“I’ve seen this sort of thing in Rwanda,” Dr. Barnett said. “And Kosovo.”
Prof. Willis said that they should investigate the other grave oriented East - West, collect the bones and box them. He pointed into the north-south gash: “This will require more documentation.”
10.
The last grave was exhumed. The hillside overlooking the mine was scarred with furrows of black dirt disturbed by the excavations. After the students returned to the hotel, Prof. Willis met with the owner of a landscaping service. The plan was to re-contour the slope, cutting back the overhang to a sustainable angle of repose. Several trees would be planted in the soil uprooted from the graves.
The backhoe was parked at the edge of pockmarked meadow.
“Will you need that tool?” Prof. Willis asked, pointing at yellow implement.
“We will mobilize our own equipment,” the landscaping man said.
A grant was pending to fund the Saint Slava Perpetual Care Association and the restoration contract would be between that entity and the landscaping firm.
“I asked for directions in town,” the landscaper said. “The place isn’t marked on Google Maps. People said you found some spooky stuff up here.”
“Nothing really. Rumors circulate,” Prof. Willis said. “When you open old graves, what’s seen can’t be unseen.”
“I suppose,” the landscaper replied. “Well, once we get the contract and first payment, we’ll set this up pretty as a picture.”
The landscaper said that in the meantime the two parallel snow-fences should be kept in place. He went back to his van and carried back a hammer and several plastic, laminated signs: “No Trespassing” and “Beware: Poison Ivy.”
“The ‘poison ivy’ warning scares people away,” the landscaper explained.
Prof. Willis said that it was true, in any event, that there were dangerous patches of ivy growing among the trees. “Wood ticks too,” Prof. Willis said.
The landscaper tacked the signs to several trees. Then, they shook hands and parted.
11.
Pizza was delivered to the banquet room at the hotel. Prof. Willis and Tiffany Runs in Light thanked the student field workers. The pies in their cardboard boxes were set out on a table at the front of the room next to the podium on caster-wheels and the microphone.
Dr. Barnett said that he was flying to British Columbia early the next morning. “It’s a graveyard at a First Nations boarding school,” he told them. He beckoned to Tiffany and, then, sat close to her eating his slices of pizza. Sometimes, he bent close to her and seemed to whisper. After a few minutes, Tiffany excused herself and went to the bathroom. Dr. Barnett, then, sat among four co-ed girls. They grimaced and shook their heads in dismay as he told them about things that he had unearthed in Ukraine.
When everyone had eaten, Prof. Willis gathered the students together. He said that it was fortunate that none of the people from the town were at the dig when the anomalous grave was discovered.
Dr. Barnett said that the cadaver was most possibly female, nulliparous by the look of the pelvis, likely between 25 and 30 years old.
“Most likely it’s a case of alleged witchcraft or the evil eye,” he said. “I’ve seen these things before. Buried, after protest, in consecrated ground, but, then, precautions taken to avoid... repercussions... it’s hard to imagine the mentality. But this sort of thing happens from time to time.”
Prof. Willis said that further study was necessary. Then, he said: “We don’t want rumors to spread. Of course, the discovery will be published. But you don’t want to rush into print with these findings. The professional approach is to conduct a thorough study, amass all the facts, and, then, explore folk traditions, relevant customs and folkways, to interpret this feature.”
One of the students asked: “So we are to keep quiet about this?”
“It would be best,” Prof. Willis said.
“I will be lead author on a scholarly paper,” Dr. Barnett said.
“Co-author,” Prof. Willis added.
“In any event,” Dr. Barnett said, “there will be a publication in due course and I will want Prof. Willis to supply me with all of your names. Everyone here will be given credit in a footnote.”
“But best not to advance any interpretations before all the evidence has been gathered.,” Prof. Willis said.
Tiffany Runs in Light returned from the restroom. She and Dr. Barnett divided several remaining pizza slices among them. Tiffany said that there was nothing better than cold pizza for breakfast.
The students were restless. Loud music throbbed in the bar across the lobby. Dr. Barnett said that he had an early morning.
“The kids will pair off tonight,” Dr. Barnett said. “It’s wonderful to be young.”
Some drunken guests were splashing around in the pool in the enclosed courtyard between the sleeping rooms. Dr. Barnett said that he planned to soothe his weary bones in the hot tub.
Those who were alive went on living. The dead rested in their square boxes in the mortuary garage. It rained after midnight and lightning flashed. More of the hillside oozed down into the mine. The witch’s square wooden box was heavy. Her disassembled bones were accompanied by the two big rocks used to pin down her corpse in her misaligned grave.
12.
The new graves were oriented exactly as found above on the imperiled hillside slipping into the mine. A front-end loader with bucket dug 12 trenches five feet deep and aligned east to west. One trench was excavated on a north-south axis. At the mortuary, the skeletal remains were re-assembled in a semblance of anatomical order and transferred in simple pine boxes. City ordinance required concrete vaults and these had been placed in the open graves. It was early November, a few days after Halloween but the climate was changing and autumn had been unseasonably warm so that the ground was not yet frozen. The woods crowded around the terrace cleared for the interments were dying and bare trunks, stripped by beetles of their bark, stood like marble columns around the edge of the forest. Fallen leaves were heaped between trees in inert brown and grey piles.
Several mortuary technicians assisted with the re-burial of remains on the newly landscaped terrace. The county coroner was present with a couple of local police, ostensibly for crowd control but present mostly out of curiosity – the affair hadn’t been publicized and there was no one else there but a priest, Prof. Wilcox and Tiffany Runs in Light. The pine boxes had been sanded but not varnished and their wood planks exuded a smell like fresh woodshavings. The clouds in the sky fused together and some feathery flakes of snow fell but melted on the grass.
All the bodies assigned to the east-west facing graves were positioned in their wood caskets with their heads to the west. From this posture, they could rise and greet the Lord on the Last Day without having to turn around. You don’t want to first encounter your Lord and Savior with your backside. When the heavy lids of the twelve concrete vaults were closed, Prof. Wilcox beckoned to the man standing idle near the front-end loader. The operator was dark with little eyes and a grizzled grey beard. He had been chewing tobacco and his chin was damp with spittle and Prof. Wilcox thought that he smelled alcohol on his breath. Prof. Wilcox told him to push dirt into the open grave aligned north to south.
“That hole will have to be dug again,” Prof. Wilcox said.
“Why?” the equipment operator asked. He looked a little angry. The machine was needed somewhere else that afternoon and this change in plans would delay things.
“I won’t have her buried facing in the wrong direction,” Prof. Wilcox said.
“Who?”
“The... inconnue...” Prof. Wilcox didn’t have a name for the cadaver and he didn’t want to describe the dead woman as a witch or sorceress.
The machine operator was puzzled and he spit. “Canoe?” he asked. Prof. Wilcox realized that he didn’t know anything about the unusual burial or why one grave was differently aligned.
“I just did what I was supposed to do,” the man said. “And now we have the cement vault down there in the hole. I knew this was a bad-luck gig.”
“Well, it has to be changed,” Prof. Wilcox said.
“Who’s gonna pay for this,” the operator of the front end loader asked.
“I will... if necessary, I will,” Prof. Wilcox said.
Tiffany Runs in Light approached the place where the men were talking. She overheard the discussion and asked Prof. Wilcox if he could speak with her privately in the university Suburban parked a couple hundred feet away on the gravel lane.
They sat in the vehicle. It smelled of dirt, wet gravel, the iron of tools – shovels and rakes and picks.
“We talked about this,” Tiffany said. “I thought we were agreed.”
“I’ve changed my mind,” Prof. Wilcox said. “It’s inhuman to put her back in the ground with her wrists and ankles tied and two big boulders on her hips and spine.”
“That’s how she was found,” Tiffany said. “It would be insensitive to these people’s culture to bury her like everyone else.”
“I think it’s barbaric,” Prof. Wilcox said. The cold in the air made him sniffle. “It’s barbaric,” he repeated.
“I wish you wouldn’t use that word,” Tiffany said. “It’s a loaded term and offensive to some people.”
“I don’t mean to offend.”
“I’m not taking offense, but let’s not distort things by talking about ‘barbarism’ and barbarians,” Tiffany said.
“No one deserves to be buried with boulders on their bones, face down, and pinioned,” Prof. Wilcox said.
“She’s dead. What does it matter?”
“It matters to me,” Prof. Wilcox said.
“Why?”
“Because witches don’t exist. There’s no such thing as the Evil Eye. Maybe, she was mentally ill or confused or just misunderstood...”
“Misunderstood,” Tiffany Runs in Light repeated.
“All sorts of misunderstandings can occur. But that sort of thing doesn’t justify desecrating a corpse.”
“We don’t know the circumstances,” Tiffany replied. “Maybe, she wanted to be buried that way. Maybe those were her last instructions. We have to respect the mentality of these people, how they saw the world.”
“If they buried a young woman in that way,” Prof. Wilcox said, “they saw the world wrong. They were profoundly mistaken and their consciousness was false.”
“I’ve heard that said about lots of people, lots of groups, who have belief systems different from what prevails today. That’s just a form of bigotry.”
“Well, if science and objective reality are bigotry, then, you can call me a bigot.”
“I’m not calling you anything,” Tiffany Runs in Light said. “I’m just saying that there are many different ways to see the world and we have to be sensitive to these differences.”
“I can’t be party to mutilating that girl again,” Prof. Wilcox said.
His face was red and his hands were shaking a little where he clutched at the steering wheel to steady himself. His grip tightened and his fingers turned bloodless and white. Then, he began to sob.
“What’s wrong?” Tiffany asked.
“It’s just the accumulation of everything. I agreed to them digging the grave north-south – I mean that’s what we found, but I can’t accept putting the cadaver in the ground tied-up and face-down and with her rocks on her bones. I just don’t know what to do.”
Tiffany watched the white, vaporous snowflakes sifting down between the trees. It was becoming cold and some of the people from the grave site had left the open holes and were sheltering in their cars.
“The vault is already in the ground. It would take a hoist or something to yank it out of the hole,” Tiffany said. She paused. “Why don’t you rearrange the body in the box, fix things so that she’s buried with proper respect. That’s a compromise.”
“I don’t think this should be compromised,” Prof. Wilcox said.
“There’s no choice.”
“She was abused. She was taunted. She was harried to death. I won’t be complicit.”
“You don’t know any of those things.”
“I won’t add to her suffering,” Prof. Wilcox said.
“We have to be sensitive to the way people understood the world when she was buried.”
“This isn’t medieval,” Prof. Wilcox said. “She was buried in an age of silent movies, motor-cars, even airplanes. If people believed in witchcraft, then, it was a horrible anachronism.”
“We’ll open the pine box. You can arrange the bones so that this is acceptable to you and, then, put her down in the vault.”
Prof. Wilcox turned on the windshield wipers and they whirred a little, flicking over the wet windshield. He held a handkerchief in his hands and dabbed at his eyes. Then, he said “Okay”, stopped the wipers, and they got out of the Suburban.
Tiffany Runs in Light waved to the people waiting in the parked cars. They got out, stretched their legs, and walked back to the open graves. The front end loader man had walked a little ways into the thicket to urinate. He gazed at the others defiantly and, then, climbed back onto the implement.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Tiffany replied.
With the help of the coroner, Prof. Wilcox jimmied open the pine box. He bent over the skeleton and rummaged in the casket. Several times, he paused and stepped back from the box, shuddering a little and holding his handkerchief to his nose. A dark substance covered his hands. He called the machine operator to the open casket, but the man shrugged and stepped away in the opposite direction. Then, Prof. Wilcox gestured to the coroner. The two of them lifted a big egg-shaped granite rock out of the box. They staggered with the weight of the stone and set it to the side of grave. Prof. Wilcox and the coroner, then, lifted a second rock, a bit smaller and flat like an anvil. They put that boulder next to the first one.
The last pine box was set in the vault. The lid to the cement casement was slid over the opening where the casket had been placed.
Prof. Wilcox went to the Suburban.
He said: “My hands are filthy. Ugh, they smell of mortality.”
Tiffany said he should wipe his hands on the freshly laid sod and that they could wash back at the mortuary.
Behind them, they heard the front end loader huffing and puffing as it pushed dirt into the open holes.
13.
A week after the bodies were re-buried in their new graves, the operator of the front end loader was killed while smoothing the upper edge of the cemetery into a less unstable slope. Tracks in the grass among the muddy pits where the dead had once been buried showed that the machine had backed for eighty feet straight over the brink of the mine. The frozen dirt cornice above the pit had collapsed under the loader’s weight and the machine had rolled end over end to the edge of the water at the bottom of the hole. The operator was crushed under the loader. Alcohol was thought to have been a factor.
Prof. Wilcox’s back was sore from lifting the big rocks at the grave-side of the unknown woman. A disc in his lumbar spine was herniated. He treated for almost a year with a chiropractor but, in the end, had to be hospitalized for laminectomy surgery.
14.
In February, Prof. Wilcox drove to Mount Iron to attend a city council meeting. The state historical society in partnership with the county and the St. Slava Perpetual care association were planning a marker and kiosk at the little gravel parking lot at the edge of the cemetery. Prof. Wilcox knew that simple numbered granite markers, installed flat in the lawn (for ease of mowing) had been placed on the terrace to which the graves had been moved. In fact, he had anonymously paid for the marker at the vampire’s grave to be incised: YOUNG WOMAN - INCONNUE.
In the City Council chambers, Prof. Wilcox used his lap top to display on an overhead screen a power point with some pictures of the disinterments, taken from a discrete distance, with photographs of some of the grave goods found on the site. He didn’t mention the grave with the skeleton face-down under heavy rocks. He also distributed a mock-up of the kiosk design and the proposed text for the explanatory sign: the writing emphasized the diversity of the mining communities and the hard-working immigrants who had worked at the dangerous task of extracting ore from the rocky earth.
After the meeting, the Mayor and one of the council members, a stylish woman with a realty business, approached Prof. Wilcox and said that they appreciated him downplaying the burial of the witch.
“I didn’t mention it at all,” Prof. Wilcox said. “A paper is in progress. We’re evaluating those unusual findings.”
“Kids have been going up there, you know,” the Mayor said. “Getting drunk and spooking each other.”
“It’s been a challenge for the police,” the stylish realtor said. “But, if its not...emphasized...I hope the situation will be forgotten in due time.”
‘Yes,” Prof. Wilcox said. “With enough time, pretty much everything is forgotten.”
Snow was forecast and Prof. Wilcox stayed overnight at the hotel on the highway to Duluth. The next morning, he drove up to the cemetery. A cast-iron fence with a gate had been erected at the end of the lane. Prof. Wilcox parked and walked uphill
Most of the new graves were hidden by snow blown into shallow white ripples. Someone had cleared the grave of the inconnue of St .Slava. The two big stones found in the casket flanked the marker inset in the frozen sod. Prof. Wilcox felt a flaring twinge in this back when he saw those rocks. Footprints pressed into the snow surrounded the grave. It looked like visitors had leaped and danced.
On the highway back to the Cities, Prof. Wilcox encountered a slippery spot and lost control of his car. The vehicle spun and, then, slid into the freeway median, narrowly missing a big truck in the other lane. Prof. Wilcox sat in his tilted car, panting a little. The accident was not a blur at all, but, rather, a series of discrete episodes, each clearly seen in his mind’s eye. More trucks thundered by and, then, a highway patrol car edged up to where he was crashed. The trooper took him to the town at the next exit where he had to hire a tow to pull his car out of the snowy ditch.
15.
In late April, Prof. Wilcox returned to Mount Iron for the kiosk dedication. The black flies were not yet swarming the thickets and forest clearings, but, in the watery pit, the mayflies were hatching, green gossamer beings that seemed too delicate to be alive. The ibuprofen that Prof. Wilcox had taken for his back had worn off and, so, he spent most of the dedication ceremony sitting in his car. Two local politicians spoke about how the prosperous past was a map to a prosperous future. After the dedication, Prof. Wilcox got out of his car to shake the hand of the Mayor, the realtor on the city council, and a lawyer who was the president of the St. Slava Perpetual Care Association.
He drove into town and sat in the bar, nursing a drink while he waited for the painkillers to take effect. Then, feeling a bit better, he drove up to the cemetery, parked, and walked up to the terrace where the new graves were located. Someone had swiped one of the big stones next to the vampire’s grave marker. A storm had passed over the place the night before and some twigs and branches blown from nearby trees littered the lawn. Prof. Wilcox picked up two sticks and set them on the inconnue’s grave, arranging them as a cross. Then, he limped farther up the hill to the edge of the graveyard sloping down to the mine precipice. At the place where the front end loader had plunged over the rim of the crater, Prof. Wilcox saw a small wooden cross planted in the ground surrounded by a tangle of muddy-looking artificial flowers.
Returning to new graves, Prof. Wilcox saw that the twig cross that he had improvised was no longer on the inconnue’s stone. The two pieces of branch were lying to the side of the marker and separated by about two feet. The day was still and warm. Fogs of mayflies moved through the thickets where a few wild flowers blossomed. Prof. Wilcox, flinching a little from back pain, stooped, picked up the two sticks and again set them on the marker, one atop the other to make a cross. He had written a grant for MUCAS to provide field work, a surface survey and some shovel tests, at a trading post on the old St. Paul to Pembina road. A conference call was scheduled and he groped in his pocket for his phone. It wasn’t there and, so, he shuffled back to where his car was parked by the kiosk. A smear of illegible black graffiti disfigured the historical marker.
After the phone call, Prof. Wilcox walked back to the new burials on the hillside. No one was around and air felt still and moist. The make-shift cross on the grave was again scattered apart and, this time, the longer stick was shattered, cracked in two. Prof. Wilcox looked around. A green ray of mayflies was ascending into the sky; an animal, perhaps a deer, thrashed through the underbrush and a bird cried out like a human infant.
16,
Dr. Barnett published a paper detailing the anomalous burial in the St. Slava cemetery. The article disguised the location of the find to prevent the curious and eccentric from trampling graves and holding vigils in the cemetery. Several on-line archaeology sites interviewed him and his article was mentioned in two periodicals for the general public on the subject. Prof. Wilcox and Tiffany Runs in Light were the fifth and sixth authors listed in the publication’s byline. He didn’t individually identify the student workers from MUCAS who had worked at the site, but credited the group collectively.
17.
Several years later, Tiffany Runs in Light encountered Geordie, the young man bitten by the tick, at a symposium on archaeology and the oral tradition. He was older and had filled-out. Geordie no longer looked like a boy scout but more like the scout master. At a break, Geordie told her where he was teaching and that his experiences at the St. Slava cemetery had led him to his present career.
Geordie said: “You know, there’s not a day that I don’t think back on that field work.”
“This is true for me too,” Tiffany told him.
18.
Eleven years later, Prof. Wilcox died from lung cancer. He had not been a smoker – at least, as far as anyone knew – and, so, his doctors were surprised by the nature of his cancer and its virulence. The human body is a miraculous wonder, intricate and mysterious and our diseases are intricate and mysterious as well.
Tiffany Runs in Light hadn’t seen Prof. Wilcox for a decade. Their careers had diverged. At the time of his funeral, she was working in the field in northern Saskatchewan investigating tipi rings and stone circles. She didn’t learn of Prof. Wilcox’s death for several months and first read his obituary in the in memoriam section of the proceedings of a professional conference that she attended. It was before the first session of the day and she held on her lap a donut on a paper plate and a cup of coffee. She remembered Prof. Wilcox with tears in his eyes and, then, thought of him stooped over, staggering under the weight of a big oval rock.
