A Season of War

Cootie started dancing back and forth from foot to foot. He knew we had to finish up our work, and we couldn’t do that till we figured out what Butch’d seen, so he was antsy to get it over with, but he wasn’t too keen about picking up that kettle. But finally he knelt down and reached in his hand and grabbed it, and he didn’t bother with any paintbrush, either. And as soon as he lifted it, we saw the flesh on the guy’s thighbones.

"There it is, just like Butch said," Cootie called to me. "But there ain’t no flesh growin’ there. It must’ve been the copper in this kettle preserved the flesh somehow so it didn’t rot away. Kinda like they preserved the mummies in Egypt. I think I read of copper doin’ that sometimes."

Butch was standing behind me now, looking in. "I told yuh I seen flesh, din’t I? I don’t like this, and I don’t like this goddamn rain. I say we close this thing up and get the hell outta here."

"I second it," I shouted to Cootie. "We don’t have any business here. Let’s fill it in before we get in trouble."

Cootie put the kettle back on the guy’s thighbones and stood up. The wind was whipping our clothes and our words now so that the only way we could hear each other was by almost screaming.

"All right," Cootie yelled with his hands cupped to his mouth. "We’ve seen enough. I’ve studied that skull close enough so I’ll know what we’re lookin’ for later. Let’s close her up."

We grabbed the shovels and started tossing the dirt back in the grave as fast as we could, covering up all the artifacts right along with the skeleton. And as we shoveled I said some words to myself, a sort of prayer, I guess, for this Indian’s soul. And I asked him to forgive us for bothering him and touching his stuff because I remember Tom telling us that once an Indian died, his property was considered sacred and nobody else used it or touched it. And he’d told us about this one sachem who’d died and the guy’s father set fire to this big old lodge the sachem had and burned the whole thing down with all the guy’s belongings in it. Well, it was sacred. And after a sachem died, his name was never mentioned again. If another sachem wanted to start a war with an enemy tribe, he’s say the name of one of their dead ancestors. He’d kind of spit it out to show contempt, and that’s all it took to start a war between tribes.

The rain made the dirt heavy and soggy, so it was hard to lift and toss back. But we finally got the grave filled, and then we had to toss the mud into a heap so’s we could rebuild the mound.

The wind was roaring now, and the sky got so black that it was almost like night out, and all kinds of things began to spook me. I thought of Nick’s Day of Judgment and how the whole earth’d turn dark, and I wondered if we could’ve started the thing in motion by doing what we’d done.

You couldn’t make out what anybody else was shouting because the wind was so loud and strong that it sucked the words out of us and whipped them away, leaving us out of breath from trying to shout and shovel at the same time. And it was like we knew we’d done something wrong, and the sooner we buried the evidence, the better.

I could barely see Cootie and Butch right next to me except when a zigzag of lightning’d fizz down from the sky and light up the whole burial ground in one flash, and then everything looked like the black, dark shadows that you see in movies like Frankenstein. Leaves were flying through the air and slapping us in the face and all over, and it was all we could do to reach with the shovels for some more diggings without getting blown away. And when you’d toss the dirt, half of it’d blow back to the canvas in the wind.

Just as I tossed the last shovelful onto the mound, a bolt of lightning hit a nearby tree, splitting it, and you could hear the thunder at the same instant. At first I thought somebody’d set off a charge of dynamite. The shock of it knocked all three of us on our asses, and all of us jumped up screaming at the same time, but it wasn’t from the lightning hit.

We’d all spotted it in the flare of the lightning strike: these arms and legs of clothes that were jumping around in the wind, and they looked for all the world like clothes made out of hides, like Indians used to wear. But what was most scary was the face that was glaring at us, angry and hard and fierce, from behind a hemlock tree next to the dancing clothes...an Indian face!

We didn’t wait for the next flash, but took off running full speed toward Bridgebury Road, leaving the shovels and trowels where we’d dropped them and not thinking about them at all. We hit the road at top speed and didn’t begin to slow down till we’d covered the two miles back to Reservoir Road.