Relics Page 3

  Dr. Bingham stroked his goatee. He delivered the obvious question—“Who stole the hog?”—with a perfectly deadpan face.

  Carmen said, “Miss Dovey knows, but so far she won’t say. She says telling the story now would only hurt people who never laid a hand on anybody else’s hog.”

  Dr. Amory’s mouth was twitching. This evidence of a sense of humor made Faye like him better.

  “And precisely how does this relate to the hypothesis of the federal grant that is paying all our salaries?” Dr. Raleigh had not yet demonstrated evidence of a lighter side.

  When Carmen wasn’t messing with the minds of over-serious scientists, she was all business. “I’ve made recordings of Miss Dovey singing songs about tremendous sailing ships and sailors who lived at sea for years on end. She knows stories about young women who were kidnapped to serve as ‘companions’ to sailors lonely for female company. Finding the truth in Miss Dovey’s tales is like decoding a staticky radio signal. The truth is buried in there somewhere, but we won’t know what it is until we filter out the noise. I have a few more interviews I want to do, but starting Monday, I will stop the general population interviews and devote all my efforts to untangling Miss Dovey’s songs and stories.”

  “Had you the slightest intention of clearing this change in approach with me?”

  Carmen would have taken a step back, if the pew hadn’t been in her way. “I didn’t see this as a change, more as a focusing of the approach we were already using. As far as clearing the change with you—that’s what I thought I was doing right now.”

  Dr. Raleigh stopped pacing and lifted his chin off his chest. His wide-legged stance made him look more like a fly-weight boxer than a man of learning. “Well, I don’t approve the change. You can’t abandon the door-to-door canvassing of the settlement. It will compromise the project. For one thing, how do you know that there’s not another Miss Dovey in the next house, one with even more informative stories than this one?”

  “The settlement isn’t that big. I’ve asked everyone I interviewed if they had elderly relatives who might remember old family stories and folk tales. They said—”

  “But you just said that fully one-quarter of the Sujosa refused to speak with you. And you haven’t tried everyone yet, have you? You don’t really know who’s lurking behind those last few doors, do you?”

  “No, Dr. Raleigh.”

  “Then finish the survey as it was mapped out at the outset of this project before you make the unprofessional decision—without authorization—to prematurely narrow it to one person.”

  Carmen sat down, and Raleigh turned to Brent Harbison.

  “Anything from you, Brent?”

  “Nope,” said the doctor. To Faye’s surprise, Raleigh accepted his rather succinct answer. Faye interpreted Raleigh’s unwillingness to push him further as an indication of Brent Harbison’s high status on the team and with NIH. She wondered how Raleigh felt about that.

  “Very well,” said Raleigh, and after a few words about the following week’s schedule, he dismissed the meeting. Faye filed out with everyone else. The fact that Raleigh had not given a progress report on the archaeological work had not escaped her attention.

  Chapter Four

  Faye and Joe spent most of Saturday morning at Raleigh’s excavation, which, if possible, looked even worse in the clear light of day. Never had she seen a less promising or more battered site, but she was determined to do the professional thing and devote the day to conducting a thorough review. Until, that is, she discovered that the work shed was locked, and that no one knew who had the key. Raleigh, of course, had taken off for the weekend, so she couldn’t ask him. Late in the morning, she decided there was nothing more she could accomplish without staff or information, so she sent Joe off with one of the technicians to purchase supplies in Alcaskaki, and turned to setting up her office.

  Faye’s office was in a former storage room in the back of Hanahan’s Grocery. She had to share it with Carmen, but, other problems aside, she was as excited as a six-year-old with brandnew school supplies. She spent a happy hour transferring her research materials into her very own filing cabinet and organizing her new aluminum briefcase.

  Faye was proud of her color-coded files, but she loved her briefcase best. Hard use in the field might someday dent its smooth flanks or dull its silvery shine, but it would survive abuse that would shred an ordinary leather or canvas model. Faye knew, because she had shredded a few briefcases in her day.

  She had unrolled her maps of the Sujosa settlement and the surrounding area and was thumbtacking them to the walls when Carmen appeared and settled down to write up her latest round of interviews. The two women worked quietly, side by side, for an hour or two. Then, when a conversation eventually started, it arose naturally from their work. Faye felt that this spoke well for their future as officemates and housemates, since she herself had never been good at idle chit-chat.

  “I looked up words that sounded like ‘Sujosa’ on the Internet as soon as I got this project,” Faye said as she slid her last file folder into place.

  “Yeah, me too,” Carmen said. “How long did it take you to find out that sujo meant ‘dirty’ in Portuguese?”

  “Ten minutes,” Faye said. “How ’bout you?”

  “About that long. And yet that’s the only progress Dr. Amory’s made on his part of the project in a whole month. Do you think he’s serious when he says he’s been lounging around Jenny Hanahan’s store all this time?”

  “Maybe he has a crush on her,” Faye said. “How long will it take you to finish the door-to-door survey and get back to Miss Dovey? It sounds to me like she’s your best bet.”

  “Raleigh is an idiot.” Carmen opened her briefcase—an aluminum model like Faye’s, but bigger—and yanked out a fat binder, holding it high like a trophy. “Check this out—I just finished transcribing every interview I’ve done to date, and there’s a lot more of Miss Dovey in this file than our asshole director needs to know about right now. I’ll finish the interviews he wants me to do, then I’ll spring these on him, pretending I just finished them. He’ll never know how much data I collected without his approval.”

  With a conspiratorial grin, she waved the binder. “Miss Dovey’s been getting up at dawn to feed the chickens for eighty-five years now. Guess where I’ve been having breakfast seven days a week for the past two weeks?”

  “I thought the team didn’t work on Saturdays,” Faye said, reaching for the binder.

  “When I’m on a field assignment, I work when I have to. I’ve never seen a budget for site work yet that gave a realistic estimate of the time required to do a project right. Raleigh’s dig team has been working from eight to five with an hour off for lunch, five days a week, for a month. I don’t know how you’re going to finish the archaeological survey, considering all the time he’s wasted.”

  Faye, flipping through the transcripts, reflected that Carmen didn’t know the half of it. “Is that ethical, letting an interviewee feed you breakfast?”

  “It’s worse than that. I bribe her,” Carmen said. “She still keeps chickens, so she’s fried me some of the freshest eggs I ever tasted, but she’s got no cash to buy things she can’t raise herself, now that her husband’s gone. When I come walking up every morning carrying a package of bacon, she meets me on the porch, already talking. ‘What kind of questions you got for Miss Dovey today?’ she wants to know. And you should see her kitchen. She’s got an electric pump on her well now, but the old hand pump is still right there by her sink. And she never moved her wood-burning cook stove out of the house when she upgraded to LP. It just sits there like a museum piece.”

  “Like the kitchen in our bunkhouse,” Faye said. “It’s a real antique.”

  “Yeah, but Miss Dovey’s kitchen feels—I don’t know, it feels alive. She and her husband grew and slaughtered all their food for over fifty years, and they preserved it and cooked it in that room. She has a wooden table he buil
t her, just to knead bread on. He made it low, so she could lean over and put her back into her work. She’s had to let a lot of the gardening and canning go since he died, and I think her diet has suffered for it, but that kitchen has her life’s history in it.”

  Faye couldn’t help herself. “I do believe Dr. Raleigh has a home economist on his team after all.”

  Carmen rolled her desk chair over closer to Faye’s, so she could smack her on the head with a brimming file folder.

  “Seriously, Carmen,” Faye went on, “this is a treasure trove. You’re absolutely right—you may have already gotten some critical information from Miss Dovey, but when will you find time to do the digging it’ll take to uncover it?”

  “Here’s an extra copy.” Carmen handed her a second binder. “You want to read it? I’m not going to get any more work done on these notes until I’ve finished Dr. Raleigh’s precious door-to-door survey.”

  Faye was impressed by the generosity of an academic willing to part with primary data. “You think I work all the time, too?”

  “It’s still Saturday, isn’t it?”

  “Busted,” Faye said. “Okay, I’ll read your interviews. I’ve done about all I can on the archeology side today.”

  “Good, you can come with me on my afternoon round of interviews.”

  “Me?” Faye was honestly taken aback. “I don’t do interviews—I dig in the dirt. I’d be in the way. Wouldn’t I?”

  “Not at all. It’ll give you a chance to get a feel for the place. And unlike Dr. Raleigh, I don’t think it’s productive to pigeonhole a talented staff. I have no doubt you can help me in my work. Later, maybe I can help you in yours. That’s how real professionals operate.”

  Faye held out a hand, and Carmen gave her a quick, deal-sealing shake. With a colleague like Carmen, things just might work out well, after all.

  ***

  Despite Faye’s initial concerns, she found that Carmen’s easy charm had worked its magic on the Sujosa. Wherever she went, whoever she passed as they wandered through the settlement, she called them by name and asked after their children and their pets, and they responded warmly. Faye, they more or less ignored, but Carmen, they loved.

  Faye didn’t mind being on the sidelines. The walk gave her archaeologist’s brain a chance to look around and enjoy the contrast between old and new, between now and long ago. Actually, she was using the words “new” and “now” rather loosely. She doubted that a new home had been built in the Sujosa settlement during her lifetime—and she was pushing thirty-six. Some of the houses had to be way over a hundred years old, but the people who inhabited them weren’t fossils. They were vibrant and lively, if poor, products of the twenty-first century who just happened to live in very old houses. She wondered what the odds were that any of them would let her excavate in their own back yards. They could be treading on treasures every time they walked out to water the petunias.

  Eventually, Carmen led her to the front porch of the Smiley home, their first stop. It seemed to Faye that the Smileys were taking an inordinate amount of time to answer the knock on their front door. But Carmen filled in the down time ruminating on why she enjoyed her career as an oral historian.

  “It’s not even like work,” she said, and Faye could hear an echo of Carmen’s Cuban roots in the exotic twist she gave every vowel. “In my family, we’d sit together on Sunday afternoons, just talking, and my abuela told me such stories. And sometimes, when I was lucky, her mother, God rest her soul, would tell me stories, too. What if she had died without passing them on? And now I get paid to collect stories from—”

  The Smileys’ door finally opened, and a woman who Faye judged to be about her own age stepped into the doorway, filling the open space.

  Carmen stuck out her hand. “I’m Carmen Martinez and this is Faye Longchamp. We’re here to—”

  The woman enveloped Carmen’s hand in her larger one, shook it once, and withdrew it, saying, “I’m Ronya Smiley. I know who you are.”

  Ronya Smiley was thick-waisted, broad-shouldered, and close to six feet tall. Her intelligent blue eyes were set into a face the color of a brown paper bag, and their expression was not welcoming.

  “Then you know I’d like the chance to sit and talk awhile,” said Carmen.

  “I’m real busy today.” Ronya crossed her arms.

  A reedy little voice piped up. “Mama, mama, come see what I built with my blocks!”

  Ronya turned her head, but didn’t move from the door. “Mama will be there in a minute, Zack. Just as soon as these two nice ladies leave.” She raised her eyebrows at Faye and Carmen, as if to say, “It’s time for you two nice ladies to take a hint and get the hell out.”

  But Carmen only smiled. “Perhaps later in the afternoon?”

  “Leo works in the limerock mine all week. Saturdays are the only time we have as a family. You ladies have a good evening.” Ronya stepped back from the door, preparing to push it shut. Zack, a bright-faced four-year-old, rushed up and threw his arms around her powerful thigh, saying, “Mama, come see! I’m building a spaceship that’ll take us to Mars!”

  “Then perhaps another day?” Carmen asked, and Faye admired her dogged persistence.

  Mrs. Smiley finally nodded, albeit grudgingly. “I’m supposed to sit with Kiki Montrose next Friday afternoon. Ain’t nothing to do but just sit there while she sleeps. Come talk to me then.”

  The door closed and they could hear the sound of a deadbolt sliding into place.

  “Good going!” Faye said, punching Carmen on the arm.

  Carmen shrugged off the compliment. “Some of the Sujosa are never going to cooperate with this study, and nobody can make them, but people do like to talk about themselves. If people see that I’m really truly interested in what they have to say, they usually respond.”

  Stepping off the porch, she set down her silver-toned briefcase and began writing in a notebook. When, five minutes later, Carmen was still at it, Faye could stand it no longer.

  “What can you possibly be writing? She hardly spoke to us.”

  “Really? She told us her husband worked at the limerock mine. She showed us that she’s a loving mother—”

  “But—” Faye had started to ask how Carmen could possibly make such a statement after observing the woman with her child for hardly thirty seconds, but she stopped herself. It was true. In the way Ronya Smiley had spoken to her son, in the uninhibited way he rushed up to her and grasped her leg, in the timbre of both their voices and the soft look in Ronya’s eyes, it was apparent that mother and son enjoyed a special relationship.

  “And,” Carmen said, gesturing at a pole barn standing beside the house, “I think you can guess her profession.”

  Through the open sides of the pole barn, Faye could see a potter’s wheel, a shovel, and buckets full of mud, or something very like it. “Looks like she throws pots. Are you sure that’s her profession and not just a hobby?”

  “Trust me, the Sujosa don’t have the time and money to waste on hobbies,” said Carmen. “More likely, she stays home with little Zack all week while Leo works at the mine, then she sells her pots at craft shows on Saturdays.”

  Faye conceded Carmen’s point. Then, just to show that her powers of observation weren’t completely overshadowed by Carmen’s, she pointed at a satellite dish that stood in the Smileys’ front yard like a metallic mushroom kicked on its side by a petulant kid. “Looks like somebody in this house likes television.” Gesturing toward a brand-new box labeled Satellite Dish—This End Up she added, “And they just got real happy.”

  Leaving Carmen to her writing, Faye took a few steps to the side of the house. Looking deeper into the Smileys’ back yard, she spied a large woodpile and, beyond that, a massive stack of mottled bricks. The pattern of mud on the lower bricks, splashed there by rainstorms, said that the brick pile had stood in the yard for quite some time.

  “Reckon the Smileys were planning to build a new house when th
ey bought that pile of bricks?” she asked Carmen. The idea made Faye sad, as if she were looking at an abandoned dream. Perhaps time and bad luck and the vagaries of low-wage employment had killed the Smileys’ hopes for a modern home.

  Carmen nodded and continued. “I also know the Smiley marriage is not a model of domestic bliss.” Her head was still bowed over her work, but Faye caught her peeking mischievously through her bangs as if to see what Faye thought of her clairvoyance.

  “She said nothing of the kind. You’re making that up.”

  “Not exactly. Check your copy of the transcripts. I interviewed Leo Smiley last week and Ronya apparently knows nothing about it. That doesn’t make them sound like one of those couples that sits at the supper table, chatting about every single minute of the time they were apart, now does it?” She grinned, picked up her briefcase, and headed for the next house.

  ***

  Ronya Smiley had heard that the Martinez woman never stopped working. Jenny Hanahan said that most evenings, while she was tallying up her cash register and locking her grocery store for the night, she saw the historian trudging out of her office, heading back to the house that the government people were renting from Amanda-Lynne Lavelle. And Jenny stayed open until nine.

  Ronya respected hard work, but she didn’t see how spending day after day just talking to people counted as hard work. Talking didn’t earn any paycheck that she’d ever heard about, and it surely didn’t buy groceries.