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Burials

Anthropology and Humanism v 21 no 1 (1996)

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Anthropology and Humanism Volume 21, Number 1

Burials

DON MITCHELL

Department of Anthropology

Buffalo State College

1300 Elmwood Ave.

Buffalo, NY 14222-1095

On Site

The bridge across the South Bay was little more than a causeway, but when it humped up over the channel you could see beyond the salt flats into the marsh where the site was. On the rest of the drive there was only the stinking bay to see, in the harshly reflected early spring light. In those days I drove an old convertible, and when I collected Suzanne and the other students to drive over

to the field school we usually had the top down. Suzanne sat in the front with me, and we wore our lap belts because the front seat wasn't fastened properly, and any abrupt maneuver made it tilt back suddenly.

I have vivid and complete memories of one of those spring days, but sometimes I have trouble connecting it to what came afterward in my life. I suppose there are people whose lives can be represented as a single stratigraphic column, but I'm not one of them. Mine seems to move between sites, sometimes occupying several simultaneously. There appear to be unconformities. I haven't found

an appropriate sequencing method for myself yet.

Sometimes I go to my closet and get out old Kodacolor prints from that spring. I look on the back and they all read May 1966. Thaf s photo-finisher dating, a method not found in archaeological manuals. I always check the date, but it never changes.

Even though I know I should be trying to understand process, I keep returning to the dating. Thinking about process is harder for me, and the answers more elusive and obscure. I do know that on a shell midden near those salt flats, late in a day in early May 1966,1 began to understand how past and present can intersect in many ways and how those intersections can either trap us or spit us out.

There's the picture of Suzanne and then there's the burial. Those are the two I look at. Suzanne doesn't look embarrassed, but I think she probably was. I surprised her by grabbing the camera and turning to where she was lolling in the grass during lunch, and by saying, "Suzanne! Smile, look sexy." And she laughed before she did look right at the camera, making one of those faces that mid-sixties good girls put on when they were pretending to be sexy. Then we went back to work.

Suzanne and I had straight pit walls, and we had neat notebooks and competent photographs of the few artifacts we'd found. But we'd been told that this wasn't enough for a good grade. The graduate assistant had taken everyone aside and explained that our professor valued technique over everything, and that to him, the true test of technique was excavating a burial.

She said, "He needs to see you brushing phalanges and he wants to see that you can pick out ornaments from among the bones. He wants to see you expose the whole thing without having it shift before you get it out of the pit and back to the lab." She said it was an open secret that no one could get a good grade without exposing a burial, but that our chances were good because there were many burials in this shell midden.

It was the last day of digging, and then there would be only backfilling and lab work. I was worried, because I probably wouldn't be going to graduate school without that A. We were approaching the sterile zone, and since we couldn't open another pit I didn't think I had much of a chance.

We were down five or six feet by then. Usually only one of us worked in the pit at once. Suzanne and I could both get into it, but it was cramped if we did. One of us used a stubby pitchfork to break into the midden, and once it was loose the other one got in and troweled. In mid-afternoon I was taking the pit floor down another six inches when I hit the lip of a big shell with my trowel.

I didn't think too much about it until I'd worked the trowel around the lip a bit and realized that it was an abalone shell, and that it was a very big one laid horizontally- By then we knew about abalone shell burials, though no one had gotten one that season. I stood up and called Suzanne over into the pit, and she came over from where she'd been helping someone else backfill and squatted on the edge. I put my hand on her arm, pulled her down toward me, and whispered to her, "I'm onto an abalone shell. If s big and I think there's something on it."

She dropped down into the pit and knelt beside me. We worked side by side with our bodies touching from time to time as we moved. We didn't tell anybody what we were doing. As we worked down from the top and in from the edge, the little skull began to show. The cranial bones were surprisingly unbroken for an infant. It was pure luck that Suzanne hadn't impaled it with the pitchfork when she was loosening.

I leaned over to Suzanne and whispered into her ear, "Our A, if s our A." She turned and gave me a long, hard look, and said, "If s our chance, anyway."

We kept working. We didn't want anybody else to see us until we'd exposed more of it. Just past the skull and what was left of the mandible, there were the disks of a little shell necklace, scattered because its fiber stringing had long ago rotted away. I was prepared for a skull, and even for little infant facial bones, but I wasn't ready for decoration. I was prepared for a skeleton, but I wasn't ready

for someone's baby, and the necklace made it someone's baby.

I said to myself, "Jesus, it's real." I might have said it out loud. As if before I uncovered the necklace I'd thought it unreal. As if I'd thought it an effigy, or a doll, or an apparition.

Suzanne was brushing off the pelvis and the legs, and she was whispering, "Oh look at this little thing, oh these little legs, oh you poor little thing, oh look at you. Lef s get you cleaned up and out of here."

I pulled myself out of the pit and got my camera, and that's why a second picture in that old Kodak envelope is a picture of a partly excavated abalone shell infant burial. Suzanne's hand is in the picture, too.

The recorded sequence on that day was that Suzanne pretended to be sexy first, and then we uncovered our burial. The evidence for this is that the two events are recorded next to each other on the orange strip of negatives, and they will stay in that relative position forever, even though the prints made from them have been well plowed and mixed.

The only physical evidence of that day left to me are those negatives, and the prints with their dates. The rest is all memory and it isn't fixed in time, but instead exists in that space where the past remains not just alive, but loose, and where the only thing that stays fixed is how I feel when I remember it, and even that changes too, but more slowly.

On that day I learned what it was like to be uncertain where in time I was, and though that yielded a sense of multiple possibilities more than a sense of fear, that day can return to me as both fear and uncertainty now that I am old. I wonder, how many more junctions await me before I die? When I start wondering that, I know I need to anchor my own chronology at some point. May 1966 always seems the best. Thaf s when I go get the photographs and look at them, because what happened after we found the baby is recorded only in my memory, and I need to start someplace.

After the burial was well exposed we called to the other students and they knelt on the edges and congratulated us, but I could tell that some of them were envious. They would not be getting A's. We called Cunningham, the professor, over too, but both of us got out of the pit before he slid down into it, and knelt next to the burial. Neither one of us wanted to be too close to him.

He did a little technical work, and then he climbed out. He told us it was a good one and that we were to finish exposing it. He told us to cut the shell matrix away around the sides, leaving it as if on a platform, and then to cut under it and slide it off and onto a piece of wood he gave us, and to take it to the lab like that.

We were supposed to take it like that to the lab as if it were some kind of insect pinned onto cardboard, or maybe as if it were the remains of a planked fish that people had eaten at, leaving just the bones. I didn't like the way he talked about it. But I decided I'd do what he said, because even though I had found it and it wasn't his to tell me what to do with, I wanted a better grade and I also wanted

to see if I had in fact learned how to do the tricky parts of this work. I looked at Suzanne, and I thought I could tell that she was thinking the same thing, so we dropped back into the pit together and continued working.

We needed another two hours to do it, and by then everyone else had left the site and gone back across the bay. There was still some light left in the pit when we finished sliding the baby off onto the board. I picked up the board and held it carefully so he wouldn't shift, and then I handed him up out of the pit to Suzanne. We had decided it was a boy even though we both knew enough osteology to understand we would not ever know its sex.

The baby lay on the baulk, and we stood over him and looked around at the site. Most of the pits were partly filled in, and pools of shadow were cast around the site in that arbitrary excavation geometry in which the Euclidean overlies the non-Euclidean. The people whose lives were buried here had not laid them out in five-foot squares. It was we who cast the net of coordinates onto their mound

of shells, hoping in this way to enmesh them and pull them from the ground.

Suzanne and I were young and inexperienced, but even so we sensed that the net lay clumsily on the site and that it had not enveloped all that had been there. We had landed the baby, but in the necklace we had already understood that we had not brought his world up out of the pit with him, and for all that we had dug our way into it we had not become any part of the world that had made him.

Suzanne and I understood this, but we could not have explained it to anybody that day on the east shore of the bay as it was getting cold and the wind was picking up. And if the others had not all gone home we would never have seen it that day, and perhaps not ever any day, because we would not have been alone on the site with the baby and the pits.

A feeling was growing in me: Suzanne and I needed to join ourselves more to the site. We had been on our hands and knees down in it. We wore its substance on our skins, beneath our nails, and in the little cuts and scratches we'd gotten from the shells, and its dust and dirt were in our mouths and lungs too. It had marked us in many ways, but we knew we were not part of what had happened there.

I felt the pit drawing us in because it seemed the only place we might deny that Euclidian world in which we were not parents of any baby, did not belong to the site, and had created nothing of substance together except a large hole. In the pit perhaps we could become that which we were not. In the pit perhaps we could find a way to insert ourselves into the world that, having disregarded all this, had yielded its baby up to us.

So I said to Suzanne, "We should do something- We can't just take him away with us. We need some kind of ceremony. Maybe we should go back in the pit for a while." She nodded, and then she stepped over the boy and went with me to the pit. I dropped in first and then she slid down into my arms. We stood in that way, holding each other and not talking, clinging to each other and swaying back and forth in the pit. The walls were sharp with shells on my arms and my hands as they moved on her back. I could smell her sweat from working, and when I pressed my cheek against hers I could feel gritty dirt.

After a while I began to think I knew what we should do. I pulled away and I reached out my soiled hands and I began to unbutton her shirt, and when she did not object, I stopped and began to unbutton my own. Suzanne looked at me and then nodded. We each removed our own clothes and threw them out of the pit, and stood there facing each other.

I was surprised that this did not seem strange to me, even though we had never seen each other naked before, nor had we ever touched each other except by accident in the pit. It did not seem strange to me, though I had never stood in a pit in a shell midden clothed only in shadow, as was Suzanne, though for a moment as she pulled off her shirt a yellowish light had fallen on her breasts.

The midden was yielding up the heat it had stored during the day, and so it was still warm in the pit. We embraced, and when each felt the other shivering we knew it was not from cold, but because of the thing we were about to do, but knew not how to do, nor what its meaning would be when we did do it. We shivered because of our shared compulsion to do this thing, to connect ourselves somehow to our baby and his people.

Suzanne said, "We have to say something before we do it. We can't just do it here in his place and not say anything, because it's for him and how will they know?" I said, "I know we can't. We have to say something." I cleared my throat and tried to think of what I needed to say, but Suzanne spoke while I was still thinking.

She said, "Little boy, I'll do for you what your mother did here where you've been lying all these centuries before we found you. Now you've been born into our world because of us and this is the only way I can see to back up before you as if we had made you first."

I said, "Little boy, I'm sorry you died. I don't know where your parents are. Maybe they're nearby. Maybe they've been dug up like you. But we can't make you ours without doing what your parents did, and so thaf s what we're going to do. After that we'll take care of you."

And so we made love against the pit wall that evening while the wind blew across the site, and there were no other sounds but the sounds the wind made, and the sounds we made, and the sounds of the cars far away on the bridge.

As I moved with Suzanne I could see our boy lying on the baulk. The grass behind him was swaying, but the wind didn't move his delicate little bones at all. And then Suzanne and I had to curl around each other in S curves and lie on our sides on the dirt and the sharp shells while we finished what we were doing, and I couldn't see our boy any more, but I knew we were lying where he had been borne to us.

In the Woods

We were probing the ground with sticks where she thought she'd buried him. She was afraid he'd been eroded into the river and had bounced and floated down to Rochester, or maybe had just sunk behind the dam. The mosquitoes were biting, and I wasn't sure I wanted to be there in the woods behind the Parade Ground, down on my knees in the dirt, trying to find the widow's husband so we could dig him up out of the ground.

We didn't even have proper tools because when we set out driving that day we hadn't thought we'd end up here. She hadn't said anything about digging him up even when we'd gotten to the part of the park where she'd done it, and even when she'd taken me up into the woods to show me the place, she'd said nothing. It was only when we'd been there for a while that she'd said she wanted to do it.

I kept digging and probing because I knew she wanted me to, and because it was a kind of work I understood, except that before this I had never known exactly who I was looking for down in the ground. I probed for a while and found nothing.

She didn't want to give up. I went back to my car and got some long stainless steel rods I had left in it from another job I'd been doing. They were better for probing, and when she struck wood with one I could hear the clunk and we both knew it was not a root. We switched back to the digging sticks, and before long we had enough of a hole to pull him out.

The maple box she'd put his ashes in was stained but intact, so she didn't open it. She said that if it had been broken she'd have looked in it to see that he was all right.

She held it on her lap and rocked back and forth and cried a little. She introduced us. Nodding and saying hello to the box seemed entirely natural to me. I'd heard about this man, and I'd seen pictures of him and he'd lived with this woman, and he'd made love to her, and I'd done all of these things too, and now that I'd dug him up it was time to meet him.

His name was on the box, so he was well identified, but I wasn't sure whether the widow was or not, and I was pretty certain that I wasn't. His birth and death dates were on the box, which located him in time, but I thought that the widow probably wasn't, and I thought I probably wasn't either. I began to feel time loosening around me.

This loosening of time made itself known in the form of questions I could not easily answer. He was surely dead and cremated and in a maple box which had been buried along the gorge of the Genesee River, but what were we? While she was holding the box in her lap I didn't know whether she was his widow or whether she had become his wife again. It seemed to me in that place that she was both, for all that he was dead and she was alive.

And when we put him back in the ground, what then? He'd leapfrogged many years and had just now inserted himself into our lives, but would putting him back in the ground push the chronology down, or was his exposure going to leave him with us in our time in a way he had not been until we took him out? I couldn't answer these questions. They just chased each other around the edges of my consciousness.

I put my arms around the widow, and we sat cross-legged, facing each other for a while, the box between us. I thought that perhaps holding her would let me anchor myself, and it did. We looked at the box, and at the river, and down through the trees to the parade ground. She didn't say anything more, except from time to time she would sigh and put her head against my chest.

I found myself thinking of Suzanne, and I was thinking of the baby too, and I think if there hadn't been a birthday party going on at the pavilion, the widow and I might have made love there in the woods. For all that I was twenty years older we might have done the same thing Suzanne and I had done. It would have shown her husband how we cared for each other, and maybe it would have located us a little more precisely, as apart from him. He had his presence, but he couldn't make love to her. At least thaf s how I was thinking about it. I didn't think it would be insulting to her husband, but I thought she might. It also seemed to me that there were too many people too close to us, so I didn't suggest it.

Instead I told her about that time on the shell midden. I told her that after we were done making love in the pit we still felt as though we had more to do. We were inventing our ritual as we went along, and it didn't seem complete. Here we were literally in his grave and though we felt that what we'd done was powerful, we wanted to do more. What we'd done seemed correct, but incomplete. So I told the widow that we'd cut ourselves and left some blood as a symbol, as a kind of offering.

The widow didn't say much, and she didn't ask me any questions. She must have been thinking of her husband and how they'd been together, and how she was with me now. My story didn't seem to mean much to her. She probably didn't care about what I'd done years before when I dug up a baby with another woman, even though I thought that telling her about it would remove whatever strangeness might be clinging to us from what we'd just done.

I asked her how she felt, and she said she felt good about what we'd done and didn't want to do anything except sit. So after a while we reburied her husband, and then we walked out past the birthday party and left. But I wasn't ready to let go of my memories of May 1966. I was remembering what had really happened at the site.

I pulled out a sharp shell from the wall, and put it in Suzanne's hand. Then I got one for myself and said, "Suzanne, I think we need to leave more of ourselves here than we have already. Can you cut me? Because I can cut you." She closed her eyes for a moment,

and then she said, "Do you think that's what they all want? Or will we only do it for our boy?"

I said, "I think for all of them and for us too. This pit's his grave and because of us it's his birthplace too. There's blood around birth and there's blood around death and so we'd better leave some of our blood here." She nodded and said, "I can do it."

"Cut my leg," I said, "cut my thigh." And she said, "cut my belly." We each gasped as the shells cut. It hurt. The blood flow wasn't heavy but there was enough. We rubbed our hands in each other's blood, and we rubbed our hands together, and we rubbed them

on our sexes, and we dripped what we'd mixed onto the shells where our boy had been buried, and after we climbed out of the pit and put our clothes on, we put our hands in our pants to get more, and we lifted the pieces of our boy's skull up off the abalone shell,

and we painted pink streaks on the shell's pearly surface, and then we laid him back down on it again.

Up on the Mountain

I was trying to catalogue the things my father had taught me. I hadn't been with him much over the last thirty years. I sat with him in a hospital room while he died, and when he was conscious we'd talk. When he'd lose consciousness I'd drift and think about the things I knew how to do and try to decide which of them he'd taught me. I knew he would die soon. I understood something of the chaos and disorder that accompany deaths, and I thought I might shunt some of it away if I could count what he'd given me and put those things in order. As I tried to name them I realized they mostly had to do with finding animals, killing them, and cutting them up, activities that I had long ago abandoned.

He taught me how to butcher animals. He taught me to eat what I killed or not to kill it, and to despise trophy hunters. He taught me to climb in the morning while fresh and come down tired in the afternoon, through the clouds that had formed along the mountain slopes. He said it was easier to get clear of the fog by climbing down, as you were more likely to walk out of it at the base of the clouds than you were to walk out over their tops.

I wanted to ask him how it felt to have something killing him, but I didn't know how to do it. I knew I should ask him other things, but I couldn't name them and so I didn't know how to ask them. I just wanted to know more about him than I did, to have some new knowledge of him to hold on to. Instead, when he seemed himself for a while one afternoon, I decided to tell him stories about the old days. I thought I could get him to talk that way.

I started by reminding him of the time he was squatting in a clump of grass when somebody flushed a pheasant up the mountain from him, and he just picked up his L. C. Smith shotgun and downed it without even standing up. It seemed like a good story to tell, since at the time I was helping him with his bedpan. He laughed, but my story led nowhere.

So I decided to tell him things about myself I'd never told him, things I wanted him to know about before he died.

I told him about the time we were up on the mountain bird-hunting. I was about eleven or twelve. I had to take a crap so I sat on a log at the head of a little gully, resting my shotgun beside me. As soon as I settled myself, a pig chuffed and ran out under me. Without even thinking I grabbed my shotgun and killed it. It was bird season and I didn't have a pig permit. What now? My dad called to me, what had I shot? The dogs were with him so I was safe. "Just shooting at a wild cat," I yelled back.

I dragged the pig back under the log and shoved it in its hole, burying it. I didn't have to go anymore. I didn't tell him what I'd done, because even at that age I understood the shame of killing something out of fear rather than by intent.

He laughed and said that he probably wouldn't have been mad at me, because he knew what it was like to be startled by a pig. "You were just a boy." he said, "you got scared. Don't worry about it." That was all he said.

I fed him his dinner a little later, and then I tried asking my question. I started by asking him, "What are you thinking about?" and he said, without hesitating, "I'm thinking about getting well and getting the hell out of here." After that I couldn't ask him the question I was going to ask, which was whether he was afraid to die or not. That night he did die, so the last things we shared were a meal, a bedpan, and a good laugh about things we'd killed with our pants down.

When I got back from the hospital after he died, I went into his workshop to think about him. It seemed like the right place to go. His tools were still scattered much as he'd left them when he couldn't use them anymore. I knew I'd have to decide what to do with them, just as I'd have to decide what to do with him. As I leaned on his bench, picking up chisels and testing their edges against the hairs

on my forearm, I thought of Suzanne and the site.

A little rain blew in from the bay. Suzanne and 1 were sitting up on the baulk, with our boy between us. We were sticky and tired and sore and drained, and so we hoped the rain would cleanse us and renew us a little, even though it was cold. The car sat there

waiting for us. We knew all we had to do was pick up our boy on his board and put him in the car and go back to school. We could hand him in on Monday.

Suzanne said, "It's not right to do this." When she said that, I was feeling a different kind of intensity than I had in the pit. I was feeling a kind of clarity about what we'd done, and what we'd failed to do. We'd tried to merge ourselves with this infant and his

people, and now we understood that if it could be done at all it couldn't be done by possession.

We'd twisted time and generation here at the midden and now we sat on the baulk at their center, time pivoting around us. It came to me that past and present might somehow be hinged, so that instead of just sweeping up out of the past, time's arrow could bend or fold back on itself in some way, in some places. If we'd tried to bend time into a new alignment, we could try to bend it back, too.

I saw this in what we'd done and I sensed it on other levels, but I wasn't sure how to talk about it. I didn't have the words, and I was unsure of the framework, and I knew Suzanne was, too. For the first time I understood one consequence of being young, which is that I hadn't understood very much about time. I only knew about one way for past and present to intersect. On site I'd become aware that there must be others, but I didn't know what they were. I just realized there must be many, and that Suzanne and I had

felt them, and that we'd been caught for a while in one of them, here on the baulk and down in the pit.

What Suzanne and I had done felt right to me, but we couldn't do what Cunningham expected us to. I said to Suzanne, "You're right. We've joined him to us, but he's not really ours, and so I think he's got to stay here." Suzanne turned to me and nodded, because that's what she had been thinking, and we leaned over our boy and we put our arms around each other. We needed to hold each other a little more, but we didn't kiss because that was all finished. After a while we helped each other up, and we picked up

our boy and carried him to the pit, and slid him carefully off the board and put him where we had found him. We backfilled the pit about half full, as if we'd done it before we left with the baby.

On the way back we made up a story about the tipping car seat, and the board on Suzanne's lap, and the top down, and the bridge and a sudden lunge, and the baby flying out and disappearing into the bay. We didn't care whether Cunningham believed it or not.

Ashes

My father gave me the kind of knife the ranchers used. He told me it was a castrating knife, but I never thought I'd castrate anything with it. Until he took me up on the mountain to kill sheep, I had used it only for boyish tasks. My knife had German words on its blade: Friedr. Herder abr. Sohn, Solingen. I had no idea what they meant, and I didn't care either. Those words became my mantra:

freeder herder aber son sol in jen

I was saying it to myself the first time my father took me on the long ride over lava roads in the dark, going up on the mountain to hunt sheep. He'd borrowed a short-stocked rifle for me to use, and I had it in my lap so I could get used to the feel of the wood, and the lever action, and the touch of the blue metal. My castrating knife was in my pocket, and my blade mantra in my mind all the way

up the mountain.

We climbed in the morning, and then we stalked a flock, and I chose a ram and I aimed, and dropped him sprawling among the rocks, but he wasn't dead when I ran over to him.

"Still alive, son. Slit its throat." I knelt by the ram's heaving chest, pulled back his muzzle so his throat was exposed, felt hot breath on my thumb and heard a little bleat, a moan perhaps, rushing air, or a soft doom-sigh. I hesitated. I closed my eyes, I opened them and slashed. Blood chased my blade, then came rushing out, washing over Friedr. Herder abr. Sohn, Solingen. Freeder herder aber son sol

in jen.

My father said, "Don't bury me. I don't want to be any place when I'm dead."

When he finished dying I took his ashes to the edge of a place I knew, where the wind never stopped, and I could see the mountain spreading itself out below me, and when I turned and looked up it seemed to be spreading out above me too, as if to fold me into itself.

I took off my clothes and laid them on the ground, and I poured my father into my hand, and I whirled and threw him into the wind until he was almost all gone, and then I put the rest of him in my mouth, to be with me a little longer.