from the tyranny of stratigraphy
“When Presley Arduck arrived, the first person he saw was the farmer; and I don’t remember his name – the name of the farmer that is. But Presley found the farmer leaning on his shovel outside of the cave. Well, with a foot in the cave. And when Presley got there he asked the farmer to show him the way and the farmer wouldn’t do it.”
“The farmer said that he wouldn’t go in there again. He said that it was like nothing he had ever seen before. ‘Damn ugliest thing,’ he said and he spit into the doorway of the cave when he said it. ‘Did you bring a lantern?’ the farmer asked and Presley said, ‘Sure’. But he wondered why the farmer wouldn’t go inside with him.”
“Mrs. Stein isn’t it? Your name is Mrs. Stein?. Well, because Presley knew something about the farmer; he knew that the farmer had found a lot of these on his land and was a good man to have called every time. He knew the farmer was something of an expert on it all and had studied most of the textbooks. Presley thought the farmer was probably better educated about them, right in that area, than any of the graduate students that Presley had ever had. The farmer would always call Presley first and Presley would tell him to make a few sketches and notes and send them along and to call the fellows at White Mesa and have them come up and do the real work, because the area was pretty much all Kayenta and Presley let those fellows do most of the Kayenta because so much of it was on their land. It was a kind of gentlemen’s agreement. But this time the farmer had been so excited and upset on the phone. And what he said sounded so crazy.”
“Presley wasn’t far away. He was working on the Dirty Devil when the farmer called. So Presley came himself and got there before that fellow who works for the them at White Mesa – his name is Maddox – and those who came with Maddox or the Sheriffs Office or any of the media of course. It was a long time before the media came and I don’t think they ever saw the cave.”
He stopped speaking as the waiters appeared. Dr. Jason Trimbly looked a little out of place, he looked younger, at least slimmer, ruddier and less eccentric, than the others. He augmented his narrative with vivid gestures and facial expressions. He had dark angular features and long dark hair that was drawn into a pony tail that snaked down behind one shoulder. The waiters began placing salads, a few leaves of lettuce and slices of grapefruit, in front of the guests. The guests sat at four large tables on folding metal chairs on the lawn. The tables were spread with white linen. Wine and water glasses, plates and silver sparkled in the bright sunlight. Behind Dr. Trimbly was the beginning of the rose garden. This was a wooden trellis that had become silver with the sun and was roped with the vines and artfully punctuated with the buds of dark red roses.
He sat adjacent to an older woman who was elegantly though casually dressed, also in white linen. She was one of those rare woman who seem to maintain the indefinable essence of teenage beauty well into their sixties. It is not a physical beauty. She was, to the unacquainted observer, not overtly attractive. It was somehow more a beauty of manner.
As he paused and looked at the waiters, she leaned back from him.
“Please go on,” she said.
“Well,” he said. “The amount of interest, all around, is just striking. We tend to work in the background without a lot of outside scrutiny. There are always discussions. Sometimes they’re awfully difficult and personal. But never anything quite like this.”
“It’s fascinating, bewitching really,” she said.
“So,” he began again, “then Presley looked at the doorway and looked at the pictures that the farmer had taken. These pictures here. These are the pictures of the doorway. It’s different you see. The face of the cave had been bricked over with stones and that loose mud mortar. Here you can see a little of the wall in the corner just at the bottom of the door. The farmer found it in the wall one day and had one of his sons take it down just to see what might be inside. See the stone-work looks a lot like a granary.”
“And the whole back side of the stone work was plastered with mud. You see that in the granaries too, I guess. So that the mice and rats couldn’t get into the granaries. Well I suppose it was a little unusual to find a bricked-up cave. But who the hell knows.”
“There’s no way to predict what you might find sometimes. But what was really strange. The farmer’s boy didn’t notice it. Well he noticed it, but he didn’t think it was strange because he wouldn’t know. Well what he found was a set of wooden bars built up behind the masonry wall. These bars covered the whole entrance and it was constructed in a way where it could not have been opened or closed either. It was just there behind the masonry wall. It was made out of cottonwood branches – thick ones, maybe half-a-foot thick. They were laced together with coyote-willow and rabbit-brush into a grid with holes only a few inches in diameter. The whole thing was elaborately weaved almost like a basket. The boy said that it wasn’t just a rectangular grid either, but it was laid out like the web of a spider. It kind of coiled around I guess. I’ve never seen a picture of it intact because the boy took it down before they took any pictures. But you can see a little bit of it here in the comer of this picture. The farmer told the boy to take down the wall not knowing that there would be more parts to the wall than just the front masonry.”
“Well Presley had the boy draw a picture of the way the branches were woven up and I’ve seen that. I guess the boy couldn’t draw for awhile or Presley couldn’t get to him, to ask him, for awhile. I’ve seen that drawing and it did look like a spider web. Anyway, Presley was able to get at some of the cottonwood and they carbon dated it and some of the rabbit-brush and both came up with 1,000 AD. Plus or minus something. I don’t remember for sure.”
“The boy went and got the farmer after he had finished taking down the walls: both the masonry wall and the wooden grid sort of wall. He said he didn’t go inside before he got the farmer and I believe that because I don’t see how he could have not said anything about what was in there if he had gone inside. So I think it was the next day, late in the morning, the boy and the farmer went back with a lantern, a couple of shovels, a notebook and a camera. Usually the farmer would poke around these things a little without disturbing much and then call Presley and tell him what he found. Presley never got very concerned about it because the farmer knew the rules and knew what he was looking at and also the sites were usually small and didn’t contain much information: just a few pots, bones, fire rings maybe and a skeleton sometimes.”
“Here in this one, they found five skeletons, only they weren’t like the skeletons that you would usually find. Normally they’re buried in shallow dug-outs with their legs bent like an infant sleeping and normally they’re under a slab of rock with some soil on top and normally they’re buried with things like old hides or necklaces with sea shells or something like that. Three of these skeletons were leaning against the walls and were pretty intact. Just leaning there, kind of amazing. They were as far apart a they could be from each other. The room was round and maybe twenty feet across but only about four feet high and a little tunnel ran out from the back of it a few feet and there was another room, a very small room behind that. The other two skeletons were in the middle of the larger room. They were all spread out with bones not connected where they should be connected and pieces were missing and I think they found some of those loose bones later near the other skeletons. But it’s hard to know, given the way things have gone with this.”
“Here, these are the pictures of the skeletons. Another thing about the skeletons in the middle of the second room, they both had heads that were smashed somehow. Not smashed all to bits but smashed like someone had held their head against a wall and crashed it over and over again into the wall. Then the boy and the farmer noticed a couple of terrible things once they had time to think about them which wasn’t very long. First, there was the petroglyph that ran the full length around the larger room. It filled up pretty much all of the space between the floor and the ceiling of the room. It was etched into the sandstone and then stained in black they figured. It was all bodies connected with phalluses that ran from one body to the next in one way or another, all around the room. They saw that the bodies were all men. That made them a little sick to their stomachs after they thought about it. Here look at these.”
“Then they saw that two of the skulls still had a little skin on their faces like sometimes happens. You’ll see a little skin left here and there. The thing that was really terrible was that the mouth of one of these was sewn shut with some kind of animal sinew, it was the face of one with a broken skull in the middle of the second room. The other face that still had some skin left was one against the wall and they noticed that the mouth on that one wasn’t sewn shut. When they looked carefully at the skulls in the middle of the second room they saw that the mouths of both had been filled with clay and they saw that the other one, the one in the middle of a room that didn’t have a face, or any skin or flesh, had that same sinew laying on the dirt under the skull. Then they noticed and I forgot about this, that none of the skeletons, none of the five, had any fingers or thumbs.”
“So then the farmer sent the boy outside and went into the back room. There he found a couple of pots: Kayenta pots. They’re white and black, very elaborate. He opened the first one and found it was half-full with finger and thumb bones, or he thought that’s what they were. Next to that one, the pot was only just the bottom covered with dust and some pieces of skin.”
“He went outside and told the boy to head home and not come back, to just take the car and leave him. Then he called on a cell phone and got Presley’s secretary. The secretary for the Department and she gave him Presley’s cell number on the Dirty Devil and he called and tried to explain and Presley said to calm down. Presley figured he could be there in about three hours and that was the beginning of it.”
She placed the elbow of her left arm on her lap and rested her chin lightly in the notch of that thumb and first finger and she looked at him with an intent disregard for her salad or the waiter who straightened up from having just knelt and provided it to her.
He said,” Well you’ve heard enough of this,” and then he began to gather up the photographs and drawings that he had spread on top of the plates and silver and placed them in the open mouth of the brownish-yellow leather valise at his feet. He had just cleared his place as the waiter returned and set the salad in front of him.
“Do continue,” the woman said. “Please, We have never had anything remotely this exciting occur in the English department.”
On the far edge of the lawn, also against the trellis that was the beginning of the rose garden, and beneath a ramada of wooden beams that dropped stiff, long shadows upon them, a string quartet played soft classical music that the younger man could recognize – a piece here and there – but could not have named.
“Well, when the boy got home, there was a call from Paul Maddox. He is the fellow who works for them at White Mesa. He has a small group there, maybe three or four with degrees and as many technicians as he could want. They have some affiliation with one of the little colleges down there. He isn’t one of them, but he tends to pull things their way because he works for them. It’s surprisingly political. I’m a specialist in Egypt and the Levant and am used to the politics over there. I had no idea it could be this political here. The farmer had called Maddox the day before to tell him what he’d found and that he was going to take the wall down. So the boy gets the message and returns the call and tells Maddox what they found. Maddox says he’ll be right up. Maddox doesn’t screw around. He’s concerned right away from what the boy told him. So he rents a plane, flies with two of his guys to that little air-strip outside of that little town. I don’t remember the name of the town. He rents a couple of jeeps from one of those tourist outfits and gets there an hour before Presley. He goes right to the cave because he’s got directions from the boy. When Maddox gets to the cave he goes right in and starts packing things up, loading the bones and pots and everything into canvas bags and loading those into the jeeps. The farmer knows that this isn’t protocol and he calls Maddox on it and Maddox gets nasty with him. So the farmer tries to call the department but can’t get a hold of anybody with any say.
Then he calls, of all people, the County Sheriff. He tells Maddox to hold it right there because the Sheriff’s coming and Maddox loads everything up with his boys in the jeeps and they head off. Before he leaves, Maddox asks the farmer if he took any pictures or made any notes or sketches and the farmer says ‘yes’ to all three. Maddox looks worried then, and asks for all of it. And the farmer says, ‘Hell no’ and Maddox drives off. The funny thing was the farmer had all of it right there and Maddox didn’t try to take it.”
“So then Presley arrives right before the Sheriff and both of them look around inside but there isn’t that much to see because Maddox took it all back to White Mesa. So Presley is sensitive to Maddox. He’s angry and he’s beginning to question the fellows ethics. But he is sensitive to the situation that Maddox is in. He also knows that the relationship between the department and White Mesa is important. They get first word on a lot of sites and there are several sites on their land that we couldn’t get into at all without their say. Presley’s mad. But he wants to spend a little time thinking about things before making anything more out of this than it needs to be. So he calls the Department and tells Melissa to let everybody know that if they should hear anything about this, not to pass it along. He tells this to the farmer, but the farmer is really mad. Because, see, he knows that he has to play by this set of rules even with sites on his own land. And he sees this professional come in and toss all the rules out the window. ‘Jesus,’ he says, ‘that Maddox is an unethical bastard’. The farmer is a really religious type so you can imagine how mad he was. Then the Sheriff gets to talking to the farmer and he and the farmer are friends: high School together in that small town. So the farmer can’t lie to him; and he doesn’t want to lie to him. Then things get complicated because the Sheriff has no idea where to go with this. There are laws protecting the sites, but it isn’t clear if the laws can be applied by a local Sheriff, or to a professional who has been called in by the land owner.”
“So the Sheriff asks Presley a lot of questions about the law and his relationship with Maddox and whether Maddox has a right to the material. I’ve read the police report and it looks like Presley was pretty vague. He didn’t want the Sheriff running after Maddox because of the potential for the press getting involved. So the Sheriff tells the farmer that he’ll file a report and leave it up to Presley to sort everything out; and Presley intends to. Or at least that’s what he tells me. You know there have been some questions. The farmer gives his notes and photographs and sketches to the Sheriff and asks the Sheriff to make copies for the report and to send the originals to Presley in Salt Lake. Presley agrees with this. I guess.”
“I can kind of understand what was going on with Maddox. His motivation you know. None of these things, these discoveries can be explained with unique solutions. There’s always many ways to interpret things. They’ve got a lot at stake. One way to interpret the site, of course, is, well, the way the media has taken it. Hell, I don’t know. The pieces do point in that direction. Maybe kids just being curious. Maybe just one time with big nasty consequences. It’s the apparent magnitude of the consequences that concern White Mesa though. That they could have done such a thing a thousand years ago. I’ve seen worse. Much worse. Who knows? The way the media was ready to run with it though. It makes for some level of empathy, of understanding of Maddox’s motivation.”
“So then, because the Sheriff has to forward copies of his reports to the State office, if the value of the material taken is over a certain amount, he called an illicit dealer to find out the amount and that’s a whole other story. The report ends up in the State office. Somehow a copy of the report is faxed by someone with the State Police, probably a secretary, to the Metro Section of the Portland Oregonian. Why a paper in Oregon? I have no idea. The next day we have two reporters and a photographer looking for Presley in the Department; and I guess another reporter and photographer showed up at Maddox’s office in White Mesa.”
“They’re asking questions like, ‘Have other examples of exclusionary imprisonment been suppressed?’ ‘Were the boys buried alive?’, stuff like that. We start getting calls from Congressmen from California and bigwigs with the Bureau of Land Management. Because Presley isn’t answering his phone and I’m the chair, I’m talking to all these folks: a conference call with six BLM staff guys and the Secretary of the Interior went on for three hours.”
“Meanwhile, Presley has worked up a deal with Maddox to make it look like everything had been planned and Presley doesn’t have any gripes. Maddox issues a press release saying that the White Mesa office will issue a report in four months. He also has several statements in there about how the farmer’s notes and sketches weren’t done by a professional and can’t be relied upon. So then it’s clear to the newspapers what’s going on. They ran a few stories with comments from the farmer, the boy and the County Sheriff, but without a professional they can’t take it very far. They can only say that the farmer’s comments aren’t confirmed and that a report will be issued in four months. They did find some grad student from back east and taped a bunch of interviews with him but he didn’t have the credibility or the local familiarity that they need. It was pretty clear that he had an agenda too. White Mesa’s PR lawyer gets involved and we and the newspapers all get threatening letters. So last week Presley calls Maddox and says that he wants to participate in preparing the report; and Maddox says, ‘No.'”
As the waiter returned and began to remove the salad plates, the young man began to eat quickly. He spoke while he ate, “I’ve only been the Department Chairman for three months; and, as you know, it’s temporary. Don Michaels is heading the search committee. Well, I don’t know what to do. It seems to be the most incredible dilemma. There’s no politically correct way to go; and it’s so high profile now.”
The woman smiled a very thin but sincere smile as if she were at the same time sensitive to, and intolerant of his predicament. She cleared her throat and spoke in a very soft voice,
“My, what a unique circumstance. To be asked to participate in such a thing. A conspiracy over a thousand years old. My. If l were you, I’d do everything I could to take that wall down.”
“The wall,” he said, “you’ve misunderstood Mrs. Stein, the wall is already … “
He paused for some time and looked into her eyes, which were blue and sparkled with a kind of smiling, intellectual childishness that he hadn’t noticed before. He held his fork above his plate as he chewed the last bit of grapefruit and then he pointed the fork at her and pushed it slightly towards her as if to say, “I understand.” Then he smiled for the first time in three weeks as the waiter removed his salad plate and replaced it with braised pheasant, fresh peas and new potatoes.