Where the Basilisk Dreams by W. Michael Gear

Author:W. Michael Gear [Gear, W. Michael & Gear, Kathleen O'Neal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781639773978
Published: 2023-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

9

The sharpened edge of the shovel caught on roots as Dusty lifted and tossed the dirt into Maureen’s screen. She threw her weight into rocking the mesh-bottom box. Dirt cascaded through onto the back-dirt pile.

All in all, it hadn’t been too traumatic. Maggie had reluctantly agreed. Dale had crossed his arms and firmly forbade them to make further excavations outside the designated impact area. His bulldog jaw had been set, his wiry gray hair poking out from under his fedora.

Dusty had immediately set up the transit, and while Maureen held the rod, shot in the elevation for the control corner. He wanted to get it down before anybody had time to reconsider. After they’d measured out the two-by-two unit, he’d started digging.

Sylvia knelt in her unit ten paces away, continuing the slow process of skeletal removal. Maggie and Hail sat under the ramada, sipping tea, talking softly.

Dusty took a minute to pull the line level tight and extended his tape measure to check the depth of his pit floor while Maureen sifted through the root mat, gravels, and small stones in the screen.

“This is hard work.” Maureen sighed, flipped the junk out of the screen, and wiped her forehead on her white T-shirt sleeve. “I’m going to have great arm muscles when I get back to Ontario.”

“And every other kind of muscle,” Dusty said, as he jotted notes on his clipboard. “There are no out-of-shape, pudgy women archaeologists. Unless they’re academicians,” he said the word like a five-syllable curse.

Maureen leaned on the screen. “Did your mother excavate or just do cultural fieldwork?”

Dusty hesitated, his pen hovering over his clipboard. Without looking up, he said, “If I talk about my mother, I don’t want any flippant comebacks from you, all right?”

“Sure.”

Dusty took a deep breath. “She never sank a trowel. She never washed a potsherd. Her kind of fieldwork was walking around a village, taking notes about what people were wearing or eating. If she ever got dirty, she went into town and took a shower, so she’d look ‘pretty’ the next day. The Zuni used to make jokes about her behind her back. They called her ‘The-Woman-with-No-Eyes,’ because she never looked at them, just her papers.”

Maureen toyed with a root that had lodged in the hardware cloth of the screen. “She must have had a knack for languages though, if she could understand what they were saying.”

“She did.” He left it at that.

Maureen worked the root out of the screen and tossed it onto the dirt pile. “How did you end up with Dale?”

Dusty finished making his notes, closed his clipboard, and set it aside. “There wasn’t anybody else. After Dad…”

“When did he die?”

He met her gaze. “Actually, that’s the wrong word. He didn’t just die. He killed himself.”

To his surprise, her voice softened. “Were you the one who found him?”

He shook his head. “No. A nurse in the hospital did.”

Maureen rubbed her fingers along the wooden rim of the screen. “I found John. He’d been making dinner. He was in the kitchen.

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