Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1) (6 page)

“What’s the small x mark to the right between the bow section and the farmhouse?” Frank asked.

“I thought that would be a good spot for the sifting screen and the excavated soil pile.”

“OK by me. That will probably become a pretty good sized hill before we’re through.”

She had drawn a grid precisely over the hull. The hull itself was an oval with three large black dots for the suggested mast locations. Placed on the grid were a series of proposed test pit locations measured out from the datum point marked in the center of the outline. These suggested pits corresponded to Maggie’s stakes in the actual site.

“I’ll run you through it,” she said. “There are twenty-six test pits in my plan. They are located three across at different sections running down the hull and I have placed them ten feet apart going across and ten feet apart going lengthwise. There is a letter code identifying each one, so the first is A and the last is Z. The letter codes start A at near the top of the grid at the bow area and end up Z near the bottom of the grid at the stern area. I surmised three mast locations and labeled their test pits H for the foremast, N for the mainmast and T for the mizzenmast. So,” she said, “you start at the port side of the bow with a test pit marked A, then go to the right ten feet. That is test pit B, the original discovery location, right where Mr. Spyder destroyed that piece of stem wood. Go ten feet to the right of that and that is test pit C. You can see how the letters run down the wreck, for example, the crew area begins near test pits D to F, the cargo area runs G to I and down the ship to S to V.”

“The whole center of the ship,” said the Pastor.

“Yes,” she answered, “and the Captain’s quarters in the stern near the river would be S across to U and back down to test pit Z.”

She pointed out to the site, “Each stake out here corresponds to the center of the test pit location on the grid.”

“Looks like a good search pattern,” said Frank. “The ship’s beam could be anywhere from twenty to thirty feet at her widest points of sheer and chines. You’ve set the centers of the pits at ten feet. The pits themselves will be staked in their corners and could go out further to allow for collapse of the old hull sides outward. You’re assuming that there will be artifact scatter outward from the hull.”

She nodded.

“Which pit do we search first?” asked the Pastor.

Maggie looked at Frank hesitatingly.

“Come on, Maggie. You call it. You’ve studied the site,” said Frank.

“OK. We only have a short time.”

“Jake Terment is talking two days,” said Frank.

Maggie looked at him. “Do you really think we can do a good job in two days?”

“We can try,” said Frank.

The Pastor raised his hand. “Let me understand,” he said. “We search this site for two days. Then you decide whether they can pour concrete on it and destroy it forever?”

“That’s about it,” said Frank. “If we decide that they should hold up the construction any further we better have some good arguments. There’s usually a lot of jobs and money at stake. People have to be convinced that there’s something here worth all the fuss.”

“Terment Company made a deal with my office and the other state officials when this artifact was discovered. They agreed that to leave the decision to an independent consultant, that’s you, Doctor Light. Doctor Light does his reconnaissance, tests a few pits, makes a decision what’s here or isn’t here and makes a recommendation. What Jake Terment wants is a recommendation from Doctor Light that there is nothing here worth saving. Then he’ll get a construction permit to continue building the bridge.”

“What happens if we find anything that you recommend is significant?” asked the Pastor.

“The law is clear. Historic artifacts are to be preserved. Jake has to stop immediately until the situation is cleared up, the artifacts researched or moved to another site. It would definitely be a major and expensive delay for him and his backers.”

“Suppose there are graves here but we don’t find them?” asked the Pastor.

“I don’t know about that,” said Frank.

“There was never any agreement to hold the site for the discovery of graves. It’s the shipwreck that is holding up the bridge, that’s all,” said Maggie. “The agreement between Jake Terment’s company and my office is pretty definite.”

“That’s because I couldn’t get any proof of the graveyard. I’m a clergyman, not a historian. I couldn’t find anything in the few records that remain from those days. Most of the records in the River Sunday courthouse were burned by vandals during the Civil War. There’s only one man in the parish that talks these days about this burying place. He’s very old. His story is too emotional. He keeps talking about Adam and Eve, always quoting verse, too much about the Bible. People like you, Doctor Light, you want facts.”

“You have to understand that my job here is to look for a ship, not to look for graves of dead slaves.”

“I understand that,” said the Pastor. “There’s not any room for an old man who confuses his Bible with his stories.”

“Doctor Light?” interrupted Maggie.

“I’m not your teacher anymore so you might as well call me Frank.”

“OK,” she smiled. “Frank, let’s prioritize. We’ll start by working back from the discovery area in the bow.”

“Could there be gold here, a treasure?” asked the Pastor.

“I wish,” smiled Maggie. “Unfortunately, the ones that have gold usually get salvaged right after they sink. Especially if they go down in shallow water like this one. There’s a lot of things to look for. Every wreck is different. What you want to find is something to date her by. Something in the soil strata of the wreck that can tie us to the time that she entered that strata. It’s highly unlikely we’ll find a date stamped right on the ship itself. What we do is date it from things which lie in the soil near it, if we can prove that those things arrived at that spot at the same time. Beside the dating of the artifacts we try find things about the wreck itself, construction, timber, that kind of thing. We want to find out about the people on board, the food they ate, the clothes they wore, the items they had with them.”

“Maggie. You said you had already started two pits.”

“I dug first at pit A, the location of the port bow area.”

Maggie folded her diagram and put it back into the notebook. They walked a few feet toward the bow timbers and came to a two foot square-sided hole in the ground. It was almost a foot deep, with some water in the bottom.

“These pits get expanded in size if we find anything,” Frank explained to the Pastor. They got down on their knees, heads over the pit.

“Here’s what I wanted to show you,” Maggie said. “On the side or balk of the pit you can see the different colors of the soil strata. The first strata is made up of silt. That soil comes from the local fields around the site. When it rains here, the silt runs out from the fields into the marsh on its way to the river. I found silt throughout the excavation area. I figure that took a long time to build up. The next strata is what I think was a fill. It’s not anywhere but in the ship area. I did some quick shovel probes nearby and found the natural soil profile. There was no fill. That’s when I went out and found the borrow pit. I found a topsoil like the fill, in an area that looked like it was dug out a long time ago. It was a big hole in the ground, a gully, with trees growing down inside it that are at least two hundred years old. Then, down along the shoreline, there are pilings, some of them very old ones, that have been set into the bank to keep the soil fill from washing out into the river. Some of that embankment is falling in, rotting away, and the marsh soil is falling into the river.”

Frank ran his fingers lightly over the strata marks. “It’s certainly interesting.”

“What you’re looking at, Frank, that darker soil, was pulled up near the bow timbers, disturbed from below by the bulldozer.”

“Let me have your brush,” he said. He worked intently at a spot, brushing the soil carefully away.

“I’ve got something here. Have you got some tweezers?”

She handed him the tool.

“Here, I have it.” He held up a sliver of rusting metal.

“Same type of thing we found in the other pit,” said the Pastor.

“Part of a spike or bolt used to hold the ship together. If we could find one in good shape we might be able to tell something from the type of spike. If it was handmade, that would indicate the ship was older.”

Maggie sketched the find in her notebook. Frank put the sliver of rust into a small plastic bag that Maggie handed to him. Then they labeled the bag with a marker on a tag giving the exact location measured with reference to Maggie’s pit stakes.

“Come on over to the other probe. I want to show you something else,” she said.

“This other one is pit Z,” she said. “It’s in the stern section.”

They walked back over the site, stepping carefully over the white twine. As they walked they passed by the soil pile on their left towards the house. Near it was Maggie’s sifting frame, of wood with hardware cloth and a hose for wet screening. Already she had completed the sifting of a large pile of soil from the two small test pits.

“I’ve had that sifting rig with me for a long time. I built it the year after I worked with you. You probably recognize it. It’s like the one we had in field school.”

Frank nodded. Walking was difficult. There was mire everywhere. Maggie sank to her ankles each time she stepped, slipping through the thin hard crust that the sun formed over the wetness. The Pastor’s high tops were totally covered with the soft muck. Frank stopped and removed his heavy boots after a few steps. Soon his own bare feet were clods of earth.

Beside the other pit, neatly arrayed in a white plastic tray were several of the rusty splinters, each with a carefully written label tied to it.

“I’m using your coding system, Frank.”

Frank smiled. “With the coding system, Pastor, and with our drawings, notes and photographs we itemize exactly where everything was found and how it looked when we found it. Many times we find that we want to go back to the records of a find with new information and new insight. It’s important to see what was there originally. Records are very important. We are dealing sometimes with such little clues that we have to put all the traces together to come up with any information. The records are very important because we can work with them at home, back at the university, or wherever. We can study them, come up with ideas that we would never have time to develop out here on the site. You see, archeology is inherently destructive. Once we’ve finished with an area, by definition it is destroyed. Our notes are all that is left of it.”

“Would you like me to keep some of these finds back at my church?”

“I think they’ll be safe here.” Frank said, looking at Maggie for her agreement.

She nodded. “I’m keeping everything in the farmhouse or in my car. Safe, especially if it rains. It’s clean there. Besides, we ought to be able to get at the material if we need to look up something.”

“Well, if you two change your mind and need a place to keep things, you let me know.”

Maggie nodded. Her attention was on the small pit in front of them. They squatted by it.

“Here’s what I wanted you to see,” she said. She pointed with her trowel to dark surfaces on the side of the probe pit. Moving her trowel downward, she explained.

“Here is the silting layer and the darker fill that we had in the other pit. Here is the base layer of the dark clay. Then there is this thin layer of black carbon at the top of the dark clay. I think it shows there was a fire here. It makes me think there was possibly some kind of fire damage to the wreck. This fits with what you saw on that frame section, too.”

“A more recent wreck could have run in here at a real high tide, maybe during a storm, then be left here for years, just rotting. Some kids could have come along and set it on fire for fun,” said Frank, remembering Jake’s speech.

“That’s possible, but it doesn’t fit with the wreck being below the fill area. The fill alone seems to date the wreck a good two hundred years ago.”

She went on. “I think this area was a cove of water, fed by a stream from back over the fields, and that the action of the stream filled and silted the cove. That stream is probably still there underground and gives us all this ground water. I think this wreck caught the silt as it came off the fields, stopped it like a dam or barricade, stopped it from going out further into the river, maybe speeded up the filling-in process. Then the pilings were installed at the river’s edge to stop the soil flow even more effectively. There’s something more going on here too.”

“What?” asked Frank.

“In the last few years the Nanticoke River has risen here. You can see from the shorelines. That’s what is destroying the bank, weakening the pilings. This site might get washed out in time. Then the wreck would be opened up anyway.”

“We see global warming everywhere,” mused Frank.

She nodded. “The silting of two hundred years is being reversed. Unless the bank is rebuilt, the higher tides from the rising water will wash out the soil and uncover whatever is buried here for all to see. Even if those pilings are reinforced they may continue to collapse. Nothing can stop the rising water.”

“The graves too,” said the Pastor. “The water will open them up. I mean, if they are here,” he quickly added.

There was a piece of orange and black paper caught on one of the stakes.

“You lost one of your journal pages,” said the Pastor.

“It looks like a butterfly,” said Frank.

Maggie reached down and picked it up, “Clever. Another one of these butterfly things,” she said, holding it for them to see.

The Pastor smiled. “You see them everywhere in town, Frank. Mrs. Pond will try anything to keep Jake from taking down those nesting trees out on his island.”

“I’ve seen some of her work already,” grinned Frank.

Maggie began to read it out loud.

RED ALERT RED ALERT

WE NEED YOUR HELP

HELP US STOP THE NEW BRIDGE TO ALLINGHAM ISLAND

HELP US STOP THE CONSTRUCTION