Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

carry on long past any sane person’s breaking point, she found herself weeping at dog food commercials. Now, since she no longer had a TV, she was denied even that cheap outlet, so she was defenseless in the face of Joe’s chivalrous offer. The sudden tears surprised her.
    “Why are you crying? Don’t do that!” Joe cried.
    Faye, in her state of emotional upheaval, found Joe’s panicked squeak uproarious. She dropped to the ground, laughing.
    Joe bent over her with his brow furrowed in confusion and demanded, “Why are you laughing? What’s wrong?”
    “I’m laughing because you think I’m an idiot for digging in the dark, but you’re willing to be an idiot, too, rather than leave me alone with the sand fleas.”
    Joe put his hand on her shoulder. His solicitous tone did nothing to quench her giggles. “And why are you crying?”
    Her giggles subsided. “Because you’re the best friend I ever had.”
    Joe brushed his ponytail over his shoulder and looked at the few stars bright enough to penetrate the early evening haze. “Aw, Faye. Smart, pretty girl like you—you’re bound to have bunches of friends.”
    “No, not many. You don’t know how hard it is…” She swallowed the suggestion that Joe wouldn’t understand how hard life could be for a child who wasn’t really white or black, who didn’t fit neatly into any racial pigeonhole at all, because she knew better. The bronze tint of the skin over his high cheekbones said that Joe Wolf Mantooth knew all about it.
    Whether he knew what she was thinking or just sensed it was time to change the subject, Joe took the trowel from her hand. Humming in his monotone way, he aimlessly moved soil around the bottom of the pit Faye had excavated. They both heard the muted click when the trowel struck something that wasn’t rock, nor metal, nor plastic. On their hands and knees immediately, they saw the object at once. It was the color of the sand that nearly buried it, but its sleek, gleaming curve attracted the eye. Faye, instinctively falling back on her archaeological training, reached into her back pocket for a fine paintbrush to work the sand gently away from the surface of this human skull.
    Joe jumped up, saying, “We have to go home and get my stuff, Faye. There’s a lot of things I need to do.”
    Joe believed in the old ways from his skin-clad feet to his pony-tailed head and Faye respected his desire to consecrate this old grave. He fumbled in the large leather pouch that always hung from his belt. “I’ve got tobacco here, but nothing else. I need to go home and get some food, and a clay pot to put it in. And some coals from my fire and some cleansing herbs for washing. Faye—”
    Faye held up a hand for him to be quiet, because she was busy assessing the skull’s archaeological context. It was unusual to find a burial like this one, one unassociated with other graves or signs of human habitation, but it wasn’t a complete aberration. She’d read that Choctaw warriors killed in battle were buried by their wives on the very spot where they fell. The burial had to be accomplished without disturbing the corpse, without even touching it. As Faye brushed sand away from a sizeable fracture radiating from the skull’s temple, she wondered whether she was the first person to touch this man since his killer had bashed his brains out.
    “Faye, let’s go. This guy’s rested here a long time and we’ve disturbed him. We got to help him rest again. It’s the right thing to do. It ain’t respectful to wait.”
    Faye didn’t answer Joe, because she was busy. She would discuss this with him in a minute; he’d just have to be patient with her. She was wholeheartedly glad he knew how to treat this burial with respect. She may have become a common pothunter, but she was no grave robber and disturbing the dead chilled her bones. Joe’s makeshift funeral rites assuaged her guilt a bit.
    Still, she wished that he would hush for just a minute while she examined this skull.

    The cabbage palms of Seagreen Island cast jagged shadows on the red-haired girl’s face as she initialed her field notebook with a flourish. She ran her fingers through an inch-long crop of spiky hair.
    “Done,” she said. “I can’t believe we finished before dark.”
    “Dr. Stockard would probably say ‘Quick work is imprecise work.’”
    “I don’t care,” was the girl’s airy reply. “Let’s go check the sample bags so we can eat supper and go to