IN THE COOL Georgia morning under dogwoods my uncle’s Mercury Marquis possessed animal-like qualities, like a workhorse taken from a shaded stall at dawn, sleek and quivering. Later, under the match strike of the summer sun, the car would be too hot to touch, and in the humid air my legs would stick to the leather seats. With the thud of the big doors just then, though, I only felt class coming to attention, the teacher taking his seat.
My uncle Gordon lit a Panatella cigar and headed us south out of Thomaston. We were driving to a farm in Macon County, a quarter-section of land on the east bank of the Flint River owned by a man named Arthur Drewpierce. The Drewpierces, my uncle told me, had been in that part of Macon County since before cotton, seven generations or more. He and Mr. Drewpierce had business to discuss that morning, he made clear as we drove along, gesturing occasionally with his cigar hand at a distant barn, offering a few lines of history or an anecdote. I knew when he asked me to accompany him, though, that he had a separate reason and thought it not likely that it was solely to meet Mr. Drewpierce. It was Gordon’s way quietly to set a problem before me. He was then the Upson County superintendent of schools as well as the superintendent of schools in the county seat of Thomaston, but he had taught high school for many years and some at Auburn University, his alma mater. He was as devoted to the idea of a formal education as other men were to the pursuit of financial profit.
I lived hundreds of miles from his home, in an apartment in Manhattan with my younger brother and my parents. Whenever my brother and I came for a visit, Gordon would impress on us the need to understand the family’s history, the incidents in our slow migration from the Delaware Water Gap in 1725 through Virginia to Georgia and Alabama. He would emphasize our obligations to the integrity and honor of that family, no matter what we may have heard from others of horse thievery or disinheritance.
He was neither obsessive about family history nor overbearing about integrity, only direct and serious. And because he undermined the gravity of these concerns with wit or humor he seemed neither pedantic nor sanctimonious. He appeared to suggest, however, that there was something debilitating that haunted human society. He implied that the knowledge he conveyed was crucial to survival, that Armageddons loomed for us, always. The threats he saw to civilization were vague. They had to do with the failure to remember, which explained some of his devotion to the study of history, and the failure to honor. The high polish of his shoes, the careful routine of his days, the deliberation with which he spoke, like his library and the perfectly maintained car, were his proofs against such menace.
We rolled south in the big Mercury. I sat with my elbow out the window in the car’s slipstream. In the summer of my twelfth year I could almost manage this naturally.
Gordon was being promoted by businessmen and state educators for the House of Representatives. I understood that his driving out to see Mr. Drewpierce had something to do with this, that he wanted Mr. Drewpierce’s views. I was staring at a feral wall of kudzu vine festooned in the roadside trees, wondering what he had in mind for me, when he began to speak of Indians.
I’d heard some of these stories from him before, about the Kashita and Coweta, and about Andrew Jackson’s fight with the Creeks at Horseshoe Bend on the Tallapoosa. His recountings seemed exotic; I knew no one else in Georgia who referred to local Indians. He lined out their histories with the same knowledge and authority he brought to discussions of what he called the War Between the States. I knew no other adult who took history as seriously. I listened attentively, knowing this was a prelude, that he was leading me someplace.
His language tended to be formal and dramatic and was sometimes biblical in its cadence; his views he decanted in slow measure. The sentences sounded rehearsed, but they weren’t. The Creeks, he was saying, were a confederacy of tribes, the most powerful of which were the Muskogee. The ceremonies of a farming people held them to the earth, in particular boskita, an eight-day celebration built around the ripening of the last corn plants. (We drove a macadam network of backcountry roads with no signs as he spoke, passing isolated clapboard shacks elevated on stone pilings and weathered gray, passing the spindle-lattice of picked cotton fields and fields thick with sorghum and ripening corn, passing Herefords slow-grazing pastures in the awakening light.)
“But long before that …” He was pausing now, gathering the documents in his mind. “… long before the Muskogee, it might have been Aztecs who were here. Before that culture had either name or notoriety among the Spaniards, before they were a horror for the Mixtecs to behold, they might have been living right here on these creeks, tending their gardens, worshiping the sun.”
He looked at me, to see how I was taking it in, gauging his next remark.
“A man named Whittier, from the university up at Athens, has been down to see Mr. Drewpierce. He wants to excavate along the river there at the edge of his fields. He believes Aztecs once camped there. Now, Mr. Drewpierce, he has no strong feelings about this yet—either way. It’s in a state of negotiation for him. Mr. Drewpierce reads his Bible closely on this and other matters though, so Mr. Whittier, you see, might not be able to dig there. We may or may not learn anything more of this campsite beyond what Mr. Drewpierce’s man Otis found last fall, a few bits of pottery. He may decide to take a six-bottom plow to it, you understand.”
I nodded yes. Yes I would not bring up the subject in Mr. Drewpierce’s presence; and, yessir, if Mr. Drewpierce brought it up and suggested I go down to the site while you talked together I would go (and this, certainly, was why my uncle had brought me here). And, yessir, I wouldn’t touch or take anything.
“Do they teach you these things in school?”
“Yessir.”
“About the Aztecs?”
“Yes, I’ve heard of it, heard of them.”
“I don’t remember it well, just that the Aztecs came in from the north and conquered the Mixtecs and others, and then the Spaniards slaughtered them.”
“And they had a great empire.”
“Yes, they did. They were great builders and mathematicians. When you walk along the river, think about these people, how they started out on these creeks. Mr. Whittier is impassioned to prove his point, you understand, which could be a mistake—archeologically and with Mr. Drewpierce.”
He looked at me with an amused smile. I basked in the level of his confidence in me.
MR. DREWPIERCE WAS a tall man and I thought him disdainful at first. He wore a clean white shirt under a fresh-laundered pair of Union bib overalls and greeted us in a quiet voice. He steered us to a gather of green-and-white metal lawn chairs on his porch and called to his wife to bring us some lemonade.
I drank my lemonade in silence while the two men spoke, a light conversation of gossip, weather, and anecdote which I knew often preceded serious conversation in such a setting.
“Boy, I believe I know where you might interest yourself for an hour or two,” said Mr. Drewpierce.
I glanced across at his long face, not meaning to stare at the way his dark eyebrows rolled down into the corners of his eye sockets.
“Yessir?”
“You see that fence running yonder?”
“Yessir.”
“Well, you go out there and follow that fence down to the river, and then you walk on up there about five hundred yards, to where the river comes on a bend, and right there in the crook of it is some mighty interesting things washing out of the sand.”
I looked to Gordon, who nodded approval of a plan he was pleased to have helped fashion.
The morning heat and humidity had now become oppressive. Crossing the fields and walking the fence I began to sweat, a scent attractive to mosquitoes and, I suspected, chiggers. Canebrake rattlers lay in the field rows here and cottonmouth water moccasins were in the river. The country seethed with the threat of violence from small animals. I watched anxiously, too, for poison ivy. I was relieved when the banks of the river appeared at the end of the fence and I felt a faint, fitful breeze off the water.
I found the bend with no trouble, and saw the first potsherds before I’d walked a dozen feet. I squatted down on my haunches to study them: gray and reddish shards, some incised with stylized patterns resembling the impression of leaf fronds, some looking blackened by fire. I brought my fingers hesitantly into contact with their gritty edges protruding from the soil. Aztecs. I stood and walked farther along the curving bank. I discovered concentrations of potsherds in two more places, and nearby found glistening flakes of quartz, a sign of worked stone. I began a diligent search for arrowheads. That I would take nothing from this place had been my faith, but I felt now a need beyond all restraint and thought. I could not understand how taking a single arrowhead might matter at all.
I searched for nearly an hour, looking for any object that suggested weaponry or adversity. I found nothing. Disappointed, I instead pulled two potsherds from the soil to examine more closely. One looked as if it had been broken away from the smooth rim of a bowl or jar. The other was intricately hatched with fine lines. I washed the sandy red soil off both in the river. They glistened like fish in my hands, and now seemed very valuable. I pushed them deliberately into the pockets of my shorts. What Aztecs had once held, I now held. The thought worked on me that the confluence here was preordained, a cabalistic power was inherent in this simple act. In taking possession of these two pieces of pottery, I had transcended the intrusive nuisance of insects and heat, the threat of snakes and poisonous plants. I felt ownership.
I walked back along the fence to the Drewpierce place. My eyes cooled when I rested them in the pine-straw shadows of a loblolly copse, the Drewpierce woodlot. The light on the muddy surface of the river had been fierce, predatory.
They were still talking. I sat on the ground beneath a weeping willow, studying how the fabric of my shorts might disguise the shape of what was in my pockets. I hated having to wear shorts, that I was not old enough for pants.
The men talked on. I felt hungry. I began to imagine how I would explain what I’d found to my brother, tell him how I, myself, had located this obscure site, had discovered what once had belonged to Aztecs, and had carefully removed only these two pieces of pottery. If he reacted with jealousy I would offer him one. Or maybe just give him one on his birthday, anyway.
My uncle hailed me to the porch, and we said good-bye before Mr. Drewpierce would feel obliged to invite us for lunch. We drove east in the big car with the wind blowing through the open windows. We stopped at a family cafe in Marshallville for lunch. They all knew him. They called him Mr. Holstun when we walked in.
My uncle asked if I’d had a good time, but he did not ask what I had seen. Sitting there at the Formica table, I could not fit the desire to share my excitement to any story I might confidently tell. Riding in the car I felt a piece of pottery, its outline clearly visible, stabbing me in the leg. When I showed no inclination to discuss the site or Mr. Whittier’s ideas, I felt sure Gordon knew I’d stolen something.
On the way home Gordon said the river site might not be Aztecan. He said he respected Mr. Whittier’s views and hoped Mr. Drewpierce would allow Mr. Whittier to carefully examine what was there, but he believed the pieces of pottery now sitting on the Drewpierce mantlepiece would prove to be Mayan. The Mayans traded vigorously and extensively north of their homes in the Yucatán Peninsula, he said. Some of their pottery, he told me, had been found in sites as far north as New York State.
“These are all theories,” he concluded. “Just speculation. Someday men will have the tools to confirm what they believe happened here”—he gestured out the window—“before we came along. And then in another time they will talk about us, about what we did, or what we might have believed. We make sense of ourselves as a people through history. That is why we should make no modifications in records of the past, you see, but only speculate.”
On the long ride back to Thomaston I searched beyond his words for the power that had been undeniable and true on the riverbank. An angry silence, for me, grew up between us, as if he had ruined something.
That night I lay wide awake, succumbing finally to shame and stupidity. The boyish fascination with notoriety that makes being any kind of outlaw attractive was gone now. I felt the false step, the bad faith, that ultimately makes the outlaw an outcast among his own people. I couldn’t continue to deny it with bravado. If the house had not been asleep, I would have gone upstairs and asked Gordon not for absolution but to listen to my explanation, to the intelligence I had arrived at on my own through shame. I knew that night that I was on the verge of the territory of adults.
In the morning, my thoughts were jumbled and I said nothing to him. The act was ineradicable and I lived with it.
GORDON DID NOT enter the race for a congressional seat, although he seemed assured of winning it. He didn’t want it. I continued to see him once a year or so after that, until he died in 1976. We enjoyed many fine and complicated discussions while I was in college, and in some ways I came to reflect his sense of values. The incident at the river, though we never referred to it, formed part of our understanding of each other.
Twenty-five years after that day on the Flint River, walking in a remote area on the west rim of Marble Canyon in northern Arizona with two archeologists, I came upon the ruins of an Anasazi dwelling, a structure about eight hundred years old. Scattered all around it in the dust were hundreds of potsherds, some beautifully decorated with red-on-black designs, others finely incised with a fingernail to accentuate a corrugated pattern in the clay. With the permission of the archeologists I moved several of these shards to photograph them against a background of sunlit canyon walls and white cumulus clouds floating in a bright blue sky. When I was finished I returned each piece to its cradle of dust.
It occurred to me, of course, to take a potsherd as a memento, but I had no such desire. I agreed with my companions that the shards formed part of a historical record, that they should be left for some other mind to come upon and to interpret after we are gone. I had no desire to take anything, either, because of the esteem I had for my companions, my regard for their profession and for our friendship. I couldn’t shake a feeling, though, which had clung to me since I’d moved the potsherds, that something was wrong. Something was unfinished.
That evening I sat on my sleeping bag working up the day’s notes by the light of a fire. Across from me one of my companions, Bob Euler, was cleaning our dinner dishes. He was older than me by about twenty years, a professor of archeology, a former university president.
“Bob?” I said. He looked up. “I want you to know that even though I picked up those potsherds back there to photograph, I didn’t pocket them. I haven’t picked up anything on these sites. I just want to tell you that plainly. I don’t do that.”
“Yes,” he said, “I noticed.”