The reason the big hole at Hangman’s Bluff never flooded was thanks to Deputy Middleton’s quick thinking. When he went to check the rice gate, he realized it was just about to give way, so he started up the bulldozer, drove it down into the hole, and pushed a bunch of marl up against it. The marl was heavy and full of clay, and it kept the old wood from giving way under the force of the river.
Because the hole didn’t flood completely, it meant the bones from the broken graves weren’t washed away and lost, and the police gave Professor Washburn permission to gather them up and move them to a different place. Over the next week, Bee and I rode our ponies over several times to watch Professor Washburn and his team of archeology students from the College of Charleston as they carefully sifted through the mud and dirt for more remains. In their digging they had identified the bones of at least twenty-five people.
The police were also digging, but but not for bones. Out of one of the big dirt piles, they unearthed the stolen gas truck and a whole bunch of silver tanks that said Old South Bottled Gas. In the other pile, they found what was left of the armored car. It looked like our hunch was right, and that Lenny and Possum had been using the welding gear and the stolen gas to cut up the armored car into pieces that they hauled away with all the marl Mr. LaBelle was trucking off the island.
The last day we were there was after school on Friday. That morning Bee and I had presented the joint project that we had done for our history assignment. It was titled “How the History Sisters Came to Be: The Story of Two Families.”
The report started:
Our families came together nearly three hundred years ago. A rice planter headed one family. He had come to this country from France to find religious freedom and seek his fortune. He bought a plantation on Leadenwah Island and named it Reward.
We don’t know much about the other family. We don’t know how old they were, how many children they had, or even their names, because they had been imprisoned and brought here from Africa. They did not speak the language or share the culture or religion of the planter family. They were slaves, and coming to the plantation was anything but a reward for them.
Our report examines what happened over these three hundred years, to acknowledge the wrongs and the suffering but also to recognize that, in some cases, quite by accident, unbreakable bonds were formed, bonds that are very much like traditional family ties between blood relatives. We aren’t trying to say that those bonds in any way justify what came before; only that sometimes, very unexpectedly, very good things can come from very bad things. We believe that is a reason for us to try to practice forgiveness and to have hope for our futures.
We got an A+, thanks to the fact that Bee wrote most of it.
That afternoon Bee and I were both still tired out from the craziness of the past week and the work involved in writing our paper, so we were moving slowly. By the time we finally got to Hangman’s Bluff, all of Professor Washburn’s student diggers had quit for the day, and the place was deserted.
The big piles of dirt were still where they had been, but the trucks and tanks of gas had been taken away. Strips of orange tape that said POLICE CRIME SCENE NO TRESPASSING fluttered in the wind.
We ignored the tape, tied up our ponies, and walked over to the edge of the huge hole that Mr. LaBelle had dug into what had once been beautiful old farmland. Even though the students were gone, we could see where they had driven wooden stakes into the ground and broken up the entire area into squares lined out with white string.
Down below us were the tools the archeologists used. There was a long wooden table, a group of large shovels and small hand trowels, and brushes and boxes with mesh screening on their bottoms. The boxes were used to sift through the loose dirt to trap bones, or perhaps coins or shards of pottery that had been buried with the dead slaves to help them in their journey to wherever their spirits were headed.
Out beyond the trenched ground, the lowering sun glinted hard off the Leadenwah River, forcing us to shield our eyes. A steady wind blew off the water, and the humid, warm air brought with it the familiar scents of pluff mud, shellfish beds, and the distant ocean.
Bee seemed to be lost in thought as she stared out at the river with a faraway look in her eyes, but after a few seconds she sensed me watching her.
“Can you hear it?” she asked.
“Hear what?”
“The spirits, the ones Mrs. Middleton was talking about. I don’t think they’re angry any longer.”
“Bee, there’s no way—”
She held up a hand, shushing me. We stood there with the sun dying slowly in the west and the breeze ruffling our hair. At first the only sound I heard was the splash of a distant mullet and the low whistle of wind as it whispered through the marsh grass. But then, after a few seconds, I heard something else. Singing.
The sound was so low and so soft that I really couldn’t be certain, but up from the ground all around us came what sounded like low voices raised in some kind of gospel song.
When I glanced at Bee again, I saw that a tear had broken loose from her eye and was trickling down her cheek. She made no move to wipe it away.
“You hear it?” she whispered.
As I nodded I was thinking about families, all kinds of families—about my family and Bee’s family, not just now but going back over the centuries. I thought about all the wrongs and all the pain that had been inflicted by my family onto hers. I thought about how neither Bee nor I could do anything to change what had come before, but if we could remember that we were bound together not only by our common past but also by our friendship, we could take that whole ugly stew of history and make something good from it. Heck, who knew for sure, but maybe we could even make that same idea work where Donna LaBelle was concerned. Maybe.
I put my arm around Bee’s shoulder and gave her a hug. A minute later we turned around, the sun to our backs now, making our shadows huge, much bigger than we would ever be. We mounted our ponies and headed for home.