Sand Sharks in the Pines

"Do you mean that these are the bones of a person and not of an animal?" I worriedly inquired.

Noting an expression of deep concern, the physician placed a considerate hand upon my shoulder and answered, "Probably, but there is no need to worry, as it just may have been the femur of a very large deer who learned how to walk upright like a human, to keep off the dinner table, or it just may have been an Indian sawbones doctor just like me." The expression upon the physician’s face turned instantly serious as he questioned, "Did you find any more of those bones?"

"No," I answered. "There were only pieces that were too small, and they broke apart to the touch."

Once again his smiling self, the physician gave reassurance as to my perfect health. I responded by thanking him for having examined both me and my bag of crumbling bones. As I turned to leave his hospitable office, the neighborly physician casually suggested that it might be a good idea to return those bones to where I had found them.

A human body? How awful! I shuddered at the thought of having handled them. I had been collecting the remains of another human being. I wanted to toss them away immediately, anywhere, even into the garbage can or flush them down the toilet. Then I thought of the red clay face and its owner, who had a just claim to those old rotting bones.

The next morning was one of increasing impatience, wondering why Uncle Moe had not arrived on time to take me to work on the farm. I was greatly relieved when he finally arrived, and as we bounced down the road toward the farm, I held the little bag of bones tightly to my breast. "Should I also return the stone artifacts and rare animal teeth to where I found them?" I debated with myself. "No! They would only be tossed over and over again, gouged, scraped and broken by farm machinery, until they were unrecognizable to even the most experienced archeologist. And if they were not damaged they would be found, left unidentified, and hidden in someone’s distant accumulations, to be little more than forgotten curiosities."

The first thing I did when we arrived at the farm was to rush off with the little bag of bones. There, on the rise near the creek, foot-before-foot, I measured to the exact spot where the bone fragments had been found. With but a kind thought and without ceremony, I tucked the meager remains of the unknown person into the scarred earth on the rise near the creek, to be further broken and blended into nutrients for the corn we would soon plant there.

I had big ideas for the artifacts...a school science project. So I made illustrations of them, marked and labeled them with India ink, sealing the ink with several coats of clear nail polish. My sister became interested in the artifacts and the project too. Together we completed the display, and when she took it to her science class she was given an A for her effort. I took that same artifact display to my science class and got a C for my effort, which was quite all right with me, but it confirmed that teachers assumed such scientific pursuits to be extraordinary for girls, and thus much more worthy of reward. Or could it have been that the one who had worn the red clay face, and whose dust and bones I had disturbed, had something to do with that?

On the following day Uncle Moe and I began the disking of the plowed field on the rise near the creek. As our disk harrow broke up the folds and clods of earth that had been left by the plow, my attention to the work at hand lessened while the machine sliced nearer and nearer toward the spot where I had re-interred the ancient bones. "What’s the matter with you today?" Uncle Moe asked. "Don’t you like working with me on the farm anymore?"

"I like working with you very much," I answered, "but the other day I found an Indian burial place...a grave...right where our machine is cutting and churning the earth."

"That just might be," Uncle Moe matter-of-factly said. "Dust unto dust will certainly be all of our fates, and especially that much sooner if we don’t get the corn in on time!"

"I wouldn’t want my bones tossed around and you wouldn’t want your bones tossed around by an uncaring machine," I shouted above the cough of the tractor.

The tractor motor continued to cough and then it died right over the spot where the bones were. Uncle Moe just sat in the tractor seat, staring at me. "And, even if you really have found some bones of an Indian, instead of a deer, you can be certain that the spirit of that fellow lives on in the good corn we will grow to feed the animals and ourselves," he said.

We got the tractor started again, my uncle unaware, but I was certain that the one who had lived on the rise near the creek had turned the tractor motor off.

We worked hard that summer; the crops thrived and it was Uncle Moe’s most prosperous year, and the very best that he would have in all his days of farming. On occasion, I continued to find artifacts churned to the surface by our machines, but none ever so exciting and of such strikingly fine workmanship as those I had first found on the rise near the creek.

In the years that followed, Uncle Moe’s family grew and grew, and he built a big house on the rise near the creek. During excavation for the footing and foundation of the new house, I sifted through the excavated soil, finding only one little pointed and polished black stone that spun like a top when I put it on a flat surface and flicked it with a finger. As I watched construction take form in the cornfield on the rise near the creek, it seemed ironic that a new house would squat upon the exact spot where the dust and bones of the one who wore the red clay face now lay again juggled and tossed about.

The time had come for me to leave New Jersey for the first time. Farming with Uncle Moe and public school was over. I had "graduated" into the U.S. Air Force and was soon sent to many foreign lands to work on airplanes and crew them into war zones. More than six years passed before I was able to return to New Jersey on a military leave and a new assignment. One of the first places I chose to visit was Uncle Moe’s farm. There, I went for walks in the old cornfields surrounding the big new house. Each step brought back fond memories of my childhood working in the fields with Uncle Moe. I was reminded of the excitement of my first artifact finds, and of Mr. Tutter behind his old horse and plow, the great pickerel fishing in the nearby creek and bogs...and that red clay face, invisible, with me every place I went.