said.
“How the hell can you promise that?”
And that was when I reached into my pocket and showed him the little brass trade bell.
E LEVEN
When I left David I drove back to the office and parked outside with my motor running, thinking. I hadn’t mentioned the brass bell to Willie because I didn’t want to create false hope. It’s one thing to find a few artifacts and another to find a whole cemetery. Besides, I’d seen projects where the archaeologist had to perform with his client looking over his shoulder and it doesn’t work for anybody, believe me.
So I checked in at the office, was relieved there were no calls, and made a call of my own. Then I walked across the street to the university, a map cylinder under my arm.
The Italianate buildings, sand-colored with tile roofs, fronted a parade ground, where the cadet corps marched twice a week. In the seventy years since the campus had moved here from the old location downtown, it had come to fill an area of about six hundred acres, and many of the grassy vistas I remembered from childhood had become parking lots.
By the time I reached the shade on the far side of the parade ground I was soaked as well as parched. I sucked in the cool air of the geology building and took the elevator to the third floor. I passed under an emblem that said LOUISIANA, GEOLOGICAL SURVEY , 1934, and down a hallway. Lars Kjelgard had his office door half-open when I stopped outside.
“Alan, come in and tell me what brings you to calling me after you don’t come up here in so long,” Lars cried, rising to give me a two-handed shake. A solidly built man in his late thirties, Lars had longish, prematurely gray hair, and a way of killing the king’s English when he spoke.
“A question,” I said. “The kind I only trust you to answer.”
“Somebody trusts me?” Lars snorted. “You know I’m on the Corps of Engineers shit book after I told them they can’t put that canal north of the city without they run into sand before they got the bore holes drilled good.” He made a face of mock pain. “They say I made them all kinds of embarrassment.”
“I bet you did.”
“So what is it now?” he demanded. “They sent you to offer me money to recant?”
“Not exactly.” I laughed. “It’s just a little problem of alluvial geomorphology.”
He nodded gravely. “We do that here,” he said.
I took the topographic map out of the map tube and he made a place for it on his study table. Over the table, on the wall, was a framed certificate from some South Louisiana mayor, declaring Dr. Lars Kjelgard an honorary Cajun.
“You see this island?” I asked, indicating the strip where P. E. and I had ended up.
“Yah, I see it.” He turned his head to give me a puzzled look.
“Any thoughts as to when it was formed?”
“Yah, I got thoughts on that.” He squinted at me. “But why you want to know?”
“Just a project I’m doing,” I said. “I need to know if the place is worth checking for sites earlier than, say, the middle of the last century.”
Lars sighed. “This island is part of an old river meander. I think if you check your Mississippi River Commission maps from the last century you see that until 1886, the river was right against the hills there. Then it meandered west after that, during the flood of ’87. That left this area exposed.”
He pulled out some blue-line maps and put them on the table, over my topographic sheet. I’d seen the maps before. They were issued by the Mississippi River Commission on a periodic basis, and I’d meant to check them before we went to the field again.
I watched him compare two of the maps and saw that what he was saying was true: The island and the floodplain leading to the island had been part of the river until 1887.
“Well,” I said, looking up. “I’m impressed.”
“Yah, it’s kinda like I read your mind, yah?”
“Kind of.”
“Like I see you coming, I know from the map tube you got a project,
“How the hell can you promise that?”
And that was when I reached into my pocket and showed him the little brass trade bell.
E LEVEN
When I left David I drove back to the office and parked outside with my motor running, thinking. I hadn’t mentioned the brass bell to Willie because I didn’t want to create false hope. It’s one thing to find a few artifacts and another to find a whole cemetery. Besides, I’d seen projects where the archaeologist had to perform with his client looking over his shoulder and it doesn’t work for anybody, believe me.
So I checked in at the office, was relieved there were no calls, and made a call of my own. Then I walked across the street to the university, a map cylinder under my arm.
The Italianate buildings, sand-colored with tile roofs, fronted a parade ground, where the cadet corps marched twice a week. In the seventy years since the campus had moved here from the old location downtown, it had come to fill an area of about six hundred acres, and many of the grassy vistas I remembered from childhood had become parking lots.
By the time I reached the shade on the far side of the parade ground I was soaked as well as parched. I sucked in the cool air of the geology building and took the elevator to the third floor. I passed under an emblem that said LOUISIANA, GEOLOGICAL SURVEY , 1934, and down a hallway. Lars Kjelgard had his office door half-open when I stopped outside.
“Alan, come in and tell me what brings you to calling me after you don’t come up here in so long,” Lars cried, rising to give me a two-handed shake. A solidly built man in his late thirties, Lars had longish, prematurely gray hair, and a way of killing the king’s English when he spoke.
“A question,” I said. “The kind I only trust you to answer.”
“Somebody trusts me?” Lars snorted. “You know I’m on the Corps of Engineers shit book after I told them they can’t put that canal north of the city without they run into sand before they got the bore holes drilled good.” He made a face of mock pain. “They say I made them all kinds of embarrassment.”
“I bet you did.”
“So what is it now?” he demanded. “They sent you to offer me money to recant?”
“Not exactly.” I laughed. “It’s just a little problem of alluvial geomorphology.”
He nodded gravely. “We do that here,” he said.
I took the topographic map out of the map tube and he made a place for it on his study table. Over the table, on the wall, was a framed certificate from some South Louisiana mayor, declaring Dr. Lars Kjelgard an honorary Cajun.
“You see this island?” I asked, indicating the strip where P. E. and I had ended up.
“Yah, I see it.” He turned his head to give me a puzzled look.
“Any thoughts as to when it was formed?”
“Yah, I got thoughts on that.” He squinted at me. “But why you want to know?”
“Just a project I’m doing,” I said. “I need to know if the place is worth checking for sites earlier than, say, the middle of the last century.”
Lars sighed. “This island is part of an old river meander. I think if you check your Mississippi River Commission maps from the last century you see that until 1886, the river was right against the hills there. Then it meandered west after that, during the flood of ’87. That left this area exposed.”
He pulled out some blue-line maps and put them on the table, over my topographic sheet. I’d seen the maps before. They were issued by the Mississippi River Commission on a periodic basis, and I’d meant to check them before we went to the field again.
I watched him compare two of the maps and saw that what he was saying was true: The island and the floodplain leading to the island had been part of the river until 1887.
“Well,” I said, looking up. “I’m impressed.”
“Yah, it’s kinda like I read your mind, yah?”
“Kind of.”
“Like I see you coming, I know from the map tube you got a project,
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