Short Story
ANCIENT HISTORY
by
Jeffrey Hartman
Their father is coming. They hear his careless footsteps outside the house, scuffing up dust. Matthew thrusts the small atlas at Callie. He has been tracing with his finger the pencil line drawn from England across the south of Europe, along the craggy countries that with Africa make a mouth of the Mediterranean. Callie turns from him so swiftly her braid bats against his cheek. She gathers the items spread between them on the floor, stuffing them into a clear plastic bag. Three blue ribbons from the Carter Elementary School spring field day. A silver ring with a dark stone. A tube of lipstick long since hollowed. A photograph of their mother, torn in two.
Matthew hears the front door open. His mouth dries. He snakes himself into Callie's lap, pressing the atlas against her flat chest until its gold-edged pages splay on the underside of her chin. She pushes at him and he clings and he fears she will pinch him, hard, but instead she slides the atlas down and into the bag and the bag across the floor and under the bed just as their father enters the room.
"So, you're awake," he says in his deep voice. "Guess what? I have good news for you." He reaches down to poke a finger gently against Matthew's ribs. Matthew laughs without wanting to, writhing, until Callie hauls him from their father's reach.
"What is it?" she asks. "Are we going home? Are we going back?"
Their father scowls, pulling at his beard, and tells her to make the bed.
***
They walk to the market in the morning, watching the distant sea flash in the gaps between the buildings. Their father has business. He has decided they will stay here, in the two rented rooms of the small whitewashed house, with the narrow windows that admit light in sheaths. He has only to make one or two things happen, simple things, and they can stay as long as they like.
"Won't that be great?" he asks, and they glance at each other before nodding slowly. At the market their father has men to meet with. He leaves Matthew and Callie in the square with a group of sleek, dark-haired children. They do not speak the same language but nonetheless a game of jacks commences in the dust beside the fruit stalls, governed by gesture and tone. Callie bounces the ball high and easily swipes all of the jacks, then hands them out one by one to the other children, like a mother passing sweets. When Matthew's turn comes he cannot scoop the jacks and soon the other children do not pass him the ball. Callie takes his thin shoulders and steers him to a tree's nearby shade. She has thieved two apricots from the fruit man. Matthew lays with his head on her leg and she presses the fruit against his lips, laughing, while the juice runs under his cheekbones and into his ears.
"It tickles you," she says. "Say it tickles!"
"It tickles," he murmurs.
She laughs and spins over to hug him. She wraps her arms beneath and around his chest so tightly that he has to skip three breaths.
***
Their father explains his new opportunity. On the far side of the market square is a field. Not an ordinary field, he says. A treasure chest disguised as a field. Men have come from America to dig in the field, to unearth its treasure. He will help them, their father says. He will find them workers, a cook, a place to stay. He will speak with the landowner. Without his help, the treasures will never be found.
"Where in America?" Callie asks.
"Hmmm?"
"Where did the men come from, in America?"
Their father yawns in his chair. Matthew sees the fillings in his teeth, like spots of ink. Callie sits cross-legged on the floor, perfectly still.
"Where in America?"
"Oh, Callie, I don't know. Maybe it is Canada where they come from. Or England. Not America. I only meant that they speak English."
She opens her mouth to ask another question but their father takes his book to the terrace outside. Callie stares at him through the window and abruptly reaches under the bed to pull the atlas from the plastic bag.
"Matthew, come here."
Matthew hesitates.
"Come on already!"
They sit with their backs to the wall, beneath the window. Callie flips through the pages of the atlas, pausing here and there to set his finger on a section of map, whispering. Everything she tells him she has told him many times before.
"This was first. Listen to me. You need to remember this. It was England. There was a woman there you liked. Mrs. Jarmon. You let her brush your hair. Like mom." Matthew remembers a woman smelling like mint, with a voice that made him want to sleep. "And this was next. Down here in France. I heard him on the telephone. He thought mom had found where we were. You don't remember that, but try to remember that I told you about it. In case."
Matthew traces his finger along the jagged coastline. His sister's hands are very tan. Her nails are like pieces of shell.
"And then we had to get on the train and go over here. See how this is like a shoe? It's Italy. That's where we had to go next, because he knew someone who could help when you got sick."
He remembers the awful feeling in his chest and makes himself small beside her. "You were really sick, Matthew. I never saw someone so sick."
He insists his arm under hers. He wants to hug her. No, he wants her to hug him. Absentmindedly she drapes her arm around his neck and flips the pages. Their gold edges dazzle in the light from the window overhead. She stops flipping and he points to the page. "That's where we are now. Tunisia. Say it. Tunisia."
"Too-neez-see-uh," he says softly.
"I never heard of this place before. It's really foreign. Not even like the other places. This place is nowhere. That's why he wants to stay."
Matthew looks down at the great toothy mouth of the Mediterranean. He knows they crossed that mouth in a boat, sitting on either side of their father, accepting bits of cheese and apple that he cut for them with a folding knife pulled from his pocket. He knows he spit olive pits into his father's cupped hand. He knows that Callie vomited over the railing in the middle of the night, and afterward refused to let their father wipe her face.
***
Their father fashions them wide-brimmed hats of palm fronds, which they wear to the excavation site each day. They sit beside the pits, watching the local men from the market haul dirt and sift it through large wooden squares bottomed with wire mesh. Twice each morning and afternoon, at their father's instruction, they walk to the market to fill a bucket with water, which they then carry from pit to pit, a ladle clanging in it like a clapper in a bell. Each man smiles at them before drinking. In the late afternoons, while the men cover the pits with plastic sheets, they play tic-tac-toe on a grid drawn in the dust.
On the fourth day Callie calls out to one of the men, Ahmed, the fruit seller's son, and by pantomime convinces him to let her help him shake his sifting square. The dirt drizzles through the mesh, revealing rusted batteries, bits of china, bottletops. After lunch a fist-sized rock emerges as they shake the frame. Callie pockets it when Ahmed bends to remove a thorn from his sandal. She brings it to Matthew. Together they brush the dirt from the rock and gradually it assumes the shape of a butterfly. An hourglass. "Do you know what it is?" she asks him.
He shakes his head.
"It's an ax head," says a voice behind them. They turn. One of the archaeologists is leaning over them. His black eyebrows are threaded with gray. He lifts the stone. "Pretty remarkable, I'd say. Come on. Show me which pit this came from."
Callie leads him by the hand to a pit where Ahmed toils with a small pick-ax. The archaeologist lowers himself into the pit and directs the young man backward. He kneels down and removes a small broom from a hook on his belt, which he uses to whisk the dirt at his feet. With great care he uses the pick-axe to dislodge several hardened clots of dirt, then sweeps again. As Matthew watches a spot of astonishing blue appears near the archaeologist's boot.
"What is that?" asks Callie.
The archaeologist reaches for her, helps her down into the pit, hands her the little broom. She sweeps the dirt. A long edge of blue emerges. Callie begins to laugh. The blue is set in tiles, straight in some places, curved elsewhere. She sweeps along the edge until it corners, then lays her hand flat on the tiles. She stands up, raises her arms, laughing. Matthew realizes his sister is standing on something ancient, hidden, beautiful.
"What is it?" she asks again. "Is it old? Who made it?"
The archaeologist removes his glasses and wipes his brow.
"I'd say it a mosaic of some sort. Likely Roman. Very large. Excellent color. Well preserved. Stunning, really."
"But what is it?" Callie asks.
The archaeologist looks at her, tilting his head one way, then the other. He guides her to the side of the pit, off of the blue tiles, and lifts her up into Ahmed's waiting arms. "You mean, what is its picture? What does it show? Well, we won't know that until we uncover it entirely. But I think that this part we can see is one of two things. Can you guess?"
"It will be the sky," Callie predicts.
"The sky," Matthew repeats.
"Or it will be the ocean."
"The ocean," Matthew says.
"Yes, I think so, too. The sky or the sea. Equally lovely. You have brought us terrific luck. Let us do some work around it now, and tomorrow you can help uncover it. Okay?" Callie grins. She removes her palm-frond hat and throws it high into the hot wind. She takes Matthew's hand and pulls him across the field, singing a song he recognizes but cannot name.
***
The plastic bag lies between them. Their dirt-stained knees touch. The sound of rushing water comes from the outdoor shower where their father is washing. Callie joins the torn halves of the photograph and Matthew sees his mother. She stands on a driveway beside a bright red car, waving.
"Tomorrow we're going to uncover the mosaic," says Callie. "That man said so. People who lived here a long time ago made it and now we found it."
Matthew nods as he moves the halves of the photograph around, slipping them up and down so that his mother's body zips and unzips. Callie makes a fan of the atlas, flipping its pages beside her face. She slips the silver ring with the dark stone on her finger, admires it for a moment, and leans against the wall. Matthew lays his head on her leg. Somewhere outside music begins and a wailing voice flows into it. There is the sound of the running water. Matthew counts the fine blond hairs on his sister's calf, forgets the count, feels the light pouring through the window against the back of his neck, struggles to stay awake and then falls asleep.
***
Matthew is shaking. He opens one eye. His father looms above, shirtless and wet-haired, shaking Callie by the shoulders.
"I'm taking these things," their father says. "Do you hear me?"
Callie cradles Matthew's head until her father lets go.
"These don't do us any good," their father says. He holds up the empty tube of lipstick and waves it in Callie's face. "These are behind us. Do you understand? It doesn't do us any good to hold on to these. These are ancient history. I've told you guys a hundred times. The only way we can stay together is if we forget about everywhere we've been. Forget about it. Don't talk about it. Don't think about it. That's the only way."
"Why?" asks Callie quietly. "What did we do?"
Matthew tries to rise, to put himself between them, but Callie holds his head steady in her lap, smoothing his hair. Their father has the plastic bag, the atlas. He stands over them. "Tell me you understand what I'm saying."
Their father kicks her bent knee with his foot, flecking her lap with drops of water.
"Tell me."
Callie's face hovers over Matthew. He thinks of who she was before. Three years older than him, in the fifth grade. Teachers who taught her later taught him. Your sister is so beautiful, they said. So alive. He would roll his eyes and pretend to be sick.
"I understand what you are saying."
Their father turns to go, then turns back.
"What's that on your finger?" he asks, bending down. Callie makes a despairing sound only Matthew can hear and closes her hand in a fist. Their father grips her wrist and begins to pull her to her feet. He straightens her fingers one by one. Matthew slides forward, imagines himself a cannonball, a torpedo, and drives his head upward, striking his father between the legs. His father makes a small sound and collapses on top of them. As he falls his elbow strikes against Matthew's face like a club.
***
Matthew wakes in the night and touches his face, around the eyes, across the forehead. He recognizes the feel of swelling. It is worst on his left cheek. His neck is sore. He reaches across the bed for Callie, to know she is there. The sheets are in a circle around a warm spot of mattress, but she is gone. Blind in the dark he pats the length of the mattress, waiting to feel her. She is gone. He pulls the sheet high over his head and beneath its canopy he holds a finger in his mouth to keep from crying.
He falls asleep and wakes again. Callie stirs beside him, warm, her arm flung across his chest. Their father stands beside the bed with a green canvas bag on his shoulder. The windows are stripes of dim light.
"Callie, Matty, come on now," he says.
Matthew kicks at the sheets and crabcrawls backward toward the corner. Callie flattens herself against the wall to give him room.
"It's okay," their father says, "really, it's okay. I'm sorry. I know it hurts, Matty. Come on now. We need to go for a walk."
They do not move. Their father reaches into his pocket and pulls out the silver ring. He offers it to Callie.
"Here. I'm going to get rid of the rest of those things but this was your mother's. You can keep it. I'm sorry for before."
Callie clambers around Matthew and reaches for the ring. She holds it in two hands, like a small animal she fears is close to death. Their father takes Matthew's arm and gently tugs him from the covers.
***
They pass through the market, its stalls empty and battened, and take the road toward the harbor. Their father strides before them without looking back, as if he cannot imagine they would not follow. They know they are leaving this dusty place, leaving with Matthew's swollen face cloaked by the empty early hour, leaving before any inquiries are made. Gulls wheel silently overhead, shadowed checks against the blueblack sky. Callie reaches for Matthew's hand. As they walk she pulls him to herself and halfsteps until their strides match. A crescent of dirt curves where her neck meets her body and a line of dried blood creases across two of her knuckles. She leans close, sets her mouth beside his ear.
"Look," she says, pointing back the way they have come, back to the square where they played jacks with the other children, ignorant of their language, and ate stolen fruit during the heat of the noon hour.
"Look," she says again, nudging his head with her chin so that his eyes turn toward the field they are passing, the field where they scratched at the earth with the archaeologists. He sees his father look, too, briefly, a jerk of the neck, a hand to the brow in reflex to shield against the unrisen sun. The plastic covering the pits flaps in the wind. Matthew squints and sees the sifting frames stacked high, the mounds of dirt, the tools lined along the fencepost.
Callie removes the silver ring from her finger. She holds it up for Matthew to see and then throws it toward the field. He lunges to stop her but she is very quick and he is so slow. He hangs on her upper arm and weights her even as the force of her throw swings him around and into her legs. They collide and fall. Sitting close, Callie takes something from her pocket and unfolds his hand. Their father turns to them now, smiles thinly, beckons for them to get up and hurry. She rises to one knee and nods toward him. When he turns back away she presses into Matthew's palm a rough-edged square of stone, white and chalky on the bottom, blue on top, chipped on the sides. A square from the mosaic, a piece of the picture he knows they will never uncover, a piece of sky or sea. She leans close once more and he shivers into her warmth and when she whispers he struggles to hold his voice before repeating loudly each word she says.
"We were here. We were here. We were here."
§ § § Biography: Jeffrey Hartman lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife, Alice and son Will. "Ancient History" is his first published story.
You can reach Jeff at: jeffhartman2@attbi.com .GO TO NEXT PAGE