Bones to Ashes

Disappointed, I turned to the skeleton. Hippo’s girl. Before being interrupted by the Iqaluit skull and the dog exhumation in Blainville, I’d cleaned what remained of her trunk and limb bones.

Going directly to her skull, I cleared the foramen magnum and emptied soil and small pebbles from the cranial base.

At nine-thirty, I tried O’Driscoll again. Still no luck.

Back to teasing dirt. Right auditory canal. Left. Posterior palate. The lab thundered with that stillness possible only on weekends in government facilities.

At ten, I lay down my probe and dialed Miramichi a third time. This time a man answered.

“Oh O! Pawn.”

“Jerry O’Driscoll?”

“Speaking.”

I gave my name and LSJML affiliation. Either O’Driscoll didn’t hear or didn’t care.

“You interested in antique watches, young lady?” English, with a whisper of brogue.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Two beauties just come in. You like jewelry?”

“Sure.”

“Got some Navajo turquoise that’ll knock your socks off.”

Navajo jewelry in a New Brunswick pawnshop? Must be a story there.

“Mr. O’Driscoll, I’m calling about human remains you sold to Trick and Archie Whalen several years back.”

I expected caginess. Or lack of recollection. O’Driscoll was polite, expansive, even. And had recall like a credit card agency computer.

“Spring of 2000. Kids said they wanted it for a college art project. Said they were constructing some kind of homage-to-the-dead display. Sold it to them for sixty-five bucks.”

“You have an excellent memory.”

“Truth is, that was the first and last skeleton I ever traded. Thing was older than all the angels and saints. Lots of broken bones. Face smashed in and caked with dirt. Still, the idea of selling dead souls didn’t sit well. Didn’t matter if the poor devil was Christian or Indian or Bantu. That’s why I remember.”

“Where did you get the skeleton?”

“Fella used to come in every couple months. Claimed he was an archaeologist before the war. Didn’t mention which war. Always had this mangy terrier trailing him. Called the thing Bisou. Kiss. No way I’d have put my lips anywhere near that hound. Guy spent his time searching for stuff to pawn. Poked through Dumpsters. Had a metal detector he’d run along the riverbank. That sort of thing. Brought in a brooch once was pretty nice. I sold it to a lady lives up in Neguac. Most of his finds were junk, though.”

“The skeleton?”

“Guy said he found it when he went out to the woods to bury Bisou. I wasn’t surprised. Dog acted a hundred years old. Old geezer looked like he could really use a lift that day. Figured I’d take a loss, but I gave him fifty bucks. Didn’t see any harm in it.”

“Did the man say where he’d buried his dog?”

“Some island. Said there was an old Indian cemetery there. Could have been hooey. I hear a lot of that. People think a good tale ups the value of what they’re offering. It doesn’t. An item’s worth what it’s worth.”

“Do you know the man’s name?”

O’Driscoll’s chuckle sounded like popcorn popping. “Said he was Tom ‘Jones.’ I’d bet my aunt Rosey’s bloomers he made that up.”

“Why is that?”

“Guy was French. Pronounced the name Jones. Spelled it Jouns.”

“Do you know what happened to him?”

“Stopped coming about three years back. Old duffer was frail and blind in one eye. Probably dead by now.”

After the call, I returned to the bones. Was there truth to Tom Joun’s Indian burial ground story? Could Hippo’s girl be a pre-Columbian aboriginal?

Cranial shape was distorted by breakage and warping. No help there. I rotated the skull and looked at the remnants of the face. The nasal spine was almost nonexistent. A nonwhite trait. Though dirt packed the opening, the orifice seemed wider than is typical of Europeans.

I went back to teasing dirt. Time passed, the only sounds in my lab the competing hums of the refrigerator and the overhead fluorescents.

The eyeballs are separated from the frontal lobe by the paper-thin bone forming the floor of the anterior cranial fossa. Clearing the right socket, I found jagged breaches in that floor. I moved on.

I’d emptied the left orbit when something caught my attention. Laying aside my pick, I dampened a cloth and swiped a fingertip over the orbital roof. Dirt came away, revealing pitted, porous bone in the upper, outer corner of the socket.

Cribra orbitalia.

Now we were getting somewhere. Or were we? While cribra orbitalia has a fancy scientific name, and the lesions are known to occur most commonly in kids, their cause has yet to be satisfactorily explained.

I did one of my mental rundowns. Iron deficiency anemia? Vitamin C inadequacy? Infection? Pathogenic stress?

All of the above? None of the above? A and B only?

I was as puzzled as ever.

Findings to this point included modification of toe bones, enlargement of nutrient foramina in the hands and feet, cortical destruction on at least one metacarpal, and now cribra orbitalia. Abnormally pitted orbits.

I had plenty of dots. I just had to connect them.