The Artifact

Mattie Pruett had been sitting on an overturned crate at the edge of Trench Four, watching Caleb sift screen-loads of ochre dirt through a wire mesh, when her father's shadow fell across the both of them. Caleb was eightteen, tall and loose-jointed like so many boys his age who hadn't finished arriving at themselves, and he wore a battered felt fedora that he'd bought at a thrift store in Lincoln because – he'd admitted on his second day in Tanzania, grinning like it was a confession – Indiana Jones was the whole reason he wanted to be an archaeologist. Next fall he'd start at the University of Nebraska, if a summer of hauling buckets and sifting dirt in the Rift Valley impressed the admissions committee the way he hoped it would.

Mattie thought the hat was ridiculous. She also thought about it constantly. Or rather, she thought about Caleb constantly. She was really no different than other teenage girls entering their freshman years of high school.

"Matilda." Her father only used her full name when he'd been rehearsing. "Come give me a hand with the cataloging."

"Caleb's showing me how to read the sift."

"Caleb has work to do. So do you."

She followed her father as far as the supply tent before the disappointment boiled over. He kept his voice low and hushed, which somehow made it worse. He stopped being her father and turned into the lecturer in front of the classroom. That careful, reasonable, lecturing voice, the one that treated her like a specimen to be labeled and shelved rather than as his own daughter.

"You're fourteen, Mattie. And that boy,” he pointed his finger to somewhere beyond the tent’s walls as he stared down at her, “is starting college. I need you to focus on your studies and leave,” he gestured wildly, “all of that for when you're older."

"All of what, dad? We were just talking."

"I know what I saw."

"You didn't see anything!" Her voice cracked upward and she hated it. She hated the way she sounded like a little-girl when the sound happened. "You see rocks and bones and dirt. You dragged me to the other side of the planet for your dig. I'm actually happy with something here but you decide it needs to be excavated and put in a drawer!"

"Matilda…" Jeff hung his head to one side.

"I can't wait until I'm grown," she said, "and nobody gets to decide anything for me ever again."

Just as she always did after a fight with her dad, Mattie stormed off out of the tent and out into the bush, her pace fast, head down, arms swinging, out past the water drums and the flagged survey stakes and into the golden beyond. Nobody stopped her. Nobody even looked up. Mattie storming into the scrub to burn off a temper was as much a part of camp routine as the generator dying at dusk.

Her canvas belt still hung at her hips. It was the one her mother had rigged for her with a trowel, a wooden pick, two brushes, and a dental probe in a leather loop – a child's toy version of a real archaeologist's kit, which was, she thought bitterly, exactly how they saw her – the toy version of a real person.

The heat pressed down like a hand. Whistling thorn and umbrella acacia stood in scattered clumps, and the ground was pale and cracked, seamed with old gullies where the rains came through in April and abandoned the country the rest of the year. She kicked a stone and watched it skitter.

"He treats me like I'm six," she told a go-away bird, which regarded her from a thornbush with one skeptical eye. "Leave boys for when you're older, Matilda. Focus on your studies, Matilda." She pitched her voice down into her father's careful baritone and the bird, unimpressed, flew off.

"I just want to be grown," she said to nobody, to the heat, to the enormous indifferent sky. "A grown woman. I want to make my own decisions. That's all."

The sky, enormous and indifferent, said nothing back. But something at her feet caught the sun and threw it into her eyes.

She stopped.

At the lip of a shallow gully, half-buried in the pale hardpan, something glinted – a curve of brightness no bigger than a thumbnail, winking at her like a dropped coin. Her first thought was that it was trash. A bottle cap, a shell casing, a strip of foil blown out from camp. Her second thought – the thought her parents had trained into her before she could ride a bicycle – was provenance. “Note the context of the artifact,” she thought to herself. Nothing shiny belonged in undisturbed sediment.

Mattie knelt.

She worked the way she'd been taught, and the anger drained out of her hands as the ritual took over. Trowel to break the crust in careful shaves, well back from the object. Wooden pick for the packed earth nearer in. Then the brushes, the soft one last, sweeping loose grains away in strokes so light they wouldn't have bruised a moth. The sun leaned west and she didn't notice. The shadow of a marabou stork slid over her and she didn't notice that either. Grain by grain, the ground gave it up.

It was a vessel. Small enough that it fit in her two cupped palms with a swollen round body and a short neck, stoppered with something that had fused to stone. The material was nothing she could name. Not pottery, though it had a potter's shape; not metal, though it had taken that first flash of sun and thrown it at her like a signal. Its surface was the color of deep water, and worked into it, in bands, were spirals of some paler inlay that seemed to shift when she turned it, the way a starling's feather shifts, as if the pattern were not on the surface but somewhere farther in.

Incised beneath the spirals, ringing the vessel's fattest curve, ran a line of marks. They weren’t pictures, and they weren’t quite writing. They looked, she thought, like the footprints of very small birds that had walked once around the jar and then flown away.

"Oh," Mattie said softly, "Dad is going to lose his mind."

The walk back to camp took twenty minutes, and in that time daylight was retreating from the encroaching darkness as afternoon turned to evening, and the sun set over the valley. She carried the vessel against her chest with both hands, and warmth came off it like a stone that has sat all day in the sun, though she'd pulled it from shadowed ground. Her boots began to pinch and she blamed the swelling heat. Her belt dragged low and strange on her hips and she hitched it up without looking, twice, three times. The horizon sat somehow lower than she remembered; her stride ate ground she didn't remember lengthening to take. Her shirt pulled taut across her shoulders, tight under her arms, and the cuffs of her sleeves crept back from her wrists as if the shirt were shrinking in some slow invisible wash. Every step, the spirals on the vessel turned a little, though her hands were still.

She was composing the speech in her head – undisturbed sediment, Dad, I noted the context, I used the brushes, I did everything right.

Joseph the camp cook saw her first, and the ladle stopped in the pot. Two of the survey crew stood up slowly from their folding chairs.

“What are you looking at?!?” Mattie said with a scowl to the men staring at her as she returned to camp. By the time she reached the center of camp, walking out of the low amber sun with the vessel cradled in her arms, work had stopped, and Mattie mistook the silence for awe at what she carried.

"Dad!" she called. "Dad, look what I found!"

And her voice came out low, full and unfamiliar, a woman's voice, and she was so lit up with triumph that even she didn't hear the change.

Her father came out of the finds tent with a clipboard, and the clipboard fell.

He knew her at once. The bearing was hers; the jaw set at that defiant angle was hers; the dark eyes lit with look what I did were the same eyes that had looked up at him from the crib. But they were level with his own eyes now. The woman crossing the camp toward him was perhaps twenty-five years old, wearing his daughter's clothes a stitch too small everywhere at once, seams straining at the shoulder, ankles bare below outgrown hems, a child's toy toolkit riding a woman's hips.

"Mattie," he said. It was barely sound.

"It was in the gully bank, in the hardpan, totally undisturbed, I marked the spot, I…" She stopped. He had gone the color of ash from the cook fire. "Dad? Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Mattie," he said again, and took her gently by the elbow, and his hand had to adjust to find the size of the arm it had guided across streets a thousand times. "Come with me. Come. Right now. Please."

In the family tent, the light came green-gold through the canvas. He took the vessel from her arms with shaking hands and set it on the shelf as if it were a sleeping snake. Then he lifted a hand mirror from the footlocker and held it out, and his face was so strange, so carefully broken, that she took it without a word.

The woman in the mirror had Mattie's eyes.

Everything else belonged to a stranger – the long planes of the face where the roundness had been, the set of the mouth, the fine faint lines of a life she hadn't lived. It was the face she'd imagined a thousand times, idly, in classroom windows and darkened phone screens – me, someday. It looked back at her wearing her own terror.

Mattie screamed.

The mirror hit the tent floor and cracked across its face. She screamed again, both hands at her face, at the tears sliding down it, at cheekbones that weren't hers, that were hers, and canvas whipped as the tent flap tore open.

"What's the matter? What's happening?" Caleb stood in the gap, breathless, a shovel still in his hand, a boy in a thrift-store hat charging in to save someone.

He did not know her.

She watched as he looked straight into her face and saw no one he'd ever met. And she saw the other thing too, the thing she'd wanted so badly and imagined so many times: the flushing cheeks, the parted lips, the stunned wonder of a boy at her mercy. He was staring at her the way he stared at artifacts coming out of the ground. Like something rare. Like something wanted. Like something eight thousand years out of his reach.

"Ma'am," Caleb said. Ma’am. “Are you all right? Can I… do you need anything?"

"Get out," her father said, not unkindly, and shepherded him from the tent, and the flap fell shut on the fedora and the wide, eighteen year old brown eyes.

Mattie stood among the pieces of the mirror. In each of them a sliver of the stranger stood too.

"I said it," she whispered. "Out there. Before I found it, I said… I said I just wanna be grown, I want to make my own decisions.” Mattie took her father’s hand, pulling at him desperately for help.  “Dad, I said it out loud, and then it was just lying there, waiting, like it…"

"Like it heard you?" her father said quietly.

On the shelf, the spirals had stopped moving. The vessel sat inert now, spent, only a jar, its bird-track warning ringing its belly for whoever came too late to read it. Her father looked at it a long moment, and she watched him work his mind as he did for every unearthed artifact –assemble the sequence, accept the evidence, refuse the despair.

"Wishes." He said the word as if wishes were a curse, and then he looked at his daughter and all the years she'd been robbed of, the birthdays and the growth marks on the doorframe and the slow ordinary mercy of becoming woman. His eyes went wet, and his voice, when it came, was iron.

"Listen to me. This thing was made by human hands. It went into the ground and stayed there eight thousand years. Whatever was done, Mattie, was done by something, some way, some rule we don't understand yet. And things that were done leave traces." He took her grown woman’s hands in his and held on. "Finding what's buried is what we do. Your mother and me. It's the only thing in this world I know how to do. We will take this thing to every lab and library and gray-haired expert on this earth, and we will dig until we find the way back. I promise you. I promise."

Mattie looked down at their hands. Then past them, at the tent flap still swaying where the boy had stood – the boy she'd wanted, the boy she'd told herself she couldn't have only because her father stood guarding the space between them. Nobody stood in that space now. She'd wished the guard and the space itself away, and on the far side of it there had been nothing for her at all.

"I only wanted to decide things for myself," she said.

"I know," her father said, and gathered her in. She was too tall now to tuck under his chin the way she used to fit, so he just held on. "That's the cruelty of the things, sweetheart. They give you exactly what you ask for."

Outside, the generator coughed and caught, and the camp lights came up small against the enormous dark, and somewhere out in the bush the wind whistled over the empty gully and the hole her own hands had made, like something very old and very patient, listening still.