The Sparrow's Tale

Copyright© 2019 by Richard Gerald

This is my submission to the Beyond the Wall of Sleep story challenge. Please excuse the typos. Normally, I give a story a final reading after a week or so, but this has a file by date. I have played with the theme a bit. This is more Hitchcock than gothic, but then that's what I was raised on.

*

The hill was not high, but steep. The cart's wheels sank deep into the sand and jostled the sole passenger threatening to toss her into the road. She had no place to sit, and her hands were tied, and a large hemp noose dangled from her neck. She wore only a simple deer-skin dress, and a shawl made of bird feathers and seashells.

A young lieutenant rode behind the cart on a swaybacked house, a shabby beast, but the best he could afford. He wore a plain wool red uniform coat whose only extravagance was its six silver buttons. Two laconic soldiers strolled behind as if out for a walk on a warm spring day.

The sky was overcast, and the Canarsie marshland was damp with the promise of an impending storm. A small crowd had gathered at the hilltop where a crude scaffold had been erected of hewn timbers. The crowd was awaiting the spectacle of the witch's execution. She had been tried and convicted of cavorting with the devil and practicing the black arts.

She was named "Little Bird That Sits in the Tree," the English called her "Sparrow." She had healed the sick among the poor when the fever had spread across the eastern colony during the last outbreak. Clearly, this with her worship of the native gods was proof of her witchcraft. She was one of the last survivors of the Canarsie tribe whose home this land was. Her native blood was the best evidence of her guilt.

The lieutenant was a Scot by birth named James Wilson. He could see that Sparrow was but a girl, barely more than a child, and although clearly an Indian in dress and appearance not pure of blood. Yet, she was a class apart from the ragged group on the hill. These colonials were a rough lot. The preacher, who judged the witch, and his family were but a half step above the crowd.

The cart creaked to a stop below the makeshift scaffold. The executioner fixed the noose to the rope. At this point, the preacher a tall pinched faced fellow by the name of Simon Pierce stepped forward and asked the girl to repent of her sins for the sake of her immortal soul. The crowd murmured restlessly, but the girl didn't flinch. In a clear, unaccented English, she spoke.

"You have taken all from us. Our Gods, our land, and now our lives, but all this will be taken back for the sea will rise and take all this away. On that day, you will pay for our blood for this is my cur— "

Whatever else she might have said was taken away for, planned or not, the cart jerked forward dislodging the Sparrow to strangle at the rope's end. She gurgled, and her face turned black. Her tongue protruded, and she would have crudely suffocated had the officer not jumped from his horse and grabbed her legs. With a sharp jerk, he pulled down on her and snapped her neck, thus kindly ending the grisly spectacle.

As the crowd dispersed, the ditch diggers stepped forward. They were a Paddy, and a Nigra and both had come to this so-called "New World" as slaves. Now technically free they were the under cast of a bare subsistence society. Together with the officer and soldiers, they took down the Sparrow's body. James Wilson carried her to the bottom of the hill where a grave had been dug. The preacher had wanted the body burned, and the ashes scattered to the wind, but the regimental colonel had refused citing both the expense of firewood and the impracticability of lighting "A sufficient conflagration in a swamp, sir."

The grave was a good six feet down, but the bottom was filled with water due to the marshy ground. James thought quickly and removing his coat; he placed the dead girl on it. Then he had his soldiers gather several large rocks. They placed the stones on the coat beneath the girl's body, and he tied her into the coat with its sleeves.

James cut off the buttons from the coat giving each of the men a button and placing two over the girl's eyes tied in place with his linen neck scarf. From his pocket, he removed a wooden rosary which he placed between the dead girl's fingers. Thus, arranged the five men solemnly lowered the corpse into the grave. The Sparrow's body sank until only her blindfolded head was raised above the water as they filled in her grave.

When they were done the five men bared their heads, and the Lieutenant solemnly intoned the Lord's Prayer. Finished, he added these words of warning as the wind rose, and the sky darkened with an approaching storm, "We do pray that no man disturbs this grave with impunity and that this child sleeps in the eternal peace of God's love. May, the angels of the Lord, our God, look over this place, Amen."

A large swarm of birds took flight as the men walked away from the grave. The birds flew into a great winged spiral. They soared once across the plain and were gone.

Two weeks later as the regiment embarked for Albany to join General Prideaux for the assault on Fort Niagara, the Colonel noticed that Lieutenant Wilson wore a bright new linen coat, "Such an improvement over that Scottish woolen rag he's been wearing," he said to his aide de camp. It was late May 1759.

****

May 2019

"You can't build here, "James Wilson civil engineer said trying to keep from raising his voice.

"Says who. I have a permit from the city," Harris Pierce said to Wilson, his construction engineer, and thinking he wouldn't have hired the man at all if not for the fellow's attractive and accommodating wife.

"Use your head man. The last hurricane flooded all this area and destroyed two full blocks of building two hundred yards West of us. The next storm could do far more damage. This land was a coastal marsh filled in by the city's garbage nearly a hundred years ago. Waste makes for bad fill. The ground has compressed and sunken beneath our feet.

"We've standing a good two feet below sea level now, but that level is rising. The only thing between this building site and the Atlantic Ocean is a ridge of sand. Each hurricane strips more of that sand away. Building here is certain to cause property damage and take lives, hundreds or even thousands."

Harris was a tall, attractive man with a glib tongue and a way with the ladies, but he had no compassion for his fellow man or any care for other peoples' problems, "How does that concern us. We got our permits."

Wilson's frustration with the developer had been rising since he had taken the job, but before he could lash out angerly, a cry came from nearby. The backhoe had unearthed something. They were standing in a relatively level plain sunken slightly in the middle. When the city began to fill the site, it bulldozed the land flat. The National Seashore began to the Southwest on more solid ground. That and the ocean view were what made the building site as desirable as it was unsuitable.

They were excavating for foundations trying to get below the fill to some solid ground. The excavator had turned up bones. All the work stopped at once. The curious stood around gawking while the bosses stared fretfully into the ditch.

"It could be a crime site," Tom Munsen said hopefully to Harris Pierce.

Munsen was the construction boss and with Pierce the developer, Jake Clinton the excavator, and the engineer Wilson, a partner in the venture. He was a big handsome man and at fifty still able to draw the interest of the opposite sex.

"From your lips to God's ear!" said Jake Clinton, who had unearthed the bones. Jake ran a one-man show only taking on help as needed. He had converted an old garage in Flatlands into a home for his earth-moving equipment. He had a good reputation for getting the job done especially among the ladies. Although proud of his African heritage, he preferred his ladies of the natural blond variety. Mrs. Wilson was very blond and in all the right places.

The alternative to the bones being from a homicide was almost unbearable. An archeological site could hold construction up for years over a wide area; whereas, the cops would limit themselves to the burial site and clear out in a few weeks.

"Jump in Tim and tell us what you see," Harris said. Tim Watson was Munsen's assistant, more a gofer than a second in command. He was an awkward young man in his mid-twenties who generally went unnoticed except when there was an unpleasant job that needed doing. He was known for tripping over his own feet when a pretty woman was around. Mrs. Wilson was more than pretty. "She's so beautiful," Tim was known to gush.

Tim went in the hole carefully and reluctantly. Just as he entered the trench, a dark cloud seemed to block the sun. Looking up Wilson saw it was no cloud but a massive flock of birds, hundreds of birds twisting and turning in a great spiraling mass. Maybe a thousand individuals moving as if with a single consciousness. They rose and fell on a wind that only they could feel as if guided by some spectral spirit.

"Don't touch anything," Bob Munsen demanded of Tim. "Just look."

"Can't see anything too dark," Tim said, but he bent over for a closer look, "There seems to be some cloth with the bones."

"Could be recent," Harris Pierce said, "Call 911 and report it. In the meantime, move the equipment over to the other side we'll dig there for now," he directed Jake Clinton.

The police were not quick to respond to the call, and it was several hours before a squad car showed up. Two bored looking officers created a crime scene perimeter with yellow tape. By that time, the sun had begun to descend below the cityscape to the West.

James Wilson returned home as the spring afternoon gave way to night. He was late as usual, but he was not surprised to find the house dark and empty. His home in Mill Basin was overbuilt taking all the narrow lot to accommodate the two-story four-bedroom house. The brick façade hid the wood frame of the late twentieth-century track house. It had a vaguely English style that his realtor wife declared a "Tutor Colonial." He had to take her word for it; Kathy was a highly successful realtor with her own Century 21 franchise.

Kathy was once again out, and Jimmy couldn't remember the current excuse for her absence or more rightly couldn't be bothered to try to recall the current falsehood. Kathy was a tall, blue-eyed blonde who never failed to turn every head when she entered a room. As wives go, Kathy was in the ninety-ninth percentile of love, affection, and beauty. She was good-tempered and considerate. In bed, she was a tigress who never let her spouse go unsatisfied and made his desires her own. In short, she was all that a husband could ask for if he didn't mind a little flirting with other men, and he was deaf, dumb, and blind enough not to observe that the flirting was far more than a little and went far beyond the line of infidelity.

She was always sorry, contrite, and racked by guilt, but never able to keep her promise of never again beyond the next seduction. Kathy was a woman with a problem that seemed to encompass a large part of the male gender. Jimmy had lost count of the times he had forgiven her. He no longer looked to determine her infidelities and was only aware of them when they blundered into his personal space. There were the jilted loves who blamed him for the end of the affair, and the jerks who flaunted their conquest of his wife in front of him. All these misguided souls regretted the encounter with the large powerfully built engineer who was trained in Jiu Jitsu. The worst part of these inconvenient interactions were the tears that Kathy would shed on her way to forgiveness and her next affair.

He had barely turned the lights on when the phone rang. It was Harris Pierce, and between the expletives, he gathered the explanation that the police technicians had arrived at the site and promptly called in their archeologist. The bones were old "very old."

****

The day was sunny with a mild breeze off the water. The kind of late May day that let you hope that summer with its heat and humidity would never arrive. It was 7 a.m. as Jim turned off the Belt Parkway and headed southeast through the wetlands to the building site. The only crew member there that early was Jake Clinton, and he was grumpily packing up his equipment.

"Morning Jake," he said.

"Nothing good about it," Jake replied, "They were here when I got here," he said tossing his head toward a group by the excavation site.

"Five pixies with a hard ass Indian bitch in charge," Jake said and then as Jim grimaced, "Oh excuse me five metrosexuals and the Native American bitch in charge."

Jake seemed more hostile than the shutting down of the site called for, but the cause was soon obvious. Laura Brandt was a short raven-haired hottie. The coppery tint to her skin was exceedingly attractive, and her big dark eyes had a fire in them that promised rapacious encounters that the serious chip on her shoulder proclaimed her unwilling to provide.

"Before you ask, I don't know how long this will take," she said on seeing Jim, her attitude all frosty disdain.

It was little wonder that Jake, who never met a pretty woman he didn't want to fuck had his feathers ruffled.

"Take all the time you need," Jim said, "Take forever."

As he turned to leave, she apparently couldn't help herself, "maybe we just will."

Jim flashed her a smile as he walked away.

The surveyors showed up. They had been contracted weeks before to take the measurements needed to draw the subdivision map. Jim set them up to do their work. Whether or not the project went forward— and he was fairly sure that eventually, it would go forward—the map would be of use. Other workers began to arrive mostly to clean up the site and secure it for a shutdown while the historic preservation took place. As neither Pierce nor Munsen showed up, Jim was the senior person on site. When Tim Watson appeared, he was looking dejected.

"Cheer up," Jim told him, "There are better places to build. We just need to find them."

As Tim walk off, he seemed to be grumbling something about a woman, and Jim thought, "He must have struck out again."

In the absence of the senior partners, Jim was responsible for the site. As such, Jim was fully occupied with his work and had nearly forgotten the historical diggers on the other side of the plain. He was bent over a steel barrel with a piece of plywood laid across its top to make a crude desk when he heard her voice behind him.

"I came to apologize. I was rather rude earlier, but I thought you were making fun of me. When I asked around the other workers told me you are against building here. May I ask why?" she said.

"It's simple enough we are standing below sea level with only a narrow ridge of sand between us and the ocean. How old are you?"

She hesitated not sure why he was asking, and then said, "Twenty-eight."

"Before you reach fifty this land will be under water. Every great storm from here on has the potential for flooding this coast, destroying the buildings and drowning their occupants. Only the ignorant would live here, and only greedy fools would build here."

"I see," she said, "By the way, I'm Laura Brandt deputy director of the Eastern Native Archeological Preservation Project. Most people refer to it as 'En-App.'" She said holding out her hand.

"I'm —" he began taking her small hand into his large one, but she finished his introduction for him.

"You're James Wilson civil engineer fondly known as Big Jim because of your height, six foot eight is impressive."

"No, just unusual. Would you like some hot coffee? We keep some in the project trailer."

"Yes, I wouldn't mind. When I got here this morning, it was cold, but I expected it to warm up which it did but just a little," she said as they began walking toward the project trailer at the northwest corner of the building site. The distance was no more than a hundred yards. The site was about a mile wide and a half mile deep. The bones had been discovered a little west and south of the center of the site.

There was something about her that brought a smile to his face and his heart. It made him want to grab her like a little girl and swing her into the air. He wanted to hear her laugh and laugh with her.

As they walked, they talked. "Are there many women involved in Archeology?" he asked.

"More than you think, but before you ask there are only men on my crew because I'm sexist."

He had stopped with his hand on the trailer's doorknob as she said this and turned just in time to catch her laugh. It was a nice laugh, deep, free, and unaffected.

"Sorry, I couldn't resist, but there is a certain truth in it. The boys play well in mud, but the girls not so much. I knew this would be a mud job. So, I brought the boys."

"You can say that again. Just how are you going to handle the water?" he asked as they entered the site office.

"Pumps and filters to catch anything that comes out with the water. The mud is another story. We may try freezing it to cut it out in blocks."

"I'd like to see that," he said.

"Feel free to come over and observe."

He waved her to sit down at a little table and brought cups for the coffee.

"Any idea what you got here?" he asked as he poured the coffee.

She took her coffee black with a lot of sugar. She held the cup with its hot contents warming her hands as she replied.

"Don't like to speculate, but I think something if less than we at first hoped."

He didn't press her but let her talk.

"The bones are definitely a she, and she's part aboriginal, which is why they called us in. However, the site is confusing. Preliminarily, there is a mixture of native and European elements. I guess she's Eighteenth Century, but why she's buried here, and like she is will be hard to determine if we ever do at all."

"So, maybe it will take you a long time."

"No, I doubt that. We'll dig a few trenches just to make sure this is an isolated grave, and that there are no structures about, but she looks to have been buried alone. However, tell me if you are so against building here, then why continue with this project?"

"Jobs are hard to find, and I got myself in deep before I understood what was being planned."

"Is the money that hard to pass up?" she asked.

"Yes and no. My wife is very successful. I don't need to do this for a living, and sometimes I feel that she'd be perfectly happy if I did nothing. The flip side is she put her money into this project, and I hate to lose it for her."

"I heard your wife was attractive, but I take it that she's also rich."

"Well off is how she would put it. As a realtor, she's making four times what a civil engineer can expect," he said looking at Laura, he knew that was not all she had heard about his wife, but he certainly didn't feel like exploring what the building crew had said about Kathy's reputation.

Laura must have sensed what he was thinking because she switched the conversation back to her dig, "It's an interesting site. She was small like me and of mixed race. We can tell that from the bones, and we recovered almost the complete skeleton so the forensic pathologists may well tell us the cause of death.

She was wearing a native deerskin dress, and there is an indication of a shawl of feathers and shells, which suggests a shaman in the case of a man and possibly a healer in the case of a woman. What's confusing is that she was wrapped in an unusual wool garment. The wool was very dense and far too coarse for a modern fiber, but the buttons in the skull and the remains of the linen cloth wrapped around it are the confusing part that and the prayer beads clearly indicates a European influence," she finished musing.