Orphan of Creation by Roger MacBride Allen Read Free Book Online

weight in her stomach. “I think it means that damned old Colonel Gowrie tried to import gorillas or chimps to work alongside our ancestors, and it didn’t work. Then Great-Great-Granpa Zebulon remembered them as more manlike than they really were,” Barbara answered, her voice hard and cool. “Does that make sense to you?”
    Josephine knotted up her mouth for a moment and thought. “When I was just a young child, there were stories, the sort of thing you might tell around a campfire to throw a good thrilling scare into a body. All about wildmen lurking out by the river and in the hills, ready to gobble up bad little girls and boys. When I was a bit older, I remember Papa saying that there was something to it all, but even back when he was a boy, no one would ever talk about it.”
    Barbara turned back toward her great aunt. “Maybe the stories were about the creatures Zebulon saw.” She almost shuddered and her voice softened. “Brrr. Can you imagine, wild gorillas wandering free around Gowrie? The poor things would be frightened out of their minds, and sick from weather they weren’t used to, but they’d still scare me . But—Aunt Josephine—the truth behind legends isn’t what I’m interested in.”
    “What do you want, child?”
    This was it. The bull by the horns. Barbara felt her shoulders tense, the cold weight in her gut tighten. None of the older generations of her family had ever altogether approved of her chosen profession, and now she had to put them face to face with it. To a family of hard-edged black Southern Baptists, even to Baptists who wanted no truck with what the white fundamentalist preachers had to say, there was something clearly sacrilegious about the whole idea of digging too deep into the past. And Barbara knew only too well their attitude toward what many of them still referred to as “Evil-oution.” Aunt Josephine had been teasing, mostly, when she had called Barbara a grave robber, but Barbara knew that many in the family felt she was just that, nothing better, and possibly something much worse.
    It was only the Jones family’s rock-ribbed, unshakeable faith in the value and dignity of education and book-learning that made Barbara socially acceptable. She was a Doctor, and Doctors were to be respected. That was the tack to take. “I’m a paleoanthropologist, Aunt Josephine,” Barbara said, hoping the long word sounded impressive and learned. “That journal says the gorillas, the chimps, whatever they are, were buried by the crossroads. If that’s true—well, it could be very important. It could say a lot about how our people were treated, how slaves were regarded. If it’s true, it implies whole chapters in history— our history—that no one even knows about. Who traded for them? How? Was this the only place they tried it? Now, I know you won’t like it, but I want to dig for them, prove it all really happened. If you’ll give your permission.”
    The old woman turned and looked out toward the old burial ground, gazed out on the whitewashed marker stones turned golden ivory by the light of the rising sun. She seemed preoccupied, as if the history she held in her hands and the dead whose graves she looked upon were far more interesting than anything the present and living might offer. “I suppose those are good reasons for you . It might make you famous, let you announce a big science discovery. And it would be good to learn more of the history around here. But if you’d stop thinking like a fancy Washington scientist and started thinking like a member of the Jones family of Gowrie, you’d know I don’t want some herd of monkeys buried out there right next to my relations. So you go right ahead and dig up your monkeys. They’re too close to where our kin lie. Just clean it up when you’re done, and don’t bother me with it if you don’t have to. I’ve got more important things to spend my thoughts on. Like my grandfather’s journal.” She reopened the book,