Dead and Buried by Sam Hutchins, The Graveyard Smash

 

The fascination of the two skeletons was that they had been found lying on their backs in a shallow grave. The man and woman had seemingly died together and had been buried linking arms. Any evidence of organic material had long since disintegrated in the acidic soil. I was intrigued by the find: the stark grave, orientated towards the east, might be a Christian burial, but it was independent of any graveyard or church building. It might also be a pagan inhumation.

The tomb had been found early that morning by the driver of the mechanical digger. The skeletons were unscathed: the metal teeth of the digger had cleared the bodies by centimetres and the loose earth filling the oval grave had fallen free revealing the features of one of the skulls. The discovery was remarkable: it was the first substantial find outside of the fragments of pottery and the numerous potholes and would be useful in dating the occupation of this early medieval village. I asked two members of my team to clean the skeletons and, though the task was laboriously long, requiring fine tools: trowels, brushes and dental picks, the skeletal couple were completely presentable for their photographs and sketch session by mid-afternoon.

By late afternoon the winter dusk began falling, casting disfiguring shadows across the site. The roar of the excavator further down the hill hushed and I told my team to cover their work areas with polystyrene boards and plastic sheets against any nightly frost or rain. When all was ready, I threw my helmet and safety shoes into the boot of my car, exchanging these for my headband and some tatty, blue plimsolls. I drove home.

The drive back to Birmingham was eternal, but at least the heavy traffic was flowing the other way. I thought of Sasha who was probably home by now. She was my earthly support when morale was low and frustration with work almost unbearable, my economic support when I was between jobs, my partner for sports and sex. Here, the romantic picture of the buried lovers on the hill came to mind. I wasn’t sure that I was ready for Sasha to be my earthly partner in the spiritual sense of eternal togetherness, but the burial of the two lovers – if lovers they were – did show a certain commitment. Was I ready for that with Sasha?

I parked the car outside a high brick wall and was distracted for a moment by my black silhouette against the cracks and joints of the overbalanced wall; it would topple over soon, pushed up by the roots of the pollards. I grabbed my bags and breathed in the refreshing smell of the first heavy raindrops before making a run across the road. Going through the hinged gate I saw Sasha watching me from the kitchen window. I put my head down and fairly scuttled to the front door. On pushing myself into the hallway, along with the fierce draught from the oncoming storm, Elsy, one overfed collie, launched herself at my legs.

‘Down, girl, down Elsy,’ I ordered, knowing that she would not obey; she never did. It took Sasha to do that.

‘Stop Elsy,’ she ordered before smiling at me and giving me a warm kiss on the mouth.

She drew back instantly. ‘Ouch! That hurt me.’

‘What!’ I saw a pinprick of blood on her upper lip. ‘Sorry love.’ I licked my thumb to rub it off. ‘I’d better have a shave and then I want to print off the photos from the site.’ I watched Sasha roll the tip of her tongue along her lip before offering to print the photos for me. ‘And then tomorrow,’ I continued, throwing my satchel on the sofa, ‘I’ll ask Mike to dismantle the two skeletons, the ones I phoned you about, and crate them off to the museum lab. The curator’s team should be able to give me the results of their analysis in a few weeks.’

‘Fantastic find! What’ll happen to the couple afterwards?’ Sasha asked, inserting the camera wire into the computer so she could download the pictures before printing.

‘They’ll probably be stored somewhere in the museum cellar unless there’s room to display them.’

‘What a shame they can’t be re-buried together.’ She sighed as she bent over the desk. ‘It seems wrong to disturb the dead.’

‘They’d have been destroyed by the new by-pass anyway; it is a rescue excavation after all.’

‘Look Simon,’ she said, picking up the first picture as it rolled out of the printer. ‘Don’t you think these raindrops on this skull look like tears? They even look sad at the prospect of being separated.’

I had to laugh. ‘Always so melodramatic! It wasn’t even raining this afternoon. But that’s enough of work: I’m tired, dirty. I probably stink. I need a shower.’ I swung myself around the doorpost into the bathroom.

The following day the stormy weather continued. The weeks of fine weather were over and the dry, ‘clean’ excavation suddenly turned into a quagmire of slippery mud and ponds of water. It looked like a battlefield. Work had to be abandoned for the next few days. I was furious, frustrated: it meant more delays. As it was, my colleagues and I had so little time to examine the site before it was destroyed. It meant more work pressure. I would have to leave the two skeletons to rest.

However, the weather was surprisingly clear at the weekend. I made the most of this by deciding to work whilst the weather held. Sasha came along. Dressed in a green parka, with wellington boots and her brown hair tied back, she looked quite the part. I had put on my workman’s kit of dun-coloured trousers, helmet and steel-capped boots. Together we uncovered some of the work areas and I showed Sasha the grave.

‘You found them just like this?’ she asked.

‘Yep. Undisturbed for about fifteen hundred years, give or take a century.’

‘Don’t you sometimes feel like a graverobber?’ She had frowned when she said this, but I knew she was also curious to know more.

‘Archaeologists are not graverobbers: we don’t steal from anyone since everything belongs to our cultural heritage and is given to museums.’

‘You sound like a tourist guidebook.’ She shook her head as though in despair at my lack of sensitivity. ‘So, what can I do to help restore our cultural past?’

‘You can start by cutting that section of the ditch.’ I pointed to a point of ground nearby.

‘You can sketch the cut and its stratigraphic layers whilst I dismantle the two skeletons.’ I handed her a crate with some drawing pads, pencils and plastic sample bags.

A number of visitors from the local village came to look at the site. An elderly farmer stopped and asked some questions. About to leave, he said, ‘This grave reminds me of an old story my grandfather told me when I was a lad.’

I wasn’t that interested in any myth-building that had been made over the generations but politely asked him what the story was.

‘He told me that long, long ago this slope was occupied by a small village. There lived a young stonemason, happy, handsome, and poor…’ He stopped.

‘And the woman?’ I prodded.

‘She was the daughter of the local priest – priests could marry then you understand. She was also handsome, comfortable, but unhappy; she was unhappy because she was suffering from an unreciprocated love with the young man. He was building a church for the village but was not interested in her. So, in desperation, she went to visit a wicca, an old witch that is, who made her a charm band. It is said that the young woman even sold her soul to the devil in exchange for the man’s love. Still, the man wanted nothing to do with her. Feeling harassed and tormented by the woman, the man left the village to fight as a mercenary in one of the Frankish or Saxon wars abroad and so make his fortune. He never returned—’

‘Wait a minute,’ I interrupted, ‘you’re saying he never returned. Then how did he end up back here with a second skeleton on his arm?’

‘Let me finish my tale,’ the old man said, tapping his forehead. ‘The woman would not take rejection. Disguised as a man, she followed him, and signed up with him so they could fight side by side. It was disguised as a man that her beloved fell in love with her and that is when she realized that the witch’s spell had, in fact, worked: the man only loved men.’

‘So, what happened after that?’

‘That is why it’s a sad story: as a man she could not reciprocate his love; both desired the other but could not be satisfied. In one battle the man was mortally wounded. The woman managed to pay for their passage home, but her heart was too weak. On that fateful journey, she lay down next to her lover, and wrapped the wicca’s charm band around their arms before she died too. Their bodies were brought back to this village and, as their arms were bound together, they were buried alongside one another in the same grave.’

‘But not in the village cemetery,’ I added.

‘Well no. They weren’t married and the girl’s father would have nothing to do with his run-away soldier-daughter; he wouldn’t let her be buried in consecrated ground.’ The farmer shivered as he ended his story. ‘Just a myth, yes, but good for the tourists.’

The farmer had become cold standing there so he offered to help me carry the two crates of bones to the car along with a metal bracelet which had been found with the bones.

‘So, the witch’s spell did work,’ the old man said, ‘but the witch also warned that whoever broke the charm lock would have a price to pay. There has to be a message in there somewhere, something like beware the anger of a scorned woman.’

‘Yes, it’s one letter short of ‘danger’,’ Sasha threw in as she arrived at the car with her crate and sketches.

The old man laughed before trudging off across the fields.

 

After that, the weather remained fine but I was dogged by work. I began to feel exhausted and slept badly. Work put a strain on my relationship with Sasha and we began to quarrel. It was nothing at first, meaningless bickering, which I sometimes managed to diffuse. One evening, for example, I didn’t leave my desk to join Sasha at the kitchen table - I had to finish a report first. Angry - but here she was a bit extreme - she gave my dinner to the dog. She’d put my plate on the floor with a knife and fork on either side and then drawn an arrow in chalk with a message saying, ‘Simon’s dinner, eaten by the dog.’ She went to bed. When I eventually came into the kitchen and saw it, I had to think of a good riposte.

When Sasha got up the next morning and went into the kitchen she first shrieked in horror and then almost gagged. I rolled out of bed: I had to see her face, and I wanted to appreciate my artwork. On the tiled floor, I had drawn a small coffin. On the lid I had written: ‘Elsy - R.I.P’. Beside the coffin I had added an arrow pointing to a message: ‘Dog, killed by Sasha’s cooking.’ It’s a good thing she had a sense of humour because that is what made her laugh and broke the ice between us.

But it couldn’t last. As the weeks went by, it seemed to both of us that there was never a moment when we didn’t argue. I was to blame for a lot of it, I know: I thought of nothing but work; Sasha just retreated into herself.

At work I hired a remote pilot to fly a drone over the excavation and take air photographs. Flying low over the site I was struck by the bareness of the escarpment. The few remaining trees surrounding the excavation looked dead and destroyed. Some of them had been partly pulled down or split apart by the mechanical digger so that they looked like the decayed ramparts of some deserted hill fort. Within the line of trees, structural outlines were clearly defined in the brown earth, but what was most clearly visible on the stripped ground beneath was the empty grave.

The drone pilot, a young enthusiast from the British Archaeological trust, was enjoying flying all around the site. Over the grave he let slip, ‘Looks like a black eye.’ I frowned at him and took another look. He was right: the oval hole did look like a black eye, and it was staring unblinkingly at me. Disconcerted, I scratched my rough chin.

‘No, don’t be daft; it looks more like the outline of a small boat. A good find: they were buried in a boat.’

I clapped the young man on the back and then turned away to look at the extent of the encroaching new road: it would split the ancient village in two. The speedy construction of this dividing line was another painful reminder of how close I was to my own deadline. I shook my head; I felt another migraine coming.

‘We can stop that now,’ I said to the drone pilot. ‘We’ve got enough pictures.’

 

At the regional museum the osteologist had just completed her bone analysis on the two skeletons: the couple were in their early twenties, from the eighth century and, going by their DNA, they were of Germanic descent. With 3D imagining she had also reconstructed the two faces, giving them skin, brown hair, eyebrows, blue eyes. She had used me as her model for the man so there were certain similarities between us, even down to my untidy hair and dimple.

‘Did you have to use me as the model?’

‘Only a little bit,’ she said, grinning. ‘It’s mostly down to the bone formation of the skull.’

‘What else did you find?’ I asked, slurping warm coffee from a paper cup.

 ‘The man was killed by a weapon,’ she resumed, ‘a sword or dagger, that cut into his ribcage, but I can’t determine the cause of death for the young woman - a broken heart perhaps.’

I crushed my paper cup into the bin. ‘Yeh, right!’

The museum’s curator wasn’t sure what to do with the silver armband or bracelet: there was so little space in the museum, but the Anglo-Saxon burial would make an interesting addition to the permanent early medieval collection. The curator was also hoping to obtain further material from the British Museum in London to complete the display. Perhaps I would be free to help with this, he’d asked, especially since the excavation was now over, which reminded me again of my new status of unemployed.

Sasha had decided to leave me. Our final argument had begun just after the excavation had been flattened for the new road. We had financial difficulties and I didn’t have another contract after the site report was finished. Sasha accused me of being morose and ill-tempered, criticizing everything she said or did. We were already sleeping apart – I was on the sofa. I could not understand how this had happened to us. We had a furious row over breakfast because the milk was sour – or perhaps it was just because we were sharing a meal together.

‘I’m leaving,’ Sasha shouted, throwing her bowl into the sink, where it broke. ‘I can’t take any more of your moods, your bloody-mindedness, your selfishness. I’ve had it.’

‘That’s fine by me because I don’t need you. You keep the flat and I’ll find a new place and a new job - as a grave digger perhaps - I’m good at that; might as well change my whole life at the same time.’

‘Yes, you might even get a discount for digging your own grave!’ She had stormed out of the flat.

Skulking in London, I spent a few days doing some research in the British Library trying not to think of Sasha whilst constantly checking my telephone for WhatsApp messages from her, but she didn’t send me any sign of life. Oh yes, there was one: ‘I’ve changed the locks and your bags are in the dustbin.’

I ignored her too and decided to do some work at the British Museum. I visited the Anglo-Saxon collection on the upper floor and had a coffee with an old colleague who worked there. I even managed to arrange the loan of some of the jewellery for the museum collection in Birmingham. But I wasn’t enjoying my lone stay in London - I missed Sasha; being apart from her somehow felt like the end of my life.

Leaving the British museum at dusk, thinking of Sasha as I crossed the busy road, I was distracted momentarily by the disfigured outline of another shadow behind me against the iron grilling: it looked like a witch. I stopped. I looked at it. And didn’t see or hear the black cab racing towards me - I felt it of course, the sharp stab in my chest, the tear in my heart, the wicca’s curse. I fell.

 

In Birmingham, the museum curator began laying out the bones in their display cabinet. The two skeletons had been placed within a small, reconstructed boat with a touch screen for visitors to scroll through the phases of the excavation and the three-dimensional faces and dress of the couple. Just one final touch, the armband was added, and the couple were linked as they had originally been in their grave: arm-in-arm. The curator smiled, recognising the face of Simon on the screen. And if I’d been there, I might have smiled too.

About the Author:

Sam Hutchins grew up in London to a single working class mother and an unknown father, something which motivates her interest in self-identity and the past. She now lives in France where she teaches English literature and creative writing at Orléans University. She writes books, articles and short stories.