29. The Ancient Ones ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

Robert had only two more years to help his father with spring planting before Robert would be off to a university. As Robert preferred disking to plowing, Joe agreed to do any plowing that had not been done in the fall while Robert did as much of the disking as possible. This arrangement often meant that Robert and his father were not in the same field.

At the time when the family had moved to the new house, Joe had inherited a hundred-acre farm from his uncle Marshall. It was located a mile east of the Williams place. The field rose gently—almost imperceptibly—to the north and to the east from a lower area that had been a pond before the early settlers tiled the land. Often, Robert would be disking part of what Joe called “Uncle Marshall’s farm” (Great Uncle Marshall to Robert) while Joe was plowing or planting at the Williams place.

On one of the days when Robert was disking by himself with the International 560 at Uncle Marshall’s farm, he was writing stories in his imagination. The cloudless sky was cornflower blue at the horizon, shading to a rich azure at the zenith. The sun shone like an arc welder’s torch almost directly overhead. Red-winged blackbirds sang conk-la-reeeee! while brown thrashers flitted among the emerald green leaves of the thickets at the edge of a long and narrow ten-acre woods on the west side of the field. Various warblers trilled rapid arpeggios, showing off their virtuosic talents. The “chuffy” soil (Robert’s adjective) lay fluffed: the perfect bed for the kernels of corn to come. Robert spent many minutes going one direction before turning at the edge of the big field and going back, over and over again.

Suddenly, he wondered how the nose of his tractor could be pushing against the rusted wire of an old fence along the northern border of Uncle Marshall’s farm. Robert flew into action, stopping the tractor before it was damaged. He had fallen asleep, and the tractor had kept going straight when Robert should have been turning. By repeatedly backing up the short distance that his tractor could go before the drawbar of the disk would be turned too far to one side, Robert finally was able to make the turn with the corner of the disk missing the rusty fence by a whisker.

“Now, take a mental note,” Robert said aloud to himself. “You dare not fall asleep while operating a tractor. You must stay awake at all times.” He stopped the 560 and walked around to look at the nose. The paint was so strong in those days that there was not so much as a scratch from where the tractor had pushed against the wire. Robert felt relieved that he had done no damage.

When he regained the by-now hot black seat, he laughed at the sight of the last pass he had made, for it angled on a slight curve to the left from the moment when slumber had overtaken him. No harm done! He could go back over that part in reestablishing a straight line.

To keep himself awake, he watched for flint knives. Beginning in the Archaic Period and continuing through the Woodland Period, Native Americans had lived on the land of which Uncle Marshall’s farm was a small portion. A heavy sprinkling of flint chips in an arc surrounding the lower area of the field suggested that, from at least eight thousand years before Christ, knife makers had surrounded the pond. The Akers family had acquired the part of Uncle Marshall’s place to the south of the road. On that land and in the surrounding fields that had already belonged to the family, Bob, a veteran of World War II who had earned the distinction of having driven a car on the Alaska Highway and who epitomized what the noun “gentleman” means, had amassed a vast collection of artifacts including gorgets, bannerstones, pipes, mortars, pestles, axes, and seemingly countless flint pieces. Clearly, thousands of years of habitation had left their mark on the landscape across the road.

As Charles was attending Indiana University, Robert discovered that he could conveniently take artifacts to be identified by Dr. James H. Kellar, the first director of the Glen Black Laboratory of Archaeology on the Bloomington campus and an expert on Angel Mounds near Evansville. Robert could not have foreseen that, in the future, he would take fifteen hours of anthropology courses, including Dr. Kellar’s upper-division archaeology course, and that, when Robert was finishing his undergraduate degree, Dr. Kellar would offer Robert the opportunity to take a graduate student position at the laboratory—an opportunity that Robert would forgo to pursue a master’s degree in creative writing, instead. While Robert was yet in high school, he decided he could examine farmers’ collections of artifacts, draw sketches of them, and have Dr. Kellar review the sketches, thereby making it unnecessary to transport heavy collections to Bloomington for identification. Robert sketched many pieces in a large collection that Pete Thurman had made and that Louise Thurman, a sister of Robert’s Great Aunt Margaret and a former teacher who had taught Joe, let Robert peruse for the several days that were required to make the drawings. Robert also sketched a number of Bob’s exquisite pieces from his farms and from the portion of Great Uncle Marshall’s land that Bob had acquired.

When Professor Kellar paged through Robert’s sketches, he said, “Until I met you, I had no idea there were artifacts in Warren County, let alone such a concentration of them.” Dr. Kellar began sharing his findings with archaeologists at other universities.

Immediately, Bob took a keen interest in learning all he could learn about the cultures that had produced such masterful utilitarian pieces and such artistically fashioned stonework. Within a few years, Bob had attended archaeological digs and had taken part in workshops and classes offered by faculty representing several universities. Bob was responsible for an eventual scholarly exploration of an earthen mound on Don Akers’ farm northwest of Pine Village. Bob became a familiar figure in the study of the ancient cultures of Warren County.

While Robert was in his junior and senior years of high school, he and Bob had many discussions about artifacts. Quite often while tilling the soil, Bob would discover another piece, and, at his earliest opportunity, he would show it to Robert, who might share a fact that he had learned from Dr. Kellar. “Is that right?” Bob would ask, adding, “I thought this piece looked to be a good one.”

Ever kind and considerate, Bob would ask Robert, “Do you suppose the people were becoming less nomadic even earlier than was thought? That might account for why there are so many of these artifacts here.” Then Bob and Robert would spend a happy hour conversing about the possibilities to be deduced from the kinds of materials that had turned up.

Robert and Bob soon learned that one of the best times to find flint knives and other pieces was in the spring soon after rain had washed the surface of fields that had been recently plowed and disked. Both became adept at stopping tractors in the nick of time to hop down and pick up a beautifully shaped knife just before the disk would have run over it. Frequently, only the edge of the knife was revealed above the soil. Keeping a sharp lookout became a goal, especially when disking.

Robert’s imagination continually roamed over what the ponds and marshes must have looked like before European descendants began to tile the soil for farmland. He tried to picture bison finding their way between wallows in the pockets of prairie grass like islands amid bogs. The land must have been good for hunting.

Once, during a full moon, Robert wondered if flint knives could be seen by moonlight, so he drove his 1953 Packard to Uncle Marshall’s farm. He walked slowly along the slight ridges left by the disk, but he soon realized that the light was not strong enough. A fog was forming in a thin blanket near the ground in the lower area where the pond had once been located. Robert stood watching the fog slowly swirl. He could easily picture the fog as water. Before long, he envisioned the people who were living along the edge of the pond. They had eaten their dinner and were settling down for conversation and story-telling. A man turned, saw Robert, and beckoned to him.

At that instant, Robert’s hair stood on end. He knew that everything he had pictured was nothing more than a product of his imagination, yet he felt a time-defying presence in the land. Jogging over the ground, he jumped into his car, started the motor, turned on the headlights, backed into the road, and drove home, vowing that he would never again risk returning to that farm at night.