~ Children Of The Bones ~

by

Jim Green

“Hi, Raith, we’re glad you’re okay.” It was his friend, Dickey McKee.

Raith gave a timid head nod. “Where’s Liam... and Jesus... didn’t you find them?”

The answer was no, and it came without words.

“Look, look!” cried Pudger through smudged face; it had been so dirty even the gentle rain had trouble cleaning it. He pointed to the valley below. Eight sets of eyes faced the bottom of the cliff that had once been B Valley.

The torrents of water had scoured the clearing, the clearing that some team of developers had leveled with their big bladed tractors, their giant graders, after unrolling large white plans and spreading them across the hoods of their white pickup trucks. They had planned, staked the ground, and cut and graded B Valley from the virgin forest to make the athletic field and recreation ground where thousands of youngsters could come and live in the forest.

In Cabin Twelve.

At Camp Sinagua Ranchero.

And have a real life experience.

But the flood had exposed a terrible secret, a secret the developers didn’t discover... or did they?

There below, through the beginning fog that comes from warm earth when cool rain falls, eight youngsters thought they could see the exposed, white bleached bones of hundreds of skeletons all across the land. Skulls and ribs and thighs and... bones, for sure... from hands and feet and arms and legs... It had to be, they thought, the bones of the children littering B Valley below.

The raging water had exposed a giant burial ground... a graveyard as large and as great as the entire valley cleared by the developers. These had to be the bones of the children of Sinagua.

“Oh my aching gonads,” called Pudger, who had asked the dumb question to Ms. Canter, “would you look at that! Remember the night of the old storyteller? It’s true. That’s not B Valley. That’s the Valley of the Bones!”

The eight huddled together high atop Lookout point.

“Look,” someone pointed. “Look down there!”

“Holy ghost and jumping catfish! Who is that? How could anybody still be alive after that horrible flood?” It was Daniel who questioned what he saw.

The eight crept to the very edge of the cliff. A gentle humming sailed on the northbound breeze catching their ears. But it wasn’t a hum, it was a chant, an ancient chant... a chant from long, long ago... an ancient chant of mourning... it was a lament for the children of the bones.

Far to the south, at the very edge of the forest, looking tiny and unassuming in the great distance, stood the old storyteller in his concho-banded hat. When the eight looked closely, they could see a fluttering around his head and shoulders. The woodpecker, with white splotches on its black wings and with red on its crest, circled the old man’s head.

But the clouds were thinner now; the rain had ceased; and the waning light of a fading day began to struggle through the overcast. No thunder talked through the canyons; no lightning bolts illuminated the evening, just a soft and gentle breeze with the slim fingers of caress pushed to the north.

Below, the rhythmic chant floated through the forest like greenstick campfire smoke, stroking the trees on its way to Lookout Point, and then...

The bones began to move.

Eight sets of young eyes morphed into magnets, and eight mouths hung aghast. The children of the bones rose to the mourning song of the ancient Sinagua.

Them bones, them bones gonna walk around. Them bones, them bones gonna walk around. Them bones, them bones gonna walk around. Now hear the word of the Lord, and in the back of their minds, eight boys remembered Ms. Danniter’s music class.

“Look!” cried Pudger, as several of the boys dropped to their knees or leaned on each other or sat on the slick rocks where Jesus Rodriquez had watched the tiny haints swirl and disappear in a massing vortex across the valley below. “The bones... they’re moving! They’re walking around!”

“And, hey, what’s that sound?” called Billy Budoff, rolling from his tummy to look behind him. “It’s coming from atop the rim. It sounds like a train! I think the flood is coming again!” he yelled, and the roaring of a hundred jet plane engines came tearing from high atop the Mogollon Rim, racing through giant ponderosas, and scouring down the canyon of Tonto Creek. The sounds grew louder and louder until eight sets of young ears could hear nothing but a deafening roar.

While the boys watched and tried to listened, the mourning song for the children of the bones floated across the valley, and the bones walked.

This second roaring flashflood, in no time at all, reached the place where no embankment guided its course, the place where developers with their heavy equipment and their pickup trucks and their white stakes had cleared the meadow. Like a thousand Hoover Dam floodgates opening at once, the roaring black water crashed across the valley and answered the call of vengeance.