the London Institute of Archeology, a lanky man named Clive, long of leg and charm, a gifted gabber with twinkly eyes, handsome smile lines around his mouth, and defined biceps revealed for my viewing pleasure when he occasionally dropped his supervisory clipboard to shovel dirt alongside the volunteers.
I developed a mad crush on Clive within about a day of meeting him, uncaring that he had a young wife at home and a roving eye that did not rove over me. Such was my devotion that soon before the dig ended, when he mentioned during a tea break that he was driving up to Yorkshire next to do a quick survey of a late Neolithic hut circle site that had come to light when a farmer plowed his field, and did anyone want to join him, he could take and pay three diggers for a few days, I shouted out yes before he’d completed his sentence, like an overeager game show contestant jumping the buzzer.
A smelly but cheery young teenager named Tom, from Manchester, who relished the outdoorsy, camping aspect of archeology, also signed on. So did an Oxford student named Mary, a milkmaidish girl — busty and apple-cheeked and sweet of countenance. Neither a maker nor appreciator of acerbic remarks was she, and therefore, to me, not friend material. Having her along would make the tent-sharing arrangements equitable, though — Tom and Clive would tent together, and so would Mary and I.
The Yorkshire site was remotely situated, the nearest village a cluster of houses grouped around a church and a combination grocery store and post office. Heavy machinery sent on ahead had excavated the field down a few metres prior to our arrival and exposed, on the dusty plain below, five or six round darkened rings of soil that indicated the location of postholes for the posts that had held up the huts of the late Neolithic/early Bronze Age people who had lived in the area a few thousand years before.
Other Bronze Age sites in the area had revealed large earth-works and funeral barrows filled with artifacts, including pottery indicative of the Beaker Culture that emerged in England during that time. There were remains of henges, elsewhere, but our Blasted Heath, as Clive dubbed it, was a dud. The sand flew into one’s eyes whenever the wind blew, gradations in soil colour were the only signs of ancient inhabitants (there was nary a pot shard), our toilet was the massive spoil tip of earth piled up at the end of the football field–sized site, Tom smelled, Mary giggled too much, I grew bored of holding the surveyor’s staff, and Clive was businesslike with me, did not twinkle an eye or crease a laugh line in my direction.
He twinkled and creased around Mary, though, especially in the closest (ten kilometres away) pub, when we drove over on our last night and startled the locals with our out-of-town presence. (And where lucky me got the chance to explain that despite my look and name, I wasn’t from Japan but from Canada. Yes, born there, if you can imagine, of a father who was born there too and a mother who was not Asian but Irish! They couldn’t imagine.) A few hours of heavy drinking later, Clive asked a more sober than he Tom to drive home from the pub and stepped up from twinkling at Mary to fondling her in the back seat of the van. The fondling elicited from her a series of delighted giggles and chortles, and from me a stabbed heart and a grim face. In the front seat next to Tom, I stared out the window into the deep rural darkness and turned on the car stereo, though the tape was one of makeout music, so “Stairway to Heaven” blared out, a song I have despised ever since.
Young though I was, I should have known better than to go after the top dog male of any group. I’d been spurned by such golden boys in high school and university, had settled instead, on more than one occasion, and for solid stints of time, for the boyfriend who is cute once you get to know him, versus the godlike quarterback prom king. I should have known better, but I didn’t, and the passing-over hurt as much as if I’d never felt it before. More.
I stared out the window, died a few times, tried not to let fall any self-pitying tears, and resolved that if I were asked to bunk in for the night with Tom so that Clive and Mary could fuck their brains out in the women’s tent, I would refuse, no matter how churlish and unsportswomanlike that decision would make me seem.
Clive and Mary fucked their brains out all right, but in the back of the van, which had convenient fold-down seats for the purpose. Tom and I slept alone in our separate, newly roomy tents on the sandy soil floor. Or Tom slept — I heard him snore — and I lay awake most of the night, wrapped in a blanket knit of sadness and humiliation.
The next morning, at around six, I pulled on jeans and a shirt over my T-shirt and underwear, stepped into my construction boots, went out to pee behind the spoil tip, and walked back to the tent, my face and head aching from fatigue, all vans and people and farm animals in the vicinity quiet, save for a few very loud birds, including a cuckoo.
When I caught a glimpse of something not sand-coloured on the ground, I crouched down for a closer look. The object was round and ring-like and made of a crusty, heavy, dark metal — bronze. It was a bracelet, perhaps, or a buckle. I picked it up, thereby breaking a cardinal rule of archeology — that finds must be considered in context, in situ. I squatted there for a few seconds longer and thought about putting it back, placing it into the impression left in the dusty soil. I could have taken off my belt and used it to mark the spot, then roused Tom or, if I had to, Clive and Mary, and shown them the object, and properly documented the find according to its coordinates on the field. But I didn’t. I swept away the faint circular outline on the surface of the sandy soil with the tips of my fingers, stood up, clasped the ring in my palm, crept back to my tent, slipped inside, and closed the tent flaps.
No one stirred until eight o’clock, by which time I had examined my find closely, turned it over and enjoyed the heft of it, run my finger across its roughened surface, and arrived at two rationalizations: first, that Clive, contemptible and indiscriminate if only because he’d fallen for a simple package of tits and giggles, did not deserve to be handed this gift; and second, that in the world of archeological objects, the armlet, bracelet, ring, or whatever it was, was insignificant, not close to museum-quality, an everyday sort of trinket that would eventually be catalogued by a bored clerk, lumped into a drawer or a box in a storage facility somewhere, and forgotten about.
I wrapped the object in a bandana, hid it in a zippered pocket inside my knapsack, and said nothing about it when the others awoke and we began the process of striking camp.
Tom and I were both quiet that morning, he presumably due to embarrassment about Clive and Mary’s roll in the van — Tom was younger than the rest of us, still in high school. I was preoccupied with thoughts of my hidden treasure and with convincing myself that since artifacts unearthed in archeological excavations are referred to as “finds,” the finders-keepers rule can be applied to them.
Clive and Mary acted abashed about their illicit coupling, which they blamed on drunkenness, as if they’d become lovers because they were drunk, rather than gotten drunk so they could become lovers. I was already not caring so much and had my eyes and mind directed toward home. After packing up, we hit the road, drove away from the Blasted Heath, and when Clive dropped me at the train station in York, from where I would proceed to London and a youth hostel and, a few days later, home to Toronto, we were all relieved to part company and say goodbye.
The bronze object was smuggled into Canada without incident and was collected in a shoebox full of souvenirs that I kept of my English sojourn. My journal was placed in there, with a few English coins, some train schedules, my youth hostel passport, an envelope stuffed with black and white photographs, my trusty digging trowel, and, in a square lacquer box, the armlet, as I’d decided to term it, because I liked the sound of the word and the connotations of weaponry and strength it came with.
For all my imagining of the armlet’s neglected future without me, it didn’t fare much better under my custodian-ship. The shoebox was moved from my communal student house to my first solo apartment once I began working full-time, then to the two-bedroom I shared for eight years with a boyfriend named Sam, someone I lived with when I was too young to consider marriage but, for reasons that now escape me, thought I wanted to be part of a couple. The shoebox stayed with me when I broke up with Sam and lived alone again, and it was moved to the small house Henry and I shared before we were married.
I didn’t gaze upon the armlet again until Henry and I split up. In the course of separating his junk from mine, I came across the shoebox, then some twenty-odd years old, and opened