Chapter One: The Field Museum

Laura Dell sat her suitcase on the winding staircase of her grandparents’ old house in Siloam, Alabama. She had come back to visit once more before she took off to Chicago for her graduate work at the Field Museum of Natural History. She walked lightly around the memories that lingered in the old home. The screen door leading to the backyard didn’t hang properly from all the times she and her brother had come running through. One summer John William, who wanted to be a fireman more than anything, ran through the house with the water hose yelling, “This here ol’ place is goin’ up in smokes like the devil’s house! Everybody out, everybody out!” Water covered everything that day; even the curtains were washed of their sins. Laura Dell smiled and turned back towards the front door. She ran her fingers along the wrinkled floral wallpaper, yellowed from the years of wear and sun. She could still smell golden crusts of apple pies that had risen out of her grandmother’s oven and her grandfather’s old fishing hat that smelled like the Alabama River. The hallway pictures of her grandmother’s great cousins on this side and that side of the family along with so-and-so’s great Aunt Gertie stared at her. To them, she was still ten years old, the baby of the entire extended family; she was free to play and roam as she wished. At that moment, she could have stayed in their presence for a lifetime.
She looked at her mother’s watch on her wrist. It was 9:15. Siloam Methodist Church did not tolerate tardiness so she took her bags and walked to the screened front door. Before pulling the door shut, she closed her eyes and whispered goodbye to Mamaw and Pepaw’s house on Cedar Crest Lane. She locked the door and stepped from one frame of her to another.
* * *
The air in Chicago was just as she had imagined, but as with all dreams in reality, something was astray. The smells of the city made Chicago feel like her brother’s room when she was little; it never ceased to amaze her how much little boys could smell like the outside world. In Chicago, the asphalt, sidewalk hotdog-stands, constant exhaust, and steam from the sewers blew to and fro with the shifting traffic. Just before she stepped into the stiff winter wind, she breathed deeply into her scarf and heavy overcoat to soak in all the warmth she could. She was used to the southern sun that wasted no time changing to spring; like her distant cousins from Vermont, winter usually brought the warm southern air back to Siloam, Alabama, regardless of whether or not it was invited. For the past four years, she had worn cotton dresses on Christmas day.
The gift she received this Christmas was the internship acceptance letter the Field Museum. Her brother had shouted up to her room early one quiet morning after the big Christmas gathering, “Laura, you have some mail on the kitchen counter.” Her mother was out visiting her great Aunt Mattie, all the relatives were gone, and the house stood silent. Not wishing to disturb the rest she finally had, Laura Dell simply snuggled back in her bed and watched the Carolina wrens snuggled in their nest outside in the Oak tree next to her bedroom window. She admired their small lives and imagined the Mama bird giving the baby birds an early morning lesson in tone, technique, and overall composition of their newly fashioned songs. Their talent was natural, unlike her ability to get into a graduate program.
Laura Dell knew the letter must be from the sixth program she had applied to since her graduation that May. It wasn’t that Laura Dell disregarded the importance of mail at this point in her college career, but the first five of the six programs she had applied too had respectfully declined her. Many of the letters politely explained that she was highly qualified, but the positions were already filled. She heard a knock on the door, “Laura Dell, I think you need to open this one,” her brother said. Her eyes opened wide and she tried to stuff down the overwhelming sense of rejection carried within a weightless object. The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago was not her first choice, but it had become her last hope. Bracing herself and pulling on her soft yellow housecoat, she opened the door to see her brother grinning.
He waved the letter in front of her and backed away as she reached for it. Not in the mood for games, Laura Dell groaned, but John William was determined to get beneath her skin and poked her. Deep down, Laura Dell knew she would end up giving in, but she was almost a graduate student, and it was about time John William had started acting 26. John William thought just the opposite, and constantly reminded her to loosen up. Laura Dell had backed John William into the corner railing outside the guest bedroom and moved in for the victorious snatch when John William ducked beneath her and rounded the end of the hallway nearly stumbling down the whole flight of stairs to the kitchen. She sprinted after him, jumped the last two steps, and slid across the kitchen floor in her slippers. Following her brother’s clumsiness, however, she ended up beneath the kitchen table on her back. The kitchen door creaked back open at the thud as John William looked around trying not to laugh at her, but Laura Dell couldn’t help herself and she started giggling. He came over, sat on the linoleum floor beside her, and handed her the letter. She wiped a couple tears from her laughter, and sighed a heavily before she unfolded it. She couldn’t handle another rejection, “Dear Miss Dell, we are pleased to extend to you an invitation to be a part of our team…23rd of January…8:00 a.m. Thank you for applying with us!” Laura Dell dropped the letter and let out a victory yelp, “I’m going to Chicago!” That one letter made the entire Christmas worthwhile.

Trying to ignore the biting cold that seemed to slip its icy fingers right through her overcoat, Laura Dell made her way up to the bare and chilled steps to the Field Museum. Laura Dell knew she would never forget her walks to the Museum in Chicago. She had a parking pass to the Museum, but she preferred walking. A few years ago when her father passed away, she had realized to slow down in life. That year she boxed up her running shoes, and invested in some converse sneakers.
She waved to Eddie, the security manager she met on the day of orientation, swiped her card, and started down the hall to the observatory room. The glassed, preserved mammals welcomed her. Just as masterpieces leave their viewers standing in unprovoked reverential silence, so Laura Dell walked by intricate, delicate, and extravagant creatures of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois. She nodded at them as she walked by as if to say good morning to them all; it had quickly become a silent, humble ritual in the few days she had worked there. As she entered the observatory room with light spilling in from the steeple high windows, she was greeted by the largest preserved t-Rex in the United States. Not noticing an older man quietly moving into the presence of the theropod from the south entrance of the museum, she laughed a little as she acknowledged the seemingly tiny name on the plaque beside its giant big toe. This was “Sue.”
A true southerner with the hips to prove it, Sue stood 13 feet high from the hip and 42 feet long. Around the 1990’s Sue Hendrickson found this leading lady of the dinosaur world on the eastern coast of Virginia. The team of paleontologists hypothesized that the dinosaur, or Sue, was migrating South for the winter, but the cause of its death was unknown. Laura Dell figured it must have been a heat stroke, but she was glad to see Sue looking alert and perfectly preserved. She smiled to see a southern face. “Lovely morning isn’t it, Ms. Sue?” she said and squinted as light continued to overflow into the expanse of white marble in the opening room to the museum.
The old man shifted his body to sit on a bench and the echo startled Laura. She checked her mother’s watch; the man must have been waiting at the south entrance, and came in right at the opening. She watched him breathe heavily and rest both hands on his cane. The black rubber stopper on the cane looked brand new, and the shaft of the cane didn’t have a scratch. Old age did not seem to come natural to him, and Laura Dell imagined that he frequently forgot that his body did not function as well as it used to. He wore a brown tweed overcoat and a crisply ironed button-up shirt. There was a crest of some sort on the right upper corner of the jacket that Laura Dell couldn’t make out. He carried a newspaper and a small leather notebook. A pen was tucked neatly into his shirt pocket. She sighed and quietly admired his strength for walking here this morning and wondered if she had ever seen him out on one of her walks before. In a way, she found communion with the older man and fossilized theropod, and Laura Dell stood silently watching the shifting Chicago sun age their skin and bones.