Yolanda Sespe wrapped the skull back into the tule cloth at eleven in the morning on the third of July, in the back room of the Santa Ynez Chumash Museum and Cultural Center, and she did it with the same hands with which, as a child, she had woven baskets in her grandmother's house at Zanja de Cota, where in winter the water came down from Figueroa Mountain and filled the ditch the land takes its name from; and as she wrapped she counted not the years but the folds, three folds as her grandmother had taught her, one for the head, one for the hands, one for the rest, though of that rest, after almost a hundred and fifty years in the drawers of the Peabody, little more remained than what a man can hold in a basket an arm's length wide.

There were one hundred and sixty-seven of them, the ancestors come home; and more than two thousand of the objects, arrived by truck on the morning of the twenty-seventh of June along the 154 from the north, down the San Marcos Pass, in crates that someone at the university had closed with star screws and that the young people of the tribe had opened one by one in the courtyard, without haste, because the haste, Yolanda said afterward to those who listened, had belonged to the others, to the ones who in 1877 had dug the bodies out of the earth at Mescalitan and shipped them east the way one ships an ore.

On the thread that tied the cloth the museum tag still hung, a rectangle of ivory card stock with a number in black ink, and beneath the number, in a slanted hand from the time when inventories were written by hand, a date and the word cranium and a provenance code; and the tag was the only thing, in the whole room, that knew exactly which grave that head had come from, which dig, which boat, which shelf on the third floor, while the name, the true name, the one the man had been called by when he breathed, no one knew any longer, and the tule cloth did not say it, and the earth behind the museum, where at two in the afternoon they would lower him, least of all.

Yolanda held the scissors suspended above the thread for a length of time that her nephew Marcus, sent to hold the flashlight and aim it where it was needed (Marcus aimed it at the ceiling, then at the wall, then at last at his aunt's hands, learning mid-gesture what a ceremony is), later reckoned as too long, and he said he had thought his aunt had forgotten what she was doing, when in fact his aunt was doing exactly that thing, that is, deciding.

Because to cut the tag meant giving the ancestor back clean earth, without the number of the one who had stolen him, without the institution's hand hung around his neck like a second theft; and not to cut it meant burying together with the man the proof as well, the only document that tied that skull to his people, to the valley, to the grave at Mescalitan, the one paper in the world that said, in a language that was not his but that for a hundred and fifty years had been the only one allowed, that this man was Chumash and not an anonymous object from some bequest or other.

Yolanda lowered the scissors without cutting. She set the tag back against the cloth, on the side of the head, and with a turn of thread she tied it tighter, inside, so that into the earth they would go together, the man and his number, the lost name and the hand that had lost it; and she said to Marcus, but more to herself, that the ink in the damp earth would fade in a season, that the card would fall apart, that in a year there would be no number left down there, only a man, and that this was right, but that in the meantime the number had to go with him, because it had been the only thing to know the way back, and one who carries you home, even if he has held you prisoner, is not left on the threshold.

At two the grave was ready behind the museum, toward the hill, in a spot that cannot be seen from the road and that the tribe does not mark, and around it stood the elders and the young people and two women who sang something brief, and Yolanda lowered the basket with the three folds and the tag tied tight inside, and she did not say the number, no one said the number; she said instead, over the earth that the young people were putting back with small spades, a name that was not the man's true name, because the true name had been lost in 1877 together with the body, but it was a Chumash name, one of those given to children at Zanja de Cota when the water comes down from the Figueroa, and for an ancestor who comes home after a hundred and fifty years a name his people still use is worth, Yolanda said afterward, more than one no one remembers: because the earth behind the museum did not need to know who that man was, it needed only that someone, closing the grave again, should call him.