Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (11 page)

Early Friday morning Nick boarded one of the venerable, lovingly maintained green streetcars downtown at Canal for the twenty-minute rocking ride through the splendors of the Garden District, and finally to the St. Charles Avenue side of the university. The impressive trio of rough-stone buildings anchored by Gibbon Hall—called the Fortress for its neo-Romanesque massiveness—seemed to give him a surly welcome as he stepped down from the streetcar onto the palm- and crape myrtle-lined grassy neutral ground dividing the traffic lanes of St. Charles.

When he resigned from the faculty of the English department at Freret, more years back than he cared to remember, dispirited and indignant over a baseless allegation of plagiarism, he thought he was glad to be rid of the place and of his accusers, still unidentified to this day. But even at his young age at the time, he’d been a teacher too long to quit the academic life cold turkey without emotional consequences. Soon he fell into a yawning intellectual and spiritual void that dwarfed even the temporary emptiness he’d felt after his brief marriage ended in divorce, years earlier in graduate school.

Genealogy rescued him from a cancer of cynicism that might have turned suicidal. His passion for the new discipline was the reason that today he walked Freret campus as simply a tourist, and not an updated Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy’s tragic casualty of defeated aspirations.

In no hurry to reach his destination across campus, the library, Nick strolled past the Fortress, relishing every familiar aspect of the well-manicured, compact campus that now spread out before him.

This first-of-the-semester walk had become a ritual of fall for him, different from his regular, usually hurried, visits to the campus for research. The balmy New Orleans air; a St. Charles streetcar’s distinctive lazy clamor in the distance; sunlight slanting through the old
oaks; the hulking Italianate buildings, like waking giants, with only a few windows illuminated in this orientation week . . . all the recollected sensations of a couple of decades in academia, as student and teacher, brought him as close to melancholy as he would now let himself come. For this one moment of each year, he could again be one of those rare and great teachers, believing in endless possibilities, hoping for the imminent birth of genius from a seed he planted in a receptive mind.

Enough mental loafing
. He picked up his pace. Hichborn Library would be opening about now.

Still he enjoyed the way the few wandering students glanced at him with mingled respect and dread, their eyes as clear and innocent as the morning dew on the inviting, lush grass of the mild deep southern fall. His bulging briefcase, scholarly slovenliness, and enigmatic smirk must have given the impression that he was a faculty member, probably in the midst of planning a diabolically difficult course. He wanted to reassure these kids, break through their fears, urge them to be bold, tell them of the new worlds of knowledge and new ways of thinking that were hanging like ripe fruit within their grasp.

“That’s my reader!” a woman’s voice protested to Nick in a grating whisper. He’d just finished loading a reel on an apparently free machine in the library’s second-floor microfilm-reading room. It was an old machine, but a motorized one, essential when examining many reels.

He turned to see the owner of the voice: a short, thin woman posed in a combative hands-on-hips stance. She had a helmet of dull leaden hair, as if the roots had grown through an inner layer of acid. Her glasses were oversize squarish lenses of considerable strength. The white light reflecting upward from the reading surface of the microfilm machine
cast her face into a monstrous abstraction of bleached skin, black shadows, and floating gray-blue eyes. Her wheeled lawyer’s briefcase was supremely ordered, revealing folders of different colors, and enough pens and notebooks to stock a small office-supplies store. When the final days of Civilization-As-We-Know-It came, she would be taking notes and applying Post-It Flags.

Nick recognized her immediately as a genealogical survivalist—one of the peculiar personality types that the study of genealogy attracts. Or maybe produces. He himself was turning into something of a genealogical hermit, periodically shunning the affairs of the world for days or weeks in pursuit of the elusive answer to a research problem.

With keenly honed skills the genealogical survivalist fights an information battle every working day, determined to get those microfilms and books she needs, and get them
first
, at any cost. It’s scoop or be scooped. And what she doesn’t need, she tries to keep from others. Every discovery by someone else diminishes her own accomplishments, her years of unappreciated toil on her own family’s history. Increased digital availability of records does nothing to deter the genealogical survivalist’s lust for power. Sure, she could probably access much of what she needed from the comfort of her home, through the great Web services now available. But she relishes face-to-face combat, nastiness in person, and as long as there are microfilm readers and printed materials and researchers who need them, she would be at the library or the courthouse making lives miserable to the best of her ability.

Nick had known several genealogical survivalists who, having no real research project at all, engaged in a demented campaign of silent sabotage and obstruction. Very unpleasant people.

He glanced at the stack of census-index books and piles of white microfilm boxes this woman had sequestered in a corner of her micro-film compartment.

“I beg your pardon, lady,” Nick began, bluffing, “but no one’s been on this reader for twenty minutes. I’ve been watching it from the stacks, over there.” He pointed across the dimly lit room to a door leading to the bookshelves. In fact, he’d just noticed the empty reader and had hurried over to take possession.

“
Sir
, I have a bladder condition, if you
must
know,” she said, her voice louder than library etiquette allowed. “But I’ve been in the ladies’ room only
eight and a half
minutes. I time myself.” She took out a small spiral notebook from a blouse pocket. There were her bathroom visits, neatly chronicled for posterity. She pointed triumphantly to a sign on the wall: READERS UNUSED FOR 10 MINUTES ARE CONSIDERED OPEN.

“Kindly remove your film,” she continued. “I have this one reserved until 5pm. I’m working on a very special project.”

There were twelve machines in the room, but seven were out of commission; three crank models and one other motorized one were in use by grad students or low-ranking professors—he could tell by the cowlicks and inside-out shirts—oblivious in their research.

Nick glanced at the reservation sheet on the partition. “Muriel” had obviously been waiting at the front door when the library opened at eight, in her baggy hiking pants, marathon runners, and pom-pommed pink ankle socks. Her name was indeed first on the list, but two other names below hers were scratched out; in the same ink a line detoured around those expunged persons, to continue Muriel’s unjust possession of the projector.

Nick apologized with convincing deference.

“I’ll just take down this microfilm and get my things together—if you don’t mind.” He turned his back to Muriel.

She smelled victory in the air and imperiously held up her chin as she waited, checking her watch every fifteen seconds or so as Nick busied himself with his task. Her pride made her cocky. Mistake.

It was a simple, speedy matter for Nick to jam an inconspicuous paper clip into the spool-and-lens assembly at the base of the unit. He’d been bullied once too often by Muriels of the genealogical world. Payback time.

Moving out of the way with exaggerated graciousness, he relinquished the now useless machine to Muriel.

The library was at the moment operating under an austerity budget. Eight months before, a political scandal with Freret at the heart of it had infuriated the state’s citizenry. As usual in Louisiana, when the shoe fell, the politicians instinctively scattered like guilty roaches. Freret took the rap as the symbol of sinful, profligate New Orleans, which much of the rest of the state despises as the homely child resents a gorgeous sibling.

Scholarships for the steep tuition at the prestigious school had been thrown like Mardi Gras doubloons to children of the well connected, in the time-honored, plutocratic Louisiana way—secretly. And not merely for a year or two; but since 1876. For over a century, no newspaper or other media organ had dared break the silence (possibly because many media-owning families had benefited, too). Louisianans are wary of pointing their crooked fingers at each other.

But a Republican cattle and natural-gas centimillionaire and philanthropist from north Louisiana became incensed that his pet state senate candidate had lost the election through gerrymandering machinations of the traditionally Democratic legislature (however, when a strong GOP governor reigned, bayou donkeys embraced their inner elephant). Purely out of spite this man bought a rural weekly newspaper and spilled the beans in a hyperventilating month-long series that gained the notice of the national media, always ready to run any story portraying Louisiana as backward and bizarre.

Now there were rumors that further tax breaks were quietly being offered to Freret’s for-profit, joint-venture biotech and computer-sciences
divisions as a sop for the punitive cuts in state grants that the embarrassed legislators had inflicted on the private institution from which so many of their children had graduated, tuition paid and grades inflated. And for all the heat the university president personally had to take, the bond commission stealthily approved a tax-free issue for the renovation of a St. Charles Avenue mansion as his new official residence. The good times would roll on as discreetly as before, and everybody would soon be happy again.

Except Muriel. She lambasted an already stressed-out young woman from the library staff, who scribbled “Out of Order” on a yellow sheet of paper, placed it on the reader, and beat a hasty retreat. Muriel, gathering her things and threatening legal measures to an audience that couldn’t care less, left in a huff. Five minutes later, Nick returned to the abandoned machine. He removed the “Out of Order” sign, repaired his sabotage, and got to work.

Nick and Tommy Shawe had agreed on a three-pronged strategy. He would prepare a short tribal history; update and verify the pedigrees of the six core families back to the time of French rule; and formulate guidelines for future admission based on a study of other tribes’ practices. This basic work would help the tribe in establishing its enrollment office, the in-house genealogical department that, in most tribes, reviews the claims of applicants for tribal membership.

Of course, many of the applicants would want as their genealogist someone familiar with the case, someone who could work on a friendly basis with the tribe—namely, Nick. He hoped he’d finally found his own oil well that would pump cash for years to come. Few people got rich in genealogy. Nick wouldn’t mind being one of them.

This morning he planned to travel back centuries to colonial Louisiana. He looked around to make sure no library worker lurked about, and poured a steaming cup of black coffee-and-chicory from his
Thermos. The scruffy graduate students and junior professors sighed at the delicious aroma. One or two whimpered.

Nick was well versed in the standard works of Louisiana history. He had riffled through two of his favorites, Le Page du Pratz’s
Histoire de La Louisiane
and Giraud’s
A History of French Louisiana
, which were in his own library at his office—he’d bought them for a dollar each at a garage sale some years before. He had also browsed through archaeological and ethnographic periodicals for more recent investigatory leads.

The earliest description of the Katogoula that he’d found was in a 1771 narrative by the French explorer Jean-Bernard Bossu. He also had reviewed the accounts of Thomas Hutchins, William Bartram, Baudry de Lozieres, and other explorers and soldiers of various nationalities, who, in official reports and memoirs, told of later contacts with the tribe. These men wrote that the Katogoula were part of the Sangfleuve Confederation, dominated by the Chitiko and the Tiloasha, powerful tribes which had been in existence centuries before the arrival of the Europeans.