Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (34 page)

Luevenia’s great-grandmother had explained the scene she herself had painted on the Bible’s page edges. It was heavy with symbolism. One day, Birdie said, Luevenia would understand the meaning of many things behind the painted surface of life.

The old woman liked to be out in the woods when the weather permitted, and sometimes even when it didn’t. Luevenia learned more from this hobbling, muttering woman than from anyone else, before or since. They would walk slowly to the ancient burial mounds on Tadbull property, to the old graveyard in Tchekalaya Forest, sometimes farther along
the Golden Trace, all the way to sacred Lake Katogoula itself. She was a strong woman, who saw her great-granddaughter as the torchbearer for another generation.

Birdie always carried the little Bible with her; and when they rested in the shade of tall pine trees, the old woman would take it out and hold it in her still-beautiful hands, with those long nails of hers. For hours she would explain the many truths of the lives of Christ and the saints and the martyrs; truths that the Katogoula oral stories told in different, but not inferior, ways. In the unwritten Katogoula Bible, forest, lake, and sky were the settings, and God, the Great Spirit, gave life to demigods in the guises of human beings, animals, plants and the elemental forces of nature.

The luxuriant corn of the fore-edge painting symbolized life and fertility, Birdie said. The burial mounds, pregnant with death, stood for the necessary power that cut down the corn, according to the preordained plan of all existence, in a harvest that fed the living. The temples atop the mounds represented the Holy Ones of the Vulture Cult, who once administered the rituals of death and lived in the temples, even as the chiefs lived in their own houses atop different mounds. The smoke rising from the fires were the souls of the dead, freed from entombment in their earthly bodies.

The Bible hid much more than it revealed. It had become for Luevenia the embodiment of her complex heritage, a reminder of her high status as a daughter of the Vulture Cult, as a descendant of the ancient Yaknelousa who, caught amid the European power struggles, had been absorbed by their ally, the Katogoula. But she was also a descendant of Europeans, whose alien culture, more than any war, destroyed the world of her great-grandmother and turned the sacred stories transmitted from generation to generation into mere primitive and cartoonish myths.

Her husband, Royce, had seen the Bible daily. She’d kept it on her dresser; but he didn’t know what it meant to Luevenia. Nor did he know what the inscription meant; Birdie had always said it was Yaknelousa, the lost language of her ancestors. It was actually Cajun French, which Royce, fortunately, could not read or speak. What else had the old woman made up or garbled in her dotage? Luevenia never decided satisfactorily on that question. Birdie had loved her; that was enough to trust.

She didn’t need to read the lines of the inscription now. The old woman had told her from her own lips what the inscription meant, and she would remember it to her dying moment:

To my Little Wing, from her great-grandmother, Gray Wing,
granddaughter of Black Wing, daughter of Long Black Feather,
High Priest of Vultures. Grow like Corn,
be strong as Death, like smoke rise to Heaven.

She had come here to Tadbull Hall today because she could not destroy the little book. This genealogist was stubborn and clever, more so than the others who had preceded him. He would not stop digging up the past, he would not go away, in spite of the harsh words she’d said to him in front of the smoldering museum, words she did not fully believe herself.

Death. Death had been on her mind a lot lately. Was his death the only way to stop his snooping, to end her torment? And what if she died, what if the Sacred Cougar came for her this time? Someone would go through her things, find out the secrets she had kept even from her husband! Death would not be enough. She had to get her affairs in order, in case, in case . . . the worst happened.

Over the past few days, she had secretly burned in the trash barrel behind Three Sisters Pantry everything else she treasured. The photos
of her great-grandmother in her rocker, weaving a basket of pine needles. Her grandmother’s big English Bible that recorded the births, marriages, and deaths of generations unaware that they were Vulture Cult descendants. Letters, postcards, clothing, quilts . . . whatever had been passed down to her mother, whatever might give this prying Nick Herald a clue, whatever might taint others with her awe-inspiring, horrible ancestry. Watching the smoke from the barrel drift heavenward, she had realized with a start that she was performing the ancient rituals of death on her own life.

She feared this Nick Herald. His brown eyes were always thinking, working things out. Whenever she lied to him, his brows contracted into one, and she could feel his doubt touch her, like hands probing a sick place on her body. He saw with all his senses, like a traiteur. Was he a healer of the family soul, or a wicked spear-thrower of evil knowledge?

Exposure would be unbearable, but still she could not destroy everything, not her great-grandmother’s special gift, this little French Bible, as damning as it might be. Those forest days spent with Birdie had stuck with her, as had the stories of the great honor bestowed on the families that constituted the Vulture Cult. Today, people would not understand; they would turn on her, say things behind their hymnals, refuse to eat the good food at her store . . . but the heritage should not die. Her own child should have the Bible, even if he did not know what it signified, even if he did not know he was her child.

This was why she had called Wooty that morning, why now she followed him up to the attic, to Old Man Tadbull’s collection of Katogoula artifacts and images. She and Wooty had always been like aunt and nephew.

“Now that our museum’s gone,” she said to Wooty, “had an idea maybe you’d put this old Bible in amongst the other Katogoula stuff up here. Cleaned out some old closets and found it. I was going to try and sell it at the store, but it’s such a pretty little thing. I wanted it to have a good home.”

Such a beautiful baby he had been. How he had grown into this fine man, future master of this wealthy place.

He hesitated and then extended one of his handsome hands to take the book, no bigger than two decks of cards.
Her
hands . . . his were so like her hands. For a moment, she thought she might cry, tell him the whole story so elaborately hushed up, the sad tale that not even Royce knew. She would have gladly died just to embrace him.

No, she was all right now. “You’ll take it, won’t you, Wooty?”

CHAPTER 25

T
uesday morning, three days after the fatal museum fire and a day after Luevenia Silsby’s visit, Nick, Holly, and Wooty followed Mr. Tadbull up the central spiral stair tower toward the attic of Tadbull Hall.

“Great-granddaddy, Wooten the First,” Mr. Tadbull said proudly through wheezes, “fought for the Confederacy under Pike, Cooper, and Stand Watie—you know, that Cherokee from Georgia—in the Trans-Mississippi Department. ’Course Great-granddaddy, he already knew lots about Indians before he went to Indian Territory, you understand. The man damn near spent his whole life amongst ’em here.”

Wooty brought up the rear, hanging back several steps, hands in pockets, tight-lipped, preoccupied. Nick could see Holly wasn’t comfortable with this meeting, either. There was still bad blood between them. Her phone call setting up this private showing hadn’t helped matters. Unusually reserved, she tried, not quite successfully, to ignore Wooty; now and then she glanced up at Nick, as if searching his face for a sign he was ready to leave. But he wasn’t.

Nick could smell the past exuding its musty, alluring pheromone from every crevice of the solid old house, hear it call his name softly like a dream-lover in the night. America, for most of its life, had cannibalized its physical past to feed its revolutionary appetite for unfettered
progress. As if fulfilling some mythic destiny, this modern giant heedlessly ate its parents. But the old could nourish the new as more than just fuel, and Nick was glad that this appropriately radical idea had taken hold in America’s continuously maturing ethos. Landmark structures like Tadbull Hall served a crucial purpose in preserving the history of America, just as surviving castles and manor houses of medieval Europe salvaged remnants of their times.

The original resident families were influential and wealthy, their houses centers of economic, political, and social life when local government and associated record keeping had yet to be established or had broken down through war, famine, or disease. And it was odd characters like Mr. Tadbull’s great-grandfather and grandfather who snatched bones of the past from the rapacious, dumb jaws of voracious modernity.

The houses themselves were archaeological treasures, holding vital clues in their very construction to contemporary thinking and social organization. Tadbull Hall featured many of the architectural strategies of the time to lessen the effects of the brutal Louisiana summer heat. The plenum, as it was called, the column of open space around which the stairs circled, was one such innovation; it took advantage of natural convection to move hot air up and out of the house, and to bring cool air up from the brick basement. Nick had also noted the central hallways, with doors and windows placed for maximum cross-ventilation. The sun-blocking large adjustable shutters and latticework made him homesick for Creole New Orleans.

No, Nick was not ready to leave. Not by a long shot.

“Spent lots of time in Indian Territory, Great-granddaddy did,” Mr. Tadbull continued, considerably winded from hauling his belly up the steep stairs. “Helped get some of those tribes out there to go with the Confederacy. Later on, he took a minié ball in the butt at Prairie Grove, Arkansas. Gotdamn, that must’a hurt like hell! Damn thing’s downstairs
in my study. Yep, Great-granddaddy organized a company of these here local Indians when the war started. Not many of ’em came back, though. Most of the surviving ones went on to Indian Territory, called for their families to join ’em. A few stayed in the forest and hereabouts. Good thing, too. Got ’em recognized, didn’t it?”

They entered a narrow room that stretched across the width of the house and meandered to the rear, in an eccentric way—which seemed the common thread in everything associated with the Tadbulls. Nick determined that the open space didn’t occupy the entire area of this floor. Several generations of Tadbull women had been unwilling to cede all of their attic storage space to this family art gallery and local-history museum.

“There’s closets and storage rooms up here you couldn’t find with a gotdamn Katogoula hunting hound,” Mr. Tadbull declared, referring to the famous local breed of big shorthaired, hog-chasing dogs with strange dissimilar eyes of bright blue, gray, or yellow. “Who knows what all’s in ’em. I sure don’t.”

Crammed storage rooms, hidden closets, padlocked chests . . . holding, perhaps, a faded list of unknown significance, a diary, an album of stained photos, or a rodent-nibbled batch of letters. Nick let his mind wander among such imagined genealogical riches; he missed some of Mr. Tadbull’s subsequent narration.

“His son, your grandfather, painted these watercolors?” Nick asked finally, hoping he wasn’t betraying his raging curiosity enough to set off any warning bells in the man’s head. It was the same in genealogy as in antique or stamp collecting: the owners of treasures often clammed up when they realized the immense value, monetary or otherwise, of what they had.

“That’s right,” said Mr. Tadbull, still without any telltale suspicion. “My granddaddy was like that, you know. Sorta strange. An artist, and
all. After the War of Northern Aggression, Great-granddaddy used to go off for weeks at a time with the Katogoula men, hunting and fishing, living with the damn tribe. Took my granddaddy with him. That’s how he got to know so much about ’em, and put down what he saw in these here paintings. Wooty kinda followed in my granddaddy’s footsteps, you might say. We couldn’t hardly keep him inside, but he was always running off to play with the Katogoula children.”

Still no reply from Wooty.

Far from the clatter of family life downstairs, these attic quarters had served as a restful enclave for the Civil War veteran and then for his son, the artist. Bleached-pine floor, white plaster walls, cantilevered ceiling altered to accommodate modern air ducts. Watercolors, oils, and black-and-white photographs of local Indians covered almost every inch of wall space. Mr. Tadbull explained that Katogoula women, a hundred years ago, had made the unpainted wicker furniture, using local vines and twigs. The day bed, rocker, and tables were all still in place, just as his grandfather had left it, ready for another century of use.

Close to a window stood a tall easel with a nearly finished oil painting of a moonlit bayou scene, pencil lines indicating where the paint would have gone.

“He went a little soft in the brain, at the end,” Mr. Tadbull said. “Started seeing things in the moss and the fog.” He chuckled, shaking his head. “Bascove Tadbull. The Indians just called him Old Man Tadbull.”