Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (44 page)

Nick touched the grass of the grave on the right. “This is probably her husband.” The headstone was all but illegible. “They probably bought adjacent plots. He died decades before, in the 1880s, from the look of this marker. Of course, I’ll have to try to verify who this woman was, and look into those unusual dates, but . . . are you hungry?”

She was mauling a pickled peach, her hands and chin slathered in syrupy juice. “Starved. I can’t listen to any more of your ridiculous ideas on an empty stomach. No more work from me until I get my fill of fried chicken and potato salad.”

“Hey, as I recall, you transcribed those names and dates like a veteran genealogist. Ever consider joining our merry band? I’ll teach you the secret handshake.”

“If it means hanging around cemeteries and accusing innocent people of murder, no thanks.” She wound up an underhand pitch, and sent the peach pit into a tangled mass of underbrush, a few yards into the trees.

With a chime, the pit slammed into something solid beneath the vines.

“What was that?”

“A piece of the old church?” Nick suggested. “Sounded like stone in there.”

“Let’s find out!” Holly charged into the shadowy woods, hungry for something else now.

CHAPTER 31

T
hey tore through thorny vines, tough saplings, and fallen branches, all of which formed a matted, shoulder-high clump the size of a small church’s altar. Blood and sweat and squashed mosquitoes smeared their scratched arms. Raised, pink tracks of fingernails marked Holly’s sun-toasted legs. The scent of fresh blood drew more mosquitoes wiser in the ways of tormenting them.

Nick imagined he could already feel the runny rash of poison ivy, and the swollen welts from ant, red bug, and tick bites—hazards of cemetery research, and the reasons why he always wore long pants and high-top shoes, and brought several pairs of gardening gloves. Holly, in her lust to tear into the mysterious tangle, at first had laughed at his pants tucked into his socks and scoffed at his insistence on wearing gloves. Now she understood.

It was hot, dirty, hard work, and Nick’s mind kept replaying lines from Yvor Winters’ poem “Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight,” warning of the dangerous seductiveness of the physical world, in the form of a beautiful forest spirit who transforms herself at will to snare those unwise enough to wander into her savage net.

Something moved abruptly, noisily within the foliage. Holly, closer to the movement, uttered a cry of warning and jumped back, into Nick’s chest. For a lingering instant he buried his face in her hair. The heat
and smell of her were intoxicating. He forgot about the murders, the Vulture Cult, the Spanish
Legajos de Luisiana
, the French clerk’s account, the Bible from the attic of Tadbull Hall, the flashes along the lakeshore, and whatever it was that had startled her.

“A snake,” she said through the slow, deep breaths of an athlete. She gently pulled away, averted eyes aware of her effect on Nick and maybe of an equally powerful urge she was having difficulty suppressing. She wiped away a sweat-soaked wisp of hair from her forehead with the cuff of one glove. Then she picked up a stick and stirred an area of underbrush. A fat snake made a break for it, slithering rapidly away.

“Copperhead,” she said, with complete equanimity.

Nick wasn’t so calm. “Kill it!”

“It’s just as scared of us.” She tossed the stick away. “Would you rather have a thousand rats around? Predators and death are facts of nature.”

“Hey, I’m all for natural balance, as long as mankind is part of the equation. I may not have the bumper stickers to prove it, but I’m a liberaltarian.”

“That means”—two handfuls of stubborn foliage finally gave way to her determined yanking—“you get to do whatever the hell you want and feel good about it, huh?”

“That’s about right. Having an active ecological conscience is fine by me, as long as it doesn’t get me killed.” Nick cast a worried glance at the spot where he thought the snake had entered another area of dense undergrowth. “I wonder what balance our murderer wants to maintain.”

“The murderer’s a human being,” Holly said. “We traded in our instincts for self-awareness. Our motives aren’t controlled by nature anymore. The snake has no choice. Call me radical environmentalist or whatever if you want, but that doesn’t make me a wimp. I wouldn’t hesitate to defend myself against a man—or a woman—who should know better.” She put her weight against another wiry mass in her hands.
Vines twanged and snapped and whipped about. She staggered backward. “Are you going to stand there and yak all day or can you give me some help here?”

“Timber!” he shouted, grabbing a hank of knotted forest entrails, letting his good left side handle most of the heavy lifting. He hoped she was right: that the killer
was
a human being, who could be fought with a big enough stick. A poisonous snake or a deranged killer he could handle.
But an angry spirit? No thanks!

After a few more minutes of work, they were able to see vertical stone slabs, regularly placed to form two-and-a-half rows.

Nick said, “Doesn’t look like the ruins of a church to me.”

“More graves.”

He pushed a large rotting pine limb to the side; it fell with a thud, splitting into pieces, sending a swirl of insects and chaff into the humid air as much of the remaining underbrush went crashing over and down with it.

Holly said, “What’s this cemetery doing so close to the other one? And so neglected.”

“I wonder. Let’s get these inscriptions down first. There’s no substitute for accurate written notes. What do you think, twenty, thirty graves? Why don’t you start here and I’ll go to the other end—”

“Screw that! I’m not writing down any more names or dates or anything. I’m getting my camera. Images, not words—that’s what I do best.”

While she went to her backpack for the camera, Nick cleared away more debris and began to read the inscriptions that were legible. She’d obviously had enough of his preaching; he decided not to harp on the fact that good old-fashioned notes from a field trip could serve as backup for genealogical information otherwise lost to a malfunctioning camera or audio recorder. So he transcribed as he read anyway, just in case the camera’s memory got fried.

There were few surnames on the headstones in sight that he recognized. That was good: more ancestral Katogoula lines, more possibilities for living descendants, a more viable tribe with more members. The birth dates were, for the most part, in the early nineteenth century, with only a few crossing beyond the 1800 line. Death dates were all over the map, extending into the 1890s. Three generations, maybe four.

Was this where the Katogoula first started burying after they fully embraced Christianity, and ceased to bury their dead in mounds? Not a lot of graves for that amount of time, Nick thought. The dates were earlier than those of the larger cemetery, just a few yards away in the clearing—but not by much. Why two graveyards, if the time frames were roughly parallel? Could there have been some structural impediment separating them, a part of the old church, no longer here? Maybe this little graveyard held the last traditionalists, who followed the matriarchal clan-centered ways instead of the Western patriarchal family structure.

Nooj Chenerie had been wrong about finding graves no more than about a hundred years old. Nick wondered why?

Holly unzipped the protective case of the camera. She knew what she was doing. He stopped worrying about a photographic mishap.

“Our friendly wildlife agent may write us up,” Nick said, ribbing her. “The tribe doesn’t like tourists taking pictures of the gravestones, you know.”

“We’re not tourists,” she replied, aiming the camera, making adjustments. “I was corrected once at another tribe’s pow-wow for taping during the eagle-feather dance. They were very polite—after they took my tape.”

“I’ve run into that a few times, myself,” Nick said, ogling his companion with impunity as she fussed with the camera or ripped foliage from a headstone. “The prohibition on cameras. Some groups consider
it sacrilege, some a violation of privacy; others just want to sell their cemetery lists without competition.”

When Holly was satisfied with the settings, she began snapping close-up shots of individual headstones from various angles. “We’ll be through here in no time,” she said. “Who’ll know, except the trees?”

And the dead
. For Nick, the electronic clicking of the shutter seemed a gross affront to the beauty and peace of this natural setting . . . a serene mirage that was a phantom of human sentimentality, a soothing human delusion masking an eternal bloody struggle. Maybe he was still a bit rattled from seeing the snake, maybe it was his long-standing distaste for technology, the merciless automaton-god worshipped nowadays, but each time the camera clattered, he winced.

Holly said from behind the viewfinder, “Do you always do what other people tell you?” She moved to another headstone and crouched down. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

Then she lowered the camera.

“These names,” she said, still working on a half-submerged thought. “Nick, I read some of these surnames in the
Legajos de Luisiana
. . . . They’re Quinahoa!”

He’d wandered to the end of the small graveyard. “Are you sure?”

She walked along the stones, reading them out. “Oh, absolutely! Most of them were in the
Legajos
. Spelling’s not quite the same, but the Kentucky trader or the Spanish who wrote this stuff down might have screwed up the French surnames they heard. Nick, I think the people in these graves were descendants of captured Quinahoa enslaved by the Katogoula. The earliest ones maybe only a generation or two away from the big war. Wow, this is the cemetery of the slave caste!”

“That’s why it’s separated from the larger one,” he said. “Putting on my sociologist’s cap, I’d say the actual slavery and the attached stigma had long since evaporated. They’d become part of the larger Katogoula
tribe, but considered themselves distinct. Maybe this isn’t a place of humiliation, at that. Could it have been that the Quinahoa were still fighting for their identity, even in their burial customs?”

“Like the Katogoula in white society,” Holly said, snapping shots again. “Now I
really
want this on film.”

As she moved through the small graveyard recording their find, she told Nick that Indian slavery was, in major respects, unlike black slavery in the antebellum South. The Southeastern Indian culture didn’t rely on a one-crop plantation system, so there was no need for massive cheap labor. Life was still relatively simple, pastoral, with communal farming and hunting. Possessions and practices promoted survival, and material luxuries weren’t much of a factor, until the Europeans came. There was little real difference between the life of the slave and of the master. Slavery was more a mental construct, a matter of enhanced honor for the captor, of lost dignity for the captive. A powerful tribe could boast many slaves; and though warriors often were tortured to death, or maimed so that they couldn’t escape, in time manageable slaves were treated as pets.

The Quinahoa who survived the war—some were rumored to have vanished into the forest—became Katogoula and Yaknelousa chattel; a few were probably traded to other tribes or to the whites. If the general pattern ruled, the Quinahoa served as menial laborers and artisans; some were forced into prostitution; the exceptional ones no doubt gained respect for special skills, like hunting or fishing. The passing of years, then of generations, made the distinctions less noticeable. Daily contact led to increasing familiarity and acceptance. To respect, friendship, matings. And then came the day when no one remembered who had been a slave, who a master. Finally, the truth became another legend on the tribe’s dusty shelf.

Nick said, “It seems that the last to care about their glorious degrading past were the Quinahoa descendents themselves. In the end I guess
it became a matter of ethnic pride. But eventually they stopped using this graveyard. The headstone dates tell the story. Sometime before the turn of the twentieth century, they stopped thinking of themselves as separate and became Katogoula in spirit, Katogoula in death.”

“Maybe they all died out,” Holly said.

“Yeah, maybe.” Nick stood before several partially hidden headstones fifteen feet away from her, carefully clearing lush poison ivy from them with his gloves. “These are interesting,” he said, more to himself than to Holly.

“What is it? . . . Oh, boy, there you go again.”

He stared at the headstone directly in front of him, his mouth gaping slightly, catching mosquitoes, feeling the old familiar chill of the eureka moment. He shook off his gloves and began to scribble feverishly on his yellow pad.

“Well, whatever happened,” Holly said, curious now, starting to walk toward him down a line of old graves, “now they’re one big happy family up in the sky somewhere.”

A headstone shattered into stone splinters to the right of Nick with a loud crack like close thunder. Then another headstone fell decapitated to his left.

Stone dust filled the air. He instinctively ducked his head. “What the hell!—”

A brown streak whooshed by his face and stuck in a thick pine behind him.
An atlatl spear!
Thrown with such force that the sharp stone tip protruded from the other side of the tree.

“Run!” Holly screamed. “This way! Get out of here!”

Holly in front, they ran up the narrow path that had led them into the denser woods and to the graveyards, and then left and onto the Golden Trace again, the ancient hunter’s path through the life-giving, death-concealing forest.

Now they were the hunted, and Nick felt the terror of a rat in the coils of a snake. If this was the natural order at work, survival of the fittest in action, he didn’t feel nearly fit enough!

Holly was a good runner, keeping her arms close to her sides, pumping them in alternating rhythm with her stride. Somehow she’d managed to secure her camera bandoleer style; it flopped between her shoulder blades. She looked back at him and then beyond him. Fear replaced concern on her face.