It didn’t matter. She loved the cadence of their speech, and she loved the town.
The prospect of spending four days walking around the French Quarter—the storied Vieux Carré—with Joe had made the last ten days of this job’s unrelenting physical labor worth every minute. She wished that she could have hired Joe as her assistant, and not just because she liked the way he smelled. He would have been a lot of help to her, but he had his own education to pursue. It wouldn’t be right to slow him down.
Fortunately, Nina had proven herself in the role of Faye’s assistant. Faye was glad to have her on the team.
Like Faye, Nina was a returning student with more experience in archaeology than her college transcript suggested. Faye had earned her decidedly non-academic experience by digging up the artifacts her ancestors left behind on the land she’d inherited—Joyeuse Island. Before entering graduate school, Nina had earned hers in the usual way, by volunteering for any dig that would take a willing worker who was only available on weekends.
Nina was a New Orleans native, so all her volunteer work had been done nearby, and some of it had been done right here at the Chalmette battlefield. If Faye’d been asked to design the perfect assistant, Nina would have been pretty close to her ideal. Well, except for Joe. Joe was the ideal assistant, particularly when you factored in the fringe benefits that a man of his singular beauty could provide.
At the moment, though, she and Joe were both hardworking students without much time for romance, not unless you counted the sheer romance of archaeology. And there was more than a bit of romance to the work she had come to Chalmette to do, even though the stimulus for it was predictably prosaic: somebody wanted to build something.
When Katrina blasted through south Louisiana, she took the battlefield park’s visitor’s center with her. The park service wanted to rebuild it in another spot and, frankly, you couldn’t put a shovel in the ground anywhere in the area without the risk of obliterating history.
A review of the possible sites for the new visitor’s center had determined that the least objectionable place for the new building was near the buried remnants of the Rodriguez plantation house. In laymen’s terms, something historical would be disturbed wherever they built the thing, but the powers-that-be had judged that there was a fighting chance of avoiding utter catastrophe in this spot.
The Rodriguez house had taken cannonfire during Andrew Jackson’s battle, but survived. Just to make things interesting, there had been another plantation house known as the Beluche house nearby—right under the park’s public restrooms, in fact—that had stood even before the Rodriguez house.
Faye and her crew would be doing an archaeological survey, working in advance of the construction team to make sure that nothing old and irreplaceable was destroyed. If things went really well, Faye hoped to locate outbuildings that had stood behind each house. And if God was really good to her, she’d be able to discern which outbuilding went with which house.
She was toying with the notion of a dissertation exploring the ways masters and slaves used space. European settlers tended toward orderly arrangements of outbuildings, arranged around an open area for outdoor work like soapmaking or blacksmithing. Their African slaves had brought with them different notions of how life should be organized. This site could possibly enable her to look at two plantation complexes from two different periods in the same field trip, which could be quite a time-saver. Faye didn’t know any graduate students who weren’t all about getting their work done and getting the hell out of school.
She and Nina had spent January poring over earlier archaeological reports and histories of the site. They’d spent February digging test pits and developing a plan for a more detailed investigation. The Feds had liked their proposal for follow-up work, so Dauphine had joined them in March, and they’d all been hard at work for two months. Faye was proud of the things they’d gotten done this semester. The summer should be even better, except for the distinct risk of sunstroke.
As if to make up for Nina’s easygoing nature, Dauphine existed only to embrace life’s oddities. She eschewed practical field clothes in favor of flowing, wide-legged pants and colorful cotton blouses. Fuchsia, lime, scarlet, lavender—if Faye found herself craving an afternoon nap, she could just look at Dauphine for a caffeine-free pick-me-up.
No matter what neon color Dauphine was wearing, her braids were always wrapped neatly in a sky-blue scarf. The happy color flattered her praline-colored skin and framed an extraordinary pair of eyes. They were green, like Joe’s, but they looked nothing like Joe’s eyes. His eyes were a clear emerald, while Dauphine’s were a milky green, the color of slow-moving swamp water. They were wide and calm, yes, but not placid.
Faye didn’t think that Dauphine’s eyes missed much. They gave the impression that she was cataloging everything she saw, because it was all useful. In Faye’s limited understanding, a voodoo mambo was a scholar of nature and a minister to humans in all their frailty. She suspected that Dauphine was very good at whatever it was a mambo did.
She was a damn fine shovel bum, as well. Faye knew her team was top-notch, but the project timetable, like all project timetables, required the team to do the impossible. Faye thought that this team could actually pull it off.
The pre-Civil War foundations they were hoping to find had eluded them, so far, but some interesting things had turned up nonetheless. These finds hardly filled Faye’s cupped hands—two hundred years is a long time—but they hinted at something more surviving beneath the park’s neatly manicured grass. Among the fragments of pottery had been a bit of transfer-printed British pearlware, chipped and polished into a neat disk. Faye thought it might have been used as a counter for the African game mancala. They’d also found two pink marbles nearby, both made out of…well…marble, as well as a silver coin with a hole drilled through it.
She knew that wearing a silver coin tied around the neck was thought to ward off evil in African-American culture. Mancala was also rooted in African culture, though it had spread into general use. The marbles, like the mancala counter, could have been used by adult or child, as a mere entertainment or as part of a gambling game.
In a time when material goods were hard to come by, any of these objects would have been special possessions. The possibility that she was looking at someone’s cache of treasured items, scattered through the soil by the blade of a plow, made Faye eager to get to work every day.
Faye hoped there was something fascinating waiting for her, buried, and not just because she was a history nut. This was her first actual job as a professional archaeologist who wasn’t associated with the university. When the job announcement popped up in her e-mail, the salary had been big enough to make Faye gasp for breath. It might not be a lot of money to some people but, by an archaeologist’s standards, the federal government paid very well.
Dr. Magda Stockard-McKenzie, Faye’s graduate advisor, had listened carefully to Faye’s arguments for taking a couple of semesters off from school. The job paid well. The work could strengthen her dissertation considerably. It paid well. A job as principal investigator would look just beautiful on her résumé. It paid well. Good performance on a federal job could open doors that would affect her entire career. And it paid well.
Magda agreed that it made sense for Faye to take the spring and summer semesters to manage this job, then re-enroll in the fall. Actually, she had said, “Shit, Faye. I don’t see a down side to this idea. Why are you asking me? If you were stupid enough to pass this up, you wouldn’t want me on your dissertation committee. I’d vote you down in a heartbeat.”
So Faye was on her own, without Magda or the university to back her up, and she was giddy with the power of it…when she wasn’t queasy over the idea of screwing up a project this important to her career.
Monday’s work hadn’t been nearly as efficient as she’d hoped. The morning had gone well, but she’d lost the afternoon to tragedy. Well, not the whole afternoon. Dauphine had gotten a lot done,
while her boss Faye was busy talking about possible murder with Detective Jodi. Nina, too, had been busy doing other things, like exercising her First Amendment right to rally the populace with incendiary words.
Faye glanced around a park that would be deserted until mid-morning when the first steamboat disgorged a load of sightseers at the levee. There was a real possibility that her team might get some work done today.
Matt, whose ranger job didn’t seem to give him a lot to do when he wasn’t conducting tours of the battlefield, ambled over to watch them work. Faye was gratified to see that having a spectator didn’t affect her workers’ pace a bit.
“Got any idea what y’all are looking for?”
Faye tried to answer without slowing her own pace, hoping to set a good example for the others. It didn’t work, so she set her trowel aside and gave Matt her full attention. The events of the day before had been hard on him, and they clearly still weighed on his mind.
“You know where they found the foundations of the Rodriguez house, back in the eighties?” She pointed to an open piece of ground nearby, set in an L-shaped grove of ancient live oaks. “We have some drawings of the house from the time of the battle or just after it—”
Matt was nodding his head as if he wanted her to get to the point.
“I’m sorry, you already know that. You’ve got copies of the drawings in the visitor’s center. You know Latour’s and Laclotte’s drawings? They’ve been really useful. Those two guys headed up Jackson’s field engineers and, in those days, there wasn’t much difference between an engineer and an architect. When they drew a picture of a house, they got the details right. If only they weren’t such good draftsmen…”
Faye was still crouched in her unit, because she figured that standing up to talk would be too comfortable, and she wanted to finish quickly and get back to work. Also, she was hoping the park ranger would take the hint and go away.
Matt, ever-anxious to learn more about this spot of ground where he spent his days, didn’t seem to have an endless amount of work like Faye’s. Or if he did, it wasn’t calling him.
He squatted down to hear her better. “How can being a good draftsman be a bad thing? There’s no other way to get the kind of detail those guys could draw, not when you’re talking about a time before photography.”
“Yeah, but I wish they hadn’t been so persnickety about perspective. Both of them drew the Rodriguez house from a spot between the house and the river, because these houses always faced the river. That means that the house itself obscures most of the area behind it. We have eyewitness accounts and some other documents that may not be real accurate, but we don’t really know whether any outbuildings stood here. There could’ve been a smokehouse or a privy or slave quarters in this very spot. Or there could’ve been nothing. We won’t know until we look.”
A police car pulled into the parking lot, and Jodi got out. Matt rose to his feet, mumbling, “Thanks for explaining things, Faye.”
He seemed to expect the detective to be looking for him, and he was right. Jodi slammed the car door, looked around, and started walking toward Matt without even stopping to talk to the rangers in the visitor’s center. The woman was clearly on a mission. She beckoned to Matt, and they found a private spot under a shade tree on the far side of the reconstructed rampart.
Faye couldn’t hear them, and there was no reason for her to want to know what they were discussing, other than sheer nosiness. She stretched her legs for a minute, preparing to crouch down and got back to work, when Nina popped up out of her unit like a bespectacled prairie dog.
“Know what I heard about Matt?”
Was workaholic Nina actually offering to spread some gossip? Within the past twenty-four hours, Nina had sprouted an over-charming ex-boyfriend, passionate political views, and now an unsuspected appetite for dishing the dirt. And Faye had thought the woman was only interested in dirt from an archaeological standpoint.
Faye was human, and there is a reason that people have been gossiping since somebody told Hera that Zeus was running around on her with a heifer. Other people’s frailties were endlessly fascinating.
“What did you hear? Look at that man’s baby face. He hasn’t lived long enough to have a sordid past.”
“Exactly. He hasn’t had time to build a career, either, but look what he does for a living.”
“Um…he’s a park ranger. Am I missing something here?”
“Park ranger jobs are hard to get. The pay’s good, and government benefits are amazing.”
Faye knew what she paid for the shoddy coverage offered by her student health insurance policy. “Now I’m jealous.”
“Yeah, me too. It’s not just the perks, either. Lots of people want to work in New Orleans. Rookies usually have to start at a park that’s three hundred miles from nowhere. And this job’s especially nice, because it’s not like Matt’s out hiking in the Rockies, hauling injured hikers off a mountainside. He gives short tours to lazy tourists who don’t want to walk far. There aren’t any hills to climb or wild animals to worry about. In between tours, he sits in the air conditioned visitor’s center.”
“So you’re saying that people Matt’s age have to wait in line for a job like his.”
“Yep.”
“What do you think he did? Bribe somebody?”
“Heck, no. He grew up in the same kind of middle-class neighborhood I did…well, it was middle-class before Katrina made it a flooded-out hellhole. You saw it. The same middle-class people are living there now, except they’re living in trailers instead of nice houses. Anyway, Matt’s people didn’t have enough money for a bribe, but it didn’t take money to get him this job.”
Now Nina was messing with her. She was spinning this story for all it was worth, egging Faye on to ask for more rumors and innuendo. But like anybody else, Faye knew how to play the gossip game. To get the good dirt, you had to make the person who held it feel important. You had to make her want to give it to you.
“So what did Matt and his people do? Did somebody sleep with a government official?”
There. Faye figured that question ought to get Nina’s gossip-spreading juices flowing. And it did.
“Yeah. Sort of. Married people sleep together, don’t they?”
“Usually.”
“Well, Matt’s father is related somehow to a woman whose step-daughter is married to Matt’s boss’ boss. Also, I think their ancestors served in the same Confederate regiment.”
Only in some parts of the American South would this statement have made any sense whatsoever. The upshot was, though, that Matt enjoyed a cushy position because of who he was and who his family knew. Family connections were important, no matter where you went, but only in New Orleans was a man likely to be acquainted with his fifth cousin, once removed.
“No wonder Matt has the face of a choir boy,” Faye observed as she lowered herself into the excavation. “He’s led a sheltered life. His family has always taken care of him.”
“Maybe a little too much.” Nina stepped into her own unit. “But they couldn’t shield him from the turmoil of the past three years. Matt lost loved ones in the storm. He almost lost his parents. He would have, if the rescuers had been any slower in coming.”
Twenty minutes later, Faye watched Matt walk back to the visitor’s center by a circuitous path that came nowhere near her work site. More than once, he rubbed the heel of his hand across his face, the way men do when they don’t want anybody to know they’re crying.
***
Faye had watched Jodi spend the past twenty minutes reading all the educational placards in the vicinity of the excavation where she and Nina and Dauphine were piling up the backdirt. It was now straight-up noon, and Faye had a sneaking suspicion that the detective wanted to talk to her and that she was just killing time until Faye sent her crew off to find some lunch.
Faye’s hunch was right. Immediately after Nina and Dauphine went to fetch their sack lunches from the project trailer, Jodi approached Faye
with an invitation. “There’s a greasy spoon a couple of miles down St. Bernard Highway that has a cheap lunch plate. How do you feel about po-boys?”
“Since I got here, I’ve tried just about every variety, and I’ve loved them all. How do the bakeries around here get that crisp crust and still leave the bread soft on the inside?”
Faye was using a hose, some foamy soap, and a fingernail brush to get the worst of the dirt off her hands. It wasn’t working.
“Beats me. Something in the water, maybe? So…you wanna do lunch?”
“Police business?”
“Heck, no. Working all the time makes a girl old fast. Oh, maybe I know something about yesterday’s bones that might get an archaeologist’s attention…”
She grinned at Faye’s obvious interest, and kept talking. “Besides, I can always use a good woman friend. I’ve got me a lot of friends but most of them are dumb as a post, which you’re not. I love ’em and all, but I can only spend so much of my life talking about nothing but liquor and pretty men. I mean, they’re two of my favorite subjects, but—”
Joe had been standing nearby, slowly pouring water out of the paper cup in his hand and watching where it flowed. Faye had no idea why he was doing that, but Joe had a reason for everything he did. Dauphine was standing a few feet away, too far to be standing with Joe but too close to pretend that she was looking at anything beyond a dark and handsome man who had a strange obsession with wet dirt. Faye wasn’t sure what she thought about that.
When Joe noticed Jodi, he turned his attention away from the mud he was making and walked over to greet her. Wiping a hand on the rag hanging out of his back pocket, he shook her hand, then turned his head to ask, “Ready for lunch, Faye?”
Floodgates Page 6