by Mike Blakely
After the government accidentally drained Caddo Lake, a few riverboats continued to steam all the way up to Jefferson, but only during the wettest of times. Port Caddo declined steadily.
In just five years, there was not enough of a town left there to support my pop’s newspaper, so my folks moved to Mount Pleasant, where they died as honored and respected citizens of that town, after forty-seven years of good news coverage. I was nineteen and mature enough to make my own decisions when the Steam Whistle went under. I didn’t follow my folks to Mount Pleasant. I stayed in the old family place at Port Caddo. I also talked my pop out of any of his old notes that in any way related to the summer of pearls.
To my surprise, I found Billy Treat’s diary among Pop’s notes. Pop said he found the diary in the Treat Inn the day after the flood. I’m sure Billy had always kept a diary, but his old one would have been destroyed when the Glory went under. The diary Pop found began the day after the boiler explosion, and ended with the night of the flood. Billy made amazingly detailed entries, sometimes even recording conversations he had had with Carol Anne or Brigginshaw. That diary, more than anything, sparked my need to know everything about the summer of pearls.
The year my folks left Port Caddo, I finally took my trip down to New Orleans—by rail—and hunted up Joshua Lagarde, the insurance investigator who had looked into the sinking of the Glory of Caddo Lake. He told me that the owners of the Glory had been convicted in a number of insurance-fraud cases and multiple claims. One of the owners had confessed after a two-day police interrogation and named Judd Kelso as the man hired to blow up the Glory.
When I got back to Port Caddo, I learned that Charlie Ashenback had died while I was gone. I spent my last pennies buying his tools from his heirs, who lived in Dallas. I started building my own boats, but it took me thirty years to learn how to make a bateau that would stand up against an Ashenback.
Cecil Peavy moved down to Nacogdoches shortly after that and went into business. I went down there to see him every winter until he died a few years ago. And he came back to Caddo Lake every summer to go fishing with me and Adam. When it was all over for Cecil, he owned four stores, two cafés, and a hotel—and didn’t have to do a lick of manual labor in one of them. He created a lot of jobs in Nacogdoches. His employees hated him, though.
Some time in the eighties, things got hot around here for the Christmas Nelson gang. They went west and tried to rob a bank in Waco. The Texas Rangers were waiting for them. Every member of the gang was killed, except for Christmas himself, and he was shot eight times and captured.
When I heard about the arrest, I spent my entire bankroll getting to Waco. It had occurred to me that if Judd Kelso had stolen the pearl satchel the night of his death, maybe he had been in on the attempted robbery aboard the Slough Hopper three nights earlier. I was the first person to even think about linking Kelso to the Christmas Nelson gang.
Posing as a New Orleans newspaper reporter, I wangled an interview with Christmas Nelson in jail. He was the most pleasant and well-mannered man I have ever met, but he was also a cold-blooded killer and didn’t mind telling you about it. Among other things, he told me that he and four of his men were in Port Caddo the morning the boilers blew on the Glory of Caddo Lake. They were the horsemen who had rescued so many passengers.
I grilled him thoroughly on the attempted pearl robbery, of course. He told me that the Kelso clan over on Long Point often let his gang hide out on their place. He said Judd Kelso had come up with the idea of robbing Trevor Brigginshaw. He also said he kicked Kelso out of the gang for jumping off of the Slough Hopper like a coward when the shooting started. He claimed he would have come to Port Caddo to steal the pearls if he had known Captain Brigginshaw was in jail, or presumed drowned. But he didn’t know. He also said he would have gladly killed Judd Kelso, but didn’t.
When I returned broke to Port Caddo, Adam Owens told me he had fallen in love with a girl from Buzzard’s Bay, across the Louisiana line. Eventually he tried to marry her, but she jilted him—actually left him standing at the altar in front of all the wedding guests. It almost destroyed him. He started drinking and lived like a hermit in a filthy shack up Kitchen’s Creek, across the lake. He used to shoot at people who came up the creek. He even shot at me once.
I finally got him to give up drinking, but I had to move in with him for a year to do it. We fixed up his house and he stayed there until he died. Never married. I don’t think he ever knew the pleasure of having a woman in bed. He was my friend for life, and a wonderfully innocent kind of fellow. He knew things about animals and nature that God shares with only a few chosen mortals.
I went to find that girl Cindy from Longview once, and found out she had gotten married and fat. I went through a lot of girlfriends and finally fell in love with a beautiful thing from Marshall. I married her and moved her to the house in Port Caddo. She became my best friend, most horrific critic, constant debating partner, and the love of my life. We had a wonderfully successful marriage and I have five kids and twelve grandkids to prove it. I lose count of the great-grandkids.
By the turn of the century, the riverboat trade and Port Caddo were dead. My family was the only one living in the deserted city that had once been a port of entry to the Republic of Texas. Our house stood like an oasis of life in the ghost town.
About that time, I got the notion to go to Chicago and look in the Pinkerton Detective Agency records to see what Henry Colton had written in his reports. I had to sneak out in the middle of the night, because my wife didn’t want me spending the money on my silly obsession with that summer of ’74.
Those Pinkertons were a peculiar bunch, and wouldn’t hear of any old bayou rat snooping around in their files. I had to bribe one of the office workers to get Colton’s reports for me. They made up some of the most humorous writing I have ever enjoyed.
Colton had led an unbelievably reckless life as a Pinkerton, and was a pretty successful detective, except that he had a habit of shooting people the Pinkertons wanted him to take alive for questioning. He also drank too much, fought too often, and treated all good-looking women like prostitutes. The International Gemstones case was his last chance as a Pinkerton, and he failed in the most permanent kind of way.
His final report was written aboard the Slough Hopper, just after his shoot-out with the Christmas Nelson gang. He was sure proud of himself in that report. I guess he died happy.
To keep my wife from divorcing me on grounds of abandonment, I had to swear on the family Bible that I wouldn’t go off on any more wild-goose chases. I was out of leads, anyway. I had spent a fortune sending letters of inquiry to every postmaster and newspaper editor in the states of New York and New Jersey, trying to track down Billy Treat’s family. The only leads I got turned out to be false ones.
I finally resigned myself to the fact that I would never know who had killed Judd Kelso. I would never find out what had happened to Carol Anne that night. I would never know for sure if Billy was alive or dead. The summer of pearls would have to remain an enigma to me. It had become sort of a tragic legend around Caddo Lake by that time. As I reached my fiftieth year, I became known as the unofficial historian for the Great Caddo Lake Pearl Rush. People would come around to ask me about the stabbing death of Kelso, and we would talk about all the theories. To most folks, it was just a story. To me, it was real—an image I carried with me all day long, every day, then even into sleep. It was only then—when I resigned myself to search no longer—that the proof found its own way to me.
The summer of pearls prepared me for life. It was like a lifetime in itself. It was that summer when I made and lost my first fortune. I have made and lost many more since then. It was that summer when I first got my heart broke. It got broke many more times before I finally found my wife. And it’s even been broke a few times because of my wife. That summer I forged the friendships that sustained me through life. Friendships that even death cannot end, but only interrupt. Friendships that will resume in the
afterlife. It was that summer that I learned life would not always be simple, or fun, or easy. Neither would it always be complicated, or painful, or hard.
It was the summer I learned nothing would stay the same. Change would come, and come again, and destroy things, and strengthen things, and shock, and soothe, and sadden, and fill with rapture. That is why I should not have been surprised by the most astounding change of all, but I was.
The government, after thirty-seven years, finally decided to repair the damage it had done to Caddo Lake in ’74. It built a new dam down at Mooringsport, Louisiana, that raised the level of the lake to what it had been in the days of the Great Raft.
As soon as I heard about them building the dam, I bought the piece of land where old Esau had once run his saloon. My wife thought I was crazy, but I knew the lake would fill Goose Prairie Cove again, and make a fine location for a fishing camp, hunting lodge, and boat-building yard.
The lake came up just as the government said it would, believe it or not, and I began to make a pretty tolerable living. My wife and I built a new house where the pearl camps had once stood. If I had told her that I had situated it to overlook the spot where I had once kissed a girl named Cindy who hailed from Longview, she would have done me in like Judd Kelso was done in.
Then it happened. The thing that ended all my torturous questions about Kelso, Carol Anne, Billy, and Trevor Brigginshaw. Proof came to my fishing camp, for only my eyes to see, and my ears to hear.
EPILOGUE
Goose Prairie Cove, 1944
I AM AN OLD MAN NOW. I ALONE REMEMBER THE SUMMER OF PEARLS. I HAVE told everything I saw with my own eyes as it happened to me. The parts I didn’t witness personally, I have told as a story, but I know those parts as if I had been there, and I can prove them through documents, statements, and interviews.
This last part I cannot prove, however, because the proof came to visit only me. And it is the final, clinching evidence. This incident I am about to tell you happened thirty years ago. I never told it to anyone else, because I was protecting someone. But those I sought to protect were older than I was, and so must have died years ago. There is no longer anyone to protect. You wanted to know about the summer of pearls, and here is the final chapter.
It happened a couple of years after the government dam raised the lake level, and exactly forty years after the summer of pearls. It was 1914. One day, a Cadillac automobile drove down to my fishing camp. The sun was just rising on a summer morning, warm and humid. There was a thunderhead in the west, and I was hoping we might get some rain, but the dark cloud didn’t take up much of the sky.
I was trying to decide whether or not I should water the vegetable garden when I heard the Cadillac coming down the old Port Caddo Road to my fishing camp.
Thinking a rich sportsman had come to hire me to guide him at hunting and fishing, I walked to the front gate to greet the automobile. The driver’s door opened and an old man stepped out. He was a good seventy years at least, but he stood straight as a pine. Instantly, I felt that I recognized him, yet couldn’t quite place him.
“Mornin’,” I said. “Can I help you?”
He looked me up and down. “Mind if we look around?”
“Not at all. Can I show you a cabin?”
“No, thanks. We just want to look around.”
“Feel free,” I said.
The moment I saw him walk, I remembered Billy Treat. Some things about people don’t change, even with age. It could be him, I thought. But I had made that mistake before. I was always looking for Billy wherever I went, and never finding him.
The door on the passenger side opened, and an old woman got out. The old man met her at the front of the car and they came through the gate. As she walked by me, she looked at me, smiled, and pulled her collar together at her throat, as if against some kind of chill.
I had to wonder if it was Carol Anne. Of course there was no way I could have recognized her, even if it was her. The Carol Anne I remembered was the peerless beauty of my fourteenth year who would never grow old, never wrinkle, never die.
I watched them walk to the lakeshore. They seemed like something from a dream to me. The old man found the place where Esau’s shack had once stood. He took the woman’s hand and they walked along the shore, pointing at landmarks, talking, even laughing. They spent about fifteen minutes on the shore. Then they walked back to the gate.
I intercepted them at the car. “Sure you don’t want to stay?” I asked.
“No, thanks,” the old man said. “But we appreciate you letting us look around.”
I caught the old woman’s eyes and raced to her side of the car to open the door for her. “Come back any time,” I told her. “Fishing’s been good.”
“Thank you,” she said. When she bent forward to crouch into the car, a gold chain swung like a pendulum from under her collar. I only got a glimpse of it before she grabbed it and tucked it back in at her throat, but I swore I recognized it. The Treat Pearl. The perfect orb that had launched that wonderful summer, long ago.
Two doors shut me out and the car started. That Cadillac was the first automobile I ever saw that had an electric starter, and it caught me by surprise when it cranked itself up.
“Wait!” I shouted, over the engine noise. The car backed away. “Wait!” I waved like a madman and ran to the driver’s side. I banged on the window until the old man stopped. “Let the glass down!” I yelled, making motions with my hand.
The old man lowered the window and looked at me. “Well?” he said, in a demanding tone of voice.
No, I wasn’t absolutely sure. It could have been another pearl. But I had to know, even if it meant making a fool out of myself. “I was wondering …” I began. “Whatever happened …”
The old man swallowed and gripped the steering wheel tighter.
“Whatever happened to Captain Trevor Brigginshaw?”
He tensed in the driver’s seat and faked a look of ignorance. “Sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Then the handsome old woman put her hand on his arm and leaned over him to look at me through the car window. “He died, Ben,” she said. “About ten years ago on the island of Mangareva. He went there to live after he sent back all the money he had taken from that gemstone company. He sent us a photograph once of his wife and three beautiful little dark-skinned children. He was dressed like an island native. Can you believe that?”
I stared at her in awe and felt years of sorrow wash away from me. “Yes,” I said. “I believe it.”
The old man was still staring. “Ben?” he said. “Ben … Crowell! My goodness, boy, you’re an old man!”
I laughed, and felt tears of gratitude filling my eyes, but I held them back.
“We had to leave, Ben,” Carol Anne said. “If they ever found out we helped Trevor escape … . Then there was the Kelso clan … . We had to leave.”
I nodded. “I know. I’ve missed you both, but I understand.”
Billy Treat flashed the biggest smile I had ever seen him wear. “I’m glad it’s you, Ben. I’m glad you’re here.”
I smiled back at them until I could no longer keep the tears from coming down my old weathered cheeks.
Carol Anne stroked a few tears away from her eyes as well. “We have to go now, Ben.”
I nodded and stepped away from the car. Billy put it in gear. He smiled at me and drove away. I didn’t wave as they left. I just watched until the Cadillac disappeared over the hill toward the ghost town of Port Caddo.
I stood in the road for a while, then walked down to the lake. My wife came to the back door of the house. “Who was that, Ben?” she shouted. I waved her off. She wouldn’t understand. Nobody would.
I took off my shoes and waded in, feeling for mussels with my toes. I had suffered bouts of nostalgia before, but never one like this. As I found the mussels, I opened them with my pocket knife and probed carefully at the unfortunate little animals. I heard the rumble of thunder again to the west, but did
n’t even look at the sky.
A couple of my cabin guests rowed out to the lake in one of my boats to do some fishing. “Going to bait a trotline, Ben?” one of them asked.
“Nope,” I replied. “I’m pearl-hunting.”
They laughed and floated over the stumps of cypress trees that had been cut down during the years of low water.
I had left my hat in the garden, and when the morning sun rose over the treetops, I felt it beating down on the bald spot on the back of my head, so I waded out. The summer of pearls was long ago.
About that time, my son, Ben, Jr., drove up in his Model T and dropped his three kids off at the gate. I was expecting them. Junior waved at me, and drove on.
The thunder spoke to me again—a long grumble. This time, I looked. The dark cloud had come closer, but was drifting north. It would not rain on me today. I should water the garden. A light-gray curtain of rain was slanting from the cloud, and the morning sun was striking it. A rainbow was beginning to form.
Just as I looked down for the garden hose on the ground, something white bulged from the side of the dark, drifting thunderhead. I glanced back up to the west and saw a chalky moon, almost perfectly round, peeking out from behind the cloud as it moved north. The moon was falling fast, nothing between it and the horizon but a rainbow. It would be gone in a minute.
“Hi, Pop,” Ben the Third yelled. He was seven, and his little sisters were five and four.
“Come here, kids!” I called, waving them toward the garden. They met me at the garden gate. “You kids remember me telling you about the summer of pearls?” I
“Yeah, all the time, Pop,” Ben the Third said. “You’re not gonna tell us again, are you?”
“No, but remember how I told you that someday I’d show you a pearl?”
The girls got more excited than their brother. “You found a pearl?” Vickie shrieked. “Where is it? Let me see!”
“Let me see!” Connie said, hopping like her older sister.