by Jimmy Fox
Nick walked through a century and more of Tadbull clothing, furniture, appliances, toys, photographs, and books. Shelves from floor to ceiling were jammed with many everyday things that, in their contexts, probably were ignored. Separated from their times and uses, even the smallest personal article had an elegiac air, an allegory of impermanence to impart to the attentive explorer.
He let his hand run across other objects once held or kissed or cried upon by Tadbulls long since moldered to dust. True, he learned essential genealogical facts from the written record, but a shared touch, even separated by many decades, filled him at once with awe, reverence, and a rising rage. For contemplating mortality, knowing that in a blink of geologic time the human race itself would be gone, was enough to knock out the underpinnings of the most determined agnostic or believer alike, and send him off naked into the storm, shaking fists at the sky like a King Lear who has seen the futility of the bubble we call living.
Forty-five minutes later he’d moved through the second closet, and had rummaged around in six large cupboards concealed behind panels of the attic walls. There was so much here to sift through, and with only one arm in good shape! His uninjured arm and shoulder already ached from overuse.
He pressed on to the third closet, where he sat down on a trunk, his penchant for metaphor working at full tilt. The genealogist’s classic dilemma: an astounding mass of raw material, the handicaps of time and stamina, the certainty that an incredible treasure of information hid among the commonplace, just out of sight.
He noticed a tall chest in a cluttered corner. Twenty or so drawers, wide and shallow, seemed ideal for holding documents or papers of some sort.
He cleared away three table lamps, a tuba, five odd stringed instruments from various continents, two heavy standing fans, and four boxes straining with smaller junk.
The drawers held dozens and dozens of preliminary sketches and more fully developed partial works done by Grandfather Bascove Tadbull, most of them studies of Katogoula Indians and how they lived during his artistically prolific years.
Tommy Shawe and the present-day Katogoula were going to get their money’s worth for the hundred thousand-dollar loan! Bascove Tadbull’s collection would be highly desirable to any large museum or private collector.
The artist had also written descriptions of his subjects, sometimes just a name and date, at other times paragraphs explaining what he had drawn or painted. As he examined the loose canvases and sheets, Nick took detailed notes.
He came to a sheet with charcoal sketches of a remarkable pair of hands, in various poses. The fingernails were unusually long. On the back of the sheet, Grandfather Tadbull had written:
The hands of the Katogoula woman, Birdie [ ]x, sometimes called Gray Wing. She is a healer with plants and potions, of that I can attest. Many believe she talks with spirits. I think she has a streak of madness in her.
Jan. 10-12, 1893.
Birdie what?! A roach had chosen this crucial spot to die upon, years before; a brown stain obscured the surname. He brushed away gossamer bits of legs and wings, and held the sheet up to the light bulb. No good. A short name, ending in x, but he couldn’t quite make it out. Who among the living Katogoula was related to Birdie, if anyone was at all?
The surname felt familiar; but he couldn’t quite visualize the other frazzled rope end that might form a knot of family connection. That would have to wait until he could review his research notes, most of which were in his car downstairs or with Hawty, who, as a healer in her own right, was exercising her collating touch on them.
The name Gray Wing did strike a familiar chord, though. From his pocket he removed the Bible he’d pinched earlier. Yes! The dedication, in what he thought must be Cajun French. He found that he could tease probable meaning from it:
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.
Birdie-Gray Wing at some point had given this little Bible to her great-granddaughter, Little Wing. If his translation was correct, Nick realized that the dedication was a major find, outlining a lineage extending back at least to the eighteenth century. But whose? In a somewhat confusing way, Birdie had recorded that she was the great-granddaughter of Long Black Feather, a big man in his day. Nick had run across this name in the journal of the French clerk, who had written at some length about the Vulture Cult.
Nick’s chance discoveries today in the attic had connected several sources of genealogical information and had provided a tantalizing link between the living tribe and the ancient mysteries of the Vulture Cult. Descendants of Birdie would be fascinated to discover their Vulture Cult heritage. Or would they?
More questions rushed into his mind as he replaced sheets in drawers and moved on to others.
If this obviously beloved Bible had belonged to Birdie, whose hands Grandfather Tadbull had portrayed in his sketches, why was it here? And who was Little Wing, the woman’s great-granddaughter? Was she still alive? Did she know she sprang from the Vulture Cult line? And if, as Grandfather Tadbull hinted, the old woman Gray Wing was a little crazy, could Nick even trust the genealogical information she’d apparently inscribed in this book with her own bizarre hands? Corroborating evidence gleaned from other sources would be vital.
He found nothing of great relevance in the next four drawers. But in the last drawer of the chest he came across a series of details for the watercolor Mr. Tadbull had shown him earlier in the day. Fisherman wading in Bayou Fostine.
The artist had rapidly caught the action as it happened: the bend of an arm, the tilt of a hat, a face in profile, the paralyzing fishing powder on the water’s surface. . . . Grandfather Tadbull must have used these studies to give his painting life, later, here, in the tranquility of his attic studio.
One sketch showed the face of a man in three-quarters aspect. The resemblance was unmistakable, astonishing: it was as if Nooj Chenerie were there in the water on that day. This had to be one of Nooj’s relatives, Nick thought, maybe a direct ancestor. On the back of the sketch he read the artist’s notes, which had served as the basis for his briefer, now-crumbling description on the framed painting hanging on the attic wall:
Vince Madeul, grandnephew of old Luke Chenerie. On the Bayou Fostine. Their clan here uses a method of fishing very old among the Katogoula. They take the poison dust, which is from devil’s shoestring (the forest herb Tephrosia virginiana), and scatter it upon the waters. Their clothing protects them. Many fish come up to the surface, not dead, but drunk. The damnedest way to fish I ever did see. Not much sport, but good eating. The men laugh and joke, happy to be in the water, because it was exceedingly hot this August 23rd, 1912.
“You’re doing me a favor by scrounging up this money—a big favor,” Wooty said, on the porch of the house. “So I guess I ought to do something for you.” He looked at Holly, who clung to his arm as if she would never let go again.
“He’s our friend,” she said. “Tell him, Wooty. He may see something in it we don’t.”
Wooty nodded. “Just to set things straight, I wouldn’t do anything to hurt the Katogoula. You can take me out of the line-up. But I . . . but I was out there in the woods the night Carl was murdered.”
“You haven’t mentioned this to Sheriff Higbee?”
“Hell, no! I was out running marijuana. You know that already, of course. Not something you’d confide to the cops, is it?”
“What exactly did you witness that might interest me?” Nick asked.
“Early that morning—it was still dark—I saw what looked like a big buck. One of the biggest racks I’ve ever seen around here, and I’ve been hunting all my life, since I could walk, just about.”
“I go to the Audubon Zoo now and then, but I’m a genealogist, not a zoologist. What was so important about this deer?”
“It wasn’t the deer s
o much as what was following it. At least, what I think was: a cougar. The moon was just going down, so I couldn’t see a lot of details. Like looking at something under a black light, you know? So the cougar was stalking this deer, okay, but then it stopped, looked right at me. I was a good distance away but I’m sure it saw me. And then a weird thing happened. It rose up a few feet off the ground and”—he glanced down at Holly for reinforcement; irritated at his hesitation she yanked his arm—“well, floated real fast into the woods.” Wooty illustrated the cougar’s trajectory with his hands. “I know it sounds crazy.”
“Were you alone?” Nick asked.
“No—well, yes.”
“I’ll take that as a maybe,” Nick said.
Nick wasn’t going to get the whole story, but Wooty’s testimony might be useful later, combined with other data. In genealogy this research method was called a cluster search: pay attention to everything, no matter how seemingly irrelevant at the moment, no matter how little faith you put in the source.
“Look,” Wooty said, “that’s all I can say about my situation that night. But I did tell Nooj about the cougar the next day. We have sort of an understanding. He looked rattled when I mentioned the cougar, like he’d seen a—”
“Ghost?” Nick asked. Ah, an “understanding”. . . so Nooj is on the take, despite his sanctimonious airs.
“Yeah, a ghost. He told me about Carl’s murder and the claw marks on the cypress knees. That really perked up my ears, made me wonder about that old myth of theirs, the Sacred Cougar carrying the dead deer, walking on the lake.”
“So this understanding between you and Nooj . . . would he have known that you were in the forest about the time Carl was killed?” Nick asked.
“He knows everything going on out there. Hell, he might have been tracking that damn cougar himself,” Wooty said in an offhand way; but his speckled blue eyes grew thoughtful. “Anyway, cougars are so rare around here, I thought he’d want to know for, you know, official game-tracking reasons.”
Now that’s odd, Nick was thinking. Nooj Chenerie might have known that Wooty, a possible witness or suspect, was in the forest that fatal night and morning transshipping marijuana, and yet he didn’t report it. And even if Nooj hadn’t been aware of Wooty’s activities that night, Wooty most definitely told him the next day. That was vital information the sheriff should have received, especially from a sworn law-enforcement officer, something that might have made Tommy Shawe’s questioning less of an ordeal. Maybe the “understanding” made doing his duty a bit of a dilemma.
“Was it a real cougar?” Holly asked. “I’m not getting a consensus here.”
“Nooj must not have thought so,” Nick said. “Word spread like wildfire that the Sacred Cougar was on the prowl when Carl was murdered. The news and the supernatural spin must have come from him.” To Wooty: “He was the only one you told?”
Wooty nodded. “I knew I could trust him to keep my name out it. And he did. He said some campers saw . . . whatever it was.”
“The whole tribe’s been terrified since,” Holly said. “That sighting set a dark tone for everything else that’s happened. I don’t think any of the Katogoula have been thinking straight from that moment on.”
Wooty gave a world-weary chortle. “I had my doubts that night about it being a real one, too. Foolish, I know, for a grown man, but I was thinking, did the Sacred Cougar give me a message I was supposed to carry back to the tribe? That’s the talk about what happened to the Shawe twins. Guess I didn’t do a very good job of it.” A shadow had crept into his usual self-confidence. “I tell you, for those few minutes, this country white boy believed, really believed.”
As Nick drove away from Tadbull Hall, Holly and Wooty held hands and walked slowly down the long white-shell drive toward the landing on Bayou Fostine.
Through dusk and into night, on the long trip to New Orleans, Holly’s question repeated itself: Was it a real cougar? Long-nailed hands crisscrossed like a curtain just beyond the MG’s windshield, and with each pass Nick saw above the highway reflectors the faces of Luevenia Silsby, Nooj Chenerie, other Katogoula present and past, the Tadbulls of many generations, lovely Holly, and the Sacred Cougar, merging into ever-new forms.
CHAPTER 27
Hawty Latimer read aloud from the screen of her wafer-thin tablet computer, no more than a beveled rectangle of glass, for all Nick could tell: “American State Papers, Hill index of the Cuban Papers, Santo Domingo Papers, Fondos Floridas, Draper Manuscript Collection, Mississippi Provincial Archives, Vaudreuil Papers, Father Hebert’s Catholic records, University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Center for Louisiana Studies—”
“The Panton, Leslie Papers?” Nick asked, leaning back in his unsteady banker’s chair on the other side of his 1920s corporate titan’s kneehole desk. A delivery truck rumbled down the little-traveled street below; heaps of folders, papers, and books rearranged themselves in small avalanches.
“Yes, yes, hold your horses,” Hawty said, eyeing Nick’s disorderly desktop with disdain. “I was getting to that and a lot more, too.”
She made rapid hand motions in front of the glass pane that stood upright, without any apparent support, on the retractable work shelf of her chariot. He would have been jealous that she’d taken a moonlighting job as a sign language interpreter, except that he knew this was how she controlled the strange futuristic device.
He was silently pleased. She’d done an excellent job of plugging most of the holes in the genealogies of the six core Katogoula families. Which meant that he’d done an excellent job of instructing her in the past few years. True, he’d lost some minor scholarly perquisites at Freret U as a result of the bogus plagiarism rap, but no one could steal his gift for teaching.
He’d taught Hawty that local research, as crucial as it was, had its limitations; records might have been damaged, destroyed, stolen, or falsified. But other important genealogical information might very well be scattered across the country and the world; sometimes the most distant source held the most objective facts.
Like the French clerk’s journal, these better-known but often-ignored sources Hawty had searched were gold mines for Southeastern Indian genealogical information—official reports of alliances, conflicts, trade agreements, grievances, land transfers, mixed-blood unions . . . compiled by soldiers, bureaucrats, and merchants who’d spent time among Indians still living, by and large, according to their ancient ways. And usually, somewhere along the way to modern times, patient volunteers had run their fingers along each line, indexing names and places and subjects.
“Oh, another thing,” Hawty said, “you were right: the priest at the Katogoula’s church was terrific. Loves to talk about the church’s extant sacramental records. He’s a young guy from Belgium, interested in his own genealogy, wants to hire us to . . . what are you staring at? My hair?”
“Your hair’s . . . fine.” He noticed it now for the first time this Wednesday morning: a mass of jet-black, shining streamers. “Actually, I’m staring at him,” Nick said, pointing to the bust of Descartes presiding over jam-packed, dark-wood bookshelves in the narrow room he called his office. “Our patron philosopher of Genealogical Doubt.”
Boxes of orphaned records he’d rescued from destruction slumped against one another across from the bookshelves, on the other long wall below tall windows, few of which actually functioned. Paint peeled, pipes clanked and leaked, and the wiring dated from Prohibition years.
This was the Central Business District, where nineteenth-century Americans practiced their brash capitalism to the jeers of the Creoles across Canal Street. “The past is dead, things are going to change. It’s a new era!” successive generations of go-getters had declared here, with architectural hubris. Such naive aspirations inevitably die young in New Orleans. In the corrupting heat of the next rising sun, every gaudy bloom turns brown.
Nick’s frowzy, unassertive building squatted in the shadows of downtown’s few incongruous pre-oil-bust skyscrapers, seek
ing companionship among other battle-scarred veterans of futile local enterprise and periodic disaster: abandoned cotton and sugar and coffee warehouses, boarded-up Reconstruction banks, hotels that had morphed into shelters, Katrina-ravaged properties of bankrupts or the non-politically connected. The only truly thriving entities were the bloated government buildings hunkered down in civil-service arrogance behind black wrought-iron fences, security cameras, and phalanxes of guards.
Untold billions had come rushing into New Orleans since the big hurricane of 2005. For a long time afterward the populace was in shock, those who hadn’t abandoned the city for good; but the clandestine power players, in classic Louisiana style, always remained high and dry and ever ready to seize the main chance. Only a fraction of what was legislated actually leaked out of the pockets of insiders. But Nick had to admit, the city looked good with her hair and nails done nice and a pretty new dress on.
The fourth-floor view from Nick’s windows took in the wide Mississippi giving a fatherly elbow nudge to the French Quarter, soul of the Crescent City, a wayward daughter too drunk on pleasure, anarchy, and ennui to rise above her eighteenth-century dreams of grandeur or to heed any lessons the wise old river would impart. Looming over the levee and the Quarter, massive ships glided on the river’s surface like giant snails, threading through stout tugs and low-riding barges, all coming perilously close to the sightseeing boats and casino paddle-wheelers and the hundreds of shops, restaurants, and bars nearby that, twenty-four hours a day, urged tourists to forget everything but their stomachs and crotches.
Hawty’s domain was an anteroom that she’d meticulously arranged for maximum efficiency and wheelchair mobility, but Nick’s personal collection of documents, while not on the priceless level of the Karpeles or Huntington libraries, was off-limits to Hawty’s mania for order. She claimed that his mind was stuffed with similarly useless junk, fragmented bytes that would never add up to anything of genealogical value.