Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (52 page)

Nooj, from his fire tower aerie, spotted more and more opportunities to sow fear. He swooped down on the Shawe twins, set fire to the museum, and scared Stu, the cougar impostor, with the corpse at the mounds, all with maximum dramatic effect that served to heighten superstitious panic among the tribe. He attacked Holly and Nick at the forest cemeteries when they got too close to the truth of his Quinahoa lineage and the undying Chenerie grudge.

Big John, like Tommy Shawe, had made up his mind about casinos, too: he didn’t want one in his jurisdiction. No transparency, no accountability, too slippery, he confided to the two other men. He hadn’t even been able to catch up with the little fish named Val. According to her company, she’d stolen some money and was now missing without a trace; so was her boyfriend, Butch, who worked at the company’s riverboat property in New Orleans. Nick had nothing definite to offer on their fate, but in his imagination he saw a Luck o’ the Draw helicopter hovering low over the Gulf, dropping chunks of something into the water.

“Tommy, there’s a new space on your pedigree chart I need to fill in,” Nick said. “What did you and Brianne name the baby?”

“It was twins again! Girls, this time. We named one Carlotta Shawe, after my brother. And the other one Talinda, sort of after the Tadbulls.”

Nick turned to the burial mounds in front of the planted seed of the new tribal center. This was the meadow he and Holly had run across to escape Nooj Chenerie, the day he’d attacked them in the Katogoula
cemetery. Then it had been Tadbull land; now it belonged to the Katogoula again.

Big John and Tommy walked ahead to the latter’s new truck.

Nick lingered behind, breathing in the fresh breeze blowing from Lake Katogoula and Tchekalaya Forest and across the meadow and the burial mounds. He thought he heard an ancient song up there where the pine needles danced in the golden sunlight, the voices of Katogoula spirits assuring him that the good twin of the forest was at last ascendant.

For now
.

Nick strolled alone along the Golden Trace toward Tadbull Hall. He thought of early morning in the French Quarter, when a similar sparkling calm sometimes allowed the willing listener to hear the local gods who’d temporarily vanquished the cackling demons of the treacherous Quarter night.

The Golden Trace was a necklace strung with totems of the Katogoula past. One of these totems was Tadbull Hall. The trace ran right into the elliptical cart path in front of the house and picked up again on the other side. Nick stopped to read a newly erected marker explaining that the original Tadbull patriarch had deliberately interrupted the sacred trail with his front yard to demonstrate his power to the Katogoula.

Nick stepped onto the bright shell driveway and headed for the house. The tribe had finally broken free from this purgatorial loop the white world had imposed, to find its traditional path once again. The Tadbulls had received a painful lesson in the limits of earthly posturing.

As he reached the porch, he noticed two people on the driveway, making their way toward the bayou. Holly’s hair glowed in bronze glory,
even from a couple of hundred yards away. A thin man walked slowly beside her; he used a cane to do most of the work healthy legs should be doing. Nick could see that the man turned his head frequently toward Holly, as if she were the source of the only heat keeping his limbs from frozen immobility.

Holly waved animatedly at Nick, made the motions of shouting something at him, and then the two resumed their walking. “We’ll be there in a few minutes!” the words said, reaching him finally.

Nick waited for them.

Wooty seemed to have aged twenty years. He was gaunt and ashen. In his eyes, their size exaggerated by his body’s frailness, the vibrant cockiness had been replaced by the dazed, distant wariness of the man who’s awakened more than once to find death, like a beautiful succubus, jumping impatiently up and down on his chest. Wooty’s encounters with a surgeon’s scalpel had left scars the color of raw veal, beginning just below his now prominent Adam’s apple.

“This is our first day all the way around,” Holly said, her face and voice proud of their joint accomplishment. She guided Wooty up the steps, onto the porch, and into one of the big rockers.

Holly patiently helped the sick man when necessary, but didn’t pamper him. Wooty clearly appreciated not being treated like a child.

They would do well together for the rest of their lives, facing their problems with mutual dignity, and love, Nick was thinking.

Holly hugged Nick, pressing close with her body, her head turned outward against his shoulder. Today her hair smelled of nectarine. The deep, quavering breath she took and released told him better than words what hell she and Wooty had been through.

“They broke me open like a boiled crab,” Wooty said, attempting a little laugh that obviously hurt. “I wonder which parts of me they took
out, white or Katogoula? Nothing I can’t live without, anyway. Besides, I got a few good parts left.” He winked at Holly.

She sat on the arm of his rocker and held his hand. “At least they removed that defective get-rich-quick gland. We’re going to do honest work for our living, from now on, right? And no more of that illegal stuff. No more Senator Augustus Bayles, either.”

Wooty nodded capitulation in a war he no longer cared to fight, leaned his head back, and closed his eyes. Holly tucked a Katogoula quilted throw around him, from chest to knees, and he fell into instant open-mouthed slumber below the geometric tree-of-life pattern.

“As soon as he gets well,” Holly said softly, “we’re opening the mill again. And the tribe’s hired me as cultural director; they made me an honorary member, like you. Me, a Scottish lassie through and through, a Katogoula Indian! Best of all, I get to run the new museum. Bascove Tadbull’s paintings and drawings and photos will be the first things up on the walls.”

“How’s Mr. Tadbull?” Nick asked. “He had something of a breakdown?”

“Doctor says it’s depression that’ll probably pass eventually. Or maybe not. Doctors! Come on, I’ll show you,” she said, pulling him by his slightly sore right arm inside the house. “Smell that cooking? Miss Luevie’s in charge of the grub around here; it’s a regular Three Sisters Pantry. She tells Verla what to fix—much to her annoyance. They’re planning a major bash for Thanksgiving, out on the front lawn; the Katogoula don’t make a big negative thing out of it, like some tribes. I’ll make sure you get an invitation. Miss Luevie made me promise not to let you leave until you’ve had lunch. Don’t make a liar out of me.”

They walked to Mr. Tadbull’s den and stepped back into the dining room across the hall to observe the old man framed by the doorsill.

“His casino deal fell through, of course,” Holly whispered, “after he put all those people out of work and wasted all that money sprinkling payoffs around. The sad story of his affair with Luevenia came out. And then his son nearly gets killed. I think he did some soul-searching, and didn’t like what he found. Even his old buddy Representative Girn abandoned him.”

Girn was now a highly paid Washington lobbyist for a political action group pushing for congressional action and a giant class-action suit against all American Indian tribes for allegedly introducing tobacco to the colonists.

In his last real conversation with Holly, shortly after Wooty’s brush with death, Mr. Tadbull had told her he was a selfish old goat for keeping Wooty subservient and ignorant of his true origins. Though he hadn’t been responsible for Nooj’s mad acts, he felt that his son’s harrowing experience was a judgment from God, and a last chance to do something worthwhile. Mr. Tadbull had arranged for his son, when sufficiently recovered, to take over all family business, exercising complete, unquestioned control. As a final penance, he sold half of the family’s land and a half interest in the sawmill to the Katogoula Tribe for the grand sum of five Sacagawea dollar coins, a buffalo nickel, and an Indian-head penny.

Mr. Tadbull sat at the pearwood gaming table in his study; a lamp made from a miniature slot machine cast more shadow than light on the relics of the room. An inviting blaze crackled in the fireplace. Wristwatches were spread out like cards on the red baize in front of him. A cigar box to his left contained a heap of eviscerated timepieces.

“Oh, he eats and sleeps and all that,” Holly said. “He’s healthy physically. But this is what he does. After he signed everything over to Wooty, he just retreated into a shell. Miss Luevie sits with him a lot, since Royce runs the store now mostly. She buys those cheap watches
for him. He likes her to do his nails. That’s about the only thing that makes him smile. Just a little.” She walked to the door of the den. “Hi, Wooten. Nice day out there. Want to take a walk with me?”

He hunched over the watch he was working on, doubly intent on his meaningless task.

“Come on,” Holly said to Nick. “He’ll start crying in a minute. Have you ever seen an old man cry? I hate it when they do that.”

Miss Luevie and Verla made sure Nick ate too much delicious lunch, both grousing about his scrawniness.

And later, Holly, reluctant to let him step on the gas and go back to New Orleans, stood beside his car at the driver’s-side window. She held his extended hand in both of hers at her warm, firm stomach, against her emerald cashmere sweater.

“You know,” she said, “Chief Claude had you only half figured out: you’re the Midwife-of-Tomorrow Man, too.”

The world of Sangfleuve Parish and Tadbull Hall fell away from his view, and he was a holy man a thousand years in the past or in the future—he couldn’t tell; and his hand on this goddess’s belly was a blessing of life for the Katogoula Tribe, and mankind, forever.

The next second he was back. His eyes misted and he had to swallow hard a few times before he could say, “Thanks.”

“I called one of my anthropology professors at LSU,” said Holly. “About the phrase in Nooj’s notebooks:
BAH-UA CU-BISH-NAW-A
. She was pretty excited. Only a handful of Quinahoa words have survived. It’s more like Caddo than anything else. She translated it as ‘war blood.’ The Quinahoa might have been one of those tribes that drank their defeated enemy’s blood or”—she made a disgusted face—“ate them. We’re going to make the Chenerie notebooks available to the public. I’m sure Nooj and his Quinahoa ancestors didn’t realize their death lists would help future genealogists trace their enemy’s ancestry.”

She told him of another project: assembling a list of Quinahoa and Yaknelousa names from the memories of living Katogoula and from written sources.

“Just think,” Holly said, “if enough Quinahoa and Yaknelousa descendants turn up, maybe they’ll want to start their own tribes? And I know the perfect genealogist for the job.”

“Oh, no, not me,” Nick said, jamming the MG into reverse. “I’ve had enough Indian genealogy for a while. I’m taking some time off.”

“Actually, I meant Hawty. We had a video chat this morning. She’s raring to go. We’ll be glad to offer all the help she can use. The old hatchet’s finally buried now—”

“You mean the old atlatl?”

“We plan to display Tommy’s atlatl in an honored place at the museum. Now it’s part of our common history—Katogoula, Yaknelousa, and Quinahoa—just like the war. We would welcome the Quinahoa into our tribe, but we’d also understand their desire for their own identity. After what we’ve been through, though, I can’t say I recommend it. . . . Hawty’s a good gal, Nick. Don’t let her get away from you.”

Yeah
, he said to himself, braking and looking back at Tadbull Hall in the afternoon sun.
A talent of mine
.