by Jimmy Fox
“Oh, remember that non-Indian spouses were usually not listed in Indian census rolls,” he reminded her.
“Is that all? That shouldn’t take more than a year. What if this stuff isn’t available online?”
“I doubt much of it is, even though you’re constantly telling me how indispensable those damn computers are. Get the Plutarch to rush-order the microfilms they don’t already have. In this business, Hawty, dear, there are still times when you have to use your brain instead of your computer.”
She gave Nick a good-humored harrumph of mock indignation, and then said, “Oh, yeah, your lady friend. She’s called something like five times. That’s when I stopped counting.”
Nick rocked back in his wobbly chair and began to peruse a large glossily illustrated coffee-table book on Natchez that had just arrived from a publisher.
Hawty rolled her chariot up to his desk. “Well? You going to call her?”
“Nah. Got a date with her in a few hours. Besides, I want to surprise her. We’re going to Natchez. I want to introduce her to somebody.” He chuckled, but didn’t tell Hawty why. Some body. “Mind the store for a couple of days, will you? And make reservations at Hotel Portager for tomorrow night.”
“Two rooms?…Oh, never mind; of course it’s one. Sorry I even asked. Awwwwwww!…” Speechless in disgust, she held a hand in front of her face, as if warding off some malignant spirit. All she could manage as she yanked her chair around and wheeled toward her room was, “Men! All the same. They never buy the cow as long as they can get the milk for free.”
23
Bright and early the following day, Zola’s red turbo Volvo cruised effortlessly along I-10 and then ran like a deer through the twisting roads north of Baton Rouge. They searched for the famous plantations around St. Francisville, Audubon’s stomping grounds; they sought out a self-effacing but legendary filling station/diner in an isolated hamlet.
As they followed back roads hemmed in by fields of ten-foot-tall sugar cane, without warning they would come face to face with the monumental Mississippi River levee, looming over them like an ancient burial mound of a giant race.
“The river!” Nick exclaimed, slightly tipsy, sipping an after-lunch beer and pointing to the levee’s grassy hip. “It should remind us what a farce our petty dreams are. In our city, surrounded by human artifacts, we miss the elemental significance of the river. We’re lured into a false sense of mastery over the world, over ourselves. The river may be plain for all to see in New Orleans, but it’s become merely a prop for the tourism industry. There, there is the essence of history in tangible form! The river and history flow oblivious to our desires and efforts. Mortality, change, time, dimensions we only vaguely understand…the river can teach us. Ah, and the levee…signifying a huge green bank on the cosmic pool table that limits our elaborately planned but ultimately doomed trick shots…what are you laughing at?”
“The metaphysical ramblings of a drunk genealogist who thinks he’s Mark Twain and Thomas Wolfe combined.”
Laughing until tears came, Zola opened the sunroof and turned up the CD.
She drove aggressively, pumping the pedals and jamming the stick with an evident fondness for quick bursts of blazing acceleration. She didn’t dwell on the rear-view mirror any more than necessary for safety. The rest of her life was like that, too; Nick hated to change that about her. He banished unpleasant thoughts about the reason for their visit and watched Zola work, realizing for the first time how erotic a woman shifting gears could look.
Three heedless young girls, heartbreakingly innocent and lovely in Catholic school uniforms, stepped from a hidden road in the cane; Zola slowed from 50 mph to zero in an instant, and the girls continued on their way, holding hands as before. Nick murmured a thank-you to the Almighty Gizmo whose spirit lived in the braking system.
They made good time to Natchez.
After checking in to Hotel Portager, a gaudy relic of the Gilded Age, they made love joyfully in their big overpriced suite.
Later, languorous and thirsty, they spent the rest of the afternoon at the Next-door Bar, a small grungy place with good drinks and a great jukebox, which didn’t pretend to be anything else. Around dusk, they strolled over to the nearby Mississippi to watch the sun setting over flat, fertile Louisiana. Then, among the antique shops, tearooms, and vacant storefronts downtown, they found a hardware store just about to close.
“All right, now really, Nick,” Zola said. “What’s going on? What in the world are these for?”
They’d arrived at her car, which was parked on a steep street beside the hotel. He was maneuvering two shovels and a pickax into her trunk.
“Okay, I’ll tell you the truth. No more kidding around. I’m about to give you a crash course in genealogy. Not just any genealogy, but your own. We’re literally going to dig down to your ancestral roots. Real hands-on genealogical research. Tonight, my lovely, you’re going to meet Mulatta Belle.”
It was a strange dreamscape that welcomed Nick and Zola. The mounds and slopes and headstones of the expansive old graveyard were barely discernible in starlight.
Beneath Nick, the ground felt vaguely unsettled, as if the bodies themselves below the verdant carpet of grass were rolling toward the precipitous, ever-crumbling bluffs of the Mississippi, to fall in finally and be free of their remembrance of earthly life. Not the handholding type most of the time, tonight Nick was glad to share his clammy fear with Zola.
She thought this was all a joke, another of Nick’s wild adventures that flouted authority. “I bet you used this trick in high school, so the girls would snuggle up. Well, if that’s your ploy…” and she snuggled up, her head on his shoulder. “It’s working.”
Then he told her about Hyam Balazar, Jacob and Euphrozine, (her great-great-grandmother, he claimed), and the Mulatta Belle-Ivanhoe line; about the surviving Natchitoches Balzars, Shelvin, and others spread out across the country; about her mother’s original contention that knowledge of this hidden family history would be used by bigoted clients as a reason to drop Artemis Holdings; that the issue of their Jewish ancestry might negatively affect the Armigers’ social life in New Orleans’ stratified caste system; and finally, he told her about the injustice Jacob and Euphrozine began by dispossessing Ivanhoe and his half-brothers of color, an injustice she and her mother were perpetuating.
“You’ve asked me before to help you explore your family history,” Nick said. “This should jump-start your research.”
He wasn’t sure how she would take it all. He couldn’t see her face; she’d turned away.
Nick wanted to strike back at Armiger, stop her looting of the past, prove to her that he, too, could use knowledge as a weapon. If she didn’t already know of the drama of Ivanhoe and Jacob–and he suspected she didn’t–she would soon, through her own daughter. Zola would be his sling, and what he believed he was about to dig up would be his rock, against a modern-day Goliath in couture. It was a dangerous move, he well understood. Armiger had murdered Corban for attempting something similar.
Zola asked some skeptical questions, which Nick answered almost accurately; then she lapsed into a troubled silence again. Crickets chanted their fugal songs; frogs played staccato castanets; in the distance, a dog barked at his own echo; tugboats pushing barges discreetly piped below on the river.
She stared at him. “Are you telling me that I have Jewish and black ancestors?”
“You’re half right. Your direct ancestor Hyam Balazar was Jewish at one time, but Mulatta Belle and Ivanhoe Balzar were not lineal relations. So Jewish descent, yes; black descent, no.”
“Nick this is all…well, it’s incredible. I’m not sure I understand.”
“In genealogy, we call your temporary confusion the E.G.O. factor–for ‘eyes glazed over.’ It’s a complex measure of how long it takes for a person to lose track during the discussion of a complicated lineage. There’s a second part to it, the ego of the narrator: to what degree he notices that the victim’s interes
t is flagging. On a scale of one to ten, I’d say this case is an eight. But when you see it all written down, it’ll be clearer to you.”
She didn’t laugh at his self-lampooning explanation of genealogical enthusiasm; she hadn’t even been listening to his last few words. Her face had hardened into anger. “Incredible and insensitive. I mean, you just drop this bomb on me, with no warning, absolutely no consideration for my feelings. I…I resent it that you’ve played games with my emotions. You’ve kept this from me. Why? You’ve been using me, haven’t you?…I get it: you’ve been promised a cut from these people in Natchitoches. Let’s all sue Artemis Holdings for something that may or may not have happened over a century ago!” She sprang up and stood over him.
Her voice shook with emotion now. “I don’t know what my mother has to do with this, but I bet you’ve been using her, too!”
“Zola, calm down. This is your chance to do some good, to correct a wrong. Isn’t that the goal of Artemis Holdings? Isn’t that what you are all about?” His words had no effect on her.
“You lied to me, Nick. I should have seen what was happening. You’ve been so peculiar about helping me do genealogical research, you led me on with that story of a grant…I wonder if you lied about your feelings for me.”
“No, Zola, I didn’t.”
“I’m leaving. And I’m going to find out from Mother what’s really happening here, what both of you are up to. How can I ever trust you again? Find your own damn way back to the hotel!”
She stomped off toward her car. “Oh, in case you didn’t know, desecration of a grave is a crime!” she shouted before slamming the door.
He heard the tires clawing gravel and the engine screaming at the RPM redline. When the noise faded, the peace of the night filled the vacuum.
“You be sleeping on the couch tonight, for sure,” said a deep male voice.
“Ahhhhhhhhh!” Nick screamed in the soft river breeze, losing several heartbeats.
He turned his flashlight on a hulking figure that seemed to be an embossed wraith pressed out of the surface of the night, not two feet away: Shelvin.
“Oh, man…Shelvin,” Nick said, recovering some breath, the adrenaline still churning through his veins. “You, you almost killed me.”
“No. You’d a knowed it if I wanted to kill you. Learned how to night stalk like that in the Army.”
“Great. My tax dollars at work almost giving me cardiac arrest,” complained Nick.
“Look here,” said Shelvin, “how come every time you open your mouth, you sing a different tune about somebody else fucking-over my family? Only way to catch you tellin’ the truth is to sneak up on you. Tell you what I ought to do. I ought to beat the shit out of you, cracker, and then get me a good pit-bull lawyer to sue your white ass.”
“You were going to hear basically the same story I told her. It’s the truth.” Mostly. “Look, didn’t I get you to meet us here?” Nick asked him.
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
“Okay, then, cut the macho crap and listen–one of the new skills you’re going to need in this future we’re going to discover tonight. Down there lies your great-great-great-great grandmother.”
“You mean, what’s left of her.”
“Correct. I believe she’s been keeping something safe for you, something that will give back what is rightfully yours.”
They pointed their lights at the tombstone.
Belle Reyaud
b. 1812 Georgia
d. April 14, 1869 Natchez
His sweetest dreams were still of
that dear voice that soothed his infancy.–Southey
“I bet those lines were Ivanhoe’s touch,” Nick said. He was sure Ivanhoe would have become familiar in Hyam’s study with England’s popular poets. Seeing Shelvin’s confusion, he added, “Ivanhoe Balzar, your great-great…oh, anyway, your ancestor, okay, and this woman’s son. He bore the name of one of Sir Walter Scott’s most popular characters, and probably saw to it those lines of poetry were on the headstone.” He picked up a shovel and lobbed it into Shelvin’s quick grasp. “Let’s get started. This is going to take a while and I don’t plan to get caught by the sun–or some local cop, like the last time you and I met.”
“Hold on a minute,” Shelvin said. “You telling me you expect me to dig up a grave? No way, man. Not me. I don’t care if she is my great-great whatever.”
“Scared?” Nick asked, smiling, enjoying the irony of the big man’s sudden uneasiness. “You’re not worried about getting arrested, I know. I remember your performance with that deputy up in Natchitoches.”
Shelvin scratched his bare scalp as he made his decision. Then he attacked the ground as if he were digging a foxhole under fire.
Their tools bit through the thick mat of grass, making an awful ripping sound that made Nick think of limbs being pulled out of sockets in a schlocky horror movie. The rich, moldy black earth piled up around them, and soon there was room for only one person to work efficiently shoveling in the rectangular hole. The two of them alternated. Shelvin made much greater progress with his well-conditioned body, of course.
It was during his shift that they reached the right level. At first, as Nick shone a flashlight on the papery rotted wood, he had a second of panic. Had Ivanhoe buried his mother in a simple wooden box that was now decayed to such a degree that nothing was left inside?
No, there was something else there.
Shelvin used his hands to clear away debris. To Nick’s relief, he saw below the crumbling wood a zinc lining, which was a common burial practice in those days for prosperous families. Nick surmised that Hyam had left Mulatta Belle quite well off and that their son, Ivanhoe, did not skimp on his mother’s burial–for a reason besides love, he now hoped.
Pickax in hand, Nick carefully lowered himself into the crowded space, and when Shelvin worked free the several bolts with an evil-looking assault knife, Nick pried the lid off.
The corpse did not cackle and fly into the air. It was just the leathery, bony husk of life they saw. Nick’s momentary revulsion gave way to fascination.
Over time, insects had found ways into the coffin, and heat and moisture had done the rest. There were fragments of lace, the dust of an outline around the bones.
“That was probably her favorite dress,” Nick remarked.
Mulatta Belle’s mortal remains lay before them. Did her delicate skull smile in gratitude at Nick, or was it just the interplay of shadows? He wasn’t sure, but he was too exciting to care.
Below her gruesome arms and hands crossed on her chest was a lovely small velvet Bible, considerably damaged…and a sealed cylindrical glass jar, the kind barbers often use even today.
Nick held the jar up to his light. He’d guessed right: the family Bible and important documents were never far apart in the Balzar family. Inside the jar was a rolled-up piece of paper. He gingerly took it out and read to Shelvin the letter, in Hyam Balazar’s own firm hand, bequeathing to Ivanhoe Balzar, his son by Mulatta Belle, 1000 acres of Mitzvah Plantation; to Jeremiah Putnam, a slave, his freedom and 500 acres; and to Chapman Winn, 250 acres. The letter was dated May 16, 1859–two days before the making of the nuncupative will and Hyam’s assumed death date.
They had reburied Belle as best they could.
Shelvin drove Nick back to the hotel in his truck. Nick said that he would have a rare-documents specialist make certified copies of the letter. He would keep the original safe and send copies to the Balzars.
Shelvin hesitated but agreed.
Crusty with dirt and sweat, the two of them staggered into the lobby at three-thirty.
“Get that lawyer,” Nick said to him, in farewell.
The door to the bedroom in the hotel suite was closed. Nick crashed on the couch.
At dawn, without a word to him, Zola emerged from the bedroom and left, slamming the door.
Nick took a bus back to New Orleans.
24
A prearranged workshop gig–a paying one, of cou
rse–took Nick to a regional conference at a hotel in Memphis, where in a small, over-air-conditioned room, he expounded for a week on the genealogical treasures of New Orleans to shivering empty nesters, retirees, widows, and widowers. He also schmoozed with a few star speakers of the genealogy conference circuit, hoping to become one, and literally bumped into Gwen at a booth selling books of interest to Louisiana researchers.
Gwen tearfully confided that since her precious work had mysteriously gone up in flames in Natchitoches, she hadn’t been the same. As she swallowed a handful of antidepressants with a gulp of diet soda, Nick, in a sudden attack of remorse, begged her to let him to do what he could to help reconstruct the material that–still unknown to her, thank God!–he’d incinerated.
On his way back to New Orleans, Nick hit as many county courthouses in Mississippi as he could for a new client’s project, until his car broke down in Hattiesburg. He tried to handle the exorbitant repair bill with Natalie Armiger’s credit card. What’s she going to do, fire me? I should be so lucky! But the card had been canceled. Bad omen. He wrote a check that possibly wouldn’t bounce.
At last, he headed home, having done a lot of thinking.
The Armigers’ premier downtown property was the city’s tenth tallest building. It stood sentinel over the river at the foot of Canal.
“So, this is the famous Artemis Holdings?” Nick said to Zola’s beautiful visage on a color monitor behind the security desk in the lobby.
She’d called him that morning, three weeks after their trip to Natchez, summoning him to her office. It was a sparkling fall day, the first truly temperate one of the season. He’d walked here from his apartment, his steps unconsciously quickened by his repeated, mumbled rehearsal of what he wanted to say to her.
