Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery

by Jimmy Fox

  “I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Herald. Hardly anything original before 1863. The Red Book and The Handybook are right,” Roberta said, enthroned at her rigorously ordered desk in her office. A large plate-glass window let her keep tabs on her office staff of three women, who worked in a high-ceilinged room at old oak desks among file cabinets of many sizes, copiers, ever-warbling phones, computers, and massive ledger books. “But we offer an up-to-the-minute computer index of what we do have from the earliest surviving records to today. We run across lost file packets all the time, families bring old documents in for recording, and we’ve been able to reconstruct some destroyed records based on later property transfers, probate proceedings, civil suits, notarial and attorney papers, and the like. . . . And since you’re interested in Indian genealogy, I ought to tell you—though I’m not supposed to—we have special access to the Legajos de Luisiana.”

  Surely she’d made a mistake. Could this be true? “Excuse me, Roberta, did you say the Legajos de Luisiana?” He struggled to hide his elation.

  The Legajos de Luisiana, those wonderful, voluminous records of Spain’s administration of the territory later known as Louisiana. Part of a larger group of archives known as the Fondos de las Floridas (which in turn were part of the famous Papeles Procedentes de Cuba), the Legajos remained in Cuba after Spain had relinquished its North American colonies. Microfilm of the Legajos—a complete set would run to nearly thirty reels—wasn’t publicly available as yet, to Nick’s knowledge. It had only recently been microfilmed in Cuba, after centuries of obscurity, by the Historic New Orleans Collection. Microfilm sets were expected to cost upwards of twenty thousand dollars. He was still trying to get at THNOC’s Legajos in New Orleans—not that he wasn’t fond of Veronique anyway.

  “I keep up with what’s happening in genealogy, in addition to archival and preservation issues,” Roberta said proudly. “At conferences and what not. You might say I’m sort of a genealogical nut myself. I have some Spanish blood, and I wanted to see what my kin was up to in those days.” She leaned forward. “We clerks of court have our little mad-money funds. And then some overdue federal money came our way. Not being one to look a gift-horse in the mouth, and since my department is so routinely efficient, I purchased some state-of-the-art digitizing equipment. In five years, every record in this courthouse will be accessible by computer! The police jury is even talking about making us a regional digitizing center for courthouses around the South.”

  She went on to say that shortly after receiving the windfall, she met a THNOC scholar at an archival conference. They struck a deal whereby Roberta’s office would digitize the Legajos with her new system, in exchange for a digital copy of the rare records and the right to make the material available for on-location use only.

  “The State Archives doesn’t even have a microfilm set yet. I’m thinking we could put little Armageddon on the map with genealogy buffs. I can just see it now: RVs parked all around the courthouse, affluent retirees researching roots going back to the Spanish period of this area. Eating at our diners, shopping at our stores, some deciding to even settle here. . . . Of course, it won’t hold a candle to the Katogoula casino.”

  “You’ve heard about the tribe’s idea, then?” Nick asked.

  “Oh, everybody knows about that. Especially here in the courthouse. People talk.”

  Roberta then regaled Nick in painstaking detail about the process of transferring records from microfilm to digital form. She rattled on about diazo and silver-halide film, JPEGs and TIFFs, 8-bit grayscale capture, 4-bit GIF previews, lossless compression, encoded text, gigabytes, and metadata.

  At last, Roberta handed Nick the sumptuously produced descriptive brochure; THNOC always flew first-class. This would prove invaluable as he trudged through the vast uncharted wilderness of the Legajos.

  “We have a long way to go before we’re finished, so you can’t do a complete computer search. Cuban ladies supposedly compiled this guide by hand over many years; they paid particular attention to surnames. Better employment than rolling cigars, don’t you think? THNOC provides lots of English to help you along.”

  In Nick’s mind a weird vignette blocked out the present surroundings. Sun-baked elderly Cuban women, smoking cigars and wearing the short pleated skirts and sleeveless lettered tops of the adorable high-school cheerleaders he’d worshipped from afar, pumped out, with preternatural litheness, the silly ditty “Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar, all for the Legajos, stand up and . . .”

  “Go Legajos!” Nick erupted with inappropriate volume. “Well—ahem—this is quite a welcome surprise.”

  Obviously the lingering effect of too much Gewürztraminer.

  Giving him a worried look, Roberta said, “We’ve already digitized the rolls that deal with west Louisiana.” She handed him a stack of six jewel CD cases. “There’s a computer out there in the reading area. I’m sure, being a professional genealogist, you know your way around a PC?” Nick responded with a lying but enthusiastic nod. “Remember our index of holdings; you’ll find a link on the start page. Look it over and tell us what strikes your fancy and someone will go fetch it for you if it’s not digitally available. . . . I’m sure this won’t be your last visit with us, Mr. Herald, but at some point, would you fill out this questionnaire? We give it to all family researchers, so we can see how to improve our service. I’ll let you be, now.”

  In New Orleans, Nick had already mined the available microfilm of Sangfleuve Parish records of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There was, as he expected, a lot of crucial information here at the courthouse that he didn’t have. Roberta put her staff to work photocopying what he specified. She was not shy about asking for a healthy contribution to the mad-money fund. Nick cheerfully complied.

  He found his way to an appropriately dim corner hemmed in by tall shelves loaded with ledgers and boxes of packets of loose documents; here two old microfilm readers that looked like used launderette equipment seemed to accuse him of disloyalty. As he expected, the machines seemed to be in excellent working order; these old behemoths were nearly indestructible. The public computer was nearby. He turned the chair and the monitor so that his back was to the venerable readers.

  The waiting list of researchers in New Orleans for the Legajos de Luisiana was almost as long as Canal Street; he’d been dying to take a peek at the immensely important records. Beyond slaking his usual curiosity, he expected to find some mention of the Katogoula—and maybe, just maybe, a long-forgotten fact of tribal history pointing to identity or motive in the murder of Carl Shawe. Yes, it was a fishing expedition; but he had learned to trust his instincts.

  What would future genealogists think of the computer-generated dross that passed for public records today? he wondered. The artistry and romance of the world’s archives, the continuity with the past through an idiosyncratic flesh-and-blood hand and mind—was all of that doomed to perish in the pure digital flame of the Almighty Gizmo? And here he was, participating in the betrayal of a great and worthy tradition.

  Trying his best to appear as if he knew what he was doing, in case anyone was watching, he fumbled with the computer surreptitiously until he found where to insert the discs. Twenty minutes and many warnings and help-dialog boxes later, he was cruising blithely through screen after screen of page-preview GIFs and capsule explanations. He felt fairly cocky.

  Nick’s Spanish was worse than his French, which was far from perfect; the Legajos made use of both. For a while it was like hearing opera without the benefit of seeing the actors on the stage or of having a subtitle box. But he began to pick up clues to meaning in the placement of words and phrases, in the formulaic structures of introduction, elaboration, and conclusion. Soon, he thought he understood the quills’ flourishes and curves that were more like the courtly, mysterious realism of Velázquez than the dry proceedings of territorial administration.

  Suddenly, a hot-cold zing ran up and down his spine and across his shoulders—his mind’s unerri
ng signal that he’d discovered something extremely important. It was this:

  The Spanish had done business with a Kentucky Indian trader. This man’s name was not mentioned in the written records; secrecy concerns, no doubt. The trader had sworn allegiance to the Spanish government in 1791. From then on the Spanish used him to spy on Americans and Indians throughout the upper Gulf of Mexico area. Nick suspected the man might have been a member of General James Wilkinson’s entourage.

  Wilkinson was a huge enigma of American history. A veteran of the American Revolution, he engaged in Louisiana intrigues in the late eighteenth century and on into the American period. He apparently played on Spain’s fears of America’s growing power and on her own ambition to grab America’s western-most lands east of the Mississippi. Conflicting historical accounts variously portray him as a patriot brilliantly serving his country as a double agent, as a triple agent conspiring with the enemies of the young, vulnerable United States, as a self- serving conspirator deeply involved in, among other things, Aaron Burr’s secessionist plot and then in his treason trial, and above all as a crafty operator who always seemed to come out smelling like a rose.

  The nameless trader, cut from Wilkinsonian cloth, dutifully reported on the shifting alliances of the tribes in their struggle to understand, befriend, or outmaneuver the Europeans and the Americans, who were interested primarily in military, territorial, and mercantile exploits. He also interspersed his reports with observations that should have put him among the ranks of the great anthropologists of his day.

  The trader had heard stories of a long-ago war between the Katogoula and the Quinahoa. His account of it showed neither tribe in a favorable light. Both had been guilty of dirty tricks, but the Katogoula perpetrated the treachery that ultimately proved victorious.

  After many years of warfare, the Katogoula, through the supposedly neutral Yaknelousa, offered to parley at an intertribal feast. Both sides were to deposit arms outside the Katogoula central village. Then talks could begin. But as the visiting Quinahoa slept that first night, a Katogoula band hidden in the woods crept into the village and slaughtered many of the defenseless enemy warriors. The war broke out anew with unprecedented ferocity. The Quinahoa avenged themselves first on the weaker Yaknelousa, before finally falling to utter defeat at the hands of the Katogoula.

  The Kentucky trader had seen captive Quinahoa survivors, who, though they were very old by the time of his report, were still kept in abject conditions forty years after the event. Even the children of forbidden, but inevitable, pairings between conquerors and conquered were treated little better than dogs.

  The year of the trader’s Legajos account was 1795. If his chronology was correct, the war had been fought in the mid 1750s, before Spanish rule of the area known today as Louisiana. Granted, this account was anecdotal, secondary evidence, falling short of genealogical conclusiveness. But Nick had pushed the timeline slightly further back than Hawty’s date of 1759, with her allegedly authentic journal of the clerk on Mézières’s diplomatic mission. Still, the clerk and his tribal witnesses were closer in time and experience to the war, a fact which should entitle their account to more credibility according to the standards of genealogical proof.

  And then Nick clicked to a page listing names of Katogoula and Yaknelousa warriors, and names of a handful of captive Quinahoa.

  “Ha!” he exclaimed, jumping up from the wooden chair he’d occupied for two hours. The office women paused, glanced his way, and tittered to each other before getting back to work. They’d witnessed too many eureka moments, when genealogists strike pay dirt, to be surprised by Nick’s outburst.

  He’d found names, honest-to-God names unknown for two centuries, and which, in all likelihood, were recorded nowhere else—certainly not in the Cuban/THNOC guide Roberta had provided; he had not found them there. Names from tribes with no surviving written language. Names that could help reconstruct lines of descent to the present day, that could make a crucial difference for an applicant seeking admission into the reborn Katogoula tribe.

  Nick sat down again. Genealogists, professional and amateur, live for moments like this. But now was no time to savor his discovery. Every minute in a courthouse was a precious commodity, and public employees seldom shared the family historian’s wild-eyed determination to work nonstop until exhaustion—though he sensed that Roberta and her staff were different.

  The Kentucky trader of the Legajos had the soul of an objective historian. He put down what he saw, without editorial comment, apparently without concern for what the Spanish would make of his fact-filled reports. The names Nick read were Spanish interpretations of an American’s version of Indian-language names. What Indian language—Mobilian Jargon?—Nick did not know. And beyond that obvious problem of the accuracy of transmission, Nick wondered whether the Katogoula and Yaknelousa were identified by war names or other public monikers, which would make identification of the families difficult. Had the captive Quinahoa been stripped of their dignity and renamed in some humiliating way?

  In spite of the new questions in his mind, he was still grinning as he clicked the print command over and over again, hoping the pages he wanted would slither out of a machine somewhere in the office.

  Holly was the expert on Spanish and on local Indian languages and customs. An excellent excuse to see her again.

  Sheriff Higbee’s office was on the first floor. Nick needed to stretch his creaking joints.

  He entered the cold, damp stairwell from the second-floor landing. An incandescent bulb above the doorway seemed absurdly weak compared with the snow-glare of the fluorescents that blasted most of the clerk-of-court’s office. He blinked a few times, and the steps gradually emerged in his field of vision. He leaned a bit over the railing and looked up.

  This central part of the building was fifteen stories high, profligate with space in a way modern builders would avoid. The stairwell formed a large square shaft rising to a skylight letting in anemic illumination from the gray day outside. He could see the angled railing turning back on itself like an Escher print, but beyond each floor’s railing, nothing. Distant reverberations and the sound of his own breathing echoed off the sweating walls. The smell of cigarette smoke told him this was the refuge of fugitive puffers.

  Nick thought he could get used to the slow pace of small-town life. Roberta had informed him that the thirty-thousand person city could boast only about a hundred lawyers; several of those were judges and one was the sheriff. Not at all like New Orleans, where the legal horde made a genealogist’s life difficult by insisting that the affairs of the living take precedence over those of the dead.

  He descended the moist, slippery stairs, briefly holding on to the wooden railing, black and greasy now from decades of grime. Disgusted, he wiped his hands with a paper napkin he’d kept from breakfast. Pausing at an intermediate landing before a cylindrical trashcan, the top of which was filled with sand and studded with cigarette butts, he ditched the napkin and felt around in his pockets, fishing for odd bits of trash accumulated during his morning’s research.

  A door opened somewhere above him. Clang! It closed.

  From deep within his mind, a warning reached his consciousness. No footsteps.

  Instinctively he crouched and looked up. A blur of hands on the zigzag of railing, above him in the murky stairwell. Sand and cigarette butts rained on him, blasting his eyes with grit, filling his mouth with foul-tasting ash. He dropped his briefcase and brought his arms up to protect himself. His eyes stung, but he forced them open to mere slits. He had only a fraction of a second to jump back toward the wall, before a dark shape slammed into his right elbow and shoulder. The pain was immediate, sharp, deep. Something felt broken. He lost his balance.

  Nick rolled and bounced and ricocheted down the stairs. He imagined the courthouse—which earlier that day had reminded him of a B-movie spaceship—rocketing slowly, weightlessly, into the black void of the cosmos and being swallowed forever.

  CHAPTER 17r />
  Wooty Tadbull spooned thick, steaming, marsh-water brown oyster-crab-duck-and-sausage gumbo into his mouth. Delicious, up there with the best he’d ever eaten—and he considered himself an expert on the subject of Louisiana cuisine. There was an art to making this humble delicacy born of the verve Creoles and the resourcefulness of Cajuns and slaves. He tore off another hunk of a thin-crusted baguette of New Orleans French bread from the basket just beyond his bowl, feeling an emptiness the excellent food could not fill.

  The Katogoula, like the Cajuns and the slaves, had suffered a lot of tough luck. Even the closing of the mill didn’t break them. They had persevered and triumphed at last. Now he, supposedly their friend and defender, was screwing them. Again.

  He’d momentarily blocked out the fact that, across the elegantly set table, state senator Augustus Bayles sat staring impassively at his every move. He began to feel very self-conscious, and the gumbo didn’t go down as smoothly as before.

  Wooty wondered how much taxpayers’ money trickled into this neutral oasis within sight of the Capitol, either as legislators’ expenses or as a direct line item hidden deep within the unfathomable business of some committee. Hell, the Legislature wasn’t even meeting, and wouldn’t again until April. But Wooty knew that politics in Louisiana was a year-round job, thanks to a succession of special sessions and off-the-record meetings like the ones occurring all around him. For so many people to snipe, bite, kick, and scratch for office, it must be rewarding far above the measly salary legislators drew while enduring a few months of boring speeches.

  Not his problem. Laissez les bons temps rouler, “let the good times roll,” the saying goes in boom-and-bust, sin-and-repent Louisiana. He didn’t make things the way they were, but he damn sure wasn’t going to be left holding the bag. Every man a king, Huey Long had promised; Wooty wouldn’t mind being a mere prince. When in Rome . . .