by Jimmy Fox
“This is all sort of sudden. . . .” Wooty cleared his throat, shifted in his chair. “But yeah—hell yeah, I’d like to be on your team. Tell you what: I’ll leave the sausage making to you, and I’ll do my best to bring home the bacon.”
Senator Bayles spoke quietly in his overly cultivated voice about his far-flung enterprises, his grand battle plan for storming the heights of power. The Blue House had emptied of diners by the time he finished. Bayles never asked why Wooty was double-crossing his own father. He didn’t need to, Wooty figured. The young, sad eyes seemed possessed of a knowledge of human contradictions beyond their years. As a black man in Louisiana politics, Augustus Bayles surely understood suppressed ambition and the impatience of a son kept at arm’s length from wealth and power.
At last, the senator carefully folded his napkin the way he’d found it. The two men stood and shook hands, new friends with a common purpose.
Wooty felt he’d moved up the food chain one very important level.
CHAPTER 18
Saturday morning, Nick’s bruised right shoulder and sprained, possibly fractured, elbow hurt worse than they had the afternoon before, when an emergency-room doctor prodded and poked him and finally decided that he would live. His right arm was encased in a padded nylon tube affair, resting in a sling. The doctor had determined there was no concussion, but it was a close call. Holly occasionally cast glances of empathetic pain his way.
“If we have to move,” Irton Dusong was saying, “we’ll sure enough do it. I’d just as soon give up this place and be on our own reservation. We don’t even have a sprinkler system.”
“We sure could use a new facility,” Grace Dusong confirmed, “and a bigger operating budget. We could advertise. No one knows where we’re at. Hardly ever more than a dozen visitors on a weekend.”
The Katogoula Museum was a Spanish-style stucco building just within the boundaries of Tchekalaya State Forest. Nick, Holly, and the husband-and-wife caretakers stood in the brick courtyard.
Irton had apparently forgotten to comb his silver hair or shave for several days. Once a tall man, he now leaned forward at an unnatural angle, the result of an accident years before at Tadbull Mill. Grace, his wife, was a round woman with the stiff joints and gnarled hands of advanced rheumatoid arthritis. A cheery yellow floral bandeau secured her long charcoal-streaked ashen hair. They’d gained unwanted notoriety, and the animosity of certain other tribe members, by favoring at the last moment a tribal casino.
“I’m always patching something or other together, as ’tis,” Irton said, drawing out a screwdriver and pliers from his overalls chest pocket. “Maybe we’ll set us up some of them video poker machines in the new museum. That ought to help out the budget some!” He burst into laughter.
Nick, as he listened to the couple discussing the pros and cons of moving, unobtrusively probed the tender, throbbing bumps distributed randomly around his head.
A deputy had found him, half-conscious, at the bottom of the courthouse stairwell. The culprit had escaped, and Sheriff Higbee had no suspects. Nothing had been taken from Nick’s briefcase—a fact that didn’t surprise him: he was carrying easily replaceable copies of genealogical documents. Had his mysterious assailant, fearing future connections Nick might discover, tried to erase what was in his head, forever? Was this attack on him connected to Carl Shawe’s death, another warning, perhaps, intended to persuade the tribe to change directions? Or was the motive to hurt or kill him rooted in his own experience?
He felt lucky to be alive. More than once in the last eighteen hours he’d been tempted to throw in the towel and hightail it back to New Orleans, where at least the rampant street violence was nothing personal.
Grace Dusong was explaining that the small yearly allowance from the legislature was one of the few benefits of state tribal recognition. The museum dated from the 1950s, the end result of a controversy involving Katogoula relics that had been dug up during highway construction in the thirties.
Holly declined Grace’s offer of a guided tour.
“I’ve been here once or twice,” Holly said, smiling in a friendly, familiar way at the older woman’s solicitousness. “Well, maybe a hundred times. Let me show off a little. You could take this off my hands, though, Grace. Thanks.” She squirmed out of her backpack, which was stuffed with the picnic lunch she and Nick were to eat later, at a “special place,” Holly had promised.
She was a much better guide than Grace would have been, Nick was thinking, as he followed the beautiful red-haired woman. With great difficulty he managed to pay attention to her commentary on the dioramas and hangings and other dusty displays. What was it about her? . . . The delightfully sensual way her lips and tongue danced across her white teeth? Her expressive green eyes? The lovely curves below her supple jeans and snug sage pullover sweater?
Twelve hundred years ago, Holly was saying, the prehistoric Indians of the area made coiled clay pottery, hurled their spears with atlatls, used boiling stones in cooking, and kept dogs as pets. Only a few incomplete pots and isolated bones remained of this early period, and much of that evidence was enclosed in the cases before them. A replica of an atlatl caught Nick’s attention.
It was a foot-and-a-half-long sturdy stick, with one end curved slightly upward and notched to hold the feathered tail of a yard-long spear, the other end wrapped in hide as a grip. A sketch showed how it was used: as if pitching a fastball, the thrower catapulted the loaded atlatl at the prey or enemy, sending the spear—referred to as a dart by modern aficionados—flying with the velocity of a bullet; the atlatl remained in the hand, a good close-combat weapon. Depending on the tribe and time, spear tips might have featured fire-hardened, pointed ends, or stone chipped to incredible thinness and sharpness, or scavenged, shaped metal.
Indians of this archaic period didn’t venture far from the many lakes and rivers, and their shoreline villages were built on middens, communal dumps formed from clam and mussel shells and other refuse.
By 800, a cultural transformation had occurred. New knowledge came from the west, probably originating in Mexico. Farming and the sacred corn arrived, along with a new religion that emphasized elaborate burial rituals and mound building. Tobacco smoking, head flattening, extensive regional trading, and the building of fortified villages were other characteristics of the new order.
“The favored theory is that these prehistoric tribes vanished,” Holly said. “I don’t think so. Entire cultures don’t disappear, not without a trace, anyway. You know that from your genealogical studies.”
“True,” Nick said. “We all leave tracks in the mud of the past. In your lifetime, you’ll generate a trail of documentation seven miles long.”
“Really. That’s amazing . . . a little sad. Genealogists must love to hear that statistic.”
“If these nameless ancient tribes are still around, where are they? They ought to be clamoring for recognition and their own casino.”
“I don’t mean they’re here in a physical sense. They’re hidden below layers of genetic and cultural mixing. Oh, we aren’t going to have the kind of definitive written evidence you work with all the time. But elements of customs, languages, and myths survived. The fun part about studying the Katogoula is tracing one of those cultural strands back to its origin. Take a look at this.”
She led Nick to a modern mural of an ancient scene. Black-robed Indians ministered to a body that had been removed from a sort of scaffold. The attendants were frightening figures enveloped in smoke, nightmarish, unkempt, their long hair concealing their faces and even their gender. Their fingernails were extraordinarily long.
“Looks like something from Goya’s late paintings,” Nick said.
“The Vulture Cult.” Holly stared at the illustration with the rapt excitement of the true student of history. “They were sort of combination undertaker and estate lawyer. There were male and female divisions. Each gender took care of its own, even down to acting as what we’d call a probate officer today. They
let the body smoke for a few days, then they picked the flesh off with”—her face puckered in revulsion—“their long fingernails. Ewwwwww! A hereditary job. And they got a stipend, too.”
“Lawyers as vultures? Say it ain’t so!”
She laughed. “The tribe actually held them in great reverence, and it was an honor to marry into the cult families. At other times, they were unclean, outcasts. Couldn’t be around food or participate in war councils. They were also the preeminent artisans of the tribe; used their fingernails to do paintings, make pottery.”
With a more serious demeanor she continued: “There’s a theory that the Vulture Cult was born during the great epidemics after European contact, in the 16th century. Smallpox and other diseases killed maybe 90% of the Indians in the Americas. There’s a lot of debate about the indigenous population of the pre-Columbian New World. Estimates range from 40 to 100 million. If you’re a ‘low counter’ or a ‘high counter,’ either way tens of millions died. No immunological defense, virgin-soil epidemics. It was like the Black Death in Europe—much worse, actually, in percentage terms. Bubonic plague has a mortality rate of about 40%. The Vulture Cult might have started out as sort of like the plague doctors of medieval and Renaissance Europe.”
Nick said: “But the dying continued, the cause unknowable to them. And all the hoped-for cures and praying brought no relief. So they morphed into these ritualistic morticians.”
“That’s the scholarly thinking, yes,” Holly continued. “Their society needed them to play a new role: to handle the public-health and emotional threat posed by such mass mortality. Primitive peoples have a way of handling the contradictions of existence. For instance: water is life giving, but it can also drown you; the sun makes the corn grow, but it can also scorch; large predators are beautiful to watch, from a distance. Gods help out mortals, but they also trick them, kill them, cause disasters to come down on them. Everything has two sides, a healthy side and a deadly one. It was like that with the Vulture Cult.”
“Reminds me of the Jewish burial societies,” Nick said. “The body, as the former and future home of the soul, was entitled to great reverence. The parting ceremonies also helped the living, by getting the corpse away quickly. What happened to the Vulture Cult? Have you found any remnants, symbolic or behavioral?”
Holly shook her head. “Christianity and exposure to other Western ways did it in. There’s still some vague memory of the cult, as far as I can make out from a few of my interviews. I think it was active as late as the 1700s. What I find really interesting is where it came from. These elaborate burial practices weren’t originally Katogoula, from everything I know of their earlier history in Mississippi and Alabama. They picked this up during their wandering or from tribes already here. That’s what I was saying about a people disappearing. Tribal identities get buried, just like archaeological artifacts. But they’re never truly lost.”
“Until we stop looking for them,” Nick said.
He regarded the painted scene; something about it held his attention.
Hands. Beautiful hands, somehow connected with death. The hands of the Vulture Cult . . . picking bruised flesh from my battered bones!
He’d seen a brief flash of such hands on the stairwell the day before, when he looked up to see the trashcan hurtling toward him.
Where else, where else have I seen them? . . .
His fall and the medication he was taking clouded his memory. Maybe the vivid image of hands was just a hallucination.
“Are you all right?” Holly touched the fingers of his free hand.
“Yeah, I’m . . . I’m fine. Just daydreaming, that’s all.”
She walked slowly beside him. He felt her worried scrutiny, but pretended he didn’t. Being an invalid isn’t all bad.
“Take a look at this Bible,” she said, leaning over a display case, stashing her hair behind her ears. “It’s in French. Probably given to a Katogoula by a missionary, but some front and back pages are missing so we can’t be sure about the date or the owner. Isn’t it remarkable?”
Nick saw a small Bible, about the size of an adult palm, held open to reveal two pages of Lamentations. The cover was frayed, once of lustrous blue velvet. There was a Plexiglas press that held some of the pages fanned. Too bad about the missing leaves, he thought. Families usually recorded crucial birth, baptismal, marriage, and death information in their Bibles.
“In ancient times,” Holly said, “the Vulture priests and priestesses created their own ritual art and implements. When Christianity came and made them pretty much unemployed, they dedicated their artistry to the new religion. See the fore-edge painting on the ends of the Bible pages? A Vulture Cult specialty. You have to look at it just right.” She stooped down, demonstrating the angle for viewing the intricate, hidden painting. “The gold edges disappear and the painting comes into view. These are very collectible.”
He followed her example, until new aches made him stop. It looked to him like a primitive rendering of Lake Katogoula. “Nice to have a hobby to take your mind off picking flesh,” he said, straightening up, wondering if Grace Dusong, with her arthritis, felt this way all the time.
They strolled through the museum, examining other artifacts of more recent vintage. An apparently ancient, perfectly preserved pirogue sat in the middle of the walkway, amid cypress knees and lake reeds; the late Carl Shawe had crafted it twenty years ago, using only traditional methods and tools.
The Katogoula had always excelled at beadwork and basketry. Nick marveled at the examples on display. The pine-needle baskets were so tightly woven they could carry water, the wall texts informed him.
An hour later they’d made a full circuit of the museum and ended up in front of the Vulture Cult mural.
“Something I forgot to mention,” Holly said. “There was one ritual artifact that outlived the cult’s function. I’ve seen photos from the 1880s of Katogoula with these long nails.” She held up her hands, measuring out phantom foot-long nails. “They became an upper-class fashion statement, exaggerated to impractical lengths, completely divorced from the religious and ceremonial aspect.”
“Photos at the Tadbulls’, right?” Nick asked. She nodded. “You’re still persona non grata over there. If I keep hanging around with you, I’ll never get to see this renowned collection.”
“Oh, that. It was a couple of years ago. Wooty—that’s the guy I dated—he can’t possibly still be angry.” She didn’t seem convinced. “Besides, it wasn’t all my fault. It was . . . oh, you don’t want to know.”
“Only if you want to tell me.”
“Let’s just drop it, okay.” Her voice had the rough edge of emotions still healing. When she spoke again, her chagrin seemed gone: “Look, I promise, I’ll bite the bullet and take you one day. It’s really something to see. The collection really ought to be here, in the museum. Grace and Irton and I’ve talked about it a lot. That’ll be my excuse for visiting, to ask them to donate some photos and paintings. I think most of them are in storage, anyway. Oh, look! We walked right past the Twins-Raccoon Bowl you saw on tape. Isn’t it fantastic?”
“I’d like it much better if it had lunch inside.”
It was a beautiful fall day, not overly cool, and the tall pine trees swayed and soughed with the wind that filled the upper branches. Sunlight softened by countless pine needles danced on the forest floor. Holding hands, they strolled along the Golden Trace, toward their picnic spot.
Nick felt like a boy with his first crush. But he came back down to earth, realizing he couldn’t recall even the name of the girl he’d given his young, fickle heart to, thirty years before.
Holly told Nick the story of the Golden Trace Treasure, and the circuitous journey it had made.
When the first highway was being constructed though this nearly impenetrable rural area, during the Depression, work crews leveled any Indian mounds in the way. One day, a crew hacked into a mound and uncovered a fabulous hoard of artifacts. The foreman took possession of the pri
celess items, later selling them. The artifacts passed through the ownership of private collectors, and then the archaeology departments of several colleges, before ending up at the Smithsonian. After a long court battle, the Katogoula finally brought the treasure back to Louisiana, where yet another vote-currying governor built the museum Nick and Holly had just visited.
Lookout Point commanded a striking view of the rolling, red Tchekalaya Hills of central Louisiana. Holly had brought a simple but ample lunch of sandwiches and salads.
“You can see for miles from up here,” Nick said. “Doesn’t look like the Louisiana I know. In the French Quarter, you’re below sea level. You glance down a street toward the river, and you see these huge oceangoing ships towering over you. They seem to ride along on top of the levee, like Mardi Gras floats. It’s eerie.”
“This is the highest point in the state,” Holly said, between bites of her sandwich. “Something like four hundred feet.”
“A regular Mount Everest.”
“I don’t think we’ll see many ships,” she said, “but the Gulf did cover this area millions of years ago. We’re sitting on the sediment left by that inundation. Erosion from the runoff and rivers changing course carved these hills. Once, on a dig just over there”—she pointed to a thickly forested hill below them—“we found a Zeuglodon, an ancient whale. . . . God, I’m still starving! I could eat that whale. Where are the cookies?”
She rummaged through her backpack and found their dessert.
