Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery

by Jimmy Fox

  “Between the allied Katogoula and Yaknelousa tribes, and the Quinahoa. Yeah, we’re on the same page now, Hawty. Is this an exam or what?” Nick imagined Hawty flipping him the bird two hundred miles away.

  “Hush up!” she commanded irritably. “I found her. She’s in a nursing home in sunny Southern California. Ninety-five years old!”

  Hawty’s dogged investigative instincts would put any PI to shame, and her unflagging fascination with knowledge would one day gain her star status at some college or business—a business other than his, he realized at self-pitying moments like this. “That’s incredible. Does she remember anything about it?”

  “Sure does,” Hawty said. “She has her wits about her still; a remarkable memory, in fact. Unfortunately, she’s pretty much blind, but that doesn’t affect our project. Lovely lady. She has a taste for real French Market pralines, so I’m sending her some from Aunt Sally’s. Nick, she didn’t make it up. She really did work with the clerk’s journal. She told me it ended up at a place called the Karpeles Manuscript Library in Santa Barbara.”

  “The Karpeles, huh?” said Nick. Documents that changed history and altered human thinking forever, manuscripts from the hands of poets, philosophers, composers, scientists, and statesmen, unexplored sources rich with genealogical booty . . . very, very interesting!

  David Karpeles, a phenomenally successful mathematician and real estate entrepreneur, began assembling his renowned rare manuscript and document collection in the late nineteen seventies. Today the Karpeles owned a million or so pages of priceless handwritten and printed treasures. The thought of possessing such a historic, precious hoard made Nick giddy, and by comparison his own growing collection of scavenged and “borrowed” letters, diaries, books, and other assorted artifacts of genealogical interest seemed pitifully insignificant.

  But every great bibliomaniac was a middling collector once, and for Nick the starting point was Jacques Vulpine—an early Jewish immigrant to newly American New Orleans, a protean figure of many talents in a fascinating time, who was variously during the early and mid nineteenth century a notary, a historian and man of letters, a bon-vivant, a prosperous merchant and investor, a bankrupt speculator, and an amateur detective. Nick already owned some of Vulpine’s correspondence and rare editions of his poetry and prose; he was ever on the prowl for more.

  “And?” he prodded, knowing Hawty was eager to continue.

  “And . . . I had them e-mail the journal to me,” Hawty said. “Fabulous place. They have an aggressive digitizing program and are very nice about sharing their material. The journal is full of names, but it’s in French so I’m not sure what else it says. I’d fax the most important pages to you but your yokel motel doesn’t have a working fax machine and the only computer is so old it uses floppies and dial-up. You’ll just have to go to the Armageddon library or courthouse or Kinko’s and use one of theirs. If all else fails, I can overnight—”

  “Ah, my resourceful little cyber-princess, I have a modern computer.”

  “Uh-huh,” was her skeptical reply. “Where’d you get one? Steal it? You wouldn’t know how to work it even if you weren’t lying. Now, I didn’t call you at 9 P.M. to have you messing with me. I’m tired from juggling our other clients—all three of them. They want to know what’s taking so long with their projects.”

  “Well, finish them up and make the presentations. Sign my name; you’ve done it enough already. Aren’t you a card-carrying Certified Genealogical Researcher? You’re always pushing for more responsibility.”

  “Responsibility with commensurate pay! Don’t worry, I’m actually getting more work done with you out of town. The presentations’ll be ready when you get back, so you can have all the glory.”

  Then he recounted the day’s events, making sure to highlight his heroics. “My local doctor is a paranoid chap worried about a malpractice suit, so he’s setting up an appointment at Freret University Medical Center for tests.”

  “I hope someone else is paying,” Hawty said, informing him that his health insurance company was threatening to cancel him for nonpayment. She’d mailed a hot company check to buy some more time. “What kind of computer do you have, PC, Apple, or Android, if you really have one?” He told her the brand name he thought he recalled. “A laptop or a desktop or a tablet? What programs are you running? How much RAM have you got? What’s the processor? How much cache do you have? Is there an Ethernet port or at least a USB port? Because I’m not even going to try to get you on the Web through that motel’s antiquated phone system. Probably still has four-prong wall plugs. Never mind, we’ll go Wi-Fi. . .”

  So much for commiseration. “Hey, Hawty, all I’m saying is I have access to a computer. I didn’t say I somehow turned into Bill Gates. And as far as my cash situation goes . . . well—”

  “That’s with c-h-e, not s-h. You don’t have to tell me about your cash situation. I handle your bookkeeping, and you’re definitely no Bill Gates. Whose computer?”

  “Well, she’s a, uh, colleague, of sorts.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “And in certain respects our work has points of contiguousness.”

  “That pretty, is she? Never mind. None of my business. I don’t want to know any more about your personal life than I have to. I’d need to go to church twice as much as I do. Tell her to call me. I’m at home. We’ll figure something out.”

  “I’m writing this down. ‘Ether-something and US—’what?”

  “Just tell her to call! Don’t make it too late, either. I’ve got to teach an eight o’clock ‘Genealogy on the Web’ class in the morning at the library. Mostly grandmothers. Did I tell you I was doing that? . . . Look in your briefcase, the small pocket with the snap, where your cell phone should be but I’m sure it’s not because you probably already lost it. You’ll find a black device the size of a pack of cigarettes there, too. It’s a mobile broadband hotspot. I put it in there just for situations like this, if you’re out doing remote research and have someone computer literate to help you get online.”

  “I’ve been in a big enough hotspot already, thank you,” Nick grumbled as he located the gizmo Hawty described. “I have it. What do I do with it now?”

  “You don’t do a thing but put it back where you found it. Let your new girlfriend call me on her cell when the hotspot’s charged and ready. I’ve checked the area where you are; you should be able to get a decent but not great signal out there. Okay for document transmission but you won’t be streaming, so you can forget about watching some porn with your gal—”

  “Hey, just a minute. Now you’ve gone too far!” He regarded the hotspot with new interest, imagining a streaming porn-flick accompaniment to a passionate romp with Holly.

  “All right, all right, just kidding,” Hawty said, laughing. “I’m sure you don’t need any encouragement, with that galloping libido you have. And quit hurting that scrawny body of yours. You can’t even load a microfilm reel, in the state you’re in now. What a fine team we make: I’m in a wheelchair, and you’ve got one good arm!”

  After his conversation with Hawty, Nick rushed over to Annie Oakley, Holly’s room. On Holly’s phone, a snazzy smart one that made his “feature” phone look very dumb indeed, the two women prattled about girlish things, Nick assumed, and they shared quite a few chuckles, apparently at his expense, before getting down to the nuts-and-bolts technical issues. Nick was bored until Holly mentioned “zipping” and “unzipping,” which drew his gaze to her jeans and turned his mind down carnal byroads having nothing to do with the ultimate genealogical destination. She caught him staring; both of them blushed and pretended it didn’t happen.

  It proved difficult to get a good enough cell signal—Hawty theorized that there weren’t many towers in the rural area—but eventually the data flowed miraculously through the hotspot gizmo and into Holly’s notebook computer.

  Nick had escaped the sentence of a hard cast. Instead, his doctor had fitted him with a semi-flexible one strapped to his t
orso with an itchy arrangement of plastic, Velcro, and textiles he’d never seen before and wished he never had. The contraption was extremely uncomfortable, especially after a couple of hours in a chair, reading the screen of Holly’s computer, which sat amid her video equipment.

  “How do I get back to page three?” Nick asked.

  “Roll that ball at the bottom of the keyboard, and then click the menu down . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “Click on the ‘Go To’ command . . .”

  “‘Go to, go to’? Sounds downright Elizabethan. Ah-ha! Got it.”

  “Great. Now be quiet while I try to crack my names.”

  That made the second woman in one night to tell him to shut up. Maybe he should try being the strong-and-silent type. Trouble was, he wasn’t particularly strong, either.

  Holly was much better at Spanish than he was. She worked patiently by the room’s inadequate lamp light on the copied pages containing the names he’d found in the Legajos de Luisiana at the Sangfleuve Parish Courthouse—a goodly number of Katogoula and Yaknelousa names, but also those of Quinahoa slave families the Kentucky trader had seen among the Katogoula, forty years after the epic battle. Holly’s sagging, squeaky queen-size bed was littered with legal pads, a well-thumbed Spanish dictionary, and guides to Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Mobilian Jargon.

  Nick, for his part, pored over the French of the journal pages Hawty had zapped across cyberspace. Within the gracefully written sentences of the accomplished penman, the clerk of Mézières, were other names of Katogoula from 1768, or what the clerk determined these names, strange to him, sounded like in his native tongue. Chiefs, great warriors, female leaders of the matrilineal clans. . . . And—he grinned—a detailed description of the Vulture Cult!

  He read slowly at first; but his speed and excitement increased as he became familiar with the clerk’s style. Soon he hardly needed to touch the pocketsize French dictionary at his hand. This, to him, was the payoff, the beauty, the thrilling secret allure of genealogy: reawakening an eye-witness reporter from the past, sitting with him in an imaginary tavern at a rough-hewn table over flagons of ale, seeing through his eyes, hearing through his ears, with incomparable immediacy, times, places, and ideas lost to those of us imprisoned in the now.

  Luevenia Silsby’s accusation still rang in his mind. Was he responsible for the plague of misfortune that had struck the Katogoula? He did feel guilty . . . but not for the reasons she’d put forward. He could feel the proximity of the killer in the chill down his spine, the same chill he felt at the imminence of an intuitive leap that suddenly, irrefutably, joined distant generations of a family. The killer’s identity lay somewhere in the genealogical record, and he was missing it! He needed more than a flash of a badge on Nooj’s chest, or suspicions about Tommy Shawe, or the recollected image of—perhaps—Miss Luevie’s hands, more than just coincidences that probably in the end meant nothing. He needed to hold up the lantern of Cartesian Doubt, illuminating seemingly insignificant facts, testing them against his knowledge and experience, finally discovering the truth . . . perhaps, in a 1768 journal.

  The French clerk revealed his mingled fascination and revulsion when writing about the ancient tribal undertakers, the Vulture Cult. Yet, like so many of those adventurous men of that age of discovery, titled and humble ones alike, who saw people and practices no other European could have dreamed of, the clerk knew he was writing for posterity.

  Sometime around midnight Nick realized that for some minutes he’d been staring at the screen without comprehending anything at all.

  “Enough!” he declared. “I can’t take any more written words—in any language.” He’d compiled a list of fifty-three names, translated into his best guess of the English equivalent.

  He trudged over to Holly’s bed and cleared a place to sit among the books and legal pads.

  “Same here,” she moaned. “This is about to drive me batty.” She slapped down a dog-eared pamphlet and slowly rolled her head and flexed her shoulders. “The Kentucky trader mentions a language used by Katogoula and Yaknelousa masters and their Quinahoa slaves or servants, but I’m not sure if he means Mobilian Jargon or an entirely different slave language. Mobilian Jargon—or a variant of it—did serve as a master/ slave language, but they called it”—she yawned—“yoka anompa, I’m pretty sure.”

  “Yoka anompa to you, too.”

  “Maybe you need to copy some more pages of the Legajos for me to work with . . . how do you feel?”

  He leaned back on two pillows she’d propped for him against the headboard. “Almost as bad as I probably look. Does your face hurt?”

  She shook her head. “Not really. Wonder if it’ll scar.” She’d managed to wash off the brown antiseptic.

  He gently touched her speckled cheeks, which had begun a scabby healing process beneath the small bandages. She didn’t wince much. Tough girl.

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Great stuff,” he said after a satisfying yawn. “You were right about the Vulture Cult as an immigrant practice. For years a Yaknelousa religious aristocracy held the sacerdotal reins. They’d been both chiefs and shamans in their own independent tribe, but gave up political power when the two tribes merged and the Katogoula adopted major aspects of their religion. My reporter, the clerk, thinks this merger happened in the late seventeenth century, just as the Europeans started to upset the balance of tribal power.”

  “Hmm.” Holly scribbled on a yellow pad and bit the eraser, thinking. “I need to work that into my documentary script. That’s important.”

  “I also found lots of names that so far don’t mean much to me. Big Owl, Fast Snake, Thirsty Beaver, Long Black Feather . . . those are the ones I remember at the moment. My brain feels like cold grits. I think Long Black Feather was a leader of the Vulture Cult for decades.”

  “Clan totems, I bet,” Holly said. “Southeastern Indians organized themselves by clans below the tribal level. If you belonged to the Owl or Snake or Wind clan, that’s where your loyalties were, as much as with your flesh and blood, maybe more so.”

  “Matrilineal, right?”

  “Oh, a smarty-pants, eh?” Holly wisecracked. “Yes, most were matrilineal before the white man came; the husband joined the wife’s clan and allegiance passed from mother to child. What do you do with the names now?”

  “I’ll check to see if anyone in the present-day core families mentions them in family lore. It would be nice to find them on federal Indian rolls, especially the transitional ones that record when a Katogoula family began using English surnames. Then we’ll know where this family was living, what localities and sources to check for more family data. These names will become reference points for future membership, targets to trace back to.”

  “The government didn’t consider the Katogoula a real tribe,” Holly said. “I didn’t think they were enumerated separately.”

  “They weren’t. On and off for a couple of centuries they lived among the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Chitiko-Tiloasha. The rolls and associated case files of those tribes can sometimes hold good Katogoula info. Let’s say Tall Worm—”

  “‘Tall Worm’!?” She laughed, making the rickety bed squeak. “You wouldn’t catch me in that clan.”

  “Whatever,” he said, trying to suppress his own mirth. “I made him up. Let’s say we found Tall Worm in our clerk’s journal of 1768. On an 1858 Mississippi Choctaw removal roll a mixed-blood Choctaw testifies that Tall Worm, of unknown heritage, was his grandfather.”

  She nodded. “I’m with you so far.”

  “The grail in American Indian research is finding the full-blooded tribal ancestor—and in 1768, Tall Worm was probably full-blooded. Now we have a historical Katogoula linked to a line possibly surviving into modern times. With that information, we can figure out the exact Katogoula blood quantum of later descendants—if and when they get interested in their ancestry. The federal records are massive, but sometimes an odd source like this clerk’s journal is better tha
n a ton of National Archives paper.”

  “So what would he be, our 1858 man?” Holly asked. “I wonder how Tall Worm and his wife—”

  “Mrs. Worm?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Worm.” She playfully threw a wadded sheet of paper at him. “I wonder how they would have felt about the future of their line. There was already intermarriage with bigger tribes, and in their generation or the next, maybe with whites. Did they feel that their Katogoula heritage was dying? What did they teach their children? What would their descendants call themselves today: Katogoula, Choctaw, white?”

  “All three. None of the above. The soul doesn’t follow rules of genealogical evidence.” Nick leaned back, sighing from fatigue. “And take it from me, sometimes the soul doesn’t want to know. I need to get back to New Orleans, sift through a few hundred of my favorite micro-films. . . . Well, a few dozen, at least. After a good night’s sleep.”

  “But you’ve been fired, haven’t you?” Holly said. “They can’t fire me; I’m not working for the tribe. Anyway, I have almost enough footage to finish the documentary. Now all I need is some historic filler. The photos and paintings at Tadbull Hall would be just perfect. . . . Oh, I’m sorry. Were you asleep?”

  “Holly, Holly, give it a rest, okay. You’re tired, I’m tired. We’ve been working for hours, non-stop. It’s been a hell of a day. This isn’t the time to start again with that documentary of yours.” The pain medicine was about to pull him under the calm surface of sleep. “Shhh. Try to relax, so I can.” He scrunched deeper into the pillows.

  Finally, he’d been able to shush a woman for a change. He began to drift off, relishing this small victory, not concerned in the least that he was a trespasser in this bed. The overpowering desire to sleep made all counter-arguments irrelevant.

  “Why are you so interested? In the Katogoula, I mean. Why do all this work when they want you out of here?”

  “Because I’m such a nice guy,” Nick said, his undamaged arm slung over the bridge of his nose.