by Jimmy Fox
Nick thought of an auburn-haired Katogoula goddess, with eyes of radiant green, forever holding the reflection of her returned children in a loving, unblinking gaze.
Holly unharnessed herself from the backpack. “I could rest in peace here,” she said, her voice dreamy and distant.
Were the two redheaded, green-eyed goddesses communicating in some silent way? Confirmed skeptic that he was, Nick nevertheless felt the modern certainty of what was magical and what was real beginning to slip away. More vividly than ever before, he understood what the Katogoula were feeling, sitting atop the long-slumbering dragon of their mythology as it shook itself awake.
Snap out of it, pal! Hard facts, that’s what you need. Before you start seeing mythical cougars and sacramental deer!
“What are we looking for?” Holly asked, flexing her shoulders and rotating her neck.
“Everything. Genealogists get excited about going to cemeteries. One of the high points of a research trip. You never know what you may find.”
“Okay, if you say so. I was here a few weeks ago for Carl’s funeral. Touching. They put sand on the grave and corn seed in little packets of foil. But everybody was looking at everybody else, like, ‘Was it you who killed him?’”
Nick mentioned that he’d visited the church in Cutpine that served the Katogoula and other Catholics in the area. The church had a nice, quaint graveyard; but now the parishioners used a commercial cemetery a few miles from town. Carl’s burial here in the forest signified the tribe’s tacit admission that part of the old identity had to perish for a new one to survive. The ancient ways of living off the land were lost to all but the sociopath, a throwback like Carl.
“I used the Cutpine church’s graveyard in the documentary,” Holly said. “Remember? The shot of the green corn ear placed on the old cross headstone? I thought that was a pretty good symbol of the cultural mix. But I sure would love to work this place in somewhere.” Her eyes swept the area with a director’s alertness to cinematic possibilities. “It’s so beautiful, without all the people—well, living people, anyway. . . . I only brought my still camera today; you think they’d let me come back and shoot some video?”
“I doubt it. Royce asked us not to take any pictures at all.” Nick unzipped the backpack and found his notebook. He took out a Fig Newton bar. “Want one?”
“I’ll take an apple, though.”
He found one a bit deeper in the backpack and then tossed it to her. She snagged the apple one handed.
“It’s fairly common to find multiple cemeteries for a group of people living in one place for a long time,” he said. “There might be a family graveyard on ancestral property, and the family sells it; burial then is done somewhere else. Congregations split or merge, families, too, which is why you’ll sometimes find members of the same family in cemeteries miles away. Graves and whole cemeteries get relocated. Or plowed under.”
“I had no idea it could be so complicated. Just when you think, okay, now I know where they all lived and died, they’re all over the place. Genealogy’s like blind man’s bluff. You know the answers are close, but you have to grab them and make them sing out.”
She chomped on her apple and moved toward the green enclosure of graves.
Nick, meanwhile, walked the perimeter of the iron-spear fencing, counting his steps. “First thing is to measure, get an overview . . . ninety-eight, ninety-nine, a hundred. . . .” He counted a few more feet to a corner; then he stepped off another side. “One hundred nine by eighty-seven,” he said, writing. Now he moved inside the glossy black fence, through a gate that opened without a squeak.
The place was well tended. The Katogoula had not forgotten their dead.
Holly followed him in. Squatting down to read a headstone, she said, “Oh, Nick! Look at this one. It’s so neat . . .”
“Wait a second. Not so fast. If you get sidetracked by the first thing that catches your interest, you’ll never get anything done, or remember anything later, when you need it. Come take a look.”
“Yes, teacher. Do I have to scrub the blackboards after class.”
Advice he himself rarely followed; he could spend an entire day in a courthouse or a library, happily browsing through material that had nothing to do with the project at hand.
He was sketching the aisles and sections of the cemetery. Holly watched him, inches away.
She bit into her apple viciously. He could tell she was peeved, hated to be corrected. She reminded him of Hawty: headstrong, precocious, like students he’d taught who couldn’t wait to match wits with the most difficult writers, who propelled the class at a pace too fast for the lesser intellects, prodigies who kept the professor from fuzzy thinking and dumbed-down compromise.
Suddenly, he felt an almost overwhelming compulsion to touch her, kiss her, squeeze her, roll the bouquet of her skin across his tongue, tumble with her in the soft, thick grass, wallow in her scents and juices, dive into the ecstatic depths of her ocean, worship at her altar . . . but he kept writing.
She finished the apple and threw it into the trees with a fast underhand pitch.
“Pan-Hellenic softball at LSU,” she said, in answer to Nick’s look of astonishment at her unexpected skill. “Our sorority won, four years straight.”
He finished the sketch and then told her of the wealth of clues an old graveyard could provide.
The positioning and composition of memorials might suggest ancestral nationality; Germans, Poles, and Scandinavians, for example, placed their markers in distinctive ways. Sometimes the original Old World spelling of a name was on a headstone or in a sexton’s records, crucial because census takers garbled foreign names. On badly eroded markers, the date could often be inferred from the style, which changed according to public taste. Inscriptions, designs, workmanship, layout, upkeep . . . such subtle indicators might provide important leads lacking in printed sources.
“A gravestone can sometimes tell you more than a census,” Nick said. “Or even courthouse records.” He bent down, brushed some lichen away from a sandstone slab. “For a nineteenth-century woman like this one, it may be the only written record of her existence. Who was she? What was her maiden name? Did she have special talents? What did she believe in? What was her financial situation? Who’s buried nearby? Who loved her, missed her after she died?”
Holly no longer pouted; she was hooked on the secrets of cemeteries. “Have you heard of those computer programs forensic anthropologists use?” she asked. “You know, the ones that build the victim layer by layer, until you can see what she looked like alive. That’s what you do, isn’t it, sort of, with all these scattered facts?”
Nick slowly nodded. What a pity he’d lost her. For a moment, he pictured them lecturing together at genealogical conferences, all eyes drawn to her mesmerizing beauty instead of her slideshow. What a pleasant change she would have been from the normal female contingent, which, to be charitable, was generally a more mature bunch.
“Get a pad and pencil,” he said. “Help me transcribe these stones.”
“Hasn’t that been done yet, after all these years?”
“Not that I can find. I’ve checked around. There’s no printed source for this cemetery. Thousands of cemeteries around the country are in the same boat. The priest at the church can’t even locate the old burial records. But he did tell me the Katogoula had an older church here. So, it seems we’re about to break new ground.”
“Har-har,” she said, returning with a yellow legal pad. “Oh boy, you genealogists are real riots. Next you’ll tell me you dig up remains for those really, really difficult cases, for jewelry and DNA, whatever. Oh, please! Like I’m that gullible.” She held her pencil poised over the yellow pad. “Where do I start?”
Nick didn’t think it necessary to say he’d tried a bit of unsanctioned archaeology and other unorthodox—not to mention unlawful—strategies in the quest for genealogical truth.
About an hour later, they’d documented one hundred sixty-three heads
tones. There were eighteen unmarked sunken areas, most of them two or three feet in length, indicating unnamed children, or stranger burials. Nick had once seen a small grave for a man’s severed arm, and one for a woman’s prize recipes, which she’d vowed to take with her when she died.
“What is it?” Holly put a warm hand at the back of his neck. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, I, uh . . .” he managed to get out. He swallowed with difficulty and cleared his throat. “Just feeling a little chilled.”
He dropped to his knees to read an unpolished, weathered marble headstone:
Adolicia Hastard Coux
Gray Wing, Our Dear Birdie
Beloved Mother, Wife, Daughter, Wise Woman
Born: 1838 Died: June 18, 1951
Above the name were two chipped hands, barely distinguishable, the fingers seemingly interwoven in some ritual placement he’d never seen before.
Countless facts, past and present, which had swirled around him in a funnel cloud of randomness, now settled before him, individual grains taking their ordained places in a marvelous sand painting. He was no longer looking at a memorial headstone carving, darkened and damaged by time, the elements, and perhaps human effort. He saw instead the hands on the stair railing at the courthouse, the day someone tried to kill him; and the hands in Grandfather Tadbull’s drawings hidden away in the attic; the sand shifted to reveal the hands of Luevenia Silsby, the first time he met her at Three Sisters Pantry; and again it shifted, becoming Luevenia’s hands offering cash in front of the smoldering Katogoula museum.
And then the magic sand painting blew away as phantasmagorically as it had formed. He was back in the illusory peace of Tchekalaya Forest, a strange clarity allowing his mind to peer into depths of the past. As if old Gray Wing herself had cured him of doubt and confusion.
Nick never forgot a name—for very long. Coux was the maiden name of Luevenia Silsby’s grandmother, Adolicia’s daughter; it was the name blotted out on the back of Grandfather Tadbull’s drawing. Adolicia Coux, known as Birdie and Gray Wing, whose hands were the subject of that drawing, was Luevenia’s great-grandmother on her mother’s side. And the small French Bible from the attic of Tadbull Hall established Adolicia’s link to the hereditary Vulture Cult line.
Long Black Feather, Black Wing, Gray Wing . . . Little Wing. Luevenia Silsby was Little Wing! Even long after the adoption of Western naming ways, private Katogoula names were given at birth. Luevenia would have received one. Adolicia’s great-granddaughter could well be of Luevenia Silby’s age. Luevenia had no sisters, but Adolicia might have had many other great-granddaughters . . . .
His hunch had to be right; more things fit than didn’t as a result. Luevenia was Little Wing, and the Bible had belonged to her, at one time. A gift from her great-grandmother. Two questions occurred to him again: what was it doing up in the attic of Tadbull House, and how long had it been there?
Great-grandmother Adolicia/ Gray Wing/ Birdie had written the dedication in the old French Bible to remind her great-grandchild of the family’s distinguished Vulture Cult heritage. Luevenia could possibly be the last living standard-bearer of a noble line. Did she remember and realize the significance? And if not, how would she take it?
But she does know, and she fears unmasking!
Contemporary Katogoula didn’t look at this aspect of their ancestry with pride. They had a new, updated religion with its own wonders—Catholicism leavened with the most durable and generally most wholesome aspects of Katogoula beliefs. Their culture had mutated into a hybrid species. The Vulture Cult was the senile old relative who touched himself and slobbered in public—an aspect laughable, unsavory, unheroic, even horrifying, not part of the rehabilitated past.
“You found something, didn’t you?” Holly asked, now down beside him, in a catcher’s squat. “Something important. Is that why you have that cute stupid grin on your face?”
“This, lovely Holly, was Luevenia Silsby’s great-grandmother, herself the great-granddaughter of maybe the last high priest of the Vulture Cult.”
“Wow!”
He sprang up, ignoring small stitches of pain, and tried to walk off some of his excitement. “We’ve just awakened the dead, and they have tales to tell. Listen. This is what I hear.”
When he’d finished his rapid-fire scenario five minutes later she said, “You’re crazy. Are you really telling me that shame over Vulture Cult heritage drove Miss Luevie to . . . ?” She shook her head. “No way. That sweet, sweet woman?”
“Hey, all I’m saying is, it’s something to think about. I hope it’s not true. If you have a better idea—”
She wasn’t about to admit she didn’t. “I refuse to think of my friends as murderers. It’s crazy, just crazy! Falling down the stairs dented your good sense, obviously. Nick, listen to me.” She was up now, too, standing before him, his father’s well-worn gabardine Army dress shirt bunched up in her hands.
“This made it through WWII,” he said. “I’d hate to lose it now.”
“Oh. Sorry.” She let go of his shirt. “Miss Luevie’s no murderer. I know her. I’ve spent months with her. She’s one of the kindest, most principled people I know.” But suspicion had crept into her green eyes, and she grudgingly made room for it. She forced herself to add: “Generous, well adjusted.”
Nick said, “At the museum, you told me the Katogoula always held mixed feelings about the Vulture Cult. Her reasons for keeping this heritage quiet may never make sense to us. Is it vanity, fear of social ostracism, a concern for her business? The irrational needs very little, if any, justification.”
“Okay. I’m just giving you the benefit of the doubt here. Why Carl? You at the courthouse and the Dusongs at the museum I can see. You’re digging in the past, and the Dusongs were preserving it. All of you could have stumbled on a clue that would have exposed her . . . like you apparently did today, here. And how did she do it? She’s a frail little lady.”
“I don’t know about that. She’s on her feet twelve hours and more a day. And there’s a lot of elbow grease expended in that kitchen of hers. How frail is that?”
“Well,” Holly began, searching for some contradictory fact, “why don’t the others already know Adolicia was Luevenia’s great-grandmother?”
“What’s the name of your best friend’s great-grandmother? And I don’t mean Wooty. Quick.”
“Hmmm. I see what you mean.”
“Look at these sculpted hands,” Nick said, indicating the headstone. “I doubt anyone today connects them with Vulture Cult heritage. No one knows very much about it. Like most people, they’ve been more concerned with the grocery bill than extinct customs. What they do know is pretty much guesswork.”
“Maybe this Adolicia woman wasn’t closely related. If she died in 1951—which would have made her awfully old, by the way—shouldn’t she be buried with the rest of Miss Luevie’s family, over at the Cutpine church? Coux. I bet that’s a common name.”
Nick touched the grass of the grave on the right. “This is probably her husband.” The headstone was all but illegible. “They probably bought adjacent plots. He died decades before, in the 1880s, from the look of this marker. Of course, I’ll have to try to verify who this woman was, and look into those unusual dates, but . . . are you hungry?”
She was mauling a pickled peach, her hands and chin slathered in syrupy juice. “Starved. I can’t listen to any more of your ridiculous ideas on an empty stomach. No more work from me until I get my fill of fried chicken and potato salad.”
“Hey, as I recall, you transcribed those names and dates like a veteran genealogist. Ever consider joining our merry band? I’ll teach you the secret handshake.”
“If it means hanging around cemeteries and accusing innocent people of murder, no thanks.” She wound up an underhand pitch, and sent the peach pit into a tangled mass of underbrush, a few yards into the trees.
With a chime, the pit slammed into something solid beneath the vines.
“Wh
at was that?”
“A piece of the old church?” Nick suggested. “Sounded like stone in there.”
“Let’s find out!” Holly charged into the shadowy woods, hungry for something else now.
CHAPTER 31
They tore through thorny vines, tough saplings, and fallen branches, all of which formed a matted, shoulder-high clump the size of a small church’s altar. Blood and sweat and squashed mosquitoes smeared their scratched arms. Raised, pink tracks of fingernails marked Holly’s sun-toasted legs. The scent of fresh blood drew more mosquitoes wiser in the ways of tormenting them.
Nick imagined he could already feel the runny rash of poison ivy, and the swollen welts from ant, red bug, and tick bites—hazards of cemetery research, and the reasons why he always wore long pants and high-top shoes, and brought several pairs of gardening gloves. Holly, in her lust to tear into the mysterious tangle, at first had laughed at his pants tucked into his socks and scoffed at his insistence on wearing gloves. Now she understood.
It was hot, dirty, hard work, and Nick’s mind kept replaying lines from Yvor Winters’ poem “Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight,” warning of the dangerous seductiveness of the physical world, in the form of a beautiful forest spirit who transforms herself at will to snare those unwise enough to wander into her savage net.
Something moved abruptly, noisily within the foliage. Holly, closer to the movement, uttered a cry of warning and jumped back, into Nick’s chest. For a lingering instant he buried his face in her hair. The heat and smell of her were intoxicating. He forgot about the murders, the Vulture Cult, the Spanish Legajos de Luisiana, the French clerk’s account, the Bible from the attic of Tadbull Hall, the flashes along the lakeshore, and whatever it was that had startled her.
“A snake,” she said through the slow, deep breaths of an athlete. She gently pulled away, averted eyes aware of her effect on Nick and maybe of an equally powerful urge she was having difficulty suppressing. She wiped away a sweat-soaked wisp of hair from her forehead with the cuff of one glove. Then she picked up a stick and stirred an area of underbrush. A fat snake made a break for it, slithering rapidly away.
