by Jimmy Fox
“Copperhead,” she said, with complete equanimity.
Nick wasn’t so calm. “Kill it!”
“It’s just as scared of us.” She tossed the stick away. “Would you rather have a thousand rats around? Predators and death are facts of nature.”
“Hey, I’m all for natural balance, as long as mankind is part of the equation. I may not have the bumper stickers to prove it, but I’m a liberaltarian.”
“That means”—two handfuls of stubborn foliage finally gave way to her determined yanking—“you get to do whatever the hell you want and feel good about it, huh?”
“That’s about right. Having an active ecological conscience is fine by me, as long as it doesn’t get me killed.” Nick cast a worried glance at the spot where he thought the snake had entered another area of dense undergrowth. “I wonder what balance our murderer wants to maintain.”
“The murderer’s a human being,” Holly said. “We traded in our instincts for self-awareness. Our motives aren’t controlled by nature anymore. The snake has no choice. Call me radical environmentalist or whatever if you want, but that doesn’t make me a wimp. I wouldn’t hesitate to defend myself against a man—or a woman—who should know better.” She put her weight against another wiry mass in her hands. Vines twanged and snapped and whipped about. She staggered backward. “Are you going to stand there and yak all day or can you give me some help here?”
“Timber!” he shouted, grabbing a hank of knotted forest entrails, letting his good left side handle most of the heavy lifting. He hoped she was right: that the killer was a human being, who could be fought with a big enough stick. A poisonous snake or a deranged killer he could handle. But an angry spirit? No thanks!
After a few more minutes of work, they were able to see vertical stone slabs, regularly placed to form two-and-a-half rows.
Nick said, “Doesn’t look like the ruins of a church to me.”
“More graves.”
He pushed a large rotting pine limb to the side; it fell with a thud, splitting into pieces, sending a swirl of insects and chaff into the humid air as much of the remaining underbrush went crashing over and down with it.
Holly said, “What’s this cemetery doing so close to the other one? And so neglected.”
“I wonder. Let’s get these inscriptions down first. There’s no substitute for accurate written notes. What do you think, twenty, thirty graves? Why don’t you start here and I’ll go to the other end—”
“Screw that! I’m not writing down any more names or dates or anything. I’m getting my camera. Images, not words—that’s what I do best.”
While she went to her backpack for the camera, Nick cleared away more debris and began to read the inscriptions that were legible. She’d obviously had enough of his preaching; he decided not to harp on the fact that good old-fashioned notes from a field trip could serve as backup for genealogical information otherwise lost to a malfunctioning camera or audio recorder. So he transcribed as he read anyway, just in case the camera’s memory got fried.
There were few surnames on the headstones in sight that he recognized. That was good: more ancestral Katogoula lines, more possibilities for living descendants, a more viable tribe with more members. The birth dates were, for the most part, in the early nineteenth century, with only a few crossing beyond the 1800 line. Death dates were all over the map, extending into the 1890s. Three generations, maybe four.
Was this where the Katogoula first started burying after they fully embraced Christianity, and ceased to bury their dead in mounds? Not a lot of graves for that amount of time, Nick thought. The dates were earlier than those of the larger cemetery, just a few yards away in the clearing—but not by much. Why two graveyards, if the time frames were roughly parallel? Could there have been some structural impediment separating them, a part of the old church, no longer here? Maybe this little graveyard held the last traditionalists, who followed the matriarchal clan-centered ways instead of the Western patriarchal family structure.
Nooj Chenerie had been wrong about finding graves no more than about a hundred years old. Nick wondered why?
Holly unzipped the protective case of the camera. She knew what she was doing. He stopped worrying about a photographic mishap.
“Our friendly wildlife agent may write us up,” Nick said, ribbing her. “The tribe doesn’t like tourists taking pictures of the gravestones, you know.”
“We’re not tourists,” she replied, aiming the camera, making adjustments. “I was corrected once at another tribe’s pow-wow for taping during the eagle-feather dance. They were very polite—after they took my tape.”
“I’ve run into that a few times, myself,” Nick said, ogling his companion with impunity as she fussed with the camera or ripped foliage from a headstone. “The prohibition on cameras. Some groups consider it sacrilege, some a violation of privacy; others just want to sell their cemetery lists without competition.”
When Holly was satisfied with the settings, she began snapping close-up shots of individual headstones from various angles. “We’ll be through here in no time,” she said. “Who’ll know, except the trees?”
And the dead. For Nick, the electronic clicking of the shutter seemed a gross affront to the beauty and peace of this natural setting . . . a serene mirage that was a phantom of human sentimentality, a soothing human delusion masking an eternal bloody struggle. Maybe he was still a bit rattled from seeing the snake, maybe it was his long-standing distaste for technology, the merciless automaton-god worshipped nowadays, but each time the camera clattered, he winced.
Holly said from behind the viewfinder, “Do you always do what other people tell you?” She moved to another headstone and crouched down. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
Then she lowered the camera.
“These names,” she said, still working on a half-submerged thought. “Nick, I read some of these surnames in the Legajos de Luisiana. . . . They’re Quinahoa!”
He’d wandered to the end of the small graveyard. “Are you sure?”
She walked along the stones, reading them out. “Oh, absolutely! Most of them were in the Legajos. Spelling’s not quite the same, but the Kentucky trader or the Spanish who wrote this stuff down might have screwed up the French surnames they heard. Nick, I think the people in these graves were descendants of captured Quinahoa enslaved by the Katogoula. The earliest ones maybe only a generation or two away from the big war. Wow, this is the cemetery of the slave caste!”
“That’s why it’s separated from the larger one,” he said. “Putting on my sociologist’s cap, I’d say the actual slavery and the attached stigma had long since evaporated. They’d become part of the larger Katogoula tribe, but considered themselves distinct. Maybe this isn’t a place of humiliation, at that. Could it have been that the Quinahoa were still fighting for their identity, even in their burial customs?”
“Like the Katogoula in white society,” Holly said, snapping shots again. “Now I really want this on film.”
As she moved through the small graveyard recording their find, she told Nick that Indian slavery was, in major respects, unlike black slavery in the antebellum South. The Southeastern Indian culture didn’t rely on a one-crop plantation system, so there was no need for massive cheap labor. Life was still relatively simple, pastoral, with communal farming and hunting. Possessions and practices promoted survival, and material luxuries weren’t much of a factor, until the Europeans came. There was little real difference between the life of the slave and of the master. Slavery was more a mental construct, a matter of enhanced honor for the captor, of lost dignity for the captive. A powerful tribe could boast many slaves; and though warriors often were tortured to death, or maimed so that they couldn’t escape, in time manageable slaves were treated as pets.
The Quinahoa who survived the war—some were rumored to have vanished into the forest—became Katogoula and Yaknelousa chattel; a few were probably traded to other tribes or to the whites. If the general
pattern ruled, the Quinahoa served as menial laborers and artisans; some were forced into prostitution; the exceptional ones no doubt gained respect for special skills, like hunting or fishing. The passing of years, then of generations, made the distinctions less noticeable. Daily contact led to increasing familiarity and acceptance. To respect, friendship, matings. And then came the day when no one remembered who had been a slave, who a master. Finally, the truth became another legend on the tribe’s dusty shelf.
Nick said, “It seems that the last to care about their glorious degrading past were the Quinahoa descendents themselves. In the end I guess it became a matter of ethnic pride. But eventually they stopped using this graveyard. The headstone dates tell the story. Sometime before the turn of the twentieth century, they stopped thinking of themselves as separate and became Katogoula in spirit, Katogoula in death.”
“Maybe they all died out,” Holly said.
“Yeah, maybe.” Nick stood before several partially hidden headstones fifteen feet away from her, carefully clearing lush poison ivy from them with his gloves. “These are interesting,” he said, more to himself than to Holly.
“What is it? . . . Oh, boy, there you go again.”
He stared at the headstone directly in front of him, his mouth gaping slightly, catching mosquitoes, feeling the old familiar chill of the eureka moment. He shook off his gloves and began to scribble feverishly on his yellow pad.
“Well, whatever happened,” Holly said, curious now, starting to walk toward him down a line of old graves, “now they’re one big happy family up in the sky somewhere.”
A headstone shattered into stone splinters to the right of Nick with a loud crack like close thunder. Then another headstone fell decapitated to his left.
Stone dust filled the air. He instinctively ducked his head. “What the hell!—”
A brown streak whooshed by his face and stuck in a thick pine behind him. An atlatl spear! Thrown with such force that the sharp stone tip protruded from the other side of the tree.
“Run!” Holly screamed. “This way! Get out of here!”
Holly in front, they ran up the narrow path that had led them into the denser woods and to the graveyards, and then left and onto the Golden Trace again, the ancient hunter’s path through the life-giving, death-concealing forest.
Now they were the hunted, and Nick felt the terror of a rat in the coils of a snake. If this was the natural order at work, survival of the fittest in action, he didn’t feel nearly fit enough!
Holly was a good runner, keeping her arms close to her sides, pumping them in alternating rhythm with her stride. Somehow she’d managed to secure her camera bandoleer style; it flopped between her shoulder blades. She looked back at him and then beyond him. Fear replaced concern on her face.
Almost at his feet fat shapes exploded in every direction. Quail.
“I see . . . something!” she shouted. “Faster, Nick! Come on, stay with me! It’s still back there!”
He felt off balance, lame like a captive, intentionally hamstrung Quinahoa warrior, his bad arm and shoulder becoming more and more of a painful hindrance. A vicious cramp burrowed below his ribs, spreading, gnawing, making his breaths come shorter and shorter. His body suddenly weighed many tons. He seemed to be walking against an undertow pulling him toward the center of the earth. Panicked, he glanced down to make sure he wasn’t up to his hips in quicksand.
He’d skipped his jogging for a few weeks before his courthouse fall. A teenager could lay off for almost a month and remain in top shape; a forty-five-year-old man couldn’t.
They weren’t heading back the way they’d come. Nick had no idea where they were, where they were going. He thought he could hear footsteps behind him, gaining. Skilled footsteps of a hunter who knew these pine thickets, a hunter whose deadly pursuit made scarcely as much noise as a pine needle falling.
The Golden Trace made a sharp curve.
Nick looked back, grimacing in pain. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he detected in the dark green-and-brown shadows a large animal in pursuit. A cougar?
He faced forward again, peering through the telltale tunnel vision of oxygen deprivation. Sparks fired in his peripheral vision. Holly had really turned on the speed; Nick struggled to keep up. He couldn’t do this much longer.
The voice of reason upbraided him: Fool! Coward! Stop, turn, face your enemy. The more ancient voice of his pre-human ancestors screamed: Run! One more step, one more step, and another one! Run! Run or die!
Something thwacked into a tree where a moment before Holly’s head had been. Seconds later Nick was even with the tree—an atlatl spear had skewered it. And then the tree was a blur as he pushed his body beyond exhaustion.
Suddenly they broke from the trees into a bright openness. A field? Nick had a vague sense that he knew this place, or had dreamed of it. The world bounced wildly as if through a shaky lens attached to his befuddled consciousness. A meadow, those rounded grassy hillocks so old they looked natural. The ancient Katogoula burial mounds, on Tadbull land!
And there are people over there. Men in uniform. Lots of them. Why? Forget it. Must make it to those men! Must make it to the mounds, must make it! Faster, faster! . . .
Now everything was upside down and he fell into bluebonnet immensity.
When he opened his eyes, he saw an eclipse.
No, that wasn’t quite it.
A large, round, dark face. Sheriff Big John Higbee, looking down at him. Holly’s smaller face floated beside the sheriff ’s head, in the blue and yellow and white of the afternoon Louisiana sky.
Holly’s head grew larger and blotted out everything else. Nick felt lips on his sweat-streaming forehead. In another moment, he realized he was flat on his back in tall, yellow grass. Something had been burning nearby, possibly the grass, he was thinking.
“We’re safe now, Nick.” Holly’s face was even lovelier from her recent exertion. Half dreaming, half awake, Nick called up a vision of her after their lovemaking. A week ago? God, it seems like centuries!
“One of you men bring this man some cold Gatorade,” Big John called out. And then to Nick: “Son, you better take up something safer, like alligator wrestling. This genealogy’s getting to be a hazardous line of work.”
Nick sat up.
“Looked like that movie with Cornel Wilde,” Big John said. “What was it, Naked Prey? Uh-huh, just like that. I always rooted for the Africans, you know what I’m sayin’. Yep, that’s what you two looked like to me. ’Cept I didn’t see any Africans chasing after you. Fact, I didn’t see anyone chasing after you. You two out for a jog?”
Holly explained what they’d been doing, and what had happened.
“Sheriff,” Nick said, “you asked me to tell you if I found anything in my genealogical research pointing to a motive for murder. Today I—”
“We,” Holly said.
“We found something important.”
“Well, seeing as how you picked the middle of my crime scene for your siesta, I guess you could say you’re officially part of this investigation. Give the man a hand, Ray Doyle.”
“Crime scene?” Nick said, getting to his feet with the help of Holly and a young plainclothes detective.
Nick had collapsed on top of the final two letters of the puzzling protest burned into the grass. “‘Casi-NO,’” he read aloud. “What does it mean?”
“He’d like to know,” Big John said, pointing to the corpse being lowered from the tree. “And so would I.”
“Oh, damn!” Holly said, slapping her back.
“You hurt, miss?” asked Ray Doyle, with flirtatious eagerness.
“I’m all right, Lieutenant Sprague. Thanks. It’s just that I dropped my stupid camera back there in the woods.”
Nick gave a drunk’s loud laugh that turned into a lurching cough. When he could stand up straight again he unclenched his right hand and showed Holly the sweat-soaked ball of yellow paper he’d clutched during their flight through the forest.
&nbs
p; Nick grinned. “See. Nothing beats good written notes.” He was too weak and nauseated to gloat any more.
Holly snatched the ball of limp paper and carefully opened it. She read the inscription from the headstone Nick had transcribed just before the attack:
Amalie Chenerie Madeul
Wife of Vincent, Sr.
Born 1835
Died Feb. 5, 1893
Sadly Do We Bid Goodbye
But Know Her Spirit
To Heaven Will Fly
No More A Slave Submit.
“I really hate it when he’s right,” Holly said to Big John.
CHAPTER 32
Two mugs of coffee in his huge hands, Sheriff Higbee shut his office door with a shoe, muting the tumult of his busy staff outside. He handed Nick a mug and walked to a window.
Outside, protesters marched in antagonistic counter circles at the foot of the broad, gently rising front steps of the Sangfleuve Parish Courthouse. A live-remote truck from one of the local television stations had arrived and now the crew was setting up for a report in the six P.M. news. A sectioned aluminum pole topped by an antenna rose in slow jerks as a young technician scurried around the truck.
Otherwise, the late Friday afternoon was calm in downtown Armageddon; traffic lights changed over deserted streets.
“Yep, nothing like a few murders and the smell of cash to get the wheels of democratic dissent rolling,” Big John said. He pointed to a corner of the newer combined parking garage and jail annex attached to the rear of the courthouse. “At least it’ll give the prisoners something to watch besides Duck Dynasty and Real Housewives of Atlanta.”
From where he sat, Nick could see prisoners’ faces behind tinted glass and bars in the jail atop the garage.
