Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (47 page)

Nick could sense the marital amity that existed here, just from the arrangement of furniture and accessories. He often could imagine the emotional state of a family from the odd accidental detail in a deed or probate file; such impressions sometimes helped explain a problematic property transfer, an unusual bequest, or an unexpected disinheritance. Genealogical facts were the exterior of the edifice of a life. The family historian who hoped to truly understand his subjects had to walk into that house and live there, if only for a moment.

Nick mentally noted the details that gave him this impression of mutual happiness, compromise, and consideration patiently developed over decades. Luevenia’s baskets, quilts, pillows, wall hangings, and beadwork; the western novels Royce liked, his hunting, fishing, and
crossword magazines, his half a dozen shotguns and rifles in the gun cabinet. . . .
No wonder she was desperate to preserve her marriage, her way of life. It is enviable
.

“How did you come by this?” she asked, meaning the Bible.

“I, uh, borrowed it.”

“You borrowed it, huh?” Luevenia was no fool. “Does he know? Does he know that . . .”

“That you’re his mother?” It was a long shot. He’d run different scenarios through his mind to explain the presence of the Bible in the attic of Tadbull Hall. Finally, he’d amplified a faint hunch into a ringing conjecture: Wooty Tadbull had his mother’s hands.

“Yes. That I’m his real mother.” It wasn’t easy for her to say; quite probably, these were words she’d never spoken aloud. “Does he know?”

Nick shook his head negatively.

Luevenia placed the Bible on the coffee table and stood up. She walked toward the closed door of the trailer. Nick hadn’t noticed the shotgun she now picked up from the corner; it had been out of view when the door opened.

Had he made a fatal miscalculation? He’d just confirmed that her secret was still safe.
Killing me would keep it that way
.

The shotgun was a small side-by-side double barrel, the mellow umber stock satiny from many years of use. She smiled slightly—a smile tinged with sorrow.

“Tried to shoot myself after I gave that Bible to Wooty. My thumb just wouldn’t work, had no strength at all. Everything else I can hit. Ducks, dove, quail, rabbit, even deer . . . you name it. If it walks or flies and it’s legal to hunt, I’ve probably shot it, gutted it, skinned it, and cooked it. But me? Shoot myself ? No. Couldn’t do it.” The gun was clearly a trusted companion; she rubbed a hand over the stock. “Just a .410, but I’m good with it, like all us Katogoula. Been using it since I
was a girl. Reminds me of good times, when the old ones were alive and it seemed like nothing could happen they didn’t have an answer for.”

“You’re not cut out for suicide . . . or murder.”

“I don’t guess I am,” she said, seeming resigned to that fact, almost as if she wished it otherwise. “Would have been the easy way out.”

“But you would have accomplished nothing,” Nick said. “You realized you could never kill the truth. And your suffering? Well, you and pain are old adversaries, aren’t you? You strike me as the type who doesn’t like to lose. Living became a greater victory, and a greater sacrifice, than dying.”

She replaced the shotgun in the corner. Nick started breathing normally again.

For a half hour, Luevenia explained, holding the Bible resolutely in her lap. Her husband Royce, who poked his head into the trailer, was promptly sent packing to the store with a novel.

Some of her story Nick had already guessed. Some was new to him.

Thirty-eight years before, Wooten Tadbull was a balding playboy who had just been married at his father’s insistence, after four disrupted arranged engagements to other daughters of Louisiana’s gentry. It was a loveless match. The bride despised the backwardness of Sangfleuve Parish and the drunken boorishness of her husband. Within two months, there was a pregnancy neither young Wooten nor his wife wanted—but the couple’s growing mutual hatred bowed to the will of the man who controlled the family purse strings, Mr. Tadbull II. An heir had to be provided.

Wooten took solace in the company of a budding beauty of the Katogoula tribe, Luevenia Dejeune, who visited Tadbull Hall often to perform her manicuring tasks, and to deliver herbal remedies, which
her mother and she were skilled in preparing. The wife knew about Wooten’s infidelities, which were manifold. She sought refuge in alcohol and prescribed drugs. One night she overdosed on an herbal concoction, deliberately, the family knew, in an effort to kill herself or her fetus or both.

A rumor began to circulate that the wife had been poisoned. She allowed the suspicion to grow as a way of striking back at Wooten and Luevenia. The attitude of the whites of the area became dangerous; Luevenia, of course, was blamed without further investigation. There was even talk of a lynching, until it was discovered that Luevenia, too, was pregnant. The whispers hinted that Wooten was the father; sentiment turned against him, instead, and the women were seen as his victims.

Mr. Tadbull held almost feudal power in the area. The sheriff of the day did his bidding unquestioningly. Louisiana was a lot like medieval Italy, with its own versions of Medicis, Borgias, Malatestas, and Sforzas. Luevenia was whisked away to a convent home for unwed mothers in Arkansas, where some months later she gave birth to a healthy son.

The Tadbull child was premature and grievously sick; he didn’t survive long. Mr. Tadbull laid down another law: Luevenia would give up her child to the family, in exchange for lifetime financial security for her family. The official story would thenceforth be that one of two Tadbull twins had died.

And that is what the public records reflect. The memories of those who were alive then tell another tale; but their number declines with each passing year.

Luevenia returned to her Cutpine family not long after her son was brought home; she’d been visiting relatives in Oklahoma, her parents reported. She was a changed woman: quiet, introspective, mature beyond her years. Her hair had started to turn gray. No one talked of the controversy; Mr. Tadbull saw to that, with money or threats. Royce
Silsby was completely unaware of the late trouble when he returned to Cutpine after a stint in the Army and service in Cold War Europe.

Royce proclaimed his love for the still beautiful Luevenia. She accepted his proposal. But the first love of her life was the son she’d held in her arms so briefly, the boy who was given the Tadbull name: Wooten Tadbull IV, called Wooty.

Two years later, Wooten’s wife, disgusted with her reprobate husband, and already a long way toward the derangement that would make her a zombie by the time she was thirty, fled back to New Orleans. The divorce was arranged in absentia.

Nick said, “I saw the small grave in the Tadbull family cemetery. The real son of Wooten and his wife?”

She nodded. “Wooty took his place.”

Luevenia gave no warning before crying. Her tears fell suddenly, fat raindrops from a sky that had been clear only a moment before. And just as suddenly, her crying jag was done.

“I would like Wooty to know about me, that I’m his birth mother. But it wouldn’t be good for him, as much pleasure as it would give me. Wouldn’t be right.” Her teary eyes filled with joy. “He’s so handsome. Been to college, you know. Played football, got degrees. A real go-getter of a businessman, they say. I’m real proud of him.”

“Holly loves him.”

“Yes, I heard that. She’s a good woman. He could do worse. Could set his heart on someone like Mrs. Tadbull. I went to every high school game he played in. Told Royce it was for the child of some friend of ours. He has a good future waiting for him. I don’t want to spoil it.”

If she knew what he was into, she wouldn’t be so sure of Wooty’s future
.

Nick tried to bring her back from her fond memories to the dangers of the present. “If there are no records in the courthouse proving he’s your son, why did you throw that trash can at me?”

“I don’t know much about courthouse records; I was scared of what you might find, there or somewhere else. Like you said, I didn’t want to kill you. Just make you go away. Make you think it was dangerous to poke around in the tribe’s past. I run off a few genealogists that way already, long time ago. You turned out to be more stubborn, smarter. Couldn’t even buy you off. I could’ve shot you though pretty easy, if I’d wanted.”

“Miss Luevie, you’re not leveling with me. Your past holds another secret, doesn’t it?” For a second, Nick thought she would bolt for the shotgun again. “The Vulture Cult.”

She gave him that look of astonished fear bordering on raw panic. “You—you know about the Vulture Cult?”

“Enough to understand your anxiety. I know that they were priests and undertakers, but much more. Figures of awe. Tribe members honored them—”

“And feared them,” said Luevenia, gazing intently at a space where Nick saw nothing. “The others shunned them when they were . . . unclean. They put the dead person on a scaffold of wood gathered by the family. They covered it with skins, left it to smoke over a fire for six days. The mourners and the Vultures sat around the scaffold and cried out their grief. Then the Vultures picked the body clean to the bones, in front of the mourners. And they buried the bones of the dead one in baskets in the mounds. Fed the remains to the water and the fishes of Lake Katogoula.”

She let go of the ancient vision of her ancestors and focused on Nick again. “After each time, the Vultures who did the ceremony had to cleanse themselves. The mourners went back to their house, the Vultures went to the woods. They didn’t eat for days and made drinks from
plants that made them vomit and sweat. A Vulture couldn’t perform another burial until one month had passed; and during all that time, he—or she, there were women ones, too—they couldn’t be anywhere near the preparation of food, or have . . . relations. The tribe left meals for them outside the village, like they pass trays to prisoners in jail.”

“Do you think the others still believe in the old taboos?”

She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I didn’t want to find out. Probably a lot of Katogoula don’t really know what the Vulture Cult was, the young ones especially. You might not think they care. We’re good Catholics now, you know?” She gave a slight chuckle. “Have been for more than a hundred years. I wonder, when it comes down to it. We’ve spent all them years forgetting, but when we start to remember, and find out which families were in it . . . well, I think you see what I was afraid of. Still am. Old Odeal Caspard—you know, the old man who’s always telling the same foolish jokes—he might be able to tell you some of the families, if his mind wasn’t half gone. I wanted to keep it that way. Selfish, I guess. I’m not sure how my Royce will take this.”

She had begun to squeeze her hands white, wringing them as if trying to unscrew them from her wrists.

“We were doing just fine until that recognition letter came from Washington,” she said, exasperation at the incidents beyond her control making her voice quaver. “Nobody expected it, not many would’ve wanted it if they knew all the trouble it would bring. The attention and meanness and lies. Would have been okay with just us as the tribe, just the few of us families looking out for each other, like always. But then they want to go poking around in the history of the tribe, like you did. Getting all kinds of folks we never heard of in here with their hands out. And sooner or later, I knew it, somebody was going to find out about me. . . . I’m glad I didn’t hurt you too bad. Went a little crazy.”

Nick asked himself how he would feel if he were to find out his ancestors picked rotted flesh from the bones of corpses? The idea would take some getting used to, at the very least.

“Wooty was gone to me. I just couldn’t bear to lose my husband, too,” Luevenia said. “And who’s going to want to eat in my store, with that awful thing in the back of their minds? That’s all we got, that store. I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t sleep in the same room. . . . You forgive me?”

“Sure, I forgive you. From what I’ve seen of Royce, my guess is he will, too.”

“You haven’t told anybody else? Please say you haven’t!”