Chương 28: Chapter 27 - Chitimacha

When I stopped in at the grocery store, Jay told me that if I wanted to find the local history expert, I should start by looking in Night Owl—which was either a bar, a restaurant, or some uncanny and dubious mixture of both. She also told me that if the expert was there, he would probably be drunk. I assumed that she meant he'd be drinking. It was hard for me to imagine that someone could already be drunk when it was barely noon, even if it was a Friday, but I had underestimated the good people of Fort Rive.

Night Owl turned out to be one of the flat-front, run-down buildings that blended in with the rest of the town. I took a deep breath, jerked the door open, and went inside before I could chicken out. The left half of the restaurant was taken up by tables. The three patrons scattered among them stopped what they were doing to watch me. The right side of the restaurant was dominated by a long counter that could have been a lunch counter or a bar.

Sitting alone on a stool in the center of the counter, raving at the burly man behind it, was the expert. Jay's description of him had been perfect, and he was already roaring drunk.

"It's a conspiracy! You know it! I know it! This whole damn town knows it! Where's that beer, John—" The burly man spoke without looking up from his paperwork.

"My name's not John."

"But you heard me ask for another?"

"I heard you, Ernst." Ernst put one elbow on the counter and leaned on it as he turned to look over the room. He was an older man, easily in his sixties, with a shock of silver hair that stood straight off his head and a large brow that protruded over his eyes. He wore jeans and a button-up shirt under a thin jacket. I wouldn't have picked him out as an expert, but he sure talked like a know-it-all. His scowl made the wrinkles in his face look even deeper.

"I don't know why the hell it's a conspiracy," he said to the room.

"At this point it's general knowledge." Drunks made me nervous, but this one seemed more talkative than combative, and talkative was how I liked my experts. I walked over to the counter. Ernst was too distracted by his ranting to notice my approach, and Not-John had trained himself to keep his head down, but the eyes of everyone else followed me across the room.

"But what are we going to do about it?" my expert cried. Not-John droned his line: "What are we going to do about it?"

"Nothing!" Ernst announced.

"We are the victims of a broken system! What could we do anyway?" One of his arms almost hit me when he swept them out in an exaggerated shrug.

"I don't know, Ernst," Not-John droned.

"What can we do?" I got the feeling that this exchange had happened more than once.

"I know!" Ernst shouted.

"We'll have another drink and talk about it. John!" He thumped on the counter top.

"Bring me a beer." I perched myself one stool away from my ranting expert. Any closer would've been in the impact zone. When I quietly cleared my throat, Not-John looked up from his paperwork. At first he appeared mildly annoyed, but that relatively happy emotional state must have been left over from his conversation with Ernst. When he saw me sitting there, his face hardened into a cold, ungiving expression. I interlaced my hands and squeezed them together so it'd be harder to see me shaking.

God forbid I should show any nerves. That might make them suspicious.

"Good afternoon," I said. I scanned his shirt for a name tag, but he didn't have one. Not-John dipped his head in a grudging nod. He didn't offer me a menu. That would make things more difficult. I would've looked around to see what the other patrons were eating, but I didn't want to see them staring at me.

"Do you make grilled cheese?" I asked. Not-John didn't answer. I wondered if I'd have to mime my way through a game of twenty-questions, restaurant edition, but then he spoke.

"We can do that. Anything else?"

"A Coke?" I guessed.

"What kind?" I thought we'd already established that, but I wasn't going to say so. I got the feeling that he was still trying to decide how much he hated me. Maybe he was a Pepsi man.

"Do you have Dr. Pepper?" I asked. Not-John stared at me for another second, then put down his pen and left, walking along the wall toward the kitchen door. He could have turned around and placed the order through the long rectangular opening in the wall—the cook was right there, I could see him glaring at me through the opening—but for whatever reason, he decided not to. I chose to assume he was checking to see if they had Dr. Pepper. It was the happiest of all the ideas that had occurred to me.

"Who the hell are you?" I turned to Ernst. He swayed slightly as he forced his bleary eyes to focus on me. Since his question had sounded more confused than angry, I decided to try the open and friendly routine. I plastered on my brightest smile and extended my hand.

"Emerra Cole." On the second try, he managed to grip it and give it a shake. I added, "I'm part of the conspiracy." It was awe-inspiring how wide Ernst's eyes could open.

"Are you?" he said.

"I was hired to help out in the Sauvage Preserve." Those bug-wide eyes narrowed into red-rimmed slits.

"You work with that she-ho?" Despite my nerves (or maybe because of them), I snorted with laughter. Elegant—I know. But I couldn't hold it back.

"I really hope you're talking about Ayla Davids," I said.

"Of course I am!" Ernst bellowed. That was quite a reputation Ayla had. I almost felt bad for her. He went on, "No other woman is dumb enough to go into that swamp. Except for maybe you. If you are a woman." His narrowed eyes fixed on me. I hated to imagine what conspiracy he was coming up with.

"What's your name?" I asked. He drew himself up.

"I'm Dylan Ernst." He put out his hand. This time I managed to hold back my laugh by biting on my lips. We solemnly shook hands again. In a quieter, more thoughtful voice, he said, "I've heard about you. The whole town's been talking." His low tone was so lulling that it took me a second to realize how ominous his statement was.

"Have you been in there?" he asked.

"The preserve?" I said." Yes, I have."

"Have you seen it?" There was nothing blurry about his gaze now. The intensity of it made me want to shrink into myself.

"Seen what?" I asked.

"The secret," he said.

"What secret?"

"There's a secret in that swamp. They're hiding something from us." An involuntary shiver made me tremble from head to foot. I had to force myself to sound lighthearted.

"Is that the conspiracy?" Ernst swung his index finger in a wide arc, gesturing to the whole room.

"These fools— these fools—will tell you it's the government. But I've looked it up. There's a private company behind it. They call it a 'preserve,' but what's a private company doing setting up a wilderness area?" He closed one of his eyes and jogged the same pointer finger at me.

"They're lying to us." I suddenly felt aware of the distance between me and the tip of his finger. It was only a few inches, but gazing at it made my stomach swoop as if I'd looked over the edge of a skyscraper. I could feel the cracked pleather seat under me, the counter under my arms, the eyes of everyone in the room, and a million miles of space. The only sounds came from the kitchen. Now I knew how Gladwyn felt. All those rumors. All those stories. They brushed too close to the truth for comfort.

Ernst saw my uneasiness. A slow smile spread over his face, and he lowered his finger.

"So, are you one of the liars? Or are you one of the ones who's been lied to?" Much too close for comfort.

"I don't know," I lied. The real answer was, of course, both. He raised his voice again—not back to a full bellow, but close.

"And can you tell me what those caretakers hired you to do, or is that a part of the secret?" If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. Thank god, I'd prepared an answer for that question—and thank you, Daniel Vance, for giving me the idea. If the lurkers could be trained to do it using only hand signs, then there was a good chance that no one would question my ability to do it.

"I go to various parts of the swamp," I said, "testing the water and checking it for contaminants."

"Oh, do you now?" Ernst's voice had returned to his low-and-thoughtful mode.

"I also heard that Jay was shopping around for waders the other day—said they were for the visitors. Would that be you?" It occurred to me that anyone who'd been trained to test swamp water would have their own waders. Based on the calculating expression on Ernst's face, it had occurred to him too. Geez! If the guy was this sharp when he was drunk, what would he be like sober? It was time to change the subject.

"I was just talking to Jay," I said.

"She said that you were some kind of expert on history." Ernst's spine straightened.

"I am."

"Do you know anything about the native tribes that lived in this area?"

"You'll have to be more specific!" He was bellowing again. I wished I'd brought some ear plugs.

"Do you mean 'this area,' Louisiana, or 'this area,' the Mississippi, or 'this area,' the south-eastern United States?"

"I meant 'this area,' the town of Fort Rive, and… maybe fifteen miles around." He stared at me long enough I had to fight the urge to squirm. Not-John returned with a hot plate, brimming with a gooey grilled-cheese sandwich and seasoned fries so greasy they were shiny. The sight made my heart swell, and tears rose to my eyes. Dramatic? Probably. But the last warm meal I'd enjoyed had been Vance's gumbo. Not-John put a tall plastic glass filled with a dark fizzy drink beside the plate.

I didn't know if it was going to be Coke or Dr. Pepper. I didn't care. I put my hands together and closed my eyes. Forgive me, Conrad, for this glorious meal that I am about to inhale. I would've shared it with you if I could. When I opened my eyes and picked up some fries, I noticed that Not-John was watching me.

"You religious?" he asked when our eyes met. I scarfed the fries and swallowed.

"Only in the presence of something holy." Ernst turned to our waiter. Not-John had already gone back to his paperwork. Ernst said, "Tell me, John—""My name's not John."

"—why do you think that someone who 'tests the water' in the Sauvage Preserve would be interested in the native tribe that lived around here?" I froze with half of my grilled-cheese sandwich millimeters away from my mouth. One breath. Two. Then, despite every order I silently yelled at myself, my eyes rose. They met Not-John's again. His cold gaze had become positively icy.

"I don't know, Ernst," Not-John said. Ernst turned to me. It was an exaggerated movement that could've come right out of a comedy routine, but he stopped short of falling off his stool.

"Oh, well." He scrunched his face into an inebriated version of a never-mind or it-doesn't-matter expression.

"How about you, young lady? Do you know? I'd be mighty interested." You and everyone else in this restaurant. And given the speed of gossip in this town, it would probably be printed in the local paper's evening edition. It was time to get creative. I took a huge bite of sandwich and chewed slowly. In the churning chaos of my brain, I could hear a voice that sounded like Iset's, walking me through what I could and couldn't say.

In the background there was a replay of all the times that Darius Vasil had told me that I was a lousy liar. I thought about Ayla Davids and her mask. Could I ever play it that cool? Unlikely. I couldn't play it cool when I wasn't lying. I would have to assume a role of some kind—a one-woman show for a fun-sized audience. I was a passable actor as long as there were no vampires or wolfmen around. It doesn't matter how good or bad you are at it, Emerra. These people are already suspicious of you.

They aren't going to believe a thing you say. In a weird way, that made me feel better. I swallowed, threw on my college-student persona, and looked up at Ernst.

"My roommate's an anthropology major," I said.

"Since I'm going around the swamp, I thought I'd keep an eye out for arrowheads or something." He frowned.

"You're wasting your time."

"There were no Native Americans around here?"

"No. That swamp is a hell-hole for anthropology. Artifacts can't last in that kind of an environment." I thought of the lamp, burning away for countless years.

"Not even stone ones?" I asked. Ernst leaned on the counter again, slumping his weight against his elbow so he could focus on getting out all the big words.

"The Chitimacha didn't have stone implements. Not many of them, anyway. Not enough. They regularly traded part of their agricultural yield with the Avoyell, to the north, for stone. They made their projectile points out of gar scales and fish bones." I kept my eyes on my sandwich. If anyone saw the sparkle in them, they'd know they had reason to be suspicious. I had no idea what a gar was, but I knew that Ernst was now in full lecture mode. I had found the right drunk.

"Could I get a cup of coffee?" I said to Not-John. As he reached down to grab a mug, I turned to Ernst.

"The chittah…?" I said, deliberately slaughtering the word. Ernst was compelled to correct me: "The Chitimacha." He nodded after he said it, as if confirming his own statement.

"They used to be the most powerful nation between Florida and Texas." Not-John poured the coffee from the urn behind him, put the mug in front of me, and placed a sugar-and-cream caddy beside it. I thanked him, then said to Ernst, with my best confused face on, "They were that powerful? I've never heard of them."

"Given the deplorable state of the American education system, that doesn't surprise me," Ernst said.

"The average history student is barely more than an embarrassment." I nudged the coffee toward him.

"Ah, thank you." He picked it up and sipped. He was probably used to drinking it black.

"What happened to them?" I asked.

"The same thing that happened to all the native tribes. They got in trouble with the European settlers, fought, and lost." He scowled and waved his free hand around.

"The Chitimacha history is more convoluted than some, but that makes sense since this is Louisiana—""How so?" Ernst's head bobbed as he tried to focus on me.

"Hmmm?"

"What does this being Louisiana have to do with anything?" His scowl deepened. It looked like his train of thought had derailed and he was sorting through the wreckage.

"The French," he announced at last. I glanced around to see if anyone else was confused, but the only other person in my line of vision was Not-John. He was using Ernst's distraction to get some work done.

"Umm…" I said.

"The French!" Ernst hollered—because volume always makes things clearer.

"Iberville, the Spanish, Napoleon, the Purchase—oh, god, tell me you've at least heard about the Louisiana Purchase." He clung to his coffee mug as if it was a lifeline that could keep him from drifting into an ocean of despair. I felt nettled but tried to ignore it.

"I've heard of the Louisiana Purchase." But knowledge didn't get experts to talk. Ignorance did.

"I just never really thought about it before." That was true. History was too big for me. I had to unlock my mind from the tiny corner it usually occupied and let it expand until it could take in the thousands of years that came before me.

"The French lived here," I muttered.

"Two groups of them," Ernst said.

"The French who came over from France, and the French who came down from Canada. I wouldn't call that the start of the problems for the Chitimacha, but it hurried the problems along." It felt like he was baiting me.

"How so?" He took a long drink of coffee, then put the mug down on the counter. Without a word, Not-John filled it up from the urn he'd kept at hand. Ernst didn't seem to notice. He was too busy sizing me up to figure out what kind of lure to use next. He said, "The French Canadians thought the French Europeans were incompetent. The European French thought the Canadians were smelly, fur-trading barbarians. I don't know about smelly, but they were right about the barbarian part.

To keep the peace, the governor at the time separated the two groups and sent the French Canadians off to guard the fort they'd built in an attempt to keep out the British settlers. But it was only a bunch of men—almost no women." Ernst shaped his words with exaggerated care, so I'd be sure to hear the contempt: "They got 'lonely.'" He dropped the mocking expression, leaving behind slack cheeks, dull eyes, and a slight frown. It was the look left over when you'd swept away all the theatrics.

Dust over the empty floorboards. A thousand times more real than anything I'd seen before. He said, "They started raiding Chitimacha villages for women and children." My breath stopped. I could feel it, stalled, high in my chest cavity, squeezing my heart.

"The governor, of course, was horrified," Ernst said.

"He told them to stop, but they ignored him." A smirk twisted up one side of Ernst's mouth.

"Maybe the twerp was incompetent." He lifted his refilled mug, took another sip of coffee, then continued.

"The Chitimacha weren't stupid. They knew that the French had ties with the other tribes in the area, and those tribes were already hostile to them. They tried to avoid war for as long as possible, but then a group of Taensa invited some Chitimacha over for a party, tied up the lot of them, and sold them to the French for slaves. That was the last straw." I had started breathing again, but my head was still swimming. I couldn't taste my food, and my hands felt heavy. This was a history I'd never heard before.

It hurt. Ernst was too carried away with his story to notice.

"Unfortunately," he said, "before the Chitimacha war party found any Taensa, they ran across a Jesuit missionary, his assistants, and their native slave. Considering the mood they were in…then seeing the native slave…" He paused for a moment, then said in a loud, blunt voice, "They killed everyone else and let the slave go. That was a mistake. The slave returned to the French and told them what had happened. If you kill a fur-trader—" Ernst shrugged.

"But you kill a missionary?" He put down his mug and wagged his finger side-to-side in a no-no motion. When I spoke, my lips felt slightly numb.

"That's how they got in trouble with the white settlers?" Ernst stared up at the ceiling.

"The war lasted for twelve years." For a minute we sat there—him, sipping his coffee; me, eating my sandwich and fries, wishing they tasted like something other than plastic and cardboard. Why was it, every time I went looking into something, there was always some horrible story behind it? I guess problems don't come from the happy parts of history. Problems! Right! I wasn't asking for this history lesson because I was a masochist. I needed to figure out who'd created that lamp!

"Were the Chitimacha the only tribe that lived close to Fort Rive?" I asked.

"During that time period, and as far as we can tell, yes," Ernst said.

"What do you mean, 'as far as we can tell?'""Native territories were pretty damn fluid, and, of course, there's the problem with the Louisiana records—""What problem?"

"When the French left, most of them took their records with them. We've got holes in our history like a hooker's fishnet stockings. Come to think of it," he added in a mutter, "this place is hell for historians too." It was true that my knowledge of history was deplorable, but at least one fact had stuck with me, and Ernst had reminded me of it.

"You mentioned that the Chitimacha traded with other tribes," I said.

"I did," Ernst affirmed.

"Did they use hand signs—like, sign language—to do that?" That might have been where the lurkers learned it.

"No one knows," Ernst said. I clamped down on my lips so I wouldn't sputter. When most of my irritation had passed, I grumbled, "Let me guess. More holes in the history?"

"Go on!" he cried.

"Look around! There's virtually no information! No censuses, no records—the Chitimacha were ignored because people assumed they were of no consequence. Why would the United States government bother counting a group of people so small that they were probably going to die out anyway?" I didn't know how much of that rant was based on historical fact versus Dylan Ernst's private brand of cynicism, but, like all his other conspiracy theories, it sounded true enough to make me uncomfortable.

A sick, sad feeling bored a hole in the pit of my stomach.

"I thought they were one of the most powerful tribes," I said.

"And after twelve years of war, they were almost gone. A handful was all that was left. Everyone else had been taken as slaves or killed." Ernst leaned toward me. His breath smelled like beer and coffee.

"That's what happens when you annihilate a whole nation—you lose a lot of important things. Including information." I took a deep breath and a long drink from what turned out to be Dr. Pepper. Come on, Emerra. There has to be something that can tie the lamp to the people who made it. The artifact was magic. But I couldn't ask about magic. It was a lamp. But everybody needed light.

The Chitimacha would've had good reason to warn the lurkers about white people, but—as Ernst had pointed out—that was true for every tribe in the state. I paused. There was one other thing I knew. The lamp was old. I put down my soda.

"How long had the Chitimacha lived here?"

"That depends!" Ernst hollered.

"Do you listen to the egotists who have the gall to sit around and debate where the line is where one culture evolves into another? Or do you listen to the number-lovers who nitpick every last scrap of evidence to prove their pet theory about which AD or BC to reference?" Slowly, trying to tease out the best way to answer him, I said, "Who do you listen to?" Ernst grinned. It crept onto his face, growing larger than I would've imagined it could. Apparently, that had been the right answer.

"The Chitimacha say they've always been here," Ernst said. There was a blank beat where my brain tried to accept his statement.

"Always?" I said.

"They may very well be the original residents of Louisiana. We can confirm that people were occupying the lower Mississippi Valley all the way back around 12, 000 BC, and when we ask the Chitimacha, they say they have no memory of living anywhere else. I say"—Ernst held up his right hand, not quite pointing at me, but not quite not, his hand shaking, either from the alcohol or from a need for more of it—" I say, why not believe them?"