Burial Ground (25 page)

“But you think you can make a difference,” I said.

The warden shrugged. “I have to tell myself that. You see ever since this place became a state penitentiary, around the turn of the century, the warden’s been a boss. It’s a throwback to the days when this was a plantation that rented inmates from the state. The overseer was the boss back then. Hundreds died under that system, so the state bought the land and made it into a public institution. But the same practices continued. They even armed some of the inmates, the trustees, and made them guards over the others. It was supposed to save money. And that was pretty much the way it was, except for a couple of deviations.” He got up from his chair, no longer the warden, but the professor delivering a lecture. “Back in the early thirties they hired a man from Pennsylvania, a reformer. He caught a lot of flak for being too lenient. Then, one Sunday, eleven of the inmates staged a big break while the guards and their families were having a baseball game. Killed the guard captain and two others. Turned out the guns for the break had been smuggled in by a woman visiting a prisoner. The warden—they called him the prison manager then—caught hell. They claimed he’d revoked the order to search women visitors.”

Goodeau strode over to the window and looked out, hands clasped behind him. “They sent him packing, of course. Things pretty much stayed the same until the early fifties and the heel cuttings.” He turned around to face us: “Things improved after that, and nowadays we don’t have the cane fields, and inmates don’t disappear, but it’s still just a six-thousand-acre campground where you store people. And there’re more coming every day.”

He relapsed back into his chair as if all the hope had leaked out of him. “And fool that I am, I keep telling myself there has to be some better way for society to solve its problems than by sending men off for ten or twenty years or life. You see, even for those who don’t have a life sentence, it can just as easily become one.”

“Inmate killings?” Pepper asked.

“Oh, there’re those, all right, though we’re pretty good at keeping a lid on them. No, I mean AIDS. The day’s coming when a man who comes here for five years will have a death sentence. It’s spreading and nobody really cares. Society doesn’t worry about a bunch of inmates.” He stretched his hands out before him on the desk.

“I hadn’t thought about that,” Pepper said, shaking her head.

The warden nodded grimly. “Well, maybe we’ll get some help out of the legislature, right? At least, you have to try. Now, on to a more pleasant subject, this project of yours …”

“We think it would make a real contribution,” Pepper blurted.

Goodeau nodded amiably. “I’m sure. I’ve done a little reading about this area. You know, I’ve always been interested in history. Sort of runs in the family, you might say.”

“You’ve got about a thousand years of history right here,” I said, and told him about the Tunica cemetery at Bloodhound Hill, inside the prison, and the even earlier Indian mounds throughout the area. He listened attentively, nodding and making approving sounds.

“And I suppose if you find anything else that relates to the Tunica, they’ll want to claim the prison.” He gave a nervous little chuckle.

“Always possible,” I said. “But I don’t think they’re likely to get Angola.”

“Just my cousin’s plantation, eh?” Goodeau joked.

“Oh?” Pepper gave me a look.

“Well, not many people know it,” the warden said, “but in the early part of the century, before our family bought it, the Indians made a claim to the place. Didn’t get anywhere.”

I sat forward in my chair: “This is in the records?”

“No. It was in an old diary my cousin Carter has. It was left in the house by the family that had it before the Civil War. Nobody paid any attention to it, but Eulalia found it and I think she was going to try to have it published when she got sick.”

“Was this claim ever brought to court?”

“Well…” Goodeau’s answer was cut short by a pounding on his door. He blinked.

“What is it?”

In answer, the door burst open and young Briney stood staring from one of us to the other.

“What’s this about?” the warden demanded. “What do you mean breaking in like this?”

“It’s about the chase team,” Briney tried to explain. “The sheriff’s asked us to help him.”

“What?”

The phone in the outer office rang then and I heard the secretary saying something in a low voice.

“What’s he need the chase team for?” Goodeau asked.

His phone buzzed and he picked it up.

“Yes? Oh, hello, Sheriff.” He listened, face intent, then nodded. “Sure. Any way we can.” He replaced the receiver and gave Briney a sour look.

“That was the sheriff. Well, I gave him the chase team.” He waved a hand, dismissing his subordinate, and then turned to us.

“Hell of a thing.” He got up again and stock his straw hat down on his bald dome.

“That Indian boy they locked up for killing old Absalom? He broke out of the jail and stole a boat. They want to use our hounds to run him down.”

T
WENTY-TWO

It was a long time before I could get my breath back.

“Escaped?” I heard Pepper’s voice, as incredulous as I felt.

The warden started out, then stopped. “Look, I hope you’ll excuse me. But I like to keep an eye on the guys when they go off on these chases. They can get carried away.”

I mumbled something about understanding and we trailed after him, past the secretary’s desk. The warden stopped abruptly:

“Mrs. Burr, if that investigator comes, tell him we’ll just have to reschedule. I don’t want him rummaging through my files if I’m not here.”

Mrs. Burr nodded primly. “He won’t get anywhere with me, Warden.”

Goodeau glanced back over his shoulder. “Never a day without a crisis,” he tried to joke.

We watched him go and I saw Mrs. Burr give an almost imperceptible shake of her head.

“It’s a lot of stress to be under, being a warden,” I said.

Mrs. Burr looked up quickly. “Stress? You don’t know the half of it. Such a good man. You know, I worked for Warden Goodeau when he was at the university. I wouldn’t have come up here for anybody else. He tries so hard to protect his people, but you know what they have here…” She leaned toward us. “Just a bunch of good old boy types.”

I thought of young Briney and couldn’t find anything to say in contradiction.

“Then there’s stress from on top,” she went on. “All the politicians want favors. A job for somebody, special treatment for somebody’s brother-in-law who’s here for ninety-nine years for a double murder. And now the State Attorney General, trying to uncover brutality.” She tsked and brought herself up straight in the chair. “Well, what do they expect? It’s a brutal place. Everyone who works here is brutal, except for a few of the social workers and Warden Goodeau. But I keep asking him, how long can anyone keep working here and not become brutal, too?”

We left her at the desk and as we rounded a corner in the corridor almost collided with a young man with shined shoes and a briefcase that spelled lawyer. The AG’s man, I thought. Poor Warden Goodeau.

We were out the gate before either of us spoke to the other.

“They’ll kill him,” she said. “I can feel it.”

I remembered the posse that had found us on the island. She was right. And if they didn’t, the deputies would.

“He shouldn’t have run,” I said.

She turned on me, eyes flashing: “Why not? If you’re not guilty, why just stand there and take it? His people have been doing that for hundreds of years. What has it gotten them?”

“I know. Still, it wasn’t smart. If he’d stayed put a lawyer could have gotten him off.”

“You think so.” We were passing through Tunica now and I saw a man in prison blue, with sideburns and a leather-tanned face, talking to someone outside the general store. She jerked her head in his direction. “You think a jury of
those
would vote for an Indian.”

“Whoa. That’s kind of harsh.”

“Why? They hate blacks, don’t they?”

“They aren’t known for their liberal views,” I conceded. “But Indians—”

“The Tunicas stirred up a lot of trouble when they claimed the original treasure,” she said. “I read about it in Jeff Brain’s book. People resented the fact that the Indians ended up with something that had been found by a local man, on private property the Indians hadn’t been on for a hundred and fifty years. So you think they wouldn’t like to get back at an Indian, and a Tunica at that?”

“I think you’re being unreasonable,” I said. “Besides, the Indians have been making some ridiculous demands.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. They’re suing to claim all of Marksville just because their reservation is there.”

“It makes more sense than anybody’s wanting to live in Marksville now,” she declared.

“Have you ever
been
to Marksville?”

“Well, not exactly …”

“A very charming little town, for your information. Classically French.”

“Founded by an Italian,” she shot back.

“How did you know that?”

“I read, too. As a matter of fact, it was in one of your own culture history reports in the state office.”

I folded my arms. “It doesn’t matter. The point is that the Indians are making some impossible demands.”

She gave me a sweet smile. “I’m sure some of your best friends are Native Americans.”

“Well, they
are
.”

“God help us.”

“Just because I don’t want to hand back every burial archaeologists have recovered for the past two hundred years,” I complained. “My God, what kind of sense does that make? The Tunica can’t make any rational connection to most of those burials, anyway. They’re always ranting about blood brotherhood, but the truth is that before the whites came, all these tribes were at war with one another, and it didn’t stop after that. Both before and after the Europeans, they moved all over the place, not just small family groups, but whole tribes. So how can a twentieth-century Tunica or Sioux claim any kind of connection with some burial from Wisconsin or Louisiana that dates from three thousand B
.C.
? It probably wasn’t even a member of their group.
Their
group was probably the damn enemy.”

“You have the sensitivity of a slug,” she said, and stomped the accelerator. “No wonder the Native Americans want a little autonomy.”

“Oh, I’m to blame for the whole business, just because I’m not politically correct?”

“You and people like you, yes. It was people like you who displayed Indian burials in museum cases with clever captions. Or who just stuck the bones away in the museum and never even analyzed them.”

“This is incredible,” I said. “Who did you say was your major professor? Angela Davis?”

“Who?”

It was my turn to utter God’s name.

“Anyway,” she said, “he’d end up with a public defender and you know how incompetent they are.”

“So he won’t get Johnnie Cochran,” I admitted. “But they still have to have a certain amount of evidence. If they convict on less, the appeals court will throw it out.”

“Are you willing to bet his life on that?” she asked quietly.

“I dunno.”

“You know he’s innocent.”

“We agree on something. But I don’t know if we agree for the same reasons.”

“I’d like to hear yours.”

I exhaled. “I’ve said them already: Ben’s a youngster. Hot-blooded and full of resentment. But he didn’t kill us when he had the chance. It was a real dilemma for him. He could have killed Absalom in the heat of the moment, if Absalom was in the middle of rifling a grave, sure. But he said he didn’t and I believe him. I think, with all his blood up and his Indian pride, he’d have said so if he’d done it. Now what’s
your
reasoning?”

“Elementary,” she sniffed. “Ben gave himself too many motives for killing the old man to have really done it. A guilty person would never have admitted as much as Ben did. Besides, I don’t think Ben knows where the burial ground is.”

“No?”

“No. I think he was out there looking, just like we were. But if he’d found Absalom actually pilfering a grave, then there’d have been no need to keep looking.”

“Interesting reasoning,” I said, glancing back over my shoulder at the highway. “Anything else, before we get run over?”

“He didn’t have a killer’s eyes,” she said in a near undertone.

“Oh.”

She eased off the brake and we started forward again. I was thinking of the night on the river and the bullets zinging past my head. Was I right in my analysis? Had Ben missed on purpose, or was he just a lousy shot?

She turned to face me again: “Alan, we can’t just let them murder him.”

The car edged toward one of the bluffs on the side of the road and I took a deep breath.

“Oh? What are we going to do?”

She jerked the wheel just in time to keep from leaving the roadway.