Deadly Pedigree

15



Nick knew he should be concentrating on further sundering the thread from Hyam Balazar to Natalie Armiger. But wasn’t it possible that Ivanhoe had a place in the direct line of her ancestry, that the Ivanhoe-Jacob conflict wasn’t just a fascinating sideshow? The likelihood of surprises multiplies geometrically the further you go back. No, Ivanhoe shouldn’t be relegated to a ghetto of collateral unimportance just yet.

Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants for Madame Armiger, finding that her blue blood had black and Jewish tributaries! She wouldn’t have a client left–even in the city of which Huey Long once said that a cup of red beans and rice could feed all its “pure” white people, with some to spare.

Besides, Nick was willing to bet that Jacob Balazar, because he hated his father and his father’s origins and was so concerned with creating his own version of his family’s history, probably had done a lot of the work for him; a few dollars or threats from Jacob might have caused the damage of a dozen courthouse fires or floods…or of one Nick Herald. No wonder so few traces of Hyam existed.

Nick felt entitled to a little genealogical diversion. He was, as usual, curious: did Ivanhoe ever get his “portion?”

Ivanhoe had been right about the old Chirke place: he’d overpaid for it. The terrain didn’t look at all like the rest of mostly flat, fertile Louisiana; Nick drove up and down scrub pine-covered hills that had some pretensions of being mountainous. The distinctive red dirt gave the area a rusty, disused appearance. The property was about five miles from Natchitoches, real estate that must have been undesirable even to developers. But the highway department apparently had liked the desolate location: cars zipped along I-49, half a mile away.

He drove into the dirt driveway of a small wood-frame house with a lean-to carport and a screened front porch. Country silence and red dust enveloped his car when he killed the engine. He knocked on a vertical piece of screen-door frame that had needed painting a long time ago.

“Morning. My name’s Edmund Spenser,” Nick said to the woman who answered his knocks. “I’m a research associate at Freret University, in New Orleans. Are you Mrs. Balzar?”

“Why, yessir, I am. I’m Dora Balzar.” She was cherry wood brown, with purple pouches under her eyes; thick around the middle, in her late fifties. She wore a blue polka dot skirt and a polyester white blouse with lots of ruffles. She didn’t seem to be the pants-wearing type.

“Oh, good. Well, Mrs. Balzar, I’m working on a book, a book about…“ Nick stammered, realizing he hadn’t fabricated the details of his deception on the drive over. “A book on the African American role, uh, in the expansion of the frontier to the West. I have reason to believe that an ancestor of your husband’s might have been a buffalo soldier.”

“A what kind of soldier? You best talk to my husband, Erasmus. I don’t know nothing about buffaloes, and don’t want to, either. Come on in. I’ll go get him.” She opened the screen door and let Nick in, looking back with some suspicion, he thought, at this white stranger who might very well be the taxman or some other figure of authority who would bring hassles.

Nick heard a television from another part of the house. An interview show. The audience erupted in laughter, then groaned in disapproval, then applauded and hooted. The living room was as comfortable as straitened circumstances allowed–lots of discount store furniture and the kind of damaged antiques and knickknacks well-to-do white people discard when aged relatives die. Clearly, the Balzars were proud of this room, and it was reserved for company, though there probably wasn’t much of that.

There was no air-conditioning, but several lethargic oscillating fans kept the place remarkably cool. Nick inhaled the aroma of some wonderful meat dish emanating from the kitchen, and decided that Dora Balzar was one of those great Louisiana cooks who could put any New Orleans chef to shame, but whose artistry was known only to their families.

As he waited, Nick studied family snapshots and Wal-Mart portraits in cheap frames hanging on the walls and dotting every table. Three attractive, happy brown youths, frozen at various stages of life. The newest generation of Balzars. One son looked very much like Dora–probably the eldest, Nick judged. The most recent photo of this young man showed him stone-faced, in some kind of military uniform. Another frame enclosed a lighter, slighter young man, no doubt the younger son; he beamed with pride in a college cap and gown. Following a progression of pictures, Nick jumped through the daughter’s life, each shot a stepping stone in the stream of time. The laughing, gap-toothed girl became the starry-eyed bride in the space of seconds.

Erasmus Balzar had entered the room before Nick noticed him. He asked his guest to have a seat. Dora brought him a Dr. Pepper and some freshly baked cookies. Erasmus was lighter skinned than his wife, considerably overweight for his five-eight frame, and in poor health. He explained, in short breaths, that he’d worked at the local poultry plant until it closed without warning five years ago, and since then the family had lived on his small Army disability pay, his wife’s meager earnings as a seamstress at a store in town and as a freelancer for certain wealthy white women, and on various other government benefits. A heart attack, diabetes, a lifetime of smoking, and high blood pressure had taken a toll on his activities. The worry showed in the hollow bewilderment of his eyes, and echoed in the pensive silences between his sentences.

“Now, my grandpa in there, watching the TV. Erasmus the Second–we just call him ‘Twice,’ you know, because of the two after his name. Sometime we call him three times.” He laughed up some phlegm at this old family witticism.

“Rasmus,” Dora Balzar said, “Lord have mercy, don’t be talking about Twice that way. It’s shameful.” She left the room shaking her head, but smiling nevertheless.

Erasmus the Third continued: “He don’t have nothing wrong him, ’cept he can’t all the time remember things too good. But he’s ninety-two. Yes indeed. Ninety-two.” He seemed to lose his way, but then added, “Don’t guess I’ll make that.”

“Do you know anything about your ancestor, Ivanhoe Balzar?” Nick asked.

“He was my great-great-grandpa, I think. They say he cut hair way back when, over in a shop downtown. Somehow the building got named after him, so he must have been a pretty good barber. I used to hear that a white man shot him down over the price of a shave. They did that in them days, the white folks, you know. What’s this book you workin’ on? It gonna be a movie of the week, or what?”

Nick searched his small stock of frontier lore and came up with some convincing questions, making a show of writing down Erasmus’s answers. Erasmus gradually grew to like the idea that his great-great-grand might have lived an exciting life in the Wild West.

“Come on in here and let’s try and get Twice to remember something,” wheezed Erasmus with sudden enthusiasm.

Twice sat on a slipcovered couch before a large, rather new television. He gripped the changer tightly in one bony hand and rested the other limply beside him. They couldn’t get cable out here, and there was no money for a satellite dish, so they had to do with the grainy over-the-air signals from Shreveport, Alexandria, and Monroe.

Looking at Twice, Nick thought he could see Ivanhoe himself, and beyond him, Hyam and Mulatta Belle. Just a few pinches of the human clay, just a layer or two more or less of watery beige tint, would do the trick. He was strikingly thin and bent into angles like a grasshopper, though he was probably six-and-a-half feet stretched out. His skin was vitreous, like a piece of glazed old china, relatively unwrinkled and surprisingly youthful looking, with a sandy darkness deep down. Nick imagined he would shatter into a million pieces if touched too hard. His eyes were milky with cataract; Nick doubted he could see much of the show he watched, or even understand it. There were a few curlicues of gray hair around his sunken temples. He was dressed neatly, by Dora certainly, in a light-blue button-down shirt and a crisp pair of work jeans.

Nick rapidly figured the relationships: if Ivanhoe was Erasmus III’s great-great-grandfather, and Twice is his grandfather, then…

“Twice, can you tell me about your grandfather, the man named Ivanhoe Balzar?” Nick began, sitting down next to the old man on the sofa. “Did your grandmother or your father ever speak of him? Maybe tell you if there were any important family papers put away somewhere?”

Nick was thinking of that letter Ivanhoe had mentioned, all the while feeling guilty because the diary really belonged to these people.

Well, I’ll share the royalties when I get the thing published…don’t kid yourself, Nicky boy; Armiger will never let it happen. Nick struggled to banish those thoughts.

Twice stared straight ahead at the television. His face twitched with the effort of recollection. “Chocolate! Vanilla! Fresh, fresh berries! Half-price! Hurry, hurry!” he screamed, startling them all. Here was a man who had heard too many commercials.

“He likes his ice cream, he sure do,” Dora said, smiling patiently at her antediluvian in-law. “Let me just go get him some. Maybe that’ll calm him down.”

“Twice, Twice. Think, now,” Nick began again, feeling like a hypnotist. “I’m trying to learn all I can about your grandfather. He might have been a hero, and we want to tell his story to the world.” Nick was convinced about the hero part, though not sure that he was exactly sincere about telling the world.

“The Good Book,” Twice said solemnly, holding up an index finger, in a credible impersonation of the Grim Reaper. “First shall be last, and last shall be first. Time to reap and sow. Rejoice, leap for joy, for your reward. Happy are the mild-tempered; lo, they inherit the earth. Make your peace with your brother and offer up your gift. Yes mean yes, no mean no. Store up treasures, where moth and rust do not consume, thieves break not in and steal. There your heart will be also. Keep on asking, and it shall be given; seeking, you shall find. No rotten tree brings forth fine fruit. Fresh, fresh! Hurry while they last! In the Good Book, look to the Good Book!”

Dora brought his ice cream, and he was pacified.

More than eighty years of Ecclesiastes and the Sermon on the Mount had left plenty of echoes in old Twice’s eroded brain. Nick didn’t detect anything useful in the old man’s muddled oration. Too bad. Family secrets often were hidden away in the memories of old ones like Twice.

“We always been a family that keeps our important dates and such in the Bible,” Erasmus said. “That’s probably what he jabbering on about. It’s right over here. But there ain’t nothing older than Twice written down. Guess the one before this got lost somewhere.”

Erasmus showed Nick the family Bible, which was nothing special–the branching out of the family from Twice’s generation. He jotted down the information recorded between the testaments, out of habit. At least now he could attach names to the faces in the photos hanging in the Balzar living room: Shelvin, Ronald, and Winfred…for all the good it would do him.

After promising to send a copy of the book on buffalo soldiers to the Balzars, Nick preceded Dora to the door, eager to move on to his next stop. He had only about two hours left; and even leaving at four, he’d have to burn rubber and any remaining oil getting back to New Orleans by eight.

He walked out to his car in the searing heat. The trunk and passenger door were open. His bag, in the trunk, had been ransacked. Fortunately, he had hidden the diary and other documents in the spare-tire well, and that seemed undisturbed.

He looked around, but saw no one. Puzzled and pissed-off, he started stuffing his things back into the bag.

A pair of strong hands grabbed his shoulders and spun him around, slamming him against the side of the car.

“What the f*ck you doing out here, whitey?” said the big guy who was using a forearm to do a professional job of stopping the flow of air through Nick’s windpipe. “I been hearing about you in town. Asking questions about my family. Friend of mine works over at that hotel you stayed at. So, who are you and what you want?”

“Shelvin! Leave him alone, you hear me! Shelvin! Let the man go. Now!” Dora shouted from the porch. “You all right, Mr. Spenser? My Shelvin, he don’t mean nothing. That Army training and the Gulf War plum ruined my boy’s manners. Shelvin, tell Mr. Spenser you sorry.”

“That’s not his real name, Mama. He’s up to something no good, like all the white devils. Ain’t that right, Mr. Nick Herald from New Orleans?”

When a guy introduces himself with the etiquette of a commando and the ecumenism of a religious zealot, small talk is moot. Nick merely coughed in reply, feeling lucky to be alive.

Shelvin was six-six of lean muscle topped by a shaved head that looked like the old football helmets from Knute Rockne’s day. He wore knee-length black biking shorts, a black muscle shirt with a gold X front and back, and black Converse high tops–all of which made Nick hotter just looking at them.

“I don’t care what he call himself. You just leave him alone and let him be on his way,” Dora said firmly. She went back inside, confident of being obeyed.

“You a lawyer, huh?”

Nick continued stowing his belongings. “No, I’m not a lawyer. I’m a genealogist, someone who researches family histories. I’m in Natchitoches trying to learn all I can about a certain family that lived here during the nineteenth century. Some of the descendants now live in New Orleans, and I’m working for them.”

“What’s that got to do with us?” Shelvin asked, showing interest in hearing something besides gagging from Nick’s throat.

“That’s what I’m here to find out.”

Shelvin stared off into the distance. “I always wanted to know what it was like to live in Africa, before slavery days.”

“I’d be glad to help you get started in genealogy, Shelvin. No charge. Hey, I’m not such a bad guy. Really.”

Nick wanted to come clean. He felt he owed it to Ivanhoe. But he couldn’t. Not yet, anyway, if ever.

Shelvin looked Nick up and down and seemed to come to a decision.

“Sure, I heard of them Balazar people just about all my life. They the ones you interested in, right?”

“Right.”

This guy was quite the detective. But he apparently didn’t see a connection between his family and that one, any more than a Smith would assume a relation to a Smythe.

“Since the mayor always telling us to be nice to tourists, I guess I better be,” Shelvin said. “There’s an old plantation outside of town once belonged to Balazar folks, people say. Used to be St. Denis Parish, way back. Me and my women go out there, and, you know…” He demonstrated with fingers what carnal choreography he and his lady friends performed. “Come on. I’ll take you there.”

Nick followed Shelvin, who drove at a maddeningly slow 20mph in his low-riding matte-black 1953 Ford pickup. Nick could feel the thumping of his audio system from thirty feet behind him.

After a succession of potholed parish roads, they ended up on a meandering, grassy lane bordered by ancient oaks. Through the trees Nick glimpsed vast fields, producing now only stands of immigrant shrubs and trees; now and then he saw a weathered, disintegrating tin-roofed sharecropper’s house.

The manse itself was nothing more than seven columns and remnants of two brick walls. Hyam Balazar had planned the approach with drama: the house once towered over the carriage roundabout that the gravel road unexpectedly led into; it must have been a breathtaking event to pull up in front of Mitzvah Plantation. Within the round enclosure stood a lichen-gray classical water nymph, her head missing, petrified in the act of emptying giant seashells into a dry pool. A new “For Sale” sign was nailed to one hoary tree. Artemis Realty, it read.

Figures, Nick thought. Natalie Armiger was systematic, he had to give her that. She was pursuing her own track to destroy evidence linking her to the Balazars. And she knew a lot more than she’d admitted.

Nick felt awash in a confluence of paradoxes flowing from the nymph’s empty shells. This place that Shelvin used as a sexual playground had been the setting for Hyam and Mulatta Belle’s unconquerable love, a relationship so far beyond mere physicality that it had stretched into the succeeding century; and even though, unwittingly, Shelvin represented the line of disinherited Balzars, robbed of part of their heritage and their “Portion,” he considered himself the master of this rotting kingdom.

“They say it burnt down about a hundred years ago,” Shelvin said, as they walked amid the steamy shadows.

Cicadas wailed, and then suddenly ceased as if strangled; but others took up the mournful antiphonal song.

“Was anything saved? Business records, books, letters?”

“Can’t say as I heard anything like that. How come I get the feeling you not telling all you know? You ain’t playing fair with me. I think there’s something going on here more than just this genealogical bullshit, man. I’m in New Orleans a lot. In the Army Reserve, and we got our summer exercises just across the river in southern Mississippi this year. I be looking you up one day and ask you again…where my mama can’t interrupt us.”

“Suit yourself. But I’ll tell you one thing: I’m not your enemy, Shelvin. One day, I may turn out to be the best friend your family ever had.”

“I heard that before, fool, from lots of white folks, and still got f*cked over. When you prove I can trust you, then I will.”



Nick followed Shelvin back through the maze of deteriorating roads to a convenience store Nick recognized as a reference point from his earlier navigation of the town. Shelvin pulled his thumping truck into a parking place that seemed reserved for him, in front of the ice machine and the pay telephone. He got out of the truck and just stared at Nick, cross-armed, refusing to acknowledge his farewell wave.





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