According to Henry’s research, the mysterious “Tree of Bones” dated to pre-Columbian times, when the mound-building Natchez Indians were said to have traveled south to conduct rituals beneath a great cypress in a swamp that lay to the east of the Father of Waters, between two natural clearings that would later become the towns of Woodville and Athens Point. In that swamp, said the Indians, dying deer and panthers had chosen certain hollow trees in which to spend their final hours, over time creating and sanctifying “bone trees.” One particularly large specimen had been woven into several area legends, from that of pirate Jean Lafitte in the early 1800s to Al Capone’s bootlegging operation in the 1920s, which had flourished up and down the Mississippi River.
While Henry was skeptical about these likely apocryphal stories, he’d clearly believed reports that Confederate raiders operating in the area in 1862–1863 had used the Lusahatcha Swamp as a haven to escape pursuing Union troops. Those raiders had reportedly hanged at least three local Yankee collaborators from what one officer had called “the Bone Tree” in his diary. Lieutenant Richard Wadsworth, CSA, had noted that slave hunters punished runaways beneath the same tree (which slaves called “the Chain Tree”) by whipping, maiming, or worse. Henry had also established a Ku Klux Klan connection to the Bone Tree. According to Special Agent Dwight Stone, one Klan informant had spoken of African-Americans being hunted for sport in the Lusahatcha Swamp, those hunts ending in castration or murder beneath the tree itself. In 1964, Stone and a team of FBI agents had searched the swamp for three days with boats and dogs but had found nothing. At that time Agent Stone had concluded that the term “Bone Tree” referred to a man-made cross that the Klan had constructed for torture purposes, and not to an actual tree.
Caitlin realized that the archetypal image of a sacrificial tree would be irresistible to rumormongers, but she couldn’t escape the feeling that some of the stories must be based in fact. Henry noted that the bald cypress belonged to the redwood family, and one specimen in Florida had been documented as thirty-five hundred years old. Caitlin shivered when she read that line, for if it was accurate, then all the bloody legends of the Bone Tree could be true. She wondered whether her fascination with the tree might be rooted in her morbid curiosity about the most atavistic human impulses. Tales of castration and crucifixion conjured the horrors of the Belgian Congo and Rwanda. As unpleasant as those thoughts were, some rogue region of her brain had always hungered to peer into the psychic abyss that yawned beneath these depraved acts.
According to Henry’s notes, some residents of Lusahatcha County had claimed to know the location of the Bone Tree, but in fact they had “known” only that the tree lay somewhere in the Lusahatcha Swamp. That was like saying you knew where a particular New York brownstone was by pointing to the island of Manhattan. Henry Sexton had made one personal effort to find the Bone Tree, using as his guide an Athens Point native who claimed to have been shown the notorious cypress by his grandfather. But after an exhausting day of trolling through acres of swamp that straddled federal timberland and a private hunting preserve—all of it choked with thick stands of ancient, moss-bearded cypress, and infested with venomous snakes and alligators—Henry had returned home no wiser than he’d left.
Clearly, if Dwight Stone and a platoon of FBI agents in boats had failed to find the Bone Tree in three days, Caitlin’s only hope of success lay in Toby Rambin. If the Lusahatcha County poacher turned out to be another con man hoping to cash in on the hopes of a gullible outsider, she would be screwed. Within a day or two, the army of outside reporters would make up her head start on the Double Eagles case, and she would own the story no longer. Finishing her lukewarm tea, she picked up her Treo and dialed Toby Rambin’s number once more. She tried to stay calm, but even the prospect of making contact with a man who had seen the Bone Tree made her pulse speed. The phone rang twelve times without an answer, and at last she hung up.
Opening Henry’s journal again, she flipped to a sketch he had made of a giant cypress with an opening like an inverted V in its trunk. He’d filled in the opening with black ink, and that blackness bled into the water he’d drawn around the tree, where cypress knees jutted upward like the limbs of half-buried bodies. Caitlin touched the drawing with her fingertip, feeling the rough page that Henry had pored over while he was alive.
The legend of the Bone Tree reminded her of the mythical “Raintree” from the movie Raintree County, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. Part of that overripe Civil War film, which itself had been haunted by tragedy, had been shot about thirty miles from Natchez, at the burned ruins of Windsor. Only a few weeks after Caitlin and Penn had fallen in love, they’d spent a magical day walking among the ghostly Corinthian columns that, along with the famous Staircase to Nowhere, were all that remained of the once-majestic mansion. To Caitlin, the Windsor ruins conveyed the tragic grandeur of the Old South far more viscerally than the perfectly preserved mansions of Natchez, which gave the illusion of beauty to a society built on the bloodied backs of slaves.