Summer of Pearls (23 page)

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Authors: Mike Blakely

BOOK: Summer of Pearls
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Rayford Hayes' wife, Hattie, greeted me at the front door. “Well, hello, Ben. Come in.” She shouted at her husband, in another room: “Rayford, your little hero is here to see you.”
Constable Hayes came out of the back room, bootless. “Howdy,
Ben,” he said. “If you've come to check on me, you might as well go home. I'm sound as a horse, thanks to you and your old man. And Billy Treat, God rest his soul.”
“I didn't come to check on you, sir,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you about something.”
Hayes motioned to a chair near the dark fireplace. “Have a seat,” he said, “and tell me what's on you mind.”
I looked nervously at Hattie. “Well, it's kind of … I don't think Mrs. Hayes wants to hear about it.”
The constable wrinkled his brow at me for a second, then held back a smile. “Well, you heard the boy, Hattie,” he said to his wife. “Excuse yourself.”
“Oh, all right,” she said.
When she left, I told the constable about what Judd Kelso had said that afternoon at Esau's saloon. I could tell by the expression on Hayes' face that he took me seriously. “So, Kelso's back at Goose Prairie,” he said, rubbing his head. “I was hoping he would stay at his place over on Long Point.” He leaned back in a creaking wooden chair and asked me a lot of questions, several times making me repeat exactly what Kelso had said about Carol Anne.
“I could keep an eye on her place,” I suggested.
“No, Ben, don't do that. That's not your worry. I'll have a talk with her tomorrow and warn her. Delicate subject, though. Maybe I'll send Mrs. Hayes to do it—woman to woman. Anyway, I wouldn't worry about it. Kelso's not likely to bother her unless he finds a pearl, and that's not likely, either. I bet he'll give up and quit town in a day or two, go on back to Long Point, or head to Shreveport to find work on another steamer. Sure won't find any steamers to work on around here.” He got up. “Thank you for bringing it to my attention, though. I'll keep an eye out for him.”
I rose and shook the constable's hand. Just as I was leaving, Hattie burst into the parlor from the back room, pale as a sheet and out of breath.
“My God, woman!” Rayford said. “What's gotten into you?”
“It's gone!” she said, gasping.
“What's gone?”
She pointed into the back room. “The leather case with the pearls and the money in it!”
“What do you mean, ‘gone'?” her husband demanded.
“I just went to check on it again, and it's not there!”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
“When was the last time you saw it?”
“I took it out to look at the pearls just before supper. Then I put it back. Now it's gone!”
“Gone where, woman?”
“The window was open,” she said, almost crying. “I think somebody reached in and stole it!”
A terrible notion struck me. “Mr. Hayes,” I said, “what if Kelso took lit?”
“Now, calm down, everybody,” he said. “Just stay put. Let me get my pistol and I'll look into this.”
But I could not stay put or wait for Hayes to find his pistol. Kelso could have stolen the pearls an hour ago. He could have been in Carol Anne's room long enough to …
I tore out through the front door and barely heard the constable shouting at me to wait. I wondered what I would do if I found Kelso in Carol Anne's room. I didn't have a clue. I just knew I had to get to her room fast.
I knew the hidden passageways of Port Caddo better than anybody. I cut behind houses and leaped picket fences like a deer. I sprinted like a boy with a mean dog on his heels, but felt twice as terrified.
I had seen too many things go wrong already. The
Glory of Caddo Lake
had sunk, almost taking me with it. The pearl beds had been drained. The riverboat channels had run shallow. Billy and Trevor had been swept away by the flood. I could not stand to think of Judd Kelso forcing himself on Carol Anne now. That would be the worst thing of all. Port Caddo had seen enough ruin for one summer.
When I turned the back corner of Jim Snyder's store, I saw no light I in Carol Anne's room. I sprinted up the stairs, taking three steps at a
time. I have never run faster in my life, but I felt as if I were wading chest-deep in molasses. A thousand thoughts went through my mind before I reached the top of the flight.
I pounded on the door. I heard someone call my name from back toward Hayes' house. I probably didn't wait half a second before bursting into Carol Anne's room.
I spoke to her as I entered, took two steps, and tripped over a bulk on the floor that I knew in an instant was human. I landed on the leather satchel and heard pearls rolling across the wooden flooring. I bounced once, scrambled to the back of the room, and turned to see the vague form of a human torso against the faint moonlight streaming through the door. One pale moonbeam glinted against the metal handle of a knife, jutting straight up from the dead body.
I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman. The clothes were wadded and wrinkled in such a way that I couldn't even tell if the dead person was lying face-down or face-up. But I could clearly make out the severe lines of the knife handle, its blade buried deep in the corpse.
I heard people coming, but could not move. I thought of every possibility. At best, the body belonged to Judd Kelso. At worst, it was Carol Anne. I might as well have been dead myself for all the good I did huddled on the floor. I suddenly wondered if I was the only living person in the room. Maybe a knife would find my chest next.
I heard footsteps on the stairs and heard my father call my name. The light from a swinging lantern cast strange shadows up the staircase. When it filled the doorway, the light blinded me for a second. Then I identified Judd Kelso, lying dead on the floor between my father and me, and felt a surge of relief. At my feet was the leather satchel, money and pearls spilling from its open mouth.
Pop looked at the dead man as Constable Hayes came to his side, gasping for breath, holding his pistol in his hand.
“Ben,” Pop said. “Are you all right?” He hurdled the dead man and helped me up.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Who?” He pointed at the body and looked at me as if I might have stabbed Kelso myself.
“I don't know. I tripped over him coming in.”
Hayes put his hand on Kelso's throat. “Still warm,” he said. “Hasn't been long.” He looked at me. “What about the woman? Where is she?”
“She wasn't here,” I said. “She's gone.”
CAROL ANNE COBB VANISHED FROM PORT CADDO LIKE A FOG, AND THE
mystery over who killed Judd Kelso began. I have heard all sorts of theories. Most people believe Carol Anne killed Kelso, then fled town, fearing Kelso's people over at Long Point would seek revenge.
I never did believe that. If the knife had been in Kelso's back, I could have considered it. But I never saw how Carol Anne, a healthy young woman though she was, could have overpowered Kelso face-to-face.
Some wild imaginations have come to the conclusion that I killed Judd Kelso. They say I caught him trying to force himself on Carol Anne and plunged the kitchen knife into his chest. They say Carol Anne agreed to disappear then, to make everyone think she had killed him, so the Kelso clan wouldn't come after me.
Take my word for it, that theory is hogwash. Even if you won't take my word, consider this: at fourteen, I wasn't strong enough to take on Judd Kelso, either. And as long as they lived, my Pop and Rayford Hayes swore I couldn't have killed Kelso. They had entered Carol Anne's room
only a minute behind me. They knew I didn't have time to kill Kelso and help Carol Anne disappear.
Besides, if I had killed Kelso, I would still be bragging about it today instead of denying it.
A third theory says the Christmas Nelson gang killed Kelso for trying to take all the pearls and money for himself. That doesn't make a lick of sense, of course. Trevor Brigginshaw's satchel was left in Carol Anne's room. Those outlaws would have taken it with them if they had killed Kelso. Kelso was killed for reasons other than greed.
The wildest explanation of all says that Billy Treat rose from the swamps and killed Judd Kelso to rescue his true love. I liked this theory, of course, but where was the proof? For four decades, I tried to think of a way Billy could have come out of the flood alive. It wasn't really all that difficult to imagine. Billy could swim like an alligator and hold his-breath almost as long. He could have survived the flood that washed him and the Australian out of the Port Caddo jailhouse.
But why did it take him two days to get back to town? Over the years, I came up with a lot of possible reasons. Maybe Brigginshaw survived the flood, too, and Billy had to help him escape to Louisiana before returning to Port Caddo.
Or, if Brigginshaw drowned, which seemed more likely, Billy could have been trapped in a cypress tree anywhere between Carter's Chute and Whangdoodle Pass for a full day before the water went down. A stranger to Caddo Lake, Billy could have wandered another day in the swamps trying to find his way back to town.
Then what? Perhaps Billy got to Carol Anne's room shortly after Judd Kelso did, or shortly before. Either way, once both men were there, the fight started, and Kelso grabbed a kitchen knife. Billy took it from him and killed him with it. He would have been strong enough, even after spending two exhausting days in the bayous. He had plenty of motive.
And Carol Anne's disappearance? How did I explain that one to myself? She and Billy were wise to quit town after Kelso was killed. The Kelso clan had been thick in the old Regulator-Moderator feud. Violence
didn't spook them. They would have sought revenge.
Eventually I found out what happened, but you'll have to take my word for it. There is no solid proof. Only my word. You have to understand that the summer of pearls became a lifelong obsession for me. A few years after it was over, started investigating all its angles and facets, and continued searching for clues for forty years. I repeatedly questioned everybody involved, from Giff Newton to Emil Pipes. I searched old records and newspaper reports. I turned up a lot of evidence, but the final proof found its own way to me.
 
 
After the government accidentally drained Caddo Lake, a few riverboats continued to steam all the way up to Jefferson, but only during the wettest of times. Port Caddo declined steadily.
In just five years, there was not enough of a town left there to support my pop's newspaper, so my folks moved to Mount Pleasant, where they died as honored and respected citizens of that town, after forty-seven years of good news coverage. I was nineteen and mature enough to make my own decisions when the
Steam Whistle
went under. I didn't follow my folks to Mount Pleasant. I stayed in the old family place at Port Caddo. I also talked my pop out of any of his old notes that in any way related to the summer of pearls.
To my surprise, I found Billy Treat's diary among Pop's notes. Pop said he found the diary in the Treat Inn the day after the flood. I'm sure Billy had always kept a diary, but his old one would have been destroyed when the
Glory
went under. The diary Pop found began the day after the boiler explosion, and ended with the night of the flood. Billy made amazingly detailed entries, sometimes even recording conversations he had had with Carol Anne or Brigginshaw. That diary, more than anything, sparked my need to know everything about the summer of pearls.
The year my folks left Port Caddo, I finally took my trip down to New Orleans—by rail—and hunted up Joshua Lagarde, the insurance investigator who had looked into the sinking of the
Glory of Caddo Lake.
He told me that the owners of the
Glory
had been convicted in a number
of insurance-fraud cases and multiple claims. One of the owners had confessed after a two-day police interrogation and named Judd Kelso as the man hired to blow up the
Glory.
When I got back to Port Caddo, I learned that Charlie Ashenback had died while I was gone. I spent my last pennies buying his tools from his heirs, who lived in Dallas. I started building my own boats, but it took me thirty years to learn how to make a bateau that would stand up against an Ashenback.
Cecil Peavy moved down to Nacogdoches shortly after that and went into business. I went down there to see him every winter until he died a few years ago. And he came back to Caddo Lake every summer to go fishing with me and Adam. When it was all over for Cecil, he owned four stores, two cafés, and a hotel—and didn't have to do a lick of manual labor in one of them. He created a lot of jobs in Nacogdoches. His employees hated him, though.
Some time in the eighties, things got hot around here for the Christmas Nelson gang. They went west and tried to rob a bank in Waco. The Texas Rangers were waiting for them. Every member of the gang was killed, except for Christmas himself, and he was shot eight times and captured.
When I heard about the arrest, I spent my entire bankroll getting to Waco. It had occurred to me that if Judd Kelso had stolen the pearl satchel the night of his death, maybe he had been in on the attempted robbery aboard the
Slough Hopper
three nights earlier. I was the first person to even think about linking Kelso to the Christmas Nelson gang.
Posing as a New Orleans newspaper reporter, I wangled an interview with Christmas Nelson in jail. He was the most pleasant and well-mannered man I have ever met, but he was also a cold-blooded killer and didn't mind telling you about it. Among other things, he told me that he and four of his men were in Port Caddo the morning the boilers blew on the
Glory of Caddo Lake.
They were the horsemen who had rescued so many passengers.
I grilled him thoroughly on the attempted pearl robbery, of course. He told me that the Kelso clan over on Long Point often let his gang hide out on their place. He said Judd Kelso had come up with the idea
of robbing Trevor Brigginshaw. He also said he kicked Kelso out of the gang for jumping off of the
Slough Hopper
like a coward when the shooting started. He claimed he would have come to Port Caddo to steal the pearls if he had known Captain Brigginshaw was in jail, or presumed drowned. But he didn't know. He also said he would have gladly killed Judd Kelso, but didn't.
When I returned broke to Port Caddo, Adam Owens told me he had fallen in love with a girl from Buzzard's Bay, across the Louisiana line. Eventually he tried to marry her, but she jilted him—actually left him standing at the altar in front of all the wedding guests. It almost destroyed him. He started drinking and lived like a hermit in a filthy shack up Kitchen's Creek, across the lake. He used to shoot at people who came up the creek. He even shot at me once.
I finally got him to give up drinking, but I had to move in with him for a year to do it. We fixed up his house and he stayed there until he died. Never married. I don't think he ever knew the pleasure of having a woman in bed. He was my friend for life, and a wonderfully innocent kind of fellow. He knew things about animals and nature that God shares with only a few chosen mortals.
I went to find that girl Cindy from Longview once, and found out she had gotten married and fat. I went through a lot of girlfriends and finally fell in love with a beautiful thing from Marshall. I married her and moved her to the house in Port Caddo. She became my best friend, most horrific critic, constant debating partner, and the love of my life. We had a wonderfully successful marriage and I have five kids and twelve grandkids to prove it. I lose count of the great-grandkids.
By the turn of the century, the riverboat trade and Port Caddo were dead. My family was the only one living in the deserted city that had once been a port of entry to the Republic of Texas. Our house stood like an oasis of life in the ghost town.
About that time, I got the notion to go to Chicago and look in the Pinkerton Detective Agency records to see what Henry Colton had written in his reports. I had to sneak out in the middle of the night, because my wife didn't want me spending the money on my silly obsession with that summer of '74.
Those Pinkertons were a peculiar bunch, and wouldn't hear of any old bayou rat snooping around in their files. I had to bribe one of the office workers to get Colton's reports for me. They made up some of the most humorous writing I have ever enjoyed.
Colton had led an unbelievably reckless life as a Pinkerton, and was a pretty successful detective, except that he had a habit of shooting people the Pinkertons wanted him to take alive for questioning. He also drank too much, fought too often, and treated all good-looking women like prostitutes. The International Gemstones case was his last chance as a Pinkerton, and he failed in the most permanent kind of way.
His final report was written aboard the
Slough Hopper,
just after his shoot-out with the Christmas Nelson gang. He was sure proud of himself in that report. I guess he died happy.
To keep my wife from divorcing me on grounds of abandonment, I had to swear on the family Bible that I wouldn't go off on any more wild-goose chases. I was out of leads, anyway. I had spent a fortune sending letters of inquiry to every postmaster and newspaper editor in the states of New York and New Jersey, trying to track down Billy Treat's family. The only leads I got turned out to be false ones.
I finally resigned myself to the fact that I would never know who had killed Judd Kelso. I would never find out what had happened to Carol Anne that night. I would never know for sure if Billy was alive or dead. The summer of pearls would have to remain an enigma to me. It had become sort of a tragic legend around Caddo Lake by that time. As I reached my fiftieth year, I became known as the unofficial historian for the Great Caddo Lake Pearl Rush. People would come around to ask me about the stabbing death of Kelso, and we would talk about all the theories. To most folks, it was just a story. To me, it was real—an image I carried with me all day long, every day, then even into sleep. It was only then—when I resigned myself to search no longer—that the proof found its own way to me.
 
 
The summer of pearls prepared me for life. It was like a lifetime in itself. It was that summer when I made and lost my first fortune. I have made
and lost many more since then. It was that summer when I first got my heart broke. It got broke many more times before I finally found my wife. And it's even been broke a few times
because
of my wife. That summer I forged the friendships that sustained me through life. Friendships that even death cannot end, but only interrupt. Friendships that will resume in the afterlife. It was that summer that I learned life would not always be simple, or fun, or easy. Neither would it always be complicated, or painful, or hard.
It was the summer I learned nothing would stay the same. Change would come, and come again, and destroy things, and strengthen things, and shock, and soothe, and sadden, and fill with rapture. That is why I should not have been surprised by the most astounding change of all, but I was.
The government, after thirty-seven years, finally decided to repair the damage it had done to Caddo Lake in '74. It built a new dam down at Mooringsport, Louisiana, that raised the level of the lake to what it had been in the days of the Great Raft.
As soon as I heard about them building the dam, I bought the piece of land where old Esau had once run his saloon. My wife thought I was crazy, but I knew the lake would fill Goose Prairie Cove again, and make a fine location for a fishing camp, hunting lodge, and boat-building yard.
The lake came up just as the government said it would, believe it or not, and I began to make a pretty tolerable living. My wife and I built a new house where the pearl camps had once stood. If I had told her that I had situated it to overlook the spot where I had once kissed a girl named Cindy who hailed from Longview, she would have done me in like Judd Kelso was done in.

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