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Prologue

I reconstruct and set the scene in my mind of how it must've happened.

First my oldest brother, John Maupin LeBlanc III, strides out and stands on the portico of the three-story dormered brick mansion. He looks down across the five-acre lawn sloping to Virginia's Axapomimi River, a winding tidal stream that on that mid-August Thursday afternoon would not seem to flow as much as to lie soaking up sun before sliding on, reptile-fashion, into the day's hazily moist heat.

A kingfisher might cry and a great blue heron squawk as it glides to a graceful landing in greenish shade of the far bank. The infrequent breeze likely fails to rouse the weather vane on the crown of the slate mansard roof.

John, head of the family, is tall, fit, in his mid-thirties. He has the blunt LeBlanc chin of all the murky portraits inside the house. His wife, Eleanor, appears wearing a voluminous white skirt. I remember from my few glimpses of her a small pinched mouth in a doll-like face. I expect John wishes she'd slow to a more dignified gait, though it's his complete domination of her that makes her scurry around like a cornered mouse. Above all, John believes in composure.

Maybe he watches his blond son Paul, age five, whacking striped croquet balls on the lawn or rolling with the English setter's puppies. John hopes the boy will be a horseman. It's in the blood, he assumes. What isn't in the blood?

The occasion is the annual celebration honoring Jean Maupin LeBlanc, who in 1740 sailed from La Rochelle to escape increasing Huguenot harassment by Louis XV. On this day the family dresses in eighteenth-century costume -- the ladies in rustling floor-length silk gowns, snug bodices elaborately hand stitched, puffed sleeves with lace ruffles; the men in cravats, waistcoats, breeches, polished boots -- all without a shred of irony.

The idea was our father's, but the whole thing took on the feeling of a much older tradition even before he died. "In America ours is the bluest of blood," he'd told us.

John, who hates lateness, waits for our other brother Edward, Edward's wife Patricia, and their three-year-old daughter, Marise, to arrive from Richmond.

"You'd think a person of Edward's nature would be prompt for this gathering," I hear John say, checking his gold pocket watch, a LeBlanc heirloom.

"He's usually on time," Eleanor would answer, since Edward's a fussy, time-driven man. Eleanor would've taken my mother's place, and I imagine her fluttery hands smoothing an Irish linen cloth on the oak trestle table carried out and set at the portico's east end. Would she also rearrange the centerpiece of red roses as I saw my mother do years before?

"Usually is a word that ought to be dropped from the dictionary," John would quote our father. "It's a cover to evade the exact."

Exactitude was my father's hard lesson to John, Edward, and me, among other things, though I don't believe my brothers ever felt his fist as I did.

Now I see old Gaius walk on stage to set the table with the family Limoges. He and Juno also wear period clothing -- Gaius a sagging vest and badly fitting frock coat, Juno a long gray calico dress and a white kerchief knotted around her hair.

Maybe Gaius nearly topples crystal from his silver tray. John might reach to rescue the goblet brought over the sea from France. His composure perhaps conceals a wish to retire Gaius.

I close my eyes and conjure up a raincrow's plaint and a mockingbird's intricate parody of a cardinal. I remember Bellerive's sultry Augusts and insects chirring drowsily in the mown grass and along limbs of scaly water oaks.

John will be growing more irritable about Edward's lateness and would again lift his watch. I see him cross to the hunt board at the portico's west end to fix himself a bourbon over cracked ice and crushed mint.

For two hundred and fifty years, he might well be thinking, the LeBlancs have owned the land. And here, I have him invoke his sense of gratitude to Jean Maupin LeBlanc as well as to our own father and the long line of ancestral blood.

The river's course bounds the long front of his property. My land now, John must muse, and feel the full goodness of it. I picture him standing on the portico, his stance like a liege lord waiting for fealty. "My land, my son's, and my son's sons," he'd whisper, for certain.

The family is scheduled to gather at one o'clock. After drinks and conversation, they'll step to the table for a meal that never varies: chilled honeydew melons, sugar-cured ham, black-eyed peas, rice topped by raisin-thickened gravy, blackberry wine, and a chess pie served warm from Juno's oven.

When all are seated, John will stand at the head of the table and say grace. He'll lift his wineglass and repeat the words spoken annually by my father:

"We are gathered here at Bellerive to remember Jean Maupin LeBlanc, our illustrious forebear who possessed the courage to cross the great ocean. He planted the seeds of this family in rich Virginia soil to provide for his descendants the means to secure the blessings of a bountiful life --"

But before he can finish rehearsing the words, John experiences a sensation of weightlessness an instant before he feels the searing force of being hurled upward, and his world wrenches into a whirling disruption of glass, bricks, and flagstones.

Chapter 1

I rowed the leaking skiff through a muddy, brackish gut that snaked among reeds of the green, steamy marsh, the boat's bow pointed toward a low spit of land where my cabin stood among ragged cedars. Some cabin -- a plank shack I'd hammered together using unmatched pieces of lumber found along the eroding shore.

My inlet off the Chesapeake was too small and shallow for work or pleasure boats and had no identification on the charts. I'd named it Lizard. A red sun glinted across the murky water and off the flattened beer cans I'd tacked to my tar-paper roof to plug leaks.

Lizard Inlet bordered a swamp grown up with cypress, myrtle, and elder. Cottonmouths and the last canebrake rattlers in Virginia made it home. The swamp water lay still and darker than the tidal rise that flowed over the mudflats twice every twenty-four hours. Nights I'd hear the cry of a lynx and squeals from its prey.

Months ago I'd found the skiff half staved and sunk on a sand shoal and dragged her ashore. I'd repaired, caulked, and tarred the bottom. Using a drawknife, I'd fashioned oars from split lengths of a cedar felled by a nor'easter. In purring coals I'd heated leaf springs swiped from a wrecked Chrysler at the junkyard and hammered myself a pair of oarlocks.

Gill nets, crab pots, floats, poles, buckets, and scrap lumber had collected around my shack. I'd dug a pit, lined it with oyster shells, and covered it with angle iron and wire mesh. I used it to do my cooking except during rains or the coldest weather.

A stovepipe stuck from the shack's roof. My outhouse I'd framed and covered using two-by-fours and galvanized sheets salvaged from the dump. When the crapper's stench became so strong I gagged at my own foulness, I shoveled out another hole and moved the frame. Not often. I could tolerate lots of stink.

I hauled the skiff among reeds and made the painter fast using a clove hitch around a pine stump. Laughing gulls had followed me in, and they squabbled overhead. A rockfish lay at my feet. The striper had to weigh eight pounds. As I hooked a finger under its gill to lift it, a man stepped from cedar shade.

He wore shin-high black shoes, light brown uniform trousers that had dark brown outer seams, a white V-collared sport shirt, and a white Panama hat. The butt of a Colt .38 Police Special gleamed from an oxblood leather holster. He ambled toward the skiff, his full cheeks jostling with each step. Sweat shone on either side of a lumpy, porous nose.

Fear rose in me like a rotted log stirred up from the swamp's bottom.

"Nice catch," he said, his face half turned, a mocking look that positioned his eyes at the edge of their sockets. He smiled, yet only the left side of his mouth raised.

He wasn't the local game warden, whom I knew by sight. Maybe the new Drake County sanitarian. Were they armed now?

The Health Department and fire-breathing environmentalists wanted my privy gone, though any pollution I caused to seep into the bay was nothing compared to what the yachtsmen flushed overboard -- classy air-conditioned turds. The real filth was fucking man himself, occupying the earth and seas.

I didn't speak. I crossed to my cleaning bench, a heavy plank nailed and braced between cedars. I drew my fish knife from its sheath attached to my belt, which I'd made by stitching together strips of leather carved out of a discarded army boot. I cut into the striper just below a gill slit. Blood welled over the blade I kept honed on a whetstone. At Lizard Inlet I lived by my knife.

"Ain't the taking of stripers illegal this time of year?" the man asked. He knuckled back the Panama. His red hair was short and kinky. He hooked thumbs over his hip pockets. Not a sanitarian, I decided, but more police shit.

"Found him floating dead," I said and made the next cut across the tail of the fish, whose last life quivered against my fingers. Stripers were strong and gave themselves reluctantly to death. I'd meant to slice off two fillets and use the carcass and innards to bait a crab pot. Maybe not today.

"Sure, and him still wiggling under the knife," the man said. "Make a better story to tell he just jumped into your skiff."

He acted as if we shared a joke. He was too redneck to be a Fed. He watched me pare between the initial cuts to remove a slab of mostly clean white flesh. I'd planned to grill and eat it with greens picked from my garden.

"You good with that blade," the man said. "Appears you don't care much for the law."

"The law's not cared much for me," I answered and felt the chunk of fear rise and shift around inside my belly. I'd learned terror from gliding, deadly shapes in black places.

"Oh I don't know," the man said, and a finger flicked a drop of sweat from the tip of his nose. He was younger than I'd first judged, no more than in his forties. "You been a guest at a first-class government hotel according to your record."

My hands didn't shake as I peeled the striper's outer skin from the fillet. Why would this shitkicker be looking into my record? Maybe the rich bastards at Sailors Cove put the law up to it. They'd been wanting to wipe my ass off this earth.

"Who you?" I asked.

"The question is, who you? Jesus, this place smells. You ever clean it up?"

I lifted a yellow plastic bucket from a nail pounded into the side of my cleaning bench. I'd found the bucket floating in the bay. I crossed to the water's edge and dipped it. I dunked the fillet to wash away blood smears, which looked too red against the white flesh.

"I been taking an interest in you," the man said and allowed the rest of the smile to work across his mouth.

"You must got time to waste."

"Nah, Charley, you make good reading," he said.

Charley, Charles, names shed, on no piece of identification in my frayed wallet, a memory seen only in flashes and quickly quelled.

I flipped the striper over to slice the second fillet. A shudder disturbed the blade's cut.

"Don't be dumb," he said. "Just check out your dance card and let us know who you was two-stepping it with August sixteenth last."

"Why?"

"This why," he said and slipped his wallet from a hip pocket. The cloth of his pants had worn glossy over his big, rounded butt. He opened and extended the wallet with its badge and glassine enclosed identification. "Sheriff Lewis Rutledge from King County."

I dunked the second fillet in the bucket before speaking. Words were traps.

"You come all that way down here from King County to ticket me for a fish?" I asked, but fear slogged. I gripped the knife.

He stepped back and whistled between his teeth -- the way you'd call a dog. A second man emerged from cedar shade. He wore a brown-and-tan uniform and campaign hat.

"Might add the illegal fish to the list," the sheriff said and repocketed his wallet. "Now you fixing to talk to me or not? August sixteenth, 'bout one in the P.M."

"I don't keep calendars. And I got no watch."

"'Fraid that won't buy it," the sheriff said and hunkered good-ole-boy fashion, his smile leveled to a slit. The tip of his holster prodded salt grass.

"I not been anywhere except to Sailors Cove," I said.

"You produce verification of that statement?"

"You probably noticed I don't live in a place that keeps verifications handy."

"You a bona fide hermit, huh? You scare children with that ratty beard. They smell you coming."

"I don't study times or dates. I not left here except for the Cove."

"But you coulda. Nobody round here'd miss you. You might be gone a week and who'd notice? Just slip away and back unseen."

"Why'd I do that?"

"Because your name ain't Jim Moultrie at all but Charley LeBlanc. That good enough reason?"

"A name's no reason for anything," I said and dipped the knife blade to rinse it.

"Well what you think about this? I'm carrying a piece of paper here signed by a circuit-court judge that invests me with the authority to take you into custody and ride you back up to King County for questioning."

The sheriff stood and drew the folded paper from the other hip pocket. He tapped a stubby index finger against the writ.

"Not a hell of a lot," I said.

"You can pack a bag, but I got to watch everything you stick in."

"Don't own a bag."

"Charley, what say we then just put our feet on the path?"

"My fillets?" I asked and held them across my palms.

"Let's wrap and take 'em. They be too tasty to waste on them frigging gulls."

From TIDEWATER BLOOD by William Hoffman. Copyright © 1998 by the author. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a division of Workman Publishing.