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"The Widow's Buried
Gold," #157 Swapping Stories
Pierre Daigle, Church Point, Acadia
Parish, Louisiana
Recorded July 3, 1990, by C. Renée Harvison from Pierre
Daigle, sixty-eight, a Cajun. Daigle, a retired schoolteacher, writes
stories and composes songs, some of which have been performed by Cajun
Gold, a contemporary Cajun band. He doesn't take much stock in buried
money stories but believes this one was probably true.
The man whose story I'm
going to tell you, as far as I know, actually lived, because I played
around his grave a lot. He was buried, still buried, where we lived. He
was buried in the yard where I lived. They had built a cypress picket
fence around it. By the time I was old enough to know anything, the picket
fence was falling apart. But it was still intact, partially.
This
was a guy by the name of Fisher, which is obviously not a Cajun name.
Supposedly Fisher and his wife and Fisher's wife's son, whose name was
Billy, came to live in that house. Where they came from, nobody knows. The
story is--and this is rumor and speculation--that he was a bank robber. He
had moved into that house to sort of disappear. He was a drunk. Every time
he'd go to town, he'd get drunk. This would have been Church Point, the
closest town. He'd go on horseback and go to town and come back drunk and
beat up on Billy.
One afternoon he came back drunk, and Billy shot
him. Killed him. His wife and Billy buried him right there. That night, as
it was dark, they left in the buggy, supposedly with a lot of gold. They
came up to Jean Jannise, Jr.'s house. . . . The house is still there, not
the house but the place. When they got there, she looked upon Jean, Jr.,
as a reliable man. She stopped there right after dark.
It's always
after dark! He told her, "If you try to cross this forest at night, you're
going to be robbed. Why don't you stay here tonight and tomorrow you can
go."
Supposedly she was returning to Mississippi. That night,
supposedly, she buried her money on the other side of Jean, Jr.'s house, a
lot of gold. Tremendous amount of gold. She never returned, so the gold is
still there. I had a friend of mine who told me that was true because all
drunks have a lot of money to bury!
Notes:
For more information about this and related tales,
refer to the book Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana,
published by University Press of Mississippi.
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