“And you got to go and answer him? Fool! You can’t say you don’t know? But no, you gone and done it now. You not only told him about that peddler man coming all the time here, but you told him about that peddler man speaking French to the Colonel Judge and Little Miss and En glish to Miss Rebecca and all.”
“I don’t see no harm in that. That’s what he did.”
“Sure he did. But you didn’t have to go on about what they talked about. If I was asked, I would have said I don’t know nothin’ about what they was sayin’. But you, you gots to answer, don’t you.”
“But Mr. Raifer asked. What was I to do? He knows I speak French.”
“But did you say they talked of this and that and then hush up? No. Did you say they talked about the weather and the crops and all and then hush up? No, not even then. Did you say they talked about politics and that there president who’s come and gone and come back again, what’s his name?”
“Grover Cleveland.”
“Yes, him. You could have stopped there, but you didn’t. You said that they talked about religion a lot. Well, that was like honey on a cow’s teat, weren’t it? Then Mr. Raifer asks you all about that. And you told him.”
Jenny heard Sally going at Marcus good, but it hadn’t disturbed Little Miss. She was sleeping soundly.
Jenny opened the French door from Little Miss’s room and stepped out on the veranda that wrapped the house. She cautiously peeked around the front corner. No one was there. Jenny tiptoed to the back. Sally was still chewing on Marcus.
It was just as well that they didn’t know where she was going. Sally was right. The less they knew, the safer they’d be.
Jenny took a deep breath and prepared herself. It was up to her now.
Chapter 18
Bucky was having a wonderful time. Tee Ray could not have been nicer. Tee Ray had just bought him another drink. Tee Ray wanted to hear all that Bucky had to say.
It had all happened just as Bucky had imagined, from the moment he and Raifer had gotten to Cottoncrest. He was famous because he had seen the dead Colonel Judge and all. He had been where the curse had hit and had seen what it had done. People wanted to listen to him. They wanted his opinion on everything. He had shown them. He had become a real somebody.
“Yessir, Tee Ray. Me and Raifer, we investigated real good. Once the Doc headed back to town, we stayed a while and questioned Cubit and Jacob, but they didn’t know nothin’. And we talked to Sally, and she don’t know nothin’. But Marcus, well, that’s a different story, ain’t it.”
“Is that a fact, Bucky?” Tee Ray was solicitous.
Bucky could see that Tee Ray was hanging on his every word. Maybe the others weren’t paying attention now, having gone back to their drinking and card games, but Tee Ray was still there with him, standing next to him at the bar. He could tell Tee Ray respected him for his investigation. “Fact for sure. We got Marcus talkin’ good. Where was he during the night? What did he see? We all know that times is tough, but why is it that the Colonel Judge ain’t had no one out and ain’t had no wagons full of goods going to bring stuff to Miss Rebecca but the Colonel Judge always got fresh cigars? How did they get the stuff they needed all those months? Marcus, he told us everything. Everything!”
“And that,” asked Tee Ray, “explained the curse?”
“Marcus explain the curse? I don’t think so. How can anyone explain the curse? It just is. But Marcus, you see, did tell us that the only white man that the Colonel Judge had let come see him and Miss Rebecca in the last year is that peddler man. You know who I’m talking about?”
“Yeah. Jake. The man with the cart.”
“Right as gold specie. Jake, the Peddler Man. Did you know that he speaks French?”
“Well, I figured as much, all that time he spends peddling down in Lamou.”
Bucky paused. He should have realized that everyone knew that the peddler walked a five-parish area, and that Lamou and the other Acadian villages were on his regular route. Of course Jake had to speak some French because a lot of those folks didn’t speak En glish.
Bucky was not going to be deterred, however, and pressed on. “Maybe, but did you know what they talked about in French? He and the Colonel Judge?”
Tee Ray poured some more whiskey into Bucky’s glass. “I don’t speak no French, and you don’t either. So, how was it that you know what they were talking about?”
That was more like it. Tee Ray needed him. Tee Ray needed to listen. Bucky would show Tee Ray. “We… Raifer and me… we questioned Marcus good. You know he speaks that French. Anyway, he said that they talked all about religion. Not just good Christian talk, no sir. They talked heaven and hell and lots of different religions. Religions that no respectable Christian could tolerate. The Colonel Judge had spent a lot of time at the Cotton Exposition when Cottoncrest was king of the cotton plantations, and he talked all about what he had learnt from them Chinese and Japanese and foreign folks about their religions, with lots of gods and no Christ or Virgin Mary. They were talking about how there could be so many religions and so many gods. ’Course, we all know that there ain’t no god but Jesus, but them heathens don’t know that. And then, Marcus said they even talked about…”
Bucky paused dramatically. He waited for Tee Ray to show the proper degree of anticipation. Tee Ray did. Bucky felt that he was really getting the hang of impressing people.
“Yes, Marcus said they even talked about those Jews what who killed Jesus. And you know what that Jake peddler told the Colonel Judge? Jake said he was a Jew and claimed that Jews didn’t kill Jesus or use Christian blood in their ceremonies! Imagine that.”
Tee Ray was glad he had let Bucky prattle on for the last half-hour. It had been worth it. It was perfect. Sure, it could have been a curse. But you don’t need a curse if you have a Jew.
That’s because Jews are cursed.
Chapter 19
The sky was clouding up by 10:00 a.m. It was going to rain by evening. If Jake didn’t hurry, he was going to get soaked.
The wedding had been held at sunrise in Lamou’s tiny Catholic church. The cochon de lait and fais-do-do had lasted all night, and everyone barely had time to get home, change into their church clothes, and walk to Sainte Clotilde sur le Rive before Father Séverin began. During the wedding itself, Father Séverin had talked about how love is perfect, like the perfect circle of the wedding ring, and how Jeanne Marie and Étienne were perfect for each other and would be bound until death by the perfect circle of Jesus’s love.
Jake had been attentive throughout the service. When the congregation stood, he stood. When the congregation kneeled, he kneeled. He had let the Latin of the Mass wash over him. He was going to blend in wherever he was. Religion was something he never talked about to anyone. Anyone, that is, except the Colonel Judge, and the Colonel Judge knew how to keep a secret. And there were secrets to be kept.
After the church services he had offered his congratulations to the young bride and groom and to their families and started walking up the road, into the woods that surrounded the bayous, heading for the agricultural lands to the northeast. His cart, which had been half-empty before he had gotten to Lamou yesterday, was now full with the skins of deer, muskrat, beaver, and cougar. He had long snakeskins—brown water moccasins, black diamond rattlers, and the coral’s red cross-bands bordered by yellow rings—all poisonous, all deadly, and all beautiful, stretched on boards and ready to be made into belts and purses and boots. It had been a full night of trading during the cochon de lait.
Jake knew that if his father were still alive, he would be appalled. A Jew slaughtering a pig and joining in the eating of it! If his father had known what Jake would do, would he have had second thoughts about sending him away? Would his father have thought that being an involuntary Cantonist was better than being an enthusiastic violator of many commandments, including the ones on keeping kosher?
Eating a pig was not the worst commandment that Jake had broken, but Jake liked what h
is sister Leah had whispered in his ear as he was leaving: Az me est chazzer, zol men essen fetten. If you’re going to eat pork, let it be good and fat.
At the church the white of Jeanne Marie’s dress and of the lace around her puffy sleeves and on her collar reminded Jake of the white lace on the petticoats of all the women on the train.
White lace. It always reminded him of trains. Maybe because it had been his first train ride. Even then, he liked being around women, but after that ride, trains always bothered him and lace always excited him.
Woman after woman in the cars on the train. Petticoat after petticoat. He was twelve, and they were hiding him in their vast petticoats. He was crouching down, hugging their legs, feeling the warmth of their skin and inhaling their odors. The Czar’s soldiers were checking the trains, looking for those trying to escape being made Cantonists, and the women had taken pity on him and had hidden him. Mile after mile, hour after hour, he had stayed there, trying not to make a sound, trying to ignore the aching in his legs and back and trying not to move.
With each jolt of the train, he feared that he would be found. Each time he heard a footstep in the aisle, his heart beat so hard inside his little chest that he felt it could be heard above the constant rumble of the wheels. Each time the whistle blew, he knew it must be a signal to someone about his hiding. When the train stopped at stations or for water or coal, he held his breath and tried to curl up tightly under the petticoats, hoping against hope that the soldiers would not ask the women to stand or move to the next car. If the women moved, he would be captured. Then the train would start again, but the fear would not subside. Soldiers were still on the train, watching.
The women around him talked and talked. They kept up a constant stream of conversation to amuse themselves and to make the soldiers think nothing was amiss. They spoke softly in Russian of their sisters and their families. Jake’s heart ached as he thought of Leah and Beruriah. The women shared stories about children and parents. Jake tried not to cry thinking about how he would never see his parents again.
And through it all, the train rumbled on, and Jake’s fear continued. The closer they got to the border, the more fearful he became, for the risks were increasing. His tiny frame ached from being contorted in hiding. Would the soldiers find him? What would they do when the border guards got on the train? Would the women have to leave at that point, and what would he do then? Could all the women be trusted? Would one of them give him away?
The belching of the coal engine. The clacking of the metal wheels against the tracks. The creaking of the cars as the train rounded curves. Train noises and escape. And fear. And inner courage. For Jake they all were united somehow.
Chapter 20
Cooper was out in his garden, picking fall tomatoes and pinching the green, leafy suckers off the plants, when Jake rolled into Little Jerusalem. Cooper stopped, the muscles rippling in his massive arms as he held up a ripe tomato in his hand. “I’ve been done growin’ the finest tomatoes you everest did see, Peddler Man. Sweet like a woman’s kiss and moist as a woman as well.”
Jake halted his cart and stopped to mop his brow. “It’s as big a tomato as I think I ever saw, Cooper. And it’s as red as the face of a white man telling a lie so big even he’s embarrassed after saying it.”
Cooper gave a big grin. “Could be. But since you seen my crop, then I believes you’ll be wantin’ to trade somethin’ for such fine eatin’ as this.”
“Cooper, if I ate all that I traded for, I wouldn’t have anything left to trade and wouldn’t be able to buckle my belt, much less push this cart, except with my stomach.”
Cooper’s grin only got larger. He liked the Peddler Man, with his black curly hair cut close and his wiry little build. If the Peddler Man was getting any extra flesh on his bones, it had to be the thinningest flesh ever.
“If you don’t eat, how you gonna push that cart of yours?” asked Rossy, coming out of the tiny cabin, holding a baby on her hip. “Cooper, ain’t you gonna just give the Peddler Man one of your tomatoes?” She gave a sly smile to Cooper. “‘Moist as a woman?’ If you keep talkin’ like that, you better get all your ‘moist’ from that tomato and don’t come lookin’ to get any from me.”
It was always like this when Jake came to Little Jerusalem. Cooper would try to get him to trade for food, and eventually Cooper and the others would come up with something more substantial, and they would work something out and have a meal, for Cooper and Rossy and all the rest had no money.
It was a miracle the little community of Little Jerusalem was surviving at all. The Colonel Judge had told him all about it. Sixteen families sharing a half-section of land, 320 acres, acres that they had financed during the seventeen days in the mid-1870s when C. C. Antoine was the acting governor of Louisiana—the second black ever to hold that position in Louisiana and only because of the presence of carpetbagger blue-belly troops during Reconstruction. C. C. Antoine did things that the first black governor, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, could not.
P.B.S. Pinchback, the Colonel Judge had told him, had a white father and a black mother, and Pinchback could have passed for white had he wanted to, but he refused. When he was asked which race he more closely identified with and of which he was most proud, Pinch-back said: “It is far more important to be evaluated by the worth of one’s friends than measured by one’s pedigree, for the former involves self-determination and mutual admiration, while the latter is a mere involuntary attribute. To deny one’s pedigree would be as vain a folly as denying the sun to rise tomorrow; however, it should never be the cause to create or circumscribe a man’s opportunities.”
The Colonel Judge would quote it word for word because he had thought this was, as he said often, “the height of arrogance for an adulterous bastard of miscegenation.” Of course, that was before… but by then it was hard for the Colonel Judge to change his ways.
Pinchback was one of many blacks, both former slaves and free men of color, who had been elected to the Louisiana legislature during Reconstruction. Pinchback had survived threats, taunts, and attempts on his life when he was elected to the state senate, and he had to fight all the way to the Supreme Court to retain the post as acting governor. But Pinchback, despite the success of his legal case, was kicked out of office in less than eight months.
C. C. Antoine, who, a few years later, served as acting governor, had seen what happened to Pinchback and had no illusions about what would happen to him as the second black to hold the state’s highest office. The Colonel Judge was clear about what he thought about C. C. Antoine. Antoine, he used to say, used what little time he had in office to “issue proclamations that didn’t do any damn good and did a lot of damn harm.” Miss Rebecca would gently disagree, saying that C. C. Antoine used his time in office to make a difference.
Antoine had sold a portion of state land to some of the former slaves in Petit Rouge Parish. The mortgage was held by Comite River Bank, the only bank that had agreed to give loans to the former slaves because, for a short time, its board and employees were all former slaves. But they were ousted when Reconstruction ended.
Little Jerusalem had been formed along with other communities thanks to C. C. Antoine. Little Jerusalem was one of the last to survive, and it was surviving by the barest. The others had lost their lands because of legal title held by whites who could read and write and who “found” documents that voided the grants or because of the floods or because of the tough times, or a combination of all of these. Comite River Bank had closed, forced out of business by the hard times, and it looked as if it might be only a short while before the Little Jerusalem mortgage was bought for pennies on the dollar by some speculator who would foreclose and kick the families out.
Rossy came over to the cart and peered inside. “What you got there, Peddler Man, that you want to trade?” She handed the child to Jake as she picked through the top few layers. “Surely you don’t ’spect us to trade for some old, dingy skins what got so many bullet holes in th
e deer and trap marks on the muskrat and beavers that ain’t nobody gonna use them for nothin’ but rags. And besides, if you want skins, why don’t you ask Cooper here or Nimrod or Esau? They got squirrel and possum and coon skins so fine them ladies in New Orleans will be wantin’ to wear them ev’ry day, and not just for go-to-meetin’.”
The child was squirming in Jake’s arms, reaching for her mother, but Jake could see that Rossy was warming up, ready to trade. Jake cooed and patted the baby, who calmed down again and nestled against his shoulder. Thanks to what had happened in Lamou, Jake had only a few trading items left in the bottom of the cart under all the skins. He checked the sky. To the west a dark line of clouds was forming. A thunderstorm could be headed their way. One never knew in Louisiana. It could rain like a waterfall on one side of a road, turning the fields into a muddy slough, while the other side would remain dusty, as if shut off behind an isinglass curtain.
“I’ll tell you what,” said Jake to Cooper and Rossy. “What do you say you let me sample one of your tomatoes? But I don’t want a whole one, just a small piece.”
“You want to take a bite out of my fine, plump tomato and hand it back to me? Rossy, I think that the Peddler Man is worser than a boll weevil that’ll get in that cotton field and ruin it for ev’ryone.”
“Cooper, have you ever known me to ruin anything?” Jake had picked his words carefully, gently adjusting the child on his shoulder. Cooper, isolated here in Little Jerusalem, would never know about what other things Jake had ruined. Jake had ruined many things. Like the girl in New York with the dark-red stain spreading across her blouse. “Now it just so happens that I have a knife here with a blade so sharp it will slice faster than a snapping turtle can snap. It slices so clean and so quick that you’d think it was voodoo.”
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