The Cottoncrest Curse: A Novel

by Michael H. Rubin

  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.”

  Rossy looked uninterested, but Cooper’s eye glimmered with anticipation.

  “We don’t need no fancy knife,” said Rossy, digging down further in the cart. “We can’t ’ford no fancy knife.”

  “Ah,” said Jake, placing the child on top of a soft muskrat skin and pulling out a wide, thin box from the bottom of the cart, “of course you can’t. But I see the quality of your stitching on your shawl there, and these are delicate stitches, each one identical to the next. My uncle was a tailor, and next to your shawl, his stitches looked like they were made by a blind man. Now, if you had a few yards of this new cotton fabric and some new needles and thread and a thimble—I’ve got them in pewter and porcelain and even black—then you might find you’d be making yourself a new outfit for church, or maybe you’d take just a yard and make a special dress for your beautiful daughter.

  The baby, smiling and gurgling, was entranced by the feel of the downy muskrat.

  “Come on, Peddler Man, let’s go inside, and Cooper here will give you a tomato, and you’ll show us this here fancy knife of yours, and maybe we’ll show you some real skins so that you don’t have to walk around sad because all you got is this stuff that looks like those men in Lamou took advantage of you.”

  Uncle Avram always said, ven es gait gleich, vert men reich. When things go right, you become rich. Things were going extremely right for Jake. He had lucked into the cochon de lait, and now Rossy and Cooper were going to trade for even more skins.

  Jake followed them around the back of the cabin, to a rickety lean-to shed, where he placed his cart. Coming toward them was Nimrod, bent over with age, being assisted by his son, Esau. Coming out of the fields, they had seen Jake talking to Cooper and Rossy. Esau’s wife and the others would follow shortly. A few more hours here would be all that it would take.

  By then the rain might arrive.

  And afterward Jake would leave. He had to return to Cottoncrest. He needed to check on the two of them.

  PART II

  Today

  Chapter 21

  “Why your great-great-grandfather came to Louisiana in the first place seems strange. There he was, living with Moshe in New York City, in the midst of the fabulous 1890s, the time some called the Gilded Age, and it seemed as if they left, almost overnight, to come south at the worst possible time.

  “Grandpapa Jake used to say he and Moshe had come because of the Cotton Exposition. But that had ended almost ten years earlier, and by the time they were heading toward New Orleans the South was in terrible shape.

  “You’ve heard of the Great Depression? Good. That was started by the 1929 stock market crash and continued on through the 1930s. And why was it called the Great Depression? To distinguish it from ‘the Depression,’ which was what people called the calamity of the 1890s, the worst of it being in 1893. You mention the Depression at the time Grandpapa Jake was in Louisiana, and people knew all too well what it meant.

  “While the rich in New York were living in the Gilded Age, the rest of the country, which had thought for sure things could not have gotten worse than they were during the Civil War, were finding out they had been wrong. Two decades after the fighting had stopped, the finances had stopped as well.

  “The Depression of the early 1890s was a time of poverty and violence. Strikes. Deaths. Riots. Cotton prices fell so far that even the richest planters could barely scrap by.

  “Storms hit in some years and droughts in the others. Crops were ruined. Little farms and big plantations were ruined. Lives were ruined.

  “What’s that? What did this have to do with Grandpapa Jake?

  “Well, yes, I do run on, but I keep trying to figure out why Jake and Moshe went down to Louisiana when they did, so quick like. It was the worst possible time.

  “And I still don’t know why Moshe never stayed in the South but came back up north before they ever got to New Orleans.”

  1893

  Chapter 22

  “I don’t understand why we just couldn’t get them darkies to do this!” Bucky was on his hands and knees, examining every square foot of the vast hallway that ran through the center of Cottoncrest, dividing the house in half.

  “Because I told you to do it. That’s why.” Raifer was concentrating on the staircase, step by step. He was now halfway up and still had not found any signs of a bullet. They had thrown open both doors and all the windows to let as much light in as possible. They had worked their way around the walls of the hall, looking for a hole in the heavily patterned wallpaper or in the dark frames of the portraits that hung on long wires from the wide crown molding. That had taken them more than half an hour. Now they were doing the floor and stairs.

  “I’m doin’ it, ain’t I?” Bucky responded. “But what’s a bullet gonna prove anyway? Dead is dead. He shot himself. He had the gun in his hand.”

  “Bucky, you keep flapping your mouth, it’s just likely to flap so much that we could use it to mill rice. Think about what you saw when we got here, and tell me exactly and without drama.”

  “Okay. She was dead. Face down on the stairs. Head almost cut off. His head was on her back. Gun in his hand. He had shot himself. Blood was everywhere. What could be clearer?”

  Raifer had now reached the red-stained stairs. Despite all the wiping and washing that Marcus and Cubit and Jordan had done yesterday, the distinct odor of blood mingled with the smells of the wood and the damp cloying mustiness of mildew from the wallpaper. “Good. Now where had the bullet entered?”

  “His temple. You saw that, Raifer. His temple.” Bucky’s knees were beginning to hurt, but he inched his way to the next section of floor.

  “Think, Bucky. Which temple? Which way was his head lying on her back?”

  Bucky paused a moment and sat with his back against the wall, to give his knees a rest. “His head was lyin’ with his right ear down on her back, so that means he shot himself in the left temple.”

  Raifer looked out over the banister and saw Bucky sitting on the floor. “You can’t think and work and talk at the same time?”

  Bucky took the hint and started crawling again, pulling up the narrow oriental carpets and running his hands over the wood floor beneath, feeling for any holes. At each knot in the wood he paused, but the knots were shallow, filled with nothing but lint and dust. “He slits her throat, she dies. He drops his knife, and then he shoots himself in the left temple. We’ve been all over this. This is what I told you and Dr. Cailleteau yesterday. I seen it all and figured it out.”

  R
aifer was now at the landing on his hands and knees. “Bucky, if you’ve figured this all out, then tell me how a man who is right-handed shoots himself straight through his head by putting the barrel to his left temple?”

  Bucky called up, “Raifer, it’s easy. Look.”

  Raifer stood up and looked down at his deputy in the hallway below.

  Bucky, on his knees, straightened his back and took his right hand, and pointing his index finger like a gun, lifted it slowly to the side of his head. It was so obvious.

  “No, Bucky. Remember. He shot himself in the left temple.”

  Bucky took his right hand and brought it around to the other side of his head. But now he had to twist his arm and wrist painfully to make the index finger point straight through. A puzzled look came over his face. “I don’t understand. This don’t make no sense.”

  “I agree. That’s why I need you to keep looking.”

  Bucky bent over again, trying to figure it out. It must be all part of the curse. That’s it. The curse explains everything because when you got a curse on a place, like Cottoncrest, anything is possible.

  Raifer, crawling around the second-floor landing, had not gone but a few feet from the staircase when his hand felt a depression in the floor, something that could well have been just another deep knot in the wood. Up here, even with all the French doors open, the light was dimmer. Raifer took out his knife and probed in the knot. His blade struck something metallic. He rocked the knife back and forth to work it out. It was the mashed metal of a spent bullet, black with powder and blood.

  Raifer was glad that he had found it and not Bucky. No need to tell Bucky. Not yet. Raifer had to have more time to work out the issues. Eventually, someone would get concerned. Eventually, someone would reveal himself. All he had to do was wait.

  Raifer put the metal in his pocket, pulled a nearby rug over the spot, and pretended to keep on looking. Later, after he had sent Bucky on his way, there would be time to search the Colonel Judge’s office here in the house.

  Jenny was in Little Miss’s bedroom. It had been a long night, and she had barely gotten back before Mr. Raifer arrived. Mr. Raifer had dismissed Marcus and Sally, but Jenny, hidden behind the door, had been listening to Bucky and Mr. Raifer.

  They were bound to come down today and want to see Little Miss. Jenny was glad she had acted when she did.

  Chapter 23

  Tee Ray held a big torch and touched it to the ground again. It was so dry that flames rose up immediately. The fire spread from stalk to stalk. Billows of black smoke roiled upward.

  To Tee Ray’s right and left, as far as the eye could see, other men were doing the same. Forrest, his beard and hair wild in the updraft created by the flames, was walking and stooping every few steps to let his torch start another blaze. Jimmy Joe’s huge muscular frame was already partially hidden from Tee Ray’s view by the smoke. Another five or six men were now invisible, enveloped by the dark, smoldering clouds.

  The flames moved inexorably through the field, jumping from one elongated leaf to the next, picking up speed as the fire grew. Low walls of red flame, silhouetted against a wall of black smoke, were sweeping through the brownish-green sugarcane.

  Burning the field was necessary before the cane could be harvested. Burning stripped the foliage away, leaving only the thick, sugary stalk, a stalk so moist that it would not burn. The stalks were all that were important. The flames reduced leaves and brush and weeds in the field and made harvesting easier. It also drove out the rats and snakes.

  It would take until nightfall for the fire to cross through all the cane—several thousand acres under cultivation at Cottoncrest in seven different fields—and burn itself out. At sunrise the next morning the sharecroppers would come with their scythes and cut the cane near the ground, just above the lowest nodules that protruded above the dirt. This year they were working on a ratoon crop, grown from the roots of last year’s cane left in the ground after harvest. They could get perhaps one or two more years’ crop from the roots, and then they would have to replant again.

  The stalks would then be piled on wagons and taken to the mill, where the cane would be mashed by large machines to draw out its milky fluid. Tee Ray remembered well the days when slaves did not only the cutting but also the mashing, turning large mangles by hand to wring out the juice.

  The slaves would work twenty-four hours a day, sometimes for a week or more, boiling the liquid so the sugar would crystallize properly. They’d stoke bagasse fires built with the dried, crushed stalks, keeping the liquid boiling in the huge iron pots large enough to hold ten men, stirring constantly with long wooden paddles to bring the impurities to the top. Adding slaked lime to the juice to settle out the dirt, they’d skim the brown froth and debris, removing it from the pot before it formed a blanket. When puckering began, when the bubbles and froth browned, they knew it was almost ready. Then, when hominy flop and hog eyes occurred, when the liquid boiled violently and unevenly, it would be put through the triple evaporators. Out would come the fine syrup and the thicker molasses and the thickest lacuite, more viscous than honey and twice as sweet.

  Tee Ray started to walk back toward his house. The others could watch the fields as they burned the rest of the day. The cane breaks, the wide paths around thousands of acres of fields that they sharecropped, would keep the fires from spreading into the woods and neighboring pastures.

  Watching the white men tend the fires to keep them low and cool so as not to harm the stalks, Tee Ray thought it a damn shame that coloreds weren’t still doing this work. They were the ones who should be doing it. Hell, years ago it was an Orleans Parish nigger, that Norbert Rillieux, who liked to call himself “a free man of color” and who was all uppity, just because he was educated in Paris, who everyone said “invented” the triple-effect evaporator that was used now. But no darky could ever be that smart.

  It doesn’t matter, thought Tee Ray, what the coloreds did. It was the white men who made sugarcane king. It was De Boré who, right there in Audubon Park in New Orleans, figured out how to make a profit raising cane. It was white men who came up with a way to replace Otaheite and Creole with Louisiana Purple and Louisiana Striped varieties so that the infrequent frost wouldn’t damage the crop.

  But it was them blue-bellies, fighting for them niggers, what killed sugarcane. Where there used to be over a thousand plantations, there were now less than two hundred, and all of them, like Cottoncrest, were suffering. Oh, before he died, the Colonel Judge could put on a good face, but everyone knew hard times were upon him. The parties had ended. The sharecropping had expanded, and with more sharecroppers farming the same fields, there was less for each to take home.

  Niggers. That’s who was to blame. And Jews too. Especially Judah P. Benjamin—all fancy with a middle initial and such. Once Jeff Davis and his ghostly looking vice president, Little Aleck, first let that Judah Jew become attorney general of the Confederacy, then secretary of war, then secretary of state, the Confederacy couldn’t help but be cursed.

  Jews and niggers. The northern Jews, with their newspapers and big words. The southern Jews, with their big noses and strange language that sounded as if they got too much phlegm. Tee Ray had never seen one before—that is, he hadn’t known he had seen one until Bucky told him that the peddler was really a Jew—but he had heard tell what they were like. So what that Jake the peddler sounded normal and never spoke any Jew-strange language? That proved it all the more, didn’t it? Jews were shifty and full of deceit. It was them what caused slavery to end, and now it was too expensive and time-consuming for small ’croppers like him to do the sugarcane processing by hand; ’croppers were relegated to taking their cane to centralized mills owned by the big plantation owners.

  So, the plantation owner won again. He took a percentage of your crop. He took another percentage of your share of the syrup and molasses and lacuite. He took it even if he was your relative.

  The niggers and the Jews had to pay. Tee Ray would make su
re of it.

  Chapter 24

  It was damn unfair. That’s what it was. Unfair.

  Go look for this, Bucky. Go there, Bucky. Go get it for me, Bucky.

  Here he was, having figured out what happened, having told it all to Raifer and Dr. Cailleteau, having everyone listening to him now, and what does Raifer do? Tell him to get back to Parteblanc and send a flimsy from town to New Orleans.

  A lot of good a telegraph message was gonna do. Why couldn’t it wait until this evening? Or tomorrow? What was the purpose of sending a flimsy to the Cotton Exchange to tell them of the Colonel Judge’s death? They’d know soon enough. But Raifer said it had to be done. Something about the Colonel Judge’s creditors having to know, him with no direct heirs or anything. Something about crop pledges and notes that may be due and all that kind of finance stuff.

  Sending a flimsy. That’s not a job for a deputy. A deputy should be investigating. Should be out there at Cottoncrest locking down the silverware and taking inventory to keep them former slaves from stealing the big house blind. Should be there with Raifer when he questioned all them others. Should be there to help out when Raifer talked to Little Miss.

  But no. Go back, he said. Back to Parteblanc.