The Cottoncrest Curse: A Novel

by Michael H. Rubin

  “What can I say, Jeanne Marie? People sometimes hate others because they are different. The Cossacks hated us in Russia because we were Jews. We looked different. We acted different.”

  “But you do not look so different. To me you look like all the others in Petit Rouge. Yes?”

  “Jeanne Marie, you are a wonderful girl, and may you always have eyes that see the truth rather than what someone else thinks you should see. In Russia, however, we did look different. My father and uncle wore beards, my mother wore a wig, and even as a little boy, I had long strands of hair that dropped in front of my ears—pais we called them. And special hats and special clothes. We looked different. We spoke a different language. Yiddish.”

  “Yet,” Jeanne Marie protested, “today you look like everyone else. You wear the same clothes as everyone else. Your hair looks like everyone else. You even speak En glish just like everyone else. Your French is so good too, like someone from Paris.”

  “You are very kind. I hope that someday you will see Paris, Jeanne Marie. You are right. Sometimes even if people look the same, they are still hated because others hate who they are or what they believe.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Sometimes neither do I. There was a war here, you know. The Colonel Judge fought in it. That’s how he became a colonel. In that war state fought against state because of beliefs. It was not about looks at all. The soldiers on one side of the line looked like the soldiers on the other side, except for the color of their uniforms. They spoke the same language. They worshipped in the same churches. They had grown up singing the same songs and reading the same books. But they killed each other by the thousands. It was about beliefs. Just like a cheap knife can rust from the inside out—starting with a tiny crack where the blade meets the haft, until there is nothing left of strength in the blade, although the tip of the blade looks shiny and strong—hate can eat away inside a person until there’s nothing but the rust of spite and malevolence keeping them alive. That is how I think Tee Ray is. That is how I think some of the Knights are. They hate the Jews because they think we killed Jesus. The Knights hate the Catholics because they think you obey a foreign power, the pope, instead of being American like them.”

  “How silly. How can Tee Ray and the others believe such things? The ouaouaron in the swamp—the bullfrog—has more sense than that.”

  “I agree. In fact, what makes it all the more strange is that Tee Ray’s mother was Catholic.”

  Chapter 59

  Bucky stared out over the railings in wonder. He had imagined what it would be like, but he hadn’t imagined half hard enough.

  The paddle wheels turned endlessly, water cascading from them as the batons reached the top only to plunge down into the river once more. The boat carved its way through the strong currents of the Mississippi, the brown water swirling around the vessel as it arced slowly port to bypass a sandbar or bore starboard to avoid a huge clump of driftwood half-submerged and drifting downstream.

  Port and starboard. Left and right. It was all so miraculous. Bucky was mastering all these new words.

  Every part of it was wonderful, even though this was not the riverboat with rooms and actors and a fancy restaurant and rich men and women in elegant clothes with refined manners that Bucky had dreamed about. This was only a cargo transport, its hold filled with hogs and goats and chickens and smelling of animals and manure.

  But Bucky didn’t care. It was still a real steamboat. It was still taking him away from Parteblanc. It was whisking him, curve by long curve of the river, toward the great city of New Orleans, where he would see sights so fantastic that for the rest of his life he would be able to tell tales to all those who never even left Petit Rouge Parish, whose world never extended beyond the parish lines.

  Bucky couldn’t bear to be distracted even for a moment. He wanted to remember each and every sight. The vast forests that abruptly bordered even vaster plantations, where the planter’s homes, some as large as Cottoncrest, rose up on tall columns like white spectral figures praying to the sky.

  Bucky wanted it all to last forever, and at the same time he couldn’t wait to get to New Orleans.

  Tee Ray couldn’t wait to get to New Orleans either. Propped against a rail on the upper deck, he slowly drew his knife across the small whet-stone for the hundredth time. Raifer had been clear; if Tee Ray wanted to go get the Jew, he had to go with Bucky. You got to be sure, Raifer had told him, that Bucky is with you when you catch him. That’ll make it all legal. Do something to the Jew when Bucky’s not there, and then either the sheriff of Orleans Parish or the police chief of New Orleans may get involved, depending what you’ve done to the peddler, but if Bucky is there with his badge, then they’ll let you do what you got to do.

  Tee Ray was happy enough to let Bucky continue to stare wide-eyed at everything. For Bucky this was a trip of firsts. His first time away from home. His first time on his own. His first time to experience the sensuous pleasures of New Orleans.

  For Tee Ray it was a trip of lasts. This was going to be the last season he would ever be a sharecropper. This was going to be last season his six children would sleep in the crowded two-room cabin instead of each having a separate bedroom with a fine feather mattress and a four-poster bed and a porcelain washbasin and a mahogany armoire filled with new clothes. This was going to be the last time Mona would have to fetch water and cook breakfast rather than ordering a servant to do this and everything else for her.

  This was going to be last time Tee Ray’s family would ever be just one of many. Soon they would be first above all.

  Tee Ray wished his mother were alive to see this day. Would she have rejoiced? Tee Ray was not sure. Even after all the General had done to her, after the bitter rejection and continuing slights, to the day his mother died, she couldn’t bring it in her heart to hate him or Little Miss or the Colonel Judge. Every night she said a prayer for them, a prayer for forgiveness.

  Those prayers had gnawed on Tee Ray as he had grown up. He had never understood them. Why pray for those who refused to talk to you, who refused to see you, who treated you like you were invisible and worthless? His mother never lost hope, but Tee Ray never found it. If that was the way those folks feel, Tee Ray came to believe, then you should return the feeling ten times over. Love, his mother had said, gave her strength, but Tee Ray knew that, for himself, it was anything but love that gave meaning to his life.

  His mother had always done things for love, regardless of the consequences. Now Tee Ray would continue to do things for hate because of the consequences.

  PART VI

  Today

  Chapter 60

  “No interstate highways back in those days. No six-lane express-ways leading to bridges across the river. No. In those days you took the Airline Highway north out of New Orleans. There wasn’t anything for miles and miles. Just cotton fields and sugarcane and hot sun.

  “When you got to Luling, you drove your car up the levee, right across the top, and back down onto the ferry. That’s how you got across the river. The ferry could fit maybe sixteen cars on it in a squeeze, five on each side next to the railings, lined up like wagons ’round a camp-fire, and six in the center, parked three and three. You put on the parking brake and got out, ’cause it was far too hot to sit in those cars. You just watched and waited as the muddy water sloshed below, and the diesel engines slowly pushed you across the river.

  “I don’t know how Grandpapa ever got from Lamou to New Orleans. I know he couldn’t take the riverboat; he had said they were watching for that. And he didn’t have a horse, and he couldn’t take the road. He said they were watching the roads too. Yet somehow he managed to get from Parteblanc to New Orleans.

  “In those days that trip took a minimum of three days by horse once you crossed the river. I don’t even know where or how he got across the river from the west bank where Cottoncrest was to the east bank where New Orleans sits.”

  “But there I was, in 1961, crossing the
Mississippi on a ferry, having come up from New Orleans in less than an hour.

  “And once I was across, there were those strange little cities. It wasn’t like it is today, all uniform, with national franchises of everything from gasoline stations to stores to fast food, so every place you go is really like every place you’ve been.

  No, in those days everything was local, and Louisiana was like no place I had ever seen. Little towns like Des Allemands, where lots of people spoke French although it was originally a German settlement. Tiny stores with hand-lettered signs that sold homemade boudin and andouille sausage. Little boys sitting on their haunches next to the ditches on either side of the road—the road having been carved right through the swamp and marsh and built up, leaving deep ditches on either side where the dirt had been dug to pile up so that the road was a few feet higher than the usual water level—a pole in one hand and a net in the other. No, they weren’t fishing. They had tied a raw piece of bacon on the end of the line and were hunting for crawfish.

  “It was all mighty strange to a northern city boy like me. But what lay ahead, I knew, was going to be even stranger. And much more dangerous than even the Freedom Rides.”

  1893

  Chapter 61

  “Now who could be knocking at this hour! Zig, if I’ve told you once… this isn’t a respectable area. We should have bought that house next to the railway line, right on St. Charles Avenue. But no, you said, this area is less expensive and would be just as nice. Well, less expensive gets you this. Knocks at all hours of the night!”

  “Leah, shhh. You want the neighbors should hear you?”

  “The neighbors! If we lived in the Vieux Carré, with all those houses with their common walls, then they could hear. Out here in the Garden District who can hear anything from one garden to the next? Besides, all our neighbors are asleep. That’s what respectable people do.”

  “Enough! You’ll wake the children.”

  “Who could sleep through this knocking? Go answer the door already. And take a gun. One cannot be too careful.” Leah Haber adjusted her green silk dressing gown as she walked out of the handsome parlor, with its elegant gas lamps flickering a warm glow on pale blue walls that stretched up past the triple crown molding to the sixteen-foot-high stark-white ceiling with its carved plaster reliefs.

  As she turned the corner, past the tall Chinese vase filled with fresh flowers, on her way up the wide staircase to the second floor and beyond, up to the third floor where the children slept, Isaac “Zig” Haber could hear her muttering, “Does he want to live where respectable people live? No. He wants to live where he thinks property will appreciate faster. What am I going to do with that man?”

  Zig reached into a cabinet and, opening an intricately ornamented oak case, withdrew an expensive revolver. Making sure it was loaded, he approached the broad double doors that opened onto the front veranda. “Who is it?” he said stoutly. Zig Haber was not a man to be trifled with. Not in business. Not in deal making. And certainly not in his home.

  “Please, Zig, open the door. I need your help,” a hoarse voice called.

  “I don’t open the door at this hour for anyone. Go away!” Zig’s tone was that of one who was used to getting his way. Since the Italian massacres no one could be too careful. No one, certainly, like Zig Haber, who would always be seen as an immigrant and an outsider by the famously insular French who lived downtown as well as by the brashly proud Catholics and Protestants who populated the uptown Garden District.

  “Siz nito keyn tachlis dorten?” the voice beyond the door asked.

  Zig put down the gun and, unlocking the door, quickly ushered in the young man, who stood shivering on his gallery in the chilly October night air. Jake Gold always began their talks that way. Jake always asked, when he came back from one of his trips to the country, “There’s no room for negotiation here?” And of course in their trading there was always room for negotiation.

  Hearing the door open and close again quickly, Leah called from the top of the stairs, “Zig! Who is it?”

  “It’s business, Leah. Go back upstairs.”

  Leah murmured under her breath as she turned around to complete her way to the top floor of the house to check on the children, “Business. With him it’s always business. Even at this hour of the night!”

  Chapter 62

  “Slow down, Bucky, we’ve got another full day tomorrow. He’s either here already, or he’ll be here shortly. He’s gonna fall right into our hands, that’s for sure. And when he does, remember, you’re gonna get all the credit.”

  Bucky finished off one final mouthful of beer and put the half-filled pint mug back on the counter, next to the two empty ones he had already drained, next to the tumblers of whiskey he and Tee Ray had raced through a half-hour ago. Tee Ray was right. Bucky was going to get all the credit. That’s why Raifer had given him this important task.

  “But Tee Ray,” Bucky asked though the haze of inebriation that was descending over him, “do we really have to start so early tomorrow mornin’? After all, we’ve been at this four days already. We’ve been to each of the five Jew churches twice. We’ve been to most of the Jew stores in town. We done passed out flyers and made it clear that ain’t no one should be harboring the peddler and, if they hear about him at all, they’ve got to let us know. We’ve been to the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office, the City of New Orleans Police Department, City Hall, the Cotton Exchange, the Board of Trade, and even the Fire Department. Ain’t it time to have some fun yet?”

  Tee Ray’s face broke into a malicious grin. “Plenty of time for fun when we’ve caught him, you know that, Bucky. I’ll make sure you’re gonna have so much fun you ain’t never gonna want to stop.”

  Bucky knew exactly what Tee Ray meant. Bucky could hardly wait. Tee Ray was going to take him into Faubourg Tremé. Before coming to New Orleans, Bucky hadn’t known what a Faubourg was, but now, along with port and starboard, he had added new words to his vocabulary. Faubourg, he now knew to his satisfaction, was just a French word for neighborhood. New Orleans was full of strange words. Like banquette for sidewalk. Heck, it weren’t that hard to be in the big city. It was easy to learn what you had to learn.

  But what Bucky really wanted to learn about, firsthand, was Faubourg Tremé. Tee Ray had promised him. Once they caught the Jew Peddler, Tee Ray was going to take him down to one of them fine fast houses in Faubourg Tremé where they got all the good music and all the liquor you can drink and all them girls who dance with you in their silks and some who dance with you without anything on at all and then take you upstairs where you…

  Bucky couldn’t wait. A whole night spent like that. And Tee Ray promised him he could have two gals at one time if he wanted. Who could dream of such a thing? Bucky hadn’t even thought of it before, but now that was all he could think about.

  “Come on, Bucky, leave the rest of the beer. Tomorrow, first thing, we’re going to see Isaac Haber.”

  “Just another Jew,” Bucky complained as he started to pick up the mug again.

  Tee Ray grabbed the mug from his hand. “Don’t you listen to nothin’?” Tee Ray snapped. “Didn’t you hear what they said at the Board of Trade today?”

  Bucky was hurt. Why was Tee Ray doubting him? “Sure I heard. Jews like to trade with anyone, but Jews stick together. I ain’t surprised. We knew that all the time. It’s just like you tell the Knights. Jews get to do special deals, but only among themselves. Secret deals, along with their secret language.”

  Bucky’s hurt feelings now started to turn to anger, fueled by the flush from the liquor. “Heard all of it. Remembered all of it. And I also remember who Raifer put in charge. It’s me. You’re here to help me, Tee Ray. You remember that, hear? I’m the one with the badge. I get to decide what we do and don’t do. So don’t go tellin’ me what was said at the Board of Trade.”

  Tee Ray softened his approach. Being stern with Bucky wasn’t going to get him where he needed to be. Tee Ray needed Bucky’s full
cooperation, and Bucky needed to think it was his own idea, not Tee Ray’s.

  Taking the still half-filled mug, Tee Ray led Bucky to the end of the bar, away from the crowd, and said encouragingly, “That’s right, Bucky. No question about it. But I need your help. Maybe I wasn’t makin’ myself clear. What I need for you to tell me, ’cause I don’t remember so well, is exactly what they told us at the Board of Trade this afternoon. You’re the one with the good memory. It all kind of slips away from me.”

  Bucky pulled himself erect. Tee Ray was right. Tee Ray needed him to remember. That’s why Bucky was there. To be in control. To make sure Tee Ray didn’t make any mistakes.

  Bucky squinted and looked at the ceiling, trying to recall the conversation. “Well, as I said, I remember it all. I handed out the flyers and talked about how the Jew Peddler and them darkies, Marcus and Sally and Jenny, were all stealing stuff from Cottoncrest after the Colonel Judge died unexpectedly—I was good, wasn’t I, in not mentioning how the Colonel Judge done died? Raifer had said not to say.”

  “You done real good, Bucky. Go on, what happened next? I’m a little hazy.”

  “Then, as I recollect, they got real interested because they don’t want no Jew stealin’ from no one. And then they said that they don’t know no peddler named Jake, but they asked what he peddled. And I done told them. He was always wantin’, even more than money for his things, skins and hides in exchange. He always was trying to sell or trade a cartload of needles and thread and bolts of fabric and pots and pans and other such stuff. And knives. Real fancy knives.”

  Bucky’s eyes lit up as he uttered these last few words.

  “That was it, wasn’t it? I remember now. It was my sayin’ fancy knives that got them talkin’. Fancy knives to sell. Skins to trade. They done said that while there was lots of pelt traders, there was one Jew place that bought pelts and shipped them upriver to New York, and it also would purchase a supply of fancy knives from time to time. And that was Isaac Haber & Co. Hell, Tee Ray, don’t you think we got to see them folks?”