The Cottoncrest Curse (11 page)

“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.

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 sure of it.

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.

Bucky's horse, almost as thin and forlorn as its rider, moved slowly down the road. The smell of burning was everywhere. Wisps of dark smoke coasted across their path, sometimes obscuring their vision and then, just as abruptly when the wind changed, sweeping away, revealing the remaining thickly planted green cane, higher than a man's head, on either side of the road.

Occasionally, a rattler would slither out of the field and cross a few hundred feet ahead of them, moving rapidly to avoid the spreading fire. Mice and rats scurried along, seeking refuge. Hawks hovered overhead, circling slowly, anticipating the feast to come as their prey was flushed from the shelter of the densely packed fields of cane.

The horse whinnied and shied. Bucky looked up. Coming out of a narrow cane break, thirty feet to his right, a man was walking with long strides toward the road, his long thin hair hanging from beneath his sweaty hat and its dirty brim.

“You give my horse a start, Tee Ray,” Bucky called out.

The expression on Tee Ray's face was unsettling. The gap caused by the front tooth knocked out long ago in a fight was visible, and the lips seemed more a sneer than a grin. “Bucky, either you got to get a better horse or that horse got to get a better rider.”

Bucky pulled the reins up, and his horse stopped. Bucky loosened his grip, and the horse started to graze on the grasses that ran along the edge of the field.

Tee Ray reached the road and turned down it. Bucky had thought that Tee Ray would stop and chat, but Tee Ray kept on ambling away. That was all right. Tee Ray would see how important Bucky was.

Bucky jerked the reins and the horse resisted, but the gag bits hurt its mouth. The horse reluctantly lifted its head and started moving again down the road toward the man ahead of them.

“You know, Tee Ray, ain't no white men seen them bodies 'cept Raifer and Dr. Cailleteau and me. I seen them again today, all waxy-like under the sheets. And did you know what Raifer and I been doin' all mornin'? Lookin' for bullets. That's right. Crawlin' around on our hands and knees like some darky scrubbin' the floor.

Tee Ray slowed his pace.

Bucky was proud. He knew what he had to say was interesting. Tee Ray was impressed with him, Bucky could tell.

“Is that a fact?”

“Fact, Tee Ray, fact. Raifer wants that bullet what the Colonel Judge shot himself with. For a souvenir, I bet. I mean, the curse made the Colonel Judge not only kill his wife—it made him do all kinds of strange things. Like, he didn't shoot himself like a normal man would. No sir. Got himself all twisted like. Like his arm and wrist were as twisted as his mind. Look, let me show you.”

Bucky, sitting atop his horse, made a broad gesture of taking a gun out of his holster, forgetting that the Colonel Judge was not wearing a holster. But it made for a good effect. His forefinger cocked, Bucky raised his right hand to his right temple, and then he rolled his eyes. “My fate has been sealed. My darlin' wife is dead. Dead by my own bloody hand. And now I must be the agent of my own dee-mise.”

Bucky was just getting started with his performance when a change in the wind brought smoke over the road. It was thick and obscured the sunlight.

Bucky started coughing as ashes caught in this throat. Bucky's horse frantically pawed the earth, looking for some way to escape. Burning embers smoldered in Bucky's hair, and his eyes were smarting.

“Get down off your damn horse before you break your neck and it breaks a leg!”

Gladly complying with Tee Ray's command, Bucky dismounted the increasingly terrified animal.

Tee Ray yanked the reins from Bucky's hand and, grabbing the throat latch of the bridle with a steely grip, led the horse slowly down the road. Bucky followed.

Eventually the wind shifted, the fire's dark smoke was now behind them, and the horse, now calmer, ceased resisting. The road finally exited the cane field, and the three of them, Tee Ray, Bucky, and the horse, continued on at a leisurely pace into the hardwood forest, the dark-green palmettos growing low and spreading their spiky fan leaves over the soil that was always damp or muddy and which, after the rains, was covered with several inches of water.

“They gonna bury the Colonel Judge and his wife soon?”

Bucky, his throat still raw from the smoke, blew gray-brown mucus out of his nose and wiped it on his muddy sleeves. This was good. Tee Ray wanted information that only Bucky could give. Tee Ray needed him.