The Cottoncrest Curse (16 page)

Jake thought quickly. “Tell you what, Rossy. If you and Cooper can find some way to hide all this that's in the cart, I'll give you half of it. If I'm not back in a month for the other half, it's yours as well. All I want is for you to give me my knife back. I traded you the last one I had.”

Rossy shifted the baby to her left shoulder and stuck out her right hand. “You got a deal, Peddler Man.”

“One thing,” Cooper added. “That cart. Everyone knows that cart. If your cart is found anywhere near Little Jerusalem, ain't none of us are gonna be safe.”

“Break it up,” Jake said, starting to unload the furs and handing them to Cooper. “Burn it. Destroy it. If I'm able to come back, I'll come back with another cart. And, if I'm not able to come back, it won't make any difference anyway.”

Cooper took the armload of skins, piled more on, and walked back inside the cabin, his big muscles barely straining against the load.

Jake followed him, empty-handed. “Cooper, you can't keep these in here. If, as Marcus says, the Knights come, they're going to search everywhere, inside and out. It won't be safe for you or Rossy if these are found in your possession.”

Cooper smiled. “Oh, there's ways.” He took a shovel that rested against the fireplace, blackened from the ashes and coals that had been scooped out over the years, and, moving the table in the center of the small room, started digging in the hard dirt floor. The shovel only penetrated a couple of inches before there was a hollow thud. Cooper quickly shoveled away an area three feet wide and four feet long; underneath several inches of dirt were four rough wooden planks. Cooper pried up the planks with the shovel, revealing a hole lined with planks onto which had been nailed roofing tin so that the contents would remain dry. The hole was almost five feet deep.

“You can hide a lot here. Can hide a woman and child if need be. Have done it before, and I'll do it again if I have to.”

“But where you gonna go, Peddler Man?” Rossy asked, coming back into the cabin with her baby, carrying more skins in the other arm. She handed them to Cooper, who was starting to lay his own pile into the hole. Then, reaching under the fireplace mantel, she dislodged a brick and pulled from the hollow behind it the knife Jake had traded to her earlier in the day. She looked at it longingly. “You ain't got no money. And when you leave here, you ain't gonna have nothin' to trade but this. How you gonna live?”

Jake just shrugged. He knew he was unlikely to see Rossy and Cooper again. “My people have a saying for this.
Tsum schlimazel darf men oych hobn mazel.
”

Cooper and Rossy looked puzzled. They turned to Marcus. “Is that French?”

“Ain't no French I ever spoke, and I've been speakin' it since I been born.”

“No,” said Jake, “not French. It means even for bad luck you need some luck.”

“That,” proclaimed Rossy, still holding the knife with a mixture of pride and resignation—pride of having been the owner of it, even temporarily, and resignation at having to give it up so soon—“don't make no sense either, and that was En glish.”

“It means,” Jake explained, “that things could always be worse.” He took the knife from Rossy and, sticking it in his belt, turned to Marcus. “Look, if Jenny is coming to New Orleans, you tell her to meet me in two weeks time at the Lafayette Cemetery, after dark. If I make it, I'll go there every night, three nights in a row. I'll be there waiting for her. There are things we have to talk about.”

“Well, no money. No cart. No nothin' to trade. And you gots to get far away. You're right, Peddler Man. Things for you can get worse,” said Cooper from down in the hole.

“Cooper, you hand up that bearskin,” Rossy commanded.

Cooper stood up, a thick bearskin in his hand. “What you want this for, Rossy? I got to get this all hidden. Don't got no time for you to go examin' the Peddler Man's goods.”

Rossy grabbed the bearskin out of his hands and handed it to Jake. “All you said you wanted was your knife. Well, you better take this too. Your ol' coat ain't gonna do you much good if the temperature gonna go and drop. You'll freeze to death for sure.”

Jake took the bearskin and opened his mouth to express his gratitude, but Rossy put her hands up in protest. “Hush. Don't say nothin'. Besides, I can't understand none of your sayings anyways, whether you're speaking that strange language or telling me what it means in English.”

Marcus laughed. “A bearskin and a knife, and that's all he's got, and it came from you. Didn't know white men could get so poor.” Marcus laughed again. “Rossy, it ain't only Mr. Jake's people that's got sayings. My people got a saying, too, that fits Mr. Jake.
La pauvrété n'est pas un déshonneur, mais c'est une fichue misère.
”

Now it was Jake's turn to laugh. “That's something
my
people might say!”

Rossy was indignant. “Marcus, it's bad enough when the Peddler Man starts in with his talk, and now you gots to throw French on top of that? The two of you! Speakin' things we don't understand. Marcus, I didn't think you'd be the one gettin' all high and mighty on us.”

Marcus smiled gently at Rossy, patting the baby on the head. “It just means that poverty is not a sin, but it is a mighty inconvenience.”

Today

“I don't know why Grandpapa Jake came to Louisiana, but I do know why I came the first time. I was young, almost as young as you. The nation was in turmoil. President Kennedy was in the White House, and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba had just happened and was a huge failure. In the meantime there had been twelve months of sit-ins all over the South. People were getting beaten up and arrested.

“There had to be a way to get blacks and whites together. There had to be a way to help bring the South to its senses. Here was something I could do personally that could make a difference. Here was something I could help with and not just study about in college.

“I made my way to Washington, D.C., and on May 4, 1961, after three days of training, I boarded a bus with five other whites and seven Negroes. I had just a tiny suitcase with two days' change of clothes, a toothbrush, a razor, and my most precious item safely hidden in the lining. The suitcase was small enough to fit in the overhead rack. All of us had been trained to travel light.

“We thought we were invincible, at least those of us on the buses who were white. We were going to expose the segregated interstate transportation facilities in the South and to overcome obstacles by the force of logical persuasion and peaceful protest.

How wrong we were. Our buses were stopped. Searched. Fire-bombed. We were pulled off and beaten up. White or black, it didn't make a difference. If you were on the bus, you were a target.

“Finally, in Alabama, the ride was shut down. The governor issued a proclamation telling all Freedom Riders to leave the state immediately.

“No more buses for the group I was with. Some of us were put on a plane and flown out. But me? I got on a train to New Orleans with a few others, and I held my suitcase in my lap all the way.

“It was 1961, but I found out that southern attitudes seemed to have changed little since 1896.

“Why 1896, you ask? That was the year the Supreme Court decided
Plessy versus Ferguson,
the famous ‘separate-but-equal' case that was finally overruled by
Brown versus Board of Education
in 1954.

“The train we rode had a Whites Only and a Colored Only car. The train stopped at stations with Whites Only and Colored Only restrooms. The train had engineers who were white and porters who were black. And in 1896
Plessy
had held that separating whites and blacks on trains was perfectly all right, as long as they were separate but equal.

“I'm ashamed to admit it, but in 1961, after having been cursed at and beaten up and driven out of Alabama, when riding that train, we sat in the white car all the way to New Orleans.”

1893

Dr. Cailleteau left Cottoncrest and headed northwest, back toward Parteblanc, his buggy squeaking with every slow step of his horse. The weather was changing. Soon the temperature would drop dramatically. Dr. Cailleteau could feel it coming. Underneath his vast folds of skin and fat, Dr. Cailleteau's joints ached with each jolt of the wooden wheels on the rutted road.

The air was full of odors. Ominous clouds to the south smelled of rain. The acrid smell of burning fields was everywhere. Strong wind gusts from the nearby thunderstorms gathered force and swept down in waves upon the burning fields, tossing the smoke in strange directions. Rain and smoke. The only thing missing was the smell of death; that was confined to the two bodies starting to rot in the Cottoncrest barn. The smell of death, however, had once filled his lungs every day, decades ago. The smell had remained on his hands and clothes, on his surgical knives and apron, on his boots and socks and hat. Death's odors had permeated him.

François Cailleteau had gotten to where he believed he could smell death coming. The war had done that for him. To him. Well, maybe not the smell of death itself but, rather, the smell of the fear of death.

From the time he spent in his gray uniform, his heavy canvas apron red with blood and covered with bits of human debris, he had learned that death could strike at any moment. From bullets. From cannons. From disease. From anywhere. He had seen it time and time again.

You could be hidden behind a thick redoubt and have it blown up in your face.

You could be kneeling down in the mud to tie your shoe, and a bullet would pierce your brain.

You could get scratched starting the late-evening's fire, and sepsis would set in, and your limbs would rot, and then your body would fail.

You could not have a mark on your limbs but start in with a hacking cough and not survive 'til dawn, gasping for each breath, your lungs clogged.

You could have survived another day's bombardment during the long siege and then choke to death on the bone of a baked rat caught in your throat as you hastily ate your first meal in two days, all the while glad that you had caught something to eat, even if it was only a rat feasting on the bodies of your dead comrades.

Death was everywhere, every hour of every day.

Young François Cailleteau, newly minted as a physician before Secession had been declared, his arms strong on a powerful torso, had walked the deep trenches at Port Hudson, tending to the wounded and comforting the others who were, as yet, uninjured but who cherished a kind word.

Young Dr. Cailleteau had found he could smell the fear of those who feared death. It covered them like a thick shroud. You could see it in their eyes—pupils dilating with a growing dread of the inevitable. Some were pimply-faced recruits, mere boys, their ill-fitting gray uniforms hanging limply on them, their Confederate caps pulled down tightly over hair crawling with lice. They had joined up, so sure of themselves and so ready for the glories of battle. Now they were shaken by days and days of bombardment, feeling certain that any moment would be their last. Others were married men, longing for their wives, desperately trying to survive just one more day and trying to hide their panic that they would not.

Then there were the injured and maimed. They cried in mortal agony, the mere act of inhaling bringing anguish with each breath. Dr. Cailleteau knew they were screaming not to be granted the release of dying but to be granted just a second more of life, no matter how terrible it was, no matter how wracked with pain they were, no matter that their guts were oozing out of their shirts and onto the ground, their limbs broken and missing.

And then there were those who squirmed under the saw and the fleam and the surgical knife. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Dr. Cailleteau had lost count. Bilious fevers racked their bodies. Pus and blood ran from every natural orifice as well as the unnatural ones caused by their injuries. Even though he had doused their wounds with a decoction of red oak bark and water as an antiseptic, even though he had given them stramonium and nightshade to try to ease their pain after the amputations, even as they fell into a senseless stupor on the planks that served as surgical tables, the smell of the fear of death was on them as well.

Yet, there were others who seemed to know no fear. Perhaps they were the most foolish of all. They crawled through the rain of grape-shot as if it were a light spring sprinkle. They loaded their weapons with precision and speed, not with panicked haste. They ducked their heads when the earth flew from a cannonball's nearby crash, and not bothering to wipe the mud off of their faces, quickly raised up above the parapets to fire another shot at the enemy.

These were the men who created the smell of the fear of death in others. In the sailors attempting to assault Port Hudson, who did not believe that this small ragged band of southern farm boys could hold off Farragut's mighty fleet. In the blue-belly troops who now feared the hail of bullets and cannon fire coming from the bluffs of Port Hudson, high above the Mississippi River, that repulsed wave after wave of black Corps d'Afrique soldiers and white Union soldiers, even after day after day after day of constant bombardment.

These men, who created the fear of death in the enemy, also created the fear of death in their own comrades. Their fellow soldiers marveled at these men, at their seeming indestructibility. Standing beside them in the trenches or crouched low in the brush atop the bluff, their friends in dirty gray uniforms feared that they would die but these men would live.

Of course, these men who instilled the fear of death in others also fell and died, but they never believed they were going to die. They never believed it at all, until a bullet proved them wrong.

Dr. Cailleteau could see that Tee Ray Brady was like that. His mere presence caused weaker men to exude the smell of death. Tee Ray carried himself like a stalking creature of the night, full of guile and cunning, waiting to pounce on those who were helpless or frightened. Tee Ray wanted the panic of mortality to be cast over others as he strode by. That's why the Knights followed him.