The Cottoncrest Curse (28 page)

Jenny awoke with a start. Marcus was tapping her shoulder. How long had she been dreaming?

The faintest glow from the east could be seen through the open roof. Dawn was still an hour or more away. Sally was standing next to Marcus. To Sally's right, visible in the light of the setting moon, was a tall white man. Next to him was a short, squat white woman whose height was about four and a half feet and whose width was almost the same.

“Jenny, we got to go now,” Marcus said urgently. “There's no time.”

Jenny rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “The train's coming to Baton Rouge, and you've got to take it already? At this hour?”

“Ain't gonna be no train for us. Not for Sally and me right now.”

The squat woman helped Jenny to her feet and then handed her a large bundle. “You put this on your head, you hear, and follow me.”

Jenny was indignant. She hadn't left Cottoncrest and the service of Little Miss to serve any more white women.

Sensing Jenny tense up and fearing she was about to say something she shouldn't, Marcus pulled her to one side and whispered in her ear, “These are Undergrounders too, just like Mr. Ganderson. Seems there is a warrant out for all of us. They're gonna be watchin' the trains and boats goin' north throughout Louisiana, so Sally and I got to follow this man. He's gonna put us on the Underground to Alabama. Once we've passed through Mississippi and over the Alabama line, we can head north from there. But if you're set on gettin' to New Orleans, as you are, then you got to go with this lady. They're lookin' for a high yallow gal like you travelin' alone, not a housegirl followin' a respectful distance behind her mistress, carrying a bundle on her head that shows she knows her place and covers her features at the same time. Understand?”

Jenny nodded and squeezed Marcus's hand.

Marcus leaned over and gave her a grandfatherly kiss on the forehead. “The Lord will protect. Two dead. Two safe. And two on their way to safety. That leaves just you.”

“Monsieur Jake,” Jeanne Marie asked in French, “why is it that the Knights hate Catholics and Jews so much?”

Jake sat in the middle of the pirogue wrapped in the bearskin, while Jeanne Marie paddled in front and Étienne steered through the seemingly endless marsh.

After leaving Lamou they had traveled all day in the long, narrow boat, carved from a single piece of cypress, down the curving bayou. The bayou had emptied into the forested swamp. There towering cypress trees had loomed overhead, their gigantic roots poking above the water and forming knees for these ancient sentinels.

Threading the pirogue through the swamp's maze of brackish waters, Étienne had brought them out into the marsh. Once the tops of the trees had almost disappeared over the horizon in the late afternoon, they had paused while Étienne and Jeanne Marie had taken out fishing poles and expertly caught several speckled trout. Then Étienne had located a narrow piece of high ground, where Jeanne Marie built a fire, Étienne prepared the fish, and they had a hot meal before sleeping under the vast sky, secure on the tiny treeless island in the marsh.

Today Étienne and Jeanne Marie had been paddling through the marsh since dawn. The sun was almost directly overhead. The swamp had been confusing enough with its immense trees and canopy of leaves and moss and vines, and Jake did not know how Étienne knew the way through. Here in the marsh, however, it seemed even worse, for from his low perch in the pirogue, Jake could see nothing but still water and thick vegetation. High oyster grass projected five feet above the surface of the marsh and marched to the horizon, broken up only by narrow pathways of water that opened onto hidden lakes from which led more streams and bands, some of which abruptly terminated at dead ends and others of which led to yet more open acres of water. Upon crossing the lakes, they would again be swallowed up by the ocean of grass pushing in on the narrow pirogue. Every so often Jake would see clumps of reeds fifteen feet tall, each stem as slender as Jeanne Marie's little finger, rising above the grasses and casting gently swaying shadows.

Overhead the birds of winter were arriving. Huge flocks of white geese, high in the sky, flapped their wings slowly as they glided along thousands of feet above in precise V-shape formations. Hawks hovered even higher, coasting on the air currents. Flittering ducks, sometimes in groups of twos and threes, sometimes in the hundreds, swooped low over the marsh, settling onto the wide hidden lakes, only to fly off when the pirogue entered, disturbing their feeding. Tiny yellow-throated vireos, darting from the safety of the swamps over the horizon, flew out and then quickly returned to their nests in the hackberry, green ash, sweet gum, and water oaks.

Jeanne Marie knew all the birds and pointed them out to Jake as they passed by, but Étienne never spoke to Jake. He never spoke to anyone, it seemed, except Jeanne Marie and only then when he didn't think Jake was listening. Jeanne Marie had explained that, as Tante Odille liked to say, Étienne kept his tongue in his pocket.

Jake and Jeanne Marie, however, had carried on a running conversation in French. Jeanne Marie did not speak any En glish.

“Why, Monsieur Jake?” Jeanne Marie asked again. “Father Séverin in Lamou has said that we must all love our neighbors, and I want to love them, but our neighbors do not love us. They hate us, and they seem to hate you more, just because you are a Jew. I could see it in Monsieur Tee Ray's eyes and hear it in his voice, even though I could not understand the words.”

“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.”

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.

Today

“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.