The Cottoncrest Curse (4 page)

That's the way to do it.
Honik oifen tsung.
Honey on the tongue. That's what Uncle Avram used to tell him in Yiddish in the tailor shop. Make the customer happy, and the customer will make you happy.

Jake looked up at the sky—about another hour until noon. If he kept up this pace, he'd hit the bayou, head south, and be in Lamou by four, leaving plenty of time to do some selling and some trading.

Although there were long walks between stops, Jake far preferred this rural and untamed country to the docks at Hamburg and Paris or the East Side of New York. It reminded him, in some strange way, of home.

Of course, there was no snow, no mountains, no fir trees, and no Jews out here. Yet it was just like what his father and Uncle Avram had wanted their village to be. A quiet place, where you could raise a family, where you could smell the fresh air and own land, where you could be free from looking over your shoulder in fear, free from wondering whether the Cossack you fitted for a new shirt today would come stone you tonight, free from wondering whether the Czar would take your children away and destroy your family and your religion.

This Louisiana had many things that his father and Uncle Avram would appreciate. Here you could earn a living. Here you could buy land. Here there was no one to tell you that Jews weren't allowed to do this or to do that.

Of course, out in this countryside, unlike in New York or even in New Orleans, they had never seen a Jew. That meant that Jake could do anything he wanted, could be just like anyone else. He wasn't Yaakov the Jew. He was Jake Gold, the Peddler Man. Jake Gold, a good, short American name. He was just like many others in Louisiana—a man who could speak more than one language, who had come here to make his own way, who would be judged on what he did.

Moshe! His brother had not one but two Jewish names. Here in America Moshe could have any name he wanted, but he chose Moshe Goldfarb. With a name like that, you knew he was Jewish before he walked in the door. Of course, Moshe would probably never leave New York a second time, and he was never coming south again. Not now at least, not after what he had been through.

Moshe loved New York, however, and he was happy to stay there from now on. Moshe loved the crowds and the bustle. He loved living in his sixth-floor walkup on Mott Street. He loved the nightlong card games and the days filled with trading. He loved being on the streets and being able to conduct business in nothing but Yiddish.

Jake remembered the first time he had walked down Mott Street toward the tenement where Moshe lived, where Moshe was going to let him live. It was a Saturday afternoon. Moshe had carried the little bag that contained all of Jake's belongings, the bag he had bought in Paris before sailing. Moshe had just met him at the ferry that brought Jake from Ellis Island.

For three long days, from early in the morning until late in the evening, Moshe had waited at the ferry landing. He had been worried, Moshe had told him as they walked, that Jake would not clear customs, that something would be found wrong, that Jake would be sent back. Moshe had written to him to put a white slip of paper in his hatband and that Moshe would do the same. That way they could spot each other.

Jake had no way of contacting Moshe while the customs officials kept him sitting on hard benches in that long, high-ceilinged building on Ellis Island. It was not until that Saturday afternoon, after being questioned time after time, after being poked and prodded by doctors for a whole day, shuffled from one area to the next, and after being cooped up in a packed dormitory for two nights and waiting in long lines to be served strange food on metal plates, that he had at last arrived and found, amidst the sea of hats, the one with the white piece of paper and the face underneath that looked like a twin to his sister Beruriah.

Yet Moshe was years older than Beruriah, and it was Leah and Beruriah who were the twins, although they were far from identical. Where Leah was outwardly emotional, Beruriah was coolly logical. Beruriah was taller by a head, with a more fulsome figure. Beruriah had a rounded face and hair the color of the finest black ink, hair that naturally curled and twisted into ringlets the few times she let it down at night before carefully combing it out and braiding it back onto her head, held in place with a mass of cleverly hidden pins. Unlike Beruriah, Leah, with her finely chiseled features, with her pale skin, with red hair brightly luminous as the setting sun, stood out from all the other Jewish girls in the village.

How Jake had wished that Beruriah and Leah and his mother and father and Uncle Avram had been with him to see this marvelous city through which Moshe wove with such practiced skill. Hamburg had been crowded, but at least Jake—Jacob Goldenes as he was known there—could understand what was being said. Yiddish was similar to German, and he was able to pick up German quickly. Paris, where he went by Jacques Giraudoux, was harder. It was more difficult to get his tongue around French pronunciation, although the intonation he absorbed readily, so that when at last he started to speak the language, he did not sound as if he had been in the country only six months. And besides, in Hamburg and Paris there were lots of Jews and lots of Russians. He had no problem getting what he needed.

But here in New York, they spoke so quickly! Their tone was so flat and nasal. Jake had started to pick up some En glish on the boat over, but the En glish he had heard sounded nothing like the En glish that now engulfed them as they walked arm in arm toward Moshe's apartment.

And the Jews! In Paris and Hamburg the Jews had their special places where they lived and worked, but you seldom saw them out on the main streets in huge groups. But as Jake and Moshe had approached the East Side, on the sidewalks and in every door there were Jews. Hundreds of Jews. Thousands of Jews. Tens of thousands of Jews! Signs in Hebrew above shop doors. Signs in Yiddish. Jews with tables on the street filled with goods, piled so high that Jake had been sure each was richer than the next. Jews crowding around the tables, touching the wares, comparing. So much to sell! So much to buy! So many Jews and so much negotiating over prices in Yiddish and Russian and German and Polish and other languages that Jake barely recognized. So much money changing hands. And on the Sabbath!

They had been walking past one corner on the way from the ferry to Moshe's—it was almost five o'clock, and already the streets were filling with shadows from the tall buildings six or seven stories high, one after the other—when a whistle blew and hundreds of girls poured out onto the street from the nearby brick buildings. Jake recalled, with a smile at how little he knew then, that he had turned to Moshe and said in Yiddish, feeling a mixture of lust at all the women and astonishment at the sight, “Isn't it wonderful, Moshe, that there are so many good Jewish girls here who have spent the whole day in these enormous shuls and who only now are coming home for Havdalah?”

Moshe had turned to him and said with a straight face, “So true, so true. You should be so lucky as to worship in one of those shuls. They're open from early in the morning until late at night every day.”

It was only later that Jake had found out that those brick buildings were not synagogues at all but, rather, garment factories.

There were no Jewish girls here in the Louisiana countryside, and those in New Orleans hadn't appealed to him. He would have time soon enough to find a wife. First, however, he would build his wealth and protect what he already had.

Jake paused to wipe his brow and look in the cart. He checked his inventory, especially the Freimer knives, which were his highest-profit item. If he could do what he anticipated, if he could trade for them profitably, it would be at least another week before he would have to go back to pick up what he had hidden at Cottoncrest.

The pistol in the Colonel Judge's hand was old and rusty. Raifer hadn't noticed that fact the first time he had looked at the scene, but now that he was bent over the old man's body, he could clearly see it was not like any weapon the Colonel Judge kept.

The Colonel Judge had been meticulous. If you went to see him in his court chambers, his desk was always clean. He kept in front of him only the one thing he was working on at the moment. As soon as he was finished, the documents were filed away. His inkstand was always filled, his blotter always fresh. Even as times grew harder, even as the Colonel Judge had to cut back on farming and sell off some of the cattle, he had kept the house at Cottoncrest in the finest condition. The fence around the garden always looked as if it had been freshly whitewashed, with no tinge of green from the rain dripping off the leaves of the oaks and magnolias. The veranda was swept clean each morning. The windows and mirrors were washed and the furniture dusted daily. Before Rebecca had arrived and taken over supervision of the house, Marcus had been kept busy. Everything had to be up to the Colonel Judge's standards.

The Colonel Judge's special pride was his military collection. He had mounted, over the mantel of the great fireplace in the sitting room, his father's sword, pistols, and rifles. The General's arms were always kept polished, seemingly ready to be taken down and used in battle on a moment's notice.

After the Colonel Judge had gone hunting, he would clean his guns himself while Marcus chopped off the feet and removed the feathers from the ducks or turkeys the Colonel Judge had downed with expert aim. Then, the guns would go back into the gun case in the wall of the study.

This revolver in the Colonel Judge's hand did not look like the kind of weapon the Colonel Judge would have kept.

Why would the Colonel Judge use a rusty gun to kill himself? It was not an ordinary revolver. It was not a Colt or a Derringer. It was an unusual design. It had a cylinder that held nine shots, not the usual six. It looked like the.36-caliber bullet you'd use with a Colt wouldn't be big enough. What type of bullet did the Colonel Judge use to kill himself?

The revolver had two barrels, a normal-sized one and another one, underneath, larger in diameter. The larger one, however, hadn't been used in years; it was jammed with dirt and grime and crusty mud. Why had the Colonel Judge not cleaned the pistol to make sure it would fire properly?

Raifer examined the loading lever. It flipped up, and the accumulated rust made it difficult to work. This, too, was an unusual design. If it stuck, the piston could be shoved into the cylinder, and the pistol would jam when you got ready to cock it for the next shot. Why use a revolver that had a chance of misfiring?

The Colonel Judge's body lay across Rebecca's back. Raifer grabbed the wide, mahogany banister to steady himself as he squatted down awkwardly to get a close look at the Colonel Judge's face. The bullet had clearly entered the skull at the left temple; there were burn marks there. His eyes were open in a fixed gaze. Blood—his and Rebecca's— stained his white beard and mustache and his once carefully combed mane of white hair. His right ear rested on Rebecca's lower back as if he were listening to something. Carefully and very gingerly, Raifer picked up the Colonel Judge's head to look at the right temple and stared long and hard at the blood-covered head in his grasp.

Raifer returned the Colonel Judge's head to Rebecca's lower back. Let them have one more time together, even in death.

Maybe the Cottoncrest curse was worse than people said, or else there was something very, very strange going on here that had nothing to do with a curse.

“First I buy needles and thread and two, yes two thimbles for my Jeanne Marie. That should be enough, I think. But now you tell me,” Trosclaire Thibodeaux was saying in French, “that this knife, she is one beautiful piece of work and that she could slice through anything like it was butter. I think you are fooling me, no?”

Although Jake had no problem understanding the French spoken in New Orleans—his time in Paris had equipped him to converse fluently enough—the French that the Acadians spoke had taken some getting used to. They had a different intonation, a different pronunciation, and a slew of different ways of saying things. It was as if they had been separated from everything French for 150 years and had developed their own vocabulary and way of speaking.

But of course, they really had been separated, first in Canada and now here. The British had driven their grandparents from Port-Royal and Halifax in Nova Scotia, which was then called Acadia. Some had gone to Saint Domingue and then to New Orleans and finally to here. Others had been sent to Virginia and then Britain and then, courtesy of Spanish transport ships, to New Orleans.

But no matter what their route, the high French in New Orleans looked down their noses on these Acadians. The high French considered the Acadians coarse and uneducated. The Acadians had callused hands and sunburned faces. They lived in the swamps and ate anything they could catch or shoot. Crustaceans that lived in the mud of ditches. Old alligator gar, fish too ugly to even look at. Catfish with their protruding lips and stinging, fleshy whiskers. Even alligators and possums and armadillos.

But Jake liked the Acadians. They were openhearted. They were sharp traders. They had a sense of humor like his Uncle Avram's—they told stories on themselves and told stories about how they got the best of others, who never even realized they had been taken advantage of.

Jake appreciated the Acadians, and the Acadians reciprocated. They appreciated this wiry little man with a grip like iron. They liked the Peddler Man who spoke an interesting form of French, who, the more he visited them, the better they could understand him. Maybe it was because the Peddler Man was just getting better in speaking the way they spoke.

The Acadians liked the fact that Jake would come on foot, pushing his wooden cart filled with interesting things, things that they couldn't get any other way. They liked the fact that he would joke with them and haggle with them and trade with them, and then, when they had finished their business, he would stay and talk. Jake did not run off like those American traders who were only interested in seeing how fast they could get from one place to the next, or like those nasty Germans who fought over every penny, or like those highbrowed New Orleanians who spoke as if they still lived in Paris, going to Versailles for parties, and ignoring the fact that the Bastille had fallen more than a hundred years earlier and that Napoleon had died in exile in 1821, more than seventy years ago.