The Cottoncrest Curse (23 page)

Raifer shook his head in disbelief that Bucky was ignoring him. He said loudly, almost yelling across Bucky's sprawling figure, “You heard what happened last night, Doc?”

Bucky didn't move. He kept his eyes shut.

Puffing away on his cigar and blowing the smoke directly at Bucky, Dr. Cailleteau responded. “Are you talking about Bucky getting himself drunker than a blue-belly at a fast house or about how the peddler and Marcus hid from Tee Ray in his own cane field?”

The smoke irritated Bucky's nose, and he stifled a cough. He tried to concentrate on going back to sleep.

“No,” Raifer boomed back, “about the accidental fire.”

Finally, Bucky stirred. Picking up his head from the desk, Bucky groaned out, “ 'Tweren't no accident.” His head sank back down to the desk.

Raifer was disgusted. Even though the predawn air was cold and a light October frost covered the yellowed grass in the courthouse square, Raifer opened a window. The frigid air poured in, and the smoke flew away, along with all the warmth in the room. Then Raifer took a ladle and dipped it in the water bucket that only recently had been brought in, breaking the melting layer of ice on top. He poured the water directly on the back of Bucky's head, which was still face down on the desk.

The cold water shocked Bucky into action, and he sat bolt upright so quickly that he knocked the burning coffee into his lap. He leaped to his feet, yelping as the scorching heat penetrated his pants and blistered his groin, “My privates are on fire!”

“I'm glad to see that at least one part of your body is awake,” Raifer laughed, as he picked up the bucket and flung the entirety of its frigid contents on Bucky.

Bucky's clothing absorbed the unpleasant chilly water. Goosebumps grew all over. Cold water drained into his boots, and his feet started to become numb. He began to shiver.

Raifer went into one of the cells and returned with a woolen blanket that he handed Bucky, who gratefully wrapped his trembling shoulders.

Raifer refilled the coffee cup. Bucky pulled his damp sleeves over his hands as gloves and used it to pick up the steaming brew. Now he drank it as quickly as he could.

“That fire was an
accident,
Bucky. You understand?”

Bucky did not. He started to protest.

Dr. Cailleteau took the cigar out of his mouth. “Silence, boy! Don't you see the Sheriff is trying to let you keep your job instead of jugging you up for violating the Klan Act?”

“But,” Bucky protested, between sips from the cup, “it weren't no Klan. Just the Knights of the White Camellia. So, why would Raifer want to arrest me and lock me up?”

Dr. Cailleteau turned to Raifer. “I don't know why you would want to keep this apple-shaker!”

Bucky, still cold and trembling under his blanket, protested, “I ain't uneducated.”

Dr. Cailleteau merely sighed with disbelief and concentrated on his cigar.

“I ain't no doctor, like you, that's for sure, and I ain't got none of that French or Latin or them other weird languages that don't do no one no good, but I got me a whole five years of schoolin'. I can read and write and all. After all,” he added proudly, “when Raifer needs someone to send a flimsy, he calls me, and I goes down to the Western Union office and takes care of it.”

Raifer pulled up a chair. He was stern. “Listen, Bucky, and listen good. The Ku Klux Klan Act has been in effect more than twenty years. It was passed before you were born. President Ulysses S. Grant got it done. It tries to make certain actions against coloreds a crime, whether you are doing it as a member of the Klan or otherwise.”

Raifer drew closer and spoke more softly and urgently. “Bucky, I don't care if Tee Ray busts up some colored's crops or tears up his garden, but I can't have Tee Ray and the Knights going around burning down their cabins. If that happens, then I'll have to act. I won't want to, but I won't have any choice. Why do you think Tee Ray got you to torch the cabin? 'Cause he knows that if I caught him doing that, I'd have to jug him. So, he gets you to do it.”

“But I thought…” Bucky started to say.

Raifer cut him off. “The problem is, you haven't been thinking at all. Now listen.” Raifer spoke quietly but firmly, as if instructing a small child. “The coloreds got scared, thinking that the Knights were coming. They ran. They left their houses quickly and their fires unattended. One of them got out of hand. The fire at old Nimrod's cabin was an accident caused by the coloreds' own carelessness. Do you understand?”

A glimmer of awareness finally penetrated. “I understand,” Bucky echoed.

“And I don't want to hear you ever again talk about what you did last night.”

“Yes, Raifer. I ain't gonna say no more 'bout it, other than we came across a darky's cabin what done caught on fire by accident.”

“Good. Now, you go home and change clothes. I want you to ride out to Cottoncrest with Dr. Cailleteau and me. We've got to check on Little Miss. I'm concerned, having heard Jimmy Joe say last night that none of the coloreds were around. That's not right. They should be there, tending to Cottoncrest and looking after Little Miss. Anyway, I want you to ride on south from there and join up with Tee Ray and Forrest before they get to Lamou. I've got to agree with Tee Ray; the peddler has to be headed in that direction. I'm sending you out there to arrest that peddler for the murder of the Colonel Judge and Rebecca. I can't stop Tee Ray and Forrest from going, but I can send you with them, and you're to bring that peddler back alive and stop Tee Ray and Forrest from doing anything foolish that will cause me to do something I don't want to do. You're a deputy. You act like one, you hear?”

Bucky's head nodded so vigorously in agreement that water cascaded from his damp hair, which made Dr. Cailleteau think that Bucky looked like a scraggly dog shaking itself coming out of a pond. Except that a dog would look better.

Bucky gulped down the last of the coffee and, gathering up the blanket around his damp clothes, dashed out of the courthouse in the moonlight toward his home, his boots squishing and water squirting out of the seams. He was running fast because he wanted to please Raifer, who had given him another chance. And because it was so cold.

Through the window Dr. Cailleteau watched Bucky trot at a good clip across the courthouse lawn. The moon, still in the sky before dawn came, was so bright that he could see Bucky's shadow on the ground as he loped along. “He's putting the licks in, Raifer.”

“Sure, he's going to run as fast as he can, even if his head is sometimes as dull as a spinster.”

Bucky sprinted across Main Street in Parteblanc, oblivious to the oncoming horse and high hitch wagon, which almost ran him down.

The man violently reined in the horse. It whinnied with pain as the bits jerked taut. The wagon shimmied, and several boxes fell out, tumbling to the ground.

Bucky looked up in surprise. He hadn't expected to see anyone out at this hour. “Sorry, Mr. Ganderson. It's just…”

Ganderson, his worn face and gray mustache peeking out from a wide-brimmed hat, climbed down from the seat, easing his way onto the ground from his high perch. The front wheels of the hitch wagon were almost four feet in diameter, and the rear ones were taller. The wooden bed, riding far off the ground, was piled with a towering stack of boxes resting on a thick bed of hay that splayed out over the sides.

Ganderson started loading the fallen boxes back onto the wagon. Although in his late fifties, he was still robust, and he handled the heavy boxes with ease.

Bucky bent down to grab a box to help, and the woolen blanket fell off onto the dirt road. Now he'd have to wash it before bringing it back to Raifer. He slung it back over his cold shoulders and tried to lift the box. It was heavier than Bucky thought, but Ganderson took it from him, holding it as if it were an empty container.

“I got it, Bucky. No harm done.” Ganderson stacked it back on top of the other boxes in the wagon and reached down for the next one, lying on its side on the ground.

Chilled by the cold air, Bucky was grateful to be released from any further obligations and trotted on down the road toward his house. No lights were on in any of the homes. The moon was the only illumination. Bucky did not bother to think further about why Ganderson would be traveling with a full wagon before dawn. All Bucky wanted to do was to get home, change into some dry clothes, and get ready to join Raifer and Dr. Cailleteau on the trip to Cottoncrest.

Ganderson put the last two boxes back onto the bed of hay, climbed back up onto the high wooden bench, and flicked the reins. The horse moved slowly north along the road, traveling away from Parteblanc and toward the ferry that crossed the Mississippi River.

Jammed tightly inside the false bottom of the hitch wagon, Jenny, Sally, and Marcus sighed softly with relief.

Today

“So there I was, in New Orleans in 1961, and although it was only May, the heat was already awful. There was no central air-conditioning in those days. In New Orleans you took a bath before you went to bed, just to cool down, but you still went to sleep sweating despite the overhead fan whirling, and all the while hordes of mosquitoes buzzed angrily outside the screened windows. You woke up, and you took a bath, but before you could dry off, you were sweating again. The heat was constant and the humidity pervasive. By the time you had breakfast, the clothes you put on were already damp with your sweat.

“I had left the other boys at the old hotel we had found in the French Quarter and went out exploring. I had given myself permission to be a tourist for a few days until I had to do what I really came down for, until I had to deliver what was hidden in the lining of my suitcase.

“In those days all the hotels were segregated. In fact, all downtown was segregated. You walked down Canal Street, and the differences between blacks and whites could not be more stark, but to the New Orleans' white shoppers, the blacks could just as well have been invisible, for the whites ignored them completely.

“The blacks couldn't use the restrooms in the stores on Canal Street. If they wanted to buy a blouse or a dress or a shirt or a suit there, they couldn't try them on and couldn't use the dressing rooms and couldn't return the items if they didn't fit.

“But I wasn't in New Orleans to shop. I had to conserve my money so I would have enough to rent a car. I was in New Orleans only to try to soak up the atmosphere.

“I walked for hours in the French Quarter. And I tried to find the remnants of Storyville in Faubourg Tremé, but there wasn't much left, just a few old buildings.

“You don't know what Storyville was? Why, it had been the home of jazz, in an area of the city set aside for bars and brothels, in an attempt to stop them from being in every neighborhood. It was the heart where jazz first beat. It was right there, at the edge of the French Quarter, far away from the fancy Canal Street stores.

“Well, if you had brothels, you also got bars and dives and ‘dance halls.' And if you had dance halls, you needed musicians.

“That's what I went looking for. Jazz and musicians and Storyville. By 1961, however, Storyville was long gone. It had disappeared almost fifty years before I got there, having been closed in World War I by order of the U.S. Navy to keep our sailors ‘safe from sin.'

“For a time I wondered whether your Grandpapa Jake could have walked those same streets. Of course, he passed through New Orleans on his way down and on his way back, and he had business contacts here, but I don't think he ever stayed in the city any length of time or had anything to do with Storyville.

“The more I thought about it, however, the more I realized he couldn't have been there. He left the South for the last time in the winter of 1893 and never returned. That was a few years before Storyville was even created.”

1893

The frost crunched under his boots as Jake made his way through the marshy woods. The sky had cleared as the temperatures had dropped, and now, an hour or so before dawn, the moon cast a bright blue glow. Jake had slept the night only in fits and spurts.

It wasn't that he had been cold. The light October freeze was nothing like the hard winters in Russia. He was used to cold, and the un-cured bearskin had kept him pleasantly warm, even if it was muddy, smelly, and itchy.

It was dreams and concerns that disturbed his slumber, not fear. He could live with fear. There was nothing more fearful than escaping Russia under the skirts of women on the train, trying not to breathe when the Cossacks stalked through the cars or when the Czar's militia clattered through in their sharply shined shoes, intimidating everyone. He could live with fear now. But the concerns were something else.

Jake had been on the run so much with Marcus, moving so fast, that he hadn't really had time to think. But once Marcus had gone and Jake had settled under the tree, hidden in the darkness, the impact of the day's events finally struck him fully and caused his thoughts to turn again and again to the Colonel Judge and Rebecca.

He would never see them again.

He would never have another earnest discussion with the Colonel Judge. They would never talk again of religion. Of man's ability to hate those he does not wish to understand and inability to love those he should hold the dearest. Of the things that make us most human and those that cause us to do the most inhumane things.

And Jake would never have Rebecca's beauty and warmth near him again.

Two gone and two lost. That was why he had to speak to Jenny. That was why he had to see her again. He had spent the night wondering if Marcus had found Jenny and Sally and, if he had, how the three of them would get to New Orleans with all the commotion that must be going on in Parteblanc.

And when Jake did drift off, his dreams were disturbing. The girl in New York, with the red spreading across her blouse, had appeared. Before, whenever he had thought of her, it had been with a feeling of yearning. He had contemplated a thousand times her dark eyes and smooth skin, creating a face as perfect as Eve's must have been in the Garden of Eden or as entrancing as Bathsheba's must have been to King David. Although Jake had seen her only once at that party, in his mind was a perfect image of her, one he could recall at a moment's notice— her blouse as white and pure as a Torah cover, her long skirt as blue as a new prayer book in the shul.