The Cottoncrest Curse (7 page)

From the size of the hole in his head, Augustine had shot himself with the smaller round. Why hadn't Augustine cleaned the shotgun barrel of the pistol and loaded it with a.65-caliber shell? That would have made a damn big hole pressed against your temple.

It didn't make any sense that Augustine would not have used the shotgun barrel, if he was going to use anything. Not after what had happened to the General.

When François Cailleteau was back from the war as a young doctor, he was just starting up his practice in Parteblanc and had been called from town to Cottoncrest. That was thirty years ago. Marcus had come on horseback, the steed heaving and snorting outside his door. Marcus had run inside, past the frightened white girl waiting to be seen, and breathlessly informed the doctor that he had to come quick—the General had shot himself.

François Cailleteau had dropped everything and, mounting his own horse, followed Marcus at a gallop all the way back to Cottoncrest. There he found the General barely clinging to life, gurgling and unable to speak. There was nothing he could do other than bandage up the General's head with roll after roll of torn sheets and gauze and tell the family he wouldn't last the night.

There was no question why the General had done it. It was the bad news.

The General always carried his combat pistol, even at Cottoncrest. It was a Whitney revolver, well made and sturdy, with the cylinder stamped with a coat of arms that seemed both En glish and American— a lion on one side, an eagle on the other.

The General had taken the Whitney and, placing its barrel in his mouth, had pulled the trigger too soon, or perhaps he had drunk too much bourbon before doing it. He had pointed the gun too far to the side, blowing off his left cheek, shattering his jaw, blinding him but not killing him. He tried to fire a second time to finish himself off, but he was in too much pain, and his hand obviously had been shaking, for he shot off his left ear.

When Augustine had found out about it after he returned home, he seemed inconsolable. He blamed all blue-bellies. And he blamed himself.

The General had acted too soon. Too abruptly. If only he had thought of his wife instead of his own grief. If only he had tried to live from one day to the next, he would eventually have found that the news was in error. If only he had possessed the faith to persevere instead of giving into despair. But the General hadn't, and he had died in agony.

After that, Augustine became even more careful and deliberate. Nothing was out of place. Nothing was left to chance. It had seemed to François Cailleteau, as he sat with Augustine on those many evenings out on the Cottoncrest veranda, that it was as if, by keeping the things in his life orderly, Augustine felt he could keep himself from the internal disorder and disarray into which his father had fallen.

But eventually Augustine had succumbed to both internal disorder and internal disarray. For more than a year now, Augustine had come to town only when he had to adjudicate the few court cases that arose from time to time, and then he would promptly leave. He had not received guests in his chambers. He had not paid the social visits he once did.

Augustine and Rebecca had retreated to Cottoncrest. Augustine used to travel to the Cotton Exchange in New Orleans to conduct his transactions, but for more than a year he had simply sent instructions in writing. Augustine and Rebecca used to host grand dinners, but since before last year's harvest, no one had been invited to the house. Internal disorder and disarray. Maybe it had consumed them both.

Maybe the old Greeks were right when they said that the four humors had to be kept in balance—the sanguine red of blood, the impassive green of phlegm, the rancorous yellow of choler, and the black bile of melancholy. If they were out of balance, then the soul would break.

“So you want to see the bullet, Raifer? It's clear from this small hole that he didn't use the shotgun barrel. Couldn't do it with this rusty old LeMat. After what happened to the General, seems to me that Augustine would have used something that he knew would do the job the first time, no mistakes. And he wouldn't have used anything that was not in pristine condition. Of course, the LeMat nine-cylinder takes a.40-caliber bullet rather than a.36-caliber like a Colt, but even so…”

“Doc, let's just see what kind of bullet he used. Go ahead and dig it out for me.”

Dr. Cailleteau couldn't understand why Raifer was so insistent, but he picked up the scalpel and slowly walked around to the other side of the board, where Rebecca's body lay.

There was no way to tell from the dress, with the hardening blood clumping up around the laces, where the bullet had entered. Dr. Cailleteau sliced through the stays on the back of her dress and pushed the fabric aside. He cut through the waist cinch beneath the dress and pulled it back to reveal the gentle curve of her backbone and the soft rise of her posterior.

Her skin gleamed like alabaster. There was not a mark on it.

Dr. Cailleteau looked up at Raifer with puzzlement, and their eyes met.

“I thought,” said Raifer, “that this might be the case. Now Doc, tell me one more thing. You knew the Colonel Judge longer than any of us. What hand did he write with?”

Dr. Cailleteau wiped the blade of his scalpel on his trousers and put it back into the black case. “Right hand, of course.”

“Then how could he have done it?”

Dr. Cailleteau closed his case and sat down on a bale of hay, which, even though it was tightly bound, sagged under his weight. He took a long pull on his cigar and blew a vast cloud of smoke that drifted over the uncovered bodies. “Good question. Damned good question, Raifer.”

“Bucky,” Raifer commanded, “get back in that house and tell Marcus and the other boys I meant what I said. I want that place clean, and I want them to find that bullet. Probe the banisters and the staircase. Look at every wall. I want to know exactly where the Colonel Judge was when the shot was fired.”

The gathering for the
cochon de lait
had begun. More than thirty people were at Trosclaire Thibodeaux's house, resting on the porch, sitting on logs in the yard, standing near trees and talking.

Trosclaire's oldest daughter, who was not yet fifteen, was frying some of the fish she had carried home in her basket at the front of the pirogue. She had cleaned them expertly, covered them with a mixture of flour and cornmeal, and was placing them in a big pot of boiling lard. The reflection of the fire played on her face and hair, and it caught her eager smile aimed at the skinny boy who stood next to her. The boy, his thick dark hair jammed under an old hat, took every opportunity to brush against her arm and touch her elbow as he helped her with the frying.

Trosclaire took another swig from the jug and yelled from the porch. “Do not let the fish burn, Jeanne Marie.”

Jeanne Marie just laughed. “Étienne, he is watching the fish almost as close as he is watching me!”

“But yes,” her mother, Aimee, replied from her seat on a nearby log where she was shucking peas. “The
poudre de Perlainpainpain
sure worked on him,
cher.
”

Jake had understood everything Trosclaire and Jeanne Marie and Aimee had said in French until this last phrase. He looked questioningly at his host.

“Aimee, this man, who wants to sell us a knife sharper than the teeth of that old alligator in the bayou, does not know what a
poudre de Perlainpainpain
is.”

An old woman who was sitting next to Aimee and helping her shuck the peas shook her head in disbelief and said to Jake, “How can you speak so well and not understand anything?”

Her face, a mass of deep wrinkles set in skin the color and texture of parchment, broke into a wide, toothless grin. “Are you a
loup-garou,
come to place us under a spell so that we will buy your needles and thimbles and fabrics?”

“Tante Odille,” Aimee said, throwing a pea at her aunt, “if you think he is a
loup-garou,
then you'd better get some
gris-gris
before the moon gets any higher.”

Jake called down from his perch on the porch. “I am no werewolf, but if you need a lucky charm to scare away a real
loup-garou,
then I think I have just what you need in my cart.”

“See, my Aimee,” the old woman said, “who was once my little Mimi who I held on my lap, you give that man a word, and he turns it into a way to sell you something. Besides, now I think he is too foolish to be a
loup-garou.
If he were a
loup-garou,
he would have in his cart some voodoo grease, and he would not use a big knife to do a
boucherie
and then sit and wait for his meat to be cooked. No,
cher,
he would bare his teeth and jump on a sheep and eat it down in one bite, yes?”

The small children who were trying to snatch pieces of the fried fish on the platter waiting to be handed out to the guests heard Tante Odille talking about sheep and started singing one of their nursery rhymes:

Mouton, Mouton, est ou tu vas?

Passer l'abattoir.

Quand tu reviens?

Jamais… Baa!

Jake understood it perfectly. Sheep, sheep, where are you going? To the slaughterhouse. When will you return? Never… Baa.

Just like Moshe would never return.

He and Moshe had left New York with such grand plans. The Cotton Exposition in New Orleans six years earlier, in the mid-1880s, had captured Moshe's imagination, and he couldn't stop talking about it. Countries from all over, he had said, had come to New Orleans to trade and sell. There was rum, coffee, cocoa, and dyes. There were oils and fruits. There were goods from Guatemala and Venezuela and Brazil. Mexico had built the filigreed and domed Alhambra Palace just for the occasion and filled it with display cases crammed with gold and silver from Chihuahua, Zacatecas, and Sinaloa. Lace in the Belgium exhibit, furniture in France's pavilion, machinery in Great Britain's arena, and strange and unusual items and food in the exhibits run by China, Japan, Russia, and Siam.

And the money that was flowing. Opening day expenses, Moshe had said, time and time again, were almost two million dollars. Who could imagine such a sum? And that was just the expenses for one day alone! And over seven thousand exhibitors!

The wonders that were to be seen, Moshe had said, time and time again, the wonders we missed. President Chester A. Arthur, sitting in Washington, D.C., had opened the fair by pressing a telegraph key. An electric railroad had been built specially for the Exposition and ran constantly three miles around its perimeter, ferrying attendees from gate to gate, from one remarkable sight to the next. The Pilcher organ, the biggest ever made, was the backdrop of the vast stage on which more than 150 musicians played under the huge seven-tiered chandelier whose gas lamps illuminated the entire area. Even the Liberty Bell had been brought from Philadelphia to New Orleans for the Exposition.

Moshe had read all about it. He had saved the old papers, folded neatly and pressed flat in a book. Just think, Moshe had said, if we had been in New Orleans then, think of all the trading and selling we could have done. But it's not too late. We can go, he had urged. We can still go to where the money is, where the woman flow as freely into your arms as wine flows into a glass, where a fortune can be made by two, like us, who are quick and smart.

“What is the matter, my friend, are your ears maybe sleeping while your eyes they are open?”

Jake looked up. Trosclaire was standing over him offering the jug.

“I said, will you do me the honor of drinking to my beautiful Jeanne Marie, who at the dawn will go to the church with Étienne for to be married, no?”

“Yes,” Jake said, wiping away the memory of Moshe and the night they had hurriedly left New York and the girl there with the dark-red stain that had spread across the bodice of her dress. “Of course I will drink with you.” He raised the jug high. “To Jeanne Marie and Étienne. May the love that brought them together be as lasting as the oaks that line the bayou.”

After taking a drink from the jug, Jake added, “What God decrees, man cannot prevent.” He said it in French, not Yiddish, although that was a phrase his mother often had used.
Vos Got tut basheren, ken kain mentsh nit farveren.

He seldom spoke Yiddish these days. It was too dangerous.

Marcus and the others were still cleaning. Although dusk had not yet settled, it had gotten so dark inside that candles had to be lit.

Sally had made sure that Marcus had not used the good beeswax candles. They were for special occasions, although with the Colonel Judge gone, when they would be used again no one could say. It did not matter, however. Sally knew that the Colonel Judge would have wanted them saved. So, she found some old spermaceti wax candles made from the oil of those whales they caught way up north. They were left over from the General's day. The Colonel Judge had ceased using them when he could purchase paraffin candles so cheaply, candles that were machine made with tightly plaited wicks that did not have to be snuffed and trimmed as the candle burned. And the best paraffin candles were brought to the Colonel Judge by that Peddler Man with the cart who came around so often.

The blood was now all mopped up. All that remained were the dark stains on the staircase and on the landing, stains that formed patches so dark they absorbed the flickering light. Marcus made sure that Cubit and Jordan double-checked for a bullet. It could have fallen on the floor and been pushed under a rug with all the commotion of the cleanup. It might have been bundled up in one of the sheets taken outside to be rinsed. It might have gone into a wall. But try as they might, searching around the wash bucket and the clothesline outside and the staircase and the first floor inside, no bullet could be located.

Marcus and Cubit had lifted up each carpet in the downstairs hallway one more time, and Marcus personally swept underneath and then examined the collection of dust, debris, and carpet lint. No bullet. Marcus had Cubit and Jordan walk up the staircase shoulder to shoulder looking at each step in front of them. No bullet. It was already too dark on the landing at the top of the stairs. That would have to wait until tomorrow.