The Cottoncrest Curse by Michael H. Rubin Read Free Book Online Page A

had granted him a strong body. He was older than the Colonel Judge and had outlived him. He would do what he always had done. He would live today and let tomorrow take care of itself.
    On his way back into the big house, Marcus passed by the sharecroppers. They had been counting. This was his sixth trip. Six buckets of bloody sheets. How much blood had there been? It was obvious the curse had hit again. The Colonel Judge had killed himself. And the curse was getting worse. Miss Rebecca was dead too. Who would run the plantation? Who would honor their crop pledges? Who would market the sugarcane now that the Colonel Judge, who had handled all the financing for them, was gone?
    Some of the sharecroppers glanced upward as the sun headed toward the western horizon, the October sky the blue of well-worn Union uniforms, now absent for almost a decade since President Rutherford P. Hayes pulled the troops out and ended Reconstruction.
    Some Reconstruction it had turned out to be. Times were now worse than ever. And even if they harvested their crops, the sharecroppers worried that they would not raise enough to pay off the money owed for the goods they had bought during the season at the Cottoncrest plantation store—the salt and flour, the hoes, scythes, and plows, and the seed for their personal gardens of corn and squash and beans.
    There was hardly any wind. That was good.
    Tomorrow would be a fine day. The entire plantation would be on fire.

Chapter 11
    Trosclaire admired the way that Jake bled the suckling pig. You had to bleed it before cooking anyway, but why did he cut the throat so deep? All that was needed was a point in the knife in the jugular vein; let the pig squeal as it bled to death, and you’d preserve the head so that it would look right when presented.
    Trosclaire tied the pig’s hind feet together and then, slipping a stout branch under the rope, he and Jake lifted the pig and placed it into the big pot until it was fully covered, but only for a minute or two. After the skin had softened, they lifted it out and, propping the branch in a wooden rack that hung from the porch beams, they started scraping, Trosclaire with his American blade, retrieved from the pine tree, and Jake with his Freimer knife. They worked quickly, removing the hair and outermost layer of skin from the carcass while the skin was soft and hot.
    Trosclaire noted that Jake worked far faster than he did, for the wiry man had no wasted motions. Jake’s long, smooth strokes were just the right depth, neither cutting too deep and hitting the meat nor cutting too shallow, leaving hair and skin behind.
    Trosclaire threw the bloody contents of the bucket on the ground behind the house. On the porch Jake was using his knife to slit the pig’s stomach. The knife cut cleanly into the flesh, exposing the intestines and stomach.
    Jake quickly scooped out the innards and then, swiftly but carefully so as not to damage the liver, removed the gall.
    Trosclaire and Jake then went to the garden on the side of the cabin and dug up some shallots and picked some peppers and fall tomatoes. Trosclaire got some salt from the barrel he kept inside the front door. Together they filled the eviscerated animal with the seasonings, and Trosclaire bound up the stomach with some wire.
    Jake and Trosclaire laid the pig into the trench next to the fire. Then Trosclaire shoveled the white-hot ashes over the pig.
    â€œIn a few hours, my friend, we will have ourselves some fine eating. A fitting tribute to my Jeanne Marie, no? She is most beautiful. Until then, what do you say we have ourselves some fine drinking and perhaps a game of bourée?”
    â€œIt is too fine a night,” Jake responded, “to do anything other than sit out under the stars and enjoy a drink. Why don’t we drink to Jeanne Marie?”
    Jake didn’t want to play cards anyway. He would let Trosclaire go on and on about Jeanne Marie, and he would pretend to listen