Crescent City Read Free Page A

to forehead he twined loose strands of curly hair.
    “Oh, yes, Indians! The Choctaw tribes. And wolves. It was because of the wolves, though, not the Indians, that I got a rifle. The Indians never bothered me.”
    “A rifle,” the boy repeated. What was left of the child in him was enthralled, Ferdinand saw. Three-quartersman, or maybe more, he was; the rest was the remnant of the child. And with these adventures the father was reaching that child.
    He nodded to his son. “Yes, but fortunately, I never had to use it on anything except a rabbit. After a while I was able to afford a wagon for the horse. I remember my first wagonload. Ten trunks, I had, stuffed with every kind of cloth from bombazine to madras. I had brass clocks and gold watches, lisle stockings, paisley shawls, kid gloves, and gimcrack jewelry, everything for master and servant both. Once I had the wagon, I had to stay on traveled roads.” He laughed. “Traveled! Why, you could go a whole day there, too, without meeting another human being! Sometimes I’d come upon another peddler, another European Jew, most likely. After a while I began to feel the loneliness of the life. Still, you know, if you’ve an idea in your head, a thought that goes along with your steps, you’re not entirely alone. I wanted to settle down in one place and open a store, that was my thought. After all, I knew how trading is done; my father bought grain for Napoleon’s army. Well, after two years or so I had saved enough to set up a trading post. Wasn’t much more than a big square shed with shelves all around. But the location was right, on the way to the Chihuahua Trail, supplying caravans on the way to Mexico. Everyone who passed that way, from planters to Indians, came to me. And things moved fast. They moved fast in America.”
    The candles were almost burned down. Dinah got up and kindled another. To burn candles so late into the night was still a luxury, an extravagance, Ferdinand knew, as it had always been and as it would always be. Here in these European villages, nothing moved.
    “So—where was I? Oh, yes. I prospered, you see,because a community sprang up around me in no time at all. The next year I sold my plot of land for three times what I had paid for it and made my way downriver. What a river! One of the greatest in the world. So wide that in some places you can’t see the opposite shore. With bustling cities all the way: Memphis, the big inland cotton market, Baton Rouge, going south, always south into the heat. New Orleans was what I’d had my eye on from the beginning. The Queen City, or sometimes they call it the Crescent City, at the mouth of the river.”
    Ah, New Orleans! The jewel in the river’s crescent, the slow green bayou water, the slumbering afternoons, the glittering nights—
    “I fell in love with it as one”—he was about to say, “as one falls in love with a woman,” but a man does not say such things in front of his daughter—“as one would expect to fall in love with such a place. Almost at once I struck up a friendship with a very fine man. His name was Michael Myers. He was a Jew from the northern part of the country near New York. His father had served under George Washington in the American Revolution. Do you know anything about that, David?”
    “I’ve heard about it. It was a fight for freedom from England.”
    “Exactly. You’ve done some reading, I see. So, now. This Michael Myers had been in New Orleans for twenty years and had built up a thriving import-export business. But he wasn’t young, and he’d been looking for a partner, someone younger and stronger who understood the business or who at least could be taught and trusted. It happened that he found that man in me. He never had any reason to regret his choice, I can say that with confidence. I not only caught on fast, but I was able to add a few touches of my own. Forinstance, I made friends—I make friends easily—with some of the ship captains you meet