The Cottoncrest Curse Read Free

with pitch-perfect intonation, had fooled them.
    â€œBut all of Yaakov’s accents couldn’t protect him in Russia. After Czar Alexander II’s assassination in 1881, Russia was beset by increasing political and financial problems. Czar Alexander III’s solution was simple—blame the Jews. The pogroms began. Their intensity increased. Over 150 Jewish settlements were set on fire. Yaakov’s family was right to be worried. The village down the road had been attacked, the women raped, houses and businesses destroyed. Jews weren’t safe anywhere.
    â€œNot only were individual Jews at risk; the entire Jewish culture was in jeopardy. The Czar had reinstituted compulsory military service for Jewish boys. Starting at ages ten or eleven, the boys were forcibly taken away and put into the army. Cantonists, they were called. Cantonists were lost to their family for a long, long time—a minimum of twenty years. But they were also lost to their religion. Conversion to Russian Orthodoxy was ‘strongly suggested’ by their superiors, and their superiors’ suggestions were the law.
    â€œYou’ve heard of Moshe, haven’t you? Yaakov’s older brother? No? That’s all right. With no children of his own, Moshe Goldfarb is just a memory. Part of my memory and now part of yours. Moshe had left years earlier to escape being a Cantonist.
    â€œGrowing up outside of Bialystok, Yaakov never knew Moshe. Moshe had been gone since Yaakov was six months old. Yaakov’s older twin sisters, Beruriah and Leah, still grieved over Moshe’s absence even as they shed tears of joy with their mother when, once or twice a year, they would get a short letter, written in Moshe’s spidery handwriting, that somehow made it to them from New York. He was fine, Moshe would write, and there would be American money folded carefully into the letter, money that they couldn’t spend but that they knew was being sent for Yaakov.
    â€œCan you imagine how difficult it must have been for Yaakov’s parents to have sent one son away, knowing that they would never see him again, only to be confronted with having to do it again with their youngest son, their baby, a son who could take over the business and was so adept at handling their customers and even the Cossacks who went to Uncle Avram’s?
    â€œThe Cantonist crusade would be coming to the village shortly. The pogroms were heating up. Only recently, in the fields outside the village, a young rabbi had been attacked and his head split open with a scythe. He had stumbled into the synagogue, blood pouring from his wounds. He had lost an ear. Yaakov’s father and uncle had helped the young rabbi out, bandaging his wounds, hiding him for the night.
    â€œThe danger was upon them. Yaakov’s parents knew that there was no time to waste.
    â€œYaakov always said that it was blood that drove him from Russia. It seems strange, doesn’t it, that it was blood in Louisiana that ensnared him.”

1893
Chapter 3
    â€œIt’s the curse, ain’t it, Raifer? The curse that done ’em in.”
    Deputy Bucky Starner, sweat dripping from his forehead onto the fine rug on the upper landing and mingling with the drying pools of blood, was looking at the bodies with a combination of fear and excitement. Fear that the curse was real. Excitement because this was the biggest thing that had happened in Petit Rouge Parish in his lifetime.
    Bucky had been happy last year when the Sheriff hired him, even though his friends had made fun of the way he proudly wore his badge on a shirt so encrusted with sweat and mud and grime that it seemed to have a life of its own. But now Bucky’s friends were going to know that he was someone important. He would be someone people came up to talk with. To listen to. All because he had seen the bodies, had seen the blood of the curse.
    Sheriff Raifer Jackson made no comment. That boy was green and naive.