The Cottoncrest Curse: A Novel

Chapter 14

49 Chapter 14 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 50 dark on the landing at the top of the stairs. That would have to wait until tomorrow. After Marcus sent Cubit and Jordan to look again outside the front door and back and all around the garden and the washbasin, Marcus confided to Sally, now that the two of them were alone in the hallway. “Woman, I’m gonna have to go out and tell Mr. Raifer there ain’t no bullet here.” “You’ll do no such thing, fool! Don’t you go tellin’ him there ain’t no bullet. You don’t know that. All you know is that you ain’t found no bullet yet. What you go and tell him is that it’s too dark to see good, what with the sun going down and all. That’s the truth, and he gonna know it to be the truth. Then, if in the mornin’ he wants to come and look for himself and decide that there ain’t no bullet, then it’s his decision, not yours. Don’t you go givin’ the white man anything but what you know. And all you know is that you ain’t found a bullet yet.” Sally was right, as usual. Mr. Raifer and the others, they weren’t like the Colonel Judge. Marcus would talk to the Colonel Judge, and even Miss Rebecca, without having to watch his tongue. Maybe in the last year, with them being in the house and not going out, with it just being them and him and Sally and Jenny and Little Miss and the others, he had forgotten all the caution he had spent a lifetime developing. He didn’t like Mr. Bucky anyway. Didn’t like him coming around, bossing them. Oh, he wouldn’t say anything to Mr. Bucky or even show what he thought. He never showed what he thought. Mr. Bucky was the law as much as Mr. Raifer. And what good was the law to him except to be something else to avoid. Had the law helped Cubit’s brother? No, he had been caught and beaten and strung up by those men in white sheets. Did the law do anything ? No. All they did was cut poor Cubit’s brother down and bring him home to be buried. Had the law helped Jordan’s daddy when the claim jumpers said that the land he had worked since after the war, the...