Deadly Pedigree - By Jimmy Fox Page 0,48

and in your Grandmother’s Eternal Love.

November 3rd 1870. Jacob, my half-brother, came in to my shop this afternoon. It was not a plezant meeting, though I cannot say that such meetings ever been so, and espeshly since dear Mother died and I bought my place with the money she left me. Jacob–I don’t call him Mister anymore, or even Captain, like some folks do, because he carry himself so high. I don’t like to give him the plezure of such titles. Sometime I call him Brother, and that makes him madder than a rattler. Jacob, he marches on in and everything just stops. Mister Fabergas from the hat store was in my chair and he just gets up real quick and pays and leaves, and don’t even wait for his change. James was doing Mister Flaneur’s fine English boots and he just slip out the back door. There were some other men sitting inside and outside, smoking cigars and spitting and jawing about this and that, like they always do, and they all tucked tail and left the two of us alone. Everybody knows Jacob carries a sord in his cane, and a gold and pearl litel pistol, because he has used it twice since the War. Once on Blane Paternoster when he blamed Jacob for losing that fite outside of town with the Yanks back in ’64 (shot him through the throat and he died in a most awful way, I seen it). And once on my half-brother Jeremiah, when Jacob said–Your mother, Mulatta Belle, wasn’t nothing but a common whore and a nigger!–and Jeremiah lit into him like a hericane. But I was not around for that one, or I might have stopped them. Poor Brother Jeremiah. He is alive, but he don’t know his name. Lost an eye, too. After all he been through, to come to this! Jeremiah is the son of my Mother and a slave called Putnam on my Father Hyam Balazar’s plantation, Mitzvah. After my Father died and before the War, Jacob sold Jeremiah to a planter in Missippi! The hardhearted scowndrel! Selling my half-brother to spite me! Father wanted Jeremiah to be free, and said so in his own will and testament. Such paper don’t mean nothing to Jacob. He tore that will in peeces, rite there at my Father’s deathbed! My Mother never spoke a kind word to Jacob after he did that and sold Jeremiah. Father took care of all of us while he lived. He made sure we got some learning. Me espeshly, cause he liked me and let me read many a time in the library out at Mitzvah. He taught me to speak French. He even had a fine portrait of the two of us painted, and it used to hang in the library where he taught me. But Jacob he slashed it up with his sord. Just like he do to anything he don’t like. He kill it. So, Father promised Dear Mother on his deathbed that my Mother’s children would be free and get our Portion after he died, no matter what happened in the war he could see coming. I was there, I remember. He talked to her in French, that nobody else in the family but her and me, a little bit, could understand. Course, lots of folks around here talk French, still, and Spanish, too. He told her, I think,–My dear, I have loved you more than the two white wives who gave me Jacob and Euphrozine.–And then he said some words in a langage I could not understand. I guess he was raving by that time, for he was very old. But Mother said he was praying. Then Jacob, he said–Bout damn time the old Jew died.–Well, I don’t know what he meant by that, cept he always hated Father, because Father was a good Christian man and never missed a Sunday, at one church or another. Father was a man of Honour and Compassion and Charity and Christian Love. Jacob and Euphrozine call theirselves Christian. Make me want to laugh out loud! But Jacob didn’t know rite off about those three letters Father gave to Mother. One for me, one for Jeremiah, and one for my other half-brother Chapman Winn. He was born a free man, like me. Chapman is the son of a white gambler and my Mother, and almost white himself. They say his father had Choctaw in him. Around here, we all mixed up like Missippi mud.