The Blood of Heaven (15 page)

Tennessee is a worthless country, he said. The people are cruel from plowman to judge. They caught me with the bridles in my hand—not even having taken the horses proper. I ask you, how could a man have a horse full-stolen if he’s not even on its back and riding? So they dragged me into their ratty courthouse, rapped the gavel a few times, and then in came a man with a tin-worker’s stove and an iron. The stove was smoking when he put the iron in, but they were too eager, had me put my hand on the rail even though I saw the iron wasn’t red, and I said, It’s not hot enough to burn me, brothers. But they wouldn’t hear me. And I looked into the eyes of the judge and the man with the brand, and when he laid it on me there was no smoke, no sizzle. O, it burned, but no more than a pan-handle. The man’s eyes bugged when he took the iron from me and he went running to stoke his stove. They all looked at me like I’d ask some reprieve for already being punished once—but no, I wanted to see if they could burn me. The brand’s end glowed red when the man returned and I said unto them, You can visit torments on me, but like Jesus I’ll endure. And when he laid it to me I didn’t give so much as a whimper for pain. I didn’t even grit my teeth.

Egg slime rolling on my tongue, I wanted to spit it out and tell him about all the coals I’d eaten. My childhood of fire. But I kept quiet and swallowed down my words and drink.

They said they’d hang me, that I’d ride the horse that’s sired by an acorn. But they wouldn’t and it wasn’t finished after my branding. Next they took me to the post and the townspeople gathered there to watch me get my lashes. Thirty of them with a whip as big around as your arm. They stripped me of the good clothes I’d worn to court figuring on them respecting respectability and they threw them in the dirt. I only asked for rest twice in the whipping. And if my whipping did anything—and I could even thank those Tennessee shits for it—it was to show me my calling was to liberate more than horses and white souls, but black bodies as well.

What do you do with them? I asked.

Sell them, of course, said the Reverend. You sell them to another man and have the black escape again, then the process is repeated.

Damn, said Samuel. That’s a scheme if there ever was one.

It’s good money, said Morrel. But more than that it’s a balm to the soul and an investment in the future. Like the Book says, every day we inch nearer to the great battle. And, my God, when it happens, what kind of army will I have! It will come to pass, and I’m the one to make it so.

I was awed that he would tell us such a thing. It would get you hung just mentioning; or locked up for a madman. But the Reverend Morrel must have known the way his words and vision would strike us, for we both nodded that we understood. It was the first time since the night before that Red Kate was off my mind. I thought only of a black army, swallowing the houses of the moneyed. And I could tell already that Morrel wasn’t the sort to boast idly, but the kind of man who could make such things possible.

Move aside, split tail, said Lowde to the mulattoe as she squeezed herself onto the bench. The girl started cussing but the matron whore said nothing.

Now, said the Reverend. I’ve got the blood too hot in here.

The mulattoe was standing up, but Morrel put his eyes on her and she sat back down without even a hiss.

I got distracted, boys, said the Reverend. But keep the idea in mind, for when my story’s through I’ve got a proposition for you both. Now, after I was whipped they put me in the stocks, and for three days of that torture I preached a sermon to the townsfolk. After a while of watching them I knew all their sins and wrongdoings and made sure they heard every bit of it. Hey there, chappy, your wife lays with your plow-mule when you’re in town! Ha! So when the bastards finally took me down I’d turned the place into such a tumult of rage, revenging, and mistrust that they gave me a horse so I could ride away faster.

Morrel finished his coon-box and crushed the shell in his branded hand.

I’m on my way, he said, to preach some great revivals in the southern end of the territory, and here look how lucky I am, finding two young preachers in the house of my good friend. You boys have God’s gift, I can see it already. Always been able to tell a good preacher. Drink another with me, sons, and we’ll go down and do the work of salvation together. For the love of God, let’s have full glasses!

IV

His Disciples

Lower Mississippi, Summer 1801

The Great Revivals

All the preaching I’d forsaken those weeks at Mother Lowde’s was then visited back upon me in hundredfold measures of the fiercest religion I’d yet seen.

After we’d spend a few days preparing the site—building the stage and the pine-limb piles for his barrels of whiskey and rum, and stacking cords for the great bonfire—the Reverend Morrel’s Most Glorious Camp Meeting and Christly Wonders would roar itself to life.

He convened his revivals on Thursdays and they would run like a battle into the next week with the tents of an army of frothing worshippers set all around whatever land he could procure for his purposes—usually by guilting some pious planter into letting him use his fallow fields.

We thought we’d seen things, but the Reverend put it all in the ditch.

Women would take men by the hand like picking a partner at a dance and lead them off into the bushes or a tent if he was lucky. When the drums got going and the singing started people fell flat to the dirt, stiff as boards. They were being overtaken by the spirit all around, and some just dropped with their partners to the ground and went at it. Like good Christians they kept their liquor well-hidden for the first few days, and we kept them well-supplied. But it never failed that by the first Sunday of a revival the lines at the limb-piles were long and bottles and cups were held out proudly, jumping to lips, changing hands, and striking heads rapt with Christ.

It was a legion of wild believers and even without the drink they would be struck mad by the spirit. You could look two ways and see one tossing his head and babbling, sending ropes of spittle like streamers flung in celebration of the Reverend’s words, while another would have the shakes starting in her—a-quiver from her very insides. And when you looked back again the man would be nodding fiercely and slobbering long trains of strange words and sounds, and the woman would be quaking in full fit.

Morrel’s dress would change considerably before a revival—gone were the jewels and dandies, the fine clothes. He wore the dusty black outfit of a preacher. A trim man, despite his libertine nature, in this kit he was a black skeleton dancing on the stage before an enormous painting of the horrors of Hell, which would be wheeled out behind him to the awe of the onlookers when he reached the point of damnation in his sermons. And his words were those of a man of Heaven who knew the pits of Hell enough to have it painted from life, with a great red face open-mawed and containing fire in its mouth and throat and the tiny tortured aspects of condemned souls clinging to its teeth or being dragged down by demons of the most horrible kind. Morrel could raise you up into ecstasy so high that you could almost kiss Christ’s feet, and then he’d cast you down and point to the particulars of the painting, where you’d find yourself among the mass, maybe perched on a smoking bit of rock overlooking the lake of fire, all the while with him making note of how you burned.

And when it was that the worshippers were whipped to full froth there would be cripples sent onstage to beg and be healed. But our Reverend Morrel was no mean huckster or mere magician. He claimed no powers he didn’t have. And why would he? The man was already so punishingly gifted.

Morrel would embrace the cripple and call out that he would be most blessed of all in Heaven, and the worshippers would scream louder than if he’d healed the poor bastard, which he’d done anyway with money. The Reverend was a patron of the odd and the afflicted and all who approached the stage were in his employ.

For Morrel they paraded on withered legs or no legs at all; a whole mess of harelips sputtered praises—forever speaking in tongues, those perfect Pentecostals; a man born with two heads called Look-Twice Philbert; the clutch of the regular lame with withered legs or crooked spines, or blindness; the Thorny Rose, who’d have been called just Rose if it hadn’t been for the pants-leg-tearing thorn of an endowment, called the cliver, fixed on her womanly parts. It had to be handled delicately when she appeared onstage, only spoken of with maybe a flutter of skirt for a hint as though a propitious wind had blown through. Later she’d be in her wagon and charge fees for gawkers. And there was also one deformed who fast became our friend; this was Johnny Crabbe, who was red-skinned and walked on all fours, with his limbs cocked at weird angles in their joints.

For our part we worked odd jobs with Morrel’s other trustees, had signed a contract to do so for the summer preaching season, staking our own fifty-dollar investment on a two hundred percent return. We dealt out whiskey from the woodpiles, marking far-gone drunks for pocket-picking in the night. Mornings we’d walk with the Reverend through the camp and he, great admirer of horseflesh that he was, would pass, let’s say, a fine stallion some farmer had ridden there to hear preach the man who at that very moment would say, Brothers, that’s a fine-looking horse.

Yes it is, Reverend, we’d say.

So Morrel would nod and say how he’d sure like to own a horse just like that one.

And that was all he need say, for we knew it meant we’d soon be slipping the reins from their post and leading off the beast under cover of evening down to Morrel’s runners, who awaited enough horses that they could ride on into the next town with a market and sell them at half price.

On those dog-tired nights after we’d returned from revival to our camp and hid the day’s take amongst Morrel’s already impressive holdings, we would sit by the fire and share a brief nip of whiskey between Samuel, Crabbe, and me. We told him stories of the northern territories and our travels, and Crabbe would tell us what it was like to be an insect.

When I was small, he said, I was but a mite and was covered in a sheet to go out into town. I was always stepped on until the Reverend rode in one day and snatched me up, thank God.

And we were also thankful, for we were already earning our investment back, according to Samuel’s calculations, by the fourth revival. And as summer wore on into June, there came times when the Reverend Morrel’s voice would go or he needed us to buy him time for a drink and he’d have me come up and witness. Samuel would stand aside, for it had long been confirmed between us who cared most for the Word and who had the talent for it. By that time Morrel would have the crowd at a pitch of fervor, so that when I came out onto the stage they were biting and screaming and jumping for me. The man at the skin drums would beat out a rhythm for me to preach to as cruel words for Preacher-father went through my mind: Who is the hand of God now? You rotten old bastard, I am. And I could have gone on like that in my head but for the desperate, howling crowd.

I’d spread my arms wide and open my mouth as though to swallow all their moans and calls and wild tongues and spit salvation back at them.

When I finished with my witness I would fall to my knees for the feeling of being clean and clear of sin, and there would be arms at my shoulders and it never failed that the Reverend, returned and smelling of whiskey, would hold me up by the shoulders and lift me like a pelt to show the crowd now blistering the air with hallelujahs and grown mad with glory, letting out peals of concern for my hunched and shuddering person. And our routine went like this: that before he had me to the steps and off the stage I would grow full of the spirit and, renewed, throw off his hands, cast my coat aside, and come scrambling back to the stage-front and start it up again, my legs jittering and stomping as to splinter the boards, my voice like a thunderclap of Grace.

Before we left Natchez and Mother Lowde, drying her eyes when we rode off with Morrel on a pair of horses he’d procured for us and saddle-works scoured of the names of former owners, I’d gone to see Red Kate a second time. A paying customer, I didn’t ask her why she hadn’t seen me off the other night the way Samuel’s whore had, for I knew in the moment I saw her again, hidden behind the others of the line-up, a blood-colored creature, short and snubbed of the patrons’ affections for the tall and willowy, that she was not my whore but the cross of love upon which I’d be struck and raised. She said nothing of my try with the tongue, and instead took me more traditional.

There, she said afterwards. Isn’t that a better way?

I found her sweetness unchanged, and loved most that behind it lay a past of violence. I called her Copperhead and she winced at the name, saying that she was no snaky thing. I kept her words with me the way most men keep a locket of their lover’s hair. She said that this was not her life. She didn’t mind it and liked the money and there were no cruelties visited upon her by the mistress or her sisters in the business, but she said that she could see far ahead and the paths of her life stretched out into the forests and the untilled land. And it might be that someone not unlike myself was there with her.

I said, We’re children of desolation, meant for one another.

It’s too wild to think, she said. But I do.

We were a knot of raw, afflicted youth; and before I’d leave her that day, she tried to put my words and hers away as foolish talk. But I took her hands and told her all of it was true, the Will of the Lord. Maybe I knew even then that if I had Red Kate for my own all I would bring her was sorrow. But that was my path, and if she saw it in her vision, she knew well enough what lay ahead. I soon took to inventing sermons and speeches to give her when I returned, whiling away the ash-smelling time before sleep with thoughts of her.