The Blood of Heaven (2 page)

My wife was frightened of my prayer just as she is frightened of the prospect of me dying, so I save what may upset her for the page and soothe her once again this morning with the fact that if I die there will be coin enough to keep her and the boy. Sweet Elise was no wife at first, and isn’t even now because she has a dropper’s worth of Negroe blood in her. For us to be legal and wed I’d be forced to swear that I had some black blood in me.

Now, I thank God daily that I’ve mixed my blood with hers and made a son, but there are things this world won’t bear; I couldn’t stand it in the weeks before she birthed our son the way she undertook with a gaggle of old Creole women—her creamy forebears who survived St. Domingue—twenty-five prayers and passes of the rosary each day so that our child’s eyes would be born as blue as mine. They were, but only for a week. At birth he wore a crown of golden hair like mine, which he retains to the age of ten. He’s grown up bathing in milk and lotions, receipts Elise learned from those same Creole ghouls. She gives thanks each day for his color and keeps him in wide hats when she takes him out into the city.

I cherish her, even though she came to me like a parcel, in response to a notice my friend Billy Walker placed for me in the
Picayune
for an octoroon woman to come and share my bed. But young Walker also wanted me to teach him a few things concerning being a filibuster, which is what the Spanish Pukes called me in my day and surely their descendants Walker in his. We would walk the riverfront and there he listened to me tell how our first West Floridian rebellion went down; and I hoped that he might gain from it and learn. I don’t know if he listened, but all he had to do was look at me to know that nation-making is a bitch who chews you up. As it stands, he took whatever knowledge I gave him to his grave somewhere in Central America. Still, he brought me my Elise and I am grateful.

The boy was bad to pull at her tit, bad at tooth-cutting time, but that didn’t ruin her bodily for me. I am an admirer of the pendulous in women. Seems a swaying judgment when she is astride me, like the cantered weights of human justice when she dips her shoulder to lower left or right to my mouth, and I see the scales tipping always in this sinner’s favor.

The round-heels are nowhere near her. Whiteness is all they have going for them, and in this land of every son of a bitch with enough coin having his pick of African concubines that is enough for them to charge a price to slip beneath their skin. I’m fair haired enough to be considered of exemplary whiteness, the purest of the pure. The New Orleans people give me that credit; no one wants to smirch the stainless in this city where all has swirled together. And even having added to the mix myself, I am still given the ranging benefits of my snowy bloodline. Money makes a fine shield, but I must always assure Elise that she and the boy will be protected when I die.

And what kind of father do I make? One who strops and shaves each morning, dresses in businessman’s suit and beaver, has his high boots slipped on by black hands, then goes out from our muddy way to the pavers where the gutters run full from the rain, through people huddled next to coffee stands manned by clucking German boys whose hands are welted from tending their brass pots and dropping in cloves and ground chicory which tang the air and open the lungs of ones like me cutting through the chambered palisade of the market where early morning butchery has spilt enough blood and fat to lacquer the floor so that it squeaks beneath my boots and I leave a trail of red prints on my stride across the square towards the St. Louis Hotel, and up the steps of the rotunda to the nigger-seller’s yawn, where I am surrounded by bedizened society whores and toasted by sugar-rich boys in high hats and school colors accompanied by their fathers’ clerks. There I am the father who speculates on human prices, listening to the other sellers sing today of being Southern Gentlemen and newly free while they prod their niggers to dance and show muscle. What else for this father of lies to do but swig champagne served cold and complimentary to all us men of business and wait till out of the watchers and buyers comes Dr. Sabatier, my agent and physician, who tells me how the niggers looked this week in their pens, the great gaols where we keep our living wares behind brick and bar; he shoots glances to the youths when he’s not scribbling in his ledger our daily losses and gains, the monetary measure of my iniquities. I am the father who hears the music and witnesses the great exchange, thinking that the barkers would make fine preachers and may yet be, so muddied is the face of this world and so lacking in steel.

My father was so godly that he wouldn’t even let me call him
Father,
always
Preacher
. And Preacher-father was a hard thing to have. No whiskey tits for your fevers or teething and no fairy-tale reading, as I give my own son. There were no such things as tales when I was a boy—I was read to from but one book and all of it was true.

Bad word or bad deed Preacher-father punished with charcoal slivers pulled from the campfires we built beside baptismal rivers and from the stoves and fireplaces of believers from the northern neck of Virginia to the Missouri Territory. So it was his way not to holler me down the way he did his endless congregations on the mud fares of the border towns, or even to strike me, which was common in his preaching also, but rather to tell me to go to the fire and stir it with a stick, or an iron if we were in the house of a good family, to find a coal guttering there and pull it aside, then to wait beside it while it cooled such to be handled. I was then to pray upon my transgressions, an hour or so, testing the coal with small hands getting welted and red worse than any ass could from belt or switch. Finally he would have me take the coal and stuff it into my mouth and go to chewing. My lips would at first rebel, growing fat and cracked as the coal passed between them and the fire jumped up my teeth and into their roots so that my brain was burning. I always chewed lightly, huffing breaths, or sucked it like a rare sweet, because I knew at the middle was a hotter heart that still burned live. And while I chewed he would say his first words since he ordered me to the fire:

Do you taste the Hell in there?

And the coal would squeal between my teeth and he would ask if I could hear the cries of the sinners it held. Seeing me clench and grit when I came to the kernel of Hell at the white of the coal, he would say, And that’s but a taste there on your tongue. Now swallow it down.

I’ve likened that I was born in 1776, just to be a completist in this country’s birth and dissolution, but it was Samuel Kemper, my brother not of blood but of love and war, who was born in the year of rebellion, and he always said that he had a good ten years on me. It doesn’t matter. Preacher-father never told me more than my name, which is Angel Woolsack: Angel for my golden hair and our last name which means Death in Scots talk, or so I’ve been told—Death what comes stalking the country to gather souls into his brimming black bag. The verses of our family history revealed only that I was the final issue of a wrecked line, Hell-bound, as my gospel will prove. My mother’s expiration came from a disease that ate her up from womb to gifted rib. The public sick-house where she died Preacher-father burnt as her pyre, an act of anger he often repented, saying that it smelled like cooking years of rotten meat, but not as awful as it had smelled unburnt.

So I came from nothing, from damn-near nowhere, and moved piecemeal across this nation before it ever was. And now that it’s no more I am further unencumbered of origins. Our seeds were scattered to the corners of the new country by breath passed through the anger-clenched teeth of God. And if the earth did have a face for darkness and light and water to fall upon, then we were the blue-tailed flies who crept across that countenance from place to pockmarked place, never lighting on one pus-drip for long.

My hand is not as strong as the one that brought me up, but I doubt such strength could survive these times. I have become weak out of kindness to my child, as I know he’d never survive that flinty education. Some days I see the boy off to his Jesuit minders or let him wander close to home in his wide-brimmed hat. His youth has none of the punishment of my own, but he may yet come to know the fire. And so for now and whatever days of mine remain I have a son to teach what I know: riflery, the ride, and the Word of the Lord. He will learn his delineation, of our preacherly race, as I learned it at the foot of a howler for Christ, from an early life led by Preacher-father’s hand into worlds of our own making.

And so it seems to me correct that the death columns always list a man’s children as having survived him. This wording makes some sense of fathers to me. For mine was never so cruel in punishment or trial that I did not endure him. But neither was he so weak either as to not make my life an act of survival.

Book One

IN THE BEGINNING

I

The Wild Country

Upper Louisiana, 1799

Into the Land of Milk and Honey

They would later say that the day we came into Chit Valley all the children’s fevers broke and everybody’s bowels were righted. But from the way we first arrived in that place, you would never think that Preacher-father would become their fighting prophet, their bloody savior. As it stood, we almost didn’t make it there.

Some miles below the falls at Louisville the captain of the flatboat we’d taken grew tired of Preacher-father and his talk of baptism, and so had us flung over the side along with what baggage fellow passengers felt like tossing after us, our horses, kit, and feed left behind—or flowing on ahead of us, as it may be. This was before the western territories had been redeemed or given any settled name and the country we passed into was then known as Upper Louisiana, though so was much of the world. Now it’s called Missouri, a dangling fragment of the carved-up Union.

It was a hard time to be a Baptist. The tar was always bubbling then and there were many who had no love for preaching. We were used to rough treatments, and if the boatmen and their passengers hadn’t caught us mid-sermon, by surprise and from behind, we might’ve shown them something of a fight, rather than being sent tumbling into the swirling cold of the river. The laughter of the flatboat riders passed away with the splashes of our bags, then the voice of Preacher-father called out my name. I whirled enough to see him bobbing some distance behind me. He thrashed ahead until he was near enough to catch me by the hand, and so I held fast to my father and together we fought across the current to a stand of limbs lying partway in the water.

So there came days of wandering through marshes, being eaten by insects till we were scabbed and shivering in our soaked leathers. Though by guesswork I was thirteen, I was still shorter than the grass, and the deeper we went into the marsh the taller it grew until I was swallowed up entirely and spent days without the sun. My skin grew gray and wrinkled and I kept my eyes to his footprints in the slough—those that weren’t immediately swallowed up by water and mud—so that I could follow on the good ground. We flattened reeds to sleep dry, but still I would sink into the earth and by morning would be half-drowned. I lay those nights with my head on my hands so that my ears would not fill with mud while Preacher-father wandered, calling on God and on the river, shouting, Hey, miss! Hey, miss! like it was a woman out there waiting, and he suffered to find it the same fool way most men hunt for women.

When at last he found the river, Preacher-father mistook it for more of the Ohio. We crossed that dark and swirling parallel on a raft we hewed and poled ourselves, not knowing until we came upon some other travelers, heading north to Cape Girardeau, that we had made the river and were now into the west.

For days more we followed ruts and traces in the grasslands, daily thanking God for our deliverance, through forests and up a rise of hills where the trees ended at the lip. Among the scrabble-scratch of branches we stumbled upon a squat of Indians all laid up in a grove. They were covered in sores and too sick to move or talk, nor give us more than a roll of flyspecked eyes. Preacher-father kept his hand on the handle of his hatchet all the same as we moved through their camp, which looked as though it had been set there forever, and we passed nearest to a squaw whose cheeks were so eaten away that I could see her teeth, though she was still breathing. After we’d left them and were heading down into the valley, my father said to me, That’s how you know you’re on the track to Christians, son. The heathen withers and dies even in their proximity.

The Chitites

In those wild and thinly populated reaches we found sullen Christians living at peril of soul and fearful of the avarice of the Indian. These beleaguered whites lived in holes dug underground; the only watch kept over the endless plain was by their meager stock. A homestead would only be marked by the lonesome beasts in their pens and the stovepipes trailing smoke from the fires stoked below.

Here were the very seeds of forsaken civilization, scattered along the prairie and waiting for us to sow them into a promised land. Or so much as Preacher-father said. The place was settled by no more worthless a pack of dirt-daubers than you will find in all this awful world. They were ten or so families, with names like Shoelick and Backscratch and Auger, and we were met at the door of each one’s hole, which opened like a cellar, by bewildered and mistrustful faces. Their thin, dirt-caked children slept in biers carved into the mud walls of the dugouts and watched like rats as I stood beside my father at their family tables, if they had any. It wasn’t rare for me to sit upon the floor and look up to see insects struggling in the ceiling or for an earthworm to drop into your coffee cup.