The Blood of Heaven (45 page)

When I heard this I was being led from the kitchen by Barbary, in earshot of my brothers where they sat in the receiving hall, but we must have been out of sight, for they gave no pause in their conversing. And Barbary knew my mind well enough to tarry for a moment at some task, so that I might catch their gist.

But who’s there to follow us and fight? Samuel said. We aren’t exactly popular in the place.

As far as the atheist knows, said Reuben, we’re heroes to the whole country.

But so, it seems, is Burr.

It won’t matter, Reuben said. He’ll be caught and had before we’re back in Mississippi if all goes well and we’re heeded. And when I tell him that Smith, one of his own Republican senators . . .

Scheme upon scheme. Barbary drew me on and I was thinking, as Reuben’s words were drummed out by my footfalls, that at least they knew that no one would follow them. They’d be alone in their efforts, or so I thought. None of us would know, until later, that General Wilkinson was setting out plans to wreak all the havoc he could within his pudgy reach.

So Red Kate would put down my words in cipher, laying out my brothers’ plot. But when I came to telling that I thought they’d get no volunteers, my speech trailed and I said, But neither can I. No one will follow me, nor could I lead them if I wished.

I sunk into the bed, jostling my son, who’d been crouched there giving off streams of murmuring as I talked. I saw my usefulness withering. My hand couldn’t even be trusted to write the letter; my lines would start out straight, but by mid-page, as my wife described, the sentences would snap off at their ends, dangle in the blank to be overwritten by their fellows, and be rendered indecipherable.

The boy’s imitations of me had lately worsened; when I refused to bathe or sleep, he’d do the same; he’d taken to my way of walking, combating chair-legs and overturning lamps and side-tables. When he could escape his mother, I’d find him underfoot; and I dared not speak unless to hear my voice echoed in his small and singular speech.

Damn it, said my wife one night. He’s taking after all the worst of you.

So I would sit awake and listen to the town—which suffered no small-hours but sprang to roaring life in the late night—the constant commotion of the old streets where with Samuel I’d nicked and laid in wait and searched out the history of the brother who’d now led us back split and set against each other. I heard the shouts and laughter and the weapon-seller’s cart making blade-and-iron music on his way to the next brawl.

Mornings, when the revels became silence for the briefest time and soon turned to workman’s grumbles, I would go to sit with Barbary in the kitchen, where the other slaves mulled reverently about her while she oversaw their work. There, sipping coffee and gnawing twists of bacon, I listened to her history over the clang of pots and the occasional scream of the kettle. She’d come late in life by the name of Barbary; before that she’d been Rona, Sally, Lucretia, Ruth, Sara, and the lastmost was her name when she’d been taken—for she was of the continent true and not American-born—from her country, which I cannot recall. Her current name, the one she supposed would be her last and if the graves of slaves bore names would be etched upon her tombstone, was given by the mistress Aliza: Barbary, for her nose was long and hooked, her skin light.

She considered this name second best and fitting; her father had been an Arab man-merchant in the port town of her origin, and she the product of his meddling with his wares during a time of storms when no ships would pass his stony castle. The storm, she said, lasted for six years, and so she’d been allowed to grow into a kind of mind before the day at last came when the ships returned.

By sunrise I’d be fighting sleep as the others were awaking, lurching downstairs one-by-one. I’d try and wait until they were all seated in the dining room to have Barbary slip me out from the kitchen, but on one such morning the old slave was occupied and I took off on my own. Miscounting the footsteps and the groan of chairs, I was met at the foot of the stairs by Samuel.

He had to halt me with his hand. Brother, he said, why don’t you stop with this and join the living for a day.

You’re still here? I said. The hour’s growing late—you may miss the president.

The congress is in session until September, he said.

Now you know the government, eh?

We’ve been studying the papers.

A lot of good it’ll do you, I said, and started up again.

His hand returned. You know we won’t go until you can see.

Well, shit, I said, at least there’s somebody with hope. Then I stepped aside and continued on, my busted cheek and socket, which in those weeks had begun to knit beneath the plasters, drumming hurt.

That day Red Kate would go with Barbary to market. Polly Randolph caught wind of it and, eager to escape The Church and take the sun, begged to accompany them. So I heard later from my wife, Polly stood firm.

I would rather be knifed in a back alley than be prisoner in this house, said Polly Randolph. I will go this time and in the future, or by God Samuel Kemper I’ll go further than the market!

And so it was decided that both Reuben and Samuel would accompany them. Red Kate told me, giggling, how the brothers squinted at the sun and were easy to slip once they’d all passed into the teeming stalls. She lost them among the vendors and, finding a runner-boy from the docks, drew from the bib of her dress my letter to Colonel Burr and pressed a piece of silver on him to have it delivered to the mail-packets.

She took the boy, who was skinny and no more than twelve, by the arm, and before she let him go, said, And if this letter doesn’t reach its destination, I’ll have your wee balls for baubles. You hear?

The letter would pass first, of course, through the supposed Patrick Fitzroy of Nashville, who we hoped had an idea of the colonel’s whereabouts. I knew it would be bold luck for the letter to ever find the great man’s hands, but I was glad when Red Kate woke me in the afternoon to say she’d had it off, sent out all my dreams of destiny and retribution and the Grace of the Lord, now hers as well, held within a few scraps of paper glyphed with strange markings and language unintelligible to but few, a tiny, tiny thing fluttering into a vast and wild country, borne upon more than hope, with all the chance of a single whispered prayer rising up to meet the face of God.

Faces and Features

As if to mock my blindness, the talk about the house turned to appearances.

My freckles, said Red Kate one day, are fading. And in July at that, with the sun bright as can be. Pretty soon I’ll be as milky as a German girl.

And on another, Barbary pronouncing: Your brother, Mister Sam, he’s turned full green.

That’s just his way, I said to her. It means nothing.

He looks a dead man.

He is dead, I said. I killed him. Two years past, yet he haunts me still.

There’s some sense, she said. But that’s how it goes with dead folk, I suppose.

No, I said, thinking better. He doesn’t haunt me, I carry his corpse upon my back.

And if my wife was turning white and Samuel was greening, it was not for lack of sun. Red Kate’s trips to market had increased, and she brought back with her more than fixings for our meals: news that Mother Lowde was still alive, and wished desperately to see her boys. Samuel would ask me to go with him on his visits, but I saw no point—saw nothing, as it were. When he’d return, he’d tried to tell me what she’d said, but, feigning tiredness, I’d go up to bed, where I’d have Red Kate make notes for the next of our letters, which now bore the address of a tavern in Door-Knock Alley, the owner of which she paid a tidy sum to be recipient of the return letters with no questions asked. She’d thought at first to ask Mother Lowde, but I cured her of the notion, saying how the old whore couldn’t help but give away our secret to Samuel, who called on her more and more, even bringing along the widow Randolph, herself having taken on something of a Natchez twist, her words grown sharper and cussful, her dresses bawdy and low.

I’ll be a fuck-stuck goat! Polly cried one morning, upon finding a Negroe’s hair in her tea.

While I awaited Colonel Burr’s response, Reuben was received in the hill-top town; and I imagined him being hesitantly toasted by the nabobs, eyeing him as an oddity, the brutal boatman and back-woods brawler, but yet—I could hear them whisper—so mannered and accustomed. Not the kind of man you’d wish to cross; for hadn’t he, time and again, slaked his need for vengeance upon the Spaniards and their country? Reuben wouldn’t have been a one to disappoint them with the truth. Sure he seethed and ranted and let spill his anger, though not against Colonel Burr, who he despondently reported was a great favorite of the gentry there. He would reserve his bile for the Pukes, and little did the planters know that all his rage and what they surely saw as steel resolve sprung not from righteous patriotism but from a shift of papers—the contracts of a speculator and the accounts of backwater stores. And while they sputtered over their claret at their strange and hailed visitor, the planters and gentlefolk were also thrumming with the news that the Pukes, from their Mexican outposts, had crossed the Sabine River with an army of two thousand, and were billeting at few miles from Natchitoches. War, as always, was imminent.

What was fresh news to the hill-top planters had been bandied and sung up and down the docks a week before, so when Reuben spoke of it, I was already smirking with the knowledge. The Pukes were giving an excuse, a reason for the enterprise to be outright draped in the American banner. It was only for Wilkinson to come down from St. Louis with barges packed with soldiers like cord-wood, march to the violated border, and ignite the glorious conflagration.

And when I grinned with foreknowing, my right cheek bunched at the lip of my new eye-patch. Bought for me by Red Kate when it became clear that my bones had healed, the patch was black velvet strung upon a leather thong and emblazoned with a cross in thread-of-gold. The color she had to tell me, but the cross I could feel for myself, whenever fingers went to searching, as they often did, to ease the itching of my skin, freed from the plaster and revealed to my touch as puckered and riven with lines as the sorry plots of Chit. My wife spoke admiringly of the needlework as she went about untying the snakeskin from the tail of my hair, letting it fall so that she could brush the knots out. With the fine patch had come a return to appearances; I was shaved, and bathed with scents and oils unearthed from the abandoned cabinets of rooms long vacated by their whores. My uniform was put to a hard wash, my boots drawn off and filled with wadded paper dusted with salts to draw the stench. Similarly, my son suffered a new cleanliness; often I would hold him and feel his small hands working at his skin, then rubbing his fingers together close to his face, unnerved that there was no dirt to bead between them. From the same seamstress who’d made my patch, a child-sized colonel’s uniform, in replica of mine, was ordered for the boy. He wore it proudly about the house, which sounded with his tiny martial stomping. But before this could all come to pass, I would be stripped, forced to part with my lanyard of pistols and knives; but I still kept them close, before me on the bed while my clothes were boiled and pummeled and my boots packed and polished by wincing slaves, my stockings cast out into the trash-heaps to be bedding for river-rats.

They say they never smelt a thing like it, said Barbary when she came in to bring me coffee. Those boots would stun a horse. Don’t know how Miss Kate could stand you.

She perseveres, I said.

I had to gather my weapons close, hoard them, for the boy, naked as well, would climb a-bed and try to play. I had to call for grease to pry his finger from the barrel of a gun, where it’d squirmed in search of lead to suck. He cried out with his word while we worked him free, and when his mother had gone I let him suck his finger, take what he craved, even as I worried the embroidered cross before my eye. It was fine work, but unlike me to celebrate embellishments. No, my filigreed patch was more to the taste of a man like the Reverend Morrel.

See, it wasn’t Burr alone who occupied my mind those days; there was always the specter of the Reverend, perhaps in congress with the surviving alcaldes, Kneeland and Stirling. But they were only shades—he was the one behind it. More than from the Kaintucks’ words, I knew it in my bones, felt it written on my soul. Of course, it couldn’t be proven; the word about town held nothing of his name but the tales of bygone days. Thinking he’d regain my trust, Samuel had, on his most recent visit, put the question of the Reverend to Mother Lowde, who said that all she’d heard was that he’d escaped the soldiers and the hangman’s rope, but hadn’t been heard of since.

This once I would quit my lie and listen to Samuel’s words. Lowde believed him to be dead, for word of such a man was unlikely to not be spread.

She still adores him, he said. Gave me a hot minute of hell when I told the way we parted from him. . . . And she adores you too. Misses you greatly.

She knows more than she lets on, I said, wondering darkly whether Mother Lowde was tough as I remembered, how long it would take to beat the knowledge out of her. The old whore had been so kind to me in my boyhood, not so long ago, and I did shudder some thinking of the man that I’d become. No helping it—blood and bone-crack cruelty were the music of the devil-worms turning in my gut. I saw myself, once the country was taken and remade in the image of Burr, as a kind of magistrate, ruling the unrighteous in whatever province the great man saw fit to seat me; blindness wouldn’t matter, I’d be justice itself, and wherever I put down my boot the wicked would be crushed.