The Blood of Heaven (5 page)

Some holediggers by then were nodding, thinking they’d avoided his admonishment and wrath, and so began to grin and cut their eyes at neighbors who were impugned and downcast out of shame. Emily sat beside her mother, cross-legged in the beaten grass, wild eye doing whips in her skull.

But they’ve got milk cows! called one woman. The mother Fladeboe shut her up with a thwack to the back of her bonnet.

We don’t need any milk from wrong cows, she said.

Then what about feed? the bonneted woman hissed.

Our hogs have been sick and that feed only made them worse. Now they act devilish, try and bite each other. I tell you, it’s a curse.

Amen, sister, said Preacher-father. Now you’ve learned, and so should all of you learn not to stray from the path nor backslide into the snares of this world. We’d be happy to come and see the hogs, sister.

Bless you, Preacher.

Now, he said. If we need to be refreshed in our understanding of these people, then let me ask Deacon Kemper to step up and witness again.

Brotherhood

Next night found Samuel, Nathan, and me alone when the dead man’s wife came calling. The fathers had left that morning, one toting pistols and the other with a hatchet, with purpose unspoken and heading north along the hillside. I imagined they were off hashing plans and would be gone till the following day; what they were doing was putting a plan into its first bloody motion. So it went that I had my wellspring knockaround with Samuel.

Rawboned at fist and shoulder but otherwise heavyset, he was hell to grapple with.

Ass-kissing midget! he called me. Fucksaken squirt!

There was plenty room to move, to dig our feet into the dirt. The dark came on with Samuel’s fists falling on my head, my own fists knocking at his briskets and his chin. My eyes began to boil shut and I thought his did also, because his swings grew glancing. But after some time of blind fighting we seemed granted second sight, and soon both our fists were finding their marks and we were renewed in our violence—he leveled his blows at my arms and they became dead weight; I used my head to try and knock the breath from him. And when neither of us could throw knuckles anymore, we wrestled. I could see the firelight through my swole-shut lids as we went on, grabbing with swollen hands to force each other to the ground, only to get the false hope of a bent knee, blading my shins at his to cut him down. In bloody dance, we misted each other with the red breath from our busted noses, cussed through split lips. It was only when Nathan gathered up the strength to grab at us, crying that there was someone coming and how we’d all be punished, that we collapsed to the dirt, heaving and sending numb fingers to search our loosened teeth.

Little brother danced around us, clarion call in our blindness—no eyes to see what approached, no sure hearing over the roar planted there by knuckle and thumb, feeling out the sharp and aching world with broken pieces unrendered of their touch.

I heard Nathan only dimly, and not for my fist-struck audition, but also that there were more resonant rhythms working in my head. He was making worried trips from me to Samuel, and having his hands slapped away, lamenting the future striping of his legs and ass and reporting on the progress of the lantern-holding figure, when I spoke.

Samuel, can you see?

Not a bitching bit, he said. You hit mean for such a scrawny shit.

Nathan saying all the while, We’ll get whipped, whipped, whipped.

Samuel said for him to shut up so loud I felt the bloodspray from his words.

I feel like old Jacob after he wrestled the angel.

You don’t miss a chance to sermon, do you? said Samuel.

It’s coming, Nathan said.

Damn me if it doesn’t seem that way, said Samuel. I feel more godly than I ever did.

This place is our Pineal, I said.

Brothers, Nathan whined. It’s on down the rise. A woman.

What’s that? Samuel asked.

It’s in Ephesians, I said.

Samuel sagged and winced. I’ve got to do better about the Book, he said.

Nathan whimpered and fussed as we went on driving each other into a scripturous drunk.

It’s like the Lord had us lay into each other so we could tear off our old names. No more Woolsack, no more Kemper. We are Israel.

God damn, Samuel said, sucking and sputtering with fat-lipped reverence. Israel. You hear that, little sucker?

For a moment I thought that little sucker was me until Nathan answered yes. But there’s still someone coming, he said.

God damn yes, I said. And yes we vained and blasphemed until Nathan hushed us; and I was not ashamed, understanding that if a man can’t blaspheme when he is on the raw edge of revelation, then when? If you can hear the thunder of the holy heartbeat, where the conscience rests that burns holes in the sky and calls up pits of spiders to swallow the weak, do what comes natural and your actions will be smiled upon.

The Widow’s Oil

With strength in our legs, buoyed with a newfound righteousness of purpose, we wobbled there awaiting the arrival of the wife Magee, who came as a hip-thin fuzz in my vision. She carried her infant child in a bundle in her arms.

You boys shouldn’t fight that way, she said.

It’s settled now, Sister Magee, I said.

Sister Magee set down her lantern, hugging the child bundle to her. She grunted, Where’s your fathers?

Out praying, I said, still gogging blind to see her.

Whenabouts might they be coming back?

Before dawn, I believe. Right, Sam?

Then I’ll wait, she said, and plopped herself down beside our fire, in the dirt just now settled from our struggle.

What’s the trouble, Sister? Samuel said. If you don’t mind me asking.

Well, she said. My husband’s dead yonder in the woods with his head split open and I was wanting your fathers’ help.

Half a day and into the night she’d spent going to find her husband, discovering him at last in the lonesome woods between their homestead and the pilgrims’. We couldn’t find a thing to say for comfort, and she was so cold about it that comfort seemed a foolish thing to try.

Nathan shut right up and was horrified, but Sister Magee, after clucking a few minutes over the state of our faces, handed off her child for me and Samuel to take turns holding, rose, and went around our camp, gathering up roots and grasses which she ground into a poultice between two of the creek-bed rocks from the lip of our pit. This accomplished, she bent between us and rubbed the poultice on our swollen eyes. We didn’t even think to thank her, for she was so quiet and the only thing to do was be silent yourself. So we passed the child back and forth, cooed it psalms, and the swelling abated and our sight returned, revealing to us each other’s busted faces and the child’s sun-burnt head lolling in our arms.

The fathers came talking out of the morning light and didn’t stop or take notice of Sister Magee and her baby, much less our wounded faces. They were concerned with their own, which were scored and cut with red slashes.

Wake up, you boys! Preacher-father called, stumbling into camp, supporting Deacon Kemper with an arm. What a rotten stinking day it’s been.

The disciples didn’t fare any better at the hands of the heathens, said Deacon Kemper.

They both fell beside the fire and my father held up his arms to the light, examining his clothes. They ran us out with sticks and switches, he said.

Whipped us like mules, said Deacon Kemper, holding out the flaps of his coat, which were indeed shredded.

What happened? Nathan asked.

Pilgrims, said Preacher-Father.

Sons of bitches—how? said Samuel.

Watch your tongue, his father said. Sister Magee? What brings you here so early? No trouble, I trust, though there seems to be so much in this sorry world.

Sister Magee had stood when the fathers first appeared, and now she swayed between them and the dying fire. Say you saw the pilgrims, Preacher Woolsack? she said.

Yes, Sister, he said. More than saw them. Endured them.

You take the way through the woods?

Yes, Sister, we did.

You see my husband?

Preacher-father’s look soured.

Why, no, we didn’t, said the Deacon.

What’s the matter, Sister? My father asked with kindness in his voice, though that look in his eyes was the same as when he’d give me the coal.

He’s dead—had his head stoved in the woods.

Well, said Deacon Kemper, I believe we know the culprits now.

Sister Magee looked unmoved. In my arms her child whined and I muffled it in my coat. I would carry it on our silent way winding across Chit to gather up the holediggers for the funeral service. I bore the tiny burden, for its mother never asked it back, and I watched Preacher-father, striding at the front of his marching congregation, the head of his hatchet slapping time against his leg, Deacon Kemper alongside and both of them barely able to contain their gladness. What they tried to mask in holy sorrow I knew even then was foul design. They’d been no more beaten by the pilgrims than me or Samuel. Their wounds, like ours, were by their own hands. The hatchet clapped and tolled; I’d seen him do worse than split a man’s skull.

When we came to the Fladeboes’ hole I edged through the haggard crowd and went to Emily and suddenly the child was like a great weight on me. I reached the child out to her and she took it, smiling, drawing it close, and with her good eye she stared at the pitiful thing and with the wild eye she looked at me. Emily held it only for a moment before her mother scuttled by and swept it from her arms. Mother Fladeboe took the child and Emily both, one tucked under an arm like a gourd and the other pulled by the wrist to walk with her at the back of our procession with the other chittering women all the way to the Magees’ tract.

The days of the wife’s journey and ours back with her weren’t kind to the body of the husband. She had soaked his shroud in lye soap, thinking it would preserve him from the insects and the elements and abate the smell. She was about half right. The stink of rot was there but different, and when Deacon Kemper lifted the sheet from the body, besides that it had swollen and blackened, the flesh was welted and melted in places and came through his clothes. The husband’s face was a runny mess, but the maggots that had nested in the split in his skull were all dead. I don’t know how Sister Magee bore to look on all that, even as her red-faced child was passed between the women of Chit.

Preacher-father asked whether she wanted her man buried or burnt and Sister Magee couldn’t suffer the idea of fire—perhaps lit by the very wood her husband had been cutting when he himself was felled. So Samuel and I were put to digging while the fathers sermonized the Chitites.

That’s about the worst thing I’ve ever seen, I said, pointing with my shovel-blade to the shrouded corpse.

Samuel turned some dirt and scoffed. The worst I’ve ever seen, he said, is General George Washington ride a man down and club his head with a Powhatan war hammer.

Washington?

The man himself. This was when I was little and we were in Pennsylvania. The general put down an insurrection single-handed. Rode on a horse slung with all kinds of murderous things he’d collected on his travels: clubs, swords, French pickaxes. Sometimes he swung an iron ball on a chain. That got his men going, I’ll tell you.

I never imagined him being like that, I said.

Gospel damn truth, Samuel said, voice choking a bit, whether out of emotion or having caught a whiff of Magee. And you know, when I saw him, I knew that’s what I wanted to be.

Why aren’t you then? I said, chucking a shovelful past his shoulder.

Samuel stuck his blade into the earth and considered me. We were but a few feet down and our hole was as yet shapeless. I thought we were brothers now, and friends, he said.

We are.

Samuel put one great foot to the head of his shovel and turned up a clod of prairie dirt. Then I don’t expect to hear such things again, he said.

We dug the grave up to Samuel’s shoulders, taking breaks on occasion to sit at the lip of our hole and spy the Chitites sitting at our fathers’ feet, listening like children to the story of their scourging at the hands of the pilgrims. Finished, Samuel called to Nathan, who was laid out on the ground between us and the congregation, for him to go and tell them the service could begin. I pulled myself up out of the grave and attained the higher ground beside Magee’s body. The wind had blown the sheet from his head and his face was boiled into a mask that gaped with empty eyeholes and a wide-grinning smile with lips skinned back over teeth that had gone translucent and lost their divisions; and I wanted nothing more than Emily to be beside me, even if she had to look on the tortured form of the corpse, just so long as I could look on her while she did. Spit out a word or two to soothe her for the horror. Samuel bent quickly to cover up Magee before the others arrived at the grave. And horrors seemed to be the order of the day, with all us hoisting the body up on its wrappings, only to have it tear through and spill onto the graveside in a revolting jumble. Samuel and I had to push him in with our shovels while my father gave the burial verses.