The Blood of Heaven (52 page)

My God, sir, I am sorry. A doctor was called, but—

I was past him, shoving guests aside who’d come down from their rooms to witness. I remember their hands, reaching out, trying to touch me. I remember one of the chamber-niggers leaning by the stairs, weeping. Upstairs, still clinging to my parcels, and into the rooms, where there stood among crumpled masks of colored paper the belated doctor, who I passed without a word, and to the bedroom, where a single lamp burnt low, revealing Red Kate curled upon the bed, stroking the pale hair of our dead son beside her.

Their faces both were bloody, hers in smears and his in a great wash from his mouth down his chest. His eyes were closed, but hers turned on me as her mouth began to part and widen into a black and tortured gape, screaming though she didn’t make a sound.

Rites and Offerings

Where was he christened? said the cemetery clerk.

Nowhere, I said.

Baptized?

By this hand.

On what authority?

The Lord’s.

In the offices of the cemetery clerk, I sat with my fists as stone. My throat was poor of words, my eye reckoned nothing but the bare outline of this fool man, who read me territorial statutes as to why my child could not be buried in the city cemetery. He was a large man, seeming more a farmer than a grave-tender. But there came the thought: Does he not plant and till the earth?

So you have no papers, he said.

None.

Not for your marriage, nor the birth.

Write Justice Baker of Wilkinson County. He’ll guarantee whatever you need.

That would take time, sir. And I need the documentation.

How much will it take?

The papers—

No, I said, how much money? Give me a fucking figure.

Sir, said the clerk, I am a public official, and the penalty for bribery, even in such a delicate matter—

God damn you, I just want to put my son in a proper place. With a good stone.

I understand and you have my sympathies. . . . Have you tried the churches?

I’ll die and go to Hell before the flesh of my flesh gets put in a papist yard or the damned field of the Church of England.

You may find them more receptive to your . . . offer, he said. And it would be better than what I can give you.

Which is?

There is a corner of our holding, for the—pardon—indigent, the unregistered.

The potter’s field?

We do not call it that. There’s a prince of France buried there. It’s not so mean a company. And you could put your stone as you wish.

A monument among the paupers and niggers dead of dropsy, eh?

The clerk said that I must understand his position; he’d been eyeing, since I’d entered, my pistols, worn according to the law uncovered and outright in plain view. I squared him in the cross of my patch. I can kill you; put your brains through the back of your skull so that you’d be only a mess of teeth and blood-meal. Or the gut-shot, an hour of writhing on the floor of your office with the fires of Hell-pain burning in your belly, your friends calling in a doctor, who messes his arms to the elbows toiling in your innards, but too late.

The doctor had said it was poisoning, hemorrhage resulting. He’d called me from the bedside and my silent-screaming wife, then gone about the rooms in search of the cause. And after a few minutes he crouched at one of the couches and reached beneath it, withdrawing with a knowing sigh one of the boy’s lead soldiers, sucked of paint, which the doctor said was no doubt a glaze of sugar-of-lead; the soldier stood upright with his musket, black and terrible and ready.

They should ban the use of it, he said. I’ve seen it from cookware, utensils.

Staring at the black soldier, I said: He liked the taste. When he was little he’d steal lead shot to suck.

I should think the poor little soul would have suffered an earlier fate if that were the case.

He was troubled, I said. He never spoke my name.

The true evil is the glaze. The lead for shot is less insidious, slow-working. Where did you buy the toy?

A vendor in the street, I said, trying to remember voice or face, but finding nothing.

Where? asked the doctor.

Under the hill, I said.

Bastards, he said. You cannot trust them down there a whit.

I left the clerk unharmed, his mumbled apologies and bureaucratic sympathies, and returned to the hotel, where the body of my son was laid out on a stand in the sitting room, shrouded in fine cloth so that only his face showed. Red Kate had done the business of cleaning and powdering his corpse, and now she sat in a chair nearby, keeping the vigil over the work of her hands, her womb. She said nothing when I told her of the clerk, nothing when I cursed the potter’s field. She wouldn’t speak until after I’d gone downstairs, called for one of the slaves to bring up my horse, saddled, came again into our rooms and began to wrap tight the shroud about my boy, cinching knots at his limbs so that they wouldn’t be jolted loose on the ride.

It was then she said, Why?

And in that question lay the measure of her grief. To fill the breach of the silence that followed—so that it might not be filled by all the awful answers—I said that I would go and find a place of worth, a good place to put him in the ground. I lifted up my son and held him shoulder-wise.

She rose as though on strings and said, I’m coming; and stepping near she reached out with hands hard and clammy from where they’d held her eyes, and she pried him from my arms, made a bower of hers, and, folding him into a tuck, carried him down after me.

The day had been the coldest yet, windless and barren, clouds overwhelming the sky, everything impenetrable gray. The slaves of the hotel had my horse out front, hitched and ready, and when they saw Red Kate behind me with her bundle they ran inside and brought back a small step-ladder so that she could, in some comfort, mount. They also brought a blanket for her shoulders and scrambled up the ladder to fling it over her, while she, unmindful, looked away. I rose, careful not to upset her or the burden which would ride between us on our way through the town, stiffened fingers jabbing at my back, bony shoulder giving nudges, as though asking where it was that we were headed.

And I didn’t know myself. We rode through the square and to the north side of town, past the pens, the auction-ground, past the office of Stephen White, where that gentleman was bent to his maps, shoring up the plans for his trip, which would commence so soon that he wouldn’t know of my loss until he’d returned from New Orleans bearing the good news of finding partners for our venture. And I wondered were Aliza and the widow Randolph at their spyglass now, watching. Had they witnessed the events of the night, and now the sorry progress of the day?

Further up and out of town we climbed higher, and along the road went tenant-farmers, drivers from the plantations which appeared every few miles, distant from the road and white as bone. Still I didn’t know, and Red Kate didn’t ask. We went on faith or madness both, rounding the hillocks and through places once covered with trees, now reduced to stumps cut down for timber, the country chewed down by the white columns, which did appear like teeth in the faces of the mansions, now more and more infrequent as the trace led us further out from the habitations of men.

At one point, many miles out and nearing end of day, I let the horse go off the road; he wandered and ate the brittle dying grass. The land thereabouts was unfenced, not yet put to cultivation. I only steered him when we came into some trees, and told my wife to watch her face, but she held it high and let herself be cut by the limbs. One pried the patch from my face and I felt the chill deep in my socket, had to let go the reins to tie it back.

And it was that we came into a clearing, broad and free of tree or undergrowth, where stood a pair of hills twenty feet or more high, whose flattened sides showed the work of human hands. These were the mounds of the Indians long scattered and despoiled by those French explorers who’d ventured first up the river a hundred years before, the same lot who might’ve marooned the whore Sara back in West Florida. The grass upon the mounds was green, still living, unlike what we’d left behind; and as we approached the horse strayed and ate of it, while I looked about in awe at this glowing clutch of life, fed for millennia from the flesh of chiefs and braves.

I hadn’t brought a shovel, but once we both were down, I went to digging in my bags and found a small hatchet. I judged which mound was tallest and went to it, found a place near its crest and began hacking at the earth with the hatchet-blade. Through the dirt flung upwards by my work, I could see Red Kate standing with her bundle at the foot of the mound, straight as the surrounding trees and moving just as little. I wanted to holler for her to set him down, but thought better of it, swallowed dirt instead of speaking. Let her hold him while she could; soon enough he’d be in the ground. Let her bear the weight of our small and warped creation for what time remained before he’d be put away.

My blade struck something hard, and I swept away the dirt to find a spearhead of shining black stone, like glass. I pitched it aside and kept on, hitting now and again veins and pockets of ancient knives, arrowheads, and axes—all of stone. I lifted up my head and rested for a moment, thinking: This is a pagan place. Just as bad as a Catholic yard. But there were those who said the Indians were the lost tribes of Israel, forgotten by God and exiled to America. And this was their temple, long-forgotten, of no use to their inheritors. I could go like Abraham and cut lengths of wood and make him as a burnt offering. But the Lord had already taken him, and there was nothing more to give but flesh already rotting. No, he’d go into the ground with the other lost. Those who the Lord saw fit to vanish from the earth. My boy had been born just as Louisiana was born into America, and now I’d put him in the earth among the people who were there before America was a thought, among the ancient means of war, old as man himself.

It was dark before I’d finished, the hole dug into the mound-side like a bier, the piled dirt aside and waiting to cover him over. There was no pain in my arms, nor was I tired. I waved for Red Kate to come, which she did, trudging up the mound, clutching him close. On her ascent the moon broke the clouds and we were cast in a terrible cold light. And I thought I’d have to take him from her, but my wife fell to her knees before the hole and gently rolled him in. I stood by, Preacher-father’s voice clawing in my mind: Be sure you bury it deep.

She peeled aside the shroud from our son’s face, took me by the pants-leg and pulled me down to look along with her. Some dirt had already spilled onto him, smudged at his mouth and showing in the strands of his hair. Red Kate choked and put the shroud back again.

I’ll be the one to do it, she said.

And so my wife reached out for the piled dirt and by handfuls she would cover him over, batting me away whenever I made to help. You dug the hole to put him in, she said. Now it’ll be me.

III

All Fall Away

Winter 1806–1807

The Devil’s Pisspot

The Reverend Morrel’s hands were bare, his rings pawned off one-by-one to supply himself and his following of Blessed, with whom he crouched and scrounged in the great sink to the east of town.

My God, he said, how you have changed.

Having done so for some years, they’d built up shacks of twigs with roofs thatched with pine-straw, lodges of the damned; he sent the Blessed into the countryside and town in search of bits of cloth to stop the breaches, so their huts looked like the nests of thieving birds. And these Blessed had been the first things I’d seen when I’d ridden down into the pit that morning in late November: worse off than what he’d had before, not harelips or legless or four-legged or crabs or girls big in the cliver, but idiots skulking and humpbacked, with enormous heads overgrown with matted hair and far-set watery eyes which regarded me with fear on my approach to their camp, scurrying downwards to warn the others. And was this what my boy would’ve become? No, they had not even his single word; rather they moaned and yelped, clapped their hands as they ran in circles of the largest hut, four or five of them, until I came into the clear and the Reverend Morrel stumbled out his door of twigs and briars. A few moments of awe upon his face before he recognized me and went to hushing his Blessed, calling them
children
.

It was all so pitiful as to make me wonder why I’d come at all. Mother Lowde had been right, so Samuel and Reuben, and in truth I’d known it all along. But it was also that my soul cried out for something to do besides mourn. November, slow as torture, had progressed; by mid-month I’d read not only of Burr’s first hearings before the Kentucky jury on charges of plotting war against Mexico, but also that Wilkinson had signed a treaty with the Pukes and now the land between the Hondo and the Sabine, the decided borders between the respective countries, would be termed a
neutral ground
. The Pukes had found a price to their liking. One war done, another to begin—at least in the mind of the general, for he continued sending messages of alarm throughout the territory, and before he quit Natchitoches he dispatched his troops to reinforce New Orleans. He’d tried to be secret about it, but governors do talk and the march of twelve hundred men overland did tend to draw attention. And as it went, instead of New Orleans being conquered by Burr, it was Wilkinson who, in his way, would take the prize. But not before he returned to Natchez, where he was not hailed and his call for Mississippi troops to be sent in defense of New Orleans was refused by Governor Mead. So the general dispatched personal messengers to the president, and took up his dying wife again on her litter, hauling her to the boat for New Orleans.