The Blood of Heaven (55 page)

The Spilling of the Books

Ice crackled in the air, glinting in what little sun deigned to shine upon that day; the governor’s militia, collars pulled to their eyelids, hats tucked low, went slipping and stumbling upon the boats of Colonel Burr’s surrendered army. Samuel and I wore scarves tied about our faces, looking like the banditti we had once been. Stephen White had secured us Mead’s allowances to accompany him and some fifty militia to the spot where Burr would make his end. It was an outlet of a bayou, frozen over, its arteries blocked with muddy drifts of snow, which had fallen in great force all through the night, beginning while I’d been sitting in the tavern listening to Stephen White try and convince Samuel of how fruitful our slaving venture would be.

Looking out from the hill-top where we’d been told to stay while the governor and his men approached the boats, I wondered how could this land bear any fruit. None that wasn’t wicked. Rotten on the vine. Burr and his party had floated down almost to Natchez, landing in this place where he could have his shame with the fewest witnesses.

Can you see him? Samuel said.

Down at the riverside eight or nine boats were banked and piled haphazardly with casks and barrels and crates, and among the goods huddled clutches of men whose breath rose in clouds, indifferent to those who now boarded and began to upturn casks, pry with bars at the mouths of crates. They’d outpaced the governor, who’d gotten down from his horse and was now mired in a muddy bar. A man from off the boats strode through the slough and helped him free. This was Colonel Burr.

Damn this, I said, spurred my horse and rode downhill, Samuel following. We stopped before the mud, wet snow tumbling down from the branches of the trees as we tied our horses off. We made the muddy plain, seeing now that the governor and Burr had moved away from the bank to higher ground. Mead wore a gray great-coat, soaked about the shoulders with melt, while Burr was in his black and stood against the snow like the lone tree in a field to have been struck by lightning.

At the boats there were maybe a hundred men, not counting the militia; we trod the boards and ignored the cusses of the Mississippians, taking stock of this beleaguered army. They were young men, younger than me, and in their faces, blue from cold, I saw my foolishness reflected—my vanity, as Morrel would have it. Samuel gave one a light for his pipe.

My father will be pleased, said the boy. Now I’ll go home with my tail between my legs.

Where do you come from? I said.

Nashville, he said. He told me not to go, but the colonel has his way—makes you believe, you know? O, the old man will be feeling his oats when I come crawling back, I’ll tell you.

Then don’t, I said, and strode on. The militiamen were sifting their hands through open casks of sugar, licking their fingers.

That’s poor advice, said Samuel.

Why? I said. We never did go back.

It was different for us, he said. These here have prospects. Did you hear his voice? It’s an army of school-boys.

Samuel picked his boots up high to step over a passel of them warming their hands around the belly of a small lamp. The next boat was full of long crates, of the kind which might hold rifles and muskets. Some militiamen were now at them, prying with hammers and bars they’d brought from home when they’d been hastily called up in the night.

I don’t see why, brother, said Samuel. Why you’d want to come and see this.

I didn’t answer, couldn’t term it then in all the frozen sorrow, that I would not be such an apostle who would miss the crucifixion. The snow had begun to fall again and the militiamen let out a cheer as the first crate was opened, then cussed bewildered when they overturned it and found that what it held was books.

Volumes spilled out onto the planks, kicked at by the men in their anger. Another crate, the same result—thuds of leather spines, books sliding down and slipping to the water, bobbing off into the ice-bit flow. It was this sight that struck me most of all. He’d come with boys and books, dear God, and this was what I’d been waiting for. And more crates were pried and more and more books spilled, joined their fellows on the decking, their pages swelling and bloating from the wetness of the falling snow. The militiamen were laughing now, drawing up volumes and holding them like muskets in their hands, aiming at each other and the boys who sat nearby on the bank cross-legged and sullenly reviewing the performance; they sniped them out and made sounds of shooting with their mouths. The boys shook with every shot, but it might’ve only been the cold.

Dear Christ, said Samuel. This was it?

I turned and started back the way we came. And I would’ve gone straight to the horses and ridden back to Natchez if I hadn’t come, at the bridge of the last boat, face-to-face with Colonel Burr. He was the same man I’d seen at my table in Pinckneyville. Brows pushed back from the wide, searching black eyes, he showed no wear or sorrow, unlike his followers, but rather than the petals of magnolias which had been caught all up in his clothes, now his person was gathering snow like any edifice, this one erected as a monument to failure. Frost rimmed the brim of his hat and he made no move to dust it away, but let it fall. He greeted me without any recognition, but as another function of the great machine his plans had engineered, and which was now grinding him apart between its gears.

Colonel, I said. It’s Colonel Kemper. Your friend in Natchez.

Burr blinked; he’d been staring off, perhaps letting his vision go to haze so that he might spare his eyes this scene. I’m sorry, he said, but at present you escape me. Everything escapes me now. He shook himself, fixed his eyes on me. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you are not my friend.

You stayed at my house in Pinckneyville, I said. I have your letters—

Curse letters, Burr said softly. I’m undone by letters.

I’d forgotten how small the colonel was; how his size was like mine.

My respects, sir, said Samuel. We met once in New Orleans.

Burr nodded thanks, and giving gaze to the boats, this creature who I’d thought for so long to be a great man, to whom I’d attached myself like a tick to a dog’s neck, thinking I was also great, spoke these words in parting: Forgive my memory. I’m sure you are a good friend. It’s only that I have so many . . .

Aaron Burr then brushed past us and went on, boat to boat, kneeling and giving words to his young men, who, when he came to them, would smile solemnly and listen, as though they still believed.

IV

The Last Island

Spring 1807

Settling Accounts; a Parting Gift

Pinckneyville had been rebuilt since the storm of our departure, but still the citizens watched us with unease from their porches and windows as we took what things remained from the house. Reuben was among them, and stood in observance off with some of the town fathers. If any of them were papists, they’d have made the sign of the cross. Instead wives brought them out punch and glasses of lemon-water to ease their nervous talk; it was mid-April and the heat was beginning to return, the crops blighted by the winter being renewed. Hope broke the soil in green leaflets, the world went on.

Red Kate hefted a stack of pots and handed them to me, saying, I wouldn’t have come if I’d known there’d be so little. I don’t remember us having so few things.

I put the pots in the cart, between the legs of the bed, broken down but loaded with hopes that she’d sleep in this one—the one where our son had been conceived and born, where I hoped to do the same again. Fallow hopes, and hopes they would remain. But at the time I had some faith, not in God but in my own works. So I climbed into the cart and tested the riggings that held the bed and mattress fast. I’d agreed to come for reasons more than gathering up our meager possessions. There had been, to use Reuben’s words, accounts that needed settling—only my accounts weren’t made of paper and ink, not yet at least, but were of flesh and blood, and I paid them out with pistol and knife. His words upon me: All you know is the sneak and ambush. Killing out of shadows.

Sun burning in a clear sky above the flat land of Pinckneyville, above its flat people who chattered and tsked and cupped their hands above their eyes, checking the horizon for the makings of another storm, now that we were back. All of this in preparation for the move to Berwick’s Bay—take our things down to the barge which awaited us at the river, from where we’d float onwards to New Orleans, cut across to the bay. Stephen White was on his way with the forged papers, enough for twenty, taking some time off from his practice and the affairs of the surveyor to assist me in this first exchange. Talking excitedly on the eve before I left Natchez, he said, It’ll be good to do it ourselves, before we find some men to hire who we can trust. Good to get our boots wet a little, eh? Get our hands dirty.

His hands were paltry feelers and spreaders of foolscap; the only blemishes they knew were ink on uncalloused knuckles trapped and under well-groomed fingernails. If he only knew what hands could do.

I leaned at the kick-boards of the cart, eyeing Reuben now and again. He’d bought Randolph’s plots outright from the widow and Samuel, sought to solidify his place in town with a tavern and a new store, renew his barging on the river. He bore ill will for no one, so he said. In the last week he’d heard the news that John Smith of Ohio was now the first senator of these United States to be indicted for a crime. He crowed the fact proudly since he’d come back to Natchez in February, in time to see Burr brought to trial under Judge Rodney in Mississippi, and there he’d spent a few weeks with Aliza before shutting her back in her cage and heading down. In that time he’d worked over the sale of the land by letter with Polly and Samuel, who’d employed Stephen White in finding them a piece of worthwhile townage in the village of Alexandria, in the Orleans Territory. White said it had room to grow, and would be prosperous of cotton, a fine place for a tavern and hotel.

You want to sling liquor, work a stinking bar? I said.

Samuel, putting pen to deed-papers, said, It’s better than the alternative, brother.

By this he meant my slaving venture. Samuel wouldn’t be persuaded to join in it, despite my or White’s persuasions. He wanted to be upcountry and on his own. He said if it wasn’t for Polly he wouldn’t have even come this close to West Florida. Last Island and what we aimed to do there weren’t to his liking, said it reminded him of Morrel. I smiled when he said that, smiled as I watched him now as sweating, he tossed a chair into his cart. Let him wear an apron and tap casks—I wished him well. I’d even given him a parting gift for the mantelpiece, now squirreled away amongst his goods, hiding in some corner of his cart: the ears of Ira Kneeland, floating in a small jar of pickling wine.

Reuben thought he’d won, the fool. You lied about cutting men, lied about a jar of foreskins for the love of your wife. I am no liar.

I’d made this gift to my brother that morning. I was just returning when he came outside at the sound of my horse. We’d been in Pinckneyville a single night, and in that time I’d made my mind up to settle that outstanding bill. Lying alone in the bed while Red Kate slept out in the open room upon the floor, there came a voice—not God’s but mine, saying, You’ve got nothing. You have failed and what you believed in is a failure. This is your last time near the country you so sought to take. Soon you’ll be down at the swirling Gulf, a slaving man. But now, you can ride out one last time. Leave them all in fear. And if you should die, what matter? She’ll be this way if you are dead, she’ll be this way if you’re alive. Once more for blood and screams and retribution. One more ride before you’re rich and just like them.

So I went, stepping over my wife where she lay upon the rug in the hall, out into the early night, the moon not even risen. She hadn’t said a word, but I knew she’d been watching, resigned.

Twenty miles of the old southward road, where we’d been made to run that awful night, where I’d wept and bled and jogged along gagging with my brothers towards Kneeland’s promised torments. I beat the horse down, charged it fast. I wanted not to look upon the places of our suffering. Past the invisible line of demarcation between the countries and into the open land of the plantations. If any had been looking, they’d have seen me coming—lone rider, black and terrible of purpose. And if I’d been still in the habit of belief, it would’ve seemed divine providence that Ira Kneeland would be riding northwards with a friend on that same road, to what purpose I can’t say. I never gave him a chance to speak it.

At first I only saw a pair of men a-horse, trotting slowly, oncoming. I slowed and edged to the far side of the road, hoping for them not to catch my face. But as they came I heard one speaking, talking loud perhaps to frighten off the night and this traveler he didn’t know. It was the voice that had called my wife a whore, told me I would never see her again. I could not forget it. The knowledge broke upon me, his face blazing to my eye, in the instant we passed each other on the road.

I wheeled and shot his fellow in the back before they’d gone ten yards up the road. The man fell, shrieking, and Kneeland, in his confusion, trod upon him with his horse. He gave a dig of spur to ride away, but I had my second pistol out and it plucked him from his mount as though I held a rope and yanked him down. The beast tore away and I rode over the trampled man to where Ira Kneeland lay splayed out, blood pouring from his shoulder and gathering in the ruts.