The Blood of Heaven (7 page)

Scarcely could I catch a breath while in that wiry patch; my hands holding fast to her hips, the words I said into her were my first true sermon, a sermon on the furry, clefted mount. My burnt and sorrowful tongue was at that moment healed, and I tasted fully for the first time in my life; what now would surely cause my gorge to rise was then a revelation. She rocked and grabbed fistfuls of my hair and called it pretty, pretty, pretty, and I dug furrows in the prairie earth with my bootheels.

We were joined only for a few minutes; fear and noises which proved to be nothing forced us to tear away from each other. In the silence following what had sounded like the hole-door opening, she said that it was no sin to put the tongue in. And this made sense, my tongue being anointed and girded with hoary holy callous as the Archangel’s loins.

Emily struck a flint to light the lamp again and I was smiling at her. She plucked a hair from my bared teeth and ducked away when I tried to kiss her.

No sin, I said.

She hurried back to the hole, softly singing:

There’s a lily in the garden

For you, young man;

There’s a lily in the garden,

Come pluck it if you can.

Dear God, said Samuel when I told him what we’d done.

What was it you expected? I asked, walking alongside my horse and leading it, for the rubbing of the saddle only made worse my painful engorgement.

For you to stick her, he said, not—not that!

Come now, brother, I said.

Brother me no brothers. Samuel shook his head. Then he looked down on me and said: With your mouth on it? I can tell you right here that I never heard of such a thing. I don’t even know what you’d call a thing like that.

Whatever you call it, I said, it’s wondrous.

It’s against God as sodomy or bestiality.

There’s worse things done by men beloved of Him in the Book.

Maybe, said Samuel, but she wouldn’t let you at her true?

Not yet she says.

Then there you go. That blue ache’s Him telling you you’ve done wrong.

Shit on you. You don’t know about it.

Samuel whirled in his saddle. Don’t you tell me what I know and what I don’t, he said. When I was in Cincinnati I spent time with plenty fillies, but I never did a thing like that. And I’m old enough to have a woman and a baby or two by now, you ass—and you think I don’t know? I’d done the deed before you even knew about it. And you know what I got for it? Buggywhipped by an Irish mother, that’s what. My brother Reuben, God bless him, he had to knock the old bat off me and he pled my case that I didn’t ruin her daughter. Staked his reputation on it. Saved me from having to work off the debt of her maidenhead. That’s partly why my father brought us out here. He thought the town corrupting.

I didn’t mean anything by it, I said.

Don’t lie. You did. Samuel looked off eastward, as though peering for that same brother, of whom I’d only so far heard whispers and legends. Son of a bitch, he said, I got nothing out here but beating myself under a blanket. I tell you, I’m heading back there first chance I get.

We stopped at the Baptist and while the horses drank I tried to wash the smell of Emily from my face. It was a painful and stiff-legged amble home, with a prodigious ache from bearings to gut, as if all my weight had fallen there to collect like a supplicant who praised and begged for more. And we would need the lantern light to make our homeward way, and the time to figure on what lies and truths we’d tell the fathers—who wouldn’t care, they were so fixed on their plans for the pilgrims—while they sat waiting out the morning at the fire.

A War Sermon

I was thinking of the demons I’d cast out and the accompaniment of devils and dark angels whose skeleton wings would shelter me on my way to Satan’s bosom, when Preacher-father mounted his rock that meeting day. And I was only just laying out the way I’d take to get to Hell, with words dripping lies and with deeds much the same.

Emily’s wild eye went gyring while the other, and those of the rest of the congregation, pored over the welts and scratches the fathers showed during the service. I looked along with them, wondering how, days later, their wounds seemed worse than the night they’d been received. For all I knew they’d been flogging each other to have the marks just right for the day they’d make their call to arms. I did notice that Nathan was watching me close—had his brother revealed my sins to him? It didn’t matter; I was searching out the corner of my eye for any breasts budding in the rumpled front of Emily’s dress.

I stared at her until Samuel gave me one of his correcting jabs to the ribs, and I straightened up to watch Preacher-father, high up on his rock, bear down upon the collected rabble of dirt-caked believers and give his barbed sermon:

Listen now closely and hear the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Prepare ye the way of the Lord, and make his paths straight. By his hand every valley shall be filled, and every hill and mountain shall be brought low. The crooked shall be made straight and the rough ways shall be made smooth. And now, the axe is laid unto the root of the trees, and every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is cast into my fire. There it is, friends, to be found in your familial Bibles in the Book of Luke, chapter three. And so, brothers and sisters, there is also to be found, not a half day’s ride from here, a valley dug and planted with such malignant growths. And they are flourishing. O how they grow—in the sight of your good works, in sight of your hard lives, and your mercy they grow and grow. And I ask you: Do they suffer like you do? No. They laugh at all your toil and hurt; they’ve made a pact with Satan, and the gaming chip of this unholy deal is our own hard-scraped lands and our own people. But I’ll say this—they are a generous people. They are that. They freely and without guilt make child-brides of their young girls to each other, and there isn’t a man among them who doesn’t have a quarter-dozen wives. Wives, I said. And don’t think for a moment, brothers and sisters, that they won’t extend this same generosity to your wives, and to your daughters. Maybe then they’ll have themselves even finer stock to pacify their wicked urges with. But listen to me now, valley neighbors, Christian families: you know me, you know my boy, you know the Kempers, who’ve come to aid our ministry and first told us of the threat, and you’ve known us all through fertility and famine, through locust and snowstorm, through demonization and through flood. So then you know that all we’ve ever done is kept our humble duty of witnessing and baptizing, never trying to increase our stocks, often even refusing your own good-kindness because we’ve come to be your rock and we will not set ourselves up as usurers of our flock, with the Word and salvation as our Jew’s Coin. We’ve asked you for no charity, nor do we now. We ask for the charity of your justice. The charity of bodies in the saddle—or afoot, as you can afford—to ride with us to this black encampment and cast out the vicious spirit there that’s struck down one of our brothers. Now, I can’t say that if you are kind, if you treat the blasphemers with sweetness, with mercy as your good hearts surely would, that your crops will wither in the earth, that when you come upon hard times they will use your children as loan currency, that you will watch more husbands’ and wives’ heads split by those who are given arm and reign over the land you’ve worked so hard to preserve. But I can promise you that your souls will shrivel, that your spirits will be cleaved and gutted, and your children will grow up as slaves in a godless country, all because these blasphemous roots are allowed purchase by your kindness. So put away mercy and kindness for a time, and unlatch your horse from the plow and bights, take your axe or rifle or scythe, and bring yourself some kindling fire and we shall burn out the tree and its roots.

And in the tumult that followed, amid the singing and the screaming for bloody vengeance, I made my way to Emily. The wildness of the people was our hiding place, and we took hold to one another. Smiling, she asked me how many would I kill. There was no answer I could give but that I loved her, nor can I now explain how in that moment I felt such damnable joy.

Righteous Fire

Pregnant women tottered belly-slung for the longhouses as we charged upon the pilgrim camp out of smoke and fire lit by the foolish hand of some holedigger who held his torch too high and caught the low-hanging limbs of brittle pines. There were maybe ten of us on horseback: the fathers, a few Chitites, myself, and Samuel sharing his with Nathan, who carried a long-handled shovel, bouncing and jostling behind his brother but for the first time looking well and clear in eyes and complexion. The rest followed on foot up the last lip of the hill into the clearing, armed with either ancient pieces bearing continental gravings or the marks of Deacon Kemper’s generosity, a K notched into the grain for future reclamation. Others carried tools: axes, sickles, trammels, and flails, the spiny cradle-scythe. And so they put their tools to work and the chaff was cut down even as it begged and pleaded mercy, just as my father said.

I carried a buss tamped with grape, and with the first shots and screams like out of another world I emptied my bladder into the seat of my saddle. Soaked and shamed before I’d done a thing but ride into the slaughter, I kept close behind Samuel and Nathan and we circled round the camp and saw many things. A pilgrim impaled in the tines of a fork; others crowding in through the doors of the longhouses while Chitites hacked at their hands and tried to force the jamb, which was shut on the unfortunates, who tried climbing through the windows but were mostly brought down; a Chitite’s head blown into the air by a volley from such a window—Samuel giving one back in return.

I remember his shot, for with it we came around the pens and corrals of the pilgrim’s beasts, harried by bullets from those now-barricaded indoors, and saw Preacher-father and the Deacon riding circles around a man in a sugarloaf hat. All around them was battle, but they only rode and shouted at the man. The prophet held up high his hands and took the hat from his head and waved it, entreating. The fathers called for surrender and banishment, but the prophet didn’t seem to understand. Samuel highed for them and I was close behind when the second volley came—I don’t know from which direction, but the fathers toppled and were on the ground with the prophet, fallen also. And in the after-roar I threw myself down to the dirt and landed upon Nathan, whose throat was torn away. He whistled bloody breath at me and I tried to stop it with my hands but failed, and I crawled on those hands mixing blood in the hoof-churned earth to Samuel and he sat up and stared as though I wasn’t there. The fathers both were up, the Deacon holding his leg and Preacher-father shouting he’d only been thrown. The prophet lay dead at their feet. Deacon Kemper shambled towards us, shoving both Samuel and me aside, and catching up his dead son from the ground, hurried down to the woods.

It was Samuel and me left there on the ground and we didn’t hear the next shots, only the screams of both our horses, a gobbet of knee landing between us on the ground. I shouted asking if he’d been hit; he gaped past me at the trees. To my left I saw a crescent of the woods on fire. I pawed at my brother and there was gunfire again but moreover the roar of flames and burning. A hand took my shoulder from behind and pulled me up. It was Conny Fladeboe, and he looked grim but pleased. He was still holding me up when another holedigger came around and grabbed at Samuel, but he shrugged him off and ran after his father. Fladeboe turned me loose and I fell again to ground and snatched up my buss; and when he tugged me up the second time I ran with him towards the nearest longhouse. I was screaming as I overtook him and threw my back flat against the hot boards and jabbed the short barrel of the buss in the flame-licked windowsill, which had cracked and crumpled brittle-black even as the barrel rested there but a moment before I fired. The only scream I heard was Fladeboe’s; the gun had blown back out of my hand and struck him in the face. That was the only blood for sure I drew that day, and mine was among the last shots fired. Pilgrims poured out the doors, some on fire, being beaten by their fellows trying to put their burning clothes out, screaming peace and surrender; and they were received.

We made our way back through the place in the woods where the flames were lowest; and we passed through dying fires without caring; and was this what my father wanted? Was this the fulfillment of his lifelong preaching? I could judge nothing then but the smoke which rose from the burnt soles of my boots, slowly staunched in the grass of the hillside where three dead holediggers were laid out. Nathan was not among them, but down at the foot of the hill with his father and brother kneeling above him.

The surviving pilgrims were gathered in a bunch and Preacher-father presided over them. He hugged his rifle and faced them so that none could look away, even those attended with wounds. There were ten or twenty pilgrims, mostly women and children and young boys. Now he seemed to speak with one old lady at their front, whose hair was singed to her ears.

Downhill I went to join Samuel and his father, looking along with them at that pale and split neck. Deacon Kemper reached for Nathan’s shut eyes and opened them, stared in, then smoothed them back closed. Wishing I still held the buss, so that I might take some strength from its weight, I did what I could with my hands and held them together as in prayer. But no prayer came.