The Blood of Heaven (8 page)

Deacon Kemper kept opening and closing his dead son’s eyes, and I tried to stop his hands and pull them back as gently as I could. Samuel took my wrists and shoved me back; and there was a moment of recognition in his face, and he slapped his father’s hands back and held them.

How will we tell Reuben? asked the Deacon of his surviving son.

We can leave, said Samuel. Leave here.

His father turned to him. Leave?

You got what you wanted, Samuel said.

The Deacon fell back from his knees and sat. His hands now free, I expected them to head again for Nathan’s eyes, but he let them rest in his lap and said, The Revolution wasn’t like this.

Samuel didn’t try to parse his father’s words, nor did I. The Deacon would spend the next months out wandering the valley, leaving Samuel alone while he fired his dueling pistols at invisibles.

Eventually we rose and took up Nathan’s body, and in a long line headed southward into Chit. The holediggers peeled away slowly from our train, back to their own houses. Some carried the dead to wives and families and we could hear the wailing from a ways off. Preacher-father promised he would comfort them in time, and that they would be provided for. For the moment, he said, there was the matter of leading these people out. And we did, when the guard of Chitites had departed and we passed through our own camp, leaving the Kempers behind.

So it was Preacher-father at the head and I at the back, the last of our walks together. The pilgrims had no food, no tools, not a thing to bring into the wilderness. I thought they might turn upon us, but they never did. They knew when the hand of God was upon them in disfavor. And strangely there was little weeping or even talk among them. Once a girl of Emily’s age in a frilled bonnet turned, looked at me, and spit. The woman beside her slapped her head back around.

We led them to the southern bend in the hills, at the termination of the Baptist into marsh, and there my father gave them a sermon, on forgiveness. I said nothing; and if this was what it meant to be an agent of the Lord, then I damned my station. Nathan, burnt in life, burnt in death, went writhing through my mind. If the Lord could take the weak and suffering, then I was also prey. But above it all, ringing in my soul, I felt the power of His will borne in me. I was alive and that was proof. We had won and that was proof. The Lord of Hosts and Battle smiled down on me with teeth of knives and powder-horns and firearms, and He blessed me with an awful glory in accomplishing His works.

Preacher-father sent the pilgrims off and together we watched them go.

Some die, he said, so that the Lord may live on stronger in the hearts of others.

When I did not respond, he asked me if I understood. I said that I did and we walked back side-by-side through the darkening valley. And when the light was gone, and we and all the world about was shapeless, I made to fall back from my father and see about Samuel, but from out the black his hand caught me up and he said, Stay alongside me. You are a blessing of a son.

III

Rebellious Sons

Fall 1800

Blessings of Christ’s Kingdom

The days went bloodlessly by in the wake of the raid: the Chitites were again good congregants; Preacher-father strutted and showed them his teeth, barking bits of sermon in leftover anger; and I set out on the thorny course with Emily and so would make myself a crown of them.

Deacon Kemper went to collect the guns he’d lent, brought them back, and cleaned them solemnly. He still made his daily shooting walks and solitary dances with his pistols, no longer bothering even to load them—just made their noises with his voice. From our camp you could hear him start into it when he came upon his first assailant:
pah, pah, pah, pah,
he went, and without knowing it invented the repeating pistol in his lunatic’s mind. And you knew he was keeping in step with the pistol-fire, using it for a metronome, the great dance master’s hand on his shoulder and him blowing holes in the offending air. How Samuel would wince when he heard the mouthed shots.

I sat with Samuel those days and listened with him to his father’s ghostly battles, even went once to see him making pirouettes. Thinking it would help him to hear about my yearnings, I spent them out to him in long fool streams of talk.

From what I saw at the service, it looks like she’s filled out a bit.

You showed me then, Samuel said.

She’s prettier when she’s not so sickly-looking.

That doesn’t take much.

I’ve put a sermon together for her, listen—

I don’t want to hear it, he said.

Why not?

Because I don’t want to hear about you trying to Christ your way into her cunny.

But my brother would hear it, just as I would hear him go on about leaving Chit. We traded these dreams while out working amongst the people, hewing logs or laying fences for the widowed. He would say that whenever he had the chance he was leaving to join his brother Reuben back east. But instead on those hired-out days he played lookout for me and Emily, now rejoined and freer because her father was laid up in the hole, healing his eye, which was infected. I would bring him medicines from Deacon Kemper’s wagon, or what the widow Magee would grind, and the man’s thanks and his wife’s would still be upon me when I’d hurry off with their daughter to the bushes or the corn patch and we’d lay down right there at the feet of the stalks and in the bug-rustle and withered silk have a fast sin together.

Samuel endured it, listening hard for the door or for the father Fladeboe banging blindly about.

They can probably God damn hear you, he said one day. They can probably feel it in the ground, you humping.

We told Preacher-father and the Deacon that we’d been gifted with visions out in the valley, this to explain our usual lateness. Samuel rarely told his well, and so I’d tell enough visions for two.

But first I would test my Angelics and mystic sights unseen on Emily, when we were finished and she would recompose her clothes, or when I was still in her lap, something in me refusing to be out of her. Emily’s ears were better than her eyes and I made my visions fit her. She’d feature in them along with the angels and the burning clouds.

Once, when I was done relating, she said for me to keep on talking.

That’s the end, I said. There isn’t any more.

I like to hear you talk. I don’t care what you say.

I thought my voice was funny.

That don’t mean I don’t fancy it.

It’s all lies anyway, I said.

I know that. So say some more.

And I would. I could lie for hours straight if we’d but had the time. And she would whisper to me, Lie on, Angel, my Angel.

We stunk of each other and that was one of the pleasures of those days. We washed on Sundays, maybe, but it was often weeks of adding on the anointment of our couplings. So much that I would go to dirt wallers and roll in them till I was covered in dust or mud. Neither of the fathers ever questioned any of it, especially Preacher-father, who rocked gleeful on his heels at our fire whenever I told him a new vision.

You could come and call on me with my folks, said Emily one day.

They’ll know it then.

They can know it. I don’t care. They’d be happy to know you were loving me.

I’d have to tell my people, and my father, he’d go blind. A prophet has to keep pure until his time comes.

I’m your time. And he wouldn’t be angry with you. You want to make a wife of me, seed me, seed the land. A preacher should love that.

I thought on what she said, prayed on it most days even when I was hustling off to meet her. Would I have been content to live out my days with her in our mud-hole or thatched cabin? With that girl who was thin and worn already at the age I knew her? I could be the shepherd of my father’s flock and another generation of dirt-caked worshippers would follow me, knowing his legend by heart, trusting in me that I had the same fire that set their forefathers on the pilgrims. Or I could have taken her from that baleful valley and somewhere hacked out what life we could. But I was a boy, and fearful, as boys are—ground between desire and cowardice in this millstone of suffering.

The Vehemency of Love

There is no beauty in the thing when it is done by the young. The heat was on us and it was only rushing place to place and hustling quickly into Emily; and she was not delicate about it—lifting and parting for hasty work done out of need.

But she was no more a whore than I was a whoremaster, and it was a lovely thing she did to me. The world had lost its bearings and tilted under my feet. And between my made-up visions and Sunday work all I could take stock of was my next chance with her. The dead should walk if ever my sight were to right itself after that sweet laying down.

With Samuel I brought her to the pilgrims’ burnt encampment to search for any usables that had escaped the retreating pilgrims or the fire. Samuel was being a good brother, hanging back at the scorched tree-line. Also it was that he couldn’t bear to stay so near the place where Nathan had fallen. The place had been picked clean, not only of good wood and most supplies and beasts, but also of carrion. I wandered aimless while Emily went among the blackened timber piles, picking out buttons, needles, nails, and other trinkets, holding a pouch of her dress as a basket for her fired keepsakes, revealing flea-bit thigh and scabby knee, beautiful to me. But before I could snatch her up, Emily returned to her work and when she was done stirring the ash piles her arms were black to the elbows.

On our way back she said to Samuel, I would’ve put a flower on your brother’s grave. But there’s no mark.

He’s not buried there.

O, she said. I just heard this was where he died.

Samuel’s mouth bit into itself. We don’t bury people wherever they fall.

Nathan’s at our place, I said to her. And Emily nodded gravely and whipped her wild eye.

She couldn’t bring her treasures home, so she hid them in the knot of a tree, telling Samuel to turn his back when she picked the one, for only she and I were to know.

We would visit them those weeks and she would take out her playpretties and arrange them for me around her, talk about me calling on her manure-caked parents, and about their suspicions. Emily taught me her body and I learned from her when comes the blood, when the blood staves off and what it means. In late September she told me her condition, in the plainest way, saying that she hadn’t bled in two months.

You bastarding fool, said Samuel. You’ve ruined yourself.

I was snuffing like a child and gave no response.

God damn it, he said. You’re stuck now. You’ll stay and that’s it. If your daddy doesn’t kill you.

I was chewing my tongue when he hit me, sending me to the ground.

Answer, damn it! I’m in this, too! I helped your sorry ass!

Samuel kicked me in the stomach and I retched empty.

Answer! he cried.

But it all seemed signs and wonders, and in this way my sins would be revealed.

My Heart Is Sore

I put her pregnancy away, kept myself from Emily for weeks, and she thinned in my memory while she thickened round the middle in life. All my thoughts of love gave way to sorry prayers for fire or Indian attack or sudden disease to sweep through the dugouts, wicked fancies of nighttime forays with a shovel to bury over the Fladeboes’ door and seal her and my shame underground, or that she might trip and fall gut-first upon a doorway pike. So I skulked, a rotten, fearful boy, who would not own his works.

Keep hiding from it and see what you get, said Samuel.

But I would hide, just as I couldn’t muster any more angelic visions for Preacher-father, and gave him a child’s vision of apocalypse instead. Skies of blood, roads of blood; if blood could be smeared with blood it was in my prophecy—a lazy red vision of the end. Paul’s scorpions made appearances, and so did that famous quartet: the skin and bones, the pox-house man, the soldier armored in plates of dried flesh, and the long-haired grinning harrier of souls. It was all another lie, for my true vision was this:

Shrouded in steam, Emily Fladeboe held in her bare arms a child bloody and slick with afterbirth and all around her were pale, raw-headed women working great scalding pots, and into them they dropped squalling infants; the women cooed in sweet voices to the vats and drew the reddened babes from out the boil, setting them, steamed and rendered for the scraper, on butchers’ tables. Not yet the color of a person, our child mewled viciously. I was there with Emily and together we cleaned the child and I swaddled it in towels until the blood was gone. We handed the thing over to one of the ghouls, ourselves cooing as she dropped our baby in.

Along with such horrors and the awful prayers already detailed, there were the thoughts of marriage. Bizarre ceremonies came to me often those days: Emily covered in milkweed flowers, the only white bloom on the prairie, amid the morning sunlight attendance of the entire muddy population, Preacher-father performing the deed with a smile on his face. Another: fire-lit and shadowy; the holediggers there as an accompaniment of freaks and Samuel standing in judgment. My father is there again and in his hands he holds a needle threaded from a long spool. We betrothed stand naked before him and the entire congregation. I say my vows with my mouth moving like a nightmare scream. In the vision my father starts with his needle at our heels and sews me and Emily together up our legs and backs and skulls, unwinding his spool and twining us down the front. When it’s done and we are bound, bride and groom can only shuffle our feet to turn and face the cheering crowd.