The Blood of Heaven (12 page)

The following night at a shabby landing the boatmen departed for the taverns and we followed after them. But while they carried razors or knives in their shirts, we wore each a pistol in our belts beneath our river-rotted overclothes.

Raw-eyed and fully loaded, we went out into the town past the houses where the boatmen drank and whored and battled, to the finer establishments up the way where the cozy imbibing of the merchants went on behind unbroken windows and the proprietors had both their ears; for the owners of the lower bawds were generally marked with the thief’s punishment as was dealt in the territories those days—the cutting of the ear.

Tucked into an alleyway, watching groups too large to trifle with go by, we awaited our first transaction.

You’re right, said Samuel. They’re full of drink and money. They’re laughers.

They eat money, I said. I can hear it jangling in their guts.

The wait was long and once our chance showed itself we had worked up a murderous righteousness. Stepping with a shout out of the alley’s mouth with pistols extended mule-dick fashion we robbed a chance of dandies on their drunken nighttime way, one who puked on his boots as he fumbled for his purse. And when our marks would catch sight of us, come to understand their sorrowful position, I drank in their looks of fear and redeemed their money as I would a soul.

In this way I believed crime was spiritual, robbery an act of faith. Like saving a man’s soul or healing the sick, the hand of the healer being as under as the robber’s; in the process, both parties were brought closer to God, one to gain and one to lose. I numbered that the prayers said during our nickings were more numerous than in any church. And they were prayers that saw us clawing back to the first man ever gave: let me survive, let me retain.

The City Under the Hill

We passed first the fine city on the hilltop, then eased round the banks to lower Natchez where the goods were put in and somehow the money would ascend that peak to tickle the fingers of merchants and planters. On the down-hill side of the finery and the respectable was where we’d make our home, where we’d come to find more than money or mission.

Time being, our eyes were softened slightly by the spoils of our recent robberies and we were bacon-fed and feeling easy the morning we moored at the landing.

The work that day went easy, chewing rind while I shouldered sacks of Kentucky flour and brought molasses in casks back to the boat, the whole time looking out to the town all filthy with hopes for gains ecclesiastical and profane. Thus were the prospects of the rougher places of the world, that they could satisfy both sinner and savior in us.

All down the great landing other crews worked the wharf-boats after we were done. Captain Finch was brandishing his knife on one, waving it in the face of a merchant’s agent until he stormed off, hopping back onto our keel, red with anger.

Bastarding Pukes! he shouted at no one in particular. Dog-ass mothers!

What say, Cap? called the men. How’s it?

Finch jerked the hilt of his knife and said, The God-damned bastards have raised the rates on American goods at New Orleans. And these shit-birds, he said, indicating the men on the wharf-boats, they think they might just be putting a halt to all the bitching American cargo coming. Damn-all!

So we can’t load up when we get there? said one crewman.

Hell if I know! But I’ll burn the place to the fucking ground if that’s the case. We got orders upriver to fill, by God!

Hell yes, Cap!

Who’s doing it? said Samuel.

The French-ass Spanish, who else? Finch said. Can’t tell them apart anyhow.

Samuel understood the issue better than I did at the time. Meanwhile, Finch and the crew went on bemoaning and cussing until the high sun put them down; a few went and fell in with the workers, their foremen hollering out the journeyman wage, or shucked off through the piled goods to town. I swear there was steam coming off the river, and seeing all the toilers still working on the landing, the merchants’ men and the loaders, slave and free, mechanics, boat-rights, and all the gathered souls teeming there for me to save, I swole with the Word and itched to preach a bit, told Samuel so, but he didn’t hear. I said to him, Look out there and tell me there’s a thing wrong with robbing.

That’s honest labor you’re seeing, he said.

True, they’re Caesaring, I said. But half of them are niggers who can’t help it besides.

Samuel rose, pointing to a stack of crates high above the toilers. All right. You want to preach? Let’s do it there.

And so we set out armed with our Bibles and pistols, which were tucked beneath our shirts, onto the sun-beat boards of the wharf-boats and up the landing to the piled crates. Captain Finch, having his first dip of the day, perhaps to calm himself, raised his cup as we went by.

Go to it, my boys! Go to it!

We wove through the men and mounted the crates, where Samuel stood high and hollered out the name of the Lord.

Not a head turned.

Work on, men, I said. It’s fine not to look on me—but don’t you dare turn your eyes from God, for He won’t ever turn His from you!

The workers said not a thing, but their overseers did glance at us suspicious.

Brothers, I went on, I turned my back on Him and cut my eyes from glory. I thought He couldn’t see me if I wasn’t looking at Him and I laid down with a girl and made her fill up with child.

Hoots and jeers issued amid the crack of crate and commerce. I continued:

But both that girl and my child were struck dead—dead sure as if I’d killed them with my own hands. That is the power of God’s eyes.

One called out, What’d you kill her with, your prick?

Samuel put a hand to my shoulder and said: He knows what all you do. You do it in His sight, so don’t turn your head from him. He’ll love everything you do if you just look on Him and be cleaned.

Ask my ass! called another.

We’re young! I cried, and I know we look fresh-faced, but we work this river same as you and we’ve packed a few hot Hells’ worth of sinning into our short time.

Here Finch’s crew whooped praises and now were black faces giving us swift glances over work-bent shoulders. I’d never seen so many in one place, long strings of slaves played out upon the landing, working alongside others that were free and cheaper.

I went on with my sermon in the swelter and some bedraggled whites hollered for me to shut my cotton-headed ass up. Samuel nudged me to see Finch’s men sidle them with gaffs and razors and I preached on:

You work hard here on earth, but you’re only paid in gold. And you’ve forgotten your Father’s work. Do you Father’s work in all your ways, do it all your days and you’ll be paid by Him with a mountain of heavenly gold!

Now the overseers and the merchants’ clerks grew restless and one came to us with his hand in the pocket of his waistcoat and said why didn’t we just save it for the Sabbath. When he gave us his back, satisfied, Samuel let out a yawp and I went even harder into the Word. Soon men were dropping off from their work and came to listen and shout back in refrain.

You work, I said. You work hard!

Christ yes! they cried.

And your misdeeds on earth aren’t but a fly speck in His drink if you are only washed in the blood of His son, Jesus Christ. Wash yourselves clean of work-sweat and whore-juices, everything! Under that eye of fire up there, make it clean. Make it joyous in His sight and if you’re a sinner like me, get yourselves up now, and go to the end of these boards you walk with so many earthly burdens and cast off Satan’s weight—and fly into that water! Fly into that muddy water! It may look dirty, but it’ll make you clean in Jesus’ eyes.

And they did fly, at first a few gathering at the edge of their wharf-boats, timid with their overseers screaming for them to stop, then joined by a press of more; and a few Negroes broke through and ran to their backs, howling, Jesus! And in the crush of bodies and outstretched arms and whipping heads both black and white to search the sky for signs of Christ they all went tumbling over.

Samuel was beating me over the back with his Bible he was so happy, and from the men splashing in the froth there came much laughter and singing. The baptized beat the sides of the boats with joy, and their drivers tried to call them out of the water. The workers stood idle down the landing but for a few untouched by grace and the water was a tumult of goodness. The braver of the overseers laid out on the lips of the wharf-boats, reaching for necks and arms, only to be turned away by gouts of Mississippi.

High hats flew from heads as a dripping clutch of overseers hurtled down the docks towards us. Cursing, they mounted our makeshift pulpit and we scurried back the other side and went clattering along the wharfs to our boat with the cheers of the saved hailing our safe passage. And when we came to, merchants’ men biting at our heels, there stood Captain Finch waving us by with his knife, giving me a slap with it across the backside and some steeling words before he whirled them each-by-each across their rage-puffed faces with the fat of his blade, shouting, Glory hallelujah! And we turned, feet beating the air from our bellows, back around to race again across the bobbing wharfs and onto the landing, up the frontage, and into town.

III

The City of Refuge

Natchez, 1801

The Wicked World

Mother Lowde would tell us whore-tales, of New Orleans line-ups and the boat game, of being sold for slave just because her nose was flat and her skin browned by the sun, of Natchez-Under-the-Hill and its environs: Rowder’s, Clay’s, Door-knock alley, The Church. Later she’d even tell of that brother we’d so long sought. She was our landlord from the first day, when we came scrambling into her tavern by chance, breathless and looking over our shoulders; and she was good to us boys, that lady who’d once been a whore of some repute, famous for her barrenness, but now in her dowager years she only took callers on occasion. She’d been a river rider in the early days of its commerce, hopping from barge to barge on the slow go south, taking advantage of the lonesome oarsmen and polers. It was said that if two boats were close enough she could stretch herself across their sides and pleasure a man on one craft mouth-wise while another on the adjoining had her from behind. Thus she was infamed. She ran no young fillies now and lived the life of any aged doting aunt, keeping her tavern and its rooms, which we left day and night to wander streets warped like wood-grain along the river-bend, and there were many places that looked good to preach, many places also good to hide and spring from. Mother Lowde sewed onto our hats flaps of cloth with eyeholes in them, to be pulled down over our faces before we robbed or tucked atop our heads when we weren’t. We left our Bibles holstered and kept our voices low.

Our own Corinth; Natchez was hellish fine and chocked with sin and unrepentance. We watched the vendors’ stalls change through the course of a day—bread to pies, the coffee urns going cold, liquor tinctures before the taverns opened their doors. There was even one who pushed what looked to be a tinker’s cart but sold only weapons, knives mostly, but also cudgels and guns, a few all-nations pistols hanging on nail heads. He marched with his cart of deadlies up and down the rows of bawdy houses from mid-day through the night and when some underarmed man, a drunken sufferer of drunken insults, came storming out into the street, he would find the weapon-seller and lay down however much he had and would receive the tools corresponding. So the now-armed man would stride back into the house of his insult—sometimes the insulter followed right along with the aggrieved and waited behind him at the cart to buy his own piece—and then have out the fight in the streets, the seller dragging his jangling cart out of the way of combat.

We only shuffled by the whores, who cawed and mocked or offered of themselves. For all the good our thieving had done, how every fear-struck face had put Emily’s and my father’s further back, I still couldn’t bear to take one on. They were different from the Licking River girls, often as not a head taller than me on their iron-point heels. We talked with some and came to know the houses and their legends. The alley girls spoke in awe of the rows of finer houses, each being differently owned and featuring ranging talents; some had Negroe girls in African garb of tiger skins and hoop-rings in the strangest of places, while others were more lacy and regular. And I do remember from their warty lips the warnings not to stray too near The Church, a sympathy also held by Lowde, for it was not church at all but a house of the most vicious whores, the mistress of which was a woman who cut the pricks from unlucky customers and kept a jar of them upon her bedroom mantelpiece. They called her Raw Liza, Bloody Lizzy, Miss-Chop-and-Swing Liz. This was our first hint of the woman of bones, when she was only stories and not yet real. And so we kept from that house of parapets and spires and windows of red-colored glass, set upon a foundation of tales of the horrors that waited within for the unwary, the unlucky, and unwise. At the time I tossed such rumors aside, for how could a business full of working girls operate if all they did was maim and steal? And even if they did slip the occasional razor to the pecker of some prick, or poison a rich traveler to get at his purse, it couldn’t be so common as was said or they’d just be violent paupers, bloody waifs, and terrorful gamines.