The Blood of Heaven (23 page)

When I came into the bedroom, Red Kate said my name. And in the dark I went to her, palmed my way across her through cord and the cold touch of a knife set aside, through afterbirth and blood and all the effluvium of life, feeling sweat-soaked sheets and her trembling beneath them until my hands came to the small form she held bundled in her arms. I cupped its head, her face where it started just above, and kissed them both, overwhelmed by the smell of more than blood, more than life. The child began to wail and she didn’t try to muzzle it. Nor would I have had her quiet the cry of advent. The widow had begun cleaning, and I knelt beside them, put my hands to wife and son, touching the boundaries of a new and unfathomable country.

In another part of the world the imaginary boundaries of America were being redrawn: a little man, a diplomat, dashed from his desk and ran through town and hedge and forest down to dip his ink-pen in the bloody fields of Europe, in casks of gore sent back from St. Domingue; and cupping his hand beneath the dripping tip the way at that moment I held the head of my child, he scampered across the Atlantic to the shores of America before the blood had even dried; and there he waded to a beach and touched his pen-tip to the sand and everything was changed.

This is my vision of the purchase of Louisiana, which came into being the same day as my child, which I wouldn’t know till morning was a boy, for Red Kate was silent until dawn and I would ask nothing of her that night but that she breathe and her heart beat and that the child do the same.

But in that span whole flocks of little men with pens were poised that instant to sign papers and sell a country, their pens daubed with the fresher blood from St. Domingue. And these men were so pleased and filled with their success that they were already hosting balls and banquets to celebrate their great feat of policy. They leaned out of their chairs, toasting, and each and every one felt a tightness in his back like a rash or boils; and their shoulders festered and swole up with sores and they hid them in their fine clothes, and when the sores began weeping they stuffed their shirts with documents to sop the pus, but still the sores grew to great size and profusion. When at last the boils burst, out of them poured clouds of mosquitoes which went in circling swarms about the diplomats’ heads like pestilent crowns until they were chased away with candles waved by wives and consorts. The mosquitoes escaped through nearby windows, from which hung the triumphant spangled banner, through cracks in doors, through knotholes in the floorboards and out into the world, churning in a great cloud before the moon, then to the South and West, where they sucked deep at everyone they met. And in this way the contagion of the Purchase was spread.

We learned of it some weeks later, from Reuben, who heard it in Natchez. But I knew it already. There were many questions, uncertainties, alarms over the particulars of the sale. I had none; the boundaries of nations shifted and I read them in the soft pate of my son’s skull as I sat with Kate while she nursed him. Here are America, Louisiana, West Florida—holding form only by the most tenuous coverings and connections. In time the soft will harden, demarcations fade, and all will be as God intended: One.

III

Judgments and Offerings

West Florida–New Orleans, July 1803–January 1804

Wicked Men

Senator John Smith stepped down from his barge onto the bank, attended by a retinue of slaves and their masters. He was a tall man, and his hair was whitened and swept back from a high forehead perhaps shielding—I judged—the remembrances of his own preaching days, before he became a man of business and a function of government. I watched his ascent with Reuben and Samuel, the elder brother pointing from our porch hissing, There he is, the bastard.

That morning had brought a gathering of putrid haughtery to the Bayou Sara landing. Pintado and Ira Kneeland, along with Alexander Stirling—who batted a handkerchief at his nose as though to ward off the lingering smell of the spilt bowels and emptied lives of his sold-off niggers—and others of the Feliciana planting class, stood there awaiting Smith while slaves waved frond fans at them. When at last the Senator arrived, they hurrahed and welcomed him, then had their blacks unload his trunks onto a carriage-back, accompanying him as he waved off the carriage and strode towards our house.

We’d learned a week before from the network of Reuben’s debts and friendships—Edward Randolph from Clark, Clark from his dealings with the newly invested Governor Claiborne of the Territory of Orleans—that John Smith was elected a senator of the Territory of the Ohio, flush with federal money, and that now with the American seizure of Louisiana imminent and the fate of our Louisiana-bordering corner of West Florida uncertain, he was desirous to come and settle his affairs and buy off more land.

Reuben took this news the same way he’d taken Pintado’s final request for him to appoint arbiters, which he refused. The result of his stubbornness was that in May Smith’s tribunal, stocked with his bedfellows like Kneeland and Stirling, came and spent a week going over our ledgers, taking account of the holdings and comparing them to books sent by Smith from Cincinnati; Kneeland waved the old contracts at Reuben while Stirling, in his brogue, mumbled numbers. They grew stooped from being so long hunched over the accounts; and they had to bring their own tea and kettle to boil on the stove because none of us would give them a thing. The widow Cobb tried to bring them out a plate of food a time or two, setting plate and fork before Ira Kneeland, who eyed her with his gentlemanly acceptance of being served, until Samuel ran her out.

Each day Reuben would go to sit in the store and silently watch them. Sometimes Samuel or Ransom joined, but neither could keep up the vigil like the elder brother, who sat for hours in his chair like a colossal impediment to their aims. Myself, I was content to spend those days occupied with my wife and son, who we named Samuel Aaron Kemper—Samuel for my brother, who’d brought me there; Aaron for Red Kate’s Indian-slain father; and the Kemper name because I’d put mine long behind me, taken the oath of citizenship as a Kemper. Woolsack stank of death and the fanatic devotions of my father. Let the boy have a start without that awful heritage.

Red Kate had tried for weeks to have him christened by a priest, Father Burke, who came to our store one day while she was pregnant, asking credit which I intended to refuse him for his popery, but my heart was softened by my wife’s insistence that we help this man of God who’d been run out of the stores across the river in Pointe Coupee. In return for my kindness, Father Burke tried to reawaken her Catholicism, murmuring blessings and always asking if she’d name the child for this or that blessed saint, and that after our son was born he’d be happy to preside over his christening. I wouldn’t have it. My son’s name would not go down in the records of their wretched parishes, added to the butcher’s bill of souls sold to Rome. My Copperhead was insistent, though, and I had to put it to her same as I would to Elise many years later, that if she wished to burn in Hell with all the other papists, that was her business, but my child wouldn’t be among them.

That’s a wicked thing to say of me, Kate said, almost in tears. A bastard mean thing.

Would you rather I smiled like a fool while you consigned our son to damnation?

It’s not just that, she said. You believe I’m for Hell and you don’t care a nit.

No, I said. I’ve saved you from it, so long as you stay away from the popelings.

That’s not what matters.

If you were in Hell I’d go down and bring you up.

Red Kate sighed and went from me to tend the pan in the fire, which hissed and spit like the bile between us. The flames held her in their glow and I could see damnation there before her face. She said, You talk like you already have.

That’s right, I said.

Then don’t talk to me like I’ve got horns and a forked tail, said my wife; and the matter was left at that, though it cropped up now and again in our growing shortness with one another, in the cries of the child when it wasn’t at her breast, in the way she never seemed to notice the smell when he fouled himself. And it went that if the boy was in the bedroom and let out one of his wails for milk and mother, I’d see the eyes soak into the front of Red Kate’s dress the same as they had all too soon with Emily. So I let Reuben and Samuel deal with the alcaldes and tried to be a father, in the time of infant life when fathers are unnecessary.

When the alcaldes declared an eight-thousand-peso discrepancy in Smith’s favor, Reuben told them to both go to hell, howling that he’d take the matter to the commandant in Baton Rouge, to Governor Folch in Pensacola, and all the way to the damned king in Madrid. The recourse of Puke law allowed for such things, and he did them all. I remember his furious nights spent scribbling the letters, and how, upon receiving each reply, he damned each one in turn, from clerk to king. The judgment was made at Baton Rouge by Commandant Grand Pré, the debts set and money bound to be paid.

So Senator Smith, in rosy silk waistcoat, came to the porch like he expected to be welcomed with cheers. When he stopped before the first step, his followers stopped also and stayed back but within earshot. I noticed now how Smith’s hair was powdered and worn curled at the sides. He was the image of the affable country parson, only clothed so well that you knew he had more to him than the Lord’s work. A speculator, a money-grubber, the Senator—and Reuben along with him—was a fool to have thought that a store in the wilderness might make any fortune. But then again, it was said—by Randolph, Clark, and the others—that Smith’s designs were on grander things: to continue acquiring land in West Florida and await the inevitable American tide, then parse the holdings out and when the speculators drove prices to a worthy height, sell it all and roll in cash. The Senator presently produced a writ, signed by Grand Pré and ordering Reuben and all of us to vacate and render the property, not only the store and house but Reuben’s three hundred acres of timber land, to Smith as payment in part.

Reuben came down the steps and took the paper from him.

I know, said the Senator, that you don’t have the money. So it’s only fair that I’m awarded this and the passel to the north.

Is that what it says? Samuel tried to grab the writ from Reuben, but the elder brother snatched it away and read it over and again.

The commandant can’t order me to pay anything more than two hundred pesos, he said.

That’s the law.

Laws change, said Smith, placing a hand in the pocket of his coat with the air of a man out for a stroll and happening upon a friend.

They change for the lawmakers, Reuben said, then balled the writ up and threw it to the ground. Pintado stepped forward, hand on the hilt of his sword. I leaned against the railing and saw Kneeland grinning his crooked teeth at me.

I’ve written the governor, written to the damned king! Reuben said.

I’m quite sure, ventured Pintado, that they will both agree with the commandant’s justice.

We’ll see about that, said Reuben.

Smith took the first step so that he stood now at Reuben’s collar. My brother brought up his hands and I thought for a moment he’d smash the Senator’s skull, but he only set them on his hips.

Reuben, said the Senator, I want you to know that none of this is false dealing. I’ve only ever been straight with you. I hired you when you were nothing more than a mechanic. The store was simply a poor venture. An experiment—though maybe poorly executed or poorly kept.

I kept it, he said.

I’m not here to lay blame or pass judgment. That’s the purview of the Lord and Him alone. We signed an agreement.

We changed it too.

And you stand in forfeiture of both, said Smith, his patience waning and his soft parson’s voice cracking a bit. It’s as you agreed: half the cost of shipping down from Cincinnati, half the cost of the goods, and the mortgage on the land. I don’t intend to ruin you, he said.

You damn well have, said Reuben.

It’s your own fault, Smith said. You neglected my affairs, gave away more goods than I can tell, did God knows what with the money from what few goods you did sell. I am the one who took the risk, paid for everything, so it is also my fault to an extent, for putting so much trust in you. We must all bear our share of culpability, in this world or the next.

I may let you find out just what the next one’s like, said Reuben, quaking with rage at the foot of the steps, a giant tied down with spider’s webs.

Senator! called a man from the crowd of followers. You’ll be late for your own party, sir!

Smith gave them a wave of his hand, saying he’d be not a moment longer. Then he bent and picked the crumpled writ up from the ground and unfolded it, thumbing the red seal of Spain, and handed it to Reuben, saying, You have eight months to vacate.

The afternoon brought a rain that quickly turned to flood. As Smith’s party started off onto the road through St. Francisville the first drops were falling and Reuben looked to the approaching clouds and said, I hope it drowns the lot.

When we came inside, going to the table to sit, the widow Cobb and Red Kate gave us one look and retreated to the back room.

He’s bribed them all, said Reuben. All the Puke officials are in his pocket.

I looked at this enormous man, now leaning his full bulk against the table in dejection while his brother sat beside him like a terrier and nodded along with his words. And what Reuben said might have been true, but with Reuben it always seemed more that he was making speeches for himself.