The Blood of Heaven (25 page)

I should not want to add another assault to the night’s tally, the Senator said.

You may add a bloody murder if you like and this dog keeps flapping his trap.

Give me a reason, Kneeland said, to bring the militia upon you all.

Smith turned to his friend and patted him on the chest. Ira, this is fruitless. Then, turning back to Reuben, he said, We shall return for him in the morning. And once they were both saddled again: Reuben, you are no wicked man.

The hell he isn’t, said Kneeland.

In an instant Samuel leapt from the porch and made for the surveyor with his hands. But his brother caught him up and held him back until they left, with Smith giving his parting parson’s words with a jangle of kit and livery: I do pray that you will consider your way.

Reuben was silent but Samuel hollered after them, Consider your fuck-lording way, you bastard!

Back inside, standing over the unconscious Abrams, I said to Reuben, Why didn’t we just give him to them?

He’s a friend, said Reuben. And there are points to be made.

Points? I said.

They have no right to come here and trouble me, he said. I had to show them.

I waved him off and was going to find a drink of gin when Basil Abrams sat up, the blood upon his face and head now dried into a swath from which his wild eyes peered out.

In the woods, he said, I saw a spider big as a man.

With that his eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed back to the cushions, and stayed that way until, in the late morning, I hauled him out, tied his hands to the front porch timbers, and thrashed him across the back fifteen times with a whip. I shouted at Abrams for how many times he’d hit his wife, but the man babbled that he couldn’t remember. So I made my own account of things and when I’d finished and Abrams, now fully sobered and bearing a hatch of wide cuts across his back, was weeping on his knees, I untied him and said, Last night Sam and Reuben saved you from the rope, but not a man alive can stay God’s hand. You go and show the alcaldes these scars and tell them you have paid.

His screams had woke the whole house, and now my brothers and the women were crowding the doorway. And it was that Basil Abrams’ answer, breathless with pain and exhaustion, was a strange one.

My friend, said Abrams, stumbling to stay on his feet. All my good and dearest friends—I only hope my Lily’s alive.

I stood there in disgust, gathering the whip into a bloody coil, and understood what it meant to prove a point, when the theater of its provation was meaningless and nothing mattered but making others see how fiercely you believed. It reminded me of preaching, of being a man of God. All fault, all sin, the infinite wrongs of the world, could be twisted into proving the Lord’s plan. And didn’t they?

Later, after he’d ridden off with blood soaking into the back of his shirt, Basil Abrams would go to the house of Kneeland and find his wife alive. It went that she would testify no charges against him, much to the anger of the alcaldes. So Abrams only had to pay a fine for disturbance of the peace, a fact which he reported to us the following week, when he stopped by our house with his wife, to buy for her one of the disused mirrors gathering dust in the store.

I want her to know that she’s still beautiful to me, he said.

Lily Abrams sat in their cart. Her bandaged face shifted a bit when he spoke, and the eyes that stared out were pale and sullen. Ransom came with a bone comb he’d brought from the store and handed it to her. She mumbled him thanks.

You should’ve killed him, said Red Kate to me that evening.

And that was all she said to me until the night, a month later, my boy spoke his first word and she saw the enormous spider crouching by the trees near our house. She dropped the pot she’d been emptying in the yard and came scrambling inside, shakily confirming the existence of the thing. She told me to go outside and look; and I did, with Samuel and Reuben, but found nothing. Back inside, I found her over our son, who was laying in his cradle by the table, and as though to comfort herself for the terrible sight, she’d begun talking to him—a steady stream of words, the names for everything in the house; and he commenced to gurgle but the noises coming from him changed and he looked at her and gabbled, MaMaMaMa. And my wife’s eyes filled with tears as the boy sputtered out the word for her over and again. She plucked him up and I raced for them both and took them close, the boy still jabbering and she now sobbing with delight.

So soon to talk, she said, shaking her head at the miracle. He’s brilliant.

And he was, with his wisp of curled towy-red hair and in his swaddling dress, repeating again and again his word for
Mother
and what would become his word for everything else. I held them, and it was at such times very easy to forget the troubles of the world, and to want to keep the land where such wonders came into being.

Smith departed before the end of August, going to take his seat in Washington with a send-off by the planters the same as when he’d arrived. We watched him from the porch, sitting on the top step this time with shotguns in our laps. And the Senator looked back as he boarded, thankful, I believe, to be out of the country that harbored such people as us. I’d come to like the thought of fighting, of standing the bastards off—this feeling being steeled in me as much by my wife’s constant admonishments and the brothers’ growing boldness as by the insults and glares of the alcaldes, who were at the dock, glancing back at us now and again.

The crowd dispersed when Smith had floated off, and the alcaldes made a file going by our porch. Most went on, but Pintado and Kneeland trickled to a stop at the steps.

I do not like the way you seem to be turning, said Pintado. Go and set yourself on your land to the north, he said. Build yourselves a place there. I would personally guarantee you good workers if you would commence such a project.

No, said Reuben. I believe we like it here.

The corners of both brothers’ mouths cracked into smiles, the stocks of their shotguns sounding a low
chock chock
as they nudged each other.

It doesn’t matter, said Kneeland, savoring the words in his drawl. Come February you will all be gone, plucked like ticks from a hound’s back.

Sharpen up your nails, nabob, I said. We’ll be hard to pick. And we may just kick the bitch herself to death before we’re through.

The Snares of Government

Reuben left aboard the Cotton-Picker in early November, first for Natchez and Aliza, then New Orleans, bringing with him Samuel, who’d taken melancholy since the night a few weeks before when Ezmina sent him home without satisfaction. Over the course of the succeeding nights she persisted in her denial of his love and barred him from her favors and her place with but the barest explanation.

She said she needs time to rectify her life, Samuel had said to me one morning, returning from another blighted attempt. His eyes were full of sleep and he’d thinned riding so much and eating so little.

I made my own rides those days, with Ransom out to my land on Thompson’s Creek, hewing logs and clearing a patch for a cabin. We had four months ahead before our eviction date, and I’d decided to be prepared regardless of what Reuben or anyone said. The ticks might be pried from one spot, but they’d have another place to sink their teeth into. Though the work was slow, in the cool air of late fall it seemed no awful toil. And to raise a house by skeletal frame and lay it with timbers high above the ground was a fine thing when all my life I’d known roofs and homes only by charity.

By the time the brothers departed for New Orleans to pay off debts, we had the foundation laid and the lumber cut to boards and lengths. My son was crawling now, and when I’d return from my work and take him up he’d brush the sawdust from my face and gather it in bunches in his small fists and clap it into clouds, giggling. At such times Red Kate would come by and kiss the patches he’d cleaned from my cheek and smile to us both.

We’ll be fine, I’d say, telling her of the house and its future.

As long as both my men are in it, she’d reply.

Christmas neared and the house was quiet, with none of the tumult of the past year, but the three of us, like a small fire in a great lamp, lighting the place with our own good blaze. Ransom, for his part, went up Bayou Gonorrhea for comfort on occasion with the inheritors of the legendary Sara, picking up a bad case of the blue buboes from the home-girls there so that Red Kate had to prepare a makeshift syringe and break a pair of thermometers in the store for their mercury to fill it and for me to inject into a squirming Ransom while she sat by with our son and told to him the words
disease, clap, quicksilver,
and
syringe
. Poor Ransom howled and suffered and claimed for days that there’d been broken glass in the tincture. But he was healed and we were soon back to work at my tract, joined sometimes by Abrams and Arthur Cobb.

We boiled sap for tarring and made our days good as winter came on. And looking out upon the cabin slowly gaining form, I was visited by the memory of the pilgrims and their toil to carve out their camp in the bitter prairie cold. I would tell Kate about it, and she said mine was a poor premonition. Still we brought the beams up and the bones of the cabin rose day by day.

Each week brought belated news from Samuel and Reuben in New Orleans, where the handover of the Louisiana Territory was commencing. In our slow and quiet part of the world, I read over their letters and imagined the city. Reuben noted Samuel’s sadness didn’t break, even with the whores of The Church, nor with the fine ones of New Orleans. He said they went one night to a circus, put on by the Pukes to commemorate their departure from the city, in which a bull was made to fight a pack of dogs, the surviving dogs fought a black bear, the bear then fought a tiger imported from Bengali, and the tiger, torn and bleeding, fought the strongest bull in the land. Reuben told that the tiger brought the bull down and lay exhausted in the ring, whereupon several men came out with fireworks and strapped them to the creature’s back and lit them, to the cheers and laughter of the crowd. The beast roared and ran in circles trailing wailing hissing sparks, cast itself against the embankments of the ring, sending plumes of fiery color into the watchers until Samuel leapt the railing and, with the flaming tiger charging towards him, shot the monster down with his pistol. The beast lay at his feet, still throwing off sparks and whistles, and, so Reuben said, the crowd poured into the ring, lifted Samuel up, and carried him out into the street, where a military band played the anthem of the Spanish Crown and they wouldn’t let him down for some hours. Samuel had dropped his pistol in the tumult and once he was on his feet and being sloshed by all the offered cups of wine and rum and whiskey, a child appeared with the pistol wrapped in a cloth and knelt to present it to the man now being hailed in jabbering Puke and French as
el tigre decampo
or
le tigre sauvage
. They wanted to cast the pistol in bronze, but Samuel dissuaded them, taking instead a gift of the tiger’s biggest teeth on a thread of silver, which he wore about his neck when they returned to Bayou Sara and rattled often for my son.

Before they returned, however, the brothers were caught up in the gears of government. The French representatives, eager to ply their Spanish tenants, had arrived before the American representatives, and as the brothers sat one day in a coffeehouse Daniel Clark stirred them with the worries of President Jefferson: that the niggers and locals might rise up in rebellion; horrors like those perpetrated by what the president called the cannibals of the terrible republic—St. Domingue—and that the only proper thing was to form a force of American guards who’d oversee the handover and keep the locals and their chattel in line.

Reuben said he wished I could have been there to see the sight of them as they left the shipyard and went tavern by tavern, gathering up nearly five hundred countrymen to stand and face the royally attired Puke soldiers in what was then known as the Place des Armes and would later be General Jackson’s Square. The American guard wore black cloaks and black ribbon upon their hats and tied to the stocks of their muskets. Black so that the French, the Pukes, the niggers, and all the people of the city might know that—while they’d soon be under the red, white, and blue—the men who stood watch were beholden to the black flag of no quarter, no yield.

With the winter-withered bushes of the garden between them, the Americans stayed in their line for two weeks, staring down the Pukes and the smattering of French soldiers accompanying their consul. They ate standing, passed standing, slept for minutes, all on their feet. In that time an impression was made upon the people of New Orleans, so my brothers said; and it must’ve been that these were madmen, and of furious endurance. Claiborne finally came and greeted Reuben and his men warmly, saying that with such sons here present, the United States were sure to hold the country in good stead. And on the twentieth of December, when the ceremony of the handover was finished and a pole brought up and sunk and a flag raised upon it, even then the American guard stayed watch, on through the revelry and balls that followed in commemoration of the New Year and the new country.

Samuel stayed mostly with the men and Reuben followed after Clark and Claiborne, who in one letter was a fine man of principle and hatred for the Pukes—assuring Reuben that the president did in fact claim West Florida in what he termed an
interesting transaction
to soon be played out—but in the next was a coward and a fool, a stripling whelp for the atheist in Washington. What happened was that a few weeks after the American possession Claiborne confessed that the States’ claim to the Floridas was to be one in word alone. Evidently they were content to hold the Orleans and all the rest of the country, but they bowed to Spain for now on her holdings from Feliciana to the coast. Reuben felt hollow of the business, he said, betrayed by the weakness of the inheritors.