The Blood of Heaven (30 page)

Abram Horton chewed his cheeks. I will not stand—

It’ll be damned tough to stand, I said, when you’re shot in your fucking knees!

The men roared and had begun pulling Horton from his horse before he beat them back with his crop and tore out from Randolph’s yard.

There’s an enemy, said the author of our declaration.

Piss on him, said a Pinckneyville man.

That’s right, friend, said Samuel.

But what’s going on now? said Randolph, suddenly taking stock of our sopping persons.

The true religion, I said. Isn’t that right, boys?

Samuel shook his head, bent to whisper in my ear as Randolph asked what Horton had meant by murder, but both were drowned out by the voices of the drunken men.

Whether my brother wanted it or not, we were all saved; muddy and soaked and stinking of every kind of spirit the territory held, and some it couldn’t, which burst out in gouts of vomit from the mouths of the gutly penitent, who were only encouraged by their fellows to down more. The row went on for hours, into the night, with more and more converts coming forward. By dawn, when the revels finally died and most were slinking off to sleep, their heads throbbing with goodness, we had nearly thirty pledged. Some were puny and bad-off, but others were grown men and fierce. All they’d needed was a cause, and we were happy to oblige. God, there was such beauty in it then, as the whole thing came to be in riotous inception; and we were proud fathers stomping our feet happily in afterbirth.

The First Incursions

The patrols were thick about the border and Bayou Sara was garrisoned with Stirling’s militia, only there were still no Puke soldiers present in the force; our opposition was wholly American.

They’re like the drowning man who fights you even as you try to pull him from the water, said Samuel after hearing the reports from our riders, who now made forays into the country not only to post the copies of our declaration, which were quickly torn down, but more and more to impress the arms of the inhabitants into our service, whether willingly or not. Guns have no qualms, so said my brother. And I came to enjoy the looks on the faces of men, working out in their fields, harrying their niggers in the bright June sun, when we’d approach and level our barrels at them, order them to their houses accompanied by Crabbe, who’d emerge with claws full of muskets, rifles, shotguns, sabers from old wars, and all other manner of death-dealers, so that soon the once-vacant house on Randolph’s plot was filled not only with us but the smells of oil and steel and lead; and my wife, when she wasn’t scolding our son for his habit of sucking on shot-balls, was bent to sweep up the drifts of powder-grain which collected like dust in the floorboard cracks.

So we made ready for the assault on the capital, and because we rode in such small groups there was little order to the enterprise; but this allowed us to break the militia’s pickets, which were more haphazard even than our rides, and go into the country even in broad daylight.

I admit we did much of it drunk. Randolph had a love for revels and we kept the spirits flowing on after the baptismal night, much to the frustration of his wife and the solemn tolerance of mine, who at first delighted with each gun we brought to add to our armory but soon was as eager for the true attack as any of our riders.

You’ve done enough jackdawing, she said to me one day. It’s time to use the bloody things as something more than a place for you and all your boys to hang your hats and coats.

Samuel had already tried and failed at burning down the house of Ira Kneeland. He’d laid his torch at the back, so he said, to flush them out so that he could have a shot at the surveyor before the eyes of his new wife, then sit back and watch the mansion devoured by flames. But I believe he bungled it out of hold-over love for the Ezmina Cobb. My brother said he’d seen her through the window as he laid the torch, dressed in mistress’s attire and holding a tiny glass of liquor in her hand, chatting with another woman of her new-found station. Arthur Cobb had come along, wanting his own chance for Kneeland’s scalp, and when the flames refused to take purchase, Arthur said they ought to just storm the house, and Samuel was about to agree when some of Kneeland’s slaves, who’d seen the flames, came upon them and with wild cries began to beat the fire out with blankets while others ran to alert the master. And my brother amid the swarming Negroes saw Ezmina at the window, looking down at the flames and then to those who’d set the fire. Arthur Cobb raised his musket to kill the woman he’d lurched after in his heart from the time she’d married his brother, but Samuel struck him across the face and the shot hit a nigger in the leg. My brother dragged Arthur Cobb to their horses and they rode home, where Arthur sulked for a few days, picking at the scabbed slash that the butt of Samuel’s pistol had left on his head. When he was fully cup-shot, he’d admit his love for Ezmina and try to get Samuel to join in his lamentations over the wicked woman.

Should’ve let me shoot the bitch, he said.

But Samuel wouldn’t hear it, and for a good while he avoided the house of Kneeland. His grayness grew worse despite our rides and he took more to the whiskey. Myself, I was deep in the barrel on the day Ransom O’Neil came leaping from his horse to tell us that Senator Smith was lodging at the house of John Mills in Bayou Sara. So I saddled and with Ransom went to kill the Senator. Reuben had ordered in his most recent letter that we weren’t to harm Smith, so that he could have him broken in the American courts, which Claiborne assured him would find in our favor. When I’d read that, I’d thought again on the madness of the man who’d rather see his enemy in penury than in the ground. So it went that I wouldn’t tell Samuel of my designs when I rode out that day, for he was hard bit to obey his brother, who remained in New Orleans for the bloody duration of our revolution. I cursed Reuben just enough that I wouldn’t have Samuel’s hands about my neck. He still held his brother high, despite what I saw as cowardly dealings and plotting. I didn’t care for the orders of our absent leader, and so I loaded my pistol with the shot I’d taken from my son’s mouth and etched with a cross; had to ram hard to tamp it in, for the caliber was too big.

* * *

That decrepit founder Mills stood before his house with a shotgun, and he cocked with rickety fingers the twin hammers as we approached. Smith was on the porch in a rocker, peering at us from the shade.

No further, lads, said Mills.

Damn, old man, you’re prescient, I said.

What’s that? Ransom asked me.

It means to know when you’re about to die, I said, loud enough for Mills to hear.

That’s what you’ve come to do, then? said Mills.

Your brother, came Smith’s voice from the porch, has been writing rather foul letters to the commandant and Mister Stirling.

They’ll get more than that soon, I said.

It’s doing nothing to help his cause, said Smith.

We’re here under the orders and protection of Governor William Claiborne of the Orleans Territory. Shoot us, old man, and you’ll have the damn Army of the United States coming across the river from Pointe Coupee.

Liar, said Smith.

Let them come, Mills said, lifting his shotgun. If they’re sided with trifling hooligans like yourselves, then they won’t be much trouble.

I ignored the old man, had my pistol out and was raising it to put the bead on the Senator’s heart when the first shot burnt past my head and we turned to see a company of militia riding for us. When I looked back Smith had disappeared inside and Mills was on the ground, covering his head. Ransom fired his rifle into the pack and I did the same with my pistol, but saw none fall. They came on through their own smoke and the air buzzed with their shots. I spurred, calling for Ransom to follow. I heard the next shot from closer and my horse was screaming and his eyes were rolled up to fevered whites. It was all I could do to keep him from going down, which he did a half mile on, and come to find that Mills had given him a load of buckshot to the haunch and blown the beast’s ass away. I had to leave my saddle and climb up with Ransom, the firings of the militia now but hollow pops in the distance. We splintered the bridge at the crossing of the Bayou Sara and rode east to Thompson’s Creek, where, in the yard of the abandoned house of the widow Cobb, Samuel was crouched over his flint and a pile of pine-needles which he’d bound to a stick and lit. The bedroom window was broken and my brother strode to it with the fire in his hand and pitched the torch onto the bed where he’d spent so many nights with her. We didn’t stay to watch it burn.

That same day, Basil Abrams and the Bradfords, who’d ridden in to Feliciana to see after their wives, came upon a small guard of Puke soldiers marching along with an ox-cart up the road from Baton Rouge. Basil fired on them and the Puke soldiers fled, leaving behind their cart, and the boys discovered, after lifting the tarp, that it bore a pair of small cannons that fired balls the size of billiards. They took the cart and the Bradford sons drove it back to Pinckneyville, hollering happily as they approached the yard, which soon became the scene for an even wilder romp than was usual. In their drunkenness, the boys loaded the cannons and gave me and Samuel a two-gun salute. But in their drunkenness they’d aimed the cannons too low and the shots tore great sections from the roof of our house and killed a neighbor’s pig when they finally landed on the other side of the village. The people of Pinckneyville who hadn’t joined us thought the war had come to their dribbling little town and poured out of their clap-board houses in fear, only to find the party in full swing.

When the cannon-balls had torn the corner off the roof of the house, Red Kate didn’t even bother to come out. I had to go in to see that she was safe, and found her with our son laid over her knee, whipping him with a switch for his crime of sucking lead.

The boy didn’t cry out even when she finished and turned him loose. He stayed silent, and I thought then that it was because he’d inherited my strength for taking pain; and I was proud, though I’d begun to notice that his words hadn’t grown since he’d said his first one back in Bayou Sara months before. In fact, they seemed to shrivel in him, and he often as not was quiet, and if he did speak, as when the pair of cannons were rolled into the house for storage that night and he caught sight of them and grew excited, it was only Ma, ma, ma, gesturing with his thin arms, his gray eyes alight as they could be. My wife worried over him more than I did; she was there in the days when he’d go from smiling to fits which lasted hours, or when he’d dull and contemplate nothing for a time; and always secreting his balls of shot until she grew so tired of slapping them from his mouth that she ordered all the guns but one, my pistol, taken from the house and stored in a shed out back.

Before the end of June Reuben sent us printed copies of the declaration hidden in barrels of flour; and we commenced to make a snow of them across Feliciana and eastward into St. Helena and St. Ferdinand, and even south into Baton Rouge, where with Samuel I rode through in the dark of night and nailed the declaration to the flag-post in the square and to the columns of the house of the commandant. I’d never seen the town before, and didn’t see it proper then we were in and out so quick. I saw my first Puke soldier there as well. He had his pants around his ankles, squatting to shit in a dusty courtyard. He stared at us in disbelief, our arms full of papers, and we were laughing too hard to shoot him. And I imagined that soldier and the other residents and straggling troops awaking in the morning to the fluttering declarations now adorning every house, and the papers’ sound being like the noise of a hawk’s wings when it swoops down upon its prey.

V

The Lord Shall Roar

July–August 1804

Wanted Men

Dead or alive, come July. The month rolled in with the news of Grand Pré’s latest proclamation, which was for the heads of Samuel, me, and even Reuben, who they thought rode with us, and Arthur Cobb tossed in for good measure. The rest were to be pardoned should they turn themselves in to the authorities. So we celebrated by riding down and getting two of us wounded and six taken prisoner.

We’d gone with the idea to strike down along the east bank of Bayou Sara, take Stirling’s plantation, which was being used as a post for the militia, then go on to St. Francisville and in one bunch of fifteen move south to the bend of the Mississippi towards Baton Rouge, while the other fifteen came at the city from the east. When the capital was taken, we’d go out among the countryside and rectify the ones like Kneeland. But we were fool enough to misjudge the craftiness of Stirling and Pintado, who laid in wait for us above the indigo man’s plantation with two company of militia.

Pintado’s men were tucked in a blind turn in the road, and we were riding so wild and loose that our number was far strung out ahead of Samuel and me. We heard the firing and screaming when the first few rounded the bend, and so we kicked hard and rode into it without thinking.

Henry Bradford was already on the ground, being dragged off into the bushes, and Pintado was waving a saber, hollering in Spanish to men who couldn’t understand him. Then smoke was everywhere and I fired into it blindly with my pistol, hearing others of ours screaming and more shots from where we’d come, and now Stirling’s men had swung into the road to trap us. I was struck with musket-butts and Samuel was roaring through the smoke at hands and barrels, one of which was jammed in his face, but he took it and shoved it away as the militiaman pulled the trigger. I spurred forward, trampling some, and rode from out the smoke on down the road and turned my horse, seeing Samuel coming also, followed by Ransom, Crabbe, and Arthur Cobb.