The Blood of Heaven (43 page)

Outside the barks and shouts were louder, and we didn’t stop to see any more than the light of the bonfires and the long shadows cast upon the roofs of the buildings from the party. There was no need; our lives were blood-sport. There was only the question now of who held the bets and what fruit our wagers would bear. We rubbed guns on the porch, kissing soft and kind for the first in a long time, until from within our son began to cry, adding his own wail to the sounds of animal pain and fury. Red Kate pulled away and went to fishing in her dress-bib for the key, saying not to him but softly and to herself, All right, child, I’m coming.

We found him with his head jammed between the bars of his crib, which had been replaced and fitted stronger since the night of our kidnapping. He was facing the ground, wailing, eyes upturned and visible through his dangling tuft of white hair, his mouth open terribly wide. I was frozen by his noise, stood there, unable to offer him comfort, while my wife went to the kitchen and scooped two fingers of clotted grease from the pan. His wailing grew louder as she had him pull his neck out straight like a man awaiting execution, and she daubed the cold grease about his ears, slicked the hair there and down the sides of his neck. I overcame myself, my weakness, and went to him, took my boy by the shoulders and as his screams reached an awful pitch I tugged and he came loose. I lifted him out and held him, shrieking as though he were still trapped while I kicked the bars of the crib to pieces. Red Kate stood back and let me go, and once the wood lay in splinters on the floor, I turned his head from where it had been buried in my shoulder and had him look. See, I said, no more bars.

And I held my boy while his mother swept up the broken wood, shook splinters from his bedding. She went to pitch the pieces in the fireplace, and when she returned we sat with him for a time while he sobbed and jabbered in his way at us, going from my breast to hers and back, soaking them with his tears until his anger and bewilderment were spent and he fell to sleep in her arms, fluttering snot from his nose which she wiped with the ends of her dress, revealing her thighs, bare and beautiful. But I didn’t want them and found myself just as bewildered, just as trapped, as my son.

What can he see? said Red Kate. What can his world be like?

God knows, I said, and thought, It must be a torture. Horrors of the everyday.

She held his head and rocked deeper. Maybe it’s better that he can’t tell it—that he has no words.

That’s too cruel to think, I said. If he’s afflicted it’s no blessing.

Her harsh whisper: You’d know cruelty, wouldn’t you? And I didn’t say it was a blessing.

She swept him deeper in her rocking and I didn’t have the strength or rile in me to press back. I was cursed with words: God’s, Preacher-father’s, Samuel’s, Reuben’s, Burr’s, my own—all preying endlessly upon my mind and soul. But as it would so often be, none of them were for these two, wife and child, who needed me; my words were then as they are now, far-flung and useless to the present.

Reuben wants to go to Washington, I said.

So? said Red Kate. It isn’t far.

I was dumbfounded for a moment before I realized she thought I’d meant Washington, Mississippi. Not the territory, love, the capital of the country.

O my Jesus, she said. For what?

He’s turned against the plan, I said. He’s angry that Burr is in with Senator Smith and has quit the Association. Now he means to go and warn the damned president.

God, men’s minds are fickle. And you’ll fall in behind him?

No.

Then you’re enemies, she said.

A dog was baying now, victorious. Men hollered for their takes. My Copperhead shifted her dozing burden and searched me in the darkness. It won’t do him any good to go all that way, will it?

No, I said. The man’s president of the country. If he doesn’t know already then it’s too late.

This is all a dream, she said. We’re little people, not so caught up in this as you and he’d like to think.

If the plan does fall through, because of Reuben or not, I’m caught up enough to be arrested.

But if the judges are all for it like you say—

There’ll always be more judges.

Then go with him. Stave his head in or shoot him on some dusty road in Tennessee.

I had my chance already, I said.

New Orleans was eventful, then.

We’ve got an understanding of sorts.

He doesn’t understand a thing, she said. Not even his own self.

Christ, you’ve done some thinking, haven’t you?

Ah, said my wife, now he’s full-out. She rose with the boy in her arms, went and laid him in his bed. She came back to the bed and took off her shoes, carefully cupping each with her free hand lest the heels hit the floor and raise a sound. As I would, I left my boots on. In the meantime, the baying was at an end, the shouts of men had died down, and now what could be heard was the dwindling, excited chatter as the spectators returned to their homes, got a-horse to jangling livery and hoofbeats to hurry back and perhaps avoid the displeasure of their wives or to trudge drunk to houses in town.

At least they’re done, said Red Kate, laid out straight as a plank across the foot of the bed.

The way they sound, I said, I can’t help but think of when we used to rob such men. And as I spoke, I saw myself stepping out with Samuel from behind a corner, pistols out, and looking on the awe-struck faces of those we’d have empty their pockets and beg for their lives.

I’ve got no fond remembrances of those times, she said.

I pulled myself further into bed so that my boots no longer touched the ground. And in the way which earthly things, facts and realities, often came to me, I recalled how young she’d been when we’d first met—fourteen. In the last year Red Kate had passed the age of her majority. Reaching for her I felt the straps of her armaments, knife-handle or the stock of a pistol, and she didn’t move. My wife was stiff and prone as a corpse in its coffin.

The homeward-heading voices were now gone, the night’s wildness at an end and the men returned to wanting safety—shuttered windows and the bar behind the door. We stayed awake even as the strangers, it seemed, had loaded up their animals and driven their carts out of town, rending the silence with the squealing of their cartwheels as they turned just past our house for the east-west road and their camp.

Sounds like West Florida, she said. The whining wheels.

This gave me pause, and I prayed on what she said until the sound of ungreased axles carried off into the distance and was gone, as we were from that place and time.

I’d only go with Reuben, I said, because I don’t think Samuel can make the trip.

He’s strong enough, she sniffed. I’ll tell you that.

Polly? I said.

This morning, when those men came knocking, was the first time in a week he’s left her bed. And I don’t mean he’s been laid up there sick.

I know what you meant, I said.

I can’t be the judge of anybody, said Red Kate, but so close to her husband’s death. I’ve resigned myself to you dying so many times I’ve lost count. And I know I’d be no wilting lily if you did. I’d go on, but I’d damn sure take no other man. I’ve had enough of them.

And her words hugged to me close and good as my weapons, though I couldn’t judge them true. They were the bedroom promises often made between man and woman; they carry little weight in the light of day. And why should they? Talk of the future blows away at morning like the ghosts of the past which hang about our periphery. I expected nothing of her but to live and to endure me. I could ask no more. I sat up in bed and took Red Kate by the arm and brought her close to me.

Kick the dirt from your boots, she said, easing to the pillows.

Knocking my heels together over the floor, I heard the boy stir at the noise, and more—there was the sound of horses whinnying out back.

The stable, said my wife.

I went from the bed, looking to the black windows for any light or movement in the front of the house as the horses grew louder, feeling in the dark for the handles of my arms.

Get him under the bed, I said.

And at that moment came a shout I recognized as Samuel’s, and a gunshot. I had one pistol out and like a fool burst onto the porch, where issued a volley of fire as the door splintered. I fell to the ground, slapping myself with my free hand for any wounds, hearing from Randolph’s porch my brothers calling out to me.

I answered with a whoop that came out strange, and Reuben was jabbering that it was ambush and murder, trying to raise an alarm in the town, which was so oddly quiet that I could hear the men rushing through our yard, taking better places to pick us off while their fellows in the barn drew out our horses. Inch by inch I stuck my head out to look at Randolph’s porch, where both brothers crouched in the doorway, lit by lamps and candles from within. Samuel held a shotgun out, barrel wavering; Reuben had both his pistols up.

I ducked back in and another shot sounded and a ball struck the frame where my head had been. Again the brothers called out, but this time I didn’t answer and the men moved closer, rustling through the weeds. I leaned against the inside wall, and there I slowly stood and waited. Boots upon the boards and evil whispers, approaching. Samuel’s shotgun sounded and the men on my porch dropped, but were unharmed. They croaked to one another their condition and the one furthest to the right returned fire.

Deafened by the after-roar and the blood pounding in my skull, I drew out my second pistol as Reuben tried his shot and failed, cussing loudly. And it was a pistol which first entered through my doorway, jabbing in, followed by a scraggy thin arm and a wild bearded face which was lit by the hang-fire of my sparking, hissing flint in the instant before the powder took and sent my shot through the side of his head. The man dropped and I slipped in his gore on my way to throw open the door, which was slick with him also, and, eyes burning in the powder-smoke and the back-blow of the dead man’s blood and brains, I stepped out and shot his fellow in the back as he scuttled down the steps, threw my pistols down and drew my third and last. The second man was still alive; he’d fallen in the space between the steps so that he was caught by them at the waist, dangling there like the target at a gentlemen’s shoot. I saw that his hands were empty, feebly reaching for the smoking hole in his back, and so I resigned to let him wail and bleed out rather than waste another shot. Above his screams I shouted and was answered by my wife and both my brothers.

Hell yes! Samuel shouted. Hell yes, Angel!

And now came the calls of the other men, who were still out back at the stable. They taunted us some country cusses, said for us to come on down. I slipped back inside my house, went to take my shotgun from my kit, hearing Samuel say, There’s two of you down already, boys! You want more?

Piss on you Kempers! shouted one.

Come and take your dues! called another.

The back-shot man was still shrieking, his arm-flailing now more floppish when I came outside again. I waved to my brothers that I’d go round the left-hand side of my house, for I judged the space between mine and Randolph’s to be the killing-range of their poorly laid trap. In fact, the foolishness of their ambush did remind me of ourselves, the way we would’ve done it with Ransom and the boys. Only I’d say we would’ve had some cover fire in the high grass near the river, so that I wouldn’t have been able to step round the porch-trapped man and descend from my house, passing by the window where my wife leaned half out with her guns, nodding sharply to me as I went around the side and made my way along the wall, trampling her truck-patch, shotgun parting the spring corn’s shoots. To my right the rest of town was quiet—not a voice, not a man without his house at all the screams and gunfire. Now hoofbeats sounded; they were mounting. Stumbling through a tangle of squash, I resolved I might burn Pinckneyville to the ground, test the citizens’ indifference that way. I thumbed to be sure that the hammers of both barrels were cocked.

I was coming out the garden when the dark moved up ahead, enormous and stomping towards me. I crouched and fired lucky, saw the rider in the flame-plume of one barrel which tore away his shoulder. He fell and I fell atop him, for the horse, which I’d later find was mine, clipped me in the face with his back shoe on his way through the plants. I picked myself up, finding my right cheek was stoved. I thought my eyeball might droop loose, but still there was no stopping me. I squinted it shut, to hold my eye in, and threw my back to the wall of the house. I peered round and fought to see. A lantern within showed the open doorway of the stable and the men, another three remaining, all on horseback, riding about between the stalls, arguing confusedly in their high-mountain accents. In the mean, Samuel and Reuben had done the same as me—gone round the outside of Randolph’s and drawn beads.

This don’t end with us, Kempers! hollered one from the stable.

I was gasping too hard for breath to answer, but there came Reuben’s voice, calling back, Well, if any of you make it out alive you can tell your Spanish masters that they’d better send something more than a bunch of Kaintuck pig-fuckers!

Piss on the Spanish, the man said. You’re marked worse than that!

That so? Samuel said, mocking. Then who is it?

A good man, who you wronged, answered the man.