The Blood of Heaven (48 page)

He sent men to kill me, I said. And Sam, and Reuben, and my God-damned wife and child.

O, yes, she said. Sam did tell me you had a boy. And who does he take after?

No one, I said. He’s not right. And that’s not the point, besides. So enough with the fuck-about, now tell me.

Mother Lowde sipped her coffee, batting the steam with her lashes. Fine enough, she said. And why should the Reverend wait five long years to revenge himself on you?

So he is alive, I said.

As you or I, said Lowde. But that blow your Reuben struck him, those army men, it finished him. He’s long since retired to shrivel and sulk. Not doing harm to anyone anymore. Not even horses or niggers.

There was a harelip, I said.

Mother Lowde drained her cup and flung it aside, pewter clanging on the boards, the only bell to be heard of a morning in the under-hill. And maybe the Reverend was drunk one night and telling about how you two boys deserted him so meanly, and maybe one man heard and told another, and the story floated thus. So after a while some rough bastards with an eye on reward hear the tale and set out to claim a prize from a man what couldn’t pay in the first place. Or maybe you’ve made so many enemies, my dear, that you can’t keep them straight, and are going for an old man who only ever treated you with kindness. Like it’s a diversion, a game like your little duels I hear about.

You hear that, eh? I said.

There’s so many stories about, she said. And have been since you left.

Like when you told us about Reuben cutting foreskins, which was a lie.

All I do is hear and tell. Give me a story that’s not got lies in its stitches. Even from your blasted little book.

So you’re telling me it’s because of a fucking story?

I’m telling you shit, son. For all I know they might’ve been some men you cheated for a horse, or whose houses you burned in West Florida. These old ears just listen, and the old brain between them knots things together best it can. Lowde was weeping now. I just try to make answers that fit. The Reverend had no part of it. He wouldn’t know your face if you walked up to him. Christ knows, neither do I.

And where could I show him my face?

Fucking hell, you are a stupid thing. He’s not in town, is he? But I know him, so he’s close—sad, scrounging in the dark with freaks for company.

The Devil’s Pisspot, I said.

Bleary-eyed and pained, she smiled her nubbin teeth at me. There, she said from between them. For that gem of intelligence did you have to come and torment me?

I’m settling accounts, I said, before everything changes. I want to start anew.

Get out with your accounts, she said. Take them to the street with the other shit.

And as I rose to go, Mother Lowde was saying, It’s what I deserve for being a ma to you. God how things do change.

I held open the door, surveying in the bare dawn the piles of dung, then turned back to her. They’ll change even more before I’m through with it, I said; as though I had my hands round the whole world’s neck, forcing downwards and telling it to swallow its coal or so help me God—

Hail Columbia issued in a growl from a smat of patriotic throats, which by the look of their owners, grunting and wobbling on the wharf-boats where the general’s barge was lashed, had been the very gullets that had filled with puke the ruts and hoof-clots I’d walked over on my way to the riverside. The barge was decked and draped with the country’s colors; red spilled in torrents down the balustrades, the goods, the pilot’s perch, the tiller, and carelessly trailed in the water, staining the white stripes between; stars in their fields, as stars go, were everywhere, overlapping one another so that you couldn’t be right sure how many states the nation had. Because we numbered them with stars, the possibilities were likewise infinite. So down towards the monstrosity through the chattering others at the landing, an easy crowd to part, and at its center, stepping down to a lamentable call of Three Cheers for the General! was Wilkinson.

I’d never seen the man, but from his size straining at his regalia, I knew him. Doffing his plumed hat to the crowd, the general glanced back towards his barge, wherefrom there came a bed-stand litter shouldered by well-dressed Negroes, its posts all draped over with netting-cloth, and beneath that, a figure.

Christ, said a man beside me, who’s dead?

At that, the figure sat up and hacked a clot of blood into the netting. And as the litter approached, I could see that there were many such expurgations, dried and spattered on the netting.

Jesus, the consumption, said the man beside me, backing off.

General Wilkinson, urging the litter up, turned at the disease’s name and regarded the place where the speaker had stood with piggy fury. Orderlies were fast approaching, and now swarmed about him. I saw his mouth say, Arrest that man; a doughy finger jabbed from brocaded cuff, indicating a spot beside my face. But the orderlies only craned their necks to see through the crowd, and by then the general was waving the litter on ahead. Within it was his wife; stricken with the bloody-lung and not long for the world, she’d been brought down from St. Louis by her husband, to be housed at a nabob’s mansion for the final term of her infirmity. Wilkinson would make her the excuse for his delays, and for coming first to Natchez rather than heading straight for the Sabine and his confrontation with the Pukes. He’d dragged the poor thing across the country for an alibi, saying that he waited for the last of the summer heat to break so she could better tolerate the arduous journey.

When the litter had passed, all that remained was Wilkinson and his aides, followed by a pair of drummers rattling a march. The general seemed bewildered, cast about for a moment as the tappers approached and might’ve let them crash into his bulk if not for the hands of his aides, who led him onwards. I looked to the barge. He’d brought no army; the garrison remained at St. Louis. The foul memory of West Florida, of his promises to Reuben, was upon me. But perhaps they marched overland; there was no way that Wilkinson, chief of the armies, could let himself appear incompetent—no way, so I thought, to parlay losing into gain. As it happened, I didn’t know General Wilkinson, nor his capacities.

But I aimed to, and so scampered along the crowd, which soon grew sparse on the general’s way through the under-hill town. He’d not stay here, dear God, but would have carts and carriages hired by the time his party reached Gorman’s Hill, and from there would ride up to the finer side, leaving behind the river-stench, the hoots and calls of a populace unsure of who had arrived.

A king, said an old woman who I dusted and sent tumbling as I hurried after the general. I caught him at the corner of Front and the bend of Door-Knock Alley; an ox-team was blocking his path with their slow progress, separating him from his blood-bedewed wife, who was on towards her own destination.

I tried to sound urgent: General, sir, an important message!—General Wilkinson, please, I must speak to you!

Disregard from the general, staring at the plodding oxen laying pats as they went, his face tucked, tripling his chin at the collar. There were others shouting to him, whatever came to mind. I imagined Colonel Burr, when he’d made his visit the year before, stopping with each one and talking knowingly to them—a voice of great understanding—until they forgot what it was they’d meant to say and remembered only him.

The general would make no such efforts. I shouted again and shouldered through the last of the crowd, who were keeping a respectful yard of distance, and came to his cordon of aides. I said, My name is Kemper and I’m a friend of—

Recognition wrinkled high on his hairline as an aide’s hand shot out and tried to push me back. The ox-team was at its tail-end.

I’m no mess-boy, I said, batting the hand away, which was followed by a voice of eastern indignance, saying something about seeing me in irons.

The general kept looking ahead, to where his wife had been, but also back at me, testing the wine-besotted tracts of his memory for my face, tapping at his mechanism as though at a toe prickling with gout. And while he did so, I thought for the first in years of Brother Zach, and the way the Reverend Morrel would look upon a slave as though he’d known him all his life.

Yes, yes, said Wilkinson, feigning recognition. Of course, sir. Approach.

Seeing the general close now—his jeweled fingers, the polished brass-work of his buttons and medals—I considered that the Reverend would’ve liked this man’s style, maybe chided him for gluttony while admiring his baubles and pomps, all the while scheming how to slip the rings from his fingers. And getting near enough to smell the perfume on him, I said softly, I’m a friend of Colonel Burr’s, and I must speak to you.

Wilkinson said, Ah, I see. He put out a hand and I let mine be sunk into it. The oxen were gone; only the steam rising from their leavings remained. His head jerked for the open path and without looking at me the general said, I’m billeted at Concordia Plantation. Do you know it? Come by and we’ll talk, given time.

He patted me on the shoulder and hurried off, calling for his men to follow. I stood there, thinking that I should’ve damn-well asked him why he wasn’t at the Sabine, but knowing also that my life was now of behind-doors dealings, not the way I’d grown up—shouting the world’s troubles and hacking them out on the street-corner for all ears. The aide who’d tried to hold me back—a spotty man, tall, with a pinched face—was last to go; he said to me, I’ll boot your ass before you meet the door. Then he clicked his heels and started off.

I called after him: I’ve chewed the fucking livers of better men than your footman self!

The aide didn’t turn, nor did the general, who was too far ahead and moving too quickly to hear.

Aliza’s eye screwed out the peep, and I crouched and matched it with my own. When it was gone and the lady was about her unlocking, I could hear her hiss and mumble behind the snapping movements of metal and the rattling of chains.

Stephen White, I’d decided, could acquit himself without me that day, so I’d headed for The Church, and rather than going to the carriage house, saddling my horse, and riding to the hill, I went to the door, thinking: I unnerve the trade, I unsettle the moneyed interests; best to wait till evening and pay him a visit while he’s tallying the take. But soon I’ll quit this house and its shard of a mistress, now opening the door and stepping back to let me in.

So, I said, you saw who came this morning?

Aliza, stiffening, said, Took the general by the hand, did you? Old friends?

Reuben’s the one that’s met him, I said. Not me.

Don’t you dare speak his name, she said, slamming shut the door and hustling to her locks. I know your designs. I’ve been keeping a close watch.

Lord, I know it.

Hunched and scraping with her nails at the locks and latches, she flashed her eyes at me and I went on: It’s not as if I’m setting traps for them on the road or paying Indians to ambush them.

Aliza straightened herself into her natural blade-posture. Her hair stood up in golden shivs, paling in what light had managed to sneak through the curtains. I thought of my own, our similarities in blondness and harshness of appearance, and how, if anyone was watching—and surely slave-eyes did accept this scene—we might’ve been mistaken for brother and sister arguing an estate.

I don’t doubt you would, she said.

I mean neither of them harm, Aliza. They’re still my brothers.

Aliza let a hand creep to her right side, just below her rib—the one I’d preached the wedding day sermon over in this same parlor, in the days of light. It was where, I supposed, she had been stabbed. And in times of worry, which for her were constant, it was her tic to set a trembling hand to that place. Soothing phantom pains reawakened by her earthly woes.

But they aren’t, she said. They aren’t any brothers to you. Not by blood. Not by anything more than years, and even that you’ve thrown away.

I considered how easy it would be to reach out in the darkened parlor, take up Aliza like a biddy hen, and wring her neck. I imagined the deed accomplished, her dropping to the rugs with a sound of breaking glass; and would she lay there like the shotgunned squaw? Open-eyed and glaring? I saw myself stepping away from her crumpled form, finding that her throat-bones had cut my hands.

I hope, I said, that they don’t think as you do.

They put no thought to it, she said. Today was Reuben’s first letter. They were in Nashville last week, and now they’re going east. The next will be from Washington. You see, they’ve put you behind them. You’re only here on their good graces to your wife and child—both of which I gave you, if you remember. That two dollar biter, Kate, and the brat you had by her.

Well, you can absolve yourself of graces. We’ll be out soon enough.

Aliza grew pinched, but made a show of puffing out her tiny breast, saying, Good. I’ll see to it that—

You’ll see to nothing, I said. You’ll see just what you can from your spyglass.

Down the room the stairs creaked; at the last step, her hand upon the railing, stood Polly Randolph. Her hair half-undone and flapping, face unpainted and pale, she’d come down looking for Barbary to help her finish.

I turned back to Aliza, who, still looking to the widow Randolph, gave her a nod to stay.