The Blood of Heaven (56 page)

I got down, and when I bent my face above his, showing him my cross and scars, Kneeland understood and let out a long wail. I didn’t cover his mouth, though the next plantation was only half a mile up; I let him scream himself out, allowed myself to bask in it like in the heat of all those fires I’d been made to sit so near. Son, you’re sure to be damned, so sit here close to the flames and by the end of a lifetime you’ll be ready for Hell. Preacher-father didn’t know I’d make Hells of my own; whether cutting flesh or bursting it with shot or selling it off in markets, I would be the one who dealt the pain, others the ones who’d endure it. I fell upon the man and held him down, drawing the knife from my bandolier. My knees were on his chest and he was choking now, wild eyes upturned to encompass the blade which would soon pluck them out. And with the stars and moon roaring in their brightest glory overhead, I said to him, I just wish it could be duller.

As it went, I’d have to cover his mouth.

Cart half-full, the loading drawing to a close, I raised the hand that bore Kneeland’s toothmarks, where he’d dug and bit in his struggle as I took first his eyes and then his ears, and waved to Reuben. He tipped his glass to me—an act of consolation, so he thought. In a few months he’d have even more to beam about: Smith would be expelled from his country, forced to retire to West Florida, where he lived out his days as a preacher of sorts, with no church or congregation, but wandering the roads and giving sermons on the traps and snares which strayed the path of righteous men.

Reuben thought he’d won, but he was wrong.

Into the house, where I walked the empty rooms with my wife, dust rising from the boards and making her eyes to water. She moved among the shapes in the floor left by the furniture, checking for if anything was left behind, forgotten, slipping in the wet spot on the floor, the handful of string beans from her truck-patch years before, which I’d pulled from their jar to make room for Kneeland’s ears.

She shook her foot, mashed the beans into the floor, and kept on searching, her toes catching now and again a ball of lead shot, which would go turning, nothing there to stop its progress, revolutions never-ending, sounding heavy beyond its size, rolling on.

All right, she said. There’s nothing left.

She spoke as though reading from a bill, the ledgering of our lives parceled out and blotted. But my Copperhead had misread the lines, for there remained those which she would write by her own hand. She had endured so much and would in awful continuance endure our first months at Berwick’s, as I brought my loads of slaves through the bayous and the bay to be penned, tidied, watered, fed. She carried on, a miserable coda to our love. One day she started digging for a truck-patch, and I made her stop. We won’t need that anymore, I said, pressing coin in her hand. Go and buy whatever you need.

The product spoke in French or Spanish when they did at all. Generally they were silent; and any man who says the Negroe sings always songs of sorrow is a fool. Sorrow is silence, and they kept it like holy orders as they were, in our secret passages of swampland and then of paper, print, and auction-block, passed into the world of trade.

Tell them, I would say to my Frenchmen hands, that if they speak of this ever I will find them and kill them. And the hand repeated it to unblinking blacks. I quickly learned there was no use in threatening. They were already dead.

And so my own language changed to one of heads and ligature, of breeding stock and field-strength. Red Kate spoke less and less, nor did she take pity on the product; no more than did myself or White. I had her a seamstress’s dummy made, carved to her shape from cypress, and sent it to New Orleans, wherefrom weekly would arrive the fine new clothes which she dutifully wore. With the first two rounds of sales, the occupation of some months, I began to build our home. White procured the marble at a fine price, the lumber, the workmen who’d thrown up the grand houses of sugar planters all along the river at whose terminus we lived. And it was to be like the finest planter’s palace, the white-columned halls we’d passed on the day we buried our son.

The place was only scaffolding on the day Red Kate abandoned her forbearance. Many times I’d tried to bring her from the cottage where we stayed to the shores of the bay and witness the progress of the house, but up till then she had refused.

I returned from settling the nerves of a customer, a day and night of haggle and soothe, to find my wife sitting on our porch, taking coffee and the sight of me. Lately to embrace her had been a hollow thing, but that day it seemed she shook off her indifference and as I mounted the steps she stood and held out her arms, almost smiling.

Wife, mother to the stillborn dreams of her husband, to children’s ghosts, she pressed close, and there were no weapons between us. Gone were her knives and pistols; she had nothing more to protect. In the evening warmth her hair had sweated to her skull, and it was wet against my cheek as once had been drowned Emily’s.

Is this all that you wanted? she said.

And I couldn’t tell what she meant, or I refused to try. What I wanted in this life was as unreal as the nation to which I’d served unwitting husbandry, as false as the borders and divisions of America, which exist only in the way of spirits, angels, and signs from God. What was there to want? There were only things to take, whether I desired them or not. Red Kate raised her head and kissed me, never shutting her eyes, which trapped in their reflection the darkening sky, as though she sought some sign in mine. Not finding it, she let me go.

She said she’d like to see the house now, and I happily obliged. She wouldn’t take the carriage, and so we rode down to the bay each on our own horse. The townsfolk hailed us, their nods and sack-cloth curtsies given no recognition by Red Kate. High and stiff in her new riding habit, she gave all the appearance of a lady of property. Only her features would betray her origins, the trials I’d put her through; and these too, I foolishly imagined, would soften in time.

We came to our inlet of the bay, where on slaving dawns I’d land with the cargo brought up from Isle Dernière. The boats rested at the shore on keel-rutted mud shining golden with the falling sun. She looked on them, to their hollows, gave her reins a flick, the chain-work of her stirrups rattling as she rode on ahead. And as I had the language of the slaving trade, so I had mastered irons. Chains, locks, slip-bars, bits; there was nothing I couldn’t bind. The difficulty was in the undoing.

The workmen sat about their tents, the day at an end. Some waved as we got down, hitching off to the nearest pile of lumber. She seemed so eager then, standing before the skeletal beginnings of my great gift to her, boots half-sunk in the yard of mud and sawdust, gazing up at the column beams. They had been hewn from the broadest-trunked trees which could be hauled out of the swamp; some twenty feet high, they dwarfed her.

Too big, she said, still staring upwards.

I came to the column and leaned against it, proudly. I wanted it to be grand, I said, for you.

It’ll be lonely here, just us two.

I gave her a smile. We can fill it.

Red Kate shook her head, stepping back, saying, I’ve got no more in me. I can’t. Her heel caught in a pile of tools. Looking down, she stopped, and said, I won’t.

I shut my eyes at these words, opened them to the sound of metal, grating, and saw Red Kate with the axe in her hand. She came for me, axe upraised, her face a death-mask empty of expression. And was this how I appeared to my father before I laid him low?

I reached to stop her as she brought the blade down.

The world lit as though lightning-struck and I was cast back against the column, where in the craze of pain I turned to see the axe-head buried into both the wood and my right arm. Bone revealed, blood bubbling at my chin from riven shoulder, unable to breathe; choking for air, I saw in that awful light the gray phantasm of my son, peering down at my wound for but a moment before he went toddling after his mother, who was running for her horse.

The workmen were upon me, prying me loose, unlashing belts to tie me off. One shouted she was getting away as others worked to force a length of leather between my jaws. It was then my breath returned and I howled. I gave out before they hauled me to their fireside, used their saw to hack my arm off clean. Awakening with the burning hell of their cook-pan pressed against my stump, the smell of my searing flesh, as only the damned should know. I didn’t see her ride away. And neither would I, in all the time that followed, seek to find her.

Before this would come to pass, in Pinckneyville, I did follow her—out of our house, away from the sounds of rolling shot. In the yard our cart was ready, and at Randolph’s Samuel was hurrying the widow up into the seat. Troubled, so it seemed, by my gift.

When I’d first presented it to him, announcing the name of the man they’d belonged to, Samuel had almost dropped it. Out in the yard that morning, he’d seen my hands and the blood they bore, took the jar quickly and slipped it in his coat. He looked about for if anyone was watching, then peeked inside to judge just what it held.

God, said Samuel, back to the old troubles.

It doesn’t matter, I said. We’re never coming back.

Thank Christ, he said, jostling the jar in his coat and looking about the yard, the dirt once churned with our struggle as we were bound and made captive, sown with our tears and blood. He shook his head. There’ll be some repercussion. There always is.

Let Reuben deal with it. He can see what it’s like to live his reputation.

God damn I’m glad to go.

And the tail of his words was finished in my mind: And be rid of you.

I wish I could say we’re going on to better things, I said. But—

We had our time, he said. And God, how we used it.

If only I had known how much more time remained, the awful count of years, their endless and terrible advancement; and how I would advance with them—in age, in wealth, in sin. But I could only see so far ahead: to the cart, the road, the river, the sea and what it held for me.

In three weeks I would be standing on the shore at Last Island, salt air stinging at my eye as though across the Gulf a thousand wives of Lot had looked back in defiance of God and were in remnants borne upon the wind; there I’d consider the recent news from West Florida: Alexander Stirling, after hearing of Kneeland’s fate, had rowed out to the center of a lake, refusing all aid and suffering cruel privations until he at last expired of disease. I prayed on this small satisfaction while Stephen White gave orders to our hands, a few mean boys of Berwick Village who cared nothing for our crime so long as they were paid, putting bony shoulders to the paddles as we made down inlets and bayous from their town to the Atchafalaya Bay and then by cabotage along the coast to that final spit of sand and writhing root. The boats were sized for twenty souls between them, hard to manage for so few men. But soon we’d have the ballast—the weight of fortune in muscle and bone. And while we waited fishermen working turtle nets did pull ashore, and they scattered the sand with their catches, selecting punies for their supper, prying out the creatures’ varicolored guts and drumming in gladness on their shells. I went and paid them to look away from our business soon to come and they took the coin with smiles and slime-slick hands, calling me a good man.

We’d been ready to camp there for a time if need be, pitch among the dunes and scrubby foliage for shelter; but in the evening, as the sky lit along its rim, there came masts extended in black spines, stabbing at the blood-bowed gut of Heaven.

The moon broke full and screaming in its bleakness to the tide. The fishermen brought out a pot for their meal, spooning mouthfuls of turtle gizzard even as it cooked over the lengths of broken driftwood gathered by the eager Berwick boys, with whom they shared. But they’d built their fire so near the water that the tide in its increase went inching ever nearer, threatening the meager flame, causing it to hiss at first, then drowning it entire to the laughter of them all. White by then had gone over to the feast, sharing their spoons, cussing that he’d burnt his tongue. I didn’t move, ground my heels into the sand as a cloudbank overtook the moon, and I looked for the first time upon the night-black Gulf; in a breath I tasted it upon my tongue, unburnt for so long, and in that breath there came the last hissing gasp of the Lord’s Word, which I would hear for a lifetime: The sky was light again and glutted Heaven hung there like a pustule; and I saw the mast-cross pierce the bloat of Paradise and the gore of all the souls I’d sent there spilling down in torrents on the ship. I saw the Negroes in their chains drowned in the blood of Heaven and set free. But I had come to know that my visions all were false, and that out there skiffs were put to oar, and that in them went people black as the night to come, shuddering against the waves and terribly afraid; as well they should, coming to a country such as this.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In the hope that I have done honor by their names, I give thanks to the following: my wife, Lauren, for love and endurance; my mother, for the language; my father, for the edge; Andrew Smith and Rachel Lane, for laughter in dark times; Catfish, for abiding kindness and a home away from home; Christopher Tusa and Michael Garriga, for taking in a stray and making him a brother; the students and staff of Seven Hills Academy in Tallahassee, Florida, for daily lessons in courage and humanity; Elisabeth Schmitz, for bringing me to tears; Gail Hochman, for steadfast advocacy; Josh McCall, for exquisite editing; Peter Blackstock and the staff of Grove/Atlantic, for tireless attention. I would like to give special thanks to the teachers, too numerous to name, who took interest in an often difficult student, and without whose guidance and encouragement none of this would be possible.