The Eden Hunter (9 page)

 

HE WAS LYING on his stomach in a purple field of blooming meadow-rue, his face buried in the folds of the saddlebags so as to block out the midday sun, when he heard the low buzzing of a honeybee. For a moment he wondered if all his pining for his home had finally confused his mind. He turned his head and opened his swollen eyes. The bee was hovering close, and he reached for it as if somehow hoping to prove the reality of the thing. His finger brushed against a fragile wing, and the frightened bee zigzagged and then bolted. Kau sprang to his feet and began moving through the towering stalks of meadowrue. As he searched the blossoms he encountered yellow jackets and even hummingbirds—but it was a long while before he again saw a honeybee, a lone worker leaving the field for the woodlands. Kau bent a flimsy tree limb to mark this spot, then collected his saddlebags and returned there to wait.

 

REPORTS OF THE blooming field soon reached the honeybee colony, and as the bees arrived and then departed, he followed. Losing sight of one he would sit and wait for the pollen-heavy next, on and on like a lost and frantic captain chasing seabirds across open water, all the while praying for land.

 

HE SKIRTED A small forest lake and was led to a flat sweep of high ground. Here the trees thickened. He noted the change, recognizing that long ago this had once been a clearing, a settlement. He saw where stones had been laid out in the shape of a large cross, but now nothing else remained, nothing save the descendants of those dead Christians’ honeybees.

The colony had laid claim to the hollow trunk of a fallen beech, near enough to the ground that he could approach and peer inside. It was almost dark and the hive was full, a wet and golden mass that pulsed like a heart with the tusslings of the bees. Were he in Africa, back in that time before his world was destroyed, he would now blow on a honey whistle, calling for his band to come and share in this. He unsheathed his knife and dug a fire-hole in the soft dirt. Again he made use of the tinderbox, igniting bits of pine shavings that Benjamin had soaked in kerosene the day before he died. The small blaze grew as he added twigs and then branches. Soon a solid fire was burning.

He covered his fire with a cut bough of damp cedar. The evergreen burned slowly, releasing a steady stream of smoke that he blew in mouthfuls over the resting bees. He coaxed the colony into a torpor and then began to cut away at the entrance of the hive
until the honey was revealed. He brushed the stunned bees aside and broke loose a small piece of dark and dripping comb that he crammed into his mouth. This was his first taste of honey since Africa, and it was different somehow but still good. He sat on the smooth trunk of the fallen beech, and the more that he ate the more that he trembled.

He kept on until his stomach was full and then waded into the tannic water of the moonlit lake. There he tore loose wide sheets of lotus and lily that later he slathered with honey and then folded into tight envelopes. He placed the bundles into his saddlebags and looked back at the hive, wincing at all that he would be leaving behind.

Still, he thought, this was a gift from the forest indeed.

He smothered the fire and gathered his things. A solitary bee stung his neck as he walked off into the darkness, departing forever that forgotten place where once there had been a Christian community.

 

CHRISTIANITY. WHAT HE knew of the white man’s religion had been taught to him at Yellowhammer by Samuel and a lone crazed preacher named Dow.

1814. He had been sweeping the inn’s chimney when a pair of Irish travelers came seeking the innkeeper. Their first language—the one they only spoke between themselves—was a strange language, but the men knew English as well, and if Kau concentrated he could mostly understand them. He would learn later that they were from Ireland, and he crouched in the cold hearth and listened as they
told of having been surprised by a wildman while cutting wood that morning along the federal road. According to these Irishmen, the stranger had been skinny and filthy and a little bit hunchbacked. The man had approached them, and they had demanded that he state his business or else leave as he came. Finally one of the Irishmen had recognized him. “I swear to you I saw that fellow preach once in Dublin,” he said to the innkeeper. “It was Lorenzo Dow himself.”

And so he was. The itinerant preacher had leapt onto a fresh-cut stump, and then he promised that at high noon exactly one year from that day he would return to that same spot and preach a sermon.

“Those were all the words he spoke,” said the taller of the two Irishmen. “We looked away for but a second, and he disappeared like we had both gone and dreamed him.”

A drunk soldier glanced up from his dented tin mug. “Hell,” he slurred. “You Irish are superstitious as niggers.”

The innkeeper was not religious, but still he had the Irishmen bring him to the oak stump. That same afternoon Kau and Samuel helped him mark that place with a signboard, and one year to the day later the inn was full and a congregation had formed. Soldiers and settlers, Indians and slaves, pioneers and traders. Pilgrims, even.

 

THE FALL OF 1815. Kau and the boy had climbed a tree to see this Lorenzo Dow. Benjamin caught a small lizard, and they watched as it bit at his hand. Samuel was standing beneath them, and Benjamin
dropped the lizard so that it fell twisting onto the old man’s head. Samuel shook his fist up at them, but it was clear that he was happy, excited that he would soon be hearing a sermon.

At solar noon, Dow showed. He was as the Irishmen had described him—a longhaired man with a tangled beard and patched clothes. Some in the crowd heckled him for his appearance, but they were soon shouted down by the righteous. There was a brief silence before he opened with a false story:

On the last day of the last century a young Dow was traveling in Vermont when he was caught in a blizzard and lost the road. He wandered the forest until finally he saw the light of a cabin tucked in the woods. A woman answered the door and Dow begged that she take mercy on his miserable soul.

“I’m sorry,” the woman told him, “but my husband is away for the night. I can’t ask in a stranger.”

Dow explained to her that he was a preacher, that he was asking her to save his life. At last she relented and a place was made for him in the cabin, in a corner separated from the main room by a partition of rough wood.

That night Dow awoke to whispers and giggles. He peered through a crack in the partition and saw the woman and a man sitting alone at a table lit by a single candle.

So the husband has come home, thought Dow. He smiled at the scene, at the love between two people in a warm cabin in a cold forest. He lay back down to sleep and soon there came a great banging at the bolted door. Again Dow’s eyes went to the partition crack. A large barrel sat beside the woman’s spinning wheel, and
Dow watched as she helped her lover inside of it, burying him under a cloud of flax tow. The man at the door sounded drunk. He was cursing and shouting.

So the husband has come home, thought Dow (and here there was much laughter from the Mississippi crowd).

Her lover hidden, the woman opened the door and was pushed aside down by her red-faced husband. “Where is the scoundrel?” he demanded.

Dow was pulling on his shoes when he heard himself identified. “There is a preacher staying here tonight,” said the woman. “He was caught in the storm.”

At this Dow appeared from behind the partition with his Bible in hand. “And good evening to you, sir,” he said.

The husband pulled a knife from his belt and took a step toward him. “That true, son?” he asked. “You a preacher?”

Dow nodded and lifted the Bible higher. “That is indeed the truth, sir.”

“All right,” said the husband, “then quote me some scripture, preacher.”

“Now?”

“It would be real bad if you couldn’t.”

Dow thought for a moment. “I can do better than scripture,” he said.

“That right?”

“I can raise the Devil himself,” said Dow.

The husband waved his knife at him. “Mind your tongue,” he said. “Mind your tongue if you care to keep it.”

Here Dow paused and apologized to the crowd. “That drunk man said other things,” he confessed. “Things I could never repeat in front of you good people.”

“Bet he threatened to cut off his pizzle,” shouted a young man. Many in the crowd laughed, and even Dow smiled.

“Why, sir,” said Dow, “don’t you sound just like that drunken husband.” The laughter grew louder as the shamed man slunk off, and when the crowd had once again quieted Dow continued with his story.

“Now you watch,” Dow told the husband, “and I will raise the Devil.”

“You had better do it soon.”

“That’s a preacher you’re speaking to,” said the wife.

“Woman, you shut your mouth.”

“I must warn you,” said Dow. “When the Devil comes it will be in a flaming fire.”

The husband sneered at him. “Of course,” he said.

“Open that door, sir. You don’t ever want to be caught in the same room as the Devil.”

The husband did as he was told. “But you make a move to leave this cabin,” he said, “and I’ll go and cut you open.”

Dow went to the fireplace and lifted a burning coal with the iron tongs. “Are you ready?” he asked.

“I’m ready.” The husband stabbed the air with his knife. “Are
you
ready?”

The wife screamed (and the crowd cheered) when Dow dropped the ember into the cask of oily tow. There was a flash like a pitch
torch lighting, and the howling lover leapt from the flaming barrel, his clothes afire as he ran out the open door and into the snowy night.

The husband had thrown down his knife, and now he pulled his crying wife close to protect her. “Dear Jesus,” he said.

Dow capped the barrel to smother the fire, and then he turned back to him. “Do I finally have your trust?” he asked.

“You do,” said the shaken husband. “Yes, preacher, you do.”

“Very well then.”

Dow began to gather his few things but the husband stopped him. “But what of the storm?” he asked. “You’ll freeze. I know that you’ll freeze.”

“No,” said Dow. “I will manage.”

“But you can’t leave us,” pleaded the husband. “Not with the Devil about.”

“There is nothing more I can do for you,” said Dow. “Only one thing alone will guarantee your safety.”

“Anything. Just say it to me.”

“Never drink again,” said Dow. “It was your weakness for drink that allowed the Devil into your home.”

The husband dropped his head and his pretty wife hugged him. “I know that to be true,” he said. “I’ll beat it yet.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise,” said the husband. “I’m through.”

Dow then looked to the woman and spoke: “He’ll need all your help as a wife with this. Do you believe you can do that, ma’am?”

“I can,” she said. “Yes.”

Kau watched with the boy from atop the tree as Dow raised his worn Bible. The crowd clapped and whistled for the parable, and Dow stood beaming from his oak stump. He then started into his sermon, and for two hours he held forth. He spoke on every vice and every virtue, until finally a Georgia man who traded mules along the federal road begged for him to stop. Benjamin asked what was happening but Kau had no answer. Dow continued and the muleskinner began to kick at the earth. Convulsions took hold all around. Women fainted. Men fell to their knees as if struck. A cavalry officer went about on all fours, barking like a dog. Kau saw the innkeeper plug his ears with tobacco as the muleskinner began to sprint round in a tight circle and claim that he was doomed. An orgy of faith. Such was the state of the crowd when Dow locked eyes with Kau sitting high up in that distant tree and smiled. A woman shrieked as the preacher began to speak on the subject of men owning men.

Said Dow, “As all men are created equal and independent by God of Nature, slavery must have moral evil for its foundation, seeing it violates the Law of Nature, as established by its author. Ambition and avarice on the one hand, and social dependence upon the other, affords the former an opportunity of being served at the expense of the latter, and this unnatural state of things hath been exemplified in all countries and all ages of the world from time immemorial.”

The cavalry officer cocked his head and went still, listening. Kau looked down to check on Samuel, but the old man was no longer standing there beneath the tree.

Said Dow, “The exercise of an absolute sway over others begets an unnatural hardness, which as it becomes imperious, contaminates the mind of the governor—while the governed becomes factious and stupefied like brute beasts which are kept under by a continual dread.”

The innkeeper removed the tobacco from the hollows of his ears and took a single step closer. After so many years as his slave Kau knew the man’s temper well, and it was clear to him that his master was very angry now.

Said Dow, “Pride and vainglory on the one side, and degradation and oppression on the other, creates on the one hand a spirit of contempt, and on the other a spirit of hatred and revenge, preparing them to be dissolute and qualifying them for every base and malicious work.”

The collapsed crowd began to stir, rising from the ground as if Dow had both killed and then quickened them.

“That is the Lord’s word,” Dow concluded. “This evil must be antidoted before the storm gathers and bursts.”

“That’s just
your
word,” shouted the innkeeper.

In the end Dow barely escaped with his life. He was pelted with sticks and rocks but refused to run. A party of soldiers saved him. Dow was led under their protection toward Georgia and this time his promise was that he would never return. The last Kau ever saw of Lorenzo Dow, the wildman preacher was standing in the middle of the federal road, quoting Luke at the enraged innkeeper as he slapped the dust from his bare feet. “I leave this wicked place as a witness against you,” said Dow. “And I pronounce you all cursed.”