Crossing Purgatory (2 page)

Thompson pulled the skin from the squirrel and gutted the carcass. As dusk came on the rain eased, allowing him to build a small fire using a little powder and some branch shavings as tinder. He roasted the squirrel over the banked embers, and pulling meat from bone he ate greedily but without pleasure, ate because his fate was to live and life required nourishment.

T
HE FOLLOWING DAYS TOOK ON
a sameness, rain continuing on and off, dimming clouds, early darkness, starless nights, the moon a gauzy hint, the going slowed by fatigue and by a road turned to mire, brown sludge puddling the low areas, food gone, game scarce. Thompson, bow-shouldered, mud-splattered, hair matted and tangled like a thicket of scrub brush, seemed more a feature of the landscape than a person moving through it. The constantly overcast skies deprived him of a clear view of the sun and the stars by which to guide, so he no longer was sure of his course, although he judged it westward still. He despaired time lost to foraging and rest, yet had not an inkling of his destination, a wanderer rather than a pilgrim. He felt compelled to move, but the why and where of it escaped him.

He must have appeared an ominous presence to the father and young girl he stumbled upon late one evening as he approached the cabin he'd seen from the rise. The girl held a slop bucket beside a small split rail pen holding four swine. The man stepped in front of the girl and loosely gripped the haft of a pitchfork. He was large and rawboned, wore a broad rimmed hat from which protruded shocks of hair the color of straw. He seemed to Thompson neither cordial nor threatening, but cautious perhaps. Thompson leaned his rifle against the fence post and stepped away from it.

“Hello. I don't wish to disturb your work. I thought only to fill my bag at the well. I've been on the road a spell.” Thompson removed his water skin from around his neck and pointed it in the direction of the well. The little girl peeked from behind her father. Barefoot, she wore a calico dress checkered in blue and white. The man seemed to take Thompson's measure and then spoke.

“You're welcome to what water you can carry. Name's Madison. James Madison.” He removed his hat and scratched his head. “No relation, but it's a topic of much merriment with folks around here.”

“Thompson Grey. Obliged.”

Thompson left his rifle at the post and walked to the well and filled his bag. Then, almost as an afterthought, “Where might ‘around here' be? I come from Deep Woods and am headed west.”

“Deep Woods?”

“Indiana.”

“If west is your only destination you are on course,” Madison answered. “A ways back you crossed over into Illinois.”

“Again, I'm obliged to you.” Thompson nodded to Madison, and Madison raised a hand to stop him.

“It's tight what with the winter stores getting low, but I'd be pleased to offer a little something to eat and a warm place by the fire.”

Thompson considered his waterlogged chill and gnawing hunger. “I'm not fit for the table. But, some bread if you have it to spare, and a rest in the hay bin.”

“As you wish,” Madison answered and led the girl to the cabin. As the door opened, an older boy, almost a man, came from around back of the cabin wielding a flintlock musket and followed the two inside. As Thompson waited, he looked over what he could see of the farm and judged Madison to have achieved a measure of success. The log house was well constructed, the plank door tight in its frame, the stone chimney true, a window with glass panes. Cornfields stretched out behind the cabin in sufficient acreage that Thompson knew Madison must have several other children behind the door. The swine in the pen were heavy and of good color. Chickens pecked in the yard. Two milk cows grazed about their tether pins in a pasture off to Thompson's right, and a pair of mules shuffled in the lean-to next to the pig pen. A good life, Thompson thought. A good life. Not unlike his own, before.

T
HOMPSON HAD BEEN PROUD OF
his quarter section in Indiana, the log cabin and the growing numbers of livestock, cultivated fields, and woodlands for lumbering. But his land paled in comparison to his father's estate, the two-story frame house with the front porch looking out over fields planted in tobacco and corn, sheep grazing on pastured hills, the forests beyond. And the outbuildings: kitchen attached to the main house by a covered walkway; the tenant shacks, base but tidily arranged in two rows and freshly whitewashed; the smokehouse; the tobacco barn and curing room.

Thompson believed himself born to farm and loved the comforting rhythm: plowing and sowing in spring, clearing land and culling trees during summer heat and winter pause, harvesting in fall, butchering after the first hard frost. He gave thanks for what he had in Indiana, what he had built for Rachel and the boys. But he dreamed of more and bitterly resented the curse of the second son. His father had told him he'd not see his future generations fall from comfort into poverty because of holdings divided and divided again. His brother Jacob would inherit the estate and Thompson despaired of ever being able to increase his own acreage. So, when the opportunity arose, he acted.

He'd been turning the soil early that spring when Cyrus Brawley rode over on his mule. Cyrus owned the farm adjacent to his own. “Giving it up,” Cyrus told Thompson. They stood in Thompson's field. Cyrus bent and took a clot of dirt in his hand and crumbled it, sifting it through his fingers.

“They say soil in Illinois is black and rich.” Cyrus looked to the woods bordering Thompson's five-acre plot. “And without these goddamned stumps to clear.”

Thompson knew the Brawley farm. Yielded fair, would do better with his touch. Good sections of bottomland, acres of hardwood Brawley found excuse not to log.

“How much?” Thompson asked.

“A dollar and twenty an acre, I'll let it go. Looking to sell it all of a piece.”

The property would double the size of his farm, if only he had the funds. He would request a loan from his father.

“M
R
. T
HOMPSON
?”

Madison stood holding out a tin plate and a wool blanket, for how long Thompson had not a clue.

“Thank you.” Thompson accepted the offerings.

“This should keep the chill off and the belly satisfied for a while,” Madison said, and with a nod withdrew to the cabin. Thompson nested into the hay bin and shoveled food into his mouth with the wooden spoon Madison had provided. The plate held a generous slab of cornbread and thick gravy, milk and flour mixed with bits of fatback fried in a skillet. When he had sopped the last of the gravy with the cornbread and blotted the soggy crumbs with his finger, he wrapped himself in the blanket, burrowed more deeply into the hay, pulled his hat low, and slept uneasily with his dreams.

R
ACHEL AT HER VANITIES
. T
HAT
last evening, before he left to call on his father, Matthew in his crib and Daniel on his mat, she untied the string that bound her hair in its tight bun. Days, she kept it up, out of the way while at chores, but at night she let it down and brushed it each evening. A raven's sheen. An open, innocent face. Full breasts, firm despite three pregnancies in four years, the first ended prematurely to bleeding. She hummed a tune as she combed, and smiled over at him. He reached to stroke her hair, reached for the warmth of his wife.

S
OMETHING WOKE HIM.
A
SOUND
, familiar but out of setting for the wilderness. Music. The tune Rachel had been humming in his dream. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. He'd slept but little, judging by the hang of the moon in a night sky now swept free of clouds and filled with cold pricks of light. He stood wrapped in the blanket and listened. Still dreaming? There, from the cabin. Thompson retrieved the tin plate and eased to the window and peered inside. A woman, fair-complexioned and slim-figured, sat by the fire bracing a dulcimer on her lap, working chords with one hand while bowing with the other. Madison sat at a rough-hewn table with two older boys while two girls waltzed a toddler in a tight circle about the room. Madison and his wife sang quietly.

Thompson removed the blanket, folded it, placed it beside the door, and set the plate on the blanket. He backed from the porch and gathered his belongings and turned for the road and walked until the moon began to set, and then he ascended a slope into the woods and when he reached a leveling he stopped and built a small fire. As the fire glowed he lost his night vision and his world constricted, limited to the flickering reach of the flames. But he heard the animals, an owl high in a near tree, a deer picking through the deadfall, something foraging nearby, a raccoon perhaps. Thompson pulled his blanket around his shoulders, stared into the red glow of the coals, felt again solitude seeping into his bones with the cold night air, and, in the hours that sleep refused to come, tried unsuccessfully to wean from his memory his past life, a life forfeited by his transgressions, a life traded for this new, unfamiliar purgatory.

2

S
abbath day, June 7th, Thompson approached the city on the river. He'd been traveling though unfamiliar but generally recognizable country, every homestead reminding him of his own, every sow with her spring farrow, every cornfield. He felt unable to shake the dust from his feet. During sleep, marching armies, awake, haunting memories. Weariness his constant companion, a drugged consciousnesses, a vague awareness of the great river drawing near. A rising humidity, dense cultivation, and on the road, increasing commerce, wagons forcing him to step aside.

Thompson had heard of St. Louis, of course, and of the Mississippi River, but after traveling for so many days alone, avoiding the towns, sleeping in woods and ravines, he was ill prepared for the draw and sweep of it, the sharp delineation between east bank and west, the city rising from the bluff on the opposite shore, buildings like Sirens luring trail-weary Argonauts. The river, brown and wide and swirling. The city an impenetrable mass of brick and plank, foreboding and indecipherable to a man of Thompson's experience and current disposition. As his ferry approached the landing, they passed steamboat after steamboat moored along an endless wharf. Although Sunday, an army of men were at work loading and unloading boats, a clatter of iron wheels and horse hooves, men shouting, cinder-belching steamboats fitted with hissing and grinding machinery, sounds mixing and merging and rising in a raucous din like the low rumble of a distant battle.

Once disembarked, he roamed the levee, uncertain of direction, stupefied by the confusion of activity, the bustle of people and animals. He required supplies. He did not desire unnecessary human contact, and he need not have worried. He observed little neighborly interaction from anyone. Men jostled him, seeming not to notice his presence on the street. No acknowledgements except from those who wanted something: shills loitering outside taverns bidding him enter; an aging whore with rouged cheeks and a slightly humped back who cupped a breast in her hand and asked if he might desire a place to rest his head for a spell; one old hag with a goiter the size of a melon bulging from her neck who pressed Thompson so insistently for a coin that he had actually to push her aside to pass.

He came upon a mercantile and ducked inside. A dim and cluttered place, several men sat smoking pipes around a cold potbellied stove in one corner. Dusty tins of hard biscuits sat mingled with sacks of dried cod. The silent and dour proprietor eyed him suspiciously as Thompson packed his rucksack with a small bag of cornmeal, a tin of coffee, a square of salt pork which he wrapped in butcher paper. His expression brightened when Thompson retrieved a silver coin from the money belt and placed it on the counter. “Wasn't sure of your intentions at first,” the shopkeeper said. “You come in looking fagged out, a little busted.” He offered a few coppers in change.

“Looks don't tell the whole of it, I expect,” Thompson answered. He returned the copper coins to his belt and walked back into the street.

Outside, Thompson left the wharf district and climbed into the city, walked through the heart of it, three- and four-story brick buildings throwing the street into early shadows, street after street, row after row of brick and stone, iron lattices over glass windows, gas lamplights along Main. A disorienting, unsettling maze; he did not comprehend the attraction of the place for so great a throng.

“C
OME SEE
P
HILADELPHIA
,”
HIS BROTHER
, Jacob, had urged that last night at the Reverend's table. He radiated enthusiasm when describing the crowds and the tall buildings. “Everything so convenient, one hardly has need of a mount.” The city, his brother lectured, is the future. All that is progressive and forward-looking comes from the city.

“Perhaps,” Thompson had countered. “But I can imagine no place better suited to my temperament than here.”

His brother and he had converged at their childhood home because their father, the Reverend Matthew Grey, was not well. Chopping wood, the blade deflected off an oak burl and nearly severed his foot. The wound now festered, filling the parlor where Thompson first greeted him with a faint, disagreeably sweet odor. The Reverend was unable to rise from the settee, compelling Thompson to stoop down to embrace him, awkward for both, and decidedly cooling the reunion. Reverend Grey had pointed dismissively at the foot wrapped in a thick bandage seeping a yellowish discharge. “Administer what ointments you think best, I told the physicians, and let God's will be done.”

God's will apparently was to take His time in determining His servant's fate, and with his father teetering between recovery and decline, Thompson petitioned him for an advance share of his inheritance. A land opportunity, he explained. The Brawley holdings adjacent to his own, the promise it held, the asking price better than fair. During moments of laudanum-induced magnanimity the Reverend readily consented to the advance, only to rescind later, when the effect of the drug lessened and his parsimonious nature reestablished hold both on his senses and his purse strings. The Reverend grew indignant, railing at Thompson's boldness during his time of peril. Thompson determined to stay on until he could resolve the matter. A few days stretched into a week, and beyond. Rachel would require help in the fields. Surely the neighbors would look in, lend a hand. It's what neighbors did. They knew of his mission. But time passed without resolution. A day short of two weeks, without having secured title to his inheritance, resentful of his father and of his brother who had no intention for the estate other than to sell it once he assumed ownership, ashamed over his own dereliction of family and field, Thompson returned to Deep Woods, returned to Rachel and the boys. Rachel and the boys.…