The Blood of Heaven

THE BLOOD OF HEAVEN

The Blood
of Heaven

Kent Wascom

Grove Press

New York

Copyright © 2013 by Kent Wascom

Jacket design by Royce M. Becker; Jacket photograph courtesy of
Special & Digital Collections, Tampa Library, University of South Florida

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9350-6

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

Distributed by Publishers Group West

www.groveatlantic.com

For if their purpose or activity is of human origin, it will fail.
But if it comes from God, you cannot defeat these men; you will
only find yourselves fighting against God.

ACTS 5:39–40

PROLOGUE

A Prayer for the City

New Orleans, January 26,1861

Tonight I went from my wife’s bed to the open window and pissed down blood on Royal Street. She shrieked for me to stop and use the pot, but below I swear the secession revelers, packed to the streetcorners, were giving up their voices, cheering me on. They’re still out there, flying high on nationhood. Suddenly gifted with a new country, they are like children at Christmas. I saw their numbers swelling all the way to Canal, and in this corner of the crammed streets the celebrants were caught and couldn’t escape my red blessing. A herd of broadcloth boys passed under my stream while a whore howled as I further wilted the flowers in her hair and drove her customers off; and yawping stevedores, too drunk to mind, were themselves bloodied even as they tried to shove others in. And if I could I would’ve written out a blessing on all their faces, anointed them with the red, red water from my Holy Sprinkler, and had them pray with me.

Pray for the children of this city drowned in sin, plague, and muddy water. We breach the filmy surface but can only manage whiskey-choked howls. Where bed sheets stained with bile and bloody flux normally fly from the iron railings of our balconies, now upstart banners are unfurled, the flags of the newly independent state and a people claiming to be free—of Washington, of tyranny, of our gangle-bones president. And we are free, in this place where I sell whip-scored flesh pound-by-pound. I have made speculation on the price of slaves my living for some fifty years, and have been blessed with an octoroon wife and a son further whitened by my blood. My wife and boy are free the same way the South is now free. Free for folly and disaster; free to go to hell—The hell I’ve made in the long and wicked years of my life, wherein I had another son, another wife, both lost to time, abandoned by me.

Pray for us who are annually subjected to those tropical atrocities: hellish heat, disease, and hurricane; who live along the fertile nethers of the South on the country’s purest coast. Our corner of the Gulf is soaked in blood, brothers and sisters, and I have given my fair share to the tide. From the heel of latter-day Louisiana to Mobile Bay lies the Holy Land I wished to make with my brother, Samuel Kemper. We fought our revolution in 1804, in what was then called West Florida. We failed, through foolishness and gall and losing sight of God’s true path; afterwards I’d try once more to take that country, through scheming and plotting and following the dreams of great men, but all for nothing. In 1810 a gaggle of planters would have their revolution and they were too respectable to call on Angel Woolsack. They had a country, so they called it, for but a few months. No matter—at that time I was wringing the first of my fortune from black flesh. And the half century since has passed like hang-fire and I’m glad my brother or any of the rest didn’t live to see what’s coming now.

Pray for those who scream for war.

This afternoon was a rage of flags, as every man whose wife knew how to stitch poured through the square with his idea of a new nation’s standard trailing behind him like a cape. A madness of stripes and stars, of bloody-breasted pelicans, of crosses, of crowns, of snakes, of skulls—all dragged, tossed, raised, and trampled by the crowd. And it was in this chaos of colors that this prayer was fixed in me, which grew like a seed to bursting and blossomed into the gospel I now set down to write. The moment came while I watched some boys who’d fought through the tumult climb General Jackson’s statue and tie their flag to the hat he holds at the end of an outstretched arm. The flag hung limp at first, just dangling blue-colored cloth, until a gust of wind blew in from off the river and unfurled it to roars and cheers and church bells; and in that instant, like a vision breaking over my head, I saw it was the planters’ flag, the emblem of their starched and lacy revolution, the one the Texans stole some years later—a field of blue shot through with a single white star. So the failed are forgotten and the South now attaches its rebellious hopes to the dusty victories of the horsed and booted. Our blood-red banner of ’04 bore the inscription T
HY
W
ILL
B
E
D
ONE
beneath a pair of gold stars for me and Samuel—the fists of God punching holes through the sky. Now our flag is only known in its dismemberment by the brandy-soaked gentry, who used its holy design to make their own.

Still, I would’ve hurrahed with the rest, but I was disgusted at the sight of that resurrected banner, which they now call the Bonnie Blue. Soon the ringleaders had the people caught in song; I listened hard for a word about West Florida, about anything of mine, and finding there was none, I wept. Southern rights, Lincoln, niggers, and cotton were all I heard from them. My war and my country were a lifetime ago for these children of the steam engine. I wept at that great fool multitude. I wept to be forgotten; for my brother, whose name I adopted and forsook; for my first wife, my Red Kate; I wept for the child we put in the grave, and for a lifetime spent at the hands of God.

Pray for the planter boys like the one who saw me weeping and, amid the song and celebration, took me by the arm and said, Don’t squall now, old man, we’ve won!

He didn’t know that winning’s not the prize. No, you have to win and win again. That is the American way of war: you have to win forever.

Besides, the only planter who wants to fight a war is bored so crazy with whipping his slaves that he’d like to try his hand at whipping something greater, so that he can see if it cows. I have fought alongside their kind and I know their stomachs for it. Atop lovely thoroughbreds and in fine outfit they will ride out to fools’ deaths, drawing scores of poorer others behind them. And there will be enough dead to pack the mouth of Hell with bodies, like the doors of an opera house on fire. And afterwards those left alive will be in tatters and in rags, defeated, riding to the cinders of their houses on stolen nags.

Pray for the soon-dead gentlemen and for the crackers who will follow them. Pray for all the wild rovers, for the night-girls and the resurrection-men, for the wine-bibbers and the riotous eaters, for the Kaintucks and duellists, for free blacks and slavish whites, for virtuous whores and whorish virgins. Pray for the false prophets and the true.

Pray for me. I am one of them.

I am a victim of the Shepherd’s Curse, that of the raised-up shepherd who ate the flesh of the fat and tore their claws to pieces, only to become the idle. So my right eye is utterly darkened, blinded in a skirmish all those years ago, and my arm is clean dried up, made a stump by the love of axe-wielding Kate, who suffered those years of killing and madness as long as she could.

I am too far gone to fight again, though my hand still better fits the pistol grip than the walking stick or cane. I have been the hand that does the will of His divinity. I have been the instrument: killer and conduit elite. I have rendered man, woman, and child unto the Lord with shot, stick, knife, hanging rope, and broken glass, but I have delivered many more with the voice I keep coiled down deep in my withered throat, and with such expedience as would make the crashing bullet weep and the knife blade, imperceptible in its sharpness, strike dull.

And if there are none in these Disunited States who will pray for us, they had better start clapping their soft hands together soon because I can talk to bones; and like Ezekiel I will call them up; and the soggy bones buried in our loam will do as good as the dry bones of the wasteland Hebrews; and I will enkindle them with the breath of life and they will march with me and light the streets with phosphorescence on our way to swallow up the world.

Brothers and sisters, we will never be the shining city on the hill, but with the grace of God we can become the rot-glowing hand that will pull the bastards down.

I see everything, past and now, like targets over the nip of a bead. There goes my father; there goes my brother and the wars we fought; there go all the souls that I’ve outlived.

Last night, as the prayer slipped out of this tomb-ready body, I was made again a vessel of their voices and the Word of the Lord. The eggs of corruption were cast out of my skin and the hatchling worms pulled forth by heavenly fingers. I am wounded and made whole. All my friends and enemies are back again. I see the face of Red Kate in the visage of my octoroon, my first child’s eyes peering at me in bemusement from the skull of the living boy. The Resurrection of the Dead is commencing, and I hope my single wrinkled hand can let them out.