The Blood of Heaven (11 page)

Not Pastor Smith? Samuel said.

The same. He’s become something of a shipper. Your brother left last year for Philadelphia—said he met Thomas Jefferson, you know—and came back with a barge of goods to sell to the Spanish citizens of West Florida, and set for those parts on the same barge with Mister Smith.

I like the sound of it, my brother said, then turning to me: He’s a Baptist and Virginian, too. He’ll be treating Reuben right.

Yes, yes, so long as your brother does profitable business. And the country sounds worthwhile—Feliciana, it’s called. Van Nuys looked to me down-table. Lovely, isn’t it? he said.

I had at last begun to eat, forking lightly the potatoes, then the chicken, then both fish and bacon together. Glorious, I said.

Van Nuys laughed, and it spread through his children and wife. I meant the name of the place, my friend, he said.
Feliciana
has a good ring to it.

The small boy beside me gave me a nudge with his finger, giggling. I had forgotten laughter, and so I kept quiet for the rest of the meal and ate all I could while the talk wore on. I would have eaten more if my stomach hadn’t shriveled into such a small thing. My plate was half-full with pot-scrapings when breakfast ended and Van Nuys rose to go up to his office and begin his lawyering of the day, leaving Samuel twitching with this new encumbrance of knowledge and myself gorged and drowsy.

My brother’s promise was now across the continent, and even addled with food I could tell that he was melancholy at the thought. But by the time we were brought to the fire, where a pallet and blankets were laid out, he was mumbling to me his new designs before I was claimed by warmth and sleep.

That night Samuel showed me the village as gusts blew in from off the river and reduced the infrequent streetlamps to cold and darkness in their cages. There was mulled wine sold by vendors from kettles set on tripods over fires built in the streets, and we drank of it and headed for a place Samuel said was called the Licking River Tavern. It was situated near the landing, beneath the second of the town’s seven hills and beside a lone elm tree, which for whatever reason had been left untouched by hewers and stood watch over the waterfront until, later in the month, it was struck by lightning. That night, though, we passed beneath its branches and to the open door of the Licking River.

When Samuel said his name was Kemper, some boatmen took up a cheer and we were bought spiced gin in pewter cups. And it was there that Samuel first said to someone else that I was his brother.

He don’t quite have the Kemper look, said one.

Too small, said a second.

Naw, said still another, grabbing me by the head and pointing to my eyes. He’s got the ferocity right there.

With the boatman’s hand upon my head I grinned and glared at them all, trying ferociousness on like someone else’s boots. Let my old Woolsack skin slip, slough off like the scabs of my boils, and be renewed in the hide of Kemper. I felt already like brass tacking to a legend in life.

See it plain as day, the boatman said. That’s the same eye I saw old Reuben get before he put a Kaintuck man’s head through yonder window.

I couldn’t muster any words, but tried to maintain the look.

Samuel, hands hip-wise and nodding prideful, said, Damn right. You can tell a Kemper a mile away.

One of the dissenters leaned in, saying, And that’s as close as some may want to get.

Unless you happen to be a girly, said the one still holding my skull, which presently he twisted so that I looked about the room. And here we got ample chance for you to prove that too.

And as he spoke I saw, fussing in darkened corners, leaning over table-lips, shouldering to the rail, women and girls who smiled and chattered, haggled, enduring the smacks and pinches of the patrons before leading those agreeable to the stairs, where lurked their sisters eyeing men as yet unclaimed.

Samuel clapped his coat pocket; his father’s coin clinked. I suppose it’s time we spent some, brother. I’ll treat you.

Now the voices of the women drew upon me loud, a river-roar of bodily commerce. Amid the tales, Reuben’s specter growing to the ceiling, some would come and join us, tapping at my shoulders and taking drinks from my cup. A gurgle of gin in one’s bobbing throat, the sound of drowning. Fleshy, flush, and untiring in their efforts, the whores added inventions of their own to the makings of the family name. Hemmed by bodies, I worked to douse grief and weakness as both story and toast became slurred. A young fool drunk off his feet, unlimbering his new place in the world, casting foggier and foggier glances to the stairs. I did not want them, wouldn’t have one that night or for all that followed while we waited for the thaw to begin our journey south. But I couldn’t curse them either—they sought survival as best they could. So I endured their offers, and proffered false and heartless boasts. I was, after all, a Kemper.

II

A River into Eden

The Ohio–Mississippi River, Spring 1801

Aboard the Ark

We dangled our heads over the side of the barge to watch the muddy water roll with stars reflected near and warm, not distant and cold like they had been in Chit. The end of February brought the flood and the Ohio swelled and at the landings where we stopped to load and unload cargo the wharf-boats were bobbing at the treetops; and like-wise the Father of Waters overran its banks and we passed above the tips of pines and willows where would be islands in the drier seasons. We would turn south at the Cape and pass forever by our fathers, and so were cast into Eden.

Still, my father hadn’t left me; he visited day by day, sometimes brought guilt, sometimes avarice or wrath. If I had killed him, and I believed it to be so, he was now nothing more than rot. But I knew even then, laid out on our flatboat’s deck, that if he had one follower yet he would not go into corruption; he would be burnt, taken by the wind and scattered in his ashy wisdom; or that same follower would scrape his ashes into the baptizing creek, and let Preacher-father silt the waters which would carry him through the wiry lattice-work of tributaries, slowly churning him with the mud until he reached an artery of the Mississippi and came into that muddy organ and lived in it, possessing all and watching me with the milky eyes of catfish, seeking land at the banks and islands with frog-legs and the claws of alligators.

Those nights we listened to the groan and creak of the flatboat’s timbers, to the men fighting over tobacco or liquor or money, or just to fight: the sounds of something being slowly torn apart in the current. We learned to find good sounding by the color of the water, to read the currents, and to see bars and traps by the ripples in the water.

The boatmen gave us tastes of their drink and smoke when they were feeling good-natured. But they found that our appetites were fierce and these gifts were soon rescinded. We worked, shucking loads at pitiful landings all down both rivers, and before long we could afford our own drink and smoke—though we only had one broken clay pipe to split between us and it was often either tobacco or food. We passed our pipe while we toted casks and bales and sugar-sacks and the men of the wharfs would say, Some preachers! and go on making fun, singing bawdy hymns at us until our captain, a man named Finch, would holler them quiet. He carried with him at all times the biggest knife I ever saw, and would use the breadth of its flat sides to knock you awake or get you working at a faster clip.

The work on the river was bizarrely a thing of speed. We floated slowly, poling where it was shallow, sometimes lashing ropes to great live oaks to pull ourselves along, but so did our competitors, and if they survived our poles on the water we would be sidled up next to them at Big Bone Lick or Bear Grass or Clarksville, and there we would unload against them and whoever was clear first to get his stock ashore would get the market price of the day and the choice of contract and credit to move further downwards, with the loser gaining nothing but merchants’ chop-change and some brawling. The shipping men would scoff and laugh amongst themselves about these river rats. Once, when I was sent to fetch contract papers from a merchant’s office, the man snapped back from his desk and waved a hand before his face.

Christ, boy, tell your captain to send someone who doesn’t smell like they floated down here in a privy.

I’d turned away to scowl, imagining how he would look with a gun-barrel leveled at his face. And such thoughts had visited me more and more, whenever we would pass into a town and see the sated and slothful. I wanted to take, but moreover I wanted someone else to hurt.

When work was through, Finch would let us go out into the docks and landings and preach if we felt the urge. The need to witness was in me and I considered it my repentance to weep and tell the people my sins and calamities, with Samuel standing like the God of Judgment behind me. And after I finished even those who had jeered and hissed me would straighten up when my brother lumbered forward to take my perch from me and deliver the moral. It was rare that any coin would sail into our hats, rarer less than the souls we turned to goodness; but what little off-chance money we did receive we gave an equal share to Captain Finch.

Lean as our provisions were, the captain was a good man, a teacher, and some miles below the falls at Louisville, not far from where Preacher-father and I were cast from our boat long before, and having dropped our pilot and proceeded downriver, the captain took Samuel and me both up by the scruff and made us look to a high, sloping bank of limestone marked with a great cave. About the cave, nailed to the trunks of a pair of trees in early bloom, were signs variously reading:
WILSON’S LIKKER VALT, BILLYARDS, CARDS, & HOUSE OF ENTERTAINMENT
. Cargo-laden boats like ours were docked below the mouth of the cave, and it was to them that Captain Finch pointed, saying, Those boats are manned by dead hands.

It looks a fine place, I said, thinking more of rows and bawds than the captain’s words.

Captain Finch took a-hold of my nape and said, Boats land and the crews drunked, whored, and by the next day, killed. The cavers float down to New Orleans and sell the goods off, the bastards. Yes, it’s a damned fine business.

He withdrew his hands from my neck and went to fiddling with his belted knife. And I didn’t know why then that Samuel took quiet and looked afraid, only understanding later, in the night, when he told me that he worried if his brother Reuben might have met that kind of fate. I said that from the sound of him, he’d have bored the pirates’ eyes from their skulls and painted their cave with gore, then writ a treatise about the process. Samuel laughed, but in the day, slowly passing Wilson’s cave, we heard other laughter issuing within and the voices of barkers shouting to us, Come down, fellows! Don’t float off now! Cheapest drink, ripest teats, fairest cards in the country! Don’t float now! Come!

Captain Finch gave me a whap of his blade to drive the point home further, then raised his knife up between us so that the blade must have shined with the sun and struck the dim-eyed cave-lurkers with its brilliance, and hollered back at them, You want this scalp and money you’ll have to come and get it, you cunt-lapping dogs! I hope the river rises twenty feet tonight and drowns your sorry asses! Then he turned to each of us, saying, They’re good robbers but worthless on the river. I see their boats wrecked all along the way. Ain’t that right, you rotten sons of scabby bitches!

Samuel’s voice cracked a bit when he shouted along, Fuck to your souls and see you in Hell!

Right-o, said Finch, sheathing his blade and clapping him on the shoulder. That’s the spirit, my boy!

Christ Comes as a Thief

And the spirit which came over me in the following days was one for preying. I’d grown sorely tired of seeing the merchants, stuffed into their waistcoats, stroll along the wharves and spit whatever change they so desired. Whereas our fellow crewmen were content with the occasional combat, I wanted my violence as I would later in life—swift, secret, by surprise. And to lift some coin from those hated purses had no small allure. My hunger grew more sharp, the ache of work more sore, and the thought of setting fear in the heart of some fool—not of Hell, not of God, but of me—became too sweet not to bring unto fruition. I could’ve lived on our provisions, on the fruits of our more honest labors, but I needed to right the balance of sorrow. So I sat one evening on the deck with my brother, our packs for pillows, fingers caked with dried flour-mud, and put it to him.

I’m tired, I said, of being on my knees. I’ll bow down before the Lord any day, but not these fools, these money-counters.

You want to quit the ship?

Not that, brother. I want to take.

No point in getting killed before we ever get to Reuben.

There’s no point in living hand-to-mouth until we find him either.

And how’d you go about it?

With your father’s pistols.

They aren’t his anymore, said Samuel.

That’s right. Now they’re for us to make our way. I reached for his pack and gave a rap to the box which held the dueling set, saying, Toting these around and never putting them to use, you might as well carry a Bible and never crack the spine.

Samuel drew on our pipe, eagerness creeping at the corners of his eyes. This hasn’t got much to do with money, does it?