The Blood of Heaven (20 page)

I told this to Red Kate before bed that night and she said it had the ring of truth, pressed her flat nose to my cheek, and hummed with gladness. For months I’d forgotten the itch to rob and even the need to preach. Instead, I stole my bought wife’s love every night and whispered sermons in her ear. My pistol hung on a peg beside our bed, which was a grand brass frame with a mattress and its down stuffing taken from the unsold wares of the store, a gift given us by Reuben, who never stayed long enough in Bayou Sara to need more than a pallet in the foreroom, and I carried a weapon only to ride with Samuel out to Reuben’s timber tracts and hunt.

We’d gut deer in the woods, then return with the carcass and proudly mount the steps to the house, which was raised on pilings eight feet high, and hang the beast by hooks on the beams for butchering. This duty was my Copperhead’s, who would appear with her knife and basin and go straight to her red work. With the hides she made us leggings or covers for our powder-horns. Resting from the ride, I’d stand with Samuel and watch her arms grow covered with blood to the shoulder as she worked, then go to grab her and have the tang of it in our noses while we embraced, looking out to the bayou, the store and the land abounding, raised, as we were, above it all. Eight feet above the fetid swamp, above the fecund goings-on of the few hardscrabble people, but our heads were in the heavens.

She was born of the frontier and before the massacre of her parents had learned the backcountry arts. Within our first months in the Bayou Sara house she’d planted a truck patch of soft corn, cow cabbage, leeks, and potatoes. We ate well, miraculous to me then, as was my very presence by the hearth while she cooked; I was awestruck by domestic happenings, and amazed to find myself comforted by them. The slow assemblage of the trappings of home and family seemed stranger than my preaching-life; the everyday became a fascination when all you’d known was warped faces and rotten minds shrieking at God, mewling malformed grifters, or the skulk of alley-way ambushes. So home had my vision clouded, and I joyed in it for a time and made it mine as far as I could. But there were also Reuben’s matters to attend, our keep to earn; so Samuel worked the store whenever customers happened by from St. Francisville, which was rare, and it was left to me to tend to upkeep and other duties, only helping my brother in mercantiles on occasion. By Reuben’s orders we sold mostly on credit, in order, so he said, to cultivate friendship and avoid acrimony; and besides, he’d say, the goods were Smith’s and he wanted them gone, had already claimed half lost in the shipping. Don’t blot the ledgers with these deals; what isn’t written can’t be writ up by the law, eh?

When we first landed and came to the house, we’d found the door kicked in. I stood back with my wife while Reuben cussed and thrashed about the place, looking for missing valuables. Finding none, he decided that this was an act of what he called the damnable Puke cabal to ruin him. The store, down the way, was found to be locked and undisturbed.

Early on we came to find that Reuben held much, but none of it was his. Only Ferdinand and the Cotton-Picker, for the rest—our house in Bayou Sara, the store, its goods, and all his land—were either mortgaged by New Orleans usurers he took to be his friends or owed to his ex-partner, Smith. Samuel explained it to me this way: a man can have no wealth in this country if he doesn’t risk, or try to slice his part from the fat sides of the wealthy. But we didn’t mind and were content. The tiresome dealings and legal proceedings were at first left up to Reuben. He’d leave Bayou Sara each time almost as soon as he arrived, boarding his boat and floating back down the bayou for New Orleans or to see his Aliza in Natchez, leaving us in charge of the land and store. He would return on occasion, bearing goods he shipped for friends in West Florida and news such as the cession of Louisiana to France. I’d heard the name
Bonaparte
bandied by people in Natchez, but it was from Reuben that I learned truly who the man was; and I recall my ears perking at the sound of the word
conqueror
. It went that he’d bring Samuel along, so we kept store loosely and the ledger told of long stretches without money-sales, hosting there the friends we made like Mills, or Basil Abrams, who’d squat by the stove and drink whiskey with us in the cold months and talk over his anger with the wicked local leaders.

Scoundrels, he’d say. They carve away at my holdings like it’s a flitch of bacon.

These men were the alcaldes, local magistrates, and arbiters, easily given over, like the petty and the small always are, to puny purchases of power. Some were Tories, escaped from the war and still bearing British accents, such as the indigo man Alexander Stirling. Others were American but running-boys for Spanish masters: the bastard Ira Kneeland. And there were also those who kept two masters but above all were ruled by the coin, like the Reverend John Smith and General Wilkinson. Slowly, through personal dealings or, more usually, Reuben’s cusses whenever he was home, did we learn the names of the wicked and hateful. And there were also the Pukes themselves, like the surveyor Pintado, who I’d often see riding out with Kneeland, his deputy, and their strange instruments to take measurements of shadows thrown by the sun or to gauge the river’s rise and fall. Pintado was the one, some months after we arrived, who gave us the oath of allegiance.

It was in February and early morning. Samuel and I were on our way back from riding our tracts to hunt, and to see if more timber had been poached, when we saw on the ridge above the bayou a pair of men with shining things like spyglasses aimed at the sky. The pair adjusted their gadgets and one would point his at the sun while the other scribbled in a notebook.

What do you think they’re searching for? asked Samuel.

God, I said. Every fool for science, all he looks for is the face of the Lord, but they refuse to see.

They’ll burn their damned eyes out doing that, said Samuel, shielding his from the light with his hand.

We left them and rode on home, and weren’t half through our morning hoe-cakes when there came a rap at the door. It was the pair of surveyors, one very fair but dark of hair and in an unbuttoned uniform shirt of a Spanish officer, the other prim and powdered. The first was Pintado, the second Kneeland. We’d encountered them in passing and tell, but not face-to-face and proper. They addressed us, one in Puke’s quick clip and the other in the slow-rolling tones of American planters, taking so much time to let their words play out that in the yawn of stretching vowel you’d find plenty room to pack with hate.

You are the new brothers Kemper? said Pintado.

We answered that we were.

And do you gentlemen intend upon staying and becoming citizens? said Kneeland. Visitors are fine, mind you, but you are here doing business.

We were told, said Samuel, to take the oath whenever it was presented.

Excellent, said Pintado, and he gave the oath to us there on the porch, a quick affair and without the indignity of swearing loyalty to the Pope, only King Carlos. The Spanish were, after all, accommodating.

Well done, said Kneeland. I’ll come by with the papers shortly.

Fine then, I said.

Kneeland cocked his shoulders and took on a biting look, contempt and greed hidden beneath all that syrup. I would tell you that we’ve surveyed out some thousand arpents to the north and east, he said, if you were interested in your own purchases. But with the matter of ongoing litigation between your brother and Mister Smith—

That matter’s settled as far as I know, said Samuel, who knew rightly that it wasn’t.

O, said Pintado, I am afraid it is not. Your brother, he is on land debted to Mister Smith, and the store is Smith’s.

The goods were to be liquidated, said Kneeland. But we hear there’s still a good bit there, and, shall we say, poor accounts?

Before I could speak Samuel bowed up, saying, Have you taken account of the God-damned people cutting our timber? We’ve sold some, but we can’t keep on with every planter carving off pieces whenever he needs a twig to pick his teeth.

Are you impugning a particular character, sir? Kneeland said.

I am not, sir, said Samuel, mimicking the planter’s diction.

May I say, sir, that it would be unwise to do so?

Samuel replied: And I’ll say that it would be awfully unwise for any son of a bitch to poach our living from us.

Pintado had had enough and started between them, giving, as a bureaucrat will, a litany of terms. Gentlemen, he said. This is another matter and it will be addressed. I will order Captain Mills to take some militia out next week to your land. You may accompany him if you choose, but for the moment I must inform you that, while you are welcome as citizens of the domain as good subjects of King Carlos the Second, Mister Smith has asked Commandant Grand Pré in Baton Rouge to appoint arbiters to look into the accounts of the partnership with your brother and assess a judgment in the dispute. Smith is, as you say, making a terminus of the partnership—and you must inform your brother that he is, by Spanish law, bound to nominate his own arbiters, in order to do away with any hint of favoritism or prejudice.

There you have it, said Kneeland. A fair judgment assured.

Ask my ass, I said.

Kneeland reddened. What did you say? He stepped towards the doorway and tried to put his height to me, stretching so that my nose was at his collar. What did you say to me just now?

Gentlemen, said Pintado with his hands in the air.

You, sir, said Kneeland, are not only impudent but insolvent—as poor a combination as there ever was.

When they left, Samuel slammed the door so hard the window-panes shook. Red Kate, wrapping the last of the cakes in a molding cloth, turned and asked what was their business.

The business of trying to destroy ours, I said as I went to her.

My Copperhead folded the last of the cloth into place and put the cakes away in a dark iron pot, then sat another pot within it to flatten them. She smelled of cooking and ash and I remembered the sorrow of my burnt tongue and what a dream it was for it to have been dead for so long when such things were in the world. I put my arms around her waist once she was finished and held on to her hands.

To hell with them, she said, turning to look up at me with a glint of what could only be called murder in her eye. You’ll have them soon enough and by the bollocks.

That’s the truth, I said.

I see their wives, she said, in town sometimes. They’re a lousy bunch of biddies and shrews. Thin-backed, never worked a day on their feet, or on their backs. Not a one came to Willy Cobb’s funeral. Deemed him too common, I suppose.

I’ll bet that Kneeland has a shrew for sure, I said.

No, said Kate, he’s a bachelor I hear.

From who? I asked.

O, she said, the widow Cobb. You know how the man plagued her husband, what a woe, so I suppose she knows a great deal of him.

Samuel sat himself at the table, put his fists together, and sat his chin upon them, contemplating the wall with a look of fury. But I knew there were other things there working in him. The Cobbs were friends of ours; Arthur, the younger brother, lived several miles up the bayou, struggling to raise cattle, while his elder, William, had lived with his wife only a mile from the line of demarcation between West Florida and American Mississippi until he died of ague late our first September, leaving his widow alone at the borderlands with a farm to mind. Arthur and William had come to Feliciana for the cheapness of the land and the looseness of Spanish governance and found themselves betrayed by both. There were many times when one or the other would come knocking at the house to go and have a drink at the store and grouse over the foolishness of the surveyors, who drew their lines wrong and forced the brothers to come into town to rectify their mistakes. They both bore a serious hatred for Kneeland, and it was that William even took a whip to the alcalde’s back one day; though, when I asked him why he’d done it, he refused to say much more than it was all the same business of deceit and rascality. By the time we heard he was down with the ague, we had time only to say a night’s worth of prayers before Arthur came with the news of his brother’s death the following afternoon. He was rendered alone and brotherless and I hurt for him.

The widow Cobb, for her part, was still young, not more than nineteen, but she refused to leave her house, which overlooked the fifty-yard swath cut in the cane and bramble denoting the end of one country and the beginning of another. She’d come down in her buggy on occasion to Bayou Sara, take on provisions which we gave her free, and sit with Kate and do needlework, which neither preferred except that they could tell stories. Mostly it was Copperhead who talked, with the widow Cobb giggling at her ribalds and blushing at the stories of her former days. Her name was Ezmina, and when she was in our house, Samuel would hover about her, filling her cups of coffee and offering her tips of gin, lingering at the edge of the women’s talk. He’d often ask her to stay the night, giving her his pallet in the sitting room while he slept on the floor of the store. By December our charity to the widow Cobb had grown to include him riding over the frost-covered country to bring her things from the store or cut her a week’s worth of wood.

One morning I met Samuel by chance on the road down from Thompson’s Creek, which was the eastern border of our timber tract, and he told me everything. It was no confession he gave, but a testament to the loveliness of the widow. He grinned as he spoke. After all, Will was dead and at the worst all he was doing was cutting short the mourning.