The Blood of Heaven (35 page)

So was my father. And his father before him. The colonel leaned back in his chair and narrowed his eyes so that they were all blackness. They trained me for it, he said. But I was not meant for that life.

The Lord’s a harsh master.

Indeed, said Burr. And so are nations. How do you stand on democracy, Colonel Kemper?

I don’t know enough about it to say.

Burr laughed, flashing his teeth. Ah, that’s the truth. Most of our countrymen will grow old and die without knowing it. . . . I hadn’t enough time with your brothers to find what sort of government you planned for West Florida, had you taken it. May I ask you?

They wanted it to become American, I said. But I wanted to make something else.

Your own country, said Burr, breathless.

That’s right, I said. In the image I thought at the time was the Lord’s, and according to His will. I don’t know if democracy much figured into it. Either way it was a failure.

Don’t flog yourself on it, man. Do you know what the same papers that compared us say about me? Burr is finished. Democracy can now do without him: therefore let him be suppressed.

A vicious slander, said Polly Randolph.

No, madam, said Burr, it is true. At least up to the point of suppression. Like the existence of God, might I say, if the existence of democracy is not made apparent after years of toil in its name, does it not cease to exist? Or perhaps never has existed?

I listened. Times past I would have struck a man who said such things a blow, but I had no love for the Lord at that time. I saw that night he had his own reasons to turn his back on the God who’d so forsaken him. We were alike in that way—and in that our Gods would one day roar back upon us both.

I served the nation well, he continued. I loved her as bloodedly as any man can. But she is ruled by men who conspire and pass over the best in favor of those who would cow and bow. I loved the United States as you love God, Colonel Kemper. But if God is revealed to be nothing but whims and nations to be nothing but land—then what are we left with?

Nothing, I said.

No, Colonel. We are left with ourselves. Men, women, and the land they live on, far from the houses of power. It is the same in Mexico. I have heard it from your brother’s Association. Young Mister Gutierrez tells of how the people suffer there under the decaying yoke of Spain. We liberate Mexico and cut the head from the Spanish dragon in the new world. The rest will wither and die. Then, Colonel, the western territories will have a choice as to their governance. And who will they side with, do you think? The eastern states and the business interests or a union of their own, like-minded people?

But aren’t you an eastern man, Colonel Burr? said Red Kate.

Burr’s eyes lit. Yes, my dear. But I am also my own man. And if democracy can do without me, then perhaps I can do without democracy. As can you.

I said, I’ve tried my hand at nation-making—

There is much to do. Much work and preparation. I do not intend to go into this enterprise without the most careful considerations. What I require of you is small. I will bring down fighters from Tennessee and Kentucky next spring, and coupled with the armies of the downtrodden in Mexico, we will have a magnificent deportment. Wilkinson will strike from the north, at the Sabine River in Natchitoches, and we will split our forces, shipping some to Vera Cruz and the rest overland through Orleans. There will be more than enough men. What I need from you and your brothers is friendship and information.

Why didn’t they give it to you already?

Well, said Burr. Therein lies some trouble. Your brother Reuben smarted a bit when I told him he’d been recommended to me by Senator John Smith of Ohio. And I see in your face that you are equally surprised. You may be further surprised to find that while Senator Smith was your enemy in the late unpleasantness, he could not help but see your spirit, even if you did not succeed.

I wouldn’t like to be attached to Wilkinson again.

The general has his uses, he said. I know his limitations just as well. That is why I intend to have enough men and supplies to abrogate the need to rely solely on him. If he comes through on his talk, which I give you is as likely as not, it will be a fortuitous event, but not a necessary one.

And despite my misgivings, I was growing more and more enraptured with the man and his designs, how he saw none of our failures, how he treated me as though I were great and had done great things. And even now I don’t believe his way was sinister, but that he saw the best in every man, and wished to raise all around him to the heights of what he called
destiny
.

The man who sees his destiny, said Burr, can put aside the enmity he holds for another to further his own purpose.

I thought on this, judged it true, and said, What about the president? He can’t stand by and watch the country split.

Burr looked to the ceiling as though Jefferson sat there on high, presiding over him still. He said, Old Tom knows my designs to a point. The severance of the Union is inevitable. But I believe the East will be the one who makes the move. They’ll suffer no equality with frontiersmen. Think of it. When we have all that country, we offer land to the eastern mechanics and tradesmen and they will pour across the border for the chance at a better station.

But the president, I said.

My friend Tom owes me more than he can ever repay. He knows that. I have given him a presidency and removed his foremost enemy from the world. And now I will offer him an empire of the Americas. What man can deny that debt?

I’d say no man could.

Right, said Burr. He leaned across the table now and took me by the hand. And what man can deny destiny?

The word
destiny
broke over my head where there had been only providence and the Will of God. And so the Lord’s path was usurped by the way of man. When Burr said it, the sound was like the wind I’d heard blowing through the blighted plains of Chit, carrying the embers of the pilgrims’ camp, the hissing stillness of the fort at Baton Rouge, the sound of a hand so often beaten down now doubling into a fist.

In early morning the colonel set out for Natchez, unheralded and alone, and traveled on his way from our house through town on a road still strewn with flowers; but the night’s rain had drummed so that the twists of petal were now ground with dirt and horseshit.

He’d given me instructions for the next year, to write him in cipher care of Colonel Jackson, and later of Senator Smith in Cincinnati. I watched the great man pull himself a-horse, thanking us again and giving a bow and sweep of his hat to the women.

What a pity, said Polly Randolph. It was so pretty yesterday.

The colonel turned in his saddle. The earth makes trash of all man’s pomps, he said, setting off at a gallop down the mucked path and sending up clods of soiled petals in his wake.

Some hours after Aaron Burr passed out of view and we’d gone back inside our house, there came the sound of a rolling thunderous wave from the south, and I hurried out onto the porch with Red Kate following to the doom-crack screeching of thousands of crows in great clouds swiftly moving across the sky. Burr’s rear-guard, they swept in peals of black beneath the clouds and swirled northwards, never lighting on house or limb, but moving after him. And I wondered when they’d overtake him on the road, and if when he saw them the great man wouldn’t smile, dark eyes alight, and consider them brothers.

Before the Fall

I notched the ears of my calved-up cattle in July, and kept the tavern going in the absence of my brothers, who, so their letters said, were feeling out the situation with Burr. Reuben was cautious, but would keep up his own ciphered correspondence with the great man. They stayed in New Orleans despite the wrath of yellow fever then in season, Samuel already bedridden most days and there being no sickness that could stop the elder brother. In fact, Reuben said, he was sorry I couldn’t see the city this time of year, in the plague-quiet when most Frenchmen and Spanish had retreated to the temperate outskirts and the place left to the hands of the hearty. The plans moved a-pace: Daniel Clark was shipped out to Vera Cruz with a cargo seemingly innocuous, but the flour sacks were filled with gunpowder and the hogs-heads of sugar contained pistols and short-swords. There he’d meet with Gutierrez’s confidants and dispatch his wares, looking also to the defenses of the port and the determination of the people to revolt.

A gift came from the brothers in early August: a uniform of sort made for me by a German tailor of the town—of black fabric and with gold embellishments about the high collar and the wrists of the coat and down the leg, denoting a rank in our imagined army. Both, so they said, had similar outfits they wore to meetings of the Mexican Association. Red Kate laughed at how loose it hung about me when I put the uniform on, and she spent a few hours tailoring until she was pleased with the figure I cut.

What a handsome father you’ve got, she said to the boy with her needles in her teeth as she cinched cuffs of the pants to where they’d fit tight under the lip of my boots.

Ma, he answered, scurrying about her.

And when my wife had finished I regarded myself in the window: a colonel of illusion, and not unpreacherly in all that black. My Copperhead stepped behind me and took my hair like that of a horse and gave it a yank to turn my head and kiss her. The misery of days past was forgotten in our house, and all the war-talk now seemed like great play and fantasy.

How’d you like to be a duchess of Mexico? I said at supper.

Red Kate blushed over a plate of steaming potatoes. It won’t be called that though, will it? she said.

No, I said, laughing. Colonel Burr’ll find a better name.

Burrland? she said, grinning.

We laughed together and even the boy in his table-bonds managed a giggle; and though it sounded like a mock and not a normal child’s joy, we were glad to hear it and unlashed him and each took him by the hand and swung him, dancing, about the room. And it went that at the end of that happy night, when I lay exhausted with my wife in our bed, she said she’d been without the blood since July. Far too soon to tell whether a child had taken in her, but, she said, she knew.

A letter from Samuel detailed the planned gathering of guns and men and the resurgence of his health. He was wearied of New Orleans and sickness, of bed-sores, and, when he was well, of being called to meet with the Association or to preside over bear-baitings. He said he’d be glad to see me and talk over what he called our happy expedition. And so we were all caught up in the dream.

I read the brothers’ boasts and news with my wife set up in bed beside me, in the calm of the passage of our son’s spells. Lately he’d quieted more, his fits of screaming grown internal so that in his moments of misfortune the boy would collapse to the floor and silently writhe. We suffered his convulsions far better than the screaming, for now it was only to jab a spoon-handle in his mouth and wait until he’d shaken out, at which times Red Kate would bundle him and sing hymns I heard for the first time with the ears of an apostate. My Bible in its corner continued to be a house for vermin. I had no urge to touch it, and by August had forgotten where it lay. And her half-remembered verses were nothing more than any other lambkin lullaby, fit only for the ears of children and the lips of mothers unknowing in their kindness. I’d built him a bed with sidebars where he could thrash in the night and not fall to the floor, and we set it up at the foot of our own and I slept so deeply that my Copperhead would have to shake me awake even after sunup. In the last days of August it was still too early to judge whether she’d taken child again; but in her way she knew and I’d wake her of a morning, feeling her belly for the lump yet to come.

I suppose he’ll be born in time for the next war, said Red Kate on such a dawn.

This one will be better, I said.

The baby or the war? she said.

And the choice she gave me meant more than what she innocently said and made grave all our jokes. Or maybe I give Red Kate no credit for offering me then what she’d ultimately later ask. As it stands, I wove a finger through her hair and felt the fat at her mound and wished it to swell as I wished the Mississippi’s waters to rise and carry down Colonel Burr and his army.

Both, I said.

II

There Shall Be Desolation

September 1805

Bonds and Yokes

I thought at first Basil Abrams was drunk and needed something for the tavern, for it was his voice at the door, calling for someone to answer. I fought for sleep, hearing Reuben, arrived two days before, go to the door and answer him. Past midnight and the moon beat our bedroom panes and I edged closer to my wife’s warmth and saw with eyes half-shut that my son was standing up in his bed and he was trembling. That was when I heard the horses and the door crash open and my brother holler murder; and they came upon me before I could get out my bed. Black faces and figures, they took my arms and legs and I raged against them; Red Kate had a knife held out and was slashing at them, but one struck her and she fell to the floor; I fought, toppling my boy’s bed so that I heard him wailing as they dragged me out. I bit at their hands and tasted boot-blacking, spit it, howling and hearing a man say, If the bitch says another word, kill her.