The Blood of Heaven (44 page)

You bastards must be drunk, said Reuben.

The Kentuckians yipped and hollered. Whoever’s men, they were clownish. Still and all there were three of them, and they were mounted. The lid above my busted cheek did tremble to keep my eye skull-bound; and I wondered were they mad enough to charge.

And they were. The lantern-light disappeared for a moment before it was made clear that they’d tossed it to the hay, which took fire as they rode howling out from the smoke. It was only fifty yards or so to cover before they were between the houses, but in that space we laid a volley down that put two to the ground. I threw aside my shotgun and lurched out, pistol in hand, breaking into a run, every step jogging my loose eye and bones until I met my brothers in the middle, saw the escaped rider turning to the front of my house. And it was that when he passed out of sight there came a pair of gunshots. Running again, brothers close behind, past the one trapped between the steps, now dead and drooping, and into the yard to find a horse turning circles, unmanned, and its rider twisted on the ground at the edge of the yard.

Be damned, said Reuben, who was turned towards the house.

And when I looked to where he did, I found Red Kate standing at the top of the porch, both her pistols smoking. I took her in my eye, and she was a fury, holding tight to her weapons and bringing them close to her chest as she started down the steps. Her leather enwrapments creaked, as did the boards, and when she passed the trapped man she kicked him in the back of the head and came on down to meet us.

We were huffing breaths, my brothers giving wild glances between us all, grinning at the strangeness of this woman, who, coming close, appeared so small, but burnt there in the dark like a lit match. I’d put my free hand to the stoved side of my face; and my wife parted the brothers, took me by the wrist and brought it away. I’d had it there for I could no longer hold the squint, and so as she shook her head and looked upon me, my eye gave way and dangled out upon the wreckage of my cheek.

O Jesus, love, she said, reaching out to cup it back as I winced and spit for pain.

But even as I spoke my good eye darkened, and I saw through a narrowing pinprick tunnel in the blackness my brothers reaching for me. Overtook by blindness that would last for days and in an instant all my weight was gone and I was light as ash. I didn’t even feel their hands upon me, hauling me up the steps to where I’d lay out on the porch for the night and early morning, raving bewildered when my wife brought out our boy, saying, How in Christ could he ever sleep? And she set him beside me on the porch, kissed both our foreheads, and returned to her hasty preparations, for we would leave as soon as possible. Feeling for my son, I hurt him when I pulled him close. He moaned his word, then settled; and we, in our way, oversaw the sorry night’s-end progress, left the horses to rot, gifts for the buzzards and the townsfolk, who had shaken off their indifference enough to venture near the slaughter-ground, though there couldn’t have been much for them to see—scuff-marks in the dirt, the holes pocked in our doors; above all, the smoldering ruin of our stable. Samuel and Reuben bartered with them for a wagon and the beasts to pull it even as the men gave pitiful croaks about legal repercussions and their worries for the safety of the town.

By then my boy, wrapped in a blanket and swaddled close, had joined in, imitated them in gibbered harangue. The men of the town resumed their grumbling; their voices were of awe and wonder, as I imagined they would be for generations, at having had people such as us within their midst. We’d hear later that, not an hour after we left, Pinckneyville was visited by a storm of awful power. The whirlwind formed at the river and slashed against the land, drawing up the newly buried killed and the bloat-bellied horses, along with many houses and goods of the living, and several themselves were caught in the pillar of wind, beaten to death by their doors and stoves and porch-beams. And, so we’d hear, when the raging column had passed and the people, mostly naked, came out from their hiding places, they found our houses and tavern to be the only things untouched by the storm.

Book Five

THESE ARE THE WORDS

I

O Jerusalem

Natchez, Summer 1806

Bring Forth the Blind

I was brought to Natchez as into the womb, a place of darkness where I floated amid the dulled noises of the world, jarred and bobbing in the shuttered, bolted madness of Aliza’s household—now reduced by that lady’s fears to herself and the necessary slaves—as in the waters of my first home, which was rotten. This I considered in my time of darkness, while being shuttled about The Church by the hands of the sighted—that I was grown in a house of pestilence, my mother diseased of body and my father sick with the Lord. From the rot sprung and to the rot returned.

Come on now, the Negroe Barbary would say whenever she’d heard enough of my mumbled ravings. I won’t have another crazy person here. I can’t hack more of that. She was chief among Aliza’s servants and had seen, since the stabbing, her mistress grow stranger, running off all of her whores and shutting up, window-by-window and lock-by-lock, the house once full of laughter and sweet voices until it became the close and fetid vault we entered to the sound of bolts unshot, chains unlatched, bars lifted.

It had been Aliza’s voice, thin and rasping, which answered Reuben at the door. She’d seen us from her spyglass, which she manned now constantly. And if her voice didn’t tell the tale, it was the jangling of her safe-guards—more than I recalled—being undone to let us in; and when Reuben told her of our troubles, it just confirmed her suspicions of the world, that it was peopled with deceivers who sought only to destroy us, invaders and assassins massing at the gate. She talked of danger and betrayal while her slaves brought our wagon to the carriage house in back and unloaded our things. Reuben, I could feel, tried to hold on to his wife, but she’d allow him only brief grasps as she sliced on through our company, giving bony embrace to each and all: to Red Kate, who she kissed and called Katie; to the boy, who she asked how he liked his horse, and was answered only by his single word.

He doesn’t talk much, Red Kate said.

O? said Aliza. Well, you’re still young, aren’t you, dear?

And on the mistress went, gasping at my wound, then to the shuddering widow Randolph, her affection strained, as bizarre as the blade of a guillotine fettered with flowers.

When Reuben spoke I groaned, and my son groaned with me. He’d continued, since the night of the attack, to be a mocker. At Fort Adams, where we were hailed and toasted and given a guard of soldiers to ride on with us to Natchez, he’d taken up his bowl of corn-mush and begun to pat it on his right eye, so that he’d have something like my plaster patch—or so I heard by Red Kate’s shouting as she jerked him up.

It was Barbary who was called to bring me and the boy upstairs, to Red Kate’s old room. She talked to me all along our way, saying how she’d seen me give the wedding sermon, and how it was a pretty thing. She toted the boy in the crook of one withered arm and led me with the other, slipping it out when we reached the bedroom door. Then, holding me there with a fingertip, she said, When I brush the mistress hair it falls out in hunks.

She sick? I said.

Worse, said Barbary. She’s lost.

Presently the boy let off a moan and the slave brought us both into the room where I had lain first with my wife in that time when all things were possible, but now the spices and perfumes were faded on the air after being shut up for a month or more, and the sheets, when the Negroe turned them down, gave off the smell of mold and were cold and furry to my touch.

I wouldn’t have told you she was lost if you weren’t the preacher, she said.

As you see, there’s not much I can do.

Because you blind, she said.

I eased onto the bed, dust swarming at my nostrils. The boy was curling into the pillows; perhaps the memory of his mother’s scent, mixed in somehow with the grime and disuse, but more likely the leavings of more recent tenants—the brow-sweat of the one who’d plotted Aliza’s death and those who’d knocked the notion into her.

Barbary said, Let’s have all that nonsense off before you lay your head.

What she meant was my cures. My condition had become the chief feature of our stops along the way; every farmer towing carts of manure-caked produce, every wizened crone, every rich man with his retinue of slaves, all proffered cures for blindness—some of which even Red Kate had never heard of. I was uncaring, and by-the-by they’d been applied—chickweed and bay leaf in compress, vials of water draped about my neck, a knotted crown of possums’ tails—applied and endured only to be drawn from me piecemeal by Barbary, clucking derision as she held the warm bulb of the lamp close that she might better see.

I suppose you know a cure too, I said.

Miss Kate knows cures. Used to doctor all the girls.

She only did the plaster, I said.

I cried when you took her, Barbary said. I knew, right then, all the good was gone and things would be sorry from then on out.

I didn’t know you were there.

Course you didn’t. You weren’t supposed to. Barbary went about the room, found the wash-basin and tray, clattering the empty china. She said, Nigger’s a ghost. Can’t be seen unless something else’s gone wrong. . . . I’ll bring back the basin.

When she’d gone, I reached round the underside of the bed for the pot and, lifting it, found that the thing was filled, its holdings hardened but heavy. I threw the pot down and put my head to the pillow, which didn’t smell at all like killer’s sweat but the sopping feathers of scalded fowl before the pluck, and I pulled my son close to me; and when Barbary returned, she took the pot up with a cuss, saying, Damn, devil, shit. I cleaned this out before I closed the room. I know it.

I snorted as Barbary went to the door. There came the slave’s voice again: Lost, lost her way.

And I thought, Dear God, who among us hasn’t?

I’d never spoken so much with a black, but it went that in the gathering of dark days to weeks old Barbary became my eyes and company. I could hardly stand the others: not Reuben in his talk of Smith and Washington, nor Samuel always either in dog-trot at his brother’s heels or cooling the fears of the widow Randolph. Their daily lives were mysteries to me, for I was untethered from the sun’s rise and fall and slept during the day and was awake most nights. Barbary, it seemed, never slept. She said she was too old for it.

Red Kate wandered through the trappings of her former life, asking where things were as though she didn’t know. She had, in her kindness, brought my letters from Colonel Burr. I would teach her the peculiars of our cipher—happy nights of code and symbol, when I’d stand behind my wife and hold her hand, which itself held the pen, and move it for her so that she would learn to make the proper marks herself. So she became complicit in the enterprise, another agent of what would later be misknown as a grand and far-reaching conspiracy of empire. Lovingly she’d read me Burr’s old letters, or take down notes for the messages I planned soon to send. We worked against my brothers even as we shared a roof, all of us paired-off in that mad land-bound ark. And Red Kate did seem to find joy in our nib-scratch sessions and whispered talk of map-lines and the movements of men into foreign countries. She was with me above all else, in the way that pairing-off makes conspirators of man and woman in the union of their hopes. And ours were the coming army of Colonel Burr and the war meant to unify the continent by rending it at the seams of its invisible borders. Moreover she’d taken on my growing hatred for my brothers—chiefly Reuben, who never really was, and Samuel for his doggish acquiescence—and would be glad to see them fail in their designs and be rid of the pair.

Red Kate twitched happily with plans, and sometimes, in our symbol-scribble sessions, she would grow hasty in her words.

We have the money, she said. Letters of credit good in all the country. We can quit this house at any time and set ourselves up far, far away.

Where can I go like this? I said.

Do I have to take that little Bible from your pocket and read you about all the great blind prophets?

All cases of charity. Only fit to be healed by greater prophets. And I don’t see many of that kind about.

You may yet see, she said. Not the right eye—it’s shriveled as a ground-fallen grape. But the left I think may just be clouded by sympathy for its fellow.

That’s a resource hard to come by these days, I said.

O? said my wife. Pitying, are we? Then let me show you some sympathy, love.

We’d have to turn the boy out.

Red Kate coughed, quick and sharp. Well, then let’s get on together with the writing.

Right, I said. And we stay because the colonel will be passing through Natchez on his way down with the army. We’ll be here to hail his entrance, having done right by him.

The first order of the letter was to warn the great man of Reuben’s intentions, that he would soon be heading north to give the president a personal forewarning and, as I’d gathered overhearing snatches of his drunken late night talk with Samuel, that he’d take up gladly a federal commission and drum a force in Pinckneyville to repel Burr’s invaders, naturally in exchange for a monetary settlement with Senator Smith.