The Blood of Heaven (49 page)

Are you that afraid of me, Aliza? I said.

Her hand was at her side again; her eyes cut a vicious jag to take me in. I’ve known things, she said, that would make you blow away like a cloud of fucking dust, little preacher. But I do feel the blade twisting in me day-by-day. Not just in me, but in Reuben and in Samuel. And yours is the hand that holds it.

My pair of broad blades, sequestered amongst the pistols, weighed heavy at my chest. One swing and her head would be on the floor. But I walked away, and passing Polly on the stairs, she standing there bewildered and agape, I said to her that I was glad to hear her man was safe. Then on and up, to roust Red Kate and make ready. Our few belongings were trundled onto the porch by slaves, my Copperhead striding downstairs past the wisps of the two women, carrying in her arms, like some exotic creature which glared and bobbed its head, our son, who yelped and covered his eyes when he was first brought outside. I left them there, went and paid a runner to go and hire a carriage, beside which I would ride, aching with freedom, on our way to the hill-top town—there to take my seat briefly at the table, the better to kick off its legs.

Devilments and Conjures

Chandeliers glowed above Condordia’s ballroom, where companies of guests were twirling and others lined the punch-bowls and the tables set with oysters, and still others, arguing, slung wine through air sifted with wig-powder and cigar smoke—all of them feigning lordly indifference to General Wilkinson, in whose name the fete was held by the governor of the Mississippi Territory, Cowles Mead.

Damned, sir, if you didn’t move fast, said Stephen White. Three weeks of business and you’re up on the hill. Two nights on the hill and you’re in the governor’s mansion.

My agent grinned at me; he’d been the one to secure my entrance to the fete, usher me past the scowling slaves at the front door, through people casting eyes at my get-up, and into the party itself, where he pointed out the risible and the serious, distinguished cotton-man from governor. The general stood off to a corner, more decked with braids, brass, and jewels than when I’d seen him the other morning, receiving what comers made it past his guard of sublieutenants and aides.

The next step, I’d wager, is Washington, White laughed.

I was thinking more Baton Rouge, I said.

How’s that? asked Stephen White, who then went on to try and explain his joke.

I let him, thinking: You just worry on the money, Stephen, and I shall put it to use.

The real money, as Stephen called it, would be forthcoming; we’d only have to wait. These weeks had been shouldering out the planters’ men sent to auction, or cornering off small but sizable fractions of Kentucky flour shipped downriver, undercutting cask-by-cask the respectable buyers until we could set the market price, send a gang of boys down to the docks and disrupt the other shipments. When he told me of this, I could see Captain Finch snorting and cussing, waving his blade as his barge was boarded by swarms of filthy youngsters, overturning the goods and upsetting his trade.

In the first week we’d hit upon the notion of buying up indigo niggers and renting them to the government as workers hacking out the new northward road. Proper planters wouldn’t rent their hands out for the federal project, not with harvests soon to come and the money of no great return. It was my idea to go for the indigo slaves, their cost little more than nothing—promises to their masters to secure discounts for their next batch of fresh bodies—and with some tinctures and the small cost of cast-off clothes to replace their own rags dyed that horrible blue, they appeared no worse than overworked cane-cutters. When several died, a few days in, Stephen laid blame on the poor conditions—tentless in the autumn cold!—and the government men were too stiff with federal money to care, so they simply ordered more until we had to impress the granddads and cripples from sugar-growers’ grinding houses.

The afternoon before the ball, I’d drafted out a letter to Abram Horton’s widow, conceding her the remainder of the judgment owed me in exchange for ten of her field-slaves—saving her, I added, a substantial sum, by my agent’s reckoning, and advising her that there was no need to bring Justice Baker in on an act of kindness. In two weeks I would receive her letter, feminine scribble flourishing with gratefulness; she would agree to make no mention to the justice, and was glad to put the matter at an end—for her husband’s wrong-headed actions had cost her so much already. Consider them, she wrote, on their way and ready for my uses.

She must’ve had some inkling as to what those uses were, or at least the slaves did, for when they arrived in Natchez near the end of October—after Wilkinson had departed for his stand-off with the Pukes, and Colonel Burr stood in a Kentucky courtroom against the accusation of treason—they were much afraid, clucking and shivering in the cart which had borne them up from Pinckneyville. I would stand there, Stephen and the indigo man’s agent beside me, and look closely upon the black faces for a hint or feature of those that attacked me in my house. But it was that they all appeared alike, undistinguished by grace or sin. By then I was far-gone on my progress of becoming a gentleman of the South, gazing pitiless upon dark faces wracked with fear. I would ask no questions, prod them not for knowledge of deeds now a year past and into which they’d been led by their former master, dumbly obedient; I would no more have asked a horse why it stepped on my boot. Justice Baker’s words stole into my mind, but were gnawed back by my own: But neither would I miss the chance to take the offending beast out back and bludgeon it to death behind the barn. The indigo agent, taking stock of them and slipping the bill of sale into his coat of striking blue, would smilingly say, These ones here may last two seasons, by God!

Women fluttered by in loose, silken dresses—not of the stiff, bedizened, and brightly colored kind favored by the ladies under the hill, but pale, fragile, and thin. They wore their gowns like funeral shrouds, their hair braided and battened down close to their skulls by Roman garlands; and I wondered how Red Kate would’ve burnt among them, a vanguard of the barbarians somehow slipped among the marbles and white columns to unsettle ghostly ladies delicately fingering the foam from their punch and flicking it to the floor.

My wife was in our rooms at the hotel. She wouldn’t trust a slave to watch the boy, though I’d offered to pick a worthy one up. Trust comes with time, she said, and I’m not giving my child to the watch of some nigger-woman I’ve known but for an afternoon. She’d said this while swallowed in a flowery chair, watching the boy as he played with his new lead soldiers, which I’d bought him to ease his discomfort with moving, to see that he overturned none of the delicates and gilt-edged finery scattered about our new home, situated nicely on the uppermost floor of a grand house on the square, a few minutes’ walk to the offices of Stephen White and the ride out of town to the mansions and plantations not long enough for the smell of horse-sweat to set on your clothes. When she wasn’t looking, the boy would snatch up a dragoon or two and suck upon their heads.

There we are, said Stephen White, pointing to an older man who was limping towards the general’s retinue. My sometime employer, Master Isaac Briggs. Let’s see how he acquits himself.

I could thank him for his help on the road contract, I said.

That you could, White said. But he’ll smart at the mention of slaves, the Quaker snit. He owns none himself, for it’s a sin, you see—but damned if he won’t use them to clear road.

So we headed across the dance-floor, catching hems and throwing dancers out of step, until we came to where Wilkinson and his men stood, having parted to receive the surveyor general. Stephen stepped aside to let me make the breach. A flash of recognition on Wilkinson’s red face when I approached, but it appeared this Briggs had engaged him in an argument, and he acknowledged me only with his glass, which was near empty. The old man held in his hand a rolled copy of the Mississippi Messenger, no doubt filled with bile over Colonel Burr’s movements, nor sparing the general any ire for his unwillingness to engage the Pukes. By the bristling of his aides, it seemed the man had accused him outright of treason.

But General Wilkinson was smiling, buoyant-seeming. He drained the last of his glass and said, Strange, isn’t it, friend Briggs, that I, a Spanish officer, am now on my way to fight my employers should they not retire to their borders?

Stephen White took Briggs by the arm and led him off like a doddering uncle. I could hear the
thees
and
thous
trailing off as I shook the general’s hand.

The younger Kemper, then, he said, though not the lesser, I’d wager. I was talking to your brother in New Orleans while you were the one thrashing about against my supposed employers in West Florida.

You’re among the first to get it right, I said. You and Colonel Burr.

I am always right by the facts. Facts are my weapons beyond shot and steel. The fact being, Mr. Kemper, that I took ten thousand from the Spaniards, though they owed me upwards of forty.

He’d whispered this last bit, leaning in to give it, wafting Madeira my way.

Perhaps, I said, you may call in the measure owed you once we’re in Mexico.

I can’t deny that I myself see the prospect of such a happy accident occurring—should the Spanish overstep.

Haven’t they already? I said.

They are on thin ground, he said. A wrong move and the surface crumbles and they will be consumed.

I hope to see it.

The aides had closed us off in a cordon, to let the general speak of matters best unheard by other guests. He waved his empty glass to one and the fellow scurried off to fill it. Meanwhile the general withdrew from his coat-pocket a silver flask, turned it up, chins bobbing as he drained it.

I leave in the morning, he said, to meet General Cushing in Natchitoches.

Then it’s coming, I said, eagerness in my voice. They’ll have to try and face you.

Perhaps, said Wilkinson. Or they may retire back to their own borders.

But you can’t allow that, I said.

Wilkinson tapped at his flask, the silver ringing hollow. I can’t?

If the Spanish retreat, we have no grounds for West Florida.

The general shook his head. West Florida is a pittance. You must understand that.

That’s not what Colonel Burr thinks. He’ll be most upset to hear you’re wavering.

Ah, and you presume to know what that man thinks? The general now took on a fatherly air, saying, Mister Kemper, you know nothing of Aaron Burr. And, it seems, you know even less of how little you or West Florida matter in the scheme of things. Burr you’ll never learn, but you can learn your place.

I know he’ll have your ass before it’s through.

We were locked in a stare when the aide returned with the wine, brushing past me to place it in the general’s paw, lean in, and whisper in his ear. Finished with his message, the aide withdrew and the general downed the glassful. Smacking and with a look of distaste my way, he said, Keep well, Mister Kemper. I’m afraid we must part. I’ve just been told that I must go and watch my wife give up the ghost. . . . Remember my advice.

I made to stop him, but he pitched his glass aside and, surrounded by his guard, strode out onto the dance-floor and in martial shout announced his departure, which was met by only perfunctory cheers and salutes.

His wife wouldn’t die, not that night, but it was, I judged, a fair way to make an exit. Stephen White found me and was telling how Governor Mead had been calling Wilkinson a blackguard up and down the hall, but I was shuttered to his chatter, thinking instead of the rotten admonition offered in the general’s words: know your place; it’s other hands that move the pieces—you just polish the board.

Fine enough, I thought. Let him fail or try his hand at power and he’ll soon see who holds the western states and their people in his sway. For Burr a crown, for the general a gibbet. Should the fat man flinch, I’d be the one to set up the cry.

But there it was again, his voice and the voice of all fathers, saying, Boy, know your place.

The Errand-Boy

Sam Swartwout chewed a chicken leg, working a beard of grease as he talked.

Two thousand miles in two months of travel, he said, all to miss the general again. Pick up and go, Sam, that’s all there is to it. But, by God, Colonel Burr will be in New Orleans and the war at terminus before I find the fat man.

We were in a tavern off the square, him picking clean the bones and me with an untouched glass of whiskey, observing this creature not much younger than myself, who’d appeared that afternoon in the fore-room of my hotel, sole-worn shoe crossed at his knee, packets and bags scattered round about him on the floor, the slaves eyeing him warily from their posts. I saw him there as I entered from my day at the markets. When he stood and said he’d been looking for me, I might’ve drawn my pistol and shot him, but he skittered immediately into telling of his service to Colonel Burr, how he’d been sent to give a special message from the great man to General Wilkinson. He’d been given my name as one of his contacts, should his journey take him to Natchez. And it had, by the long route. First up to St. Louis, so he said, but the general had quit the place; then on down the river, hearing he’d been headed first for Natchez to put up his consumptive wife. No luck here, and so he found himself with the prospect of still another journey, toting letters growing older by the day. And if any man doubted his story, the smell of the road upon him told the truth. It stood out even among the piss-tang of the horseflesh dealers and quarter-race men seated about us.