The Blood of Heaven (53 page)

Heading to the markets, I saw the litter pass, the grim procession, the fluttering of blood-spattered cloth, the shadowy figure within, delicately coughing. I went on to my work, and at the pens a cotton-man was talking of Mead’s measure, how he considered Wilkinson to be as equal a conspirator as Burr. Designs and plans grew indistinct and muddled in the eyes of onlookers, of which, I hated to admit, I was a member—a follower at best, and all that remained was out of my hands. The tavern talk was now confusion: not Mexico but New Orleans, they said. But wasn’t Burr on trial? No, no, Wilkinson’s move was a feint. But couldn’t New Orleans be still another? Convince the Spanish that Burr seeks to dissolve the Union, but all the while he’s aiming for Mexico? The drinkers on the hill-top talked this way, privy to knowledge quite different, I imagined, from the people under the hill. And I hoped that if the horsed and booted spoke of failure—another month, they jeered, and he’ll be in a cell—then the others, whose news came from river mud and knuckle-busted lips, would speak of success.

And I should’ve felt at home among the idiots and the failed fouled remnant of the once-great man who presently sat beside me on a log, stirring at the fire with a stick, a pelt of thick fur worn at his shoulders, a wolf’s hide. His clothes, once a fine suit, were now frayed and patched; his high riding-boots, which he propped on the stones before the fire to warm, had been recobbled with hack-wood heels and what looked to be buckskin sole.

Five years? Morrel said.

That’s right.

And now the prodigal’s returned, but to the wrong father. He looked about him, waved his hands to encompass the surroundings, the many scattered holes where he’d buried the fruits of his robberies, now long disinterred, saying, And what do you think of it?

I thought you were dead, I said.

Did you? No reason why you shouldn’t, I suppose. Those militia, they tried to crucify me. They tried to hang me from a tree and cut open my bowels. They tried to paint me with tar. But the cross broke before they could nail me down, the limb snapped from off the tree, the tar turned to stone in its kettle. I escaped.

So did Crabbe, I said. Do you remember him?

I remember everything, he said. I’ve got nothing else but to remember.

But he died later, in fighting.

Your war of rebellion—I know it well. Morrel coughed into his hand, struggled to regain his breath. A handbill, one of your proclamations, blew in on a northward wind and came sailing down from the treetops. Landed right over there. I read it, saw your name. In such ways the Lord has kept me apprised. . . . I’d have it still, but I’m afraid we used it for kindling that winter.

You’ve been here that long?

I tried my hand in Mobile, he said, in New Orleans. But, son, I came to know that when God tells you that you’ve failed in His eyes, that you’re through and bereft of His love, then you quit from your present path and try to regain. And so I removed myself, like the prophets of old, to the wilderness. I’ve made friends by and by; they’re drawn to me, it seems.

I meant for none of it.

Vanity, he said—to think that you’re the cause. Son, you didn’t know me for a year, and you think that you’re reason for my ruination? And who says I’m ruined anyhow. My black children haven’t forsaken me—they pass this way when they escape and I give them shelter. And I have my Blessed. So I’m loved, taken care of.

In the summer, I said, some men rode on my house. Some of them were harelipped. I thought you’d sent them.

The foolish man searches for earthly reasons, causes; he shouts to his fellows for blame; but the wise man knows it’s all because of God and simply bows his head. . . . I thought you’d have come further than this. You should’ve been the greatest preacher in the land. But I suppose there’s still time.

I’ve long given it up.

And yet you look for causes in the world of men, even when your answer comes easy from your own lips. Forsake the gift He’s given you, and you shall be forsaken of Him. I knew it that night when you followed after those Kempers like a dog, tail-tucked and willing. You looked earthward when your eyes should’ve been to Heaven. . . . God, how you sounded when you preached. I was wicked then, enraptured of money and earthly things, but you—when I heard you preach, the Lord’s voice was in my ear, and do you know what He said? He said, Morrel, this boy is sent like a Christ. To save the land. To prepare it for the great return. And I knew then that you’d be with me only briefly—though not that you’d shut away the Gospel from your heart. When will Our Savior come down from Heaven if the men who’d speed his return all fall away?

That’s not my job, I said.

And what is?

I’ve been making speculations at the flesh-markets.

I know that path. The lure of our great commodity: the Negroe. The only way a man without standing can make his way in this world. Morrel snatched a fist at his temple, trapping a thought. And no doubt you’re waiting for another revolution, he said.

I gave a bitter smile.

You have it in your heart, as did I. I waited all my life for my black children to rise up behind me and tear down their masters’ houses. They haven’t yet, and still I wait. Vanity; the true revolution is the return of Our Lord and Savior.

Then why aren’t you out among the people? Why aren’t you preparing the way?

I was given my chance. I turned from the path.

That’s my answer to you, I said.

You’re too damned young to say it. Maybe if you step back on the path, then the Lord will quit trying you.

What do you know about that?

I know that I didn’t, he said. And I’ve been made to suffer for my vanity. And I know you suffer, too. I remember how in your sermons you’d talk about the drowned girl, back in the plains, how you’d put a baby in her that died. And now you’ve drowned another—that’s what brings you here.

I’ve drowned nobody, I said. I had a son. He died last month.

Morrel sucked his cheeks to emptier hollows, stared into the fire, nodding. I see souls rising up in shafts of light, he said. I look up at nights, like this one, and I see them shoot skywards from the city. I hear their voices in low chorus. They go to Judgment. I heard your boy’s voice, singing as he rose, his light a thin scribble, but up and up it went. I heard it and I knew.

You heard shit, I said. You’re telling nothing.

Well, he said, that’s not why you came here anyway. Not to hear me talk.

At the far edge of the fire a pair of the Blessed were fighting, groaning and bleating at each other and venturing slaps that smacked dully on each other’s heads. Morrel turned and admonished them, like a gentle father, knowing and without anger: Be silent. Hush. You are the Blessed and most beloved of God, so be at peace.

At the sound of his voice the pair of them stopped and sank to the ground, looking about bewildered, having forgotten what it was they’d been fighting for. And while the Reverend Morrel was turned, I drew out one of my pistols and leveled it at him. And he must’ve heard me working at my bandolier, for when he turned back to me he said not a word, just shut his eyes. His fingers, dented where his rings had been, went scratching out of habit at his chest for where the fine jeweled cross had hung in better days. He knew why I’d come: to strike at something, no matter how useless, how hollow, it was. And even if I denied it then in my wicked heart, the Reverend Morrel knew that I could not resist being the Lord’s mechanism, and would do His Will.

I stood and came round behind him, thumbing back the hammer. I shot his head into the fire, where it seethed and hissed for a moment as the flames turned black. The pair of Blessed were crying out, their faces looking upwards as though they too could see the light he’d spoken of. Morrel’s body fell towards me and I stepped back, giving room for his soul to rise.

Nativity

Christmas nearing, a constant insult: the white sugar-dusted cakes baked into the shapes of swaddled baby Christs, a mockery piled in the shop-windows beside short-bread Marys and Josephs, attendant kings and beasts.

The Natchez people went about their days shaking heads at the confusion of the papers and the government as to who the enemy was and from whence he was coming. Like the days of the Purchase, I heard one saying, when everybody was fearing the French, the Spanish, the Federals, the British! Next they’ll say Burr’s in league with Bonaparte. Or Wilkinson’s sent a letter guaranteeing him the port. All three a gaggle of little emperors!

Mead’s refusal of troops had lent the populace a hearty contempt for Wilkinson and the tyranny he presently exercised in New Orleans. In under a month he’d imprisoned most of the Association, sent them to a ship anchored in the river, where they were clapped in irons. Judge Workman, who’d granted them a writ of habeas corpus, was sent to join their shackled company along with Lewis Kerr, the banker. Daniel Clark only escaped a similar fate by virtue of his being in Washington at the time, in his first session of congress, the bitter winter having no doubt bled the flushed health of the Mexican sun from his face. Similarly I considered the imprisoned: a fine troupe of actors, in the chill of the hold performing a spot-composed play by Workman, while Kerr counted their biscuits and pretended they were silver.

Earliest among the arrested was Sam Swartwout. In the first week of December, before the scope of Wilkinson’s awful power was full-known, he’d passed once more through Natchez with a man named John Adair—evidently the leader of the Kentucky faction—on their way, so they said, to New Orleans, where they intended to convince the general to negotiate a handover of the city to Colonel Burr. They’d stayed at my hotel for a night, prattling hopes at dinner, Swartwout counting his miles. The man, Adair, told how Burr had beaten the charges in Kentucky, and was presently assembling the force at the mouth of the Cumberland.

It’s coming close, he said. The time is nigh.

Wilkinson will have none of it, I said. He’s made his choice.

We’ll see how our offer suits him, said Swartwout. He’s an agreeable man, and he’s done the work of taking the city for us.

He’s been screaming alarm about Burr all over the territory, I said.

Screaming to cover your ass is one thing, said Swartwout. Let’s see how he acts when we’ve made him the new offer.

Later I would hear that, in his first week of occupation, General Wilkinson had sent a letter to the viceroy of Mexico: a bill, for thirty thousand dollars, for services rendered in defending the lands of His Catholic Majesty. I’m sure that he was paid. As for Swartwout, he’d have many miles yet to cover once Wilkinson had his hotel in New Orleans secured by two hundred soldiers, and he, along with Adair, was dragged off for the prison-ships and on to Washington to stand trial for treason.

We must try, Swartwout had said as I was leaving, wishing luck but knowing there’d be none, going to my hotel where Red Kate had shut up the bedroom, never to be used again. We slept on a mattress in the sitting room; and as the month progressed, in those nights, while my wife mumbled in her sleep, pulling pillows to her chest, and I numbered the ever-growing tally of arrests, I could hear above it all Reuben’s voice, low, boastful, and assured, saying he was right.

Much of the word out of New Orleans I heard from Stephen White, lately returned. Mid-December he’d arrived back in Natchez, happily bearing the weight of our enterprise high upon his shoulders. As it goes with New Orleans, his time there had been a whirl: from the soggy and bitten sailors’ rooms to the whorehouse cloisters of their captains, from the card-tables of the slave pen guards, who kept their watches in towers above the massive brick-and-iron gaols which held the slaves awaiting market, to the French hotels of those who owned the pens. On his first day he’d witnessed a newspaper editor being dragged out from his offices by a cordon of guards, and on his last day General Wilkinson’s speech to the Chamber of Commerce. White sat among the men of business, now surely feeling invested among them with the success of his dealings, and listened to the general rail and shout, stomp his spurs and clatter his scabbard to the lectern, saying, Eight thousand men! Eight thousand of the worst, bloodiest, most barbarous horde since the Vandals sacked Rome are presently forming in secret along the banks of the Ohio, hurrying to meet their leader in Kentucky—a man no close second to Catalan or Caesar—liberate him from the law, and pour downward to our fair Orleans!

The man seated beside White turned to whisper in his ear: And how in hell do you keep eight thousand men a secret?

The general went on, declaiming on the stage, where seated at his right hand was Governor Claiborne, now, as the city merchants told White, cowed by Wilkinson into utter impotence. That same speech saw Wilkinson announce that the city was officially under martial law. A little late to give it a name, said one man of business.

But the details of the city and her preparations for the imagined army were only snippets thrown about White’s talk, which was mostly of our new business. It’s so strange, he said, how you meet people of interest. So it went that Stephen White had been sitting one evening with the guards at a slave pen on Carondelet, playing cards and sharing his flask while outside the niggers were made to dance, when a Frenchman came, a blacksmith who made a measure of his living repairing the iron bars of the gaols. He was there to replace some grating, but the guards held him up, saying, Pierre, Mister White here is always talking after shipping, getting into trade. Does your brother still run ships? The Frenchman smiled and said, Mais yes. What kind of cargo are you wanting? Stephen had tried to be in confidence. A touchy sort, he’d said. Ah, said the Frenchman, and invited him to come round to his shop in the morning, where he told White horror-tales of his escape from St. Domingue—his wife flayed alive before his eyes and despoiled—until his brother, Jean, arrived from the docks.