The Blood of Heaven (31 page)

We’ll go back and charge, I said, and was drawing the buss from my saddle when Samuel put his hand out to stop me. He was shot through the right shoulder and another had grazed his forehead. His rifle was gone, and there still came the clatter and screaming from the fray ahead.

From the left-hand side and out the woods came a group of the Pinckneyville men and the Bradford boys.

It’s worse, said one.

And so we hied further down the road, until the sounds of battle died down; and I saw then the wild look in the eyes of the Bradfords, and that their father was gone. Samuel was asking all who was taken or killed and the answers varied. His face had gone full gray now and I wondered briefly if he wasn’t shot worse.

How many are missing? he said.

Let’s go hit them now, I said.

Wait, said Samuel, leaning low upon his horse.

Wait? said one Bradford.

They got our pa, said the other.

Fuck that old nit, said a Bradford. I want my pa back!

We can’t, said Samuel. We got to move.

He kicked into his horse and headed away from us and the dying skirmish. And so it went that we followed and my brother formed his plan on the fly. We think we’re in retreat, he shouted to me when I rode up and was pacing him. But really, said my brother, we’re on our way towards win.

Pintado’ll take them to Baton Rouge, he called out so that all could hear. We’re between him and his house, so we burn the God-damned thing.

But what about Pa? a Bradford cried.

They took ours, Samuel said. We’ll make them pay.

At a tenant-house on the outskirts of Pintado’s tract, we kicked in the door and took the lamps for their oil and broke the legs from the table where the family sat at dinner, watching us in terror, and we made torches of them and rode across the fields of cotton to where Pintado’s slaves were slowly filing out onto the road to their houses. Some shrieked and ran but others kept walking with their hands hanging at their sides or just looked at us. Many we ran off the road and I believe Arthur Cobb caught one across the back of the head with his torch. Sparks flew and we jumped the fence and rode down Pintado’s garden and were in the yard, circling the place and seeing where we’d lay the blaze. Samuel, Ransom, Crabbe, and Cobb took the big house, and I rode to the cotton-house with the Pinckneyville men and the Bradfords. There we set our torches to the piles of white and the gin, and everywhere went niggers screaming about fire.

Samuel and the others were beating back a horde of them when we returned to the big house. Cobb threw his torch through a downstairs window but some house-slaves inside had already put the blaze out. My brother tossed his onto the roof and it took in a corner. The cotton-house was engulfed and even still the niggers were fighting to work the water-pump and draw buckets from the well.

Damn it! I screamed to them. Come on and be free! Let the bastard’s house burn!

But the niggers were now slinging buckets of water at the roof, and every time you knocked one down another took his place and pitched a stream.

O for Christ’s sake, cried my brother.

I rode through the slaves, knocking at them with my buss. In the name of God, don’t any of you want to be free?

This is shit, Sam, said Arthur Cobb.

Won’t be shit long before that fire takes, said Ransom O’Neil.

But it didn’t. And it became evident in the chaos that we’d either stay there and wait for one of the niggers, who’d surely gone for help, to return with the militia, or we’d cut out, abandon the ride for Baton Rouge, and regroup across the border. Before we left, I saw Pintado’s black-clad wife and daughters streaming out the front of the house like a line of crows, jabbering in Spanish. So we beat back across the fields and took to the north and the woods, hacking our way through the wilderness so as to avoid any further strikes against us. The Bradfords cussed and pouted all the way back. And I couldn’t blame them for it, but did grow tired of their voices. Samuel now rode up ahead, silent, never giving any hint that his arm must have been throbbing or that he was even touched with pain. Polly Randolph doctored him that night as the others who’d escaped rode into Pinckneyville and gave us the butcher’s bill: six captured and carted off to the capital.

There would be no more charges, no more fires. Take prisoners—a few alcaldes—and bring them to Baton Rouge, where we would drag the commandant from his house and use him as the chip to secure the surrender of the fort. In truth the plan was mine—less bluster and boldness, more secret and swift. We chose our quarry and in the following days our men made night ventures into the country, and judged finally when Pintado and Stirling would be at their homes and unprotected.

It was Ransom and Arthur Cobb who brought the news, and along with them were ten men of the West Florida country, youngsters no older than O’Neil. I was shocked at the sight and bore some thoughts of outraged fathers. Samuel, for his part, greeted them with cries of joy.

Arthur Cobb dismounted and stood with his hands on his hips as his recruits got down and introduced themselves.

These boys, he said, taking one around the shoulder, all they had to do was hear what evil the Pukes are commencing in Baton Rouge tomorrow night, and they came right along.

That’s right, said one. We won’t stand for it.

And which evil is that, Arthur? Samuel asked.

Well, the execution of the forty prisoners, of course! Cobb said, betraying his slyness with a smile to Samuel.

Of course, said Samuel. Their outrages won’t go unpunished—will they, boys?

The boys were howling hell no and how they’d save those poor wretches down in Baton Rouge from torture and the rope.

See, said Samuel to the wild-eyed entrancement of the recruits, it’s not just them the Pukes mean to hang, but forty more men in the districts are set to be captured and killed.

One of the Bradfords was beside me and I had to take his arm and pull him aside to tell him it was a lie.

Then nobody’s to be hung? he said.

It’s just a way to drum up business, I said.

But the rest isn’t lies, is it? About taking the country and getting our pa back?

No, son, I said. The rest is God’s Own Truth.

Though he was only four or five years younger than me, Bradford seemed a stripling and I an old heaper of lies. But I knew even then that lies are the mortar in the foundations of revolution. You have enough iniquity and right to raise the structure up, but you need something more so that it holds fast against the winds of human frailty. I left Bradford, telling him that he could tell his brother that there’d be no executions of anyone else. He called me
sir
and said he’d justify my confidence.

Meanwhile, Red Kate tended to our son; and when he’d exhausted his word and his arms grew tired from their endless flapping and pointing, trying to form speech out of air, she would put him to bed and fix a chair before the door, then go to the Randolphs’ house, where she and Polly had begun a project of sewing. I’d see her make the walk between the houses from where I sat at the open fire in the yard among the other men, drawing lines and arrows with sticks in the dirt and using pine cones and bent mule shoes as marks for towns and plantations. I’d look up from our little war in the dirt and see my wife, and also the face of my son pressed to the window of our bedroom, lit by the lamp which she left burning for him, and which one night he put to the wall and, spilling oil, set fire to the room where he was kept, so that Ransom, who first saw the smoke, had to break the window and dive into the clouds of black and emerge with the boy, alive and staring vacantly, and put him in my arms before he went back with Crabbe and others to beat the fire down. Red Kate had come from the Randolphs’ house to us, and as I held my son it was that I thought she’d snatch him up and press him to her breast, but when she reached out for the boy her fingers took him by the face and she squeezed a handful of lead balls from his mouth.

I felt like dropping him, but his weight was like no weight at all, and I bundled my son tighter and whispered to him prayers for his mind to be cleared of the demons which fogged it. And my Copperhead did snatch him up then and stormed back to the Randolphs’ house, where she tied him to her rocking chair and resumed stitching with Polly.

Samuel came to me and we stood sharing a bottle of whiskey in the yard, amidst the excitement of the fire dying down and the men laughing about the wildness of children.

It’s a punishment for not serving well enough, I said. God shows His displeasure this way.

We’ll be doing right by Him soon, said Samuel.

I hope, I said.

We’ll make it so, my brother said. Reuben says that the garrison from Pointe Coupee is awaiting the news of our strike at Baton Rouge. When they get it, we’ll have the American army crossing the river.

I listened to him, but heard Reuben’s voice behind his own, that deep need to please the brother whose absence plagued him as a judgment not unlike the Lord’s upon my son.

I’d lately given up on Reuben’s letters and the intrigues of government, and took whatever news they contained third-hand from Samuel. The boys had resumed their places by the fire and I saw their boots stamp out the marks and scratches of the battle plans I’d made. Later in the night, I went to find my wife and tried to lay with her in the smoke-stinking bedroom, but she rolled over, facing the wall where our son had put his fire and where the burn had left a wide black swath in the shape of a cowled man, bundled herself in the soot-streaked sheets, and said to the figure burnt into the wall that there’d be no love until we’d won and she was back in her good house in Bayou Sara. I left her and the smell of smoke, the black shape she’d given her words, and went out into the house where our son was laying on a pillow, tethered by the ankle to one of the small cannons. I undid his leash and slept that night with him in my arms. And it seemed a dream that in the early morning there was a voice in my ear, a small rasp telling me over a mouthful of shot the details of our coming victory. But when I opened my eyes I found my son curled into the crook of my arm and all he gave off was breaths smelling faintly of lead. I fell asleep again and Red Kate woke us both with a kiss a-piece, and her wrath seemed somewhat cooled. I spent the day cleaning guns and readying the horses for the ride, which, with the news that Pintado had retired to his house and Kneeland to his also and the militia was strung out in patrols, was to commence that evening.

I saw nothing of my wife or son and was back to the dirt with my twigs and exhorting the boys, who now were knapping their flints and boxing them, some taking turns slapping each other across faces which burst forth with streams of whiskey, others jumping through the fire in the yard, whooping. A Pinckneyville man had out a mandolin and was playing The King of the Cannibal Islands, but no one could keep up the tune. Randolph came to see the preparations, and he was chided for not joining in the ride. I didn’t join the gibing for I knew even then that the authors of declarations and constitutions rarely took up arms, preferring victories in papers. And Samuel was there giving an oration on the coming enterprise, invoking the name of his Reuben like a talisman to men who’d mostly never met him. It was then, when we were at the pitch of fury and ready to saddle and strike, that the women came from Randolph’s house and the boys parted for them. They carried between them an unfurled flag, which had been the object of their stitching. It was of three blue and white stripes and in the left-hand corner a field of red set with a pair of gold stars, one for me and one for Samuel, and beneath the stars were stitched the words
Thy Will Be Done
.

Samuel turned to me. Why’s there no star for Reuben?

Red Kate, smiling her freckles into a bunch and looking square into my eyes, also carried our son half-hidden by the banner. I went and gave a stroke to where I thought his head would be.

Let him stitch his own, I said, when he shows up.

My brother said no more as Crabbe appeared with a broomstick and the flag was lashed to it; lots were cast for who would bear it, and finally Ransom won the honor and as we all mounted in the dying light, he planted one end of the stick in his stirrup and I gave a prayer for victory, and the Bradfords gave one for their father, and Arthur Cobb gave one for the damnation of the Pukes, and Randolph gave one for freedom, and my wife mouthed love while our son gave the only word he knew, and Samuel, biting back on anger, finished them all, giving the order to ride as the moon shot up above the trees and the air was riven with the noise of our departure.

The Way to Glory

We stopped at the road before Stirling’s plantation and I followed on foot behind one of the new Pinckneyville men, who went to the door and told the slave who answered that he had a friend dying down the way and he’d been told there was a man here who could write a will. I struggled not to laugh, crouched below the porch-steps, when Stirling appeared and took the matter as grave and hurried down in his nightclothes after the man.

You’d have signed the will over to yourself, I said, rising as he came to the last step, bringing the butt of my gun across Stirling’s face.

The alcalde toppled and fell to the ground. But I’d given him no credit for strength and he was soon afoot again and grappling with me. He had me by the throat and was cussing in his brogue until I reared back and put my forehead into his teeth. His nose had burst and he sat now with his hands fingering the split. I towed Stirling by the scruff to where the others waited with rope and bound his hands and set him up on the saddle behind the man who’d told him about his dying friend.