“Well, what are you waiting for?” said I, ready to meet my maker.
It was only then that I noticed he had failed to cock his piece. I slowly drew mine from my waistband behind. He spoke to me, some gibberish I did not understand. His arm trembled wildly. I aimed my weapon and pulled the trigger. His head snapped back and I felt his warm blood spatter my face. It was the first human being that ever I killed, and though it was an Indian who meant to kill me, I begged God for the mercy of his forgiveness.
I crept forward to the dugout. He lay on his back inside of it, windpipe severed and blood spurting out of the wound with each weakening contraction of his dying heart. Then air escaped his sphincters in the flatulence of death. His pistol lay inches from me. I tried it. It was spent. His only chance had been bluster, and he had failed at it. I crawled around the canoe and turned it on its side while the quarts of his gore trickled out. When I finally managed to drag it out of the canebrake, what a sight greeted my eyes.
The floating palace was afire. Flames leaped from the roof and licked the stately tower. With great effort, I paddled closer to the spectacle.
The blacks had triumphed in their insurrection. Red corpses littered the wharf. Figures emerged from the main gate burdened with plunder—chairs, crystal chandeliers, plumed hats—and commenced loading it on the gundalows. My memory harked back to our day of arrival, when the slaves sat upon the wharf under LeBoeuf’s baton playing Handel’s Water Music! Now, the former conductor’s lifeless head looked down emptily upon pandemonium. A figure of superior size and regal bearing, Othello, strode out of the gate to the cheers of the others. The wind rose again. The flaming tower slowly toppled into the black water of the lake. The palace listed to one side, like a great ship sinking in the ocean.
“Who can control his fate?” Othello cried as the flames roared behind him and his victorious followers danced in the skins of the vanquished. “Here is my journey’s end, here is my butt and very sea-mark of my utmost sail. Do you go back dismay’d? ’Tis a lost fear….”
With a tremendous report, the magazines of Chateau Félicité exploded, rocketing comets of fiery debris high into the lambent, darkling clouds.
“Blow me about in winds!” the blackamoor thundered into the teeth of the storm, while LeBoeuf’s husbanded kegs of powder blew what remained of his empire to splinters. “Roast me in sulphur!”
I paddled away from the hellish spectacle until my strength failed, laying my head against the rough wood of the gunwale. Ahead, the lake narrowed and became the Tennessee River again, tending north toward the Ohio. The sky seemed to shimmer with strange light. As in a dying man’s final rapture, I saw, like a figure of Jove floating serenely amid the swirling clouds, the shining apparition of a man in robes of white buckskin reaching down to me, reaching, reaching…. Then, the descent of night, the seamless dark of oblivion.
12
“Is this heaven?”
A green nimbus of light. Glowing pink center.
“He speaks at last! O, merciful Lord!”
“It is heaven!”
The green, the pink, both verged to resolution. Sun-dappled leaf. Uncle’s face.
“I was certain I’d go to … to the other place. Have you seen him yet, Uncle?”
“Seen whom?”
“Our heavenly father.”
“Bless me, but I haven’t. Not yet.”
“No?” said I. “That’s odd. He appeared to me from on high. He reached down from the clouds and drew me up here. He—”
“Sammy.”
“Uncle…?”
“Be not dismayed. Thou art as yet upon the earth.”
“Do you mean we are not dead?”
Uncle pursed his lips and shook his head.
True, I felt a pang of disappointment. But it quickly fled my mind, replaced by the warm gratitude for being.
“How did I get here?”
“We plucked thee from the river.”
“You and the Woodsman?”
“No. I and….” Uncle turned his gaze over my head. Of course by this time I had determined that I was lying upon the aft deck of our keelboat, Megatherium. Following the line of Uncle’s gaze, who should I spy upon the cabin roof, manning the steering sweep no less, but the dear royal booby, Lou-Lou.
Upon seeing me awake, the feckless boy flew into such a rapture of happiness that it was all Uncle could do to keep him at his station.
“My friend! My friend!” he cried.
“Stay aloft, lad,” Uncle told him. “Steer clear of the bars.”
“Yes, Uncle William,” he replied, gushing with excitement and joy. “I am so happy!”
“How long have I been unconscious?” I asked.
“Two days.”
“Gad!” I tried to raise an arm, but it felt like a leaden sash weight. “Might I sit up, Uncle?”
“By all means. Let me help thee. Careful, Nephew.” He inserted a bearskin twixt my spine and the bulwark. “Can thee eat, Sammy?”
“Eat…?” The mere suggestion set me a’ravening. “I am starving, Uncle.”
Behind him, upon our brazier, sat a kettle. He ladled an aromatic chowder into a wooden bowl and handed it to me. I slurped it in a trice like a sot at a pailful of beer. Much of it dribbled down my chest.
“More!” I gasped, and he obliged. After the second bowl my mind reattained a measure of equanimity. I even paused to examine the firm-textured chunks of white fish that was the concoction’s chief ingredient.
“Yellow mud cat,” Uncle informed me.
“Delicious,” I sighed. “But tell me, Uncle, however did you chance to find me?”
“In the dugout,” he answered. “Out of thy head.”
“Damn me, the dugout!” I exclaimed with a shudder, remembering the maelstrom, the butchery, the blood and fire. “Why did you leave the chateau without me?”
“The Woodsman importuned me, saying ‘The boy is on board! The boy is on board!’ By the time we cast off and I had discovered that ‘the boy’ was Lou-Lou and not thee, the gale prevented our return. We lay some miles below the lake upon this river, waiting, waiting.”
“Did you see the chateau go up in flames?”
He shook his head. “I saw only a yellow glow on the horizon. But I knew all the same. Terrible, terrible,” he snuffled. “Fernand is dead.” This sotto voce so Lou-Lou would not hear.
“I know,” said I, trying to sound sympathetic. “But how did you know?”
“The Woodsman said so.”
“Ah,” said I. “By the by, where is the poor afflicted nimrod?”
“Vanished in a mist the morning after. Just like that,” Uncle snapped his fingers. “Queer the way he comes and goes.”
“I should say,” I could not help but agree. “Uncle, do you think he is God?”
“The Woodsman? God?” he replied scoffingly. “What an idea!”
“I saw him on high in my delirium, looming among the clouds in his white buckskins and skunk hat, like a very titan out of Raphael.”
“A delirium seized me once. ’Twas on our sloop off Belle Isle on the way back from Cape Porcupine. I saw many queer things and mistook them for the face of God. Grinning whales, lights in the sky, skulking krakens. Such is delirium.”
“Perhaps you are right,” said I, still wondering. “But did he say how the insurrection was begun?”
“He said ’twas many months a’brewing.”
“Did he also relate how Yago was plotting to steal both LeBoeuf’s empire and his wife?”
“Aye,” Uncle affirmed. “A shocking scandal.”
“And that they would become King and Queen of Louisiana?”
“Such is ambition. Now ’tis nothing but a heap of cinders. Poor LeBoeuf,” Uncle said, his eyes growing moist. “For all his weaknesses, he was a man of rare gifts. I shall miss him. He might have become another Gallatin, had he but removed back to the civilized states….”
I lacked the heart to dispute with Uncle and call his lost friend a vill
ain. Weariness overcame me again, this time as a warm, benevolent tide in a shallow lagoon, not the oceanic undertow of my former delirium.
“Have you seen any sloths, Uncle?” I murmured.
“Not one,” he shook his head sadly.
“Uncle, when next we meet the Woodsman, let us ask if he would be so kind as to procure for us a specimen of megatherium so that we might go home.”
“Very well, Sammy,” he agreed, humoring me.
“For I wish so dearly to go home,” I added, a lump in my throat and my eyes brimming with salt tears.
“The rivers flow but one way,” he answered firmly but gently. “To the Gulf of Mexico. We must go on. Sleep, my boy.”
I lay me down again and in a little while I was dreaming of the hills above Lloyd’s Neck and the faces of my boyhood comrades.
The next day I awoke in far better fettle and consumed so many catfish for breakfast that I might well have sprouted fins and barbells and dived into the river to become one of them. Lou-Lou, or Louis, as I now addressed him, had adapted to his new surroundings handsomely. He delighted in the change of scene, a pleasure denied him in all his years of captivity. He took very well to the duties of shipboard life and developed a deft hand at the steering sweep for one of such limited experience—so that despite his intellectual faults, it was hard to believe he was a true halfwit. If he sorrowed for his lost “Uncle” Fernand and his former life of ineffable luxury aboard the floating palace, he concealed his feelings admirably. And it was on this hot morning, as we drifted slowly back down the sunny Tennessee River to its confluence with the Ohio, that I sought to acquaint Louis with the circumstances of his birth, his history, and his suzerainty over the dominion of France.
“Do you know who this gentleman is?” I asked him, proffering the miniature portrait that I had taken from his room in the devastated chateau.
“It is my papa,” he avouched without hesitation, and I confess a thrill ran through me to hear him confirm what I had all along suspected. “Is he your papa too?”
“Why do you say that, Louis?”
“Because I had a portrait just like it in my room.”
“This is that same one. I took it.”
“How kind you are to bring it for me, Sammy.”
“Do you know who your papa was?”
Louis knitted his brow in concentration, staring at the little portrait in its gold frame. “He was the husband of my mother, yes?”
“That is correct,” said I. Up on the cabin roof where he took his turn at the steering sweep, Uncle listened with a humorous, skeptical face. “Do you know what was your papa’s position in the world, Louis?”
The smooth-faced boy looked back with bewilderment.
“He was the King of France,” I told him.
“Ah,” Louis said. “I wish that he would own a store like your papa.”
“A store, Louis! All France was his, everyone and everything in it was at his command.”
“Like Chateau Félicité and Uncle Fernand?”
“Bigger! Grander than that by ten thousand times.”
“It must be very lonely to be this king,” Louis said.
“Not a’tall. A king is surrounded by his court, filled with dazzling beauties and brilliant men, all of whom are his friends, so he never lacks company for a moment.”
“Can he have treacle cake whenever he wants it?”
“Treacle cake by the hundredweight and hogsheads of sugarplums to follow. Now, I want you to brace yourself, for I have some unhappy news for you.”
He seized my upper arms and held them tightly. His strength was surprising.
“Your papa is dead.”
He sharply drew in a breath. The color drained from his face.
“Your mama too,” I added.
Tears pooled in his eyes. “I was afraid so,” he confessed at length in choked voice.
“This was many years ago,” I informed him to soften the blow. “Now I have some happy news for you to balance out the sad. When the king is dead, his son becomes the new king. Therefore, you are the King of France, Louis.”
He let go of me. His arms dropped limply to his side as he absorbed the shock.
“I am the King of France?” he echoed timidly.
“You are.”
“May I have some treacle cake, please?”
“Ahem. It is not quite so simple, Louis.”
“O…?”
“Besides, there are some impediments. A general of the army, named Bonaparte, has usurped the King’s power in France. If you wish to reclaim your throne, you would have to raise a large army to dispose of this fellow.”
“The Choctaws?”
“I don’t think they would suffice, Louis.”
He mulled over the matter and wrinkled his nose. “I will stay with you then. Can I be King of France here?”
“For now I suppose you’ll have to. But you must be very careful whom you tell that you are King.”
“To the contrary,” Uncle weighed in from his station above, “they will suspect it more if he says nothing. Let him proclaim to one and all that he is the King of France and no one will believe it.”
“Very well,” said I and shouted into the dark green riverbanks, “Here stands Louis XVII of the House of Bourbon, Lord of the Kingdom of France!”
Louis grinned broadly, delighted with himself and his estate in life.
“May I have some treacle cake now, please?” he asked.
Our plan was to return to the Ohio, make for its confluence with the Mississippi, and journey down the “Father of the Waters” as far as the town of Natchez, where, we understood from our charts on board, several blazed traces or wilderness trails penetrated to the interior of the southern terra incognita. There we would undertake a further search for megatherium. Whether in triumph or failure, we would find our way back to New Orleans, and get on the first good ship bound for Philadelphia, thence to be home by Christmas. As to Louis, we could see no alternative but to enlist him in our Corps of Wonders and Marvels until such time as he might be placed in the care of responsible government officials. For his existence in this hemisphere would no doubt keenly arouse the interest of many rival factions, few of them primarily concerned with Louis’s well-being.
Thus, our plan drawn, we floated happily down the Tennessee in clear, hot weather, unhindered by men or savages or beasts, until fate again intervened.
The dreaded fever that stalks the transriverine country in the summer season is a more dangerous enemy to life than all the wolves, panthers, snakes, bears, and wild tribesmen ever in creation. I speak here of the harrowing malady known as the ague. Both Uncle and I were struck down by it of a bright and airy morning, and by noontide had been rendered practically senseless.
It began with an aching in the joints and large muscles. Soon, an apprehension of coldness swept through the body as though the blood had turned to springwater. Within an hour, our teeth chattered and extremities turned blue. We shook and shivered as though we were adrift on an iceberg off Greenland’s shore rather than aboard a keelboat in summery Tennessee. No amount of clothing or blankets availed to drive away the chill. Then, an hour later, these chills inexplicably gave way to warmth, and this to heat, and this to a blazing fever as though the veins now ran with molten lava. Our ears roared. Pains racked our spine and legs as though flesh-eating beetles bored through our bones. Finally, sweat poured forth in pints as the fever broke. We victims enjoyed a brief and illusory return to normal sensation, as mice enjoy a brief and illusory taste of freedom from the cruel clutches of a cat. Then the miserable cycle of ice and fire recommenced again and again until we were addled.
Louis was untouched by the disease, possibly because of his long domicile in the region, and it was a good thing indeed he was aboard, for without his ministrations we might well have died. Louis it was who tucked in our blankets as the chills descended. Louis it was who fetched cups of water when the fever set our throats aflame and left us too weak to crawl fro
m the cabin. Louis it was who spoon-fed us cornmeal mush, who sat awake at night with rifle at the ready, alert for enemies. Louis it was who watered the valuable Puya. And Louis it was who delivered us, and himself, into the hands of another fate that only a wilderness as fabulous as the American frontier might furnish, a fate both terrible and sublime.
One afternoon some days after the onset of our illness, Louis maneuvered our craft near to shore in an effort to ascertain whether we had reached the ruins of Fort Assurance. I was prostrate in the cabin, but awake. Poor Uncle, however, lay in a delirium, thrashing this way and that, the sweat pouring from his brow as he railed at imaginary monsters, laughed with friends not seen for an half a century, or babbled the nonsense that a fevered brain fosters. Louis had been ashore long enough to start me worrying when I heard him cry from the bank.
“Sammy! My friend! Uncle William! I have found a doctor!”
A doctor, thought I? Here, in the middle of nowhere?
I crawled up the companionway and blinked in the harsh sunlight. Two figures stood fuzzily upon the shore: a plump pear-shaped form and a taller, hulking one.
“Why, dress me in sheep’s shit!” boomed a familiar voice. My heart went to my stomach like a small, frightened animal retreating to the depths of its burrow.
“Please, God,” I begged the empty sky. “If you exist, assure me that what I behold yonder is but the figment of a feverish mind.”
I closed my eyes and squeezed the lids tightly. When I opened them again, the awful sight still remained. For there upon the bank, among the flies and the water willows (Justicia Americana), stood that paragon of knavery in all seven feet of his obdurate refulgence, our late and unlamented traveling companion from the country of the Shannoah, that summing up of all that is vile in the frontier character, Captain Melancton Bilbo, Esquire.
An Embarrassment of Riches Page 25