Call Each River Jordan

by Ralph Peters (as Owen Parry)

  “Mr. B. has your Colt,” he told me. In a voice calmed almost to normalcy.

  I fetched my papers from the weeds and found my Testament a little farther off. When I come back to the road, Raines gave me a cool, almost sly smile and said:

  “You’ve been wondering all this time what earthly good Mr. B. could be to me or to anybody. Now haven’t you?”

  “Lieutenant Raines, I would not be so ungracious . . .”

  The swollen fellow trudged down the road toward us, as if he had been forced on a Sunday stroll.

  “Mr. B. fought seven duels, and killed three men who insulted his late wife,” Raines told me. “He had a certain repute down in New Orleans.” The young man gave his uniform a dusting. “Yes, sir. There’s more to Mr. B. than meets the eye.”

  And that was saying a good deal.

  “MR. B. TOLD ME your Colt wasn’t loaded,” Raines said. It was the first time he had spoken since we mounted. The forest and the dead lay miles behind us. We rode through softening light. Killing keeps good men from speech. Though fools and braggarts shout their brains away.

  We had not killed all four of them. The fellow whose jaw I smashed made off. But I did not think him a danger. Three corpses were enough.

  “When Captain Wylie restored my possessions,” I said, “he did not think it good to return my ammunition.”

  Leaning against my escort’s back, Paddycakes lolled and hummed. As if the recent danger had been a frolic.

  “Well, that won’t do.” Raines let the leathers drop on his horse’s neck and used both hands to unfasten the cartridge box from his belt. He pulled his mount in beside mine and held out the black rectangle. “Here. Take what you need.” Our eyes met. “I rely on your honor as a gentleman.”

  The somber mood rode between us a little longer. Fear haunts every man who comes near death. It may take many forms, but it is there. Shadows stretched across our way and Mr. B. dropped back to nibble the secrets of his pocket. And then the girl sang out, in stainless joy:

  Run, nigger, run,

  Pater-roller git you,

  Run, nigger, run,

  It almost day . . .

  Halfway through another verse, she broke off and asked, “Marse Drake? You fixing to take Marse Billy off?”

  Raines twisted about in the saddle. “Now what makes you ask a silly thing like that?”

  “Marse Billy, he gone so mean now. He so funny without his walking legs, but he don’t laugh none. Just drink that old whisky and be mean all the time. Bridie say he ain’t gettin’ better, neither. She say he born mean, and now God done let all the mean loose in him. Times I’se scared, Marse Drake.”

  “Bridie’s a fool,” he answered. Without a great deal of conviction in his tone. Then he asked, “What’s Uncle Samson say?”

  She crooned for a moment, then said, “Uncle Samson say Bridie don’t know nothing.”

  “Well, Uncle Samson’s right. And what’s Auntie Dee tell you?”

  “Oh, she don’t say nothing tall, Marse Drake. She just make that Hoodoo face when she mad.”

  “Auntie Dee’s a good Christian woman. And what do you know about Hoodoo?”

  The girl at the lip of womanhood became a six-year-old coquette again. “Oh, I knows what I knows. I knows lots, Marse Drake. Bridie got her a John the Conquer. She fixing to show me, if’n I cross her up with the silver.”

  “Bridie’s a wicked woman,” Raines said. “And you tell her I said that. You tell her she better say her prayers that the Yankees don’t get her, cause they gobble up anybody who even whispers the word ‘Hoodoo.’ Cook ’em on a spit and swallow ’em down.”

  The girl glanced, balefully, in my direction.

  A certain mirth played on my escort’s lips. Then he added, in a voice of comical sternness, “You listen to me now, Paddycakes. You tell Bridie that Marse Drake said if he hears one more whisper about any Hoodoo, or Voodoo, or boo-hoo, for that matter, he’s going to see to it that Old Marse Barclay swaps her back downriver where she came from. You hear? You tell her she won’t be taking any more naps in the linens. She’ll be out there in the fields bending her back till it stays crooked.”

  “Bridie say there ain’t gone be no more bending of that back, Marse Drake. She say the Lincum gunboats coming, and the meek gone to ’herit.”

  The humor left the young man’s mouth, replaced by furrows at the corner of his lips. This time his speech was authentically stern. “Well, you tell Bridie that Mr. Lincoln’s gunboats need a river. And there isn’t any river at Shady Grove. Or anywhere close. And they’re sure not going to come up the creek. You tell her she better get to practicing on her meekness, or the only thing she’s going to inherit is trouble.”

  The girl had an uncanny sense of his nature. She began to bawl.

  “Oh, what’s the matter, honey? I didn’t mean to upset you now,” Raines said. With all the metal gone from his tone. He sounded almost like an older brother. “It’s just been a hard day all around, now hasn’t it?”

  “You’se mad at me, Marse Drake.”

  He thought for a moment before speaking. “No, Paddycakes. I’m not mad at you. Maybe I’m just mad at the world. Still and all, you tell that Bridie everything you can remember from what I said. Will you do that for me?”

  “Yes, Marse Drake. Marse Drake?”

  “Yes?”

  “Them peoples back there? Them ones you kilt? They gone come back and be haunts under the Hoodoo power?”

  “No. We killed them a special way. So they can’t come back. And don’t you go telling any fancy stories to that Bridie about what happened. You hear? You just tell her what I told you to tell her.”

  “Yes, Marse Drake. I ast you something?”

  “What now, girl?”

  “Is Miss Emily a haunt now?”

  I caught the jolt. It passed through his entire body.

  “No.”

  “But she gone, though.”

  “Yes.”

  “Bridie say Marse Billy talk to her in the night.”

  I had no living man beside me, for Raines was cut of marble.

  “She say Marse Billy call out to Miss Emily, an when she don’t come, he call out for Lucy, but she gone to Kingdom herselfs an—”

  He fair lifted himself out of the saddle. For a moment, I feared he would strike the girl.

  “You just tell that—”

  He caught himself. Francis Drake Raines was a man who chose his enemies fairly, as I would learn. He settled down. But he kept his back to his companion now. Rigid as a hussar on parade. The girl curled up in fright. He understood that, too. As soon as he could trust his voice, he asked:

  “Getting hungry, Paddycakes?”

  “I’se always hungry.”

  “Me, too. Wonder what Auntie Dee has in the pot?”

  “Marse Drake?” The girl eyed me warily as she spoke. “That Yankee you done fetched up really eat the Hoodoo peoples?”

  Raines glanced at me. With an uncontrollable smile.

  “Every last one,” he said.

  THE LAND CLEARED BEFORE US. But many of the fields had not been planted. Where high trees lined the road, my escort reined in his horse.

  “Slip on down now,” he told the girl. “You go on around back. And go straight to Auntie Dee, you hear?”

  Paddycakes dropped, flat-footed, to the earth. Glancing up at me with lingering doubts.

  Raines watched her run across the near field, then let his horse walk on. Behind us, Barnaby had closed to a half-dozen lengths. Sensing his supper, I supposed.

  My escort spoke in the soft voice he used for the most serious matters. “Major? You handled yourself finely, sir. In the course of our difficulties back there. I’m not certain I’ve ever seen a man move so fast. No, that’s not right. With such precision.”

  “Twas little enough, Lieutenant. That fellow may have been a soldier briefly, but he was not a proper one. He did not know his business.”

  “Well . . . I’m in your debt, sir.”<
br />
  “As I am in Mr. Barnaby’s.”

  We turned from the road where a brace of pillars framed a gravel path.

  “I’m afraid, Major . . . that my judgement was rash. I underestimated you.” He said it with a boyish shyness. Wanting to apologize where nothing of the sort was necessary.

  “And I’m afraid,” I told him, “that this may prove a war of underestimations.”

  I sensed a change in the lieutenant, a quickening of the heart. Perhaps he had seen something I could not. Or perhaps a memory sparked. Our horses had drearied with the long ride, but Raines teased his to a canter. As though he were approaching his own home. I did my best to keep up with him.

  Before the house appeared, he slowed again. Now it was as if our arrival must be delayed at any cost. We clopped along at a pace that was almost a sleep. Clearly, there was more to tell than he had seen fit to share. Men will tell you a great deal, hoping they will not have to tell you what matters.

  I decided to try him again. Before we faced a half-built house and its shattered master.

  “Lieutenant Raines?”

  My voice seemed to surprise him. Calling him out of some deep revery.

  “I may have been under a false assumption,” I continued. “For I did not think you were a married man?”

  “I’m not,” he said. Matter-of-factly.

  “The locket holds the image of a sweetheart then? Or a memento?” I had watched him put the gold heart into his pocket after he recovered it. The chain was broken and he buried his treasure deep, clutching it long in his fist before he could let it go.

  The remaining light was pale and weak. Perhaps that accounted for the whiteness of his face. But not for the burning in his eyes when he looked at me.

  “I must ask you, as a gentleman, sir, never to raise the matter again.”

  He did not wait for a reply, but kicked his spurs into the flanks of his horse. It was the first time I had seen him use them.

  The black sprang to a gallop. Raines swept off his hat and loosed a wail to wake the ancient dead. I supposed it was a typical Southron greeting. Rascal nearly threw me, but I brought him around and kept him to a manageable trot. Well ahead of me, the young man began shouting. I could not make out a great many words, but caught, “Billy,” a good-natured, “damn you”—if such a thing may be—and “whisky.”

  The path turned and I saw the house. It was not a grand manor after the English fashion. But it was big. With high columns like ancient Greece in an engraving. Yet, one wing was only a skeleton, a frame of weathered boards.

  The house looked crippled, and I thought at once of its owner.

  I saw him on his verandah, sitting like a statue in his rolling chair. Raines had stopped his horse short of the front steps and the two men considered each other in silence.

  Barnaby come up beside me.

  “Welcome to Shady Grove, sir,” he said. “I does believe you’ll find it jolly queer.”

  NINE

  BARNABY AND I DREW UP TO LET THE TWO LADS HAVE a good stare at each other. Beyond the long porch, the heavens flamed over the hills. You might have thought Jerusalem on fire. The fields and groves smoked in the low land around us, and the air was gray as gunpowder. Raines and his horse had become a silhouette etched in crimson, with Captain Barclay a white face and white hands in the evening shade.

  Silence tested the gulf between the old friends, but if colors had voice, that twilight would have been a bloody howl. The maddened sunset was but an accident of nature, of course. Yet, I thought it spoke what words could not between young Raines and Barclay.

  We are told in John’s Gospel that Jesus “knew what was in man.” That alone would make our Lord unique.

  I believe there were fireflies.

  The lieutenant’s mount snorted and tossed its mane. It caught my eye but briefly, for Barclay was the center of this world. As surely as a king is the heart of his kingdom. His throne was a got-up contraption and his forearms rested on the rims of its wheels. Smaller wheels balanced the device in front. Where feet and legs should have been. As my sight found purchase, I marked his open-collar shirt and waistcoat. Such informality of dress should have softened his aspect, but did not. He looked a fierce one, high up on his porch. A king in a realm of darkness.

  Cushions packed him in place. He sat in a tin pan.

  Barclay was a bold-cut man, the sort who is as handsome at a distance as at arm’s length. While Raines possessed those highbred looks you must learn to like, Barclay struck you instantly with his beauty of countenance. And beauty it was, though with something brute about it. He would not think of others, but others would think of him. He had a look that wrenches women from contentment, that fills them with confused anger. Until he turns to offer them one word, and wrecks their hearts. He reminded me of young Trenchard, a bad sort I had known. Yet, Trenchard was dark, and Barclay was fair as sunlight. Of course, I speak of his face and that alone. For his ruined body would no longer call to the women who might interest him.

  He looked at Raines with a killer’s eyes.

  We might have sat there through the end of days, had Barnaby not taken matters in hand.

  “That ham I smells, Master William? It do give a fellow an appetite, the smell of Shady Grove ham.”

  I was befuddled, for I smelled nothing of the sort. I smelled earth. And new grass.

  The crippled captain glared at the man. For as long as it takes a bat to swoop past a lantern. Then he grinned. With impossible beauty.

  “Well, Drake Goddamned Raines,” he called, shifting his smile to his friend. “I didn’t know if you forgot your way, or run off and joined the Yankees. Damn me to Hell, boy. Where you been hiding? And I see you still got that old fat man dragging after you.”

  Face graven with hospitality, the master of the manor turned to Barnaby. “Mr. B.? You come round to eat my smokehouse empty again? Swear to God, you’re twice the size I recollect. Come up here to eat me out of house and home, I reckon.”

  “One don’t want spoilage, Master William. ‘The stocks must be renewed,’ as me governor always said. And he lived to be fifty.”

  Barclay laughed. As though testing an old skill after letting it languish. Then he slapped his hands on the wheels of his chair and swung himself halfway around. Violet light engulfed the porch. “Samson!” He shouted. “Uncle Samson! Company for dinner!”

  RAINES LEAPT FROM HIS HORSE and dashed up the steps to shake his friend’s hand. Barclay had difficulty sustaining his balance under the force of the onslaught and there was an awkward moment. But the invalid fellow made light of the matter, clapping Raines on the shoulder and praising the development of his strength.

  “Army life agrees with you, Drake,” Barclay said.

  Barnaby and I dropped from our mounts in succession. Now I am not a tall fellow, as you know, and I have my sour leg. Getting down from the saddle was ever a trial. I struck the ground hard and felt the jolt right up my spine. With the flank of the horse in my face, I wondered if I would ever be free of discomfort again, or if the age of thirty-four meant I was past my prime.

  A grand black fellow emerged from the house, got up as if off to the opera. The very patent of a gentleman he looked, but for the maroon of his skin. His posture was stately, his shoulders broad, and only the ash of his close-cropped hair reported declining strength. His face was a shadow in the shadows, but hinted the folds of flesh that come with cares. He might have been serving at Windsor Castle by the bearing of him, and it gave me a start to hear him speak when he greeted Captain Raines, for he had a better English than the lot of us.

  “If I may take the liberty,” the old darky said, “it is a pleasure to see you again, sir. It seems a long time.”

  “Too long,” Raines told him. “How are you, Uncle Samson? How’s Auntie Dee?”

  “We are well, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  The old fellow bent, as if bowing, to confer with our host. I could not hear the words from the yard, but Raines gave a start at so
mething. A moment thereafter, the Negro turned to Barnaby and me.

  “Good evening, Mr. B. May I attend your horses, gentlemen?”

  “Wouldn’t hear of it! Not at all!” Barnaby answered. “Barnaby’s the man for the horses, sir. Raised in the livery service, Barnaby B. Barnaby was. Practically born in a stable, like other fine sorts what preceded him.”

  With that, the titan led his mount across the gravel to the black Raines had left standing. Drawing the horses about, he shot me a look that was more than a hint to go with him.

  We left them on the porch, the old friends and the Negro, in the fragrant air and failing light. As we rounded the unfinished wing of the house, a door slapped shut behind us.

  “How the mighty are fallen,” Barnaby said, with casual sorrow. A row of cabins, lifeless, stood pale against a grove. The roofline of a barn traced black. “It ain’t proper when a lovely old fellow like Samson has to run the house and look after the horses, too. Must’ve all gone off, the rest of them. And not just them what got themselves killed, sir. No more sense than white men, some of them.”

  He swept a big arm from the barn to the darkening fields. “Oh, t’ain’t the grandest of plantations, Major, not like what you sees downriver. But there was a dozen Negroes in the house before the war, and five times that in the fields. And that was only a start, it was. Master William had mighty plans, sir. Terrible mighty plans, he had.” He shook his head between the spluttering horses. “‘This war ain’t naught but a calamity,’ Barnaby B. Barnaby says. Like to break the heart it is. Naught but a calamity, sir.”

  Rascal followed me with a goodly will, as if he sensed bed and board, and I feared him a measure the less now. Still, I felt blue. The slow clop of hooves made a lonely music that eve.

  “War is always a calamity,” I said.

  “Right you are, sir, right you are. After a fashion, sir. For some wars do got more sense than others, it seems to Barnaby, though there’s little enough sense in the best of ’em. And no sense at all in this one, as I sees it. Right you are there, sir, right you are.”

  Lilacs. I smelled the dream scent of lilacs, the perfume of young nights consumed in longing. It is a flower that always grips my heart. I thought of my love, my Mary, and wished the war away.