Call Each River Jordan

by Ralph Peters (as Owen Parry)

  The day had come up warm and lovely, although the insects pestered us in the low ground.

  “Is that what this Reverend Mr. Hitchens teaches you?” I asked in a wary tone.

  “No, sir,” Roland told me. “I done read my Gospels and them Acts of the Possums, and studied that out myself.”

  AT LAST WE TURNED from our circular trail onto an overgrown wagon path. We rode into sunlight so pure it stunned the eye. And there, at the edge of the next copse of trees, knelt Paddycakes. Setting a rabbit snare.

  She straightened her back, lifting her hand to the brim of her battered hat. Then she got to her feet and raced toward us.

  “Marse Drake?” she called. “Marse Drake?”

  “Paddycakes?” he asked, just as she reached his stirrup and clung to it.

  We stopped. With Roland and Cupid scanning the fields, hands on their pistols.

  “Marse Drake, you got you a hurt?”

  “No, Paddycakes.”

  “But you got a rag onto your head.”

  “It’s a blindfold. We’re playing a game.”

  She thought about that. “Can I play?”

  “It’s a man-folks game.”

  Her hat hid all but a sliver of face from me, for she had come to the opposite side of his horse. But now and then I saw her troubled eyes.

  “Marse Drake, you told me how’s there ain’t no spooks and haunts.”

  “That’s right, girl. Don’t you go believing all that Hoodoo silliness.”

  “But I seen one.”

  “You didn’t see any ghost.”

  “I did, Marse Drake. Last night I seen one. I was sleeping in the truck shed where I mostly sleeps now, and I seen him go floating by. I thought it was the Devil, cause of how quiet he be going and all, and I got up to see, cause Bridie say if you see the Devil and he don’t see you and you spit behind his tail, he got to give you a wish. And I seen how he gone up on the side porch to peek in the window of Marse Billy’s eating room. That’s when I seen him by the light and knew he weren’t nothing but a haunt and not no Devil, cause the Devil don’t wear ribbons in his hair.”

  I did not say a word and we rode on.

  WE PASSED A CABIN with a collapsed roof and entered a pine wood. Hares quicked in the brush. Where the track divided, the left fork climbed a ridge. We steered right, into the low ground. Marsh grass soon replaced the trees and the hooves of our mounts sucked mud. Cupid drew his pistol.

  “Is there danger, then?” I asked. Twas incautious talk, for such a remark might have told Raines I could see while he could not.

  Roland answered for his partner. “Lot of them serpents as tempted Eve down here. Cottonmouth moc’sins all over the place. Just keep an eye, brother.”

  I grew alert, but felt no special fear. For I have faced the cobra in the desert and know that men are worse.

  My greatest concern was for our horses. I worried they would sink and stumble, for the going was difficult. A spray of water reached my face. It smelled.

  But the ground firmed and the trees thickened again. Cupid slid his pistol back into its holster.

  The track led through a maze of broken rocks. Barrows loomed to the sides, unearthly in their symmetry. In Wales, such mounds are said to be haunted by ancient spirits, though no man in his senses credits rumor. The ground narrowed to a shallow gorge and we rode one behind the other.

  I sensed that we were watched. Old soldiers know.

  The defile opened into a glen and a white-haired, bearded Negro tottered against us. One hand reached out, the other clutched a cane. Blind he was, with eyes like boiled egg whites. He plunged among our horses.

  “That my boy?” he begged. “Anybody seen my boy?” His voice rose plaintive as a widow’s wail.

  “Nope,” Roland said. “Not yet, Old Toby. I expects he’ll be along when he’s done sowing them oats.”

  The old man settled back, his face in ruins. I glimpsed a sagging woman by a cave.

  After we had clopped a little distance, Roland told me, “Poor Old Toby. His boy up and went with the Shady Grove folks. With them what was killed.”

  Soon I saw the first signs of a settlement. Cabins of the crudest sort slumped in the trees. Those were the finest shelters. The rest were but open sheds and cribs, some lower than the pen that had confined me. Negroes quit their work at garden patches or bent their heads to swell from low-cut doors. Dusting their hands they come, drying them on aprons. Eyes upon us. If poverty is virtue, these were the just. For they were ragged as the sore-plagued beggar.

  “Praise the Lord!” one turbaned woman cried. “That Mr. Lincum on that red-head horse?”

  “Cupid done catched him a Rebel, too,” a boy declared.

  “Ain’t no catching been done,” Cupid said. “You step on back now. You all just get on back.” At that, he reached over and snapped the blindfold off of Raines. The young man’s hat went tumbling, but he caught it.

  I wondered what Raines thought of the sight before him.

  It was a sorry place, not fit for smugglers. Men were clothed in shirts that would not have done my wife for the scrubbing of floors. The women were covered, but dirty, and the children scratched at themselves. A dozen shacks and sheds. That was Beersheba.

  A smiling man of medium height strode toward us, fixing his direction straight for me. He was not tall or visibly distinguished. Indeed, he might have seemed the drabbest of the Negroes in his old black suit and yellowed shirt, for the others had some color to their scraps. He wore a mighty smile, but so might a dishonest clerk.

  A single thing set him apart. A gash began at his hairline, livid purple on his leather skin. It sliced down over his brow and caught his nose, gnarling its meat, then split the corner of his mouth. When the scar reached his jaw, it took a jagged turn to furrow his cheek. Now, I was an instructor of the bayonet, and I will tell you: a drunkard’s knife did that. For any man close enough to make so long a slash should have stabbed instead. And sober men cut straight.

  The scarred man spread his arms. As if he would embrace my horse and me.

  “Welcome,” he said, “to our city on a hill.”

  TWELVE

  “WE CALL THIS PLACE BEERSHEBA,” THE PREACHER told me as we walked together, “for there is a well, and the water is sweet.” He smiled, splitting that great scar wider. Twas a crescent moon carved in his face. “Perhaps this seems a wilderness to you, Brother. But to us it is a garden.”

  We entered a spread of pines. Back in the settlement, in a lean-to granted us as quarters, Raines sulked like Achilles in his tent. Our meal of “pone” and fat soppings had not troubled him so much as the suspicion the Negroes felt of men in gray. Nor did they show respect. With straightened backs, they strutted past, watching from the corners of their eyes. They welcomed me, but spared no words for Raines. I pitied the boy. He was a stranger in a strange land, a land that he had long believed he knew. But let that bide.

  “Careful by those rocks,” the preacher warned me. “There’s serpents in this garden.”

  He led me to a log upon a knoll and we sat down. The sun poured golden rivers through the trees.

  “I did not see guards posted,” I said to him.

  He shook his head. “We’re in the Lord’s hands.”

  “But, surely, you have arms?”

  “A few pistols,” the preacher said. “Shotgun or two. The wild beasts bless our cookpot now and then.”

  “Look you. Given the murders . . .”

  He smiled. “His will be done. Brother, if the Confederate army appeared before us, what good would a dozen times a dozen old guns do? I will have no killing in this place. No, sir. The sword in Peter’s hand dismayed our Lord. That’s written down.” A bee hovered, inspecting the Negro as he might a flower, then floated away. “We have our prayers, Major. Our prayers, and the peace of the forest for our comfort.” He raised his face to warm it in the light, clenching shut his eyes, as if the rays were splashing water. “Lord willing, your army will come on by soon en
ough. On that day, the children of Beersheba will be jubilant. Upon that day, Lord, upon that day . . .”

  “Until that day, Mr. Hitchens, I would judge your situation a dangerous one.”

  Setting his knees apart, he planted his hands on his thighs and swung his meaty face toward me. Brown eyes soft. “My life has been a running life, Brother. First, I ran after my freedom. Then I kept on running for my safety. In the wilderness of men, I chased after the things of this here world. Then the time come when I went running to try and catch the Lord in this place here or that one over yonder.” He nodded, more to himself than to me. “Those of little faith go looking for Him outside themselves, but a true-faith man knows the Lord resides within. I had to study that for a time.”

  He raised his right hand a few inches, making a small gesture toward the settlement. “Our Beersheba is as close to Heaven as any other place. So I guess we’ll just wait on what comes.” His mouth stretched in a smile. “Maybe in the later days, this here war gone by, we’ll go on out to one of those Western places, to good breathing land. Just like the childern of Israel. Build us a real city on a real hill. Just now though, with the whole world nothing but war and rumors of war, it strikes me that we might as well stay put.”

  Perhaps the fellow was right, after all. The Negroes who were slaughtered didn’t ‘stay put,’ and their journey had not saved them. Maybe their sorry camp back in the woods would keep these others safe and sound. Still, his confidence left me uneasy.

  “Well, it is your flock,” I told him. “And I am a stranger, see. Though sorry I am for those who have been murdered.”

  He looked down. When his face expressed sorrow, it wrinkled in rising waves above his brow and in ripples that descended from cheekbone to jowl. The livid scar cut through the flows of skin.

  “That is a powerful sorrow to bear,” he said. “And blame is on my shoulders, a heavy blame.” He brought his eyes to me again, as if I were fit to judge him. “Oh, they wanted to go on. They had the desire on them to go North. Their feet were just trampling to go. They were only stopping over here, breathing a little. Looking out on things. Hesiod, he had them all full of visions of milk and honey. If only they could reach Mr. Lincoln’s army, they’d be over Jordan and into Paradise. Yes, sir, they wanted to go on. But I did not try to hold them, either. I had the worrying on me, for my dreams tell me things. More and more, I dream about the Day of Judgement. No, I didn’t try to hold them.”

  He smiled wistfully. “See here, Brother. I can pour out the Lord’s love for these folks. But I can’t do that miracle of the loaves and fishes. There’s precious little to fill their bellies. What there is comes pretty much from nighttime borrowing. You might call it stealing, if you was to look at it under the hard law. But these people . . .” His hand lifted again in that slight pointing gesture. “. . . they been stole from all their lives. The fruits of their labor have been stolen in their Babylonian captivity. They have wept cruelly by the waters of Babylon, crying for Zion. Crying for a justice foreign to idolatrous masters. Should this here land of Egypt begrudge food to a man whose wife was torn away from his bosom? To a mother whose child was sold off? I hope we’ll be forgiven for borrowing a little mush-meal and trimmings now and then.”

  He took a deep breath. “That Hesiod was rearing up to go. He had them halfway to exultation about moving on up North. Jerusalem was just across the creek, and Heaven just a little wade beyond. And I couldn’t keep on filling no forty extra bellies.” He tapped his knee. “‘Forty’s a Bible number,’ I told myself. ‘Maybe they’re meant to go on. Maybe there’s a hand held over them.’ And they went. Those forty. And old Toby’s boy with them.”

  I shifted, for the log was hard and my rump was sore from my travels. “Then forty-one went north?”

  He nodded. “One and forty children of the Lord.”

  “You’re certain? Forty-one?”

  “Yes, sir. Forty came, and forty went. Forty-one, with Old Toby’s boy stirred in.”

  I wanted his knowledge, not his speculations. At least not yet. So I did not make an issue of the difference of one. I had been told that forty had been murdered. Did that mean one survived? Or were the slaughtered bodies too hard to count precisely? In India, we would have tallied skulls.

  Of course, one more or less might have no meaning.

  “Tell me, sir, about this Hesiod fellow.”

  He groaned as if his body were a machine in want of oil. “Bought down out of Virginia by the Barclay family, I’m told. When they were growing that Shady Grove of theirs. Had him some blacksmithing skills. Yes, sir. And he swallowed up some learning somewhere, though not much more than a gulp or two. Ran away a time back. Can’t say how long, for I was still wandering in the desert back then. Showed up here in Beersheba onto two months ago, heading back to that Shady Grove. Yes, sir. Good-looking man. Strong. Said he had the revelation and come on back to lead his people to freedom.”

  “He sounds a noble sort,” I said. “Risking his own freedom by coming back for the others.”

  The preacher had begun to sag, as men will in the waning afternoon. A light of reddish-gold inflamed the trees. “I suppose. Yes, I suppose that’s the truth of it. Surely, a brave man. But he troubled my heart. When he got to preaching. Oh, he had the talking power. Didn’t have his Scripture all chapter and verse. Not that the Spirit can’t move in the man of lesser knowledge, I’m not saying that. No, sir. That Hesiod could raise a soul up and cast it down again. Mercy. Called up my envy, too.” His brows climbed to a higher frankness. “Preacher has the pride on him, too, Brother, try how he might to lay it to the side. And that Hesiod had the jumping rants. The Lord’s hand was on that boy. Only when he talked holy, it always sounded hard. Come out more hellfire than heavenly light, the way he preached the Book.”

  He slumped still lower and cocked his head, chin down in his jowls. But his eye sparked. “See, Brother, these people . . .” The hand rose languidly and fell again. “ . . . these people here done had their share of hellfire right here on earth. They don’t need no hate talk. No, sir. I know that my Redeemer liveth. And He is love.” He slapped his leg and smiled happily at the thought. “Remember that eleventh commandment? How it goes in John? Jesus told us to love each other. All the people have to do is get to loving each other and everything else is going to go right. Nothing but that at the heart of it. There is your balm in Gilead. Just you love other folks. Now, ain’t that simple?” He shook his head. “These people here know plenty about hatred, and they don’t need to know no more. Turn up here mad as red-eyed bears, some of them. All I aim to do is soften them down. Soften them down and wait.”

  “For our army?”

  He nodded. “That, too.”

  The lowering rays gilded the preacher’s face.

  “Do you recall,” I asked him, digging idly with my cane, “a woman with the runaways? The forty? A woman named Lucy?”

  “Lucy?” He brightened, only to have his expression collapse into sorrow. “Surely. As beauteous as the Rose of Sharon. Fair and comely. Worthy of the Song of Solomon. Lovely as the daughters of Job. Husband was a good man, too. Upright. None of that shiftless, Hoodoo sort. Jase was not a hating man, either. Didn’t mind a bit about the child. Loved it like it was his own.”

  “The child?”

  “Surely. Sweetest little girl. Fair skin and those blue eyes. Couldn’t of been his with eyes like that, or with that creamy color on her. Hardly dark enough to tell she had Negro blood. But you could see Jase didn’t hold it against the child. Or the woman. No meanness in him. Though he looked like he could scrap, if he took a mind to.” He sighed as if at Eden’s loss. “All gone now. I pray for them, Brother. There’s times His purpose truly passeth all understanding.”

  I wondered if any man in this Southland would ever tell me the entire truth. If any white man would, I mean to say.

  “Mr. Hitchens?”

  He grinned. It was a lovely change. “You want to call me ‘Rev Will’ like other folks, y
ou do that, Brother. Or plain, old ‘Will.’ However you sit comfortable with it.”

  “Your people . . . the two who summoned me. This Roland and Cupid. They said you had something to tell me about the murders. About those who might have done it, perhaps?”

  “Surely. Yes, sir. That’s why I done brought you way out here away from folks. They’re good Christians, most of them, but some get too curious for sense. Go listening like the Devil at the kitchen door. Just make worries out of a thing.” Bracing his hands higher on his thighs, he drew himself up from his sag. Golden sweat licked his forehead. For a moment, he only looked at me, mouth open, pink tongue swollen. His riven face shone dark.

  “I had a dream,” he said. “Visited me three times, and three’s a Holy number. I was called to share this dream. That’s why I sent for you. I knew a body was coming, for I had the Sign, but I didn’t know who. Then Samson sent word along. About your arrival. And I knew. Yes, sir, three times means the dream has to be passed on.”

  I could have stood and shouted a rebuke. All this fuss to pass along a dream? That lit my fuse, I will tell you.

  Still, I behaved with restraint. For they are simple people, after all. I kept my seat, determined to listen, as I would to a well-meaning child. But now I regretted the time lost in my coming, and the possible danger to Raines. And I was disappointed, for I had hoped to find a swift solution. I wished to finish this business and go home. Or back to Washington, at least, to my waiting clerkship. I wanted no more blood, nor bloody leavings. And now some darky pestered me with nightmares.

  “You . . . called me here to talk about a dream?”

  “Yes, sir.” He smiled, scar-cracked. “A vision. Come three times. Like Peter’s denials.”