Call Each River Jordan

by Ralph Peters (as Owen Parry)

  “Your pardon, sir,” I said. “There is a smith, I believe, just down this road? In that direction?”

  “Einen Schmied suchen Sie? A blacksmith?”

  “Just so.”

  He pointed, confirming my direction. “Es ist nicht weit. It is not far.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Mister?”

  I looked down at him from my saddle throne.

  “I shoes a horse besser than the lazy man up the road.”

  “The horse is fine. It is an appointed meeting place, see.”

  “There is something else you need? The medicine? Ein Heilmittel? A salve to make the healing?”

  There were no salves to heal where I was sore. I shook my head and gave him disappointment, wishing him good day. When I looked back, his hat was back on his head and he had picked up the handles of his barrow, pushing through a country slashed by war.

  Twas not far at all to the smith’s, not half a mile, as I would shortly learn. But my journey met with another interruption. A figure, near-familiar, traipsed over a field. A woman it was, or a girl, coming to intersect my route.

  When I come up to where she stood, I found Paddycakes. Dirtier than usual. As if she had been rolling in ashes.

  She looked at me with a mix of anxiousness and hesitation. She had been warned, of course, that Yankees eat their fellow humans.

  “Are you all right, Paddycakes?”

  She put her fingers to her lips and smiled, body swaying. Blackened in patches, her straw hat shadowed her eyes but let me see their glow.

  “I seen the devil,” she said. “I really seen him. Tell Marse Drake.”

  I patted the horse’s rump behind my saddle. “You can tell him yourself, girl. He’s just ahead. With Mr. Barnaby. Now get you up, for time there is little.”

  She took a step backward, smile fleeing. “I ain’t getting on no Yankee horse.”

  “Well . . . then just go along this road. And you will find him.” Rascal would need a bit of rest at the smithy’s. And slow watering he would want. I had been cautioned not to let him gulp. The girl might catch us easily enough. “Go you, now.”

  She shook her head ferociously. “No, sir, Marse Yankee. I’se hiding,” she said, from the sunburned edge of the road.

  “First of all, girl, I’m not anybody’s ‘marse.’ And what on earth are you hiding from?”

  “The devil.”

  “Well, I’m sure Lieutenant Raines and Mr. Barnaby will protect you.”

  “Not from no devil. Bridie tole me all about that.”

  “And exactly where did you see this devil, Paddycakes?”

  “At Shady Grove,” she said. “Bridie say it all belong to her now.”

  THE BLACKSMITH’S SHOP WAS A HOVEL, infested with children and fleas. The hearth was out, which explained why I could not mark the location from the high ground. The smithy and his helper sat in the shadow of the doorway, carving sticks. As if they did not care whether business appeared. The South is different, if not a different country.

  Raines and Barnaby occupied a bench in the shade.

  I handed Raines his trinkets. The watch and chain hardly mattered to him, but he clutched the locket to his heart as if it were his stolen love returned. And then I tried to tell them about Lott, forgetting Paddycakes entirely. For the girl was simple and I never could understand her properly.

  Barnaby listened sober-faced, for he had seen much of the world. But Raines made faces like a restless boy. At last, he said:

  “I’d be glad enough to see Micah Lott hang, no matter who owned the rope. But you’re saying he’s taken to killing Negroes to liberate them? Because he thinks he’s carrying out the Book of Revelation?” He was so perturbed he could not keep his seat, but rolled to his feet and headed for the water barrel. Dipping himself a drink, he asked me, “That old coon preacher put that in your head? Your murderer friend?”

  “No, Lieutenant. He only helped me see what had long been spread before me. And I cannot say exactly what is in Lott’s mind, though mad enough it seems to me. Whether he believes the sacrifice of some Negroes to trigger a crusade is a fair price, or whether he is convinced he is God’s appointed avenger . . . or if he believes he can bring on the Judgement Day through his own doings . . . that I cannot tell you. But he is taken with the Book of Revelation, that is certain. A man does not brand his own hand with seven stars in a fit of fancy. I should have thought on it long before. For Lott believes the book and this war join. Beyond that, I can only tell you that he and his men killed the forty Negroes. Who were betrayed by a Judas of their own, a man with a different madness.”

  “You sound a little sun-bothered yourself.”

  I longed to ride on, to return to my own kind and leave this self-cursed land behind me. But my horse needed time, and Raines still wanted persuading.

  “Well,” I tried again, “war is a madness. And love, too, is a madness. Of more variety than there are kinds of fishes in the sea. There is madness in plenty in this world, and likely I have my share. But Lott is a killer who needs stopping now.”

  The mind is queer. I thought, just in that instant, of Mr. Shakespeare’s sad old king pleading to the heavens to save him from madness. Perhaps our ceaseless prayer should be: “Oh, Lord, spare me the madness to which I am born.”

  “Master Francis?” Barnaby said, fanning himself with his hat. “It don’t matter a bit, these revvy-lations. That’s what Barnaby B. Barnaby has to say. What matters is that Lott’s come up the killer. He’s right on that business, the major is. And there’s a fine pheasant to flush, as me governor liked to put it.”

  “But where’s the proof?” Raines demanded. He made his voice theatrical. “For God’s sake, look at it! Suddenly, the great, bloody-handed champion of abolition is a slave-killer himself?” He turned to me, so troubled by this world. He looked for sense and stumbled over mankind. “I trusted you,” he told me. “And I’m beginning to feel a fool because of it. This doesn’t make a peck of sense, not any of it.”

  “Do not look for sense,” I told him. “Look for belief. Lott is the killer, and I will stake my life on it.”

  He dropped back down on the bench. Hard enough to jar his spine. “Will you?” he asked, in an oddly resigned voice. “Will you stake your life on it? Or is there something going on that you won’t tell us? Some Yankee scheme? The way you go creeping around . . .”

  “Master Francis,” Barnaby tried again, cajoling a moody child, “begging your pardon, but it seems to me the major here’s done a proper job, he has. It’s wicked what all comes out when the questions are put right. A proper fellow, the major is. And ain’t it a pleasure to think that Lott’s the guilty party? And not none of you what wears the gray coat of honor? Ain’t it come out as good as it could come?”

  Now, you will say, “This Raines boy wanted spanking. For boy he was, though long past twenty-one.” But I will tell you: He had learned things that no man wants to know, about his friend and the woman whom he loved, about his teetering world and about himself. He was not cruel, but only disappointed. And fearful. For what one man may do, so might we all. And, despite his taste of battle and of heartbreak, his life had been a sheltered one. There is no harsher master than reality.

  “Oh,” I said, “I near forgot. I saw the girl, Paddycakes, up the road. I thought she might come after.”

  Raines waved that problem off. “She knows her way home. She’ll come around when she gets hungry enough.”

  “It ain’t far, sir,” Mr. Barnaby assured me. “Shady Grove’s not four miles down the pike. Why, it ain’t a half-dozen miles from there across country to the Negro camp, for that matter. If a fellow goes straight and proper. It’s a small world, as me governor used to say, when a gent ain’t playing ring around the rosey.” He glanced back around the corner, to where a scrofulous lad was tending Rascal. The high afternoon condensed the Englishman’s shadow. “I think your horse is ready for a trot, sir.” He clapped his hands, thinking, perhaps, of a pendin
g dinner. “Shall we go then, gentlemen? Off we go then, friendly as bacon and eggs!”

  As we rode away, the peddler rounded the bend behind us, sweating his way into his chosen country.

  AS SOON AS HE HAD ASSURED HIMSELF that Raines and I would not resort to pistols, Barnaby dropped behind us, chewing on strips that looked like ruined leather. The afternoon’s warmth was sufficient to call for opened buttons and we rode easily. Although my heart longed to gallop all the way to Union headquarters, my head knew that the journey would last at least another day, and likely two. For we must go first to Corinth, to tell the Confederates all that we had learned. Only then would I be granted safe passage.

  I thought of Lott, of how I had not liked the man. Scripture hurled about is Scripture fouled.

  Raines had strapped on his pistol, but still his hand lay buried in a pocket, clutching the charm I had retrieved. Perhaps it soothed him, for when he spoke again his voice was milder.

  “Micah Lott?” he said, clucking his tongue.

  “Still in doubt, Lieutenant?”

  “No,” he admitted. “I was only riled. You’ve figured out just about everything else in the state of Mississippi, so why not that?”

  I thought on his meaning, then said:

  “I will not pass on Captain Barclay’s secrets.”

  “No. I suppose not.”

  “Or anyone else’s,” I promised him.

  “Except Lott’s.”

  “That is different. And you, Lieutenant? May I ask you to keep the secret of the Negroes in the woods? They do no harm that I can see.”

  “Your preacher friend is a known murderer.”

  “I have killed more men with less cause myself.”

  He looked at me with eyes as narrow as razor cuts. I did not mean the statement as a brag, but perhaps he took it as one. Our words are awkward things to tell our meaning. And though we had dealt with a band of clumsy highwaymen, he had no way of knowing my service history. Nor would I tell him my tale, for the past is present enough without our chatter. Likely, he saw a bobbing little man, attempting to fit himself into seven-league boots. But let that bide.

  “Let them be,” I said. “There’ll be no harm beyond some stolen chickens.”

  He did not answer, and I did not press him. We would have time when he was calmer still.

  Rascal snorted. The shiver passed along his neck and back. Then he settled again. The day had slowed beyond helping, although I longed to gallop. I thought again of things that Lott had said to me. Trying to remember chapter and verse.

  “‘Thrust in thy sickle and reap,’” I recited aloud, “‘for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe.’”

  Raines glanced at me.

  “Revelation,” I told him. The sky glowed gilded blue.

  “I know,” he said. Of course, he knew. The spoiled theologian, the Harvard man.

  “The preacher, Hitchens, said something that struck me,” I told him. “Yesterday evening it was. He said he dreaded the Book of Revelation. That was the very word he used. ‘Dread.’ Now you will think it strange, but I will tell you, Lieutenant: I knew exactly what the fellow meant. It is a hard book, that one, hard and cruel. It does not follow rightly after the Gospels, and I have wondered why the Lord had need of it, why he had to put it in the Book.”

  “God didn’t put it in,” Raines said. “Men did. Men like Micah Lott.”

  I was about to defend the sanctity of the entire Holy Writ, and sorry I was for the liberty of my speech, when I noticed wisps of smoke above a grove. A soldier gets to know each kind of smoke.

  This rose from dwindled fires, from burned remnants. It was not much, just smudges on the blue.

  I pointed up the road. “There has been a fire,” I said. “See there? The smoke?”

  A mask of wonder covered the lad’s face. He whipped his horse and shouted:

  “That’s Shady Grove!”

  FOURTEEN

  NEVER BELIEVE THAT STRONG MEN DO NOT WEEP. That is a theme for hypocrites and fools. Young Raines was strong. I speak here of the strength that matters, and not of clumsy force or loud bravado. Even in Mick Tyrone’s medicine, the heart is the ultimate muscle. Strong arms falter, but stout hearts last. Raines had more heart than he could yet master, and the tempest in his soul left him bewildered. He sat and wept, as if remembering Zion.

  I recall it clearly, how he thrashed his hat upon the ground then sat with his legs drawn up and his face dropped toward his knees. He quivered as if wracked with enteric fever, and his sobs were gasps of despair. I have wept thus myself, once, in distant India. But that is my story, and this day’s sorrow was his, and I must not be selfish in my tellings.

  I recall the sound of his weeping, and the fidgeting of our horses, and the whisper of the ashes. Barnaby’s footsteps crunched amid the ruins, then stilled. He, too, wore a baffled, broken look. Tears wet his eyes, but I did not think they were for the master of Shady Grove. Myself, I stood there, helpless as a child.

  Crows had gathered, cawing in the trees or dipping through the final ghosts of smoke. In India, some heathens worship fire and expose their dead to the elements. Black birds assemble for the feast, as they congregated here. Perhaps it is all the same, this world, like but for climate and costume. Perhaps our mortal differences are dreams. Perhaps that final battle from the Book is here and now, and every single day.

  But let that bide.

  We found three bodies. Charred and showing bone. Barnaby identified two of them as Samson, the old servant, and his wife. He recognized them by familiar properties, for nothing like a face remained to greet us.

  We all knew Barclay. Where once the porch had been, a legless dummy, shaped of ash, lay by the tipped-over skeleton of a roll-chair. A blackened pistol touched the mitten that had been a hand.

  America burns differently. In India, you torch the thatch of roofs, or light the adornments of a palace and let them sear the marble of the walls. But here, where wood is abundant, fires level. Only a few blackened braces stand, whittled down by the blaze that failed to consume them. Foundation brick cracks from the heat, but holds. Our ruins are a jumble like a battlefield, where you can read a life from tattered remnants.

  An ember flared and black smoke puffed.

  I began to poke in the ruins, with no more sense than a widow who walks in her sleep. Oh, it is odd how fire works. It burns the robe of silk and spares the rag. The room where I had found Barclay in his midnight despair, amid the hundred gowns, had collapsed down into the library, then all had fallen to the burnt earth below, for there was no cellar to the house. Metal buttons and clasps gripped scraps of cloth. Strings of melted beads gleamed like queer snakes. Amid the black and walnut of destruction, flakes of color teased the eye. Books had burnt to rectangles of coal. And then I found one, small and thick, with hardly a scar upon it. A candle might have brushed it for the slight damage it wore. The title shone gold. Twas foreign. I carried it to where young Raines sat crying.

  “Look you,” I said, in a meager voice, “I found this. Perhaps you should keep it? To remember?”

  “Go to Hell,” Raines said, without looking up. “You can all just go to Hell.”

  “I’m sorry, see . . .”

  Oh, he looked up then. Eyes wild and fierce. “Is this how you all make war? Is this . . . it? Your noble crusade for the Union?” He face was wrecked with tears, and raw, and swollen.

  I did not know what to say. But I knew what I needed to do.

  I had to get back to our lines, to reach Sherman or Grant. Or Halleck, if he was the great chief now. I had to reach someone, anyone, who could stop Lott and his murderers.

  I just held out the book to Raines. For I was bereft of words.

  He brushed it away. But his sobbing spell had been broken.

  I did not retract the book, but nudged it closer. Almost forcing it on him. At last, he grasped it in his hand. Absently examining the title.

  He smiled. Twas as if the sun had pierc
ed dark clouds.

  The smile faded quickly, and he thrust the book back at me.

  “Here,” he said. “You take it.” His eyes followed the outline of my person, down to my feet and back again, and I could not figure his changed tone of voice. “I have all I ever wanted from Shady Grove. You take the book.”

  I accepted it. For the moment, you understand. A book is a precious thing and must not be discarded. Unless it is immoral and lascivious. I would put it in my saddlebag and offer it to him later, when he had calmed. Surely, he would want a small memento of his friend and fallen rival.

  I turned the book in my hand to read the spine again. Don Quixote. Miguel de Cervantes. At least that was not French, I did not think.

  I flipped it open and saw English words.

  “Take it,” Raines said, in a cooled voice, “and read it. It suits you.”

  Now that he seemed in better order, I was about to raise the business of Lott and my need to move expeditiously, but Mr. Barnaby crunched his way toward us, stepping with care across the desolation.

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” he said to Raines, “I’ll try to find us a shovel down in the shanties.” He glanced up at the crows. “We’ll be wanting to bury the three of them before we go.”

  A new voice at my back corrected the manservant:

  “You’ll have to bury four.”

  I turned and come up facing Captain Wylie. The pistol in his hand was aimed at me.

  “HE’S A DAMNED LIAR and a dirty little coward,” Wylie said, speaking of me. His voice was distraught and the pistol not a yard from my nose. He would not miss. “Him and Lott been working together all along, Drake.”

  He thumbed the hammer back. One click, then another. Twas a forty-four caliber Colt, just like my own.