The River of Kings: A Novel

by Taylor Brown

  44

  Fort Caroline, May 1565

  “What are you doing, monk?”

  Le Moyne looks up from his drawing, the paper secured to a wooden board seated on his knees. It is one of the carpenters speaking to him. The man is straddling the ship’s rail.

  “I’m working.”

  “Is that what you call it?” The carpenter thumps his hammer against his thigh, revealing a cadaverous grin. “I call it the work of a sodomite.”

  Le Moyne shakes his head, smiling.

  “No, my friend, you are mistaken. That is you stabbing your hut-mate in le cul every night.”

  The carpenter laughs, a dead man’s croak.

  “When I come off this ship, see that I don’t stab this hammer in your ass.”

  “Make sure to use the big end,” says Le Moyne. “I do not wish to be disappointed.”

  The Breton is anchored before the fort, moored to the palisade by several long hawsers. Men climb about its decks, hammering and sawing, the ship itself emitting what sounds a constant groan of pain. The weathered timbers, so strong and sea-rimed, have been set upon by saw and ax, a mania of pale-cut wounds, the decks laid open as if for surgery. The men themselves join in the chorus of agonies. They are so weak now. Their bodies seem something of terrible study, lessons in anatomy more grotesque even than the cadavers of executed criminals in the medical halls of Europe, set to with scalpel and forceps. Only the damned are chosen for dissection, of course, so that on the day of Rapture, no member of the elect will find himself unable to rise upon his ruined, excavated body.

  Such worlds Le Moyne is seeing beneath the skin, rivers forked blue and red, in spidery webs and lightning jags, storms of bruise and lands of fissured striation, bony outcrops like strange and secret formations of stone. A terrible knowledge, rarely glimpsed, for even the hanged and beheaded have their final meal. Le Moyne knows this is not the record of new and terrible worlds his king sought of him. Still, he will not shy away from recording what he sees. There is reason to believe he will never again see France, perhaps not even the close of the year. He will leave what truth he can upon the page.

  Today he has taken a break from the shipwork to sketch out the murder of Gambie, a member of the expedition who struck out alone the previous fall to build his fortune, trading in cheap Parisian trinkets with the Indians. Glass beads and blades of worthless alloy, scarves dyed garish hues. He ensconced himself on a midriver island the shape of a ship and took the daughter of a local chief as his wife.

  In Le Moyne’s sketch, the man kneels in the center of a cypress dugout, blowing into the glowing roots of a meager cookfire, the smoke balling up before his face. In the front of the canoe, a native stands paddling. He is looking back at the Frenchman, a sad cast to his face. Behind Gambie crouches a second native, bent nearly double, a hand-ax held high over his head, the blade poised to descend into the white man’s skull. His eyes are round, almost sad. His muscles ornate.

  The men of Fort Caroline found the boat tangled along the riverbank, the Frenchman’s head cleaved nearly in two, his brains spilled out like curdled cheese. The story emerged only later. It turns out Gambie had become like a king among the island natives, a harsh ruler who lashed his subjects with fire-hardened canes for the smallest of transgressions. At the time of his murder he was on his way to visit his old friends at La Caroline. In his possession were all of the riches he had so far accrued. He was going to leave them at the fort for safekeeping. Perhaps he knew the Indians had come to hate him. Even his paddlers were men he had beaten. One of them, recalling his mistreatment, fell upon the Frenchman with his ax, offering repayment for months of abuse.

  Le Moyne, sketching, senses someone over his shoulder and looks up. The scarred face of Lord d’Ottigni, iced in sneer. His hand falls large on Le Moyne’s shoulder.

  “Yes, Le Moyne. That’s it. Capture the savages in their murderous nature.”

  “That is not my intention, seigneur. I hope it to serve only as a warning that we not mistreat the natives of this land. A message to those who come after.”

  “Mistreat them, eh? I would treat them to the edge of my sword, the blackguards, and happily.” He spits. “I am beginning to wonder which side you are on, Le Moyne.”

  “I did not know there were sides to take.”

  “Ah, then you are not as smart as I thought.”

  * * *

  Laudonnière is a fortnight on his foraging mission, long enough to travel some forty to fifty leagues. May turns to June, the sun buzzing hotter in its arc. The very land steams. It is a diaphanous heat, impossible to escape. Men grow ill. Work on the Breton slows. Any day Laudonnière will arrive, and they will feast and return to their labor. Meanwhile they grind roots in stone mortars meant for mixing gunpowder, making meal of whatever they can.

  In the afternoons Le Moyne takes up his arquebus and sets upon the footpaths and game trails he knows so well, hunting the great shorebirds in their rookeries, long-beaked and highborn atop their leafy towers. Mostly he misses, their great wings unfolding against the sky. In the lesser branches perch clouds of birds with spoon-shaped bills, their wings faintly pink, their necks kinked like the letter S. When he nears, they turn of a one, their long spatulate bills swinging like ship’s oars. Other birds, black as night, stand spread-winged and haughty on slanted limbs, as if posing for shield crests. Sometimes an iron-gray heron will haunt the shallows, lean as a wizard.

  Once he watches a raptor tear a fish from the river, a blade of living silver caught wriggling in its talons. The bird is darkest brown with a white head, like a mountain peaked in snow. It lands on the riverbank nearby, gutting the fish with its yellow hook of bill. Le Moyne hits the bird from a distance of eighty king’s feet, a lucky shot, then plucks and roasts it out of sight of the fort, not wanting to draw men slavering and desperate to his cookfire. For this they might kill. He eats half the bird himself, his fingers flecked and gleaming with shards of meat. The rest he disburses in secret among his closest companions, thighs and wings wrapped in green folds of leaves.

  He sketches whenever he can, his only reprieve from hunger. He lives in the minutest detail. The striations of a native’s chest, the upturn of a soldier’s mustaches, the feathers of a bird in their tufted ranks. The hunger if anything makes his eye keener, his lines sharper. There is strength, he learns, in knowing you may not live long enough to complete the work of your hand.

  He is on a bluff he knows, working on the raised head of the ax that murdered his countryman, when he hears shouts of excitement, the blow of a trumpet. He hurries down the trail, breaking from the trees just above the fort. Laudonnière has returned. Men are splashing into the waters before his barque, their bodies haloed in white ruffles of current, their arms outstretched like those of street-beggars. They cling to the sides of the vessel, open-mouthed, as if they might be fed. But even from this distance Le Moyne can see the length of the commander’s face, the long-jawed hollowness. It turns first one way, then another.

  Nothing.

  45

  Altamaha River, 1996

  It is nearly dark now and still they work, a motley fleet of government and civilian boats dragging the river for bodies. The ballasted hooks and drags arc across the water, hand-thrown again and again, their ropes unfurling after them, the surface geysered with their splashes. The ropes float wormlike on the surface until the descending irons draw them down, the hooks hand-dragged along the black bottoms until they snag. They bring up crumpled lawn chairs and shed cypress limbs, beer and soda cans faded logoless with old-time tabs, a fishing pole with a live river cat still hooked on the line. They bring up mud-wrestling Barbie dolls and condoms luminescent as jellyfish, an old television set shot full of holes.

  “Somebody ain’t like Andy Griffith,” says Hiram’s helper, a chuckling old drunk.

  Hiram remembers hearing of Old Man Gillis pumping three rounds into his TV after the finale of St. Elsewhere, maddened at the revelation that the whole show was cook
ed up in the mind of an autistic child. The old man lived up Penholoway Creek, with a TV aerial raised high over his floathouse like a metal bird, and Hiram pictures the blasted television set tumbling downriver year after year, a few feet or inches at a time, until it arrives beneath their hook. If it can make it this far downriver, he worries what else? What other secrets might they bring up?

  He squeezes the rope hard in his right hand and pulls up his hook, empty this time, and throws it again. The sheriff’s department has only a couple of special body drags. At the call for help, the rivermen showed up in droves. Sheepishly they pulled their neatly coiled snagging hooks from this hidey-hole or that. After all, snag-fishing is illegal in the state. The bridge stands unfazed before them, throwing its great skeletal shadow downriver by the last light of the descended sun. White pleasure boats line the river at anchor, the banks jumbled with pale-shirted intercessors, black-skinned and white, kneeling in prayer or hand-chained in song. Their voices drift across the river, punctuated by the crashing of hooks.

  That morning, Hiram had rounded the bend upstream of the bridge too late, the unscheduled freight train just bursting from the trees, whistle screaming, and before it the robed mania of Uncle King, skirts flying, crucifix bouncing against his chest, his children clutched each to a hand, the three of them unable to outrun what was coming. At the last moment the holy man turned and hurled the two children out of harm’s way, free of the bridge, and turned toward the driving engine, disappearing in a scream of iron.

  The train skidded down the rails, raining sparks. The people shrieked. The two children whirled like rag dolls from the span and crashed into the river, a fifty-foot drop, and didn’t come up. The worshipers began shedding their Sunday shirts. They dove and dove again from their boats, searching. Hiram, too, thrusting himself as far down as he could go, touching the blind world of the bottom before he had to explode for the surface. Once, coming up, he saw the face of one of the children break the surface just downstream of him, long enough to loose a gurgled scream before she disappeared again, pulled under by the current or something else.

  Then more shrieks from the crowd, and Hiram turned to see Uncle King rise soot-faced from the rails like a resurrected corpse, called up as if by the screams of his daughter. He shed his robes and dove from the bridge himself, a white spear of flesh. He was under a minute, two. An eternity. He surfaced empty-handed. He and the others dove again and again, hour after hour, until it had been so long they brought out the hooks.

  Hiram hauls his in again. It has triple flukes like a grappling hook, the shank lead-weighted to sink. It looks like something from a medieval armory, a device for scaling castle walls or dragging men screaming from their trenches or foxholes. He touches one of the barbs with his thumb. He thinks of the pale flesh of his two little boys, so easily broken. A motor is coming upriver and he turns to look. A sheriff’s boat idles through the line of draggers. In its bow stands Uncle King, shirtless and erect. His old boxer’s body glows like white marble in the failing light, fleshed in the hard angles of the flyweight, the geometric planes scratched here or there with tattoos. The sheriff’s boat slides right past Hiram’s own, and Uncle King looks directly into Hiram’s eyes as he floats past. Hiram is prepared to acknowledge him now—blood brother—and yet the old man’s eyes register nothing as they pass, no recognition. They are gone to worlds their own, planets of hurt and loss you only go alone.

  Hiram thinks the man is being allowed again to dive for his children, returned to the place of loss like the holy thing he is. A candle-white form on the river. But as the boat passes, Hiram sees his hands are not clasped behind his back but cuffed, and he sees the worm of scar crossing the heart-line of the man’s palm. Hiram touches his own matching scar, brought back to the boyhood day they drew the shoddy lockblade across their hands, holding them clasped like arm wrestlers until their blood fully mixed. He thinks back to what came before, the secret they meant to seal in the meat of their palms, the hurt they sank to the river’s bottom.

  He looks down at the hook, knowing what terrible secrets it might find.

  He throws it again.

  46

  Altamaha River, Day 4

  The sun roars at noon height, birthing thousands of stars across the river’s surface. Hunter has his sunglasses on, and the explosion of light is still hard to bear. It makes him think of the day of his father’s funeral, a day so bright it looked washed-out, a scene from one of the seventies cop shows on daytime TV. CHiPs or Dragnet, one of the reruns his father could stare at while slurping a can of beer, sunk in something between boredom and zen. The service itself was in their mother’s church, the Baptist stronghold the old man would never step foot in. Lawton wasn’t there. Their mother had requested emergency leave through the Red Cross, but his command denied the request, responding that he was on a long-range patrol, beyond the scope of safe extraction.

  Hunter was left to do the eulogy on his own. He struggled to find the seams of strength in the old man’s faults, the deposits of power and lore that men might admire. His hands shook on the lectern. His voice was strange.

  “Our father, he was a hard man. He wasn’t partial to hugs or hand-holding, to displays of affection. He didn’t speak his love. But there were things he did hold close. There was the river, for one, more a father to him than any flesh and blood. On his days off, he’d take us upstream, have us sitting scrubbed and solemn in the bow like we were going to church. Maybe we were. His church. A swampland cathedral, roofed in leaves and plumbed with creeks, columned with cypress and gum. We knew its sights and secrets, its hidden sloughs. In showing us the river—his river—I believe he let us into his heart, at least some part of it. And that’s how I knew we were loved.”

  Hunter went on to talk of how the old man had never given up despite the years of setbacks, the lost boats and empty nets. He didn’t speak of the knottiness of the old man’s fists, oak-solid, nor his love of whiskey. He didn’t mention the stormy air of discontent that hovered always about him, ready to crack thunder. He let these remain unspoken, the shadow of the words he spoke.

  “He was a man who fought every day of his life. He didn’t always fight the right things, or for the right reasons, or in ways that fell within the laws of man or God or even, I suspect, his own heart. I can’t say that I understood him. I’m not even sure I really knew him. But I knew he’d never give up his dreams. I knew he’d die with his teeth in their throat.”

  Hunter looked across the church as he spoke, surprised at the turnout, the pews filled with people he hardly knew. Sun-spotted old men with faces like hammered leather, clumped in twos and threes, and blacks in their own rows of pews who worked the docks or decks or shelled shrimp in the ankle-deep ice of the processing houses. There were several men with stars over their hearts, their radio mikes draped over their shoulders, the cords braided like service distinctions. A few women suspiciously attractive, one with flame-colored curls and nails painted the bloodiest red, her eyes hotly welled, the tears trembling as if in fear of the blue worlds that sprang them.

  Hunter is reexamining these pews of memory, searching for anyone with a look of triumph on his face, a killer’s pride, when Lawton’s voice cuts in.

  “Hey.”

  Hunter looks up.

  “What?”

  Lawton is pointing to a creek mouth on the left shore.

  “Hornsby Creek over there. Good place to look, long as we’re going past.”

  They paddle diagonally for the creek. Near its mouth a slanted water oak, bowled over by the flood, flounders in the current. The naked crown, half-submerged, is stretched downstream, as if river, not sun, demands such upreach. The water churns through the skeleton branches, darkly riffled, and the tree trembles and trembles; it won’t be long. The creek itself is narrow, no more than twenty yards wide, and tunneled in cypress and gum. Sunlight shafts through the stained glass of just-budding leaves, speckling the surface yellow and gold—perfect camouflage for moccasins scrollin
g across the surface.

  Before them a deadfall of timber lies nearly flat across the creek, a two-trunked oak gapped and bowed like the doubled bones of a man’s shin. There doesn’t look to be space enough to slip beneath them, but Lawton leans far forward in the cockpit, and under he goes. Hunter follows, using his deck rigging to pull himself flat, hoping the bag of ashes behind him won’t snag. They enter a hall of cascading light, the new leaves slightly translucent, glowing. They purr as the wind sifts through them. A log juts diagonally from the water, wet-dark, upon which a line of turtles has assembled like friendly tumors, their heads extended into the shafts of sunlight.

  They round a bend in the creek to find a boat hoven up against the bank, a twenty-foot cabin cruiser of 1970s vintage. It’s canted on the bank, abandoned. The cabin glass is cloudy but intact, the hull a matte green, sanded over for paint that never came. The aft deck sits partly sunken in the creek, a pool of black water where the engine would be. The craft is losing the mark of being man-made. The hard lines of logic are softening, surrendering to age and growth, the colors melding with the surrounding flora. It might be the shell of some once-living creature, left now for who-knows-what species of jellied inhabitants.

  Lawton paddles up to it. He wipes the cabin window and tunnels his hands to peer inside.

  “Can’t see nothing.”

  His knees come up out of the cockpit and he pulls his boat onto the bank alongside the wreck. He climbs onto the bow and squats on the balls of his feet, the deck canted at a hard angle from level. The bow hatch gapes open beneath him, black as a mouth. He pulls the dive-knife from the scabbard over his heart.

  “Lawton—”

  Too late. He grins and drops through the hatch.

  “Crazy son of a bitch.”