Jacob's Ladder

by Donald McCaig

  Sallie hadn’t answered him. Had not answered his subsequent query—some minor domestic detail—had instead resumed her thoroughgoing noisy silence.

  Mrs. Gatewood had come during the February thaw—a woman come to mourn another’s baby. That day, Alexander took a long walk. When one doesn’t know how to act, the wise man makes his excuses. Of course he had wanted the baby! And when it was dead, he couldn’t think what to do or say. One had to make the best of things.

  Here, miles from any civilized establishment, enclosed by giant snowy mountains, in the depth of winter’s frozen silence, Alexander’s dumb spouse made so much racket he might as well have been back in Manhattan’s hurly-burly. Indeed, peace had been easier to find on Broadway than here. For the first time in his life, Alexander Kirkpatrick was unable to remove himself from the world, to find his way into his still and private safety.

  The fire snapped. No, that was some creature outside, some wild beast slaying smaller creatures by starlight.

  Alas, it was too early to go to bed. When he retired to the pile of quilts his wife would usurp this chair. The rocker squeaked. All night long he would hear it squeaking.

  It wasn’t his fault she had lost the baby! He had wanted it as badly as she. Young Alexander! Through that tiny, helpless life, the father might have lived anew, might finally have comprehended. For isn’t it said that a little child shall lead them?

  How he envied simpleminded fellows: their ease, their intuition of emotions he’d studied in detail and shammed as best he could. Alexander wasn’t arrogant because he felt superior to other men, he was arrogant because he must not be found out. During his brief sojourn at Yale College, Alexander learned one valuable lesson: arrogance kills questions. The humble man invites conviviality: that jostling Alexander dreaded.

  Alexander’s smiles were smiles he’d seen on the faces of others, his pretensions those he’d observed in senior faculty, men assured of gravity and power. Seducing Sallie had been, for Alexander, an act of bravery. He had never been with a woman he hadn’t paid, and Sallie’s vigorous aptitude for love terrified him. She wanted so much! True, sometimes he lashed out at her, but couldn’t she surmise how frightened he was?

  He leaned forward to set another stick on the fire. Of course he complained about the cabin, but surely she could have guessed that this new, bare log house was finer than the cramped rooms in shabby boardinghouses where he had previously resided. In this place, with her, Alexander had dared to hope—dared to imagine himself as husband, father, a man not unlike other men.

  When Sallie regained her senses he would tell her these things, avail himself of that intimacy husband and wife are meant to share. Perhaps one day he would tell about the mermaid. No doubt Sallie would be amused at the fright it had given him.

  “Did you hear a sound?” Alexander asked. “I thought I heard something. Oh, ha, ha. I suppose it is some wolf come down from the mountain to devour us. I am certain I heard a sound.”

  When he threw the door open, he saw nothing, no swift shadow on the hard snow. The moon had not risen and the mountains were dark jagged silhouettes. There was nothing out there for miles in every direction, and nothing inside but a woman who hated him. How had she learned to hate him so thoroughly?

  Alexander had been so careful to keep from her all that was discreditable: his failures, his weaknesses, his inability to comprehend. If Sallie once learned how lost he was, she would flee.

  Alexander was six when his mother died, and his father readily relinquished the boy to his elderly uncle. The afternoon they buried her, Alexander, wearing the clothes he’d worn to her graveside, accompanied his uncle onto the Hoboken Ferry for the first stage of their journey to New Haven, Connecticut, where his uncle had his ministry. Alexander’s bachelor uncle was vaguely good-hearted, unaccustomed to children, and had no notion how to divert the boy from recent sad events. At the ferry slip, a hawker sold pamphlets of a curiosity even the unworldly minister had heard about, so he bought one for the boy.

  The Feejee Mermaid had woman’s torso and fish’s tail. The pamphleteer rhapsodized about this scientific marvel, its capture by Japanese fishermen and subsequent embalming by a Hindoo of scientific bent. The remains had been obtained by a sea captain (at considerable expense to himself) and delivered to the United States, where enthusiastic scientists were to study this link between man and sea creature.

  It was a brilliant August afternoon and waves sparkled and seagulls squabbled in the ferry’s wake and the Hudson was cluttered with ballooning white sails. Sailors dotted a brigantine’s rigging and seine fishermen hauled nets and the ferry chuffed through it all like a pug-ugly. His uncle was enraptured, but the boy, who had never been on the water before, kept his eyes affixed to the flat black words, the engravings of mermaids and Japanese fishermen and a bare-breasted wonderful sea creature who bore an unmistakable resemblance to his mother. If it was true there were mermaids, life might be all right. If it was true—if a boy’s yearnings had any authority—then unloved, baffled Alexander’s dreams might come true. The boy prayed that anything was possible.

  His uncle had engaged a room at the Astor Hotel, but for economy they supped in a small café down the street. After their meal, man and boy climbed to the fifth floor, and after recovering his breath the minister prayed for his new ward and the repose of his sister’s soul, removed his teeth, climbed into bed, and soon was snoring. The boy crept to the window, dazzled. From Barnum’s American Museum, kittycorner across Broadway, a brilliant white light glared, lighting the bustling street for blocks north and south. Flags of every Christian nation lined the rooftop. Vivid paintings of elephants, kangaroos, and cobras plastered the facade.

  Although a living panorama of nightlife passed along the street below—Manhattan’s whores, loafers, hackmen, pickpockets, coppers, and swells—the boy saw nothing but the museum and its amazing promises.

  His uncle had allowed some time for sightseeing, and being assured by Astor’s desk clerk that Mr. Barnum’s cabinet of curiosities was improving and not unsuitable for young minds, he acceded to Alexander’s plea. First they breakfasted at the modest café, though the boy ate little. He kept the pamphlet in his lap; it reassured him. Already down the street a crowd was gathering.

  Alexander towed his slow uncle toward the exhibition. Close up, the wild animal paintings were awe-inspiring: elephants, tigers, bears!

  Anything might be inside this storehouse of wonders, perhaps even a creature that looked much like his mother, alive again and swimming happily through the sweet blue sea.

  They paid the small admission, and though his uncle was entranced by the curiosities assembled in the cavernous three-story hallway—the eagle skins, the panoramas, the models, exact in miniature detail, of Dublin, Paris, and Jerusalem, the boy was impatient.

  Up the stairs they proceeded, through rooms crammed with scientific exhibits: a stuffed buffalo, a towering brown bear, a live anaconda in one cage, live crocodile in another; passing at last into a vestibule where a floor-to-ceiling flag depicted the mermaid in nature’s colors, a golden-haired creature rising through gentle waves.

  The crowd pressed through into the room beyond, and Alexander Kirkpatrick gripped his uncle’s hand tightly as they approached the open casket.

  Inside was a wizened, hairy, blackened creature no more than three feet long. It had a fish tail. It had small furry dugs with hard black nipples. Its gums were drawn back over its sharp teeth in a plea for mercy. Thin arms, long-fingered hands had defended the creature’s face in its final urgent moment. The Feejee Mermaid had died in agony.

  The boy screamed and screamed, and though he would have run he had nowhere on earth to run to.

  Years later in his wilderness cabin, Alexander Kirkpatrick said to his wife, “I told you I heard something outside. Listen, there is some animal scratching at our door.”

  Obeying their own mysterious law, great changes always come swiftly and without warning.

  A RUNAWAY SLAVE
>
  NEAR SUNRISE, VIRGINIA

  MARCH 18, 1861

  HORSES’ HOOVES THUDDED in the snow and the iron shackles clinked over the withers of Jack the Driver’s mule. Late-winter stars whirled overhead, and Samuel Gatewood thought he could pick out the curve of Orion. The moon was making its last stand over the mountain. Things didn’t always turn out the way they should. A man can do what is honorable and things get worse instead of better.

  The slave hunter’s voice rambled among the patrollers like poison ivy through a thicket. “Ohio,” he said. “That’s prime. They get across that Ohio River and they sing their hosannas and they’re thinkin’ that’s the end of it. Why, they got no more caution to them than guinea hens in a tree. Any man can walk through an Ohio darktown knockin’ runaways on the head. Me and Nate—Nate partners me some—we plucked fourteen of those birds in one week, drug ’em down to our bateau, and except for one what jumped into the river and drowned himself, we brought each and every one of ’em back to his rightful master. Niggers got no sense.”

  Catesby Byrd rode at Samuel Gatewood’s side. An hour ago, both men had been awakened by a hullabaloo outside Stratford’s front door. Hullabaloos were no longer rare in Virginia. Even before Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated President, rumors and portents troubled the night air, sharp and angular as bats. Last month while the Confederate states were holding their first convention, Catesby heard unexcitable men swear—on a Bible—they’d heard cannonfire somewhere deep in the mountains.

  Would Lincoln try to relieve Fort Sumter? Would the South Carolina firebrands dare to attack a federal fort?

  Samuel Gatewood was the best-regarded citizen in the upper Jackson River Valley. His essays on deep plowing and improved negro hygiene had been published in the Southern Planter. Surely, Byrd thought, Virginians like Gatewood would find solutions to Virginia’s dilemma. Secession or subservience: surely there was some other way!

  At two in the morning, Byrd and Gatewood had been awakened and admitted three men to Stratford’s front hall: two patrollers known to them and a slave hunter with a distressing tale.

  Samuel Gatewood’s lips had narrowed to white lines. “Are you entirely satisfied that the Kirkpatricks—Sallie and her husband—are harboring my runaway servant?”

  The slave hunter just grinned like the devil.

  Jack the Driver had begged to be excused from the hunt. “This’s white man’s work, Master.” But when Gatewood placed a hand on Jack’s shoulder, the black man went to saddle his mule.

  Soft snow over frozen dirt. The road curved along the Jackson River running dark between snowcapped boulders.

  “Cap’n, this sure is fine country you got.” Pierce—the slave hunter’s name was Pierce. “Looks like good oat ground. You grow oats?”

  Samuel Gatewood wished he’d thought to wear his overcoat. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been out so late. Snowy Mountain loomed over them like some bulky, primitive god. He’d cut timber off that mountain for thirty years and his father before him and the trees still darkened the coves and you’d never know men had ever tried to civilize it.

  The patrollers, Billy Stuart and Amos Hansel, rode to the rear, keeping a gap, as if they weren’t really part of this and left to their own devices might have done things differently.

  “How long you been seekin’ this boy, Cap’n?”

  “Jesse ran the day after Christmas,” Samuel Gatewood thought, but didn’t say. His stomach lurched unpleasantly and he didn’t trust himself to open his mouth. He kneed his roan and showed Pierce his horse’s tail.

  Like ravens’ cawing you can hear for miles, the man’s voice was unaffected by distance. “I’m born on the Tidewater. Buxtons of Boxwood Plantation, they’re cousins of mine, though they don’t claim kin. I was raised amongst some of the finest gentry in the Commonwealth. Oh, them boys could chase the fox all day and dance all the night. Wasn’t nobody get one up on the Buxtons.

  “Ever time I get toward Ohio, I got to pass through these damn mountains, in and out, up and down, and don’t look down into the gorge lest you’ll want to puke. Not here, Cap’n. I mean this is good crop ground. Can grow anything in ground like this—oats, anything.

  “Three months—that’s a good while to be a maroon in the wintertime. ’Course, the other niggers feed ’em. Maroons sneak into the Quarters after dark. They slip past the patrollers. Maroons got too many places to hide. This country’d be considerable improved if you was to cut those damn trees.”

  “Didn’t slip by us,” Amos Hansel said in his deep voice. “That boy crept onto that mountain and denned up.”

  “Oh, they sneaky, Mister. If they wasn’t supposed to slip around in the night, why you think God made ’em black, ha-ha?”

  “It’s winter,” Amos said. Amos was the bigger patroller and the younger. He had a reputation among the colored. Sometimes a young buck slipping around when he shouldn’t, if it was to visit his gal, why then Master Amos sometimes he understood that. “Snow leaves tracks,” Amos said, settling himself deeper in his saddle.

  The patrollers rode solid horses, beasts that wouldn’t shy or balk, but wouldn’t win races either. Every night the patrollers went out, dollar a night, dangling their lanterns in the faces of colored women and boys. (“Passes, let’s see your passes!”) Didn’t need a fast horse for that work, needed a comfortable one. Under his oilskin slicker, Amos wore a jacket, woolen vest, woolen socks—two pair. Riding all night, that’s where the cold bit. Feet didn’t get a chance to wiggle around and warm up, so Amos Hansel wore two pair of socks.

  “Tracks,” Amos’s partner, Billy Stuart, added. “Runaway slippin’ around the plantation in wintertime, a blind man can see where he’s been.”

  Jack the Driver had fed Jesse Burns three times from the porch of his own cabin, last time a slab of hogmeat and a cornmeal pone, but Jack wasn’t the man to correct a patroller.

  Jack was driver over twenty-eight men. Jack got logs to the mill at the right time and carted sleepers to the railhead before they turned blue in the stacks, and timed sawing so it didn’t interfere with grinding cornmeal in November, or milling the wheat. He drove all types of men: young men, crazy as buck lambs; fulltask hands; old men who couldn’t hit a lick anymore, but needed to make a show.

  Jack was thinking that hunting a man was simpler than his usual work, that hunting a man was no harder than hunting a possum.

  “How much farther?” Pierce asked.

  “We ain’t left Stratford Plantation yet,” Jack said. He shouldn’t talk to this man, but words escaped his mouth.

  The slave hunter slowed so Jack just naturally had to come up beside him. “You the driver, boy?”

  Jack’s mind went blank. “Yes, Master,” he said.

  “You the boy supposed to know everything what’s goin’ on? Tell me somethin’. How come I can come here, a stranger, and set ’round SunRise store for a couple hours, just chewin’ the fat, and somebody says there’s this Jesse who has run from the biggest plantation in the valley, and I ride around one afternoon, and directly I learn where he is, this boy who’s been runnin’ since Christmas?”

  “It ain’t our line of work, Master.”

  “Pierce!” Samuel Gatewood turned in his saddle. “I’d thank you to not interfere with my servants.”

  “Just talkin’, Cap’n. Just tryin’ to get the lay of the land. These fields yours too, Cap’n? Was they mine, I’d plant buckwheat in these fields. Hell, I was just wonderin’ how come nobody in these parts knew where that nigger was hidin’, and me, I come in here, no kin to nobody, it takes me but two days to find him. I could understand were this some no-account nigger, old or sick, but this supposed to be a prime buck, fetch eighteen hundred at Wayne Tavern’s auction block, any Tuesday you bring him there. They say this buck reads and writes. Cap’n, how come a nigger can read when many a good white man can’t?”

  “He belonged to a schoolmaster.” Catesby Byrd spoke for the first time.

  “Agin’ the law
, teach a nigger to read.”

  “My wife and brother-in-law did their sums under that schoolmaster’s guidance.”

  “Man taught niggers and whites?” Pierce shook his head, disbelieving.

  Catesby Byrd had two healthy children, a frame house in the county seat, and a pretty wife he adored. Excepting only his cardplaying, Catesby was a fully domesticated man. Tonight, plucked from his warm bed, riding a frozen, moonlit road, Catesby was surprised how natural it felt. In these times, nothing was more natural than what was unnatural.

  “Heard the nigger run when the cap’n sold his wench,” Pierce continued. “Anytime you split buck and wench or mama and pickaninny, you never, never let ’em see the speculator till it’s too late, and soon as they’re away, you jail the one that’s left, a week, two weeks, and don’t give ’em no meat ration neither. Feed ’em porridge and dry peas, corn mush. Couple weeks, they’ll forget. No different than a cow what’s had her calf weaned away. Did I hear talk about the cap’n’s son?”

  “Mr. Pierce,” Catesby said, “we are grateful for the information you have provided and you stand assured of that reward for which you bargained. We will do our duty by you, sir. Do you understand?”

  Pierce muttered, “Yes, sir.”

  “Mr. Gatewood’s son, Duncan, is a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute. I pray the Commonwealth will not require his martial skills.”

  “Think we’ll go out, do ye?” Pierce sought safer ground.

  “Most Virginians would rather stay in the Union,” Catesby said stiffly.

  “Naw,” Pierce said. “We’ll go out. You can bet on it.”

  The road lay blank and white beside the lightly dusted fence rails. The field between road and river was smooth as an ironed shirt. The road climbed onto the mountain and paralleled a wide bend in the river.

  “This begins Uther Botkin’s land,” Samuel Gatewood said. “It was Kirkpatrick you said? Alexander Kirkpatrick?”

  “Uh-huh. The nigger’s sleepin’ right in the house. Hell, everybody knows.” He spat.