Call Each River Jordan

by Ralph Peters (as Owen Parry)

  “I’ve hunted this country since I was a boy,” Raines continued, tart as cress. “Every year. I know these hills. And every damned field. Every creek.” Young and thin-skinned in his self-regard, he turned his face toward me. “We’re not five miles from that nigger camp right now. I know those Indian mounds. I could lead you right to the damned place in under an hour. ‘Beersheba,’” he said in a tone most men reserve for fallen women. “It’s nothing but a lair for thieves and killers.”

  “Will you betray them, then? Is that your intention, Lieutenant?”

  He rode on with that bitter, scalded look. Then he straightened his back and rose up in the stirrups. Scanning the country ahead.

  A lone rider dropped down a long slope toward us. It was not hard to recognize Mr. Barnaby.

  “You think old Mr. B. hasn’t been watching over us the whole time? You think he doesn’t know where they’re lying out?”

  I reined in my mount. “He would not tell.”

  Raines cast a disdainful glance down at my person and thrust his right hand into his pocket. “Oh, wouldn’t he now? Well, maybe I will. That Martin’s Will should’ve hung a dozen times. The man’s a murderer. A white man–killer. And the rest of them are nothing but runaways and wanted men. Holding back information about fugitive slaves is against the law in this state.”

  And would you see them chained to soothe your pride? I almost asked. But gulf enough there was between us now.

  He swapped his interest back to Mr. B., whose poor mount struggled closer under its burden.

  “We’re lucky they didn’t cut our throats,” Raines added. He fumbled through his pockets, one after the other, with increasing urgency. I did not understand what he was after, but his fingers scrambled under the cloth like a man who is missing his money. Pockets explored, he patted down his uniform. With a look of panic.

  “Lieutenant Raines,” I began, “I know I am not part of your society. And perhaps this Mr. Hitchens was, indeed, a killer. I cannot say, but—”

  My escort unleashed a volley of curses unworthy of the lowest Christian man. Or heathen, for that matter. I had not heard such language from his mouth. Or from the mouths of many other men, save cooks and drillmasters.

  The first word that he spoke that I can share was:

  “Locket.”

  “Those niggers took my damned locket,” he repeated. “They must’ve gone through my pockets while I was sleeping. “The worthless—”

  I will spare you his imaginative employment of the English language. Suffice to say the boy was killing mad. He even reached for his side, instinctively, to where his holster would have been had he not been deprived of arms for our journey.

  Barnaby spurred his mount when he heard the shouting. He come up with a question on his face.

  Raines was in a vicious child’s rage. A regular tantrum it was.

  “Master Francis?” Barnaby asked, in wonder.

  Raines would look at me no longer. Twas as if I had stolen his treasure. He steadied his eyes on his servant, saying, “They stole my locket. The damned—”

  I saw that Barnaby held a bundle in his hand. Prepared he was to pass it to young Raines. It was the lieutenant’s pistol belt. With his revolver’s grip protruding from the holster.

  I nudged my horse between master and man. Clumsily, I will admit.

  “Wait you,” I said. “Lieutenant Raines, listen to me. I will retrieve your locket. It is my fault, see.”

  “They should be whipped and hanged,” he snarled.

  His anger might have frightened slaves. But it only brought my own spleen up within me. I do not like a tantrum in a man, and my patience is not endless.

  “You’re behaving like a child,” I said. Not without some heat.

  Raines went silent. Lips parted, as if seized up in midword. I wonder if anyone had ever been so blunt with him. Harvard-learned or not, he had not studied humility or met defiance. His face put me in mind of the white-bearded officer I had shot point-blank at Shiloh. Amazed the man had been that the world would cross him. I saw the kinship twixt Raines and Barclay now. It was no band of blood, but one of iron. The South grew richer crops of pride than cotton. And pride is not the least of the deadly sins.

  “If one of them took your locket,” I said in my old sergeant’s voice, “and if you did not lose it as a result of your own doings, Lieutenant, I will retrieve it for you. If you will but wait here with Mr. Barnaby, I will fetch it back, and no harm done.”

  Raines hated me in that moment. “You in league with those coons, Jones?”

  “No, I am not. And you know that I am not.” I turned to Barnaby. “Mr. Barnaby, would you calm him down, then? Reason with him, would you? I will fetch him his locket.”

  “You’ve got three hours,” Raines said, reaching into his waistcoat for his watch to time me. But the watch was missing, too, along with its chain.

  “And I will fetch your watch and chain, besides,” I said. “And anything else that was taken.”

  I tugged the reins to steer my horse about.

  Twas curious. Finding himself bereft of more than just the locket calmed Raines a little. As if a general theft were less acute than the specific one. But under the brim of his hat, his face shone crimson.

  “You know the way, sir?” Barnaby asked me.

  “I will know it from up there.” I gestured toward the long, low ridge from which we and then Barnaby had descended.

  “Right you are, sir, right you are. Hardly Piccadilly to Pall Mall.”

  Rascal wanted to be off, as if he sensed the urgency of the matter himself.

  Look you. I did not want Raines doing something foolish. Such as confronting the Negroes in his pride. For then there would be killing, I was sure.

  I was about to give Rascal a kick, the way I had seen better riders do, when Raines stretched out his hand. Twas not a proffer of reconciliation, but a plea for attention.

  He could not reach me. The hand remained suspended in the dusty air between us, as our horses danced.

  His anger had blown over like a summer rainstorm and something near despair annoyed his eyes.

  “I ask you . . .” he said, “ . . . Major, I ask you, as a gentleman, not to look inside the locket. If you can reclaim it . . .”

  I nodded in agreement. For I already knew whose portrait lay therein.

  Mr. Barnaby said, “Careful of the marsh, sir, it ain’t pleasant. The snakes kept me awake most of the night.” He flipped his thumb over his shoulder. “There’s a smithy at the crossroads just ahead, sir. Master Francis and meself will be there waiting.”

  RAINES HAD INSTRUCTED me never to cling to the saddle, but to let the horse’s motion aid my balance. Well, I clutched that saddle tighter than I would my immortal soul. All the way to the marsh I held on to the leather lip ahead of my groin. Then, as Rascal began to splash among the reeds, I strengthened my grip to the utmost.

  I did not see another great serpent, though two smaller snakes disturbed the water’s stillness. The wetland smelled of cucumbers and rot.

  The Reverend Mr. Hitchens had not heeded me. No guards were posted by those Indian mounds or above the defile. No one watched at all. Unless you count the blind man, Uncle Toby. He plunged toward me, testing the air with his hand.

  “You seen my boy?” he begged.

  My swift return excited all the camp. Hitchens himself had been at his ablutions and come toward me naked above the belt. He had a look of strength larded by age. His chest, too, bore a slash. But more commanding were the vines of scar that crept over his shoulders from his back and around his thickening sides.

  Would I have killed the man who whipped me thus? I have killed men for less beneath a flag.

  The preacher pulled on a frock coat over his flesh. His face was marked with questions for the ages.

  “You there,” I called to a fellow in a shapeless cap and a faded, florid waistcoat, “hold my horse.”

  The fellow jumped at my command, accustomed. His freedom wa
s forgotten in a moment.

  I dropped down hard on my bad leg.

  Hitchens parted his lips on a word, but I cut him off. “We must speak, sir.” I glanced around at the curious African faces. “Privately.”

  “What’s wrong, Brother? Are the soldiers coming?”

  “Walk with me, if you please, sir. Walk with me and I will tell you.”

  He shooed the others off us and we strolled. They kept away but trailed us with their eyes. Full of foreboding they were, and not without reason.

  Hitchens steered us back into the pines. Toward the log that had supported our first conversation. I did not wait to reach our destination, but explained my purpose as soon as we left the camp.

  He shook his head. “‘Thou shalt not steal.’ Lord, I’m sorry to hear of such doings.” His dismay was authentic, yet I could not say he was shocked. “Folks here still aren’t used to living decent,” he went on. “Takes a piece of time to put them right. After all the troubles been forced on them.” He stopped and stood, a penitent, before me. “But I am ashamed, Major. Ashamed and troubled.”

  “Can you get them back? He won’t be calmed, see. And might yet do a thing worth the regretting.”

  “Oh, yes, Brother. Surely. I’ll collect his things, all right. And it was a kindness of you not to shame me in front of my congregation. Or any of them in front of me. That was a true Christian kindness.”

  “Time there is little,” I warned him.

  “You just wait up by the sitting log. I’ll get what needs to be got and come on back.”

  I strolled ahead and sat me down. The morning had turned to noon and the forest hummed. Busy as a city, that is nature. With every creature industrious.

  Yet it was a peaceful place, for all the buzzing. I tried to use that peace to think things through. I do believe we are guided by His hand. What had been the purpose in my return? Was it only a matter of petty theft, or had I been given a second chance to ask what I had been too dull to ask before? At least since yestereve, a thing had gnawed me. And yet I could not say what that thing was.

  I waited in the shade, grazing my fingernails across my bites. Insect and ant had tasted Abel Jones here in the Southland, and serpents lurked. It seemed as mean a place as Rajasthan, though green and watered.

  The Reverend Mr. Hitchens returned with promptitude, a smile cleft into the deeper cleft of his wound. It was a smile of shame stirred with success. He closed on me and held out a big hand.

  I took the locket, watch, and chain, and dropped them into my pocket.

  “Thank you, Mr. Hitchens,” I said. “You are a good shepherd.”

  He shook his head, smile graven with sorrow. “Mine’s the thanking duty, Brother. You like to kept a trouble off Beersheba. A trouble and a tribulation.”

  “Would you sit beside me for a moment?” I asked him. “I have some more questions, see. It will not take long.”

  He blessed the log with his ampleness. Hasty he had been about his doings and sweat enriched his faded coat of black.

  “Mr. Hitchens . . . I am told you are a wanted murderer.”

  He nodded. “I figured that young fellow had his eye on me. Surely. Others marked it, too. Some of the hard ones didn’t want to let him go off with all his knowings.”

  “I do not know what he will do, see. Perhaps the time has come for you to leave here.”

  He shook his head. With finality. “I done run enough.”

  “It’s not just you. The others are in danger if he talks.”

  “I know. I know that, too. I’ll pray on it. I’ll pray for him to see the light.”

  “And I will pray, as well. But not all prayers receive a prompt reception.”

  “You do believe in redemption, Major? You do believe in that blessing, don’t you?”

  Oh, there is a question with which I was familiar. Redemption was the only hope I had.

  “I believe in the redemption of the soul,” I told him. “Here below . . . the law will have its way. Caesar will have his renderings.”

  “Don’t you believe a man can repent? Start over again?”

  I drew marks in the dirt with the tip of my cane. Erasing marks I had made the day before. “A man can repent.” I nodded slowly. At a thing I knew. “And a man can change, sir. I believe that is in our power. But we may not escape the judgement of our neighbors.”

  “The Good Book says, ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged.’”

  “The Bible says a muchness of things by which men won’t abide. That is a thing you know yourself, Mr. Hitchens. Better than me, I expect.”

  He made a sound so deep in his throat it seemed to rise from his heart. “I believe a man can lift himself up.”

  “And he can fall down again,” I answered, thinking of myself on the field of battle. “To be a good man is a daily struggle. A battle it is that only ends at the grave. If it ends there.”

  “I shall not fall again,” the preacher said. “I do not know if I will rise, but know I will not fall.”

  I wished that I might say that of myself, and with as much conviction.

  He stared down at the earth. Staring under it, perhaps. “Brother, I killed that man who called himself my master. After he sold off the woman I had taken to me. As she had taken me to her. She would not lie with him. Not smiling and giving. So he stripped her to the waist at the whupping post and took a rod to her. With his own hands, and with plenty of folks looking on. They kept me tied up through all that, for they were rightly fearing what might happen. Wagon done carried her off to Memphis, to the slave pens. Don’t expect she fetched much, all broken up the way she was.” He tapped his fingers, once, upon his knee. “Soon as they let me free of the tying up, I took a hatchet to that man and burned his house. I never could track on Darly, bless her heart. But they were surely tracking on me. Yes, sir. Dogs and all. Brought out the militia, cause a white man’s death is worth something. I struck north. With hatred in my bosom.”

  He sighed. “Time come and I married again. Married proper that time. That was across in Indiana. But they had the persistence of Satan, those slave-catchers. Out for bounty money. They wouldn’t quit cause of no river. Not the Ohio, nor the Jordan. And there were mean folks up North there to help them, too. Pointed them on their way, and glad to do it. Well, when those slave-catchers weren’t quick enough to take me, they nailed the doors and shutters of my cabin closed. With my Treesa and our baby child inside. And they burned that cabin down, sir.”

  He closed his eyes until he had gathered himself. “I didn’t kill all three of those men like folks say. But I killed two. And even now . . . though I have repented . . . although I would not do those deeds again . . . I cannot forgive them. There is sorrow in my heart for my doings, Brother. And I forgive the men who scarred my face and whipped me til the bone showed out. But I cannot forgive what was done to those I loved.” He almost smiled. “I pray on it til my knees hurt up through my shoulders, but I cannot forgive them.”

  Before I could speak and mutter an empty comfort, he laid his hand upon my shoulder. His touch raised a small cloud of dust. “I tell myself repentance is a start. That forgiveness is bound to follow. I shall not fall again, Brother. I shall not fall. But, tell you true, I may not rise no higher. Perhaps a man’s only got so much Christian in him.”

  He withdrew his hand, and I felt the loss of it. The wounds we hide are more in want of comfort than the wounds we show.

  “You go on, now,” Hitchens told me. “‘Seek and ye shall find.’”

  I rose to go, weary of a sudden, and with a hot and choking ride before me. But then I turned again, just as the reverend fellow labored to his feet. His jaw had dropped with the effort and his eyes swelled. He put me in mind of men whose hearts betray them. In the medical sense, I mean.

  He must have seen the despair I carried with me.

  “What is it, Brother?” he asked. “What’s so mighty? Pressing down on those shoulders?”

  I could have told the man a thousand things, but I was
sent to question, not to blabber. “My thoughts will not come straight, see. About this killing business. It chews at me, but I cannot get it clear.” I looked into his gouged and kindly face. Into a killer’s kindly face, Man’s own. “You said this slave fellow . . . the one who returned to lead his brethren to freedom, this Hesiod . . . you said he claimed he had a revelation?”

  “Surely,” Mr. Hitchens said. “Must’ve been a powerful one, too. When he passed through here a-preaching and gathering folks up, he wouldn’t even answer to his right name no more. Told everybody they was to call him ‘Angel.’”

  I GALLOPED. Clinging to saddle and mane. Rascal and I splashed through the marsh, and serpents be damned, if you will pardon me. I gave the horse his head up on the good ground. He flew like a very Pegasus.

  I had it now. I had it from the front end to the back. And had to get me back to Sherman and Grant, to warn them before Lott could kill again.

  Lott and his Judas band of killing madmen.

  When I reached the low ridge, I followed its crest for speed. Time seemed everything to me in those moments. As if I might gallop all the way to our Union lines without stopping. Yet, the flesh is weak. I mean not mine, though that is weak enough. I saw that Rascal was sheathed in sweat, a shining creature. Foam minstreled his lips. Game the animal was, and had given me all that he could. I did not want to ruin him, so I slowed us to a walk.

  I had hoped to judge a straight descent to the spot where the forge must lay, but fell a bit short in my calculations. I had expected a column of smoke to guide me, but the sky was an unstained blue. We ambled down a meadow to the road. Twas then I saw the peddler, a Hebrew fellow, sweating worse than Rascal as he went. Too poor for horse and cart, he pushed a barrow through the countryside. Dust encased his trousers to the thigh.

  As I rode up, he set his burden down. Taking off his topper, he wiped his forehead. Judging whether I might be a danger.

  It struck me then, as oft it did in India, how life plods on. For me, Lott’s evil seemed large enough to drown the world in excitement. And greater still, a scorching war had come. But the peddler had his business to conduct, as others had loaves to bake, or infants to suckle. The toiler must address his fields if he will eat through winter. It is as when a man is broken-hearted. Around him, life continues without pause, although he knows the world is at an end.