Gabriel stood there looking at the flames consuming his family and remembered his dead father, The Most Right Reverend Jeremiah McCallum, thundering from the pulpit so many years ago before the war: “The bondage of one man born in Christ’s image by another is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. Let the word go forth that John Brown is the righteous messenger of the Lord’s wrath. One cannot thunder about rights whilst in his fields he chains a child to its mother; we, all of us, will pay the price for the pride and greed of the few. This land will be set aflame by the armies from the North, but make no mistake, it is the torch of the Lord’s justice that the invader will carry to set this land aflame. And cast not a believing eye on the slave master’s newspapers which pronounce his lies—the only rights offended are the sins of slave masters.”
Gabriel looked up at his father railing from the pulpit, his arms extended, holding the Bible in one hand and a fist in the other. Reverend Jeremiah McCallum was once the most successful preacher in the slave county of his youth. Gabriel could remember the pews full with the finest slave-owning families, poor whites at standing room only and the slave hands crammed into the balcony, all to hear his fiery sermons. Back then the good folk used to take the reverend’s medicine every Sunday. But back in that day, he only railed about the venal sins, taking the Lord’s name in vain, coveting the neighbor’s prize bull. These days, for weeks on end, it was nothing but the sin and abomination of slavery—every sermon, every Sunday. Gabriel looked at the dark cherry wood pews set against the stark white of the walls as they sat empty except for a scattered few sharecroppers. The only ones left were the aged and one odd family of northern abolitionists that had moved south for reasons known only to them. Each Sunday these odd ducks would be the only ones at service. And each Sunday they heard the same lacerating screed against the sin of slavery.
These sermons had started unexpectedly. On a wet fall day, Gabriel and his reverend father had ridden to the McHales’ plantation for supper. The reverend often enjoyed the McHales’ hospitality and their commitment to the church. In turn, the McHales needed the reverend’s approval to overcome the loss of the family’s good name in society. Rumors had circulated for years that their oldest son, Tucker, was going to the McHales’ slave shacks on many a night in a drunken stupor to rape the women and threaten the children. The problem was not the act of fornicating with his father’s property but the indiscretion of being drunk and the tales of his wild violent temper on the young. It was said he would wander into the shacks and threaten to rape children, boy or girl, unless an older black woman took him into her shack and satisfied him. Afterward, he would stumble from the shack with his pants undone, the pent-up hostility drained from his inebriated body, and stumble back to the manor house in the darkness. On many an early morning, the McHales’ houseman, Old Charles, would find him in the fields with his pants around his ankles and a spent liquor bottle in his hand.
Tucker’s antics became a problem because on some drunken nights he would forget where he was. It was one thing to violate your own property, it was quite another to violate another’s. In this case, it was the New Year’s Eve Ball at the Monroe plantation. Once a year, every notable slave-owning family in the county would be invited to the Monroes for the grandest ball of the year. One year, Tucker drank himself incontinent and wandered into the Monroes’ kitchen. He shoved the kitchen women around until he spotted a twelve-year-old slave girl adding frosting to desserts. He coaxed her into the root cellar claiming he needed her to find him a bottle of brandy. Once down the cellar steps he flung himself at her. She was able to elude him and ran out the root cellar door, but not before he tore her dress, exposing her breast. The sight of the child exposed fired up Tucker until he was wild. He chased her into the courtyard below the back porch. He grabbed her by her hair and bludgeoned her unconscious with his fist by rows of Old Man Monroe’s cherished peach trees. He started to rip her dress bottom off when Old Charles, who had driven the coach to the ball, arrived with two field hands to restrain him. Tucker filled the orchard with vile oaths at the hands as they dragged him away, his pants around his ankles.
In the midst of the tumult, the girl regained consciousness and scrambled away down the orchard path, the sounds of her sobs echoing among the trees. Unfortunately for the McHales, the incident was witnessed by every male guest standing on a second-story balcony enjoying after-dinner brandy and cigars. To a man, each guest had taken his own liberties with his slaves, but they found the lack of discretion and violent nature of Tucker’s attempted rape ungentlemanly.
More troubling for the McHales, the girl was rumored to be Old Man Monroe’s daughter. It was said he had a special fondness for the mother and doted on his daughter, treating her with special consideration, even going so far as to teach her to read and write. Old Man Monroe’s quest was to see the McHales shunned and Tucker dead.
Tucker was shipped off to Europe to dry out, and the family set about repairing their reputation in genteel society. The McHales knew the only way to soften Monroe would be through the reverend’s intervention, and so the reverend became a regular guest at dinner. On this night, after a large supper and conversation in the living room, Reverend McCallum asked about Old Charles’s absence. McHale told him that Charles had taken ill and now lay dying out in an old shotgun shack with the field hands. Old Charles had lived in the main house for fifty years, but the McHales said the house was filling with the tangy smell of death, so they put Charles out to die in the far reaches of the plantation.
The McHales’ daughter, Vanessa, insisted that they would be honored if the reverend would say a few words over Charles. She claimed it was propitious that he had asked about Charles, because the very next day Doctor Roberts was visiting to relieve Charles’s suffering. She reminisced that Charles always loved to attend the sermons on Sunday and that he cherished his time in the balcony. Thus, it was agreed, after dinner, the reverend would ride with Gabriel out to the shotgun shack and say the unction over Charles.
The reverend had known Charles for more than forty years and remembered him fondly at meals and seeing him in the front row of the balcony on Sundays. Charles had a shock of white hair and beard that always stood out in relief of the dark faces in the balcony.
The night air was cool, and Gabriel could see his breath as he and the reverend rode out to the field shacks. The reverend and Gabriel entered the shotgun shack, and both had to duck under the doorframe. Once through the door, the room opened to the left. The interior was smaller than Gabriel expected, the wooden cot taking up more than half of the one room’s space. As the reverend approached, he laid the Testament atop the wooden crate near Charles’s bedside. A crude candle burned on the crate—it had a thick rope for a wick that gave off a dull, flickering light and left a sinewy trail of black smoke to travel up the wall and mushroom in a cloud at the ceiling. Next to the candle shimmering in the candlelight lay a crude cross bent to its shape out of the metal of some long forgotten farm tool. The candlelight threw shadows about the room, but Charles’s face glowed.
Reverend McCallum bent so close that his face was illuminated by Charles’s glow, and he looked directly into the dying man’s eyes. He reached for Charles’s hand, holding it firmly, and began the Lord’s Prayer. He admonished Charles not to be fearful; that the Lord would shower on his soul righteous justice. The reverend asked if Charles wanted to clear his conscience of sins, if he wanted to make his peace with the Lord.
Charles responded, “Yes, sir, I do, but I need to tell what the sin is so I can confess it true.” Even on the door of death, Charles’s voice was clear.
The reverend said, “Say to me what’s been riding your conscience, Charles.”
Charles said: “Reverend, I never saw the baptism of my own. I know I had me at least three; to this day I don’t know if they was baptized.”
The reverend said, “Every child of this plantation is given the chance to be baptized when they are old enough to decide for themselves.”
“Yes, Reverend, I know that, sir, but I’m tell’n about my own. They took all three of ’em when they was babes, you know how they do before they attach to da mother. I always wanted to speak up about baptiz’n when they was taken, but it wasn’t my place. And, you know, Reverend, there’s them that don’t think the hands should be baptized. So, I always feared that maybe my young’n never got the water.”
“That was out of your hands. God cannot punish you for what you cannot control. He will reward you for your obedience. He will not punish you if others fail to carry out His works,” the reverend consoled him.
“I understand, sir, that’s what I mean to tell you. My last one was still suckling with his mother and wasn’t sold yet, but I knew he was paid for and Mister Powell com’n for him. I stole out the main house one night and went to his mother in the shacks after his feeding and I took him down to the creek out yonder. I had heard the preachers do it with grown hands, so I kicked through the ice and I dipped that child’s head in that water and I said the words over him, the words I heard a hundred times. I knew he was too little to understand, but I thought he might never be baptized if’n I didn’t. Ever since that night I always feared I done wrong. I ain’t no preacher, and I didn’t have no right. I feared since that the Lord be angry with me, and maybe with that young’n for him being falsely blessed. But I was worried he’d never get the sin washed off him; you know how some folks don’t baptize theirs, that’s the reason I did it. Reverend, the only reason I feared for that child to get to heaven without the water.”
For the first time in the twenty years of his life, Gabriel saw his father at a loss for words. The reverend’s countenance was grave, and he was staring at the floor unable to look at Charles’s face.
Charles said, “I know I done wrong, Reverend, help me make it right ’fore I go. I don’t want no trouble with the Master above when I go.”
His voice quavering, the reverend asked, “Charles, did you baptize that, your child, your son, in the name of the Father?”
Charles nodded and said, “Yessir.”
The reverend said, “What was the child’s name?”
Charles said, “I called him Jonah, that’s the name I used, but I reckon that weren’t up to me.”
The reverend said, “Did you let the water pass across Jonah’s forehead?”
“Yes, Reverend, jest for a minute, he being so small and it being so cold that night.”
“And did you say ‘Jonah’?”
“Yes, sir, and the child smiled, I swear to you, Reverend.”
“You did it better than I ever could have, Charles. You did it right and well. Your reward will be heaven, and there you will be the master, and men like me will toil in your fields.”
Gabriel backed out slowly and retreated to the horses tied to a fence railing in front of the old shack. He was unsure of his father’s reaction to Charles’s story. In a few moments, the reverend filled the doorway of the shack. His tall frame silhouetted by the candlelight flickering behind him. He took a step down from the shack’s landing. He was holding the Testament in his left hand and pulling at his collar with his right hand as if trying to keep the night air from choking him. The reverend walked a few steps and dropped to his knees; his shoulders slumped forward as if he had a great weight upon his neck. He keeled forward placing his face in his hands, the only thing between the dirt and his nose was the Testament. He began pounding the earth with his right hand and crying out: “Lord, more than Saul, I was blind. Hypocrite. Man of God, hah, whore for the prince of lies.”
Gabriel saw the hands emerge from their shacks and appear like wraiths in the darkness to look into the yelling. They stared with blank eyes at the preacher as he wailed and beat the earth with his fists. From his knees the reverend reached up with both hands in great clawing motions as if he was trying to tear the fabric of the heavens. He was bathed in shadows, and the flickering candlelight bounced and danced in the doorframe behind him. The flames cast the shadows of his father’s movements to be elongated, grotesque. As Gabriel went to his father, he snapped threats at the hands to return to their shacks or there would be a reckoning. Gabriel looked down upon his father and his prostrate form and swore to himself that he would never again kneel.
Gabriel bent and said, “Father, we need to leave.”
The reverend rose but seemed to collapse in his arms. He stared at his son who was now dragging him toward the horses. As he reached his mount, the reverend grabbed the pommel and pushed Gabriel’s hands from him and said, “Is it your pride, son? I was once proud—yet an old man dying in bondage in a shack of old boards showed me the truth.”
Gabriel gripped him, and the preacher allowed himself to be lifted into the saddle of his horse. Gabriel grabbed his father’s reins and led both horses slowly down the road. The reverend’s eyes were a mix of sorrow and madness, and the look unnerved Gabriel. He would grow accustomed to the look. It would appear thence forward every Sunday as his father railed against the sin of slavery from the pulpit. As they cleared the McHales’ plantation and climbed up the main road’s embankment, Gabriel mounted his horse. He looked at his father slouched in his saddle.
His father looked at him for a long time, then said: “Do you know what Charles told me, son, do you know what the dying man told me after you crept from his shack? He told me he feared you—the prophet in chains said you had the mark of Cain upon you.”
The attendance stayed the same at church for a short time. The first break came when the folks stopped allowing their slaves to attend, believing their attendance might be what was prompting the reverend’s sermons. It did not make a difference. The sermons grew shriller as he castigated the slave-holding families sitting in the pews before him with righteous invective. They quit the church. The merchants and craftsmen stopped attending when the reverend turned his wrath on them as witnesses of injustice who remained silent because they profited from the sins of their slave master neighbors. The McHales were one of the last to leave, but after a few weeks of the attacks directed at the source of their wealth, they too departed.
The flock moved to a new church in town. The young preacher there was handsome with a pretty wife, and his sermons were about the white man’s burden. He preached that teaching industriousness to the hands would free them from their natural idleness. The message sat better with the gentry. Yet, the reverend pounded on, preaching to the few poor hardscrabble farmers that remained about greed, vanity, and the monstrous evil of slavery, though they owned no one and worked from first light to the end of the day’s dying sun to feed themselves. Rather than confrontation, the town simply ignored the church, and when secession fever and war rallies rolled through the county, the church faded into the background of the coming storm.
Fort Sumter splayed across the newspapers, and Gabriel could hear the whooping and pistol fire in the streets. As his family sat down to dinner, the reverend said grace and finished with, “It has come. The Lord will not turn a blind eye to it any longer. He will send his legions to smash the Egyptian slave masters. You boys are of age now. I think we’ll travel west to St. Louis. It will end as all wars do, and we’ll return.”
There was an awkward silence, and the reverend looked around at the table. He asked, “What is it?” Gabriel had worked out his speech prior to that night. He had even practiced it late at night in the church, alone. He would speak about the fight for home and rights. But, as he looked at his father, he knew the man would hate him more if he tried to explain, so he simply said, “Reverend, Luke and me and Eli have enlisted in the cavalry. We leave tomorrow for Fort Donelson to join the fight.”
Gabriel knew he could not lie. His father knew him, knew more than anything that Gabriel wanted to ride and that he did not care if it was Indians, Yankees, Missourians, Mexicans—he’d ride against anything or anyone. Gabriel had listened for years to the old men in the country store sitting about the stove smoking their cigars and pipes. He would hide among the shelves and listen to the
tales of battle. On special nights, one old soldier would be at the store. He came only in winter and only on those rare nights when you could smell snow on its way. He kept the look of the first Americans—the woolen cape worn over a threadbare colonial uniform, his hair knotted in a short ponytail, leather riding boots that were hobnailed before the birth of the nation. Everything upon him spoke to the old days, the first days, when men were giants. The men in the store who took the stock of every customer that entered with a single glance always gave him special consideration, shuffling chairs around the stove upon his appearance, allowing the old warrior to take the first place, the one closest to the fire. His name was Uriah but the old-timers passing time before death around the stove’s iron belly had named him Captain.
When he was a boy, Gabriel would climb out his window on those biting winter nights, run across the roof of the front porch, and descend the tree limbs, making his way to the far side of town. He’d climb through an old wood chute at the county store and hide amid the shelves in the back of the store. He’d wait, knowing the others would take their turns to talk of elections, the latest gossip from the chancellery court, but he knew that if the captain came in from the snows to call upon them, the old boys would save his tale for the last. The captain had fought with Marion when barely more than a boy and by twenty he had commanded a flying cavalry squadron under General Jackson. He had fought the Creek and Cherokee nations, the Chickasaw and Shawnee, and the British in the Rebellion and at the time of New Orleans. The captain’s tales were woven with the sinews hardened through a life of battle. The legends fed Gabriel’s spirit. Listening in his hide secreted amongst the shelves, Gabriel vowed to himself that he would one day sit as a warlord.
Angels of North County Page 9
