Points North, page 13
Or longer ago still when he was just starting to preach and he’d deliver a Christmas homily at Easter or vice versa. The congregation would begin to exchange glances and try not to smile, as if to say, “There the old boy goes again, galloping off on one of his hobbyhorses.” His design, of course, had been to deflect attention from his deeper heresies, in which, for a time, he had been successful.
But now it was time to walk down the length of the Common to the church for the short Holy Saturday service. If this was the end, as Charlie’d prophesied, then he would finish strong, as Charlie himself would have done in his place. He would end in a way his congregation would remember for a long time to come. He stopped briefly to pick up an empty Blue Seal Feed sack from the chicken house, then poked his head into the woodshed. He found what he wanted and headed down the village green to perform his office.
It was a plain country church of the Presbyterian denomination with no stained glass or paintings or graven images, and Pliny’d memorized the entire Easter weekend service long ago. Privately he’d never entirely understood why Jesus had been so set on going up to Jerusalem and tempting fate in the first place. Pliny supposed that he could chalk up Jesus’ impatience to get on with matters to the fact that He was still young, just thirty-three. At least nobody could accuse him, Pliny, of acting rashly. Getting into his vestments in his study in the back of the church, he had no idea exactly what he’d say or how long it would take. It would take as long as it took. But now, dear Lord, there was the specter of his adoptive brother Charles Kinneson of the hearse and the galloping whitewashed horse, having manifested himself in the Kinneson family pew, producing his prayer book as he had for a thousand other services. He still wore his mourning cloak and, Pliny guessed, the horse pistol below it.
“Dearly beloved,” Pliny began to the dozen congregants scattered through the pews. “I have a tale to tell you. A tale of death and of resurrection. But not perhaps the one you’re expecting. Hark, now. Hear how I died for the second time on the day of my nineteenth birthday, and was resurrected that same day through my covenant with God.”
* * *
“There was a man,” Pliny began. “An ordinary man like any other save in one regard. This man was a slave, on a cotton plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi. To make matters worse, he was also the illegitimate, half-white son of the plantation owner so that he grew up with one foot in the Great House, where he taught himself early on to read and write, and one in the Quarters. He was a neither-nor, betwixt-and-between creature from the outset. Indulged by his father, Judge Byrum Templeton. Despised by the judge’s wife, Mistress Lucrezia, as a perpetual reminder of her husband’s philandering. And, at best, tolerated by his brother and sister slaves.
“This slave was a good and faithful servant,” Pliny continued from his pulpit. “He worked hard, became his father’s right-hand man, and in the course of time married a beautiful and exceedingly clever slave girl from a neighboring plantation. She was a Creole woman and her name was Lake Ponchartrain.…”
What more now could he tell these maddeningly unimpassioned Yankees about the wild-hearted love of his life? That from the outset she made constant sport of him, as she seemed to of everyone and everything? The girl was a natural mimic and within moments of their first dance at that long-ago Christmas gathering she was clumping and left-footing it about the ballroom, taking him off ruthlessly.
From that evening forward he visited her at every opportunity. Rarely one to find himself at a loss for words, Pliny was tongue-tied around this beautiful and accomplished girl. She could cook to the taste of a gormandizer, entertain a brood of children of any age or color by the hour, build a fish trap, play the clavichord, and imitate to an uncanny degree the poor elderly unlettered Negro preacher who married them a month later in the little Negro church behind the Quarters. Nothing was safe from Lake’s irreverence, especially the book by which Pliny would later earn his livelihood preaching from. Why, she wondered, didn’t Adam break off a stout branch from the apple tree and kill the talking serpent? She wouldn’t countenance any serpents, talking or otherwise, in her garden. Were there mules on Noah’s ark? Where did he find them in the Holy Land? What did Jesus and the chosen twelve do for work? “Well, Miss Lake,” she said in a deep voice like Pliny’s, “you must understand that these are profound mysteries. It ain’t—oh, dear, I mean it isn’t—given to us to understand God’s ways.”
“She kept my feet on the ground,” Pliny told his congregation. “I loved her beyond measure. Then she was sold down the river, to a notorious slave dealer named Smithfield, the very mention of whose name made Negroes from end to end of the Delta quake. Imagine, brothers and sisters. You go off to Vicksburg on business with your master. You return home only to discover that your bride of just a few months has been sold away by Mistress Lucrezia into heaven alone knows what unspeakable species of bondage. Without hesitation the faithful servant went pelting off down the road, determined to offer himself up to Smithfield if only he could remain with Lake. ‘Fetch my driving horse, Lady Ebony, and my gig and a long chain,’ Mistress Lucrezia ordered. Straightaway the Lady and gig and chain were brought up. And with four burly field slaves on horseback in attendance, off she went after the fugitive, whom she ran to ground before he’d gone three miles.
“‘Now then, my dusky sir,’ said Mistress. ‘Since you wish to run, you shall have your fill of running.’ She directed her attendants to affix one end of the chain to the rear axle of the gig and the other to the runaway’s neck. Whereupon, she whipped Lady Ebony into a brisk trot, with the captured fugitive racing along behind for dear life. He fell, regained his feet, collapsed again. Sprawled out full length in the road. To prevent himself from strangling or having his neck broken he clung to the chain with both hands as Mistress dragged his torn body along the iron-hard road. Blinded by the dust raised by the horse and gig. Choking from the gritty dirt.
“Once home the mistress caused the good and faithful servant to be manacled by the wrist to a massive bolthead inside the furnace of a wrecked steamboat occasionally used by the judge as a makeshift jail. And ordered that, upon pain of sharing his fate, no one provide him with food or water until he tendered her his word that he wouldn’t run again.”
At this point in the story Pliny paused and surveyed the congregation. He wanted them to grasp the import of what he’d just said. That the word of the faithful servant was golden, no matter the circumstances. Out in the front pew Charles Kinneson was nodding vigorously in agreement. Had his earlier incarnation as mad avenger been some sort of momentary insanity? Pliny knew that such things occasionally happened to the very old, nor was this the only time over the last half century he’d seen his deliverer and friend run amok. Or perhaps a joke? Hardly. His brother was not given to joking. Scripture reported a single instance of God laughing. Pliny doubted that Charles had laughed even once.
“There he was,” the minister went on. “Alone. Sweltering. Bruised and cut. Parched. Chained to that great bolthead where the door of the steamboat’s furnace had been blown off when the boiler exploded. And before he knew it the good and faithful servant was praying.
“‘Mr. God,’ he said. ‘I know that it is not my place to horsetrade with you. But I know something else, as well. I know that which you joined together should not be put asunder. Therefore I wish to propose a covenant. I won’t ask you to lead me to Lake. But if, gentleman sir, you will help me to free myself from this furnace, as you did Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and take me under your protection while I search for her, I will be your good and faithful servant—kindly note that I don’t say slave—and preach your word for the remainder of my days, be they long or be they short. Only let me search.”
Once again Pliny regarded the congregation. It seemed to him that two or three late worshipers had ventured into the church since he’d started though he hadn’t seen them arrive. That was how consumed he was by the story he was telling. As if he were asking not God, but his little Holy Saturday flock to grant him permission to look for his wife. The congregation was with him. He could tell from their upturned, expectant faces. They had to know, had to know what happened next, after the good servant made his supplication to God.
“What happened, good people, was what usually happens immediately after we pray. Exactly nothing. Wait. Don’t mistake me. I do not say that prayer is unavailing. Not by a long shot. It is only that I have come to believe that it is God’s intention that, whenever possible, we should look within and answer our prayers ourselves. And at just that moment, looking out in the johnsongrass and jimson weeds through the gash in the furnace where the door had been, the good servant espied the means of his deliverance.”
Now, from behind the pulpit, Pliny produced the Blue Seal chicken-feed sack. From it he withdrew a double-headed splitting ax. “Aye, friends. Half concealed in the weeds lay a splitting ax with a broken-off handle. It was just within his reach, the snapped-off end of the handle lying beside it. From his shirttail the captive tore two strips of cloth. These he wrapped several times around his left forearm above his manacled wrist and the chain shackling him to the bolthead, tightening his makeshift tourniquet with the broken ax handle. Now there could be no hesitation. He must act this instant or he would never act at all.
In his right hand Pliny gripped the splitting ax just below its double blades. Made sure that every pair of eyes in the church was fixed on the axhead, which he brought down fast. Simultaneously, out from the sleeve of his ministerial robe shot his left arm. The sleeve fell away from his handless, padded left wrist. Of course his parishioners had always known he was missing a hand. Even knew he chopped it off himself, supposedly to free himself from slavery. In this regard the parishioners had been mistaken. In fact he had maimed himself for life purely in order to search for his beloved Lake. His freedom was incidental to his search.
“But wait,” Pliny said. “If the good and faithful servant died for the second time on the day his wife was sold down the river, when did he die for the first time? Beloved, any of the millions upon millions of men, women, and children ever held in bondage could answer that question. I, Pliny Templeton, died for the first time on the day I was born into slavery. So endeth my sermon on “Pliny Templeton’s Covenant with God.” The next installment of my story will commence in half an hour. In the meantime go forth, brothers and sisters, and spread the glad tidings throughout the village. Come one, come all, to learn of Pliny’s resurrection.”
“Down in the meadow, so far away,
Jack-in-the-pulpit’s preaching today.”
Hear “Pliny in the pulpit” preaching on
his life and times, Holy Saturday,
round the clock.
Some of the people Pliny’d been preaching to stood nearby, gaping at the message he’d just put up on the letter board in front of the church. Others seemed to be fanning out through the town, as he’d exhorted them to, to drum up more business for him.
“A stirring tale, brother.” It was, dear God, Charles. “What comes next, sir? You mentioned your resurrection?”
Pliny looked at his friend. Could this possibly be the same fanatic who’d threatened his life at the parsonage an hour before? Now Charles was encouraging him to tell his story to the town. Or some of it.
“Louisiana,” Pliny said. “You remember Louisiana?”
“Aye,” Charles said. “I do. Where I first heard you tell the story of your great covenant with God. And saw you fight. Louisiana.”
“Aye,” Pliny said. “Louisiana comes next.”
* * *
“A slave gal? Name of Lake Ponchartrain? Talk French, read and write, tall with green eyes? No, suh. No such a gal pass through the market here at Natchez.” Or Vicksburg, or Baton Rouge, or any of the plantations where he’d skulked up to the Quarters after dark to inquire. He traveled mainly by night in his own small blue fishing skiff, the left oar equipped with a jury-rigged leather harness to fit his wrist so he could row. It was hard to make the late-morning congregation, larger now, filling perhaps half of the church, see the big river because other than Charles Kinneson II few had ever seen a river anything like it. Not a river one quarter as large, one-tenth as dangerous. Under other circumstances it would have been the time of his life, dangers and all. How to make these stick-in-the-mud Vermonters understand?
“I traveled only by night for fear of being recaptured, and one thing I learned over the next two months was that the river was nearly as alive after dark as by daytime. Gar leaped out of the water and fell back with a splash like a plank dropped on the surface. Wild ducks clucked in their sleep. If I got too close a raft of them would fly up quacking as if the end of the world was at hand. And boats? Don’t talk to me about boats, folks. Keelboats freighting whiskey and lumber and grain downriver, red lanterns fore, green lanterns aft. Trotliners and flatboats. Ferryboats with sidewheels turned by horses or mules on treadmills. Scows and rafts and snag boats with winches and booms for pulling out sweepers and dismantling jams. Houseboats tethered to bankside trees in inlets and sloughs. Then of course there were the steamboats. Big as floating courthouses and lit up like Christmas and the waves from them lapping up on shore and giving out a long soft sigh as if they were happy to get there. You wanted to point the nose of your skiff directly into those waves. Otherwise they could tumble your boat backside over teakettle in less time than it takes to tell about it.
“I had to catch my breakfast, dinner, and supper out of the river, catfish mainly, and bream. Finding clear drinking water was a botheration. Once or twice I spied a cow in a pasture out of sight of the owner’s house and had fresh milk. And the wild strawberries were coming on. Do you know how many wild strawberries it takes to fill up a man who’s been rowing all night?
“‘Lake Ponchartrain? Ain’t no Lake Ponchartrain round these parts.’ Or, ‘What you talking, boy? That the name of a big lake down Louisiane. Not no gal. What sort of name be that for a young gal? Probably sold off to the plantations in Brazil. Or put to work in a fancy house in Orleans. Get along now, ’fore us get in trouble consorting with you. Take this square of ’pone along. Got nothing else to give you. Go on now. Ain’t no gal Lake here. Ain’t no such a gal nowhere.’
“They would have known, of course, that there’d be a reward for me. They could have turned me in. They didn’t. ‘What you-all wants us to fix you for supper? Here, drat you moonstruck cow eyes. Carry this flitch of bacon along. Man can’t live on love for a gone gal alone.’”
“Brother. Tell about President George Washington.” Jesus to Jesus and seven hands around! From his pew in the front of the church, scant feet away, the madman was kibitzing. Actually kibitzing. Well, fine. Hadn’t he always been at least half crazed? At just eighteen Charles had taken it upon himself to reroute the outlet of Lake Kingdom north instead of south, stranding several mills just south of the Landing high and dry on the original outlet with no waterpower, and at the same time flooding out half the valley to the north, including the Common. There’d been talk of a tarring and feathering or worse so Charles had skedaddled himself, gone South to “stir up the darkies,” as his enemies put it.
“New Orleans, good people, in that era, was the slave capital of the world, teeming with villainy of every stripe. Bull-baiting, bear-baiting, raree shows, taverns by the score, ranks of crooked brothels crowded elbow to elbow and leaning against each other like barrelhouse drunkards trying to hold one another up. Sifting through the slave market and inquiring about Smithfield and Lake, I made no progress in my search.
“In the meantime, I had made a mortal enemy myself. His name was Dick Driver, and he was a multicolored parrot with a scurrilous tongue who belonged to a New Orleans dandy and boulevardier named Dave Dancer. Now this Dave Dancer had trained his wicked familiar, upon sighting a man or woman of color, to shower upon them the most opprobrious epithets. Dick Driver was an abandoned parrot if one ever existed. He was said to be over a century old and formerly the particular friend and spiritual advisor of the infamous New Orleans buccaneer Jean Lafitte. For some reason, this feathered paragon had taken an especial dislike to me.
“I would come around a corner and there they’d be, Dave Dancer, the man about town, who was no more nor less than a procurer for several of the better-known houses of ill repute, with the blasphemous parrot riding on his shoulder. ‘Why,’ said the bird to me, ‘you sooty bastard, I’ll have your liver for supper I will, I will. Son of Ham, son of Ham, son of Ham.’ To this day, brethren and sisters, I believe that he knew exactly what he was saying.
“Yet working my way from brothel to brothel and patrolling the docks inquiring for Lake and the slave trader, Smithfield, garnering no information at all, I was beginning to think that neither my wife nor the slave dealer was in town. Surely if Smithfield had been there, he would have caught wind that I was looking for him and contrived to find me first.
“It occurred to me that if Lake had escaped from her captors, she might somehow have found her way back to her original home with the Ponchartrain family. I was told by a livery groomsman who styled himself a great jokester that they resided in a stately manse in the St. Charles arrondissement, with the family name embossed in gold filigree on the door. Imagine my dismay when, upon reaching the address I’d been given, I discovered that the trickster had directed me to the district cemetery. The “stately manse” was no more nor less than the Ponchartrain mausoleum.
“Not far away, in a little potter’s field at the rear of the cemetery, where for generations the slaves belonging to the family had been laid to rest without the benefit of tombs or, I suspected, perhaps even coffins, was a small enclave of wooden tablets with the names of the deceased scratched into them. A few of these little wooden lozenges were draped with colored glass beads or bright scraps of cloth.
