Jacob's Ladder (4 page)

When Duncan slid the door open, a single lantern glowed outside the tack room. Insulated by the hay floor overhead and heated by a dozen horses and as many milk cows, the barn was yeasty, a little moist, and warm enough that he couldn't see his breath. Duncan led Gypsy down the aisle to an empty stall and found rags to rub her down. When Duncan had Gypsy dry, fed, and watered, he leaned against the stall door, his knees shaking.

“Bet you wish you hadn't been so bold,” a girl's voice said.

“Who the devil . . . ?”

The colored girl was in the manger above the stalls, among tomorrow's hay, her feet dangling. “I ain't no devil,” she said.

“It was you lit the lantern!”

She turned and hang-dropped into the aisle. Rubbed her hands clean. “Weren't no cow lit it. Dark in this old barn. Rats and bats and goodness knows what-all else.”

“Midge, why aren't you in the house?”

She put her hands on her hips, a skinny child with lank black hair, all long bones and elbows and taut skin. “Because your mama was afeared for you and ask me go to the barn and see is you back but you ain't so here I waits and when I sets to leave I can't see three feet through that snow, nary three feet. I don't want be in no smelly barn I want to be in the kitchen house in my warm bed.”

“That's where you sleep?”

“My bed next the chimney. Sometimes cook says she might take my bed. Reckon she'll have it tonight. You get any supper?”

Duncan wiped moisture off his face. “No.”

“Me neither. They be eatin' in the kitchen house, Jack and cook and that old conjure man, Uncle Agamemnon, all of them. Cut up possum this mornin'. Be potatoes and carrots and cook's got a big onion . . .”

“Will you hush? Why talk about what we aren't about to have.”

“Not much else a colored girl can talk about. Want to talk about the River Jordan or gettin' to the Promised Land? I was readin' Mistress Abigail about some fancy ball in London, maybe you like me talk 'bout that?”

“I didn't know you could read.”

“Lot you don't know, young Master Duncan.”

He was clumsy and tongue-tied and didn't want to look into her flashing eyes, so he turned to give Gypsy a pat. “She found the way home. Even when I couldn't see a darn—damn—thing, Gypsy found the way. Aren't horses amazing?”

The girl nodded solemnly, “Oh yes, Master Duncan, you right there: horses mighty amazin'.” In a voice that sounded remarkably like his mother's, Midge said, “I cannot begin to name the amazements provided by our magnificent horses.”

A shiver went down Duncan's spine. “Where'd you learn to do that?”

She shrugged. “That Franky say I'ze witchy,” and she rolled her eyes.

Duncan went to the barn door and pressed his ear against the wood. “Still howling,” he pronounced. “No telling how long this will continue.”

“We be hungry. Maybe you kill a cow?” She had her head cocked slightly and her eyes wouldn't stop flashing.

“We won't get that hungry,” the boy said scornfully.

“You sayin' that 'cause you can't do it,” she said. “Here we be in this ratty barn with no food and snow blowin' all around and lots to eat—” this time in Cousin Molly's cool Tidewater drawl—“were there merely a gentleman to provide it.”

“I don't like you doin' that,” he said.

“I don't care what you like.”

The moment came for Duncan to rebuke his servant, but Gypsy arched her tail and passed manure and it fell plop plop to the floor and the two giggled. “Whew,” Midge said, “What you feedin' that horse!”

“Rose petals,” Duncan said, and they giggled again.

When they ran out of giggles, tension returned, but it was a different tension: friendlier.

“You got no more clothes than that?” Duncan asked.

Outside her short-sleeved cotton shift the girl's arms were goose-pimpled.

For reply, the girl sneezed. “Duncan . . . —I” She sneezed again.

He fumbled along the stall partition for a dry horse rag, into which she snuffled. She threw it down. “Now I don't smell no better than that horse,” she wailed, and Duncan was rendered helpless by her tears. “Account of you, I'm cold and I'm hungry and now my face stink like horse sweat. You got any more notions, young Master?”

Duncan took a sudden dislike to a title he'd heard all his life. “Don't call me that,” he said.

She judged him with her eyes, valuing him as if he were on the auction block. At last she said, “You got any more of them rose petals?”

Their smiles were remarkably like.

In the tack room they found a chunk of cheese meant for the rat traps, but Midge wrinkled her nose. When she wrinkled her nose, her entire face became her wrinkled nose: nothing halfhearted.

Duncan forked straw into an empty stall and laid a horse blanket atop. A torn gray-green buggy robe served for a coverlet. “You'll be warm here,” he said.

She took off her shoes and wiggled her toes. She said, “It's a mighty big stall. Might be room for two.”

That night Duncan slept curled against a girl so light he dreamed she was slipping through his fingers.

In the morning, a curious gray light filtered through the barn walls, but out of doors was a howling white wilderness. They spoke a few words, but not many, because words would have led them where neither was ready to go. They fed and watered the animals and twice milked all the cows, and excepting what warm milk they drank, emptied their buckets out in the snow.

By next morning, Cox's snow had deposited seventy inches of snow on Stratford Planation, seven and eight feet where it drifted. Jack and a gang dug a path from the Quarters to the main house before digging to the barn, where they hoped to find Miss Abigail's young servant.

The big double doors were drifted shut, so men boosted Jack in through the loft door. On hands and knees Jack said, “That you there, Master Duncan? Praise the Lord! We powerful feared for you!”

When little Midge stepped out from behind Duncan, Jack fell dumb.

JOHN BROWN'S BODY

C
HARLES
T
OWN
, V
IRGINIA
D
ECEMBER
2, 1859

AS IT HAPPENED,
nearly two years later Cadet Duncan Gatewood guarded John Brown's gallows the night before Brown's execution. Hoarfrost diamonded the dead grass, frost whitewashed the planks of the gallows floor, and Duncan wondered what they'd do with the lumber after this machine had satisfied its purpose and been disassembled. Although the planks were clear yellow pine, the milling was imprecise. Duncan was Jack the Driver's principal assistant at Stratford's sawmill, and in the young man's critical judgment, these boards were barely suitable for rough siding.

Picket fires blinked on the Blue Ridge, and from time to time Duncan heard faint challenges from the ford where Captain Ashby's cavalry was stationed. The dome of the Charles Town courthouse glowed in the moonlight. That's where they'd condemned him. The jail across the street—that's where they'd imprisoned him. That light in the second story window—it was his light.

Mr. Poe was Duncan Gatewood's favorite poet, and he loved Walter Scott's romances, and he believed that this ordinary grassy meadow at the edge of this village was kin to other blood-haunted places where men had done bold deeds. He hoped Charles Town might enter the noble list that included Hastings, Agincourt, Vera Cruz, and Crécy. Duncan was not deluded by his own part in this, a part he correctly deemed slight: second watch at a gallows guarded by two thousand Virginia troops who'd swiftly waylay any abolitionists intent on mischief. If Duncan's post had been important, an older cadet, an upperclassman, would have filled it.

In the grandeur of the moment, he made a pledge to his lover. “I pledge you,” he prayed. “My sacred honor.” Sixteen-year-old Duncan Gatewood couldn't pledge anything less precious. He owned only his horse and clothing. Prospects of one day becoming master at Stratford had dimmed when a furious Samuel Gatewood learned of their affair. Duncan ached to give Midge something, and honor was all he had to give.

Back at the Institute he often put himself to sleep remembering their lovemaking. The gentle underslope of her small breasts, the way she stood splayfooted when she was naked. Her elbows, she had solemnly assured him, were too big. And so he kissed each elbow and one thing led to another.

“You fancy.” Midge had laid her smooth wrist against his cheek. “You my fancy man.”

A gaunt figure startled Duncan from reverie. “Halt! Stand still a minute till I get a look at you!”

It—he—was a cadet. Well . . . almost. A charade of a cadet; his gray overcoat broomed the dirt, his dashing, braided kepi perched on streaky-gray hair. As if a cadet had moldered overnight, a Rip Van Winkle cadet who'd awakened after twenty years.

Duncan drew back his musket's hammer. “If you don't quit coming, I'll put a ball through your gut.”

“Sic Semper Tyrannis, son. That's the countersign, and had you proffered the proper challenge, I'd have returned it to you. Please set aside that blunderbuss before you do something that'll leave Mrs. Ruffin grieving.”

The oldster's sliding steps kept his greatcoat off his heels.

“You're no Institute cadet. What're you doing wearin' our uniform?”

“Craved to be a soldier since I was a lad digging mud forts in the flats of the James. Son, I told you about that musket! Colonel Preston himself located this proud uniform. A cadet captain had forethought to bring a spare. Pay no heed to his badges of rank. I am an honorary cadet private, nothing grander.”

“Yes, sir. But since you haven't any business here, I'll ask you to repair to the bivouac.”

Ruffin flapped both arms like a disturbed hawk pumping for altitude. “Son, I am come here to see and see I shall.”

If Duncan raised the alarm, there'd be soldiers here on the instant, displeased to be so summoned. “Your word of honor then,” Duncan said. “Your word of honor you are not an abolitionist.”

The old man had muttonchop whiskers, flat cheeks, a tiny sharp nose, but when he grinned he opened a frog's mouth from jawhinge to jawhinge. His teeth perched on the red ridges of his gums like coracles on a wave. “I've been accused of many sins, but of that particular wickedness I am innocent as this moonlight here. I am Edmund Ruffin.”

“I know no Ruffins. No Ruffins in my home county.”

“Your father—is he a planter?”

“We thresh some wheat. Cattle. Been a good year for cattle. I been sent away from home since spring. To the Virginia Military Institute.”

“Does he subscribe to the
Farmer's Register?”

From the way the man spoke, Duncan surmised that Edmund Ruffin and the
Farmer's Register
were one and the same.

“No, sir,” he said.

“Does your father manure?” Ruffin flipped his coat and set his hands on his hips. Cadet Spaulding's trousers yawned at his waist. “Calcareous manures, sir: marl, plaster, carbonate of lime. Does your father marl his fields?” The old man shook his head. “Sometimes I despair for agriculture in the Commonwealth.”

The moon slid behind a cloud and blackness chased across the commons, and Ruffin clutched his coat about him. Nodding at the solitary light in the jail's second-story window, he said, “He'll be busy this night, I'd venture.”

“I hear he does right smart of praying.”

The old man's grin yawned like a trap. “There's not hours enough left to him to undo the damnation he has merited.”

“Sergeant Colley—Colley's with the regulars—says he's all the time writing letters.”

The moonlight washed so strongly it dimmed the picket fires on the Blue Ridge. “I suppose,” Ruffin said, “we are fortunate to have had him.”

“Sir?”

“Clarity, son. Brown has provided clarity. Have you inspected the pikes he intended to distribute to our servants that they might employ them upon our sleeping wives and children? Pikes eight feet in length with a double-edged spearhead honed and stropped keen as your razor.”

Duncan, who was not a regular shaver, nodded.

“Only a fool can mistake that murderous yankee steel. Recently I had despaired of secession's prospects, but Mr. John Brown has made me glad. Now, sir . . .” And with that, as if he'd given himself leave, the old man darted up the thirteen steps onto the gallows platform overhead.

Thumb hooked around the hammer of his musket, Duncan followed. On each stair the old man's footsteps had scuffed frost.

Edmund Ruffin stood at the rectangular trap, boot toes at the crack. He said, “Don't fret, son. For the certainty of heaven I wouldn't disturb these arrangements.” When he turned, his eyes were wide as a child's. “You ever consider how it feels?” Unerringly his left hand located the overhead beam, the hook over which they'd pass the rope; he gave the hook a jolly tug. “Imagine such a thing. Everything you've done in your life, all the wonders you've seen, why, the very way you clasp your pen or button your britches, all come together here.” He stamped. “And after they mumble a few hypocritical prayers, ohhhh . . .” His free hand gripped his throat and his tongue spurted out, dark as blood, and his head canted to the side.

Duncan backed from Ruffin's mime, and the old man returned to life. “You ever wonder what remains of us, son?” He jutted his jaw toward the jail. “I imagine yonder fellow has some acute thoughts on the subject.”

“Don't!”

But it was done. The old man had hopped on the trap. He flexed his legs, trying the hinges and bolts that held it fast. “Ahh,” he said.

The commons below were washed by the moon and the picket fires high on the Blue Ridge were diamonds forming the limits of the known world. “ ‘I do not wish your comfort,' ” he said in a voice not his own. “ ‘I die in my faith.' A queen said that, son. How about ‘It is a far, far better thing I do now than I have ever done'?” Ruffin spat. “Mr. Dickens vilified us after his American tour. We in the South were not nice enough for him. Uncommonly fastidious, Mr. Dickens, for a scribbler. Should he return to Richmond, I believe he would find the climate disagreeable. Step up here, boy. Go ahead. Standing on a gallows trap will flush the cobwebs from your brain.”

Duncan stepped beside the older man.

“There now, doesn't that make you want to produce an oration?”

Dry-mouthed, Duncan shook his head.

“Look out there: two thousand men gathered in your honor. Not many deathbeds, I think, boast such a show of martial ardor. The Brigade of Cadets, the Virginia Grays, United States troops under Colonel Lee. Oh, we think high of you, boy. What have you to say for yourself?”

Duncan's head shook no, no, in dumbshow.

“I ask you, sir: why did you wish to arm our servants against us? Why did you conspire to murder our families in their beds? Why did you invade a sovereign state to such bloody and terrible purposes?”

Duncan blurted, “I'm not him.”

With a sweep of his hand, Ruffin dismissed the waiting troops, the dignitaries. “You've no imagination. And we ask why the South has no profession of letters. Do you think he'll falter, son? Refuse the noose?”

Duncan eased off the trap as if it were hair-triggered. “Just who the dickens are you?”

“Edmund Ruffin, agriculturalist, editor. Present occupation: firebrand.”

Duncan said who he was: “From Stratford Plantation, south of here. We come here by train, the Brigade of Cadets, first time I was ever on one of the stinkers and it like to made me sick, the cinders and smoke and swayin' from side to side . . .”

The ancient cadet wasn't listening. “I believe our John has come too far to show the white feather. If his life has been precious to him, none of his previous adventures have proved it so. Mr. John Brown will wear his noose like a riband of honor. Sometimes courage is easy. Have you ever seen the moon so near to the earth? What do you fear, Duncan Gatewood?”

It was getting on toward three and Duncan had been on duty since midnight. He would have scant sleep before morning muster, and the hanging was scheduled for nine. “The loss of honor,” Duncan said, and it was true what he said despite its nearness to his tongue. If the old man had pressed him, Cadet Gatewood might have admitted that he preferred honor to love, to country, to, even, the safety of his own soul. Such preferences were not too rare in the Cadet Brigade. Many a young man will go to the devil gladly if honor's intact.

“This will be a tale to tell your grandchildren . . .” Ruffin began.

Annoyed by Ruffin's probe, which had taken unfair advantage—Duncan thought—of the natural respect accruing to his gray locks, Duncan asked, “And you, sir; what do you fear?”

Ruffin was silent.

“It's only fair, sir, that you answer as I answered.”

Ruffin's sharp eyes weighed the young man. “One day, Cadet, you will say you were here where it began, you were present at the birthplace of a new republic.”

“Your fear, sir.”

“When Andrew Jackson fought Lawyer Dickerson, allowed his foe the first shot, suffered his wound and then coolly shot and killed his man, honor was satisifed. Honor can be satisfied by a pistol ball, a rapier thrust. The loss of honor, sir—and I intend no disrespect—is a young man's fear. We old men fear falling upon the mercy of others.”

The moon slipped behind a cloud and darkness chased the sparkle from the dead grass. In the jail behind the gallows, the condemned man's lantern gleamed, unwavering as a star.