The Whiskey Rebels (42 page)

“I see.”

“When will he return?”

“I cannot say.”

“And where has he gone?”

“He doesn’t tell me.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “you would care to invite me inside, and we can discuss this further.”

“Another time,” she said, as though she did not mean it, and closed the door.

Joan Maycott

Spring 1791

M
rs. Brackenridge insisted that I spend the night in her house, and in the morning I made my way back, not to the hunting cabin but to my own. I’d not told anyone of my plans to do this because I knew they would attempt to convince me of its imprudence. There was first the practical matter of my cabin’s condition. Much of it had been destroyed in the fire; Skye had told me as much. I found the walls scorched, and such furnishings as had been saved were blackened. The curtains, table linens, our clothes and papers—including my novel, but Skye had prepared me for this too—were all gone. The place stank of fire and dampness, but it was where Andrew and I had lived, and I would not leave it until I must.

The other principal objection to my returning was that I no longer had any right to the cabin, though I did have permission from its owner, Mr. Brackenridge, to stay there as long as I liked. It would not be long. I did not wish to remain, and doing so would be unwise. I understood, almost as soon as I’d understood anything, that Tindall had pursued us because he wished to deprive Andrew, Skye, and Dalton of the means of making whiskey. I also knew that there were more than a few wealthy farmers in the region who would be willing to buy our leases, with our equipment and instruction on the new method of distilling. For now, Hugh Henry Brackenridge held the ground rents to our lands. He assured me he would do his best to sell them to the highest bidder and to do so for no more than a 5-percent commission, though, if he wished to cheat us, we could do nothing to prevent it. It was a gamble, but I never doubted that he was worthy, and circumstances would prove me correct.

Thus it was that things settled into relative calm. Tindall, for the time being, would not risk harming us. His efforts to have me jailed, and his cowardly retreat, would make any attempt on the well-being of me or my friends far too suspicious. He might hope to evade the law, but he would not risk an all-out uprising from the populace. When Mr. Brackenridge sold our ground-rent lease and I received my share of the whiskey revenues, I might hope to return east, perhaps to my childhood home. It seemed a respectable way to engage my widowhood.

Yet I could not do those things. Jericho had said it changes you when you kill a man, and that was part of it. I had killed. I had faced Tindall both in physical combat and in a legal duel, and I had bested him both times. What else, then, could I do if I set myself to it? I was an unassuming woman and, men often said, a pretty one. My appearance led men, civilized men, to trust me, defer to me, and, often enough, overlook me. If I embraced these truths, if I used them, I could accomplish a great deal. What I wished to accomplish was revenge. Not pointless, hollow, bloody revenge, but revenge that would destroy those who had made a tragedy of my life and would, at the same time, redeem me and my friends.

The outlines of my plan were clear to me, but to proceed I would need the assistance of men like Skye and Dalton and at least some of Dalton’s whiskey boys. If I were to have them, they must trust me, even be in awe of me, the way his soldiers and officers were in awe of General Washington. If I were to effect that, I would have to do something bold.

W
hen she came into the dairy barn to milk the half-dozen cows, I was waiting for her. Dawn had only just struck bright and cloudless, filling the grounds with sweet possibility. I’d had to trek through the forest at night to meet her, but I’d carried my rifle and walked noiselessly in soft moccasins. My legs never tired, and though I made certain to watch every footfall, my mind wandered over what I would now do.

The door opened to the east, and when she came in she was nothing but a large silhouette, the skirts of her plain dress undulating in the breeze. But she did not see me, and so closed the door and reached for the milking stool. She’d healed well since I last saw her, but there were still red welts on her face and hardened scabs, and in some places the flesh had settled into a vaguely pale scarring.

She had just set down the stool and begun to talk to the first cow when she saw me. “Lord, Mrs. Maycott, what you doing in the dairy barn?” It all came out in a single breath.

I had not precisely been hiding, but standing in the shadows in the corner. I now walked forward, and it seemed to me that I was stepping through a door. I was about to become someone else. Here. Now. Under these circumstances. I must be a woman others follow. I must take command and make events unfold to my liking.

I looked at the woman. “What is your name?”

“Oh, Lord, grief done disordered your mind. You don’t remember old Lactilla?”

“Of course I remember you.” I took her hand. “I want to know your name.”

It seemed to me that, all at once, this woman who had been rendered property, the plaything of a cruel master, understood everything. Not only what I was asking, but what I was doing and why. An understanding passed between us, two women shaped and blasted by a world who cared nothing for us but as playthings for its amusement. “I’m Ruth,” she said, in a quiet voice.

“Do you know what I hate most about slavery, Ruth?” I asked.

“You gots to choose just one thing?”

“What I hate most is how we allow it to not signify. We tell ourselves we have produced this great experiment in republican government. We have launched a new era of human liberty, the culmination of two thousand years of the republican dream and centuries of philosophical ponderings. It has all led up to this glorious moment, this glorious nation, an exemplar of the greatest potential of the human soul. But never you mind about those Africans held in bondage. They don’t signify. That is what I hate most.”

“It’s worth despising, but I’d place it something down on the list. For me, I’d rather reckon my baby which was took away. And with it I’d number getting shot in the face with fowling piece.” She smiled, and I could see a scar where a piece of bird shot had grazed her lip.

“At some point,” I said, “those things—the philosophical and practical—must come together.”

She studied my face with a mixture of horror and understanding. “Is that point now?”

“Tonight it is,” I told her.

She sighed and brushed off her skirts, as though my words rained down dust of disobedience and she wished not to be tainted. “What you mean to do?”

“I’m not certain, but I must do something, mustn’t I? Everything begins with someone who either does something or does nothing, and I won’t be the person who does nothing.”

She shook her head. “You ain’t gonna kill him, are you?”

The depth of her concern surprised me. “Would it trouble you?”

She rose to her feet and walked to the barn door. Then she walked back. “It simple for you. Tindall’s a devil, that true. You want to kill him because he deserve to die. That true too. But you kill him, most likely the slaves get sold off.”

I understood the fear of change, but here I thought it madness. “Ruth, are things so good here that you fear to find yourself elsewhere?”

“Things here are bad,” she said, “but they always worse somewhere else.”

I nodded. “I have no intention of committing murder.” It was not entirely true. I could not say precisely what I intended to do to Tindall. Murder was certainly one possibility.

“All right. What you need?”

“I need everyone out of the house tonight. I want it free of servants and slaves.”

“All right. I get that done for you.”

I
waited in the dairy barn the rest of the day. Ruth, who had been mocked with the name Lactilla for decades, brought me an afternoon dinner and an evening supper. Thereafter I fell asleep for some hours, but when I awoke it was the full of night, and there were no lights in the main house of Empire Hill.

I’d made arrangements with Ruth, and the front door was left unlocked. It was no great matter to make my way across the grounds, enter the house, and proceed to Tindall’s bedroom, the location of which Ruth had also explained to me. I told her I only wished to frighten him and rob him, make him feel as helpless as I had been made to feel, but I had not told her the truth. I pitied her, for she feared being sold if Tindall died, but Tindall was not a young man, and he must die sometime.

It was not that I wished him dead so much as I wished to kill him. Or, more precisely, I wished to see that I could kill him. I had killed Hendry, but that had been in the heat of violence, and it had been the instantaneous decision of a moment. For what would happen in the months and years ahead, I wished to know that I could kill, and that if I were called upon to do so I would be ready. I hoped all could be effected without more bloodshed, but I knew that if I pursued my plan, the time might well come when I would have to make that decision, and I believed it would be easier if I had made it already. I could think of no better subject for the experiment than a man who deserved to die—and deserved death at my hand.

I climbed the stairs, delicately pressing my moccasins to the wood so it did not squeak. At the top of the stairs I turned right and went to the second door, as I’d been instructed. Inside it was light, but I heard no noise, not breathing or the turning of pages or rustling of sheets. I pushed open the door a little farther to gain a better view.

The room was roughly furnished, as though the delicacy of Tindall’s receiving rooms was but posturing and here was the true man. A large oaken wardrobe, an inelegant side table, a plain bed, a bearskin rug upon the floor. Across the ceilings, rafters were exposed, built at an arc, almost as though we were in the hold of a ship. The walls were adorned with a few paintings of hunters upon landscapes. At the far wall, a dying fire burned in the fireplace.

From the rafters, near the center of the room, hung the body of Colonel Tindall, motionless, not even swinging, upon a monstrous thickness of rope. His dead face was near black, his tongue protruded, his eyes were strangely both bulging and closed tight. He was dead and had been dead for a few hours at least.

I stared, feeling astonishment, disappointment, and relief all at once. How had it happened that the very night I was to confront him, possibly kill him, he had taken his own life? I did not believe he was the sort of man to be so racked by conscience that he must choose oblivion over guilt. Yet here was the evidence before me.

I had been robbed of the chance to test my mettle, but I had nothing to gain by standing and staring, so I decided to search the house for anything of value I might take.

I took two steps into the room when I heard the boyish voice.

“I followed you.” It was Phineas. He sat in a high-backed chair that faced the fire and so had been invisible to me at the door. Now he rose and turned to face me, rifle in his hand. He did not raise it, but it was only a matter of time until he did. I had a pair of primed pistols in the pockets of my skirts, but I thought it too soon to reach for them.

“Why?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.

“I seen you coming through the woods, and I knew you was coming here, and I guessed why. When I saw you hiding out with the niggers, I knowed it for sure. So I come here first and I hit Tindall in the head with the back of my gun, and then strung him up like the pig he is.”

“Why?” I asked again.

“So you wouldn’t,” he said. “You come to kill him. I knowed it, and I didn’t think you should.” He laughed.

I had the strangest feeling of not being there, as though I watched these events unfolding from some distant place. Relief and disgust and terror swirled through me. “What is so funny?”

“I remember you when you first joined up with the party heading west. You was just a green gal from the East. Now look at you, killer of men, housebreaker, thief, who knows what else? I told you the truth, missus. The West changes you, I said, and by God it changed you good. But I ain’t gonna let it change you that much.”