A Bloodsmoor Romance (34 page)

The boy was crying and the tears looked real but the birthmark on the side of his face gave the game away. The Devil's own. A flintlock fired in the face, his head ducked in the cattle dung pond,
Is that real blood?—that ain't never real blood,
and next April turning the bend in the road, dry September hawking Bibles and glass paperweights and water-diviners along the Trenton Pike, through the Delaware Valley leading a sickly mule, in Virginia marshlands where the mosquitoes that bit him dropped dead at his feet, in Allegheny County, in Stowe Creek Landing, along the Schuylkill, the boy helping him walk, the boy carrying the heavier of the backpacks, cheeks glistening with tears, like father like son, they ain't never father and son,
You can't hurt them you can't touch them Yankees how did they escape so fast where did they go
.
.
.
?

TWENTY-TWO

I
n the tumultuous weeks and months before their engagement was officially announced, before, indeed, John Quincy Zinn had so publicly claimed her for his own, Miss Prudence Kidde­master was disturbed by rumors involving not only her suitor's interest in other young heiresses, but his background itself: detractors whispered that the famous experimental school in the hills was less of a success than radical educators knew, and that the Zinns were shrouded in ignominy, as it were, a male Zinn having been executed as a common felon, and John Quincy Zinn, motherless and fatherless, shipped away to an orphanage . . . a Catholic orphanage, in Baltimore, perhaps; or in Wilmington; or New York.

Pride contended with curiosity, in our restless young lady, who refused for a considerable space of time to honor such vaporous rumors by so much as recording them in her diary.
I know not what to think,
Prudence Kidde­master wrote,
but I know—ah, surely!—what to feel.
She might have followed the example of the self-assured Horace Bayard who, in his role as public educator, invested with a good deal of authority, had for decades airily dismissed all doubts, and many facts, that ran counter to his own interpretation of the world; she might have sought out the source of the rumors—to discover, no doubt, that they were concocted by men jealous of young Zinn's rapid rise to prominence as a popular lecturer, much admired by the ladies, and a member of Dr. Bayard's Association for the Reform of Common Schools, and a man-about-town of sorts, lionized in the very smartest circles. That her reputation—indeed, her very life—would someday be linked to his, the impetuous young woman fantasized almost hourly; and her heart was storm-toss'd with doubt. For tho' she loved him, and thrilled to his words, she was not always certain that she comprehended those words—or could safely believe them.

So discreetly, however, did she broach the subject of
Catholicism
to John Quincy (by way of a warm inquiry into the background of his boardinghouse acquaintance Mr. Guiteau, an admitted Catholic, but one no longer practicing his gothic rite), and learn to her satisfaction that he knew very little about it, and
very
little he found encouraging, that her sensitive suitor never guessed she was interrogating him; discreetly, too, she inquired after his parents, only to learn that his dear mother had been carried away by tuberculosis, shortly after John Quincy's birth, and that his father had died a martyr's death at an Abolitionists' rally, upon the occasion of the passage of that unspeakable act of 1850, but that, for many reasons, he did
not
wish to publicize the fact.

“I see!—ah yes, I see!” Prudence exclaimed, quite stricken. “You would not—you
must
not—wish to capitalize, or to seem to capitalize, upon such tragedy.”

“Miss Kidde­master,” John Quincy said, flushing, and lowering his eyes, “you understand me thoroughly.”

 

IF, AS THE
faithful chronicler of the Zinns' destinies, I frequently draw back in trepidation at the task before me, and torture myself with the question—as, indeed, glorious Milton must oft have tortured himself, and the great Bard, and our courageous Harriet Beecher Stowe, to name one close to home, and of my own humble sex—the question of whether
Evil
may be liquefied in
Moral Art;
if, as one laboring to suggest the fructuousness of even the most dismaying and self-serving acts amongst these persons, I am subject to moments, nay, hours and days, of
doubt,
I hope the reader will grant me patience, and some sympathy. For if the
Evil
I must in all sincerity transcribe (being not entirely of Mr. Zinn's admirable Transcendentalist belief that
Evil
by its very nature cannot share the universe with
God
) is to be truly comprehended, and thereby, as it were, liquefied, in the service of a
Moral Art,
how may the chronicler proceed except by way of a fastidious recounting of all that transpires . . . no matter how hideous? For I cannot believe that Evil for all its power is finally inexpungible, in art as in life.

But here is the great Cowper, to express this sentiment in verse—

But though life's valley be a vale of tears,

A brighter scene beyond that vale appears,

Whose glory, with a light that never fades,

Shoots between scatter'd rocks and opening shades.

IT WAS ON
a chill October night, by the austere irradiation of the harvest moon, on the outskirts of a nameless little hamlet in the Blue Mountains of Pennsylvania, that the pedlar John Jay Zinn met his sad fate, and the eight-year-old John Quincy became, indeed, an orphan—tho' the reader will be relieved to know that he was certainly not shipped to a Catholic orphanage, in Baltimore or anywhere else, but was brought up in a Christian home, amidst good country people who had taken pity on him, and did not tar him—as it were—with his father's sins.

It may indeed have been as a consequence of Abolitionist quarreling, or a false, febrific rumor, to the effect that the Yankee pedlar was in fact a Masonic spy (for these were the curious years of the Anti-Masons, led by the fiery Thaddeus Stevens of Gettysburg); tho' it is more reasonable to suspect that the murderers of John Jay Zinn simply wished to punish him, because he had cheated them a twelve-month before—he or another Yankee pedlar who closely resembled him, attired similarly in a black broadcloth coat, and a misshapen hat (now white, now gray, now black, now decorated with a pheasant feather in the band, now plain as that of a Baptist preacher's), and accompanied by a child so abash'dly silent, he was believed to be mute. It is reasonable too to suspect that, given the degree of drunkenness of the murderers, and the unspeakably cruel torture to which they subjected their victim, before merciful death at last blotted out his suffering, that
alcohol
itself may stand indicted; and that the pleas of the Temperance Movement, tho' oft derided in the popular press, and even by gentlemen of culture and social standing, must heretofore be granted a greater authority.

Indeed, John Jay Zinn's unfortunate demise may be directly traced to
his having entered a lowlife establishment that served alcoholic beverages,
including cheap gin, beer, and ale; and to his having unwisely joined with a group of revelers, who noisily welcomed him to their party. (This party must not have seemed at first to be hostile, let alone dangerous, if we are to credit the pedlar with the shrewdness for which he was so widely known.) Soon falling in with their camaraderie, tho', at the age of about fifty, he was some twenty years older than the eldest, he treated them to a round of drinks, as is the custom, I believe, in such establishments; and to another; and yet another—as a stratagem to win their good will, perhaps, or out of simple vainglory. (For John Jay Zinn thought well of himself and could not resist, at such times,
throwing his money around,
as the colorful expression goes: and how imprudently, at this particular time!)

And all the while, in an unheated haybarn a quarter-mile distant, little John Quincy slumbered, protected by the deep, dreamless sleep of the child who is both pure of heart and drained of strength by recent physical exertion, for his father had forced him to walk a great many miles that day, burdened by a backpack inordinately heavy with iron kitchen utensils. So exhausted was the child he had fallen asleep midway through his simple repast of stewed mutton and potatoes, and had been slapped awake by his father, never one to cosset the weak, and anxious as ever to reward himself for a day's labor by partaking of alcoholic beverages. (Sleep away, poor child—for you are shortly to be awakened by bestial shouts and screams, which will pursue you for much of your life!)

That John Jay Zinn would willingly step foot inside a crude country tavern, let alone join with a group of drunken ruffians of the tribe who swept Andrew Jackson into office, and rejoiced at the destruction of Mr. Biddle's bank, testifies to something very much amiss in his nature; that he would drink for five or six hours, forgetting his son, and neglecting his own need for sleep, testifies to a want of sense we must judge
ominous.
Unsurprising it is, that the mood of the party gradually altered as the participants grew ever more intoxicated and began to bait the pedlar with various accusations and charges—some of them too shameful to be recorded; nor is it surprising that the foolish man, so overcome with drink that he staggered and all but toppled to the filthy sawdust floor, should have attempted to defend himself, by shouting and waving his fists and attempting to outshine his opponents with sheer vituperative wit. They jeered, and mocked, and grew more restive, and were joined by other louts, and at the closing of the tavern still others came by, there being now a general outcry of sorts, that the criminal
Yankee pedlar
had been caught, who had, some time previously, perpetrated a fraud upon certain members of the settlement by “divining” spring water for a considerable payment (tho' the sum greatly varied, growing as voice was added to voice in the excitement of the moment). He had promised them a well—a well of the sweetest and purest spring water—he had strode about with his divining rod held high, and a crafty-dreamy expression on his face, and after some hours, having traversed the village, and making a great show of the procedure, he had
found
it: allowing them to see how the divining rod fairly leapt in his hands, its fork jerking downward. And they had dug at that spot for water, and found it; and had, in all gratitude, paid the pedlar generously for his service.

But the well had dried up in a few days! Its sweet pure water had turned sandy, and then muddy; and then it had dried up. Some said it was a
witch-well,
and had never had any water at all—only the illusion of water. But by then, naturally, the dishonest Yankee had made his escape, and no one could guess where he might be found.

A wiser man than John Jay Zinn might have allowed that the incident had indeed transpired, perpetrated by another pedlar; but that he, out of a sense of obligation, or sympathy for the villagers, would make proper restitution. A wiser man, surely, would have refrained from shouting back at his drunken tormentors, and suggesting that they were naught but fools and knaves in any case. But John Jay Zinn was
not
a wise man, nor, I fear, a man in whose heart a lucid moral sense had been cultivated; and so he argued with the ruffians, and scuffled with them, and soon all the rabble had gathered, and a small tub of tar was being heated in the blacksmith's shop nearby, and there were war whoops and Indian yells, and no lawman within earshot who gave a fig for the pedlar's fate, and so—and so it happened that John Jay Zinn suffered that excruciating torture of being “tarred and feathered,” an American folk-custom still thought, by those unaware of its brutality, to be faintly risible. The tar was brushed and poured on him in great steaming gobs, and soon the moonlit autumnal calm was shattered by his screams of agony, and the poor child in the haybarn awakened in terror, and the bestial prank, once begun, could not be stopped. For one thing, the villagers expressed surprise and delight that the pedlar could be made to feel
pain
at all: they had imagined him a being unlike themselves, whom no one could seriously injure!

(Ignorant, subhuman creatures, the reader may safely conclude: a people so accursèd with bestiality as to give credence to the utterances of such Americans as John Randolph and Alexander Hamilton, who doubted from the first the value, let alone the possibility, of
Democracy.
As for their hapless victim, John Jay Zinn—it is very difficult for me to speak. I see him, I believe, as clearly as I have ever seen any living person, tho' in fact I have never literally set eyes upon him, but have been empowered, so to speak, to
imagine
him, through the recollections of his son; I am capable of “hearing” his voice too, hawking his wares, in one little settlement after another, along the endless ribbon of road that is our nation, lonely to the core, and eluding God's own blessing. His preacher's coat, his eccentric hat, his wooden face and unblinking eyes, the way he leaned upon his staff when no one but John Quincy was a witness, sighing with arthritic pain . . . His solitude, his chilling and relentless industry, so without ambition, and without evidence of a
soul
. . . I see, I hear, I tremble with apprehension for his fate, and share with his wretched son the terror of that night; and yet I cannot
know
him.

Nor do I wish to know him, despite my natural Christian pity for the suffering he endured, a “martyr's” death of a sort, it may be; and the probability of a harsh divine retribution to follow.

That he was the father of our hero is certainly a puzzle, and yet it cannot be an edifying one, and I will not dwell upon it. Pity for the repulsiveness of his death soon crumbles in the face of a profound instinctual displeasure in his being, and a reluctant but incontestable rejection of the immoral life he led. Poor man! poor sinner! That you existed at all, let alone as the father of John Quincy Zinn, argues for the inscrutability of God's ways!—and, it may be, for His vast all-inclusive Love.)