An Embarrassment of Riches (27 page)

“
Bawk bawk! Le roi sauvage!
What a man!” cried the parrot, now escaped from its cage and winging around the chamber revealing all of Madame's vile secrets.

“Ah, here you are, monsieur,” the Indian observed to me with a look of grim satisfaction. His pantherlike body glistened with sweat, as if it had cost him much exertion to find me, and I noted with alarm that there was blood on the blade of his knife.

“I was just leaving, Yago—” said I, failing to appear insouciant.

“Leaving? That is not possible, monsieur.”

“I assure you it is, Yago. Now, if you will just put down that knife and step out of the way—”

“But monsieur,” he said with a smile full of wickedness and malice, “you are already dead.”

He advanced slowly toward me, the blade flashing as he carved the air in anticipation. I felt behind my back for the pistol in my waistband. Across the room, Madame continued to fuss with her petticoats, singing a schoolgirl's song in French and oblivious to the incipient mayhem. Suddenly, a clamor erupted in the staircase. Yago spun on his heels and crouched in apprehension. Othello now appeared in the doorway, massive and monumental, clothed in the very costume he had worn on stage. Behind him on the staircase lurked several black subordinates, their yellow eyes gleaming in the dimness.

“
Bawk pweet!
My black ram!
Bawk!
” the parrot cried.

“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,” Othello intoned the bard's iambics from the final act of the play were indistinguishable from plain life. “Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!” he soliloquized. “It is the cause. Yet I'll not shed her blood, nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow…. Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men.”

“
You
die, black devil!” Yago cried as he sprang for the blackamoor. Othello plucked him in midleap as he might seize a springing wildcat.

“Pernicious caitiff!” the Negro roared. He broke the Indian's wrist as though it were a broomhandle. The knife clattered to the floor. Yago screamed like a very beast of the forest. Othello dropped to one knee and, holding Yago on his back across the other, pressed his jaw downward until the Indian's spine could be heard to snap. A moment later, Yago's body rolled lifelessly to the floor. Next, those fierce yellow eyes looked up toward me. “Go thy way to a nunnery,” Othello said.

“I beg your pardon—”

“To a nunnery, go!” he insisted fervidly and pointed to the door. I suddenly understood that he was permitting me to escape. His accomplices lowered their pistols and stepped out of my way. With a last glance back to the doomed Madame LeBoeuf—yet complacent in her dementia—I hastened to the exit.

“Ah, balmy breath, that dost almost persuade justice to break her sword!” I heard Othello intone as I hurried down the stairs. “Out, strumpet!”

There was a single shriek, then silence. How unlike each other were the worlds of Europe and the American wilderness, where she met her sordid end. Yet madness and murder are the same everywhere. Poor woman, I thought, and without another moment to lose I ran down the deserted corridors of Chateau Félicité to the bilges. Lou-Lou's cell was empty. I hastened back upstairs and made for the wharf outside the palace gates. Another squall was bearing down rapidly from the northwest, replete with jagged thunderbolts and plangent blasts of wind. The keelboat was nowhere in sight. I at once surmised that the Woodsman, upon his eternal errand of rescuing the unfortunate, had alerted Uncle of the slave insurrection, and that Uncle, in turn, had undertaken to rescue his beloved friend Fernand LeBoeuf!

Several Indian dugouts lay upturned upon the broad wharf. I lay hold of a paddle, rolled one of the smaller dugouts right side up, and slid her into the water. She was a very crude and unstable craft in a chop, and side-slipped miserably in the gale. My hand ached where the spider had bitten me. An inflammation had spread to all my fingers and below my wrist. It was very painful to wield the paddle. Still, I struggled to make the distant shore.

The wind drove me swiftly across the choppy lake. By the time I realized that our keelboat was nowhere in sight along the vicinity of the far shore, it was too late to go back. I was exhausted beyond my capacity to battle the elements. In a little while, my hull scraped bottom. I leaped out. It was all I could do to drag the dugout into a canebrake, out of sight.

I could hear gunfire across the hemp field, a sporadic
pop, pop, pop
rather than the crackling volleys of a pitched battle. If Uncle had taken
Megatherium
downstream, then I had no chance of following him in the present gale, with the wind in my teeth. I therefore resolved to make my way to higher ground and wait in concealment until the storm subsided.

I stole through the canebrake and up the bank. From the edge of the hemp field, the gunshots rang out more sharply. Human cries became audible. I could smell the miserable slave compound before I saw it: an odor of death, animal waste, and fire. In a hedgerow less than a quarter mile from the battlesite grew a large catalpa tree
(C. bignonioides)
. I made my way to it, creeping low to the ground like a four-footed animal, and endeavored to climb it. Its large, heart-shaped leaves gave off a fetor themselves.

Unlike my prior vantage in the tower, the view from the catalpa was complete. I could see entirely within the compound. Corpses lay everywhere, most of them black, though a number of Indians dangled dead from the parapet above. Much of the compound's dusty yard was occupied by a hodgepodge of crude shelters, wickiups loosely constructed of sticks and bark, the meanest dwellings imaginable—as far removed from the tidy woodland cabins LeBoeuf had shown us as the lowliest wigwam is from Chateau Félicité. In this filthy pen, the slaves were herded together like livestock.

These Negroes, of all ages and both genders, now huddled behind their pathetic shelters like so many rabbits in a walled garden hiding behind clumps of lettuce, while the Indians fired down. A number of the slaves returned this fire, fighting valiantly against the withering opposition. Many fired on the run, and when an Indian bullet felled one, another slave would spring out, lay hold of the weapon, and fight on. Yet their bravery and desperation were taking a toll on the Choctaw adversary, who would have exterminated them utterly.

Lightning crackled over my head, and the answering thunderclap boomed. My fingernails dug into the pithy catalpa trunk as I gazed down upon those poor black wretches and saw how the evil of slavery had culminated in this orgy of death. Did the Virginia gentry wake screaming from their slumbers in such nightmares of bloodletting, I wondered?

Suddenly a strange thing happened: the Indians ceased firing, quit the ramparts, and began eloping, by ones, twos, and threes, toward the river. In so doing, they passed practically beneath my catalpa. Soon they were streaming past by the dozens. The premature darkness, the thunderbolts, the screams of terror and anguish, all gave this exodus the flavor of a judgment from on high. Such was the Indian's panic, in fact, that some were trampled in the mad rush to escape. Meanwhile, I heard a resounding
boom
echo from the compound, and looked back to see the Negroes battering the gate with a log they had pulled down from the stockade. Other slaves clambered up the walls, whose abandoned parapets admitted no resistance. Once aloft, they reached down for their fellows. In a matter of minutes, these made it across the moat, around the compound to the gate, and threw open the doors. Those struggling within dropped their battering ram. The women and children now ventured timidly out from behind the miserable piles of rubbish that had been their only refuge from the Choctaw rain of death. With shouts of triumph that seemed beyond the strength of a people so starved and brutalized, they came streaming forth from the stockade. Screaming and yammering in their primitive babble, they too now passed below my catalpa tree hard on the heels of their former persecutors, their sunken yellow eyes burning with the fires of vengeance. My personal store of horror was depleted when I spied Fernand LeBoeuf's blood-smeared head impaled at the end of a twenty-foot-pike, carried by his former servelings like a flag of battle.

The cacophony of their rallying cries soon faded as they chased the retreating Choctaws to the river, and now all that could be heard amid the peals of rolling thunder were the groans of the dying. I remained aloft for what seemed like an eternity, clinging to that tree's trunk like a boy to his mother. Darkness gathered, augured by the croaking of frogs. When at last I sought to come down, I lost my footing and tumbled onto the ground. Upon recollecting my senses, it became painfully obvious that I was the proprietor of a sprained ankle. My left arm throbbed terribly from the slow-acting poison of the spider bite.

The way back to shore was paved with the bodies of the dead, both black and red. The wind had ceased to shriek. Across the water, flambeaux guttered on the wharf of Chateau Félicité. I plunged into the canebrake, searching for my dugout in the ever-increasing gloom of twilight. Imagine my terror when, upon locating the craft, a Choctaw man sprang up in it like jack-in-the-box, a pistol in his hand. I don't believe he was a day older than myself. And in the long moment that I gazed down the barrel of his gun into his eyes, I could not help but imagine, as in a series of brilliant flashes, what the history of his young life had been, almost as if I had seen a reflection in the mirror.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” said I, ready to meet my maker.

It was only then that I noticed he had failed to cock his piece. I slowly drew mine from my waistband behind. He spoke to me, some gibberish I did not understand. His arm trembled wildly. I aimed my weapon and pulled the trigger. His head snapped back and I felt his warm blood spatter my face. It was the first human being that ever I killed, and though it was an Indian who meant to kill me, I begged God for the mercy of his forgiveness.

I crept forward to the dugout. He lay on his back inside of it, windpipe severed and blood spurting out of the wound with each weakening contraction of his dying heart. Then air escaped his sphincters in the flatulence of death. His pistol lay inches from me. I tried it. It was spent. His only chance had been bluster, and he had failed at it. I crawled around the canoe and turned it on its side while the quarts of his gore trickled out. When I finally managed to drag it out of the canebrake, what a sight greeted my eyes.

The floating palace was afire. Flames leaped from the roof and licked the stately tower. With great effort, I paddled closer to the spectacle.

The blacks had triumphed in their insurrection. Red corpses littered the wharf. Figures emerged from the main gate burdened with plunder—chairs, crystal chandeliers, plumed hats—and commenced loading it on the gundalows. My memory harked back to our day of arrival, when the slaves sat upon the wharf under LeBoeuf's baton playing Handel's Water Music! Now, the former conductor's lifeless head looked down emptily upon pandemonium. A figure of superior size and regal bearing, Othello, strode out of the gate to the cheers of the others. The wind rose again. The flaming tower slowly toppled into the black water of the lake. The palace listed to one side, like a great ship sinking in the ocean.

“Who can control his fate?” Othello cried as the flames roared behind him and his victorious followers danced in the skins of the vanquished. “Here is my journey's end, here is my butt and very sea-mark of my utmost sail. Do you go back dismay'd? 'Tis a lost fear….”

With a tremendous report, the magazines of Chateau Félicité exploded, rocketing comets of fiery debris high into the lambent, darkling clouds.

“Blow me about in winds!” the blackamoor thundered into the teeth of the storm, while LeBoeuf's husbanded kegs of powder blew what remained of his empire to splinters. “Roast me in sulphur!”

I paddled away from the hellish spectacle until my strength failed, laying my head against the rough wood of the gunwale. Ahead, the lake narrowed and became the Tennessee River again, tending north toward the Ohio. The sky seemed to shimmer with strange light. As in a dying man's final rapture, I saw, like a figure of Jove floating serenely amid the swirling clouds, the shining apparition of a man in robes of white buckskin reaching down to me, reaching, reaching…. Then, the descent of night, the seamless dark of oblivion.

“Is this heaven?”

A green nimbus of light. Glowing pink center.

“He speaks at last! O, merciful Lord!”

“It
is
heaven!”

The green, the pink, both verged to resolution. Sun-dappled leaf. Uncle's face.

“I was certain I'd go to … to the other place. Have you seen him yet, Uncle?”

“Seen whom?”

“Our heavenly father.”

“Bless me, but I haven't. Not yet.”

“No?” said I. “That's odd. He appeared to me from on high. He reached down from the clouds and drew me up here. He—”

“Sammy.”

“Uncle…?”

“Be not dismayed. Thou art as yet upon the earth.”

“Do you mean we are not dead?”

Uncle pursed his lips and shook his head.

True, I felt a pang of disappointment. But it quickly fled my mind, replaced by the warm gratitude for being.

“How did I get here?”

“We plucked thee from the river.”

“You and the Woodsman?”

“No. I and….” Uncle turned his gaze over my head. Of course by this time I had determined that I was lying upon the aft deck of our keelboat,
Megatherium
. Following the line of Uncle's gaze, who should I spy upon the cabin roof, manning the steering sweep no less, but the dear royal booby, Lou-Lou.

Upon seeing me awake, the feckless boy flew into such a rapture of happiness that it was all Uncle could do to keep him at his station.

“My friend! My friend!” he cried.

“Stay aloft, lad,” Uncle told him. “Steer clear of the bars.”

“Yes, Uncle William,” he replied, gushing with excitement and joy. “I am so happy!”

“How long have I been unconscious?” I asked.

“Two days.”

“Gad!” I tried to raise an arm, but it felt like a leaden sash weight. “Might I sit up, Uncle?”

“By all means. Let me help thee. Careful, Nephew.” He inserted a bearskin twixt my spine and the bulwark. “Can thee eat, Sammy?”

“Eat…?” The mere suggestion set me a'ravening. “I am starving, Uncle.”

Behind him, upon our brazier, sat a kettle. He ladled an aromatic chowder into a wooden bowl and handed it to me. I slurped it in a trice like a sot at a pailful of beer. Much of it dribbled down my chest.

“More!” I gasped, and he obliged. After the second bowl my mind reattained a measure of equanimity. I even paused to examine the firm-textured chunks of white fish that was the concoction's chief ingredient.

“Yellow mud cat,” Uncle informed me.

“Delicious,” I sighed. “But tell me, Uncle, however did you chance to find me?”

“In the dugout,” he answered. “Out of thy head.”

“Damn me, the dugout!” I exclaimed with a shudder, remembering the maelstrom, the butchery, the blood and fire. “Why did you leave the chateau without me?”

“The Woodsman importuned me, saying ‘The boy is on board! The boy is on board!' By the time we cast off and I had discovered that ‘the boy' was Lou-Lou and not thee, the gale prevented our return. We lay some miles below the lake upon this river, waiting, waiting.”

“Did you see the chateau go up in flames?”

He shook his head. “I saw only a yellow glow on the horizon. But I knew all the same. Terrible, terrible,” he snuffled. “Fernand is dead.” This sotto voce so Lou-Lou would not hear.

“I know,” said I, trying to sound sympathetic. “But how did
you
know?”

“The Woodsman said so.”

“Ah,” said I. “By the by, where is the poor afflicted nimrod?”

“Vanished in a mist the morning after. Just like that,” Uncle snapped his fingers. “Queer the way he comes and goes.”

“I should say,” I could not help but agree. “Uncle, do you think he is God?”

“The Woodsman? God?” he replied scoffingly. “What an idea!”

“I saw him on high in my delirium, looming among the clouds in his white buckskins and skunk hat, like a very titan out of Raphael.”

“A delirium seized me once. 'Twas on our sloop off Belle Isle on the way back from Cape Porcupine. I saw many queer things and mistook them for the face of God. Grinning whales, lights in the sky, skulking krakens. Such is delirium.”

“Perhaps you are right,” said I, still wondering. “But did he say how the insurrection was begun?”

“He said 'twas many months a'brewing.”

“Did he also relate how Yago was plotting to steal both LeBoeuf's empire and his wife?”

“Aye,” Uncle affirmed. “A shocking scandal.”

“And that they would become King and Queen of Louisiana?”

“Such is ambition. Now 'tis nothing but a heap of cinders. Poor LeBoeuf,” Uncle said, his eyes growing moist. “For all his weaknesses, he was a man of rare gifts. I shall miss him. He might have become another Gallatin, had he but removed back to the civilized states….”

I lacked the heart to dispute with Uncle and call his lost friend a villain. Weariness overcame me again, this time as a warm, benevolent tide in a shallow lagoon, not the oceanic undertow of my former delirium.

“Have you seen any sloths, Uncle?” I murmured.

“Not one,” he shook his head sadly.

“Uncle, when next we meet the Woodsman, let us ask if he would be so kind as to procure for us a specimen of megatherium so that we might go home.”

“Very well, Sammy,” he agreed, humoring me.

“For I wish so dearly to go home,” I added, a lump in my throat and my eyes brimming with salt tears.

“The rivers flow but one way,” he answered firmly but gently. “To the Gulf of Mexico. We must go on. Sleep, my boy.”

I lay me down again and in a little while I was dreaming of the hills above Lloyd's Neck and the faces of my boyhood comrades.

The next day I awoke in far better fettle and consumed so many catfish for breakfast that I might well have sprouted fins and barbells and dived into the river to become one of them. Lou-Lou, or Louis, as I now addressed him, had adapted to his new surroundings handsomely. He delighted in the change of scene, a pleasure denied him in all his years of captivity. He took very well to the duties of shipboard life and developed a deft hand at the steering sweep for one of such limited experience—so that despite his intellectual faults, it was hard to believe he was a true halfwit. If he sorrowed for his lost “Uncle” Fernand and his former life of ineffable luxury aboard the floating palace, he concealed his feelings admirably. And it was on this hot morning, as we drifted slowly back down the sunny Tennessee River to its confluence with the Ohio, that I sought to acquaint Louis with the circumstances of his birth, his history, and his suzerainty over the dominion of France.

“Do you know who this gentleman is?” I asked him, proffering the miniature portrait that I had taken from his room in the devastated chateau.

“It is my papa,” he avouched without hesitation, and I confess a thrill ran through me to hear him confirm what I had all along suspected. “Is he your papa too?”

“Why do you say that, Louis?”

“Because I had a portrait just like it in my room.”

“This is that same one. I took it.”

“How kind you are to bring it for me, Sammy.”

“Do you know who your papa was?”

Louis knitted his brow in concentration, staring at the little portrait in its gold frame. “He was the husband of my mother, yes?”

“That is correct,” said I. Up on the cabin roof where he took his turn at the steering sweep, Uncle listened with a humorous, skeptical face. “Do you know what was your papa's position in the world, Louis?”

The smooth-faced boy looked back with bewilderment.

“He was the King of France,” I told him.

“Ah,” Louis said. “I wish that he would own a store like your papa.”

“A store, Louis! All France was his, everyone and everything in it was at his command.”

“Like Chateau Félicité and Uncle Fernand?”

“Bigger! Grander than that by ten thousand times.”

“It must be very lonely to be this king,” Louis said.

“Not a'tall. A king is surrounded by his court, filled with dazzling beauties and brilliant men, all of whom are his friends, so he never lacks company for a moment.”

“Can he have treacle cake whenever he wants it?”

“Treacle cake by the hundredweight and hogsheads of sugarplums to follow. Now, I want you to brace yourself, for I have some unhappy news for you.”

He seized my upper arms and held them tightly. His strength was surprising.

“Your papa is dead.”

He sharply drew in a breath. The color drained from his face.

“Your mama too,” I added.

Tears pooled in his eyes. “I was afraid so,” he confessed at length in choked voice.

“This was many years ago,” I informed him to soften the blow. “Now I have some happy news for you to balance out the sad. When the king is dead, his son becomes the new king. Therefore, you are the King of France, Louis.”

He let go of me. His arms dropped limply to his side as he absorbed the shock.

“I am the King of France?” he echoed timidly.

“You are.”

“May I have some treacle cake, please?”

“
Ahem
. It is not quite so simple, Louis.”

“O…?”

“Besides, there are some impediments. A general of the army, named Bonaparte, has usurped the King's power in France. If you wish to reclaim your throne, you would have to raise a large army to dispose of this fellow.”

“The Choctaws?”

“I don't think they would suffice, Louis.”

He mulled over the matter and wrinkled his nose. “I will stay with you then. Can I be King of France here?”

“For now I suppose you'll have to. But you must be very careful whom you tell that you are King.”

“To the contrary,” Uncle weighed in from his station above, “they will suspect it more if he says nothing. Let him proclaim to one and all that he is the King of France and no one will believe it.”

“Very well,” said I and shouted into the dark green riverbanks, “Here stands Louis XVII of the House of Bourbon, Lord of the Kingdom of France!”

Louis grinned broadly, delighted with himself and his estate in life.

“May I have some treacle cake now, please?” he asked.

Our plan was to return to the Ohio, make for its confluence with the Mississippi, and journey down the “Father of the Waters” as far as the town of Natchez, where, we understood from our charts on board, several blazed traces or wilderness trails penetrated to the interior of the southern terra incognita. There we would undertake a further search for megatherium. Whether in triumph or failure, we would find our way back to New Orleans, and get on the first good ship bound for Philadelphia, thence to be home by Christmas. As to Louis, we could see no alternative but to enlist him in our Corps of Wonders and Marvels until such time as he might be placed in the care of responsible government officials. For his existence in this hemisphere would no doubt keenly arouse the interest of many rival factions, few of them primarily concerned with Louis's well-being.

Thus, our plan drawn, we floated happily down the Tennessee in clear, hot weather, unhindered by men or savages or beasts, until fate again intervened.

The dreaded fever that stalks the transriverine country in the summer season is a more dangerous enemy to life than all the wolves, panthers, snakes, bears, and wild tribesmen ever in creation. I speak here of the harrowing malady known as the ague. Both Uncle and I were struck down by it of a bright and airy morning, and by noontide had been rendered practically senseless.

It began with an aching in the joints and large muscles. Soon, an apprehension of coldness swept through the body as though the blood had turned to springwater. Within an hour, our teeth chattered and extremities turned blue. We shook and shivered as though we were adrift on an iceberg off Greenland's shore rather than aboard a keelboat in summery Tennessee. No amount of clothing or blankets availed to drive away the chill. Then, an hour later, these chills inexplicably gave way to warmth, and this to heat, and this to a blazing fever as though the veins now ran with molten lava. Our ears roared. Pains racked our spine and legs as though flesh-eating beetles bored through our bones. Finally, sweat poured forth in pints as the fever broke. We victims enjoyed a brief and illusory return to normal sensation, as mice enjoy a brief and illusory taste of freedom from the cruel clutches of a cat. Then the miserable cycle of ice and fire recommenced again and again until we were addled.

Louis was untouched by the disease, possibly because of his long domicile in the region, and it was a good thing indeed he was aboard, for without his ministrations we might well have died. Louis it was who tucked in our blankets as the chills descended. Louis it was who fetched cups of water when the fever set our throats aflame and left us too weak to crawl from the cabin. Louis it was who spoon-fed us cornmeal mush, who sat awake at night with rifle at the ready, alert for enemies. Louis it was who watered the valuable
Puya
. And Louis it was who delivered us, and himself, into the hands of another fate that only a wilderness as fabulous as the American frontier might furnish, a fate both terrible and sublime.