Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace (25 page)

“Hey, don’t blame me for your predicament.”

My nostrils flared against the stench of spilled alcohol and smoke. Even as I balled up my fist to hit him, I knew he had me cornered. Boxed in. It wasn’t his fault I couldn’t get things right.

His eyes softened. “You seem to be in a hurry, and I didn’t want you to run off without your two. That thing is supposed to be your good luck charm.”

“These scraps of funny money haven’t made any difference the last seven or eight assignments.”

“A dozen, Merry. You’re up to an even dozen.”

I slumped onto my stool. Thumbed through the pages of my journal. A word here. A scrap of letters there. No hidden message to guide me past the obstacles of Nowhere. To help me avoid the same mistakes. Every Nowhere appearance was new. I couldn’t remember them once I failed. Who I met. What I saw. No matter how I arranged what I managed to save from my other outings in Nowhere, I couldn’t make sense of the remnants of twelve times tried.

Twelve times failed.

“So, this is number thirteen. Can I just go ahead and skip this one? Have another drink?”

“You been around long enough to know that ain’t how it works.”

“Goddammit. I know how Nowhere works. I just can’t seem to make it work for me.”

I closed my eyes and relived the moment Nowhere found me, when I looked into my own dead eyes being covered over with the dirt of a hole that was too shallow to hold me. It was a pauper’s burial. An unmarked grave. I was barely cold.

That was when I saw it: a chunk of black leather. It stuck out of the ground at the head of my grave. I pulled it from the dirt, and when I opened it, I read these words:

Remembrance is immortality.

Make people remember your story your way.

Come to Nowhere.

My story was already in tatters. Newspapers trumpeted the supposed details of my apparent suicide. Two men who knew me best—William Clark and Thomas Jefferson—supported that tawdry version of events. Faced with a sensational story, no one cared about the truth.

With one muttered
yes
, I stepped through a portal. Woke up in a New Orleans bar.

The clink of ice teased me back. The Bartender stirred a sulfur-tinged cocktail and pushed it my way. “Seconds aren’t allowed, but I’m feeling charitable today.”

Liquid heat lit up my nostrils. “What is it?”

“A Thunderclapper. Of all my customers, I thought you might appreciate it.”

An homage to the pills members of the Corps of Discovery took for every conceivable ailment. We called them ‘thunderclappers’ because they gave us the runs. Clark was always partial to them. I had to smile at the memory of him, running off to empty his bowels behind a rock. Afraid he wasn’t going to make it.

I raised the glass and sucked the mixture down. Fire ripped through my gullet. Erupted behind my eyes.

The Bartender smirked while I coughed up smoke. “Think of it as a cleansing fire. Erases what’s come before.” He paused. Leaned his burly frame over the counter and touched my sleeve. “You know this is your last shot, right?”

“Thirteen is my last chance?”

“Yep. You fail this time, you get to be a bartender. Your life will be erased from human history. Nobody will remember you, and what’s worse, you won’t remember you, either. You get to live forever, though. Slinging booze you can’t drink in a room you can never leave.”

I looked at his weathered face and wondered who he’d been. What was his story?

How would it feel to forget oneself? To never again close my eyes and see the sun set over the Missouri? To fail to hear Clark’s laugh whisper through the trees? To be Nobody?

I wiped my brow with the back of my hand. Whispered my plea. “Tell me. Tell me how to finish this. Please.”

He pushed a button on the cash register, and the drawer popped open, a fat wad of bills on one end. He picked it up and tossed it from hand to hand. “I had my own failures, Merry. That don’t mean I can remember them. I’m just here to do my good deed. To lubricate your ego a little and send you out again.” He stopped and slid the cash across the bar. “This ought to be enough to see you to the end.”

“Five hundred? That’s too much.”

He flicked his eyes to the door. A rattle crescendoed through wood and glass. “Not in 1977, it ain’t.” He swabbed the bar with a stained towel. “Look, Merry. I got another customer coming. Don’t keep making the same damn mistake, all right?”

I grabbed his grimy t-shirt. “What mistake? Tell me.”

But instead, he shook free of me. Leaned over and took something out from under the counter. “Here. You lost your hat, and you’ll be needing another one.”

I looked from it to the two dollars crumpled in my other hand. Jefferson’s stare launched me into the streets, patrolling like a lunatic. Searching, seeking the unknown someone who could save me. Rewrite my story. Release me from Nowhere to find whatever was next for a broken soul like me.

And so it began.

Again.

HARD TO DIE

(coming Spring 2015)

1822.

I always knew I’d find comfort in God’s word.

Me. General James Wilkinson. People said I never won a battle and never lost a court martial.

Damn them. I sacrificed for my country before we broke from England. Sniveled after Washington. Adams. Especially Thomas Jefferson. So what if I took money from the Spanish on the sly? Serving my country didn’t make me rich. Not like I imagined when I grasped the reins of power.

Something had to give me solace. Banished from the United States Army, from the only adult life I knew. Andrew Jackson’s victory at the Battle of New Orleans should’ve been mine. Instead, I was shuttled to the Northern theater during the War of 1812, where I watched our men die in an ill-conceived attempt to invade Canada.

I told that idiot Madison a Canadian campaign would be a mistake. And what did he do?

Put me in charge. I shivered my way up the Hudson Valley and marched alongside Lake Champlain. My decades of Army service was pummeled to death south of the St Lawrence. A frozen place called Lacolle.

And I always wanted Mexico. Warm and…..Spanish. A duplicitous place I understood.

It was ripe for invasion. I said it for years. Even tried to organize it myself a time or two. What good was a general if he couldn’t muster troops to do his bidding?

Wooden doors parted, and I was led through a gaggle of those troops. They flanked me on either side of the military courtroom.

Again, I found myself in the last place I wanted to inhabit.

A court martial was not generally a spectator sport. Witnesses delivered evidence. The accused presented his case. The adjudicators asked questions and deliberated. The place was a court of shame, a fate all military animals wished to avoid.

Because ‘innocent until proven guilty’ never applied.

Oh, everyone said innocence was another of Wilkinson’s many lies. My detractors outlined my alleged prevarications in a book-like document. They hauled it in front of the tribunal and referenced page after page after page.

James Wilkinson, spy.

James Wilkinson, traitor.

James Wilkinson, murderer.

James Wilkinson, thief.

James Wilkinson, dereliction of duty.

That last one. It got me. The rest was the trumped up twaddle of over-dramatic minds. But dereliction of duty?

No.

Never.

Not according to my definition of the word.

My sole duty in life was to advance the cause of James Wilkinson. First under George Washington, who gave me opportunity to find my place in the Army. Then under John Adams, who relegated a man with my skills to the boring task of uniform management. When I quit, Thomas Jefferson teased me back: I would command the entire United States Army and govern Upper Louisiana.

I kept fighting for my own cause when Jefferson relieved me of my governorship and handed it to Meriwether Lewis, a man who was too busy celebrating his own success to assume office for a year after he was appointed. He prowled the East Coast. Drinking. Carousing. Bedding women while his territory grew more tempestuous by the day.

If anyone was derelict in his duty, it was Lewis.

I hoped the flames of hell licked his soul and incinerated all hope of its peace. He should’ve been in that courtroom instead of me.

For taking my job. For relegating my family to the Natchez district, in spite of my wife Ann’s advanced tuberculosis. For filling her lungs with blood and choking her in the infernal heat.

For robbing me of the only person I ever loved enough to risk everything. Ann was my reason. My progressions benefited her, just as my lies filled the coffers and obliterated the glamorous life she left behind when she stooped to marry me.

As I stood on the threshold of the witness box, I removed one glove and placed my flesh on mottled leather. I muttered my oaths and promised to be truthful.

While I stroked the good book and looked the bailiff square in the eye, I dreamed of another place. Far removed from my own court martial for misdeeds during the War of 1812.

I wallowed in the best part of my life. When Ann smiled at me, and called me Jimmy.

Faith shone behind her eyes, and my brain conjured answers. My mouth sharpened them. Somewhere, in the courtroom’s darkest corners, I heard Ann laugh, and I chuckled with her. I enjoyed watching my accusers teeter and fall.

When the gavel fell, I savored the only possible outcome.

Acquitted.

Yet stripped of my uniform.

One promise on the Bible saved me, but it didn’t restore me. The United States government declared itself finished with corrupt scoundrels.

Even if they didn’t prove anything against me.

The wages of sin.

I marched down the aisle a final time, my body a mass of wool and hide, spangled with gold braid. It twinkled in the sunlight as I navigated stone steps to the street. My horse awaited me. At least the saddle and cougar skin blanket were mine. I launched my heft onto my perch and heeled the animal’s flank.

“Home, Caesar. The long way.”

I remembered that day years later, as I sat in my plantation study and surveyed the shambles I made of farming sandy soil along Louisiana’s Wolf River. If I squinted, I could see the Gulf. Just barely.

I ruffled my little Theofannie’s hair, and she gave me a chubby-cheeked grin. Ironic that my favorite child spawned from my second wife. “Celestine! Summon the man with the boat!”

An hour later, I swatted mosquitoes and bumped the sandbar at the Wolf’s mouth. I stood under a smattering of stars and gazed into the dark horizon.

I was almost an old man, my lifetime littered with almosts. Somedays. Not quites.

Time for me to claim what was mine.

A piece of Mexico.

It was all I ever wanted.

I shoved away from shifting sand. My oars propelled my soul through a lifetime of dark nights.

In Mexico, could I finally find the light?

I AM NUMBER 13

(coming Fall 2015)

So much of America is the same. When I close my eyes, I can still see virgin timber. Clear-running streams. Tight-knit communities staking a claim in the wilderness, using only what they needed. I always considered being born in Maryland a blessing, because it was the front door to paradise.

I am appalled at what Americans have done to my memories of America.

I landed in this place. Parkersburg, West Virginia. An outpost on the Ohio River. I remember floating by here. Several times. On my way to the island to meet with Vice President Aaron Burr.

You remember him, don’t you?

No?

I call him the American Napoleon. Perhaps that is who he wanted to be, with his grand plan to invade Mexico and separate the western half of the continent of North America from the burgeoning United States.

Here’s a little known fact: it was never his plan; it was always mine.

I planted that seed, while he was still Jefferson’s cuckolded Vice President. I knew the Spaniards were weak, understood their fortifications, traveled all the routes. It was I who knew what was possible, who was fed up with being underpaid by that bumbling buffoon Jefferson.

During his administrations, I never had enough money to feed and clothe my men, let alone pay them. He gutted the army I fought so hard to build, and I always hated him for it. I craved the freedom to build a country that fit my principles, suited my needs. And when I criss-crossed the landscape of east Texas on my horse, I saw what that country could be.

Who would’ve led it, you ask?

Well, naturally.

Me.

I only used Burr to do the out-in-the-open conspiring. With every ciphered letter, every meeting, I fed his ego what he wanted to hear.

This exercise will make you famous, Aaron.

It will establish your legacy.

You will be remembered for all time.

If only he had succeeded………..I would’ve had my country. My throne. My ticket to immortality.

I would’ve cast him aside as soon as we got to Mexico and used my connections with the Spanish to make myself the true emperor. Several of them told me they would support me, being tired of the slow, forgotten slog of support and information between the colonies, Havana and Madrid. One of them even agreed to assassinate Aaron Burr as soon as we’d won the day.