The Blood of Heaven by Kent Wascom Page A

they could. So I endured their offers, and proffered false and heartless boasts. I was, after all, a Kemper.

    II
    A River into Eden
    The Ohio–Mississippi River, Spring 1801
    Aboard the Ark
    We dangled our heads over the side of the barge to watch the muddy water roll with stars reflected near and warm, not distant and cold like they had been in Chit. The end of February brought the flood and the Ohio swelled and at the landings where we stopped to load and unload cargo the wharf-boats were bobbing at the treetops; and like-wise the Father of Waters overran its banks and we passed above the tips of pines and willows where would be islands in the drier seasons. We would turn south at the Cape and pass forever by our fathers, and so were cast into Eden.
    Still, my father hadn’t left me; he visited day by day, sometimes brought guilt, sometimes avarice or wrath. If I had killed him, and I believed it to be so, he was now nothing more than rot. But I knew even then, laid out on our flatboat’s deck, that if he had one follower yet he would not go into corruption; he would be burnt, taken by the wind and scattered in his ashy wisdom; or that same follower would scrape his ashes into the baptizing creek, and let Preacher-father silt the waters which would carry him through the wiry lattice-work of tributaries, slowly churning him with the mud until he reached an artery of the Mississippi and came into that muddy organ and lived in it, possessing all and watching me with the milky eyes of catfish, seeking land at the banks and islands with frog-legs and the claws of alligators.
    Those nights we listened to the groan and creak of the flatboat’s timbers, to the men fighting over tobacco or liquor or money, or just to fight: the sounds of something being slowly torn apart in the current. We learned to find good sounding by the color of the water, to read the currents, and to see bars and traps by the ripples in the water.
    The boatmen gave us tastes of their drink and smoke when they were feeling good-natured. But they found that our appetites were fierce and these gifts were soon rescinded. We worked, shucking loads at pitiful landings all down both rivers, and before long we could afford our own drink and smoke—though we only had one broken clay pipe to split between us and it was often either tobacco or food. We passed our pipe while we toted casks and bales and sugar-sacks and the men of the wharfs would say, Some preachers! and go on making fun, singing bawdy hymns at us until our captain, a man named Finch, would holler them quiet. He carried with him at all times the biggest knife I ever saw, and would use the breadth of its flat sides to knock you awake or get you working at a faster clip.
    The work on the river was bizarrely a thing of speed. We floated slowly, poling where it was shallow, sometimes lashing ropes to great live oaks to pull ourselves along, but so did our competitors, and if they survived our poles on the water we would be sidled up next to them at Big Bone Lick or Bear Grass or Clarksville, and there we would unload against them and whoever was clear first to get his stock ashore would get the market price of the day and the choice of contract and credit to move further downwards, with the loser gaining nothing but merchants’ chop-change and some brawling. The shipping men would scoff and laugh amongst themselves about these river rats. Once, when I was sent to fetch contract papers from a merchant’s office, the man snapped back from his desk and waved a hand before his face.
    Christ, boy, tell your captain to send someone who doesn’t smell like they floated down here in a privy.
    I’d turned away to scowl, imagining how he would look with a gun-barrel leveled at his face. And such thoughts had visited me more and more, whenever we would pass into a town and see the sated and slothful. I wanted to take, but moreover I wanted someone else to hurt.
    When work was through, Finch would let us go out