Points north, p.15
Points North, page 15
These ablutions concluded, Charles fell to drying off Pliny’s feet with the skirts of his frock coat. In the meantime who should come lollygagging down the street but the insufferable boulevardier Dave Dancer and, on his shoulder, his execrable parrot Dick Driver.
“Nigger, nigger, chain him up,” the bird shouted out.
Dave Dancer reproved Kinneson as follows: “What, sir, can you be thinking, to wash a nigger’s feet? Give over that blasphemy this instant.”
“Burn he, cut he, hang he high. Hang dat nigger out to dry,” screamed the parrot.
Kinneson stood up. Quite casually he reached out, wrung the parrot’s neck, and threw the carcass into the cobbled street. Dave Dancer gave out a shrill cry and made a cut at Kinneson with his gold-knobbed walking stick. Kinneson parried aside the intended blow, swooped Dancer over his head and flung him into the horse trough.
“I don’t know about you, friend,” Kinneson said, “but I am as sharp set as a spring she-bear just out of her den. Let us stop at the next chophouse.”
Some of these goings-on Pliny summarized for the congregation, far to the north, on that fair-and-foul Holy Saturday afternoon of April clouds and sun showers more showery than sunny. Some of the most peculiar happenings—the foot washing—he saw no reason to bring up. Surely it was just a matter of time before the astonished church fathers would rise as a body to usher him away from their pulpit, out of their church once and for all. Pliny could see Charles watching them out of the tail of his eye. As long as Pliny did not bring up the boy, Charles would see to it that he could speak his piece.
* * *
Over chops and mugs of beer—Kinneson said his religion forbade the use of strong spirits but nowhere did the tenets of his old Presbyterianism proscribe a cooling tankard of beer or ale—he told Pliny something of his own history. He said he was born and raised in northernmost Vermont, the son and grandson of abolitionist newspapermen and whiskey distillers. Several years ago he had been compelled to “leave Vermont in some haste.” Pliny smiled. Kinneson shook his head. “No, Pliny, you mistake me. My sudden departure involved no member of the fairer sex, but rather a little geological misapprehension. A little matter of rerouting the outlet of a local pond to help power the family distillery, with just a bit of temporary flooding in the valley below. Suffice to say I wandered South, sending home dispatches on the horrors of slavery, which were widely reprinted in abolitionist gazettes throughout the North. To do this I traveled incognito, often using false names and forged papers.”
When Kinneson’s talk turned to slavery he underwent a transformation. His pale eyes seemed illuminated by an interior light. His lean body began to sway and he nodded to himself as his eyes looked off toward that faraway place only he could see. He confided to Pliny that, while he probably could have safely returned to Vermont a year ago without much fear of retribution, he had stayed on in the South on “a very private enterprise of a ‘railroading nature,’” for a group of northern clergymen, politicos, and newspaper editors, to which he and his father had long belonged. Pliny knew immediately that he was speaking of the Underground Railroad, by which fugitive slaves were spirited north to free states and Canada, and that by coming to New Orleans, Kinneson was risking his life, as Pliny was his own.
“Now, Pliny,” Kinneson continued after looking around the chophouse to make sure he was not being overheard. “You may be surprised to learn that I have had my eye on you for some time. Word travels fast, you know. When I heard, through certain connections I have at the slave market, that you were making inquiries concerning the whereabouts of a slave dealer named Smithfield, my ears pricked up. I too have an interest in locating Satan Smithfield. He is, let us say, at the head of a list of southern businessmen whom I am most eager to call upon before returning home. Let me show you my letter of introduction to these entrepreneurs.”
Kinneson made a quarter-turn in his chair and nonchalantly brushed back his frockcoat so that, for a fleeting moment, Pliny glimpsed a long, deadly-looking pistol holstered at his waist. “I have paid my compliments to several of these men already. I fear, however, that our Mr. Smithfield has slipped through my fingers. Our fingers, Pliny. Yours and mine. I know you seek him also. As a means to finding your wife. I take it you have made no headway in that regard?”
Pliny told the man who was soon to become his deliverer that though he had made no progress in discovering the whereabouts of either Lake or Smithfield, he believed that he had perhaps eliminated some possibilities. “I don’t think she’s in Vicksburg or Natchez. Nor does it seem that she is here in New Orleans. Friend, I dread the worst. That she is mewed up in some backcountry redoubt across the river deep in the Territories. Or worse yet that she has been shipped to the Brazilian coffee plantations. I understand that, like you, I place my life at greater risk every day I inquire for Smithfield. But only he can tell me Lake’s fate.”
When Pliny concluded his tale Charles Kinneson was silent for a time. Finally he said, “Pliny, I have some reason to believe that if Smithfield was in New Orleans, he has now hit north again. He has been known, if the remuneration is adequate, to travel clear to Canada to capture and return a fugitive slave, or even to kill runaways in order to set examples. He is suspected in the murder of two of my own business associates in the North, both of them prominent in the ‘rail’ company. I believe, however, that there is a way to lure him to Vermont. We will do so on the pretext of offering a large reward for your capture. Once there, we will take him and, before putting him on trial for the murder and enslavement of Negroes, extract from him by whatever means are necessary the fate and whereabouts of your beloved Lake.”
Pliny replied that he had deep misgivings about using un-Christian methods to acquire the information he sought. Could they not, he wondered, once they had captured Smithfield, offer to spare his life in return for Lake’s location? They could not, Kinneson replied. He would handle all necessary transactions with Smithfield himself. Other than acting as bait to lure the demon north, Pliny need have no further part in the scheme.
Kinneson then stood up and poured a little beer from his tankard into Pliny’s collection plate. He placed his hand on Pliny’s brow and proclaimed, to the utter consternation of their fellow diners, “Lord, I beseech thee to make this good man, Pliny Templeton, an instrument of thy will.”
He dipped his fingers into the basin and sprinkled the beer onto Pliny’s forehead and said, “Pliny, I baptize thee in the name of Our Merciful All-loving Savior, Jesus Christ, to make you the instrument of the Lord God Jehovah in bringing Satan Smithfield to justice. His will be done, His Kingdom come. I now pronounce you, Pliny Templeton, His instrument and Angel of Retribution for all your remaining days.”
A man at an adjacent table gave out a guffaw and said he much doubted that the Lord would soon be making any black nigger His instrument. So fast that Pliny could scarcely follow his movements, Kinneson had his pistol out of his waistband and up against the man’s temple. “You said?”
“Nothing,” the lout replied. “I said nothing.”
“Quite right,” Kinneson said. Laying the two-foot-long weapon on the table where he could instantly seize it up again, he congratulated Pliny on his baptism.
“Sir,” said Pliny, “to humbly serve the Lord all my days as His minister is my design. As you know from hearing my sermon, I’ve made my own covenant with Him to do so. But I can be no such tool of his vengeance. Indeed, my own faith comes and goes with the weather. I lay no claim to godliness.”
“Minister, your honest doubt is proof of your faith. Was it not old Aquinas who said that doubt inheres in all true faith? The Christ Himself faltered briefly and remonstrated with His Father for forsaking Him on the cross.”
Smiling in a genial way, “Tell me, Pliny. What is it you wish for most?”
“To find my wife.”
“You shall do so. Here is my hand upon it.”
Kinneson clasped Pliny’s hand in his two and it was like inserting it between two millstones. “Now, what do you wish for next?”
“Freedom for both Lake and myself.”
“That too you shall have. Let us shake again.”
Rather warily this time, Pliny extended his hand and again Kinneson bid fair to crush it between those two grindstones.
“Now, minister. Ask me for one more boon. For you’re putting your life at risk for me.”
“Knowledge,” Pliny said.
“Ah. You shall have that, too. You shall have all the knowledge you desire. In the meantime, earlier today I took the liberty of booking passage for both you and myself on the packet Belle of Savannah, bound for New York in the morning. There we will rendezvous with my dear friend and colleague, Mr. J. B., to lay plans to lure Smithfield north and deal with him as I have described. Then, before you begin your formal education, you and Mr. J. B. and I will return south and purchase or, by other expedients, emancipate your beloved wife and bring her north. Are you for it?”
“I am.”
This time Charles Kinneson did not put out his hand but rather stepped around the table and clasped Pliny in a bear hug like a brother, which is how Charles would address him henceforward. As soon as Pliny could catch his breath he said, “If I may ask, sir, who is your colleague Mr. J. B.?”
“Brother, he is soon to become the Moses of your people,” Kinneson replied. “His name is John Brown and he is the greatest man I have ever known.”
* * *
So the afternoon came and wore away as Pliny nattered on from the pulpit, now with one side story after another, and even the church fathers seemed at times to be swept along by his tales. Charles II and his crony Brown shot and killed Smithfield upon sight on the day he arrived in Kingdom County, posing as a missionary with a magic lantern show. Charlie’d claimed he meant only to wing the slave catcher. Pliny had no choice but to believe him. Charles kept his word by sending his adoptive brother first to the state university and then Princeton Theological Seminary, Pliny graduating from both institutions with the highest honors. This part of his history was well-known in Kingdom Common, as was the fact that he ministered for several years, with great popularity, at the Church of New Canaan, the granite-mining town twelve miles north of the Common, founded by fugitive slaves, before being recruited for a vacancy in the pulpit of the Presbyterian Church in the Common.
“Where,” Pliny said now—oh, he still knew how to hold an audience—“if I never did anything quite right in the eyes of my beloved congregation, I never did anything wrong enough to get myself sent down the road.” Laughter.
He’d needed all his humor, and all of his extraordinary energy as well, when he began teaching and headmastering at the Academy he and Charles had built almost entirely by themselves next to the courthouse. A good enough minister but a great teacher, they’d said of him. And what, Pliny inquired of his congregation, was a great teacher anyway but a failed minister? More laughter.
The clock in the steeple of the Baptist church next door chimed six. Why hadn’t Pliny noticed it striking out the hours until now?
“Suppertime,” he said to his now nearly full house. “Seven o’clock sharp. Be here. My text will be ‘What Pliny Knew.’”
* * *
It was this simple. He would continue to return south to search for Lake for the rest of his life. In the war he served as regimental chaplain to Col. Charles “Mad Charlie” Kinneson’s Vermont Second. Later he and Charles escaped from Andersonville by feigning their own deaths. During Reconstruction—a misnomer if there ever were one when it came to the recently emancipated slaves, who’d had nothing to reconstruct—with Charles’s financial backing, he’d built more than one hundred “Templeton Schools” to teach reading and writing to Negroes throughout the former Confederacy. He would never find Lake. False sightings were the hardest. And charlatans scheming to cheat him out of the handsome reward he advertised in Negro newspapers. At first more than a few young widows and grass widows and even some of the young unmarried women in his congregation set their caps for him. As they came to understand that, never mind in the eyes of God, he still regarded himself as married and always would, they mothered him instead of courting him. He supposed the girl, Charlie’s redheaded firebrand daughter Mary, Queen of Scots, reminded him of Lake. Her anarchic ways, her quarrel with the stern old Presbyterian God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, her precocious womanliness at seventeen. Exactly who seduced whom was immaterial. He was forty years her senior and had abused the trust of his profession and his dearest friend. Her father and mother, the Charles Kinnesons, adopted the boy. Mary removed herself to New Canaan, locally known as Niggerville, and died along with one hundred others when the Vermont Klan burned them alive in their church. Charlie swore a great oath on Brown’s sword, Pottawattomie, which he inherited from his abolitionist colleague after Harper’s Ferry, to hunt down and slay each of the twenty young and not-so-young local Klansmen who’d ridden on New Canaan. He made good on his oath. Young James, supposing his grandfather Kinneson to be his father, Pliny his reverend preceptor but no more, flourished under the loving guidance of two fathers. Pliny taught him and a select handful of upper-form students Greek and Latin, taught him the names of all the birds, animals, plants, minerals of the Kingdom. Taught him baseball. The boy, a lefty, becoming the best pitcher in the history of the Academy. Charles, likewise his wife, indulged James in the adoring manner of any grandparents, which was a splendid way for him to grow up. Charles and Pliny never went to the woods or much of anyplace else without him. He had red hair and blue eyes like his birth mother and a devilish smile and his birth father’s wit. Of all of Pliny’s students, he was most expert at “getting old Temp going.”
Over a cloth-covered basket of fried chicken, baked potatoes, coleslaw, and maple sugar pie provided by Charles’s wife, and two mugs apiece of hard cider from Charles’s Westfield-Seek-No-Furthers:
“Brother,” said Pliny. “Walk not a mile but a mere hundred feet in my shoes. The boy must know who he is. He and his—our—descendants who they are. And yes, the all-knowing Common must know, too.”
“Hoot, Pliny. You just want to take credit for him.”
“What if I do? Who wouldn’t? Why do you oppose it? Don’t you have faith in him to handle it?”
“Pliny, Pliny, my dear beloved brother. Of course I do. It’s the village I don’t have faith in. And the great spinning world beyond. Not the boy. I have complete faith in the boy. Now and forever.”
“Hasn’t the village and the world too since I wrote my strange Ecclesiastical History of Kingdom County handled me well enough? There’s talk of establishing a scholarship in my name at the university.”
“Aye. Now that it suits them to do it. Pliny, I cannot allow it. You must end your wonder-story before the boy arrived on the stage.”
“Know then that I have already written to him. He and no one else will see this letter. If for some reason I should not be extant to tell him.”
There was a tremendous knocking on the parsonage door. “Minister, come out. Come out, instantly.”
Six or seven church fathers in their Sunday frock coats stood on the porch. A throng with pine torches in the street nearby, curiosity seekers. A shot rang out from Charles’s pistol, directly beside Pliny’s ear.
“Back,” Charles roared. “Back, dogs. I’ll shoot the first cur to stand in our way. The Reverend shall finish his tale if he wishes.”
But to Pliny, “Pray don’t, brother. Do not quite finish it. Do not. I know you think me prideful. I know you think me hasty. Are you not more prideful and hasty yet? What possible good can come of such a revelation?”
“This has nothing to do with pride or haste. It has to do with the truth.”
“Pliny, come. Let me make one more attempt to reason with you. This is about your beloved Lake, is it not? You looked hard and hard for sixty years but never found a trace. Do you feel somewhat of the same loss with the boy? Because he has never known who you truly are? Pliny, he could scarcely love you more did he know. Perhaps he already does, or suspects. Save for his red topknot and blue eyes there is the strongest resemblance between you two. Who knows what the boy knows? Leave it be.”
“If he suspects, that’s all the more reason to tell him.”
“And do you intend to tell him how his mother’s murderers, the Klansmen, died? At my hands? That his grandfather, whom he supposes to be his father, ran mad and slaughtered twenty people? Murderers though they were? I say again, Pliny, leave it be. None of this can make up for losing Lake. That’s my fault. Take my weapon and here on the parsonage steps redress that terrible crime, my crime, of killing Smithfield before we could interrogate him.”
“Brother, my mind is made up. Look. Someone’s lighted the church. If this is to be our last walk together, let us then make it together.”
And they did, down the Common, arm in arm. It was markedly colder now. They might wake up to snow on Easter morning.
* * *
The heroics of Col. Charles Kinneson’s Second Vermont Regiment, who turned away Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg and thereby in one short July afternoon turned the tide of the battle and the war for the Union, were well-known and much-celebrated in the village. Though of course the myth of “Mad Charlie’s” one-man countercharge and the facts of what happened that miasmic afternoon in the green hills of Pennsylvania were as different as noon and darkest midnight. In his narrative that Easter eve in 1900, Pliny cleaved to the conventional story without exactly distorting what actually happened. Meade’s orders had been clear. The regiment would wait until Pickett’s men were within five rods, then open with grape and chain, and only after that mount the flanking charge. Such was not Charles’s style. Without notice he gave out a great piercing ululation as if in response to the Johnnies’ own fearsome outcry and started down the hill, waving Brown’s sword like an avenging blue angel. Pliny tackled him just in time to drive them both to the ground inches under the canister from the hilltop above, screaming like ten thousand deadly steel hornets. Charles leaped to his feet, and with Brown’s sword fought off the swarming rebels who’d survived the first cannonade, continued swinging the sword while by main force Pliny dragged his friend and commander back up the hill before the second roaring fusillade that actually won the day for the Union. Charlie thrashing and resisting. Clearly wanting to die a martyr. Meade gave him a button cut from his uniform jacket, then later a medal of honor.
