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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2020 by Aaron Gwyn

  First publication 2020 by Europa Editions

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

  www.mekkanografici.com

  Cover image: Pexels

  1827, 1857 and 1844 Maps: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

  ISBN 9781609456351

  Aaron Gwyn

  ALL GOD’S

  CHILDREN

  ALL GOD’S

  CHILDREN

  “There was a day when the sons of God came to present

  themselves before the Lord. And Satan came also.”

  —JOB 1:6

  DUNCAN LAMMONS

  —1827—

  I came down that winter from Kentucky, travelling the river on a flatboat with two other passengers and a cargo of ice. There were crates and crates of it, packed in sawdust and stacked shoulder-high. Those days, most folks hadn’t heard of buying ice; I don’t doubt but there were some in the South who’d hardly seen it. If I’d done as Mama taught me and kept up with the papers, I’d have known about Frederic Tudor who was building himself an ice trade out of Boston, cutting blocks from farm ponds and shipping them to Cuba, Charleston, Savannah. He’d just opened a market in New Orleans, which was where me and that barge were headed.

  I knew none of this at the time. I figured the crates were full of bug juice or tobacco. I’d just turned twenty, and though my folks had lettered me and hoped I’d take an interest in business or the like, little caught my attention unless it had four legs and passed in front of my rifle.

  My second day on the river, curiosity got the better of me and I asked one of the boatmen what they were hauling. He was standing at the edge of the craft, staring into the brown water, keeping an eye out for sawyers. A tree trunk would stave the bottom of a boat quick as you could holler hickory.

  “It’s ice,” he told me.

  “How’s that?”

  “Ice,” he said.

  I figured he was just jobbing me, but he looked serious enough. I asked what they were carrying that for and he told me they sold it.

  “Folks give you money for ice?”

  “Long as it ain’t melted,” he said.

  Well, I might just’ve been a tanner’s boy from Butler County but I figured I knew a swindle when I heard it. I remember thinking any city that’d pay for ice was liable to slap a tax on well water. God a’mighty. What did they charge for sunshine?

  New Orleans was only a way station. The previous year, I’d attended a talk where a man told us that the federal government of Mexico was promising 177 acres of farmland and 4,000 of pasture to families willing to settle between the Sabine and the Nueces. His name was Sterling Robertson. Wasn’t much to look at—a squaddy little toad with a fluff of hair tied behind his head—but he could’ve sold socks to savages. He said that in Texas there was every kind of game: deer and antelope. Turkey and bear. Bee trees and grapes, persimmon trees and cherries. The climate was mild and there were Mexican soldiers to keep the Indians at bay.

  Sliding down the river on that flatboat, I thought how Robertson made Texas sound like Eden before the fall.

  Or Kentucky. Kentucky back in Boone’s day before the slavers came.

  I sat watching the country drift past, the fields and farms, the wooding places where steamboats put in to collect fuel for their fireboxes. My heart was homesick and heavy, but every mile south seemed to lift the burden of it. I still thought you could leave America where the planters and plant-managers had everything locked down and laid out. Texas was a free frontier, promising folks like me the chance to start fresh. It’s a peculiar sort of man who needs a fresh start by the age of twenty, but I was always peculiar.

  I reckon that twenty seemed old to me at the time; now it seems so young. It was certainly too young to understand that America wasn’t something you left as much as it was something that you carried, a shape inside yourself—the way stone is shaped by water—all these channels carved inside your soul.

  So, while you might’ve thought you were living in America, all that time it was living in you.

  * * *

  We reached New Orleans at the end of February. The crew delivered their ice, broke up the flatboat and sold it for lumber. I took a room at a boarding house to wait for a ship that would take me west.

  The matron was an ancient woman named Simone—I don’t know whether she was a widow or spinster, but if there’d been a husband at some point, she never mentioned him to me.

  Upon learning I was bound for Texas, the Madame informed me she’d had a number of boarders over the past several years with the selfsame intentions—one young man was a guest in her house at that very moment; she’d helped him get a job at the Leeds Foundry.

  “His name is Smithwick,” she said. “Do you know him?”

  I told her I didn’t know any Smithwicks.

  “He’s a good boy,” she said, “I will introduce you.”

  But as I had the luxury of lying abed until the sun was up and this youngster rose early to trot off to his foundry job, no such introduction was forthcoming.

  During the day, I amused myself by visiting with fellow boarders in the sitting room. At night, I’d go out and walk the gas-lit streets of that strange city. I’d never heard men speak French before.

  Or Spanish.

  Or whatever it was a young dandy whispered to me in an alley one evening as I was pirooting around the American Quarter.

  Come and see, it sounded like. Come and see.

  I stepped closer to make him out, feeling the old lure in my chest pulling me forward.

  I never saw what he hit me with. My knees buckled and the ground came rushing up. I heard a bell in my ears. When the world stopped shimmering, the man was gone and I had blood running into my eyes. I stumbled back down the street, faces floating by, women glancing at me, then quickly looking away.

  At the boarding house, Madame Simone tended me and clucked her tongue, brewing a cup of sass tea and seeing to my cuts. Wouldn’t show me a mirror, but my face wasn’t what concerned me. The footpad had slashed my britches and emptied both pockets.

  “Did he get much money?” the matron asked.

  I told her the thief had taken every last cent. My eyes were blurry and the Madame’s voice sounded as if it came from a long way off.

  The Madame dabbed my wounds with witch-hazel. I thought she’d have no choice but to turn me out on the street as I had nothing left to pay for the room but my rifle, shot pouch, and knife, none of which I was prepared to part with.

  “Do you know aught of foundry work?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t know a foundry from a bull’s foot,” I told her. “My pap is a tanner.”

  “Well,” she said, “that is no great matter. As long as you have no allergy to a hard day’s labor, I can get you employment.”

  I assured her I had no such allergy and that I appreciated her kindness, but in truth, the proposition did little to raise my spirits. A very low feeling seized hold of me, putting me in mind of my father’s warnings before I’d headed south. Pap had agreed I needed to get out of Kentucky, though he didn’t think much of my travelling plans.

  He said, “You stay clear of New Orleans, Duncan. They shoot cross-eyed men and redheads on sig
ht.”

  I was neither of these but getting cracked on the head and liberated of my money had soured me on city-life, and I realized my father had been right—and not just about New Orleans.

  Though he never hid his disapproval of my defects of character, he loved me fiercely, always praising my patience for labor and eagerness to learn.

  I missed him terribly. Some days I’d pass a man on the street and think I’d smelled Pap on the breeze. A loneliness would come down to crush the breath out of me.

  It was then that Mama’s voice seemed to whisper in my ear: You are a good boy, Duncan. You are just and kind.

  Thus, my spirits would be resurrected. I’d remind myself of the proceedings that had sent me running from home. And of the promise I was running toward.

  * * *

  And so, I took the good Madame up on her offer of employment. The Leeds Foundry hired me on as a finisher—a position I bluffed my way into, figuring if these thieving New Orleans boys could manage it, why couldn’t an honest Kentuckian?

  The factory forged cast-iron fixtures and steel cotton presses, and at the time of my arrival employed less than thirty mechanics, most a good deal older than myself. They talked a mixture of French and Spanish, and seemed to be friendly enough fellows, but it took me less than a week to wear out my welcome.

  I’d never stepped foot in a factory before and had no knowledge of the trade I pretended to possess. For a few days, I carried and fetched for the others—the youngest being the boarder Madame Simone had told me about, an ugly, freckle-faced boy of nineteen—watching the men pour molten iron into molds or pack sand into sections, and though it was noisy, noxious labor, soon I was cutting sprue holes and spouts and even operating the ovens. I went at the job hard as I could, sweating for ten or twelve hours at a stretch.

  And yet, for all my effort, I made a very poor impression. I couldn’t figure out what it was I’d done. I decided to go the whole figure, thinking maybe newcomers were required to perform double-time to prove they were up to trap. By the end of the next week, I’d worked myself to where I had to auger new holes in my belt to keep my britches cinched around my waist, and still my colleagues bored into me with their murderous looks. I started to wonder if I wouldn’t be better off strolling the docks with the cutthroats and bandits.

  One morning, when the men’s vicious glances were thick as smoke coming off a furnace, that freckled teenager came over and squatted beside me. He was a gangly, stone-faced lad with a severe brow and a big nose that looked to’ve been broken several times. His ears stuck out. He’d outgrown the sleeves of his shirt by several inches.

  “You have got to slow down,” he whispered. “These ole boys are about to fix your flint.”

  Hearing him speak took me aback. His voice was deep and melodious, as out of place in this factory as the meadowlark’s song in a brothel.

  “Slow down?” I said. “I mean to keep this job till payday.”

  “There won’t be a payday for you if you keep at it like you are. These city-men are crooked as a Virginia fence.”

  It took me several seconds to understand what he was saying. The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t keep up with the other workers; it was that I was setting too brisk a pace—the others looked lazy in comparison. This homely young man had saved me a good deal of sweat and, very likely, a thrashing.

  I stared at him a moment. Under that stern, unpleasant brow was a pair of good-natured eyes and I believed I saw kindness in them.

  “Your name is Smithwick?”

  “Smithwick,” he said, nodding. “My given name is Noah.”

  “I’m Duncan,” I told him, and after shaking his hand, thanked him for the turn he’d done me.

  He said, “The selfsame thing happened to me when I started last month. You see that bald sumbuck yonder?” He nodded toward a hairless mechanic on the other side of the room. “My third day working here, he come up to me and said, ‘No sprig of a boy will set the pace for us.’ I told him our employer paid me for my time, and didn’t I owe him all I was capable of doing in it?

  “‘No,’ he said, ‘he pays you for so much work. You get no more for your big day’s work than we do for ours, and if you go on like this you’ll make trouble for the rest of us.”

  I saw I had thoroughly misjudged young Noah: here was a boy wise beyond his years and warm beyond his looks.

  I said, “Where are you from, Master Smithwick?”

  “Wellsir,” he said, “that all depends on what you mean by from. I was born in Martin County, North Carolina, but my pa moved us out to Tennessee when I was just a stripling. Past few years, I been working as a blacksmith in Kentucky.”

  “I, dad! Whereabouts?”

  “Hopkinsville. You know it?”

  “I’m from Butler County!” I exclaimed, standing from my crouch, as if being on my feet might prove my place of origin.

  Noah stared up at me. “Where’s that?”

  “Northeast of Hopkinsville, not thirty miles. Madame Simone says you are bound for Texas too.”

  “I am,” he said. “Soon as I make enough to pay the fare.”

  I’d come to learn that many Tennessee and Kentucky boys had heard that siren call—some, the exact same Siren. It turned out that Noah had attended one of the many talks given by Sterling Robertson, the very man who’d converted me. The apostle of a new faith, Robertson was travelling the western states, extolling the virtues of this lazy man’s paradise, as he called it. At the time, New Orleans was chock full of young men trying to put together enough kelter to leave the Old States and ship off to this new Jerusalem.

  Young Noah had as good a heart as the Maker ever put inside a poor boy’s breast, and we took to each other like brothers. While I was able to learn a few passing things about this or that trade, Noah was a master of all things mechanical—by the age of nineteen, he’d been a blacksmith, a gunsmith, and was the best hand at the Leeds Foundry by a furlong. I’d come to find he had courage to boot, and something I didn’t have at all: a mind for business, and the ability to put together a little coin.

  In the evenings, after our shift had ended, we’d wander down to the wharves and inspect the vessels in port. There were ships of every description—brigs, flats, and barges—everything from the smallest boat to the three-masted behemoth, floating far as the eye could see.

  To a couple of landlopers like me and Noah this was indeed a marvelous sight, an ever-changing forest of ship masts, the vessels docking one moment, sailing away the next. And we imagined how we’d be on one of them soon enough ourselves.

  Of course, it didn’t take long before our nightly recreation was utterly polluted, and we soon got an eyeful of a very different sort of cargo as steamboat after steamboat travelled down the swollen river to dock and drive up coffles of slaves from their fetid underbellies.

  My father had strong opinions on the subject of slavery. In addition to running his tannery, he was a deacon of the Radical Methodist church and would even preach, time to time, at brush arbor meetings. In Kentucky, views on the so-called Negro Question differed county to county, but Pap was an Emancipationist, and many was the time I’d seen him address a camp meeting, thundering on about the evils of Southern slavers and Northern doughfaces to where half the congregation would be amen-ing him, and the other packing up to leave. Having never seen men manacled and chained together, I couldn’t conjure the sights and sounds of their agony, only cobbling together a few notions from Pap’s sermons.

  Well, my visits to the wharves provided a quick education. I stood there watching as the steamboats put in, threw down their gangplanks, debarked their better sorts from the cabin, and then the middling ones from belowdecks. And once the white folk had alighted and cleared from sight, here came a different kind of passenger. I can close my eyes and see them coming even now. The bridge of a rough wooden beam extends to a door in the hold, the door open
s with the sound of a gunshot, and directly, a line of famished black men begin marching across the narrow plank, coming along Indian-file and naked save for a pair of pantaloons, hands cuffed, moving in a kind of shuffle-step, the whole wretched caravan progressing as one clanking machine, heads lowered, each man fitted with an iron collar, padlocks slipped through the latches at the front, a long chain running from neck to neck, the men’s white eyes blinking in the twilight.

  It either tore your guts out or it didn’t—there was no gentle response. The very first time I bore witness to this abomination, I felt sick at the stomach. I could not even speak. Noah was standing there beside me, and I recall thinking if he wasn’t disgusted by this ghastly sight, we could not continue our association, however much I enjoyed his company.

  “That,” I heard him say, “is the vilest thing I ever saw,” and my heart swelled with affection for him, just as it filled with hatred for the slavers herding these poor men from the hold.

  And yet, we returned. I’ll not venture to guess Noah’s motives, but as for myself, I couldn’t stand knowing all this was happening and turn a blind eye to it, and though there was nothing I could do to prevent these steamboats coming downriver from St. Louis or Memphis, I wanted to sear the image in my mind.

  Go on, I’d tell myself. Get an eyeful now. This is why you’re leaving your native land. In Texas, such a thing will never be.

  Pretty soon, I’d get to thinking of my father and his sermons. So often, I’d thought him too harsh on matters of doctrine, and that had put distance between us—more than 900 miles of it. But I reckoned on the subject of slave-holding he’d been no harsher than what was called for.

  Watching those weary souls march up the street toward the auction-houses, I thought his position rather mild.

  CECELIA

  —VIRGINIA, 1827—