Cape Fear Rising Read online

  “Read us a lesson from your tract.” He offers it to Grant.

  “Cap’n, I swear, somebody just gave that—”

  “Read us a lesson, boy.”

  Grant opens the pamphlet and, haltingly, reads aloud in the lantern light: “‘I tell you Americans—unless you speedily alter your course, you and your country are gone—’”

  “You the ones is going to get gone!” somebody yells.

  “‘God will not suffer us always to be oppressed—our sufferings will come to an end.’”

  “That is quite enough. You six may be sure your sufferings will come to a speedy end.”

  “But, cap’n—”

  “You heard him, gentlemen.” The Colonel holds up the pamphlet. “Preaching insurrection.”

  “Spell it out,” says one of the men. “Read us the law.”

  The Colonel clasps his hands behind his back. “The Insurrection Law of 1741 requires that three or more slaves found guilty of conspiring to rebel must be put to death. These niggers claim to be free, but they have no proof. Therefore, under the law, they are held to be slaves. They are strangers—dangerous lurkers-about. They have on their persons evidence of conspiracy.”

  He turns to a man next to him, who is waving a horse pistol. “Take them to the marketplace. The time has come for Anglo-Saxon justice.”

  Sunrise, at the foot of Market Street. They have had their trial, in the slave marketplace. The white men line up in two ranks of twenty-odd each between the six black men and the river.

  The river is running fast and high, the tide sweeping up from the sea in brown wavelets. There is no breeze. The sun is up behind the town, but the wharf still lies in shadow. Grant looks west across the river and, though he knows better, begins to calculate how far the other bank is, how long it will take to swim there—a quarter of a mile, more, the swift current choked with logs and debris. His hands are tied behind his back. Without his hands, any man in that fast water will surely drown.

  “You came from the river,” the Colonel says quietly. “Now go back where you came from.”

  On his signal, the first black man is shoved into the gauntlet. Hands behind him, he cannot quite maintain his balance. He lurches from side to side as the first blows strike him—ax handles, gun butts, fists, boots. Halfway down the line, he is snorting bloody mist.

  Pistols are cocked.

  He is four, then just three long steps from the sea wall, running—trying to run—on his knees.

  They all fire at once. The bullets kick him headlong into the dirt. His body convulses, sprawling, legs spastic. Then he is still. They fire again into the corpse. Then there is a ringing silence into which the Colonel says softly, “Reload.” It is almost military.

  The crowd cheers them, even the women and children.

  Grant watches. As each new man is fed to the gauntlet, he feels his tongue swell larger in his mouth. He has no words—his tongue is a dry lump. His eyes burn. He must quiet himself, he thinks. Regain control.

  Names, he thinks. These country men have names. The Colonel never even asked their names. He concentrates, watches the third man reel into the gauntlet, racing toward the two sprawled bodies on the riverbank.

  Tucker, he makes himself remember, that’s his name. The first bullets knock the man down.

  Big Gee. Willis. Terel. Coates.

  Then they seize Grant by his elbows.

  “You have no right!” He has found his voice. “We have papers!” His five companions lie in a single heap so close to the water they could reach out and wash their dead hands in it.

  “Untie his hands,” the Colonel orders, his tone full of regret.

  Grant rubs circulation back into his wrists. But before he can grab or punch, strong hands are clamping his arms.

  “As you seem to have a higher opinion of yourself than those blue-gum nigger cohorts of yours,” the Colonel says, “we must take you down a peg.”

  Grant stares at the Colonel, stares at those soft gray eyes. But it is another man who has the knife. A fist closes on Grant’s right index finger, yanking it taut at the knuckle. The knife flashes so fast, the finger is already gone before the pain blinds him in one quick burn. He wills himself to remain conscious.

  The Colonel recites, as if he has said it before, “‘He shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own wickedness. Yea, the Lord our God shall cut them off.’”

  They take all the fingers, and the thumb. As each digit is severed, the Colonel’s man tosses it to the crowd. Grant stares in horror at the mutilated stump of his hand, nausea washing over him. Then, running through his mind, over and over, is the old rhyme his daddy taught him in the fields, counting it out on his fingers: ought is an ought and a figure is a figure, all for the white man and nothin’ for the nigger.

  The back of his throat constricts. The crowd goes silent. His arm feels heavy and dead. He tucks it tightly into his left armpit, and, before they can shove him toward the gauntlet, he charges through it on his own, roaring. The Psalm of David is coming out of his mouth in tongues: “‘I will early destroy all the wicked of the land! I will cut off all wicked doers from the City of the Lord!’”

  They are not quite ready for him. He is halfway down the lines before they lay a hand on him. He hears the snick of pistols being cocked, like a chain of beads being counted, hears the bellowing of men on either side as a dull, surfy roar.

  The sun is up over the town. The brown river glistens suddenly silver. Grant runs for it. He can make it—for one instant, he believes this. He is invisible, a wraith, a bloodless haint.

  His feet are not touching the ground—he is flying, weightless, pure spirit. He can feel the wind rushing past his ears.

  The world ends in a thunderclap, the river explodes behind his eyes.

  They untangle the heap of bodies and lay them in a row, heads toward the river. Somebody fetches a sharp, double-bladed ax. One man places a rock-maple block under each neck in turn. Another swings the ax—thwack. In this manner, they collect six Negro heads to be raised on poles along the roads leading into town—a warning to other strangers who might bring trouble.

  Tucker’s head is placed alongside the northbound road at Smith’s Creek Bridge, facing north.

  Big Gee’s is raised beside the tollhouse on the Shell Road, leading to the ocean.

  The heads of Willis and Terel are rowed across the river to the swampy peninsula where the channel forks into the Cape Fear and the Northeast Branch. The poles are twenty feet tall, so the heads can be seen from passing boats.

  Coates’s head is paraded up Market Street a mile and a half from the river, where the city peters out into longleaf pine forest, and is mounted beside the wrought-iron hitching post of a tavern.

  They raise Grant’s head right beside the ferry landing at the foot of Market Street, the place of execution. Boys wing stones at it with slingshots. Overhead, gulls wheel and rant, quarreling over the flesh. Men point it out to visitors. Women hurry by without looking up.

  Black servants weep behind closed doors. Word carries to the cotton fields, to the mills, to the rice and turpentine plantations up and down the river. It is a bad time. Mothers keep their children close. Something is loose upon the land. Nat Turner is killing whitefolks in the Virginia tidewater, and no good will ever come of it. All the way up north in Boston, David Walker has been poisoned right outside his own tailor shop. Jesus is not coming again in this century.

  Having slept off an evil drunk, Dal Parmele has retrieved his skiff and gone fishing.

  Late in the afternoon, when the tide has turned, husky men working in pairs sling the decapitated bodies off the sea wall into the river. Headless, they all look alike. Each one floats briefly, tumbling in the current. A southwesterly breeze has risen, pushing whitecaps against the brown tide.

  At last, the river has them all, surging toward the Atlantic, spiriting them away toward Africa.

  Arms akimbo, the Colonel stands on the wharf watching
them go. After a time, he sees only a greasy smear of blood on the receding tide. To the pairs of husky men, he remarks, “This has always been a peaceful town. A good town.”

  To himself, he says, “‘In those days there was no king in Israel, and every man did that which was right in his own eyes.’”

  The men nod, grunt, then stoop to rinse their hands in the cool river.

   PART I

  THE WORD

  1898

  The city of Wilmington has a population of about 25,000. It is situated on the Cape Fear river, twenty-five miles from its mouth, and at the junction of the northwest and northeast branches. The harbor is commodious, and is a resort for vessels from all ports of the world.

  There is a direct steamer line to New York, and a good business is done by sailing vessels to all domestic ports. Considerable trade is also done with the West Indies by sailing vessels and steamships. There are five railroad lines reaching the city, besides a short line to the coast, which handles quantities of coast products. Fish and game are abundant. There are two fine pleasure and health resorts on the beach, reached by rail and steamer. The beach is said to be one of the finest on either side of the continent. Malignant diseases are unknown. The death rate is abnormally low. No city of the South offers better natural and acquired advantages for men of energy and enterprise.

  Wilmington, N.C., City Directory, 1897

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sunday, August 14

  FROM THE OPEN WINDOW of the train, Sam Jenks watched the river—wide and brown, here and there silvered by pools of glare. The brown color came from tannin, his cousin Hugh MacRae had explained in his letter. All that rotting pine and cypress leaching into the current. The Cape Fear basin was practically tropical. Hugh ought to know—he was native and had a cotton mill on the river.

  This was the regular train from Raleigh and Goldsboro that brought businessmen back to town after a weekend in the country. The car was full of men in summer-weight suits reading newspapers.

  Sam leaned closer to the window, searching the brown water for something else—alligators. Hugh had sworn there were alligators down here, though Sam had not yet spied one. A wild country, Hugh had written: out in the swamp and lowland forest lurked water moccasins, copperheads, rattlers, whitetail deer, wild pigs, raccoons, and foxes.

  Sam turned to his wife, Gray Ellen, and took her right hand in both of his. His hands were pink—he was blond, with a fair complexion. During the weeks at the sanatorium, he’d lost the sunburn he’d gotten in Cuba. Gray Ellen was black Irish, with brown eyes and tawny skin, even in winter. “This time, it’s going to work out fine,” he said. “I can feel it.”

  Gray Ellen didn’t speak, didn’t look his way.

  “Chicago was a mistake,” he said. “They don’t give a man a chance.” Sam was feeling stronger, confident again, now that he was no longer drinking.

  “You’ve got a chance now.” She was weary, had an edge. She hated traveling, hated moving. It took so much energy to start all over each time. The older she got, the harder it became. She was nearly thirty now, and it was very hard. This was the last move. The bargain was, they would settle here. If they moved again, it would be her choice. To a place she picked out. For her own reasons, not Sam’s.

  “All that’s behind us now. I swear.” He believed it, he could feel it. This was a new feeling he had, as if a great heaviness were evaporating from his body. The heaviness had been there so long that he had forgotten what it felt like to be without it.

  It had been with him at Las Guasimas, in Cuba, as he wandered around the jungle in a feverish haze, unable to find out what was going on. It had been with him when he saw two men shot dead in front of him and a fellow correspondent named Edward Marshall take a Mauser ball in the back and later, leaning paralyzed against a tree, dictate his dispatch to Stephen Crane.

  The copious rations of contraband whiskey hadn’t kept away the fever. And the whiskey hadn’t made him any braver. While the army moved on San Juan, Sam retreated. He made it by packet boat to Miami on July 1, the day the Rough Riders were charging up San Juan Hill and into the history books.

  The biggest story of the war, and he missed it because he was too scared. And still he got home to Chicago too late.

  Gray Ellen shifted in her seat. She could not get comfortable in this humid heat. “That’s what you said when we left Philadelphia two years ago.”

  He dropped her hand. “Look, this isn’t going to work if you keep carping. Forget Chicago. Forget Philly. We’re here now. I’ll be writing for a real newspaper.”

  He had written Cousin Hugh, asking for a job. They were only vaguely related, but Hugh put a lot of stock in family. “Come down here and help us promote the place,” he’d written. “Forget Chicago—Wilmington is the city of the future.”

  Gray Ellen showed no reaction. Since losing the baby only six weeks earlier, she’d been like that a lot—distant. The day she miscarried, Sam was on a drunk in Miami. When he got home and found out, he went on another binge.

  Next time, Sam was determined, it would go better. No reason why not. It was just bad luck before, and what could you do about luck? But luck could change. This was a new place. He’d been dry for a month. They said if you could beat it for a month, you could beat it for good. His head was clear of fever. He had his old ambition back.

  Maybe he just wasn’t cut out to be a war correspondent. But nobody would be shooting at him down here. Nothing was going to spoil this start.

  Suddenly, the train lurched violently, and Sam was thrown against the window, Gray Ellen in his arms. A dapper gentleman across the aisle turned their way and smiled. He wore a silver goatee and held a brass-headed walking cane between his knees. “They are still working on the roadbed.”

  “Ah. Of course.”

  “During the War, you know, a train I was riding jumped the tracks altogether. The carriages were stacked up like stove wood.” He smiled, as if he took great pride in having survived a railway disaster. “I helped pull the injured out of the wreck. Several we could not save.”

  During the war, Sam thought—at that very moment, the Rough Riders were disembarking at Montauk Point to a ticker-tape parade down Broadway. At the front of the car, two returning soldiers shared a seat. “I hope they’ve fixed the track,” he said.

  The man with the goatee chuckled. “I should hope so—that was more than thirty years ago. As I said, during the War. Headed down to Charleston to witness the secession. I was a newspaperman then.”

  “You don’t say.” Sam reached across Gray Ellen and offered his hand, then introduced himself.

  The other man took Sam’s hand in a surprisingly strong grip, studied him with gray eyes, and kept holding onto his hand, as if making up his mind about something. Finally, he said, “Alfred Moore Waddell, at your service. And this must be your wife?”

  He dropped Sam’s hand and took Gray Ellen’s, stroking it lightly. “Gray Ellen,” she said softly.

  “Ah,” Waddell said. “Scotch or Irish?”

  “Scotch-Irish.”

  “Scotch-Irish! No finer stock on earth.”

  “Yes. Both of my grandfathers were rebels in a losing cause. Pleased to meet you.” She took back her hand, settled into her seat, and closed her eyes. Sam wondered why she couldn’t at least be civil.

  He kept his eye on Waddell. He’d had a lot of practice at observing people. That’s what being a newspaperman was all about—looking into people’s eyes and finding trust or betrayal. Listening to an earnest voice and deciding if it was lying or telling the truth. Waddell had amazing eyes, he thought—the way they caught and held you. There was a word for it—charisma. Was that too strong? He wondered what line of work Waddell had been in before retirement. Not newspapers—not for long. Preacher, maybe.

  The train left the riverside and entered a thick lowland forest of longleaf and loblolly, red maple and sweet gum, lush as the Cuban rainforest. The right of way was overgrown with bright green wax myrtle and
honeysuckle. Confederate jasmine entwined the telegraph poles, deep green leaves dotted by hundreds of withered, snowy blossoms. In the woods, between the bare, scaly trunks of the longleaf pines, dogwoods burgeoned. At one place, the roadbed was blanketed with fallen flower petals, white and pink. Oh, he thought, to have seen this country in bloom.

  At a remote station, three rowdies wearing red shirts boarded at the back of the car. They jostled each other roughly and hooted at some vulgar joke. They took their seats and quieted down, and the train racketed through half an hour more of woods and swamp before stopping again.

  This time, a single passenger boarded at the front. He was slender and fair and wore a pencil-thin moustache. He was dressed in a pearl-gray suit with a white shirt buttoned to the throat, without a tie. His gray fedora was banded in black silk. In one hand, he clutched a cloth bag, in the other, a small Bible.

  As he passed their seats, the train started up, and he staggered a moment before recovering his balance. Gray Ellen looked up into his face and smiled. He nodded slightly and smiled back. Then he found an empty seat two rows behind them.

  “Preacher,” Sam said, “by the look of him.”

  “Handsome devil,” Gray Ellen observed quietly, so the man across the aisle would not overhear. “Makes a person want to spend more time in church.”

  Waddell turned once to look at the preacher. Something about the man struck a queer note.

  When the conductor came through, he stopped beside the preacher and collected his ticket. He loitered a moment longer than necessary.

  At the rear of the car, the red-shirted rowdies were arguing. “Well, by God,” one of them said loudly, rising, “I’ll find out what color that boy is.” Sam could tell by his tone that the man had been drinking—he surely knew the signs by now. The man lurched up the aisle, swaying with the movement of the train, and stopped when he got to the preacher’s seat. Out the window, Sam could see the river again. But he turned to watch what was playing out two rows behind.