FLORIDA, 1873
HE DIDN’T WAIT AROUND TO SEE IF THE LAW WAS COMING AFTER HIM or not. At first light, when his Uncle Will rode off to town to send the telegram, John Henry took Tom’s quarter horse and headed south to Live Oak, the closest station on the Pensacola & Georgia Railroad. Among the things he’d learned while working for the Atlantic and Gulf Line before dental school were the names and stops of all the connecting railroads—and he knew that the fastest way to Texas from north Florida was by train to the Gulf and then by ship out of Pensacola to Galveston. Beyond that, he had only a vague plan in mind for what he’d do once he got to Texas, hoping to somehow find his Uncle Jonathan McKey whom no one had heard from since before the War, and whom John Henry hardly remembered knowing. But Jonathan shouldn’t be too hard to locate, living on that big cotton plantation of his somewhere along the Brazos River . . .
But it was thoughts of the past, not the future, that occupied his mind as he rode into Live Oak, arranged for Tom’s horse to be sent back to Banner Plantation, and bought a ticket west. His thoughts were on Mattie to whom he hadn’t even been able to say a proper goodbye. He’d been in such a state the last time he’d seen her, holding her in the stained glass light of the Church of the Immaculate Conception and knowing that she could never be his, that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to say farewell. And now here he was, gone from Georgia without a chance to tell her how he still felt about her—that he loved her and always would, no matter where he went.
It was a long train ride from Live Oak to Pensacola, two-hundred-fifty miles through scrub pine and small towns, and hellish hot with the windows of the rail cars closed up to keep out the sooty smoke and cinders of the steam engine. And even when the windows were opened up at each stop to let in the air, the steamy Florida heat was almost worse than the engine smoke. But the heat seemed appropriate to John Henry, who deserved to be in hell for what he’d done. For though it was just a colored’s life he had taken, it was a life nonetheless, and God would surely call him to judgment for it, he had no doubt of that. If there was one thing his mother had taught him, it was to fear God even when he didn’t honor Him, and he was feeling plenty fearful now.
His fears didn’t settle any as the train finally came to a stop on the far side of Escambia Bay from Pensacola.
“End of the line!” the porter called out. “Everybody out!”
“End of the line?” John Henry asked, glancing up from the newspaper he’d bought in Tallahassee, and which he’d been nervously reading for any mention of a shooting on the Withlacoochee River in south Georgia. “I thought this was the Pensacola line. How am I supposed to get over there from here?”
The porter raised the window shade and pointed. “You take the ferry across,” he said, “cost you two-bits.”
John Henry followed the man’s gaze out the window, looking for the ferry dock, but what he saw instead nearly took his breath away. For though he’d been to the ocean before, sailing from Savannah to Philadelphia, he’d never seen anything like the Gulf of Mexico. The water was like liquid jewels: emeralds and sapphires shimmering in the summer sun, the sandy shore as white as oyster pearls. And littering the bay, the sails of a hundred tall-masted ships looked like so many white clouds against the brilliant blue of sky and sea.
“Looks like paradise,” he said aloud, “like heaven almost.”
“Wouldn’t call it paradise this time of year,” the porter replied. “It’s quarantine season, June ‘til November. Glad this train don’t run that far, or I’d be in the middle of it.”
“Quarantine?” John Henry asked. “For what?”
“Yellow Fever, and worse than usual this year. They say there’s sixty-three dead in the city already, and plenty more close to it. Bad way to die, if you ask me. Fever and chills together, headache and gut-ache, then your skin turns yellow and the black vomit starts. Don’t take long after that till you’re dead. Real trouble comes in the buryin’. Can’t wait long to get to it, in this heat, and some folks is too poor to buy a cemetery plot. So they bury ‘em down on the sand-beach at night when nobody’s lookin’. Problem is, high tide washes their dearly departed right back up again. It’s bad, all right. That’s why trains aren’t allowed in this time of year, and ships can’t get near the wharf until they’ve done a month in quarantine over at the Navy Cove. Makes the sailors plenty restless, havin’ to cool their heels across the water like that when there’s streetwalkers and such waiting for ‘em over in Pensacola. No sir, it’s not much like paradise this time of year, if you ask me. Hell’s more like it.”
John Henry almost laughed at the awful irony of it. After running from one state and clean across another trying to escape from the evil he’d done, he’d ended up where he deserved to be after all, proving that his mother was right: you couldn’t run from the wrath of God. But he was done running for a while, having spent the last of his money on traveling expenses, with only enough left over for a few days’ room and board. He’d need to raise some cash before he could buy passage on a tall-ship sailing to Texas. But if Pensacola were anywhere near as wicked as the porter had described, raising some money there shouldn’t be all that hard. Surely, with all those sailors and streetwalkers around, there’d be a saloon somewhere too, and a card game with an open chair.
The city didn’t surprise him any, in that respect. There were plenty of saloons along Main Street, across from the wharves on Pensacola Bay, and plenty more on the higher ground of the town proper. What did surprise him was how foreign the place felt, as he walked along the wood-plank sidewalks of streets named Alcaniz and Tarragona and Zaragoza. For though Pensacola had once been the capitol of the British colony of West Florida, it had spent more time under Spanish rule than English, and the warm breeze off the Gulf of Mexico was still lazy as a siesta.
It was the ocean breeze that folks blamed for the Yellow Fever. They said it blew noxious fumes from the southeast, so they kept their windows closed up at night against the cooling air. Though the shuttered windows of John Henry’s rented room at the Tivoli High House made the nights close and stuffy, they also kept away the bothersome mosquitoes, so at least he wasn’t scratching at insect bites all the time. He was lucky to have a room at all with his funds as depleted as they were. If the Tivoli House hadn’t been seventy-years old and much declined from its days as Pensacola’s first dance hall, even that would have been too expensive for his purse. So he didn’t complain about the stuffiness of the room or the noise from the gaming tables downstairs, and he gratefully accepted the landlady’s offer of writing paper and ink pen so that he could send a letter home. He had left Georgia rather hurriedly, he explained, and hadn’t been able to pack all the niceties along with him.
He wrote first to Tom, telling him where he was and asking for him to send along his traveling trunk when he was finally settled somewhere. He was sorry, he said, for having caused the family so much trouble, and hoped that all was well with Tom and the rest of his McKey kin. Then, out of a sense of obligation, he wrote another letter and put it in the same envelope: a short note to his father, saying he was on his way to Texas. Henry would probably just toss the note into the parlor fire, once he read it, but John Henry knew he owed his father that much at least.
His letter to Mattie took longer to compose as he tried to find the right words to tell her that he was leaving, and why. But how could he tell her that it was his love for her that had made him go? How could he explain that it was his love that had made him angry enough to shoot that boy on the Withlacoochee River? She would never understand such passion, though she knew he had a passionate streak in him. She had called him prideful, arrogant, hotheaded, and had predicted that it would all get him into trouble one day. But she couldn’t have foreseen just how bad that trouble would have turned out to be. Her gentle and virtuous heart could never have imagined him taking another man’s life, and doing it so easily. Besides, it had all been an accident, just an awful, unintentioned, drunken mistake. Why burden her with something he hadn’t meant to do, anyhow? So in the end, he decided not to tell her much at all, only that he was off to Texas to visit with his Uncle Jonathan McKey.
But he had more to do than write letters if he planned to be out of Pensacola before the Yellow Fever took him, too. There had already been one notable death since his arrival: a local politician who’d accused the Board of Health of giving the town a bad name with their strict quarantine. The man called the physicians on the board damned fools for warning him against visiting a quarantined ship. The doctors had little comment when the politician took ill and died ten days later. No, John Henry did not care to be long around Pensacola, so as soon as his letter writing was done, he began making the rounds of the saloons along the waterfront, trying his hand against those eager sailors fresh off the boat.
The porter had been right about the tempers of the sailing men. After their weeks at sea and a month of quarantine with their ships at Navy Cove on Santa Rosa Island, they came across the bay as ready to fight as they were to play, and ready to take offense at the smallest slight. So, just to be safe, John Henry took along his Uncle John’s walnut-handled pistol, loaded up all around and ready to fire, and carried his Uncle Tom’s big knife as well. The pistol slid easily into his trousers’ pocket, but the knife was awkward without the leather scabbard Tom had left behind at the cabin. He found himself being wary all the time, worrying that the heavy-handled thing would slide from its hiding place in his inside coat pocket. And maybe it was the distraction of worrying about the knife, or maybe it was just plain carelessness, but being so heavily armed turned out to be more dangerous than not being heeled at all, one hot summer night at the Grand Prize Saloon.
He’d chosen the Grand Prize because of its location on the ground floor of a grocery and ship supply store, which meant that it was likely to be filled with sailors with ready cash to wager, and by the looks of the women who went into the place, the sailors were ready to spend some money. The streetwalkers were easy to spot: their faces painted up and their dresses cut revealingly low, looking almost as hardened as the suntanned seamen they draped themselves around. But every now and then there was one who seemed too soft for that hard life, too young under the rouge and powder to be offering what those sailors wanted. And though John Henry tried not to pay any attention, keeping his eyes on the cards and his mind clear, that hot night he couldn’t help but notice the girl that one of his card-playing companions had brought along to the game.
She was a little thing, tiny as Mattie around the waist but with a womanly endowment above and wearing a dress that showed off her figure. The sailor, a bad-smelling man with black hairy arms, seemed particularly pleased with the girl’s looks, letting his free hand wander from around her little waist to the open bodice of her dress, fondling her right there in public. The first time he did it, John Henry caught a breath and tried not to let his surprise show. He was in a seaman’s saloon, after all, and the girl was just a sailor’s streetwalker—though she too seemed surprised by the touch of the man’s hand on her breast. Although she didn’t move away from him, her eyes fell away, as if she could remove herself from being there by pretending that she wasn’t.
John Henry averted his own eyes, trying to concentrate on the cards. The girl was no business of his, nor was the sailor’s crude behavior any real hindrance to the game. As long as the man kept putting down his money and letting John Henry pick it up, what difference did it make what else he was doing at the same time? And when he saw the sailor reach into the girl’s dress a second time, he had to suppress his own unexpected reaction, wondering just what the sailor was feeling. But when the sailor reached for her a third time, John Henry’s long years of training as a gentleman finally took hold of him, and he put down his cards deliberately and looked up with cool blue eyes.
“That’s enough, Sir,” he said, though the sailor hardly deserved the title. “Why don’t you let the girl go while we finish this hand?”
“‘Cause my hand ain’t through with her yet, that’s why!” the man answered with a laugh, and to prove his point he grabbed her so hard that she winced and started to cry.
“Doesn’t look to me like she’s enjoyin’ your company overly much,” John Henry said, as the girl looked up at him with tear-filled eyes. “Looks like she’s kind of young for you, besides.”
“Hell right, she’s young,” the man said with a snarled smile, “just the way I like ‘em. This one’s thirteen come next month. I checked with her Ma, just to make sure. Said I’d pay her double if I was the girl’s first. Can tell I am, the way she wriggles whenever I touch her.” Then he pulled his hand from her breast and slid it down toward the full gathers of her skirt. “Bet she’s gonna wriggle some more, once I get myself under here . . .”
It was all John Henry could take, and without thinking twice, he reached for his Uncle John’s pistol, pulling it on the man so fast the sailor didn’t have time to finish his thought.
“I said let her go,” he commanded. “Right now.”
The sailor caught a breath and his hand loosed just long enough for the girl to squirm away from him. Then he laughed, and his rancid whiskey breath poured over the table like an evil cloud.
“What do you think about that, boys?” he said to the other players in the game, sailors like himself. “Do we let this pretty boy tell us what to do with our shore leave?”
John Henry realized too late that he was a lone man in a brawl. The sailor’s friends jumped him like it was their fight, too, wrestling the pistol out of his hand and yanking his arm up behind him so hard he thought it would break. And as his arm came up, the Hell-Bitch slid from his jacket pocket, clattering to the wood plank floor.
There was silence for a moment as the sailors all stared down at the giant knife. Then the big man started to laugh.
“Well hell, if he ain’t a sword-fighter! Come on, boys, let’s show him how real fightin’s done.”
And all at once they were on top of him and he was face down on the barroom floor, smelling whiskey and vomit and hoping the blood he was tasting was his own. But there was nothing he could do to get away from the assault, only gasp for breath between blows and try to keep his face away from the sailors’ fists. If they meant to kill him, it wouldn’t take them long, the way he was pinned down and helpless to defend himself. Even the Hell-Bitch couldn’t do him any good, on the floor beneath him with its swamp oak handle pressing up painfully against his aching ribs.
Then he heard a scream from somewhere up above, and after that a commotion of angry voices. And suddenly he was free again and being yanked to his feet by rough hands on his neck.
“What do you mean, startin’ a brawl in my place?” said the man who held him. “Can’t you read the sign? No firearms. No fightin’. You tryin’ to get me closed down by the port police? Now get out of here before I take a few punches at you myself. And give him his pistol back, boys. I don’t want him bringin’ no theft charges against my place.”
The man let John Henry go, and he fell to the floor again as his legs folded under him.
“I said get out of here,” the man repeated, “and take your weapons with you.” Then he turned away, cursing loudly.
John Henry pushed himself to his feet amid the jeers and laughs of the sailors who had assaulted him. The room around him swayed and he moaned as he bent over to pick up his uncle’s knife. But it wasn’t just the pain of the beating that he was suffering from. He had tried to be a gentleman, saving a lady from the sailor’s lewd advances, but he’d made a fool of himself instead. And worse than that, the girl he’d hoped to save was sitting on the sailor’s lap again, more scared now than she’d been before—and with cause. For as John Henry stumbled from the saloon, pushing open the doors into the noxious night air, he heard the sailor’s ugly laugh echoing behind him: “You see what happens to them’s that mess with me? You be a good little girl now, and won’t no harm come to you like what come to him.”
He knew without glancing back that the girl’s eyes were looking somewhere far away.
The landlady at the Tivoli House gave him rags and a bowl of clear water to wash off the blood. But there was nothing she could give him to wash away the shame he felt. Because of his impetuous actions, the sailor’s girl would likely suffer more now than she would have suffered before. And what had his bravado won him, anyhow? Just a split and bloodied lip, a shooting arm strained and aching, and a back already turning black and blue from bruises.
A fine sporting man he’d turned out to be, unable to handle himself in a saloon full of gamblers! And what good was it to be fast on the draw if he couldn’t keep ahold of his pistol long enough to pull off a shot? Worse than that, what good did it to do to carry a knife the size of a meat cleaver if it only made people laugh? It was the laughter that was the worst of it, the memory of it making him feel small and ridiculous. His father had said once that pride was about all they had left in life; now even his pride was gone.
But there was something more than shame that was burdening him. For try as he might, he couldn’t forget the face of the boy he’d killed on the river, or the way his dead-aim pistol shot had blown that face away. Accident or not, he was still as guilty as the hell he’d found himself in and deserving of every bad thing that might come to him. His blood and bruises were nothing compared to what God would lay upon him for his sin: scourges and flogging and an eternity in fire and brimstone.
And as his shame turned to contrition, he fell to his knees beside the narrow bed. His mother had taught him how to pray those many nights at her own bedside, having evening prayers before she passed on. She had taught him to believe in the goodness of God, in Jesus’ forgiving grace. And surely, sinner that he was, only Jesus could save him now.
His prayer was more a plea of desperation than the praises his mother had offered, but the words were the same: “Have mercy upon me, O God . . .”
And as he poured out his heart to heaven, the penitent tears welled up in his eyes and overflowed, wetting the bedcovers. It would take all night, at least, to confess all that he’d done wrong in his life, and beg forgiveness for it. But his mother had taught him that the angels heard every honest prayer, and wrote the words in God’s holy book against the Judgment Day. He only hoped his angel mother wasn’t having to hear him now.
He prayed himself to sleep that night, and slept well for the first time in weeks. And when he woke the next day, the only pain he had left was the spreading bruising on his back and an aching in his shooting arm. But his heart was lighter than it had been since he left Mattie, and even his breathing seemed to be coming easier. And though he didn’t know whether or not he was forgiven, he knew at least that he was repentant.
The tall ship Golden Dream set sail from Commendencia Wharf, bound for New Orleans and Galveston, on a day so clear it seemed that sea and sky were one boundless wash of blue. Alongside the ship, windward, dolphins danced and laughed, daring the schooner to a race. And standing at the rail, watching them leap and dive, John Henry felt like laughing too.
He was leaving the past behind and sailing off into the future on a fine summer day. And though he’d used up nearly all of his gambling winnings buying his passage west, he didn’t care. At the end of the voyage Texas was waiting, wide and wild and full of opportunity for a bright young man like himself. But there was one part of the past that he would never forget: Mattie, eyes full of affection, heart full of love. The Irish heirloom ring she had given him shone gold on his little finger, like a promise. Someday he’d come sailing back, take her in his arms again, and hear her speak the words that meant everything to him: “I love you. I always have, and I always will. . .”
But for now he was looking westward, across the Gulf of Mexico toward the bright blue of the rest of his life. He took a breath of fresh sea air, smiled, and faced into the wind.