James McBride - The Good Lord Bird

His fever stayed on into May, then June. I nursed him during that time. I’d come in to give him soup and find him sleeping, only to bust awake in a sweat. Sometimes, when his mind came back to him, he’d brood over military books, poring over maps, land drawings, circling various towns and mountain ranges with a pencil. He seemed to edge toward getting better at them times, then suddenly bust back into full-out sickness. When he felt better, he’d wake up and pray like a fiend, two, three, four hours at a time, then drop off to peaceful sleep. When the fever got him again, he’d fall into feverish talking with our Maker. He had whole conversations with the Lord then, with backbiting arguments and sharing thoughts and biscuits with an imaginary man standing there, sometimes throwing pieces of cornmeal or johnnycake ’bout the room, as if he and the Maker, who was standing somewhere ’bout him, was having a marriage spat and throwing food ’bout the kitchen. “What do you think I am?” he’d say. “A money tree? A fool for gold? But that’s hardly a righteous request!” Or he’d suddenly set up and blurt out, “Frederick! Ride on! Ride on, son!” then fall out, asleep, only to wake up hours later, not remembering a thing he’d said or done. His mind had gone off on a jolt and fling, so to speak, it had ginned and baled hay and gone on home, and toward July, the men got to burbling ’bout disbanding altogether. Meanwhile, he allowed no one except me to enter his cabin to nurse and feed him and see ’bout him. It got to when I’d come out the cabin, his men would gather ’round me and say, “Is he living, Onion?”

“Yet living. Sleeping.”

“He ain’t dying, is he?”

“No. Praying and reading. Eating a little.”

“He got a plan?”

“Nar word.”

They waited like that and didn’t make a fuss with him, busying themselves under Kagi by clanking away with their swords, reading the military pamphlet written by Colonel Forbes, which is all the Old Man got out of that little gamer. They played with a cat named Lulu that wandered in, and picked corn and done other odd jobs for farmers that lived nearby. They got to know one another in that fashion, and Kagi stuck out in that time as a leader of men, for fighting and squabbling erupted among them during many an idle hour of chess and fighting with wood swords and fussin’ ’bout spirituality, for some of ’em was nonbelievers. He was a thoughtful feller, firm and steady, and he kept them together. He talked into line the more doubtful ones who mumbled ’bout disbanding and going back east to teach school or work jobs, and kept the rest of the rough ones in check. He didn’t take no backwater off nobody, not even Stevens, and that scoundrel was rough work and would bust out the brains of anybody who looked at him sideways. Kagi could handle him too. Come one evening in late June, I walked into the Captain’s cabin bearing a bowl of turtle soup, which always seemed to revive the Old Man some, and found him setting up on his bed, looking strong and wide-awake. A huge map, the favorite one he always fiddled with, lay in his lap, along with a bunch of letters. His gray eyes was bright. His long beard flowed down his shirt, for he never cut it from that day forward after he got that ague. He seemed well. He spoke in a strong way, his voice high and tight, like it is when he is in battle. “I has spoken with God and He has given me the word, Onion,” he said. “Summon the men. I’m ready to share my plan.”

I gathered them up and they congregated outside his cabin. He emerged shortly after, pushing back the canvas flap covering the door, stepping before them with his usual stern expression. He stood tall, without his jacket, without a walking stick to lean on nor did he lean against the doorway, to let them know he weren’t weak or sick no more. The campfire was lit before him, for dark was coming, and the prairie dust blowed leaves and tumbleweeds ’bout. In the long ridge behind his cabin, wolves howled. In his old knarled hands he held a sheaf of papers, his big map, and a compass.

“I has commingled with the Lord,” he said, “and I has a battle plan which I aims to share. I knows you all wants to hear it. But first off, I wants to give thanks to our Great Redeemer, He Who sheddeth His blood on the cross of holy held high.”

Here he folded his hands before him and prattled off a prayer for a good fifteen minutes. Several of his men, nonbelievers, got bored, turned on their heels, and wandered off. Kagi departed to a nearby tree, sat down under it, and fiddled with his knife. Stevens turned around and walked off, cursing. A feller named Realf produced pen and paper and commenced to scribbling poetry. The others, Christians and heathens alike, stood patiently as the Captain railed at God, the wind blowing against his face, going high and low with his prayer, up and down, round and round, asking the Redeemer for guidance, direction, chatting ’bout Paul when he wrote Corinthians and how he weren’t good enough to take the strap off Jesus’s shoes and so forth. He gone on with that railing and ranting at full steam, and when he finally throwed out the last “Amen,” those who had departed to read their mail and monkey with their horses saw he was finally ready and returned hastily.

“Well, now,” he said, “as I said before, I has commingled with our Great Redeemer, He Who hath sheddeth His blood. We has discussed this entire enterprise from top to bottom. We has wrapped our minds around each other like a cocoon wraps a boll weevil. I has heard His thoughts, and I, having heard them, I must say here that I am but a tiny peanut in the corner sill of the window of our Savior’s great and powerful thoughts. But, having studied with Him and asked Him several times, going on years now, of what to do about the hellish institution of evil that exists in this land, I am certain now that He has chosen me to be an instrument of His purpose. Course, I already knowed that, just like Cromwell and Ezra the prophet of the old knowed it, for they was instruments in the same fashion, especially Ezra, who prayed and afflicted himself before God in the same fashion as I have, and when Ezra and his people were in a strait, the Lord busily and quietly engaged them to the arrangement of safety without harm. So fear not, men! God is no respecter of persons! Indeed it says in the Bible, the book of Jeremiah, ‘For these are the days of vengeance and there shall—’”

“Pa!” Owen cut him off. “Out with it!”

“Hmph,” the Old Man snorted. “Jesus waited an eternity to free you of the curse of mortal sin, and you didn’t hear Him bellowing like a calf as you are now, son. But”—and here he cleared his throat—“I has studied the matter, and I will share with you here what you need to know. We are going to trouble Israel. We will raise the mill. And they will not soon forget us and our deeds.”

With that, he turned and lifted the flap on the door of his cabin and pushed the door to go back inside. Kagi stopped him.

“Hold on!” Kagi said. “We have tarried here, hanging kettles and banging rocks with wood swords for quite a bit. Are we not men here, with the exception of the Onion? And even she, like us, is here of our own volition. We deserve more than cursory information from you, Captain, lest we go out and fight this war on our own.”

“You will not succeed without my plan,” the Old Man grunted.

“Perhaps,” Kagi said. “But surely there is danger involved. And if I am to wager my life on any plan, I would like to know the manner of it.”

“You will know it soon enough.”

“Soon enough is now. Or I, for one, will announce my own plan, for I have been working on one. And I suspect the men here will hear it.”