Ben Stroud - Byzantium - Stories

Josiah gazed at the assembly room’s ceiling and stretched out his arms, as if still in dialogue with the heavens. “‘There is a sickness among you,’ He said. ‘I will not send My Son to reign over the impure.’ ‘But what is this sickness, and how am I to cure it?’ I asked. ‘You will not see it, you will not know it, you will not cure it, but I will send a Judge who will do these things,’ He said. ‘You must make ready for him. You must build him a house, a seat from which he can spy out your pestilence.’ The Lord then showed me how we are to build this house, and I have spent all morning setting down His instructions here.” Josiah waved a paper scribbled with notes. “We begin work tomorrow. Praise be to the Lord.”

Hunched over the pulpit, sweating, exhausted, he awaited our response. The room remained silent. Perhaps the doubters were considering whether the vision quelled their anxieties, the accusers of humbuggery assessing its authenticity. But after only a few seconds we answered in unison, each of us shouting the words Josiah had taught us: “Glory and thanks to the Lord for His guiding hand!”

A FEW NIGHTS LATER I was in my corner of Pickle’s cabin, playing my violin, when Elder Williamson came to the door. It was past ten — darkness had finally fallen — and Pickle was readying himself for sleep. Elder Williamson told me to get my rifle. Some whiskey traders had come from Mackinac and set fire to Elder Hunt’s cabin. They’d not yet been so bold, and even though the cabin was saved Josiah had ordered a sortie to chase them; since the vision he’d demanded more vigilance. After Elder Williamson left I splashed my face with water. My previous weeks on sortie duty had been quiet and I felt unprepared. Bidding Pickle good night, I took my rifle and went to the dock. The others had already begun the prayer. Josiah was there, placing his hand on each one’s forehead. I raced up and he put his hand to mine.

We paired into canoes; I was matched with a man named Spofford. I didn’t know him well. He’d arrived at the island after me and worked in one of the logging camps. Josiah had elected to lead us himself, and at his orders we paddled out of the bay toward the near islands to the east, the likeliest place we’d find the whiskey traders. Above us a thick spangle of stars cast a faint light on the water. As Josiah had instructed, we took care with our paddles, guarding against every needless splash.

Halfway to Garden Island we spied a rocking lantern. I had heard stories of ghosts on the lake, and I started, but Spofford reached a hand back to quiet me, then, following Josiah, steered us toward the light. As we drew nearer, I saw it was only an Indian in his canoe, night fishing. Josiah gave him a present of smoked beef and a small sack of cornmeal, and the Indian told us that he’d seen the whiskey traders pass three hours earlier, heading toward the notch bay on Garden Island’s western point. We paddled in that direction and soon made out the glimmer of the traders’ fire on the shore, heard their shouts echo across the lake.

“I’d say they’re a few sheets,” Spofford whispered back to me. We went past the notch, to a narrow spit of land just to the east, and pulled our canoes up the beach. Once we were in the wood, Josiah gave his instructions. Elder Williamson would lead four men through the trees to a position behind the whiskey traders’ camp while the others crept along the sands. We were only to give the traders a scare, Josiah warned us, but enough of a scare to show them we were prepared to fight. After Elder Williamson’s party took a five-minute start, the rest of us set out along the shore with Josiah.

The traders had bivouacked at the tree line, their camp not fifty feet from the water, and as we took our positions along the lake’s edge I counted them. There were six circled around the fire, and they passed a jug while one among them, a blond-bearded man wrapped in furs and skins, bellowed a story about killing a bear. They didn’t see us. The fire was too bright in their eyes, their attentions too occupied by the story.

I looked to Josiah, who was holding up his hand. He dropped it and let out an animal screech. At that Spofford raced off to set fire to the traders’ canoes and the rest of us shot our rifles into the air and hooted like crazed owls. From the darkness of the wood Williamson and his men echoed us.

The whiskey traders leapt up at the tumult. They reeled and stumbled drunkenly as they looked about in terror.

“Who’s there?” one of them called, aiming his rifle at one blackness after another.

“Damned God-squawkers!” another shouted as he sat back down and applied himself to the jug.

“We didn’t mean for it to burn,” pleaded a third, and knelt in the sand.

We stood in our places and kept up our hooting. Behind us the lake, black and calm, lapped at the shore. Down the beach the traders’ canoes were in full blaze.

We were about to return to our own canoes when the trader who’d been telling the story bolted toward us with a shout of “Goddamn it!” We were not prepared for such a turn, and nobody moved to stop him. By luck he came right at Josiah and tackled him. “Got one of you now!” the trader shouted. Josiah lay struggling on the sand, pinned beneath the trader’s knees. Something glittered in the starlight. A knife. My stomach lurched. Without thinking I rushed at the trader and swung the butt of my rifle into his temple. I pushed him off and gave my hand to Josiah, who took it, rose, and whistled for the sortie’s end. The remaining whiskey traders fled into the trees with their gear. Only after the last had gone did I return to Josiah’s attacker. I shook the man, but he didn’t stir. I felt him. Already his body was cooling.

As the others circled Josiah, I stayed beside the trader’s body. His face revealed that he was my own age. On his chest lay a necklace of animal teeth, among which was a silver locket. I opened it and a loop of fiery hair fell onto my palm. Bound in its tight circlet, it had the feel of some new metal. I imagined a faraway sitting room, then a darkly lit brothel of the sort I and my companions in Baltimore had always been too timid to enter. What woman had been in possession of the trader’s heart? My own clenched quickly with the thought of Dorothea. I replaced the hair and snapped the locket shut. Blood now seeped from the side of the trader’s head and had begun to soak the sand.

I was overcome. I thought of the trader’s family, of the red-haired woman, and imagined all the better ways I could have stopped him, the ways I could have saved Josiah without killing. I was a sinner, a brute.

Meanwhile, as I watched over the trader’s body, the others talked. As of yet there had been no bloodshed between us and the whiskey traders. If anyone learned of what had happened, Josiah warned, there would be more killing. Elder Williamson asked what should be done, and Josiah related his plan. The other traders had only seen their fellow disappear onto the beach and could be certain of nothing. We would take the body to the canoes and dispose of it in the lake. The true account of the night could never be disclosed: when asked, we would say the trader who had attacked Josiah fled into the wood, after his fellows. Once this was agreed to, Josiah called me over and made me swear a vow of secrecy with the others.

I did not carry the body. That I was spared. But I helped gather rocks. We filled the trader’s pockets with the heaviest of them and lashed more to his feet, then put him in a canoe with Spofford and Big John Biggs. Josiah took Spofford’s place in my canoe — I trembled when I saw him come near — and as soon as we’d paddled a quarter mile out, he ordered us to stop. Spofford and Biggs pitched the body over. The moon had risen, and it lit the trader’s face as he sank beneath the lake. His cheeks and forehead flashed pale, and then his body turned. The last I saw of him was his hands. Unbound, they floated above his hair, reaching toward me, it seemed, until the darkness finally swallowed them and he was taken by the deep.