He took George’s church shirt from the wall and carefully wiped Wesley’s blood off his knuckles, in case it carried Yellow Fever. "He didn’t put up no fight. No wonder they won’t make injuns into soldiers, we’d might as well give up." He threw the shirt into the fire. Wesley’s blood sizzled. Harris motioned his men to remove Peter, who dropped the mule whip and walked out on his own. "This here’s a military action, don’t y’know," said Harris to George, "so I order you to stay inside. For your convenience, I’m leaving two guards to remind you. They will have to shoot if you go out."
"This ain’t right, Mr. Harris," said George.
"Who promised right?" Harris said.
Then everyone was out and the door was slammed upon George Lowery. He stood alone in the cabin that had seen years of his children die, and where, when his wife had given out, he had come back alone.
Often he had sat next to her when they returned from putting down one of the tiny bodies. Now the dim oil lamp provided no more comfort than it had on those occasions. The lamp was a cut of glass said to be rare and possibly from England. Its light illuminated the clay dishes on the mantel, glinted against the charred fireplace and the iron cook pots, and reflected off the copper pans that the boys had hammered out of metal bought from a drummer. It silhouetted the timber-framed bedstead that had held the wasted marriage of George and his wife. George smashed the glass lamp into the wall.
A long-bristled broom hung in a corner. It was of swamp sedge, its decorative air hiding the drudging years that had worn away half its length. Nearby hung an iron poker brought by George’s wife as part of her dowry. He had used it to bang coffin lids down over her babies, then, finally, over her. He had thought its next use would be over himself, wielded by one of his three strong sons. But they, like the others before, were beyond saving. His failure was complete. And he knew the men outside hoped he would emerge so they could shoot him and be done guarding.
George looked around the tiny cabin that had brought his family only death. He thought it was his fault; he must have missed something he ought to have known or discovered out. He sat by the eating board and quietly sang the hymn his wife had sung while burying each child:
Sweet Jesus in adversity
Do not abandon, stay by me,
Sweet Jesus in my every breath
Guide us in life, take us in death.
George set the poker down on the table by the mule whip.
Our love for Thee we will employ;
When life is more than we can bear
We’ll hold Thee lest we be destroyed,
And follow ere we’re in despair.
After each tiny funeral his wife had returned to this room to shed tears she would not allow in public. Now his own tears came, shed not only over her or her last child lost, but for every child who had come to this cabin through the Heaven’s gate of the woman only to return, for this place was not fit.
George opened the door. The guards raised their rifles. He wanted to step out and let them shoot but he had not the nerve. A man does not fight the swamp his whole life to end predisposed to self-destruction. He closed the door, then the shutters, leaving no light but the red hearth coals glowing like a beacon from the underworld. His last sons had been taken to die and again he remained alive within this room, again powerless to save.
In his hand was the mule whip, which he did not know he had picked up. He curled it and brought it down on his knuckles, crying out at the surprising pain. He recalled the smacks he had given his gentle mules over the years and wondered now that they had not brayed in agony. Again he brought the whip down, then again. His hand bled raw, but if there were pain he no longer knew. He continued, striking his legs, his arms, his back, his face, his groin.
Now in his hand was the poker coming down against his raw knuckles. He brought it down upon the stool, smashing it to fragments. Piece by piece he worked the shadowed cabin room round, meticulously reversing the craft that had attracted the girl Mary Cuombo to her carpenter-love Allen. George was as skillful, leaving nothing unsplintered, nothing hidden.
Finally he flung coals from the fire against the walls, where they heated the logs to ignition. Surrounded by his smashed possessions, he sang the hymn. The logs smoked and sputtered as the moisture in them boiled. Hungry flames hunted along the grain. He fed the sedge broom and the splintered furniture to the flames, prodding with the iron poker like a famished man at a cook-fire. The cabin he had built with his brother Allen and inhabited for three decades, and in which he alone now survived, began to give up. In wild jets the moisture steaming from the cracks convinced him he was firing out a living thing of evil, like burning out the obstructing stump of an ancient giant cypress. Finally he knew this thing of evil, that it was alive, that it had nourished itself by consuming his wife, his babies, his sons. This thing of evil, dying now too late, had hidden in the walls all along. Its steam swirled and cursed as it roared out of the swamp-logs that constituted the cabin. George roared back the hymn, roared the hate and grief of a score of deaths. With his iron poker staff of vengeance and purgation he attacked the spewing flames. His rod cracked new splinters from the solid wood, splinters that ignited to burn out instantly upon their creation the same way all but three of his children had done in this place of doom. "It was Death herself screaming in that place," George told me eight years later. "Lying up silent she was, doing her business in there my whole growed life. Now I had her where she’d always had everyone I ever had. She didn’t like it."
The room was an oven scorching George’s mouth and lungs. The guards outside tried to open the door but George had barred it. One guard rode off to tell Harris while the other continued to guard he knew not what. "I killed Death that day," George told me. "And that made Her so ill with me, that now she won’t come and get me. I got to wait forever, just thinking, unless I can find Her to make it up with Her."
The roof ignited to a heaven of flame. The back wall caved with a shriek of wood, a shriek George knew was Death in rage that he was playing Her at Her own game. Air flooded in and fed the flames into an orb like the sun, so hot and abrupt that the guard out front ran fifty yards.
The inrushing air was cold on George’s lungs after the smoke, and he cursed God that he was still alive to breathe it. Hair smoldering and clothes charring, George let his body escape through the back wall and into the swamp. The guard never thought to look around back of the cabin and its wall of concealing smoke. "I didn’t mean to make Death mad, I just lost my head," old George told me.
From the edge of the swamp he looked back at the fireball. "I seen Death riding up the smoke and never seen Her since though I’m looking every day."
