Pure and Patient Blue

Deep in the Brazilian rain forest, a Civil War-era assassin battles heat, madness, and guilt to find his bounty

The figure had come through the jungle for two days, chasing the river down to its widest point in the thick of the Mata Atlântica. He was a lithe and weedy sort, one of those Pennamites. Lean certainly, headstrong as any Yank. But he was still an estrangeiro.

That is, he’d no answer for the heat.

Long before noon the weather would broil the earth into clay and shoot a steam up through the canopies hot enough to chew the eyeballs and swallow the knees, as they saying went. Few men could bear it.

The only other occasion he’d felt so bothered was the last day of Appomattox. It was there that the estrangeiro had seen Mighty Grant shake the Coward Lee’s hand through the windows of the McLean House on a cold spring dawn and he knew then that the old, silly saying was true: The victor’s boots drag, since he’s all but killed himself to win.

That was years ago, countless now. Before he’d hatted up for the Atlântica a whirlwind of depravity had brought him West and then back again to the blue stone of Virginia. When he finally came lurching through his old haunts in Lynchburg he remembered all that he once swore he wouldn’t. The things he done both East and West, conjured up by that sacred soil. The eyes of the little Fife Boy as still and sure as the rock on which he laid. The scalps being counted out across the mesas in Arizona, lazing there all deflated with the clots of skin boiling underneath. Blood on them like pure sunbeat tar.

He went back to that field in Appomattox, too, looking for the stone where the Fife Boy fell. The only corpse he found was the stone itself. He wept accordingly. He promised himself he’d never do even half that sort of violence again but remembered thereafter that he was drunk and penniless and in no shape to make such grand oaths to himself.

It was then in that low moment when he was nothing more than a puddle of hooch and guilt that the old judges found him. They told him what to do. They told him what he’d find.

Now he was somewhere in São Paulo with Virginia behind him by two weeks at least. The jungle bedeviled him as it shimmered, sweating like a great green beast all puffed up and haughty. He reasoned there was nothing between the Atlântica and the rest of the earth but more Atlântica. Watching the fever bands rise up off the canopies he knew he’d believe such a lie.

Four days now. Villagers from the nearby quilombo stood at the edges of the river, limbs stuck deep into the silt, eyes staring at him as he passed, judging him. Their laughs broke out one by one. The old black hardee on his head and the Prussian-blue greatcoat on his back marked him. They wondered where he marched so clumsily and why he even thought to keep going in such heat.

The boy nearest to him had a huge, egg-shaped head and was dressed in the kind of colors you’d see on zinnias and hellebores, colors deep in limes and the flesh of thick-rind fruits. He made no face. He was like the Fife Boy come undead — burnt, transmuted of hell. The estrangeiro convinced himself of it, that the boy was a demon born of the river, one of those Japanese kawatarōs. The dust ran off the bank and through the ghost-boy’s legs in a way not unlike the gunsmoke of that Tranter he’d once fired at the living incarnation so many years past, so many miles North, robbing the youth of whatever life was promised to him. The last death in the last fight.

The estrangeiro looked down at his feet as he passed the boy and hurried on. Soon he’d be rid of him. The Appomattox judges had bestowed on him the one true method to exorcise such ghosts.

He came to the dark of the wood after another day of wandering and knew he was closer to whatever he sought. He rested to congratulate himself on it, leveling his feet into the blushing Atlântica mud and dreaming a dream of his father. They were in Coatesville again and the old man was as flatfaced and bent as he’d been all his life, raising a fire to the mess of silknests hiding in the ginger golds. One by one the nests split open in a trail of black ember and dozens of tent caterpillars exploded out, squirming as they fell. They scattered to their deaths. As a boy the estrangeiro couldn’t fathom such a thing, how they could go from something to nothing so quick and so quiet.

Father was measured all the while, relighting the fire when he had to, apple to apple, the sky behind him a wash of pure and patient blue. He did this for hours.

Then time passed unnaturally as it often does in dawn dreams and the old man was gone. One of the little bagworm things that’d survived somehow climbed back up its tree, already well inured to its solitary life. The last of its kind for all it knew. It stayed up in the ginger gold for an eon, hardening until one or two more revolutions of the earth had spun themselves round and mankind had died off or just up and left and the worm burst out of its pupa as one of those snout moths. He could see it up there and he could marvel at it but he couldn’t touch it. That was the end of the dream.

He awoke and reached for his canteen and he could feel by its weight that it was down to its last few drops. He spent the remainder of the morning hours scrambling up the trunks of picked-over jabuticabas, licking the treebark for rain or root drip or the like. His tired eyes scanned the branches for silk pouches but he found none.

He was in the middle of shimmying down when he first saw the man. Didn’t get a better look at him until he slipped off, but the man waited all the same. He was a Christ in gray, beard as wet and tangled a tapestry as the jungle itself and skin duller than worn-down sandpaper. One cracked hand was palm open as if to receive the Holy Communion. The other held a scuffed-out navy revolver at the estrangeiro’s face. The estrangeiro wouldn’t venture to guess how long he’d been waiting there, watching and aiming.

“I knew you’d come,” the gray man said, blinking a fever across his eyes. The speckles of light that leaked through the canopy dazzled them. “I knew it. Like one of those thousand-leggers waiting behind the cornice.”

The estrangeiro answered nothing.

“You know it’s there and it’ll crawl out. You just gotta wait.”

The estrangeiro just groveled a bit, eyes on the snout of the revolver. He threw his hands up and let the canteen fall. He’d come too far to be any sort of proud.

“They sent you without a gun?” the gray man laughed. He watched the canteen bounce. “Not even a drink.” He waited for a reply again but got none and somehow this amused him even more. Then he spat. “I shot a man look just like you at First Manassas. Was it? Clean through the eye but you got yours so I guess not. All you blue-bellies look the same.”

The estrangeiro never rose from his knees to deny it. He just fell straight to his face, mouth full in the mud, reaching his right hand toward the canteen and the left in the direction of the cuts of tied-off leather the gray man sported as shoes. The gray man just watched all this, still amused, still pointing that long revolver.

The estrangeiro proceeded to empty whatever scant thing remained in the canteen over the gray man’s feet. Water dripped out slow and sad. The estrangeiro trembled. It was surely the first and last anointing the Mata Atlântica’d ever seen.

The gray man took the gun off his mark and used the barrel to scratch the underside of his snakelike beard. “No gun, no beehive. They send you without a brain too? You lost it on the way down? I wasn’t going back, gun or no, but they shoulda least given you a fighting chance. Heat’s got you now.” He spat again. “I’ll draw your furrow straighter yet. Might still shoot you. But we’ll let the family decide what’s what. How’s that sound? Sometimes they like to settle on what-you-call a fistic encounter. Good fun.”

The estrangeiro was all silence. His surrender was a nonevent. The thrumming coos of the insects and the birds made enough noise for him on their own.

The gray man had already set to binding the estrangeiro’s wrists in old dogbane and hauling him up, his revolver set at the head. From there they set out further into the jungle where the clay and brush coiled up together and the veil of the sunless wood left the heat to lay on the skin all clammy. The shadows fell to a darker shade of blue charcoal, and the trees got gnarled up inside themselves, repulsed by what they’d become without proper light.

As he marched along like a little pup the estrangeiro remembered the ryegrass from back home, walking in it with the fresh Pennsylvanny junebugs the night Lincoln was shot. It was the first time that season he felt spring, and it lasted as long as its little heart could beat before the news fell on them. Just as dark as this jungle here.

“I seen you coming for two days,” the gray man was saying. The estrangeiro could hear him panting a bit over his shoulder while he prodded him along. “You were poking around the river real good, kept up appearances and all. But the heat gets to everyone. The heat and the gallinippers and the damned wet in it all. Christ.”

Just as they lost the last sounds of the river they passed by two shallow rows of makeshift graves. Each was made up like a little tumulus of mud and silt, hardened in the shade. No taller than children, the estrangeiro guessed, but they say people get stunted by the heat and shorter even without good sun. Little graves for little folk. One or two curios dotted each one, a kepi or a shoe or whatnot, dignified canopic vessels.

The gray man whistled a low, nervous whistle, stepping gingerly over the graves. “I tell ye what, I shoulda gone to the desert. West is fitten for me. Could see myself living in Utah Territory or even Colorado. But I ask you this — could I stand myself? I ask. No better’n a sheep living amongst wolves after they et the rest of his herd. I’d be surrounded.”

The graves and the vessels got lost behind them, fading from view. The estrangeiro marched on.

“You think I don’t miss it?” the gray man kept on. “I miss it all. Sometimes I hear the angry little jar flies croaking up in those trees you see there. Reminds me of Charleston. Reminds me of playing draughts with Silla on the porch, watching her get sunburnt. You’ve never seen a woman ’til you’ve seen Silla all red.” He laid down a pause like a hammer on an anvil and then coughed out his lung. “Saw my older brother get shot down in Charleston, too. I tell you that yet? I’ll tell you now. Like his soul leapt straight out his person.” He clicked his tongue. “I’ll not cede to such murder. I will not. That’s what confederado is, blue-belly. Unreconstructed. We had to go find another New World just to get away from yours.” He laughed. “What a feat. What a goddamn feat.”

They went on for what seemed like hours, until the trees and the grass and the dull-green climbers twisted away and the Atlântica grew generous enough to be indiscernible, rising up in a dead wall all around.

Before the estrangeiro even knew it he was standing before a mudflat clearing full up at its center with a round slick of black water. A small henge of figures stood there thigh-deep. Some were on their knees and bound in the dogbane just as he, some strung up across the dripping branches that arched over their heads. All colors, all made pale now through torture and starvation, all of them sick, all of them angular in places where no angles should be. The estrangeiro couldn’t pull his eyes from them.

“Morning to the family,” the gray man said.

As he was hurried forward into their midst the estrangeiro was reminded of being a small and dubious child, looking at woodcuts he’d found of the Mandan suffering through an okipa, their bodies hanging mercilessly from skewers as sun-bleached buffalo skulls weighed the skin down in thin, distended lobes. He remembered the tiny things. The toil that dithered in their eyes, the silt of the Missouri coating their feet and dripping into the fire where the shape of the Lone Man bent and danced.

His father burned the woodcuts like he had the bagworms and he put the cross to the boy, the three-beamed one with the broken suppedaneum, calling on all the angels of the orthodox and their great armies to drive this heathenry out of him. But it did no such thing. The infernal things got inured and the estrangeiro went north to the Dakotas after the war to look for the Mandan but they were gone. Their magic belonged to another age. Magic never holds.

“Here we have a real deal Yankee,” the gray man said to his slaves, taking the estrangeiro to the center of the circle and pushing him down into the water. It stayed as black and hard as tourmaline, swallowing up his knees. The snout of the revolver was back on his neck.

“He’s said naught a word but I can read him. Wants to be one of us. Ele quer ser um confederado. Come fixing to leave that old kingdom of the Lincolnites.” He looked up at the rest of them, each of them, smiling. “Should we vote on it, then? Bring him in or what?”

They said nothing. Their eyes were low but by the flutter in them the estrangeiro knew they were afraid. They’d been asked such things before.

“It matters what he’s come to do, yes it does,” the gray man intoned, as if he were repeating some words he’d already heard. “Yes, yes I hear ye. A fair point. Does he wish to testify to that?”

The estrangeiro lifted his head up but chose again not to reply.

“He won’t say,” the gray man cried, giving a great pull on his beard. He angled the gun up and down. “He hasn’t said a word, in fact. Not a one. His muzzling casts aspersions on hisself, though, don’t it? Yuh-huh. Muzzle is the watchword. He’s a dog sent by other dogs and other dogs atop them, lapping at the heels of that dead railsplitter.” He leaned down, barking spit into the ear of the estrangeiro. “They wanna drag me back to Yankeedom and festoon me up, they do. It’s revenge he seeks. What he’s been told to seek.”

The henge of slaves waited. Their breath ran ragged through their dogbane gags all in tandem, surging up. The estrangeiro looked at them each in turn without them looking back and then he turned his eyes on his hands and felt the fetid and hateful warmth of the gray man hovering about his neck.

“They wanna say that I up and absconded or some such nonsense but a man is right to take his property to friendlier places, ain’t he? That’s tyranny otherwise. Dragging said man back to that is unjust. It’s cruel.” The gray man came before him, the revolver raised up. He held his arm straighter now. “Your dogs won’t ever smell me again. They won’t smell you neither.”

The estrangeiro heard the hammer click as he lunged forward but he was damn lucky that the gray man was a slow trigger. He had already went to spreading his arms apart, holding the dogbane tight so it caught the gray man’s neck, pinning both man and gun up against themselves.

Surprised as he was by this the gray man fell clean backward and landed like a rock that’d been straight pitched into the water. There were no words left in his throat. Just a slip of air.

With his knees rolled up on the gray man’s chest the estrangeiro found that he could hold him down, lashing on his throat with the branch ties and pushing his head into the bottom of the slick. Little bits of leaf and bark and other clotted-up floaters washed in and out of the gray man’s nose and what came back out went straight on to pool in the red parts of his eyes, staining the sclera black. Not much else for him to do but sputter at this vile fortune.

The estrangeiro hadn’t come to take him back.

The gray man died slow that day, sucking in his own beard as the water took him. He said nothing of it. His eyes, though, his eyes all wide and inked, were loud enough. What they shown was a very true kind of despair, what chills us to the marrow and what spoils our thoughts to curd. The estrangeiro saw the exact thing. The realization of the new real, as it were. A truth that can’t be swayed. It’s set against our faith but happens regardless and there’s nothing else to do about it other than struggle and die. Such is every war when it turns and such was his death.

A great wind seemed to toil up after he passed, shuddering as it took a taste of the death. The estrangeiro, still bound by the dogbane, stepped over the body and set about freeing the other folk. They were all watching him finally, every move he made, every curl of his finger as he dug through the dogbane knots and cast their ties into the water.

When he was done he sweat worse than before and it ran down his forearms and his thighs like a dark salmuera, wise and endless. He sat in the black water and put his head into his hands. He washed himself and they came around him as if to comfort him but they said nothing. The estrangeiro listened to what he thought they should say.

Then, in a voice as patched and threadbare as the greatcoat on his back, he answered them. He told them his missive, what the old judges of Appomattox had said. That there were some wounds worse than death, those that keep a patient poison, those that time its very self can’t seem to skin over.

Then he previsioned a great light, and the judges showed the estrangeiro a hundred years or more down the line, centuries to come, centuries far away, and impressed on him that there was no sealing that wound back up, not in Virginia and not in Coatesville and not in Arizona and not in the Dakotas. Not anywhere in the land between the seas. It would stay dispossessed. That the blue-bellies and the rebs and the copperheads and the corncrackers and the doughfaces would all carry their division with them, passing it down true enough to put it in the blood. Their children wouldn’t ever know it but it would breed in them. They would call their homes by arbitrary colors and carry it invisibly.

So it was high time to seek new gods, they said — new bodies never chained, new lands never warred over, places hidden in the thickest of the wood. He told them all of it. He remembered every word and every color and recounted it just as he had heard and seen, even down to how in that cold dawn the flat Virginian grass was colored as gray as ambergris and the judges swam over him like dark medusas.

He was shaking from toes to ears now and was prepared to confess hisself. He thought of the villagers standing in the river just a day earlier and it made him blurt it out to all who would hear, saying he had straight shot the Fife Boy, and what’s more, shot him while the kid held his namesake up sweetly in his small pale hands, all transverse, proud of it even though it was crooked to its bore. The estrangeiro had thought it wrong, that it was one of those Elgin pistols. So he sent the kid down and watched as his small body darkened under the shale of the gunsmoke. Cries and headturns. Leers. The Mighty and the Coward had already shook and the fighting was over but it happened all the same. The boy never made a sound.

That’s why the judges sent him to do what he done. They said he was a sinner already and no second sin would ever transmute the first. They sent him so he could free these folk without passing the blood on.

He then told them to a man what they had to do next, the diktat of the song that was sung to him in sweet Appomattox.

They hesitated at first of course — no man wouldn’t. But the estrangeiro insisted. Told them it was his calling, that the jungle was his last mortal lodestar. So they did it. Lurching on as if they were all just a bunch of golems they took him up gently and walked him to the deepest part of the pool where even the light wouldn’t lay. There they lowered him down into the black water until only his toes stuck up above the surface. He was serene the whole time, gentle even, cradled by their chalked-over limbs. The shape of his face left a small ripple but all else was gone.

They held him there a long while, solemnly, until they were sure, just as he had instructed them, that he had been baptized unto death in the peat blood of the Atlântica.

Afterwards they left for other parts, where their children could play amongst the sugarcane, Santa Bárbara d’Oeste. In the spring they wore hoop skirts under a wet sun and sang strange old songs that had come to them in dark siestas and after many seasons they grew to be old timers. Their children never learnt to ask them of the time before and they never told. The stories weren’t stories. They had never been clayed, never made real. The Union was a far northern dream, something fevered and dim at the top of the world.

But certainly it crossed their minds from time to time. Every April when the hoop skirts came out and the children pulled them back to reveal a bit of the pale crinoline they would think back on what laid in the Atlântica, on what the bones must’ve looked like. Sunk in and stained, probably, drowned to that black slick at the heart of the jungle, beside deep riverstones or hiding underneath. No longer like the two men they once belonged to — what were the last confederado and his dead Yankee killer.