The Borderland
The Borderland by Edwin B. Shrake, published by HYPERION
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Although the judge and the jury found displeasure in Henry’s ungainly appearance and unrepentant attitude in court, they ruled him not guilty of murder in the deaths by gunshots and stabbing of his wife and the teamster. As Henry knew the judge and jury would be, they were guided by the unwritten code that protects a gentleman from the treachery of his wife, especially as it applies to adultery, most especially to fornication with a lover in the husband’s own bed.
However, his late wife’s father and four brothers lived by still another part of the unwritten code of gentlemen, which required satisfaction be paid in blood for an injury or insult such as Henry murdering their beloved Dorothy. Her father and each of her brothers sent cotton gentry or military men as seconds to challenge Henry to duels with pistols or sabers. He was denounced as a craven to his face in restaurants and saloons by her father and brothers. He was called a consummate coward and a dastardly poltroon. His political financing from the LaGrange cotton growers vanished.There was scandal put about the state that Henry had regularly ripped the clothes off his skinny debutante bride and beaten her naked breasts and thighs with a switch from a peach tree. But the worst blow of all to Henry was the disgrace when he learned she had betrayed him with more than twenty men and boys—including the grocer’s son—before he caught her with the teamster, and by now the whole town knew it.
Henry saw himself not as a coward but as intelligent. He was not at all reluctant to shoot and stab Dorothy’s father and four brothers, one at a time as the code demanded, but what then? Even if he survived five duels, he was ruined in Georgia. Henry called his two slave boys into the house and told them to start packing. A couple of years earlier, Henry’s legislative colleague, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, had suffered the deaths of his wife, sister, father and brother in a short period and had gone off to Texas to leave the pain of their memory behind and look into land investments. Lamar distinguished himself in the revolution against Mexico, and now he had been elected second president of the Republic of Texas. Henry reminded himself that Heraclitus said nothing is permanent except change. In Texas, anyone could invent a new life. Henry decided to move to Texas and renew his friendship with Lamar and become a land speculator. Soon he would be as rich as the plantation owners in LaGrange. He would have his house painted white with white shutters and a gallery above the Doric columns. He would buy twelve more slaves to add to the two boys he already owned, and several would be tender young girls who would heat water for his bath and fill the tub and remove his clothes slowly and stroke his skin with their fingers and crawl into his bed when he tinkled a silver bell on the nightstand. The girls would desire to be with him because he sensed their need to be writhing in lusty embrace with the devil. Eve’s daughters came from the seed of the serpent.
He heard a woman’s voice.
She was singing in Cherokee. Henry recognized one phrase—huh-so-suh—which meantwhere the sun comes out, or east. Henry had been among many Cherokees in Tennessee and Georgia, and he had read the Cherokee newspaper, The Phoenix, which ran columns of English beside columns of the Cherokee printed language. Henry had read The Phoenix to see what the savages might be writing about him. In the Georgia legislature, Henry had voted to outlaw the Cherokee Nation and banish the savages from Georgia after gold was discovered in the mountains the Cherokees called their own. Cherokee laws and customs were declared null and void. The mountains where gold was found were sold by lottery to whites only. The newspaper, The Phoenix, was seized by the Georgia government to stop the spread of news. The United States Supreme Court ruled Georgia’s action against the Cherokees unconstitutional, but President Andrew Jackson—like Henry, a slaveholder and a loather of aborigines—said, If the Supreme Court wants to make law to help the Cherokees, let Justice Marshall enforce it himself. Henry considered this Jackson’s finest moment.
Defeating the Creeks at Horsehoe Bend in Alabama was a commendable act by Jackson, whose policy of promoting new opportunities in business for the common white man had helped Henry rise in the world. The press and the pulpits persistently attacked the President for adultery, but Henry blamed the evil of women. Jackson’s legacy, in Henry’s mind, was taking the mountainsaway from the savage Cherokees, a magnificent achievement.
Henry listened to the young woman singing. Other than the musk of their women, the only thing Henry admired about the Cherokees was their melodious speech. Henry understood hardly a word of their language, but sounds like Chatahoochie, Tuckaseegee and Hiwassee struck the part of him that would have become a musician had his choices in life been different.
Henry’s saber in its scabbard dangled by a leather thong from the saddle horn. He felt the blade against his left leg and nudged it so that he could cross-draw without hitting thehorse’s neck. His cap and ball pistol lay in its holster against his right thigh, nestled beside his powder horn and bullet pouch. The woman’s voice was coming from the other side of a thicket that was blooming with purple blossoms thirty feet ahead of him, at the edge of the path. It was a girl perhaps not yet twenty years old.
He needed a girl right now. The trilling of her voice aroused him. He heard the deceit in her voice, the lure of seduction, the cry of sexual longing.
He knew it would be remarkable if this young Cherokee female was alone in the Texas wilderness. Her kind of subhumans traveled in bunches, Henry had observed. But if there were only two or three more Cherokees with her, Henry could soon have her. Shooting aborigines was fair sport and regarded in his society as good and necessary. Henry pulled the shotgun out of its saddle sheath. If there were too many Cherokees, he would bid them ‘morning and ride on toward the ferry. Henry’s groin began to ache. He felt his pecker crawling like a snake against the saddle. He was swelling up. A flash struck him, a burning. He must have relief. He knew this girl was thirsty to swallow his seed.
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