The Borderland
The Borderland by Edwin B. Shrake, published by HYPERION
PART ONE: TOWARD THE LITTLE PIGEON
I am busy and will only say how da do, to you! You will get your land as it was promised, and you and all our Red brothers may rest satisfied that I will always hold you by the hand.
—letter from Sam Houston to Chief Bowl
CHAPTER ONE
Henry Longfellow was thinking about women, how wicked they are. While he was passing through a rainwater swamp five hours ago, a perfumey odor had infested his dreams as he drowsed in the saddle, and for a dizzy moment he was sniffing the silk drawers of the whore he had taken to his hotel room in New Orleans last month, a redheaded bitch who was about to scorn him before he split her lip with his fist.
The sweet, rotting flower fragrance of swamp gas reminded him of the cosmetics and colognes his wife had kept in crystal bottles on the marble-top table in front of her mirror, and he remembered the sight of her pale, skinny legs kicking in the air, her heels behind her ears, on either side of the hairy buttocks of a teamster in Henry’s own four-poster marriage bed on the second floor of their new home in Athens, Georgia.
Riding along the trail toward Austin, growing ever more clear of mind and angry in his heart, Henry thought of his mother, a shrieking Hardshell Baptist whose mean and spiteful tongue and frequent blows with a skillet had driven his father away from their family in Memphis, Tennessee, when Henry was a child of six, an awful thing to do to a boy. On the topic of the wickedness of women, Henry Longfellow would hold forth with gusto to the laughter of men and harlots in Blue’s Tavern in San Antonio. Women love the devil, Henry told them. His audience laughed, Henry believed, from nervousness, because he frightened them; they recognized that he was speaking a truth so profound that it could not be faced by their common minds in the cold and serious light that Henry saw.
When Henry was in higher social company, as an adviser to President Lamar, his former colleague in the Georgia legislature, he was polite, tried to be charming to the women he was forced to endure at dances and dinner parties, and he measured his words like speeches an actor might recite on the stage. But he saw through the fabric of their pretty dresses to their wicked souls.
Henry’s knees ached. His bones were too long for the stirrups of this silver concho-studded saddle that had been thrust upon him by the President. Henry had thought it presumptuous for Lamar to insist that the ride from San Antonio to Austin would be more significant if seated on the President’s ornamented saddle rather than in Henry’s two-horse buggy with the padded bench, but Henry accepted as if honored and delighted. He was, after all, partly on a mission for the Republic. He was searching for a choice site on which to build the presidential mansion in Austin. Lamar stipulated the house be on high ground but fed by its own spring, with a grand view but near enough to the city center that its property value would increase as Austin grew.
Once out of sight of Main Plaza at the beginning of the eighty-mile journey on a rutted track the width of an ox cart, Henry had climbed off the bayhorse that also was urged upon him as a loan from the President. He tried to let out the stirrups to their full length but discovered they were already at their full length. Henry cursed the stubby-legged bastard Lamar, but he needed the President’s continued warm association until the documents were signed for the lands Henry was on his way to select for himself in the new town of Austin, soon to become capital of the Republic. Lamar was creating Austin in the heart of a river valley favored by savages.There was scenic land, praised for its beauty by Lamar writing as a poet, abounding with water and timber, to be owned for bargain rates—often no more than the correct signatures. Lamar asked Henry to consider investing as a partner in commercial lots along the spring-fed creek that was being renamed Congress Avenue and would run from the river to the square reserved for the new capitol building. If Henry acted with reasonable haste and care, his prosperity was assured.
He would build a plantation house on a hill near the capitol, Henry thought. His house would have a long, shaded veranda and white Doric columns like the houses of the cotton growers of LaGrange who had supported his entry into the Georgia legislature in Athens. Henry had solicited their political backing because they were wealthy and ignorant men by his view, most of them outright stupid compared to how he saw himself. With his law degree from Memphis College of Jurisprudence as credential, Henry had won a cotton-fraud case against a Georgia seller in a Georgia court and attracted the attention of the cotton growers of LaGrange. His menacing demeanor in court, his ability to twist the truth and intimidate witnesses, proved to the cotton growers that he would enforce their will in the statehouse without scruple. He rammed their desires through the legislature and appeared to have a bright future in Georgia politics. Perhaps he would become a national figure.
Henry married the daughter of a plantation owner. His bride was a bony, homely girl who had been educated at a fancy finishing school in Philadelphia. She was a debutante who entered the adult world riding in an open carriage filled with peach blossoms on the main street of the small commercial center called Atlanta,where her father and his friends had begun bringing their trade and building their city mansions.
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