After some time, Holling returned leading a dozen field hands, who carried among them tall ladders and axes and saws, and the last man was leading a two-horse team in traces. Robley could see the black men looking around, could see the apprehension in their faces. Their daily routine did not vary much. Any change was cause for concern.
“Listen here, you all,” Robley addressed his slaves. “I mean to greatly alter the look of this tree. We’ll start at the top. Who here is the best climber?”
The men shuffled their feet, looked at the ground, shot questioning glances at one another. Paine felt the frustration boiling up and he tried to hold it back.
“Very well. Billy, I have seen you shoot up an apple tree like a squirrel. You go to the top branches. Someone give Billy a saw. Set that ladder against the tree, that’ll get you to the lower branches. We are starting at the top, taking the branches clean off.”
Twenty minutes of instructing, bullying, pointing, twenty minutes of ignoring Holling, who kept muttering and rolling his eyes until Paine threatened to dismiss him, to order him to the recruiter’s office, and finally the tree was alive with men, hacking and sawing at the branches.
Billy was as nimble as Paine had remembered, clambering up as high as the branches would bear, going after one and another with a bucksaw until the branches, with their great bursts of green, were raining down around the base of the oak, where those men still on the ground carted them off.
In short order the tree grew thinner and thinner, and Robley could see through the branches in a way that he normally could only in winter. Soon the upper branches were gone, and then the lower branches, too thick for the bucksaws, so the men went after them with axes, chopping them off and chopping the trunk as well.
The task went quickly, with so many men being driven by Holling, now anxious to please. The sun moved to the west and the towering oak was rendered shorter and shorter, like a sugar loaf, sliced off again and again until there was only the wide base left.
The virtual rain of greenery slowed as the men reached the lowest of the branches, as big around as trees in their own right, and they hacked at them and the wood chips flew like dull sparks in the last of the sun. Finally, with the sun down and the light fading fast, the trunk was cut for the last time. With flailing axes the Negroes hacked it through, thirty feet from the base, ten feet above the only remaining branches, those two that had formed the welcoming arms, now bare and spindly things, stripped of their leaves and smaller branches.
“I want a fire, right here.” Robley pointed to the ground twenty feet in front of the tree. “A big damned fire.” The Negroes’ work was done, but he still had to labor on, and he would need light for his task.
Holling dispatched men to gather up firewood, and soon there was a great bonfire burning, leaping ten feet in the air, the red-and-orange light dancing off the thing that the oak had become, thirty feet of massive trunk and two great arms reaching out into the dark.
“Good,” Robley said, his eyes never leaving the tree. “You all can turn in now. Leave the tools.”
The slaves murmured something as they tramped off wearily to their tiny shacks, and Holling disappeared as well. For a long time Robley stared at the tree, trying to see what was beneath the bark, the thing that was in there that he was trying to let free.
At last he picked up an ax, held it over his shoulder, and climbed the ladder up the trunk to a place six feet above where the branches reached out from the body. He steadied himself, brought the ax back, and swung at the tree, felt the sharp blade bite. He jerked it free, brought it back again, swung once more.
For an hour and a half he stood on the ladder, hacking away, and when he was done he had cut a great horizontal gash in the trunk, a slice a foot wide in the living oak. He looked at it, grunted, climbed down from the ladder.
His arms and legs ached, he felt weariness clawing at him, but he pressed on, because he had to have this thing done by dawn. There could not be another day without his dire warning, his Colossus of Rhodes there to frighten off the Northern hordes. He picked up a lantern, lit the candle from the massive bonfire, tramped around the side of the house and across the open area to the barn.
He opened the big door and stamped down the length of the barn. In their stables, the horses shifted nervously, made quiet whinnying sounds. They were not accustomed to visitors at that hour.
Paine stopped at a storeroom at the far end, pulled the door open. Along with various tools and equipment waiting repair were can after can of paint, paint for the plantation house and the stalls, for the carriages, for all the myriad things that required it. Robley held the lantern up, snatched up the cans he needed, stuck a few paintbrushes into the waist-band of his pants, carried the whole lot back to the oak.
Again he stood before the tree like an artist before his canvas, looking it up and down, wanting not to impose his will on the thing but rather to reveal that which was already there. Then, with paint cans dangling from a short length of rope, he climbed the ladder again.
Bright red splashed into the notch he had cut, and white for teeth around the edge. No whites for eyes, but rather red—this was an angry god. Robley moved from the top of the stunted trunk to the base, slathering it with paint, until at last it was not a tree at all, but a hideous gargoyle, a pagan edifice, a frightening vision of death that would attend any who tried to cross the Yazoo River and pollute the perfection of the Paine home.
Horror, remain at bay, it cried. Stay on the northern shore, do not visit my home!
Finished at last, Robley Paine stood before his creation. In the dancing firelight it was a horrible thing to behold, but that was as it was supposed to be. He would fight horror with horror. And before he knew it, he was lying before the tree, fast asleep.
The chill of the predawn mist woke him. He shuddered with the cold, stretched aching limbs, pushed himself to a sitting position. He felt the great weight of anguish on him, but he could not recall, for an instant, what the anguish was for. And then it came back.
He looked up at the oak, at what he had done. The low-lying fog swirled around the thing, making it look like some mythical beast, the red eyes, the gaping red mouth and white teeth, the branches painted with claws dripping blood, the gray coat, an approximation of the Confederate uniform. It was a horror indeed, and Paine nodded his satisfaction.
That will do, that will do, he thought.
But would it? He had slept, and his mind was clear now. It was a good thing he had done with that tree, let the vandals to the north know that there was no welcome there. But would it be enough?
He looked at the river and thought of the great water barriers in history. He was old enough to recall the French Wars, Napoleon’s massive army, poised on the edge of the English Channel, ready to swarm over the water and spread its poison throughout England. The water had stopped them.
“No…” The water had not stopped them. They could have crossed the water, just as the Yankees could cross the Yazoo River. It was not water that stopped the French. It was Lord St. Vincent, Horatio Nelson. It was England’s mighty Channel Fleet.
The realization came to him, a flash, a divine inspiration, and he spoke it out loud.
“I need a ship.”
BOOK THREE
On Blue Water and Brown
22
CSS Cape Fear
Gosport
Naval Shipyard
Portsmouth, Virginia
July 25, 1861
Dear Father,