“And for that reason,” my father said, “I was never a very good minister.”
“Well,” said Clemens, “I was raised hearing such tales, but retold by the colored folks, in a human way. Sweet and tender do I remember their accounts.”
“Yes,” allowed Mr. Stanley. “As much as I look down on slaves — or, to put it differently, my friend, as much as I find them simpleminded — I envy their clear and uncomplicated connection to such tales. They see them as not something that happened a few thousand years ago but as the kind of thing that could have happened yesterday, to a close relation.”
“And Jesus? What make you of him?” Clemens asked.
“A very holy man, I figure. A man who spoke — and speaks to this day — to the hearts of slaves. Much of his world was composed of them back then, but what his promised salvation from their hard lives — his paradise — might well be, I cannot say.”
As we moved along that narrow trail, in a remote part of that plantation, under an arcade of high trees, whose bending foliage ensconced us in shade for much of our passage, and just as I, riding beside my father, had been looking in all directions cautiously, we heard horses. Then some hushed voices. Suddenly six mounted men astride palominos emerged from the surrounding brush, a great clopping of hooves and several gunshots accompanying them. The first I saw on his mount was a large black man with a machete by his side; the next a Cuban, I supposed, most stern and severe of expression. Three others were also Negroes, their faces covered with scars, one as fierce-looking as the next. Then a second Cuban followed from behind: He had a blood-red kerchief around his neck, and two fingers were missing from his left hand. They had converged upon us, smiling at our sudden consternation.
As they began to surround us, Mr. Davis muttered: “Turn now — whatever you do, turn back toward the house.”
But no sooner did we try to turn our mounts around than one of these men reeled his horse out behind us to block the road. Now, as Mr. Stanley wore a gold watch off a chain in plain sight on his vest, and as it glowed as a precious object, the horseman with three fingers came forward and, coveting this watch, slyly asked for the time of day. Suspecting his unfriendly intent, Mr. Stanley, being a foreigner, pretended that he did not understand the language. “No comprendo,” Mr. Stanley told him. But the fellow continued to circle around, and when we attempted to move on, that same Cuban leaned forward and took hold of Mr. Stanley’s bridle. And then he pulled from a holster below his saddle a machete, the variety that was most often used to chop sugarcane, and, jabbing it menacingly into Mr. Stanley’s coat, forcefully demanded his watch. At this point, Mr. Davis, who spoke Spanish well, explained that we were local landowners and that they were, in fact, trespassing upon the outer fringes of our plantation. But this made no impression on the Cuban brigand, for at this point, he became blunt and said: “Muy bien. Dame todo lo que tienen!” (“Hand over everything.”)
With this, Mr. Davis pulled out his ivory-handled pistol and pointed its muzzle back at him. Frightened, with good reason, the man with three fingers moved off; and when Mr. Davis turned to the large Negro who had taken hold of Mr. Stanley’s horse, he, too, backed away. Then Mr. Davis said, “Come on!” And we began to gallop back toward the plantation, Clemens and I in the lead. But as it was not easy for so many horses to advance along so narrow a path, Mr. Davis, himself a superb horseman, was jostled after some seventy yards by Mr. Stanley’s horse and thrown onto the road. Having advanced forward, I looked back and saw that Mr. Stanley had stopped to help him. But by then the Cubans had produced their own pistols and were charging toward us — I can remember that Clemens tried to halt his mount, but had gone some distance before he could turn around. In the meantime, my father, having helped Mr. Davis onto his horse, was about to ride off himself when some shots were fired. I responded with my own pistol, aimed at the Cuban with three fingers, but my horse, frightened by the noise, bucked, and I hit nothing. Eventually the brigands dispersed, though not before firing more shots after us. It was then, I am afraid to say, that Mr. Stanley, galloping toward us on that road, received a bullet in the side of his neck.
All this occurred so quickly that I was hardly aware that Mr. Stanley had been wounded, until he, riding wildly and grasping his neck, began to sway from side to side. By then, the plantation slaves, hearing the shots as they worked in the fields, were waiting by the road to help us. Bleeding badly, Mr. Stanley slumped off his saddle into the arms of two slaves, and they carried him into the house, where he lay stretched out on a chair in the parlor.
Gasping for air, and with a gurgling sound coming from his dressing-wrapped, swollen neck, Mr. Stanley seemed, in those moments, as good as dead. I could only pray for his recovery.
After a few hours Mr. Stanley began to suffer from a high fever, and in the delirium that followed, he asked several times to see his dead wife. By then, Mr. Davis had instructed one of his overseers to head out to one of the bigger plantations to look for a doctor (and to inform the civil guard about the bandits so they might round up a posse), but at some late hour, as it seemed that Mr. Stanley would surely die without immediate medical assistance, Mr. Davis, having some knowledge of surgery, loosened the wrapping and decided that it would be best to extricate the bullet. A large black-and-blue lump had risen along the right side of Mr. Stanley’s neck, and discerning that the bullet was lodged there, Mr. Davis, pressing against that swelling and manipulating the hardness within, gradually brought the round dark pellet out, along with much blood and an ooze of pus. Dousing it with a cup of brandy, he then instructed one of his slaves to pour pitcher after pitcher of cold water over the wound until the swelling gradually subsided; then he dressed the wound again, and all of us, somewhat exhausted by the ordeal, retired to the veranda to drink.
A CUBAN DOCTOR DID ARRIVE — two days later — and when he examined Mr. Stanley, he saw that while the wound itself was in a process of healing, an infection of a septic nature had begun to spread through his system. Blunt in his appraisal, he could only recommend rest, but he thought it not a bad idea for us to summon a priest to give him the last rites, “in the event he believes in such things.” Despite our obvious despair — I was inconsolable in those days — the doctor took legal issue with the fact that Mr. Davis had attended to the wound himself, and he threatened to report him to the authorities. At heart, even if he knew that Mr. Stanley would have surely died without Mr. Davis’s assistance, this physician, a somewhat bitter and gloomy man, argued for several hours with Mr. Davis about it, until Mr. Davis, getting the drift of the doctor’s threat, agreed to pay him a fee so substantial that it amounted to a bribe.
And so the doctor, having made his point and profited by it, rode away.
HERE I CAN HARDLY CAJOLE my own hand to write more of those days: I cannot say whether a recent fever has weakened my resolve or whether it is always painful to continue with the remembrance of sad things as one treads on a march of words toward a resolution. Beginnings are exhilarating; middles are comforting; but the final chapters of such memories are fearsome and resist easy summary. But here, as I squeeze out the words, is what happened:
Because he slept through many of the hours of the day, I had made it my habit to look in on Mr. Stanley, to find if he had awakened. He was dressed in a long white shirt that reached to his ankles and was laid out in bed; his beard had been shorn, exposing his fine chin, and the scab on his neck, I could see, was the size of a silver dollar. In his company were two female slaves, one of whom stood beside his bed moving the air with a feather fan; the other attended to him with a casual familiarity that I found dismaying.