1824: The Arkansas War

F EBRUARY 14, 1825

The thing was there, all right. Just as grotesque as Sam feared it would be.

Shivering a bit-even with his Cherokee blanket, the great stone church was bitterly cold, in mid-February-he stared up at the icon. The newly proclaimed martyr of the Church.

"She didn't look in the least bit like that-that-"

"Don't be rude, Sam," said Tiana. She gave Marie Laveau a look that Sam couldn't really interpret. Something so profoundly female that it was just beyond his comprehension.

"So we make up another one," Marie said, shrugging. The tall, gorgeous quadroon gave the icon a dismissive glance and an equally dismissive wave of the hand. "It's just some painted wood, you know. Has no holy power in itself. Might have, if they'd let me sprinkle-well, never mind. Father James is a good priest, even if he is just as superstitious as men always are."

She half turned and imperiously summoned forward a short, very dark-skinned black woman who'd been hanging back in the shadows of the cavernous church. "Antoinette here is a magnificent carver. Almost as good with the paints, too. With your guidance"-she waved again at the icon perched on the wall-"she can soon have that replaced with an image that captures the martyred wife to perfection."

Sam opened his mouth, about to proclaim that under no circumstances would he be a party to any such half-papist, half-voudou heathenist nonsense. He was something of a freethinker himself, to be sure, not a dyed-in-the-wool Protestant. Still and all!

But the words never came. They were choked off by the worst of the grief. That he had lost his beloved wife, Sam could eventually accept. What he couldn't accept was the knowledge that his son-only four years old when Maria Hester died-would never really remember his mother.

It was worse than that. Sam knew-had known from the day he made the decision-that he was looking at another of the world's terrible ironies. No matter what happened, little Andy would have a mother, here in Arkansas. It would be Tiana Rogers-Tiana Driscol, now-the woman whom Sam had once thought, from time to time, might be the mother of his own children. And so, in a way, she would be. But only at the price of obliterating any real memory of his son's natural mother, Maria Hester, nee Monroe and died Houston.

Now:

If the boy could come, any day, any time, to a revered place, and look up and see:

"All right," he said.

"Good!" proclaimed Marie. "And once Antoinette has made the proper icon, and you pronounce yourself satisfied, I will do the rest. Properly, this time. Pfah! "-that was a very rude gesture-"to what the priest says."

"Just stay out of it, Sam," Tiana quietly counseled.

He decided the counsel was good.

1824: TheArkansasWar

1824: TheArkansasWar