A KILLING IN THE KINGDOM

On July 4th, 1862, Caleb Brewer stabbed Benjamin Croft with a longbladed boning knife. Brewer sneaked the blade clean between Croft’s ribs to cleave deep into the heart beneath the bone.

Brewer had run out from his butcher shop with the sole intent to kill the man with whom he’d been boyhood friends. The crowd of townsfolk who watched knew this, though few would later testify to it. Most watched with faces stricken with awe and something else too that Brewer could taste but could not yet name.

Croft’s eyes went wide. Blood leaked from the corner of his mouth.

It was midday on the village green of Ivers, Vermont, a tiny town that would soon give more young men to the war to come than any other town in the first abolitionist state; a town situated just south of the Canada border among the shadows of Mounts Monadnock and Canaan and Pisgah and a goodly number of other ridges and hillocks no one had yet nor ever would bother to name.

Croft’s eyes rolled.

Brewer withdrew the knife from the man’s failing heart and laid him on the ground, muddied from a night’s hard rain. He swiped the knifeblade across his apron then reached a hand down to Henry Johnson who lay beside the twitching Croft.

Johnson flinched. He studied Brewer’s hand with his good eye, the other eye bloodied and swollen tight from where Croft had tromped him with the heel of his boot, the skin peeled back in a long flap to expose the hard white bone beneath.

Johnson’s only Sunday shirt was torn and soiled with mud and blood. His mouth too was bloodied and full of bits of shattered teeth. He dared not spit in front of the crowd, so he swallowed, washing the bits down with his own blood and saliva.

"It’s all right,” Brewer said.

Johnson’s good eye watched the crowd.

Brewer’s hand reached closer to Johnson.

Johnson flinched again. Brewer’s was a big hand, calloused and lug-knuckled, and ugly with veins, as if a rendition roughly hammered from stone. Blood spattered its white skin. Which blood was that of Benjamin Croft’s and that of the hogs Brewer had slaughtered that morning, Johnson could not know. Hog blood and man blood were the same wet red. Only under Brewer’s blunt fingernails could Johnson discern hog blood from man blood. There the old hog blood lay deeply packed, long dried and as black as Johnson’s skin.

It’s all right,” Brewer said. He slipped his hand into Johnson’s and grabbed it and pulled Johnson up to stand over Croft’s motionless body.

Johnson swayed. Blood beat in his skull where Croft had kicked him. Brewer righted Johnson and threw the man’s arm around his shoulder as if a fellow infantryman aiding a gunned comrade from the battlefield.

“Steady,” Brewer said.

Johnson leaned his head on Brewer’s shoulder, bloodying the white man’s shirt. “They’ll kill you,” he whispered.

Brewer looked into Johnson’s good eye. He glanced back at the crowd. He recognized in them what he had not recognized before, what glimmered beneath their awestricken faces: relief. “No,” he said, “They won’t.”

Johnson looked at the faces, each greased with sweat under the high summer sun. “Wasn’t them I was talkin bout. Was th’others.”

“Others?”

“S’always others.”

A month later, Brewer exited court a free man. He pushed through a knot of onlookers to slaps on the back and the mumble of nigger lover.

A reporter for the Lamoille Register asked, “Why’d you do it?”

Brewer said, “Did what any man would do.”

The reporter said, “Not any man.”

Three days later Brewer lay gutted in his hog pen, his face gnawed to the skull by the hogs he was to have slaughtered that afternoon; his stomach splayed open and stinking rank of sunrotted viscera. Those intestines not yet gorged by the hogs lay strewn and trampled in the mud. Brewer’s ten-year-old daughter discovered him.

Henry Johnson was found hanged from a maple tree on the village green, near where a commemorative Civil War cannon now rests, weeds grown up thick between its carriage wheels, the cannon all but forgotten save those two days a year when flags are unfurled and fire trucks hauled out on the streets for all to ogle. Today, the maple tree shades the neglected cannon where young lovers sit and kiss on the grass, unaware that their romance blooms where once a man name Croft was felled by the knife of a childhood friend in defense of a lowly nigger.