Читать книгу The Book of Duels - Michael Garriga - Страница 23

General Alexander Hamilton, 49,

Former Secretary of the US Treasury

On the walls of Fame I have penned my name in a hand indelible and swift—the Federalist Papers, the Bank of New York, the US Mint—for all the good I’ve given to Country, I have been persecuted from all sides—my boots sink in the sludge of this loose shore and we slog our way up the hill to where I shall engage Burr—the ignominy of Adams’s rebuffs, that rascal Jefferson’s uphiked nose, and even my own Federalists, pitching their tents with this devil who awaits me today, patient as a spider—I must admit, I choked his bid for governor, but now as I achieve the trail head, sweat beading on my hairline, I see him again—the burr in my side, the thorn in my eye—I fear our nation will fall asunder, capitulated by shortsighted men such as this Burr and the weakboys who’d willingly give Napoleon back his Louisiana—what’s next, the whole of our country?—foreign armies sit to both the west and south and we have no standing force to fight—I shake Burr’s hand and accept the pistol offered, which is heavier than I’d presumed, and I’ll say this much for him: he’s the only man in my life as reliable as George, my Washington, who never disappointed me save when he refused to be our king, and when I’d lift my chin to see up into his blue eyes, I’d become a child again, an orphan in the West Indies whose father had abandoned him, a boy whose mother succumbed to fever, and I would stand on the cliffs of St. Croix, the water lashing far below me, shouting straight into the wind between my cupped hands, Daddy, Daddy, and the wind would blow my words to shreds and dry the tears on my boyhood cheeks—

Now I’ve accepted Jesus Christ into my heart, though He comes and goes—so much on His mind, I suppose one cannot blame Him—how to concentrate on any single one thing—still, He’s filled my heart and I will waste my first shot but thereafter I am Christ-bound to defend myself—standing twenty-five feet from this filthy Catiline, I burrow my feet in the pebbles and I slip and the hair trigger goes off and I’m not afforded the dignity of delope—has the Lord forsaken me too?—Burr fires his ball and a full lifetime ticks by before it burrs into my body, and in that eternity, I realize that we are a two-sided coin flipped by Fate and here I land facedown and forlorn and I forgive him everything.