Canaan's Tongue
Table of Contents
Being a Brief History of T. Merryl & His Trade - by Frank S. Kennedy.
William H. Seward, Sec. of State.
Acclaim for John Wray’s
CANAAN’S TONGUE
“Wildly imagined. . . . Dark and fascinating. . . . Wray is rambunctiously unafraid of language.”
—
Esquire
“Wray is a talented young writer. . . . The writing is often brilliant.”
—
The
Boston Globe
“He owes a debt to Cormac McCarthy, not to mention Mr. Clemens himself, as well as to Poe. . . .
Canaan’s Tongue
is the evil in the heart of the American Dream.”
—
The
New York Times Book Review
“Pure Southern gothic. . . . Reads like dark poetry.”
—
The
Dallas Morning News
“A tense, topsy-turvy Civil War tale. . . . Wray skillfully employs the ambiguity of narrative.”
—
The
Village Voice
“Highly original. . . . If Ambrose Bierce were alive today, he would be gratified to read
Canaan’s Tongue
.”
—
The
New York Sun
“A wild and rocky ride through history. . . . A revelation.”
—
The
Bu falo News
“Raises the hair on the back of your head. . . . Even as remarkably accomplished as his first novel was, it would not prepare readers for [the] obsession and violence of his stunning second effort.”
—
The
Commercial Appeal
(Memphis)
“A stunning narrative composed of multiple voices: an epic of violence and greed and inescapable judgment that somewhat resembles—and arguably surpasses in richness and power—Cormac McCarthy’s
Blood Meridian.
Wray is the real thing, and
Canaan’s
Tongue
is itself a masterpiece.”
—
Kirkus
Reviews
(starred review)
“Chilling, entertaining and very well-written.”
—
The
Star-Ledger
(Newark, NJ)
“Original and provocative,
Canaan’s Tongue
is a stunning achievement.” —
Daily
News-Record
(Harrisonburg, VA)
“A tour de force.”
—
The
Memphis Flyer
“Striking and powerful. . . . Wray imbues the Mississippi with the feel of a living entity.”
—
The
Flint Journal
I
He appears to have been a most dexterous and consummate villain, this
“Redeemer” . . . The stealing of horses in one State, and the selling of
them in another, was but a small portion of [his gang’s] business; the most
lucrative was the enticing of slaves to run away from their masters, that
they might sell them in another quarter.This was arranged as follows; they would tell a negro that if he would
run away from his master, and allow them to sell him, he should receive a
portion of the money paid for him, and that upon his return to them a secondtime they would send him to a free State, where he would be safe.The poor wretches complied with this request, hoping to obtain money
and freedom; they would be sold to another master, and run away again, to
their employers; sometimes they would be sold in this manner three or four
times, until they had realized three or four thousand dollars by them; but
as, after this, there was fear of detection, the usual custom was to get rid of
the only witness that could be produced against them, which was the negro
himself, by murdering him, and throwing his body into the Mississippi . . .—Life on the Mississippi
Geburah Plantation, 1863.
THERE IS A HOUSE, Parson says.
There is a river. The house, built of the corpses of historic oaks, leans toward the river as if parched. The grounds stand vacant and abashed. A finger-bowl of bare red clay surrounds the house, which seems more desolate even than the grounds. But there are seven men inside of it, and one woman. They are faithful to the house—; they are beholden to it. They could make their home no other place, as no other place would have them.
They are wanted for blood-crimes in eleven states and their lives are held in forfeit. They are wanted by the Union for the murder of ninety-seven slaves—; they are wanted by the Confederacy for destruction of private property. The War the rest of the nation curses has sheltered them, till now, in its great and ample shadow. They are free and at liberty to take their ease. The War rolls past them on the river, and makes the woods unquiet in the evenings—; no more than that. The War is an entertainment. But now a thing has happened that flushes the War from their thoughts like a sparrow from a thicket.
A body has been found. Virgil Ball has found it. Virgil Ball, the most skittish of them all, the most inquisitive, the most tender. He hovers above the body like a bucket above a well. Three other men are with him. The men look at Virgil, then down at his feet, where the body lies stiff and equitable and naked. They draw closer and squint. It is a particular body, known to them by sight. They are each of them killers and well used to unpleasantness but the sight makes them curiously restless.
A question has begun forming in their minds.
Virgil Ball.
MY LIFE’S NOT WORTH A PIG’S KIDNEY, Virgil says. Everyone knows I murdered the Redeemer, driving a sliver of pier-glass through the back of his neck and stuffing him, with the help of the house-nigger, down the hole of the privy—: everyone knows it, and now another of our gang’s been snuffed.
The three holy horrors beside me know it. They know it because I told them—; I told them because I’m a donkey. And now another of us is killed. Goodman Harvey, a lisper, whom nobody liked much, and I liked less than anybody. They suspect me, of course. How could they
not
suspect me? The thought sends a tear guttering down my cheek, but I’m not such a fool as to look anybody in the eye. I keep mine fixed on this morning’s cadaver, once a man I knew well, laid out like a catfish at my feet.
The story I mean to tell will be a right cameo of this nation, truer than a daguerreotype, more telling than the Constitution. It’s the story of the Trade, and of my twists and turns inside it—: the crimes that I committed, the blasphemies I abetted, the passions I conceived. I speak as of the past, but I am frying in it still. How the devil, then, to tell it? Frontwards, like a Roman history, or backwards, like a Mandarin scroll? From all sides at once, like the Gospels of the Christ? I’m an educated man, but also something of a ponce. I have ever balked when left to my own counsel.
Ever, that is, except once. Once I did not balk. Best to start there, perhaps—: back at the height of my achievement. Best to start at the beginning of the end.
I might begin it as a rhyme, a scrap of school-yard doggerel—:
Virgil Isaiah Dante Ball
Murdered the Redeemer in the fall.
“The Redeemer” was what we called him, out of devotedness—; but his given name was Thaddeus. Thaddeus Morelle. A plain-faced dumpling of a man, remarkable chiefly in his smallness, like Alexander the Great, or Bonaparte. He was set to eat America like a biscuit. He was set to make princes of us all.
Instead I cut his wind-pipe, and he died.
The War for Southern Liberty had just turned a year and a half—: that fixes the date at October 12, 1862. The house-nigger and I hauled him to the privy (his favorite part of the grounds, in life) and forced his little body, after a brief eulogy, through the square-cut opening in the planks. He fell without fanfare, hit the bottom with a
whoomp
—: the hole was freshly dug and deep. After the service I sprinkled a bit of quick-lime after him and answered nature’s summons. I took my time about it. Then I went back to the house and brought the rest of the gang together and told them what I’d done.
It was the worst hour of my life. The Redeemer had been our Washington, our Robespierre, our Jenghis Khan. I fully expected to be torn to pieces, wept like a Frenchman and had to pinch my right ear-lobe to keep from dropping in a faint. It took a goodly while to tell it—: I’m a coward at the best of times, and on that occasion I warbled like a goose. To my astonishment the gang heard me out in silence, then went off to the privy, one by one, to pay their last respects. By supper the bucket of quick-lime was empty and I’d moved my carpet-sack up—wonder of wonders!—into the master bedroom. I went to bed that night a reinvented man.
That, however, was then. Today is the twelfth of May, and the Natural Order again prevails—: a cleverer man has slipped into the Redeemer’s britches, easy as you please, and I’m once again the Jack Fetchit to them all. Down, and up, and down again, like the India-rubber ball I am. Such is the tendency of heaven, at least with regards to me—: the occasional blessing followed by a shower of shite.
I now sleep in a narrow cubby under the attic stairs. There is a little port-hole window—; I am not ungrateful for that. And I murdered the Redeemer, that oily-faced, cane-twirling, preening sport of nature, just as I promised that I would.
I’m not ungrateful for that, either.
A QUARTER-HOUR HAS GONE BY. We remain clustered together, my three associates and I, adoring the deceased. The silence is thick enough to poke. I’m desperate to say something—anything at all—but my cowardice keeps me mute. Elsewhere (
everywhere,
in fact, in this part of the country) men are shooting at each other from shell-holes and river-beds and fields of winter wheat, debating the future of our Union. I’m here at Geburah, miles from the nearest battle-field, watching a body blanch and stiffen.
When I think of it that way it almost seems a privilege.
The body was called “Goodman Harvey” last night, when it still spoke and strutted—; I’m not sure what to call it now. It was a Mormon by birth, a nigger-runner by accident, and an arse-kisser by profession. I stare down at it enraptured. Its undeniable
deadness,
chalk-white and utter, reminds me again of the Redeemer. (The Redeemer’s face, as I pushed his eyes shut in the light of the nigger’s lantern, wore the same tender look—as though he’d just been given a present—that poor dead Harvey’s has.) In the honeyed morning light that cleaves to every object Harvey’s features seem settled into an expression of serenity—even of wisdom—that I never knew them to wear in life. Alive he was a fidgeting, sot-brained schemer, and I don’t calculate I’ll miss him. But his dying
at this moment,
hip-deep into the war, in this rotting house the eight of us are packed into like so many Christmas hams, comes as an advertisement, a calling-card of sorts—: a reminder I could just as well do without. The noose is tightening hourly about this house and not a one of us can forget it.
We were brought here to Geburah, after all, for no other reason but to die.
I WANT TO GIVE AN ACCOUNTING of the Trade, of the Gang from Island 37, and of the Redeemer most of all. I want to puzzle him out, if only for my own security of mind. The only way to get free of the past, I’ve decided, is to eat it—: to chew on it, digest it, and deposit it in pellets. So I mean to do just that. But first I have to get out of this room.
Colonel Erratus D’Ancourt, interim chairman of our Trade—a stuffed frock-coat of a man, as much like the Redeemer as a diaper is to a dinner-jacket—shuffles forward and gives Harvey a jab with the tip of his ash-plant. The body lies at a peculiar angle to the bed, its feet just shy of the foot-board, its speckled skull pointing toward the room’s south-east corner. The flesh of the shoulders and neck is still yielding and the head turns readily, with a barely audible popping of the vertebrae. I decide for myself that it was poison. The raw, strophed markings on the nape, likely made by his own fingers, and the fan-shaped bloom of broken vesicles under the skin point to permanganate of potassium, which I often laid out for prairie foxes as a boy.
A small amount of this same unctuous powder, sealed in a cut-glass vial, was given to each of us by the Redeemer at the Trade’s first meeting. He had a weakness for the trappings of dramatic theater, and we sought to ape him in this, as we did in everything. No gesture of ours was extravagant enough, no brutality too baroque. Looking down at Harvey, however—his eyes closed in parody of ever-lasting rest—I can’t help but marvel at the inappropriateness of this latest tribute. It doesn’t sit right, somehow. Harvey was not a man given to over-doing things.
It’s likely, then, that he was murdered. Each person in the room must now be suspicious of every other—: fresh killings will spring from this like flowers from a cow-pat. The Redeemer would have been delighted.
A sketch—:
We stand about in an assortment of stiff-necked postures, the sorry remains of a once-great enterprise, each wanting to slip away but feeling himself watched by all his fellows. Since the collapse of the Gang and our exile to this god-forsaken tongue of bayou, we’ve been gathered like this only once before, when I made my grand confession. The Colonel (A) crouches to my right, as low to the body as his lumbago will allow. To his left is Stutter Kennedy (B), who’d as soon stick a knife into your eye as look at you—; to his left skulks our Parson (C), who’d gladly sup upon your sweet-breads after Kennedy was done. These, then, are my peers—: the last three heads of the illustrious, blood-caked, gospel-sucking Trade. Colonel the bureaucrat, Kennedy the assassin, Parson the intriguer, Virgil Ball the fool. I wonder which of us did Goodman Harvey under.
Why kill Harvey at all, come to think of it, and leave
me
cozy as a pup?
The Colonel clears his throat and squints down at his liver-spotted knuckles, a sure sign that he’s about to launch into some new foolery.
“Boy come up at six from the depot,” he says, arranging Harvey’s shirt with the tip of his ash-plant. His expression is one of aggrieved nobility.
The “boy from the depot”—in fact a toothless, ageless Creole—is our last connection to society. One day soon he’ll turn us in.
“Did he bring any soap?” I ask.
“The news is in from Chancellorsville,” the Colonel says, ignoring me. “A Dixie victory, praise Jesus, after five days’ butchery.” He sucks in a melancholy gulp of air. “Our Stonewall Jackson’s sadly killed.”
“Not
our
Stonewall puh!—puh!—pissing Jackson,” Kennedy spits out. “Remember that, you damn butternut.”
It’s a gall to Kennedy that the Colonel (who was born and reared in Indiana) should treat the Confederate cause as his own—; Kennedy hates the South and all it compasses. The Colonel bites his lip and hushes.
From his position at the foot of the corpse Parson raises his left hand, holding it aloft in the attitude of the Magnificat—: “Magnificat anima mea Dominum.”
Parson’s contempt for papism is well known to me, and I do not mistake his tattered Latin for a performance of last rites. He is simply having his regular fun with Kennedy.
“Kind of you, Parson,” I murmur. “He’ll sleep better now, God rest him.”
Parson grants me his customary grin, one that leaves his eyes free to regard me coldly. “Thank you, Virgil. I try to match the verse to the occasion. Stonewall Jackson, after all, was birthed out of an Irish whore.”
“You shut your muh!—muh!—
mouth,
” Kennedy hollers. “God-damn organ-grinder’s monkey—”
“Steady, Mr. Kennedy!” the Colonel says, bringing his ash-plant down between them like a gavel. “That’s a lie, Parson. It was my privilege to know General Jackson well.”
“You knew bollocks,” Kennedy mutters, his eyes trained on Parson like a pair of cudgels.
Parson says nothing, content to honor me with a silent wink. I look at him a moment—at his black-robed bean-pole of a body, his cat-like face, his womanish gray hands folded piously together—then allow my sight to travel from point to point in the room, in the hope that I might find one single object that is not hateful to me.
I fail.
“Without Stonewall, I just don’t see it clear,” the Colonel says. When this draws no reply, he says again, more shrilly—: “Without Stonewall, the South may end up—no more than a
place
—”
“All the same to us,” Kennedy says. “Or should be. It weren’t ever but a place to me.”
The Colonel gathers in a breath. “But the Confederacy—”
“Will hang us as quick as the Federals will,” Parson cuts in. “Quicker. Let’s hope the trouble drags on a good while yet.”
“Hear, hear,” I whisper.
To my relief no one pays me the slightest mind.
MOST OF US, like the departed, are still in the clothes we passed the night in—; only Parson is fully dressed. He wears a floor-length soutane, clasped closely under the chin, trimmed with crimson satin at the hem-line and cuffs. He looks like a crypt-keeper to the Vatican. In ten years of working with him on the river, much of that time on flatboats and tar-bottomed nigger rafts, I’ve never once seen him out of his Sunday silks. In his cadaverish way he’s more terrible than Kennedy—: Kennedy is a killer, plain and simple. Parson is anything
but
plain. Each time I look at him I see a different animal.
“Poor fat Harvey,” Parson murmurs. “The Latter-days have taken back the most oblong of their saints.”
The Colonel gawks down at the body, running two tobacco-stained fingers through his beard. The rest of us keep mum and stiff. Parson plays with the window-sash, whispering to it fondly from time to time. I let my eyes fall closed. Sweet silence, oblivion, death-in-life—
“Was it you that found the body, Virgil?” the Colonel barks out.
I nod. “I sleep across the hall, Colonel, as you know.”
“Messing about, were you?” Kennedy sneers. “Poking your puh!— puh!—
peck
into other people’s knickers?”
“No, Kennedy! I wasn’t. I—”
The Colonel gives a low, choked cough, as though he’s swallowed a crab-apple. “
Look
at me when I address you, Virgil. Did you shift anything about?”
“I locked the door straight-away, Colonel. Then I came to your room and roused you.”
“Locked the
door,
you say!” This piques his senile interest. “With what key?”
I hold up Harvey’s room key, identical to every other on its gut-string loop. “This one, Colonel. I found it by the bed.”