Canaan's Tongue (11 page)

“Bugger Memphis!” I hissed, trying a second time to rise. I must have looked for all the world like a pilgrim genuflecting in front of a wax effigy of the Pope.

“Tell me, Captain,” Parson said, looking down the crook of his nose at me. “That
eye
of yours—: that blessed far-seeing ball of jelly.” He turned his head clock-wise until his neck cracked. “Did it show you many wonders, as you quit this life?”

The pain in my shoulder lessened for a moment and I staggered to my feet. “It showed me all manner of things, Parson,” I said, struggling to keep from falling backwards. “I saw the cloud you travel under, for one. Your own portable saintly nimbus.” I spat onto the floor. “It was the color of rotten bile.”

“You
do
have the gift,” Parson said admiringly.

“It’s the Jew in him,” Trist offered.

Slowly, painfully, I worked the fingers of my right hand into a well-known gesture of contempt.

“He’s giving us the fig!” Trist said, pointing at me delightedly.

“The yellowjack take the both of you,” I croaked.

Parson bit his lip in mock concern. “You’ll have to get us a fair piece up-river yet, Captain, for us to honor
that
request. “

I spat at him and made wobblingly for the ladder. I’d not taken three steps, however, when a new thought struck me. I glanced back at Parson.

“How did Ziba come to be down here? He had no business in the hold.”

Parson raised his eye-brows. “Didn’t you know, Virgil? Our commander-in-chief had him stowed for safe-keeping. He’d gotten flighty, it appears.”

So this was Redeemer’s doing. His by order and design. Why it should have surprised me so, why it should have washed my mind clear of all else, I can’t rightly explain—; but it turned me irrevocably on my head.

I kept silent for a time, finding a place for this latest revelation in my thoughts—; relating it, slowly and painstakingly, to the history of my tenure in the Trade. The fact that I’d not been told about Ziba did not bode well for me, of course—; but I had no thoughts for the future. The present was more than enough for me. The
Redeemer
had brought this hell-on-earth about—: my own Thaddeus Morelle. My own.

“Where are the pistols?” I said, looking about me on the floor.

“Ah!” said Parson. “Trist has one of them—; you’re welcome to it, I’m sure. As for the other—”

He planted his palms lightly on the floor, lifted himself without untwining his legs, and slid a foot or so to his left. Trist stepped away as well, and thus three corpses were exposed, stacked one atop the other like sacks of rice at market. At the bottom was the white-hair, his immense frame loose and slack-boned now, Ziba’s pistol clenched in his left fist. Ziba himself was next, laid the other way round, with his battered head resting against the thighs of his executioner. Both were arranged neat as funeral-house cadavers, their arms bound tightly at their sides.

At the top was a third body, much slighter than the others.

“Ah! Jesus,” I said weakly.

The body was that of a rail-thin boy, perhaps eleven years of age. For some private reason of Parson’s he was arranged exactly as Parson was himself, with his legs crossed loosely under him and his back supported by the hold. His mud-colored eyes hung indifferently open. In the center of his forehead was a small red hole, a clean and perfect circle, its edge lightly speckled with powder-marks.

“Who shot that child?” I whispered.

Trist gave a guffaw. “
You
did, Captain!”

“Neat shooting, that, for a hand-puppet in the dark,” Parson said silkily.

It was then I decided to murder the Redeemer.

III

The rising People, hot and out of breath,
Roared around the palace: “Liberty or Death!”
“If death will do,” the King said, “let me reign;
You’ll have, I’m sure, no reason to complain.”

—Ambrose Bierce

The Yellowjack.

WE PULLED INTO MEMPHIS AT NOON, Virgil says. A day and a night had passed since Ziba’s killing.

I’d never delivered contrabands in daylight before, but Parson promised me not a soul would care—: the Yellowjack had the keys to the city now. The look on his face put me in mind of the mayor of Sodom returned home after a holiday. He clapped me on the back— which caused me to gasp aloud with pain—and breathed deeply of the air. “Look yonder, Captain,” he said sweetly, pointing up the bluff. At the top of it the customs-house was burning.

I brought us in slowly, easing up to the pier so that Trist wouldn’t strangle himself in the hitching-rope. Since my vow of murder two nights before, I was resolved to become a model citizen in my associates’ eyes. My chance with Morelle would come quickly enough, and I was not impatient. I could no longer quite conceive of the world without him, I discovered—; and I was in no great hurry for apocalypse.

Apocalypse, however, chose not to wait on my convenience.

Having tied and weighted the line, we pulled out the gang-planks and laid them flat, as with any other delivery. The niggers had been quiet as deer since the uprising, taking the water Trist brought them but refusing all food. I knew Parson well enough to expect no great help from him, but I reckoned the lingering effects of his hoo-doo might yet be strong enough for us to finish the run, provided he accompanied us to Stacey’s. Even this small hope, however, proved a vain one. As I stepped onto the pier I caught sight of him, already well up the road to town, moving with swift, bobbing strides, like a silk-skirted daddy-long-legs.

Trist and I watched him steal away. “Sure you wouldn’t rather follow Parson, Asa?” I asked. “He’d show you a livelier time than I ever could. Just look at how he prances.”

“Not a bit of it, Captain!” Trist sang out, clicking his heels together. I was once again, apparently, the apple of his eye. My scalp prickled at the merest thought of it.

“I’m sure you could teach me more than
he
ever could, about the business-end of things,” he said, raising his skittish eyes to mine.

“I’ve seen the business-end of things, all right.”

He gave a squeal of delight at this. “You mean—you mean it would be
acceptable
to you—if I—”

“Get that mid-hatch open,” I muttered. “Go on!”

The truth of it was that I needed him direly. With Ziba dead, my collar-bone broken, and Parson off God knows where, I stood as much chance as a one-legged man in an arse-kicking match.

The twenty-three head stowed amidships came up readily enough. Two hung back below deck, cramped and exhausted from close quarters, but Trist coaxed them up the ladder smartly. A few minutes later they were coffled together and ready to march, and the same held true for the stern hold. There was no delaying it any longer.

Slowly, ruefully, I walked with Trist up to the bow. I stood by the front hatch a moment, then gave him a stiff-lipped nod.

“Look lively now, Asa,” I whispered, gripping the butt of my one-shot. “Christ knows what they’ll do when they see it’s just the two of us.”

“Oh!
They
won’t be any bother,” Trist said breezily.

“Won’t they?”

He smiled down at the hatch. “You saw as well as I did. Parson put the fear of God into them.”

I looked past him at the river. “That wasn’t the fear of God, Asa.”

“They’ll be gentle as lambs, Captain. You’ll see.” He threw the cross-bolt open and stepped aside. “Call the all-hands down to them, sir. They’ll come to heel!”

Trist’s faith in Parson’s good works proved to be well founded. All twenty-two head came up orderly as you please, with their heads bent low and their wrists held out in front of them, as though positively eager for the chain. In a matter of moments the queues were coffled-up and ready. The faces of the niggers from the aft two holds looked sleepy and bewildered—; those from the bow looked as dead as cobblestones. They moved like dead men, too, once we got them moving. It took us the better part of an hour to reach the top of the bluff, but I can’t say I objected. If the Yellowjack was all it was rumored to be, most of them would breathe their last in old Pop Stacey’s pens. Who could fault them for regretting it a little?

The nearer we came to the top of the bluff, the more wooden their movements grew—: man followed man so mechanically you might have taken them for soldiers at a drill. “Quiet bunch,” Trist said as we rounded the last bend. I said nothing at all. The customs-house was close enough now that we could hear the flames lapping at its timbers and smell the sharp cloy of the boiling sap. I’d passed the house often on my visits, and had fallen into the habit of peering in—not a little enviously—at the clean, square parlor, and watching the customsmaster’s wife setting the table for breakfast, or for supper. I’d taken a fancy to that woman, and to the family I’d assigned her. Now they were dead, either in their rooms or on the street—: it was the custom during the worst bouts of Yellowjack to set afflicted homes on fire. As the coffles passed the house, its high slate roof commenced to shudder and bow, sending great hissing embers down onto the street. I began, with a calm born of my exhaustion and my pain, to weigh my odds of surviving the afternoon.

I was a different man than I was used to being. Nothing struck me as familiar, my own behavior least of all—; but that was only fitting. That day was to be the levering-point, the very pivot of my existence, and I knew it even then. This day must not be wasted, I said to myself. This day must be played out. I was both patient and resolute. I was, in a word,
decided.
I’d been brought back from the dead for a reason, after all—; and I intended to make good use of my reprieve.

If the fire in the customs-house had been set as a warning to passing boats—an illustration, however crude, of the disaster up in town— it might as well have been a match-flame. The sight that met our eyes as we came out onto Shelby Street could easily have been wrought by Moses. Hundreds of houses were in flames, and countless more had burnt down to their cellars—; the smoke from the combined conflagrations turned the mid-day sky the color of sodden brimstone. The citizens went about in perfect indifference to the smoke, to the fires, even to one another. Mountains of pulverized window-glass, roofingtile, dry-goods, offal, evening-gowns, gunny-sacks, and every other conceivable article of trade smoldered in the streets, festooned with the carbonized remains of shop-ledgers, mastiffs, bed-linens, saddles, daguerreotypes, and various other objects I did my solemn best not to recognize.

We’d come only four streets when we saw our first corpses—: three of them—another trinity—propped together at the intersection of Shelby and Union Streets like the legs to a looted end-table.

Their bodies were set back to back, each supported by the others, in a deliberate parody of wakefulness. I was reminded straight-away of Parson’s handiwork in the hold. Two were men, perhaps fifty years of age, and looked to have been dead for quite some time—; the third was a woman in the first flush of her youth. Her body had been stripped naked and doused with kerosene and an empty lantern lay beside her in the mud. The kerosene was freshly poured—: her belly and breasts shone under its glaze like preserved fruits in a jar.

“Damned waste of lamp-oil,” a passing citizen said tonelessly. He was dressed as if for Sunday service, all in pressed silks and linen, except that his feet were bare and caked up to the ankle-bones with ash. I made to speak to him but he walked away from us, into the looted skeleton of a shop, closing the shop-door conscientiously behind him.

I was staring after him, trying to puzzle out some sort of explanation for the man, the bodies, indeed for everything we’d seen, when Trist gave a tactful cough behind me. “Our charges seem to be coming to,” he said.

And so they were. The desolation and the stink hadn’t seemed to trouble them—; the sight of that trinity, however, laid out so artfully in the middle of the street, was beginning to do its work. I was certain now that it was Parson’s doing. Guessing the route that we would take, he chose, for some obscure reason of his own, to render it more scenic. But how had he found the time to assemble this little tableau? And why would he want to sabotage the run, so shortly after saving it from ruin? Out of contrariness, perhaps, or simply on a whim? Or possibly as a warning of some kind?

The thought struck me then that none of the fifty-seven head had been told about the Yellowjack, or even that the boat was bound for Memphis. Parson’s hoo-doo had sloughed off at last, and now the fact of the fever was breaking over them like surf.

Parson surely knew that this would happen, and decided it should happen here—: here, in the middle of a ruined city, with only Asa Trist to help me. Was this entire run, down to its last detail, only a baroque form of punishment for me, a penance paid out in advance against future crimes? Had the Redeemer guessed at my betrayal before I’d even thought of it myself? Had he
seen
it, plain as porridge, in my left eye?

The men in the nearest coffle were beginning to move nervously from side to side and to glance, almost shyly, into one another’s faces. A tinkling rose up along the coffle-chain as the hands grew restless in their shackles—: an innocent enough sound, on the face of it, but terrible in portent.

Trist, by contrast, was care-free as a dove.

“Doesn’t this put you out, Asa?” I whispered.

He grinned back at me. “No, Mr. Ball! It doesn’t. Not as such.”

“‘Not as such,’” I said to myself, turning the words over in my mouth. The phrase lingered in my mind, adding to my disquiet—; its blitheness was so wonderfully ill-suited to the Golgotha on every side.

We managed to get the coffles moving again, but it was tricky going. A few streets farther on, I found the perfect complement to Trist’s expression—: a bamboo-handled polo mallet, lovingly waxed and polished, lying in a puddle of iridescent yellow filth.

I glanced side-wise at Trist, meaning to point the mallet out to him, but what I saw made the words curdle in my throat. Trist’s eyes rested neither on me nor on the coffle nor on anything on God’s earth. They seemed less like eyes at all than like chips of milky bottle-glass, washed up by some caprice of the sea.

The rumors I’d heard about him came rushing back to me in a torrent. “Mind the coffles, Asa!” I said sharply, hoping to call him back from wherever he’d gone off to.

In place of an answer he held up his hat-box for me to admire. His face was flushed with a look of secret pleasure, as though he were sucking on a lump of sugar.

I gave a quiet curse and seized him by the shoulders. “We can’t have this, Asa! Not here! Do you hear me?”

“Dilly?” Trist said politely, turning as if to someone passing by.

“Who the devil are you talking to? There isn’t any—”

“I’ll be your Dante, Virgil!” Trist said, giggling into his hand. His eyes were back on mine, and they were lucid again—; he looked at me fondly for a time, then gave me a coquettish wink.

I decided, with all the force of desperation, that he’d simply been playing me for a fool. He was less an hysteric or a madman than a molly-coddled planter’s son—: he had to be. The alternative—at that moment, and in that place—was impossible to consider.

“No time for the classics just now, Asa, I’m afraid.” We’d halted at the crossing of Jefferson and Main. I looked back at the coffles, to see if any of the head were watching us—: all of them were, closely and intently.

“Take out your pistol, Asa,” I said quietly.

I smiled as I said it, hoping to give our audience the impression of business-as-usual. But even as Trist returned my smile—uncertainly, as though he were hard of hearing—the wistful look began to bloom again behind his features.

“No-one gets shot
today,
Captain!” he said, holding up his hands.

The change I saw gathering in his eyes was more frightening than the corpses in the street, than the coffle behind us, or even than the Yellowjack itself. I found myself gazing over Trist’s shoulder, unable to return his stare, desperate for something else to look at. On the far side of Jefferson Street three school-boys were smashing the windows of a rice-and-grain-depot—: their tools were a U.S. Army bugle, a dressmaker’s dummy, and the leg of a snow-white pianoforte.

“Give me that pistol, Asa,” I said, forcing my eyes back to his. “Where is it?”

A scrap of sobriety returned to him then—: his smile slid to the right and disappeared, like the moon on the face of a clock. “Is it—is it not in the case?” he stuttered, pushing the words across his tongue as if they were clots of dirt. No sooner had he said this, however, than both his eyes went perfectly blank—: I saw the pupils flare a final time, spasm, then seemingly vanish altogether.

This is the end of me, I thought, watching Trist sink to his knees. The Colonel had described his fits to me once—with obvious discomfort—and Kennedy had gleefully filled in the specifics. I prayed that the fifty-five niggers behind me hadn’t heard tell of them—; but it made not a whit of difference. What was happening to Trist was plain for all to see.

He gave a side-long jerk of the head, as though shooing away a fly, then set the hat-box down and undid its clasps. Keeping my good eye fixed on the coffles, I motioned to him to throw it open, thinking I might find his pistol there. The coffles still stood more or less in file—: only the first ten or fifteen head could see what he was about. I wondered how much longer they would bide. Not long, by the look of them. I’d just resolved to get them moving again, to make one last push to Pop Stacey’s, when Trist got the hat-box open and I stopped thinking about the Stacey, the coffles, and the entire city of Memphis altogether.

Packed together in the box’s velour-lined recesses, in neat, Linnaean rows, were vials and bottles of every conceivable color and description. Some were old kölnisch-water bottles—; others had once contained balms, perhaps, or menthe liqueurs. Each of them now held a dram of yellow fluid with a neatly cut square of what I first took to be oil-cloth suspended within it. Trist’s pistol was nowhere to be seen, but that was trivial to me now. The box had already yielded up its secret.