Canaan's Tongue (8 page)

Samuel Clemens.

June 8, 1860.

My Sweet Leah,

You may or may not care to hear about a rare type of character I met yesterdayon a pack steamer out of New Orleans—I will tell you about him anyhow. The boat was the
Culpepper,
bound for St. Paul, Minnesota (don’t you
have an aunty there, my little cockrobin?) and I discovered him drinking
sweet co fee and rootbitters in the pilot-house with none other than Horace
Bixby, whom I cubbed under on the
Paul Jones.
Bixby’s new cub was at the
wheel, sweating and mumbling to himself like I did on my first run, but Bixby
payed him no attention. In fact it took that old eggbeater a good quarter-hour
to privilege your Sam with so much as a nod, so immaculate was his devotion
to his guest. There wasn’t much for me to do but take a seat on the bench and
wait my turn. Thankfully I had the visitor to goggle at; and that passed the
time for me nicely.

I’ll try to describe him for you.

The man who held the monopoly on Bixby’s attentions wore a three-quarterhat bu fed to looking-glass brightness, a shirtfront entirely appropriate for a visit to the “Opéra de l’Epoche,” a carbuncle breast-pin, gloves of
white kid and boots of the butteriest patent leather. I nearly took him for the
“Dauphin” of France when I first caught sight of him. He sat perched like a
dove on the opposite bench; his English was fine, if a bit Creole in the delivery;
he supported his palms on a cane of lacquered teechee-wood. From top to bottom, hat included, he was no more than four and one-half feet in height.

At this point you’re sure to think this no different from my other sketches,
but I petition you (pussums!) for a half-dram of patience. Bixby took notice of
me at last, and answered my smile with a granitic nod, evidently with the idea
of sending me about my business; the dwarf, however, let it be known that he
would tolerate my presence. Now: when I cubbed under Horace “Gomorrah”
Bixby, damned to perdition if anybody got comfortable on his watch, let alone
(by Jesus!) presumed to direct traffic; Bixby’s pilot-box was his Eden. To see the
old tyrant dictated to under his own steam—by a frock-coated Tom Thumb,
no less!—was too much for me by half. I made a small, confused noise, loosened
my neck-tie, seized a lock of hair behind my ear and twisted with all my
might. I was not, judging by the result, asleep; neither was I in my cups.
Meanwhile, the conversation—such as it was—continued. All I could do was
listen in astonishment.

The talk ran along the usual channels for a time; by and by it turned to
negroes. Bixby said something to the effect that a darky’s worth proceeds from
the weight of sack he’s able to carry without discomfort; he imagined himself,
quite reasonably, to be speaking for us all. But Tom Thumb begged to differ.

“Some men of note, Mr. Bixby, equate the black race with the renegade
angels mentioned in Leviticus, who lusted after the daughters of Men, and
were cast out of Heaven on account of it.” He raised his co fee-cup
thoughtfully to his lips. “From that point of view, the best measure of a darky—”
(he lingered over the word, rolling it about on his tongue, delighting in it)
“—would be the number of our daughters, mistresses, and wives that he has
bedded.”

A slack-jawed silence fell. The sound of the paddlewheel rose up loud as
thunder through the floor. I tried to guess, from the dwarf ’s expression, how
he meant this speech to be received—; but I found his face expressionless. After
perhaps a minute’s time, with no small expenditure of e fort, Bixby stammered:

“I can hardly concur with such—” (here he fell silent for a moment,
gnashing his teeth) “—I could never—” (another splenetic stammer) “—Never
conscience such a—”

“I quite agree, Mr. Bixby,” the dwarf interrupted. “No penalty could be
too severe in such cases.”

“Certainly not,” said Bixby. His face was the color of a pomegranate.

“I don’t believe I’ve met your young associate. . . ?”

Bixby took a breath. “That’s Clemens, sir. One of my old cubs.”

The dwarf winked at me. “What’s your opinion, Mr. Clemens?”

As I was incapable of rational speech by then, I simply shrugged my shoulders.He nodded and set his cup back on its saucer.

“I apologize, gentlemen, if I’ve led us into muddied waters. Theology is
an inexact science, I’m afraid.” He sighed. “Perhaps a dose of chemistry might
help us in our quandary.”

“I see no quandary,” Bixby murmured, staring off into the distance. “A
gallows is quickly made.”

“An acquaintance of mine—Asa Trist, of Cane River—you know him,
perhaps, Mr. Clemens? He is about your age.”

“By name, sir,” I managed to reply. In fact Trist is well known on the
river as an epileptic and a fool.

“As I was saying: this young man, since his earliest boyhood of a scientific
bent, has made an exhaustive study of the human dermis, taking samples of
about so—” (he held his thumb and forefinger perhaps a half an inch apart)
“—from financiers and flatboatmen, priests and prostitutes alike. Some of his
samples were taken in the grandest houses of New Orleans; a sizable number
come from his own slaves. Immediately on taking a ‘cutting,’ as he terms it, he
places it in a solution of one part saltpeter to two parts extract of albumen.” He
paused to examine his glovetips. “A preservative solution, he informs me. I
wonder if either of you can guess what happens next.”

Bixby and I remained speechless. The cub made a great show of interest in
the river.

“No guesses?” said the visitor, in a voice that made it clear that he’d
expected none. “Permit me to enlighten you!” His round cheeks puckered with
excitement. “Mr. Trist has found, in every case, that the sample sheds a fine—
one might almost say, a negligible—layer of particles into the astringent mixture,exposing a fundamental pigment that is blacker than the night your
mothers, gentlemen, were so fortunate as to conceive you.”

This was too much for Bixby at last. “Nay, sir—; nay. I will not
tolerate—”

“Tut, tut!” the little man said, holding up a finger. “We are each of us a
darky, gentlemen; science has spoken. Au revoir!”

He hopped nimbly from the bench, snatched up his cane and disappeared
down the ladder. Bixby immediately turned the whole of his attention to the
e forts of his cub, not so much as twirling his whiskers at me for the
remainder of the run.

Picture my surprise when I discovered, that same afternoon, that I’d been
exchanging pleasantries with the notorious slave bandit Thaddeus Murel, and
furthermore that he owned the boat, from the boiler to the watch on Bixby’s
fob!

The Punch-Line.

ISLAND 37 WAS THE CRADLE OF THE TRADE, Virgil says. But the Trade had no need of a cradle any longer.

The island was a much-fabled port of call—; not every steam-boat would put in there. When the state of Louisiana was chartered, it laid claim “to the mid-point of the river,” and the state of Mississippi “to the channel”—; a simple enough division, on the face of it. Six years later, however, a rogue thumb of current carved a long, flat sliver out of the Mississippi mainland, well out into the river but short of the mid-point by half a mile. The new-born island belonged as much to one state as to the other, and owed allegiance, by law, to neither. It was a country to itself.

Decades passed, and the residents of the thirty-seventh island upstream from New Orleans—an overnight passage by steam-ship— grew down-right cozy in their solitude. The absence of law, not to mention tax-collectors, made it a haven for fugitives of every stripe. For the Redeemer, of course, it was paradise itself. In no time at all 37 had become his play-pen, and he—as a matter of course—had become its Lord Regent. He had no further need to scour the country-side for suckers, he was fond of declaring—; on 37 the suckers came to him, and they came politely.

The sailing-bell rang behind me and the
Vesuvius
hove off. The pilot’s name was Henderson—a Scotchman—and he’d been a share-holder from the beginning. The Redeemer had got ahold of him the same way he’d gotten all of us—: partly by blind chance, partly by design, feeling his way like a crawdad toward his present empire.

No-one was waiting to meet me on the freshly white-washed pier, which didn’t surprise me much—: it was going on six, and the fleshpots at the top of the bluff would be packed to overflowing. The neat white shacks along the water glowed prettily against the bank, their shuttered porches flickering like paper lamps—; here and there a sullen-faced boy or an old woman would nod to me as I passed. For all one could see or hear from the landing itself, 37 was a sweet-water hamlet like any other.

The sleepiness of the water-front never failed to charm me. As always, I felt a quiet temptation to find some ragged pallet in an empty room, hang up my coat, and delay my interview as long as possible. Had I examined this desire, my reluctance to keep my appointment might have struck me as curious—; but I did not examine it. After a few instants’ hesitation I went on up the slope to meet with my Redeemer.

I found him in his usual warren in the basement of the “Panama House” saloon, holding court before six or seven flat-boat roughs of the sort you’d be more likely to stumble over in some piss-soaked alley than meet with on the river. The week before, it had been a clutch of Presbyterian clergy-men—; the week before that, Mandarin Chinese. The clambering vines of our “corporation”—as the Redeemer had come to call it—left no patch of light uncourted. Rumors had even begun to circulate that some of the finest houses in the South—and above the Mason-Dixon Line, as well—were serving as its trellises.

You’d never have guessed it, however, from the gathering in the Panama House that night. The boat-men were sitting in a clump on the straw-battened floor, passing a pail of rotten-smelling shine between them—; a riper bunch of gallows-apples could not have been got together. The Redeemer sat cross-legged on a padded stool he’d had specially made in Baton Rouge, presiding over the goings-on like a wax saint in a crèche. Smoke from Chinese incense and skunk-weed cigars closed the room in like a tent—; whatever compulsion I’d felt to present myself vanished completely. I was about to turn to go when the Redeemer caught sight of me.

“Virgil!” he sang out, granting me that particular smile—at once conspiratorial and shy—that never failed to convince me that my most private thoughts were known to him. “Come sit down with our friends from the Butternut Society.”

“Beg pardon, sir—; I’d rather not.”

He’d developed an acute sensitivity to my moods over the years, and an even stronger indifference to them—; tonight, however, proved a rare exception. Leaning to one side, as if to get his head around the smoke, he studied my face for a moment, then slid down off his stool, bowed to his guests, and led me wordlessly upstairs. We passed through the bar like spirits, side-stepping the first bowie-fight of the evening, and continued up to the second floor, where a small suite of rooms had been set aside for Trade affairs. The Redeemer lit a candle, motioned to me to shut the door, then guided me by the wrist—as one might lead a debutante in a quadrille—to a table flanked by two low chairs.

“Well, dear Kansas!” he said at last. (We were both still on our feet—: the table and chairs had a definite purpose in our ritual, and its moment had not yet come.) “Well!” he said again.

“How runs the Trade, sir?”

“Weakly, Virgil. Totteringly.”

This answer took me quite aback—: the usual response was “ineluctably,” “indefatigably,” or some equally luxurious term.

“What is it, sir? Have the returns let up?”

“Oh, the
returns
are right enough! It’s nothing
fiscal.
” He smiled in a melancholy way, and tugged once—pensively—on his right ear.

My alarm deepened. “Tell me, sir! What is it?”

He made a delicate gesture of regret. “Politics, Virgil, since you press me.” His eyes met mine for an instant, then slid dolefully away. “I have it on good authority that we’re to be voted out of office.”

“What—! The Trade?” My voice rang out stupidly in the empty room. “I wasn’t aware—beg pardon, sir—that we’d ever been elected.”

A look of genuine bitterness crept into his eyes. “A poor choice of phrase, Kansas. Forgive me.” He went quiet for a time, then added softly—: “You can leave a man hoeing in a field his health, his hoe, and his liberty,
mon frère.
But that won’t do much good if the field’s pulled out from under him.”

I said nothing for a time, attempting, as I so often did, to sift for meaning in his blather. “The Abolitionists, sir?” I said at last.

He nodded. “Between those righteous angels above us, dear K, and the plantationers below, this
confrérie
of ours”—peppering his conversation with Frenchisms was a recent affectation of his—“may soon run out of runaways!”

I blinked at this a moment. “How, for God’s sake?”

“Through the complete and utter abolishment of slavery, both in the territories and the states.”

I let out an uneasy laugh. “Respectfully, sir, you can’t believe all the rubbish that gets talked downstairs. You’ve been holed up in this back-water too long. Nobody I’ve come across is ready to toe the Federal line—; not yet.” I shook my head decidedly. “They’d prefer to die.”

“They may have to,” the Redeemer said. When I tried to speak again he hushed me with a flutter of his kid-gloved hands.

“Enough talk. Let’s proceed.”

“But you can’t actually credit—”

The hand flew up again. “
Repose,
Virgil! Cultivate repose.” He frowned at me a moment. “I may be ‘holed up’ here, as you say—; but the world is so obliging as to come to
me.
It tells me things, on our little tête-à-têtes, and I listen very closely.” He stepped up to the table and motioned to me to sit. “Those boys down in the cellar, for example. Six butternuts from Indiana, and they’re saying the same thing as associates of ours in Boston, Baltimore, Louisville, even the capital itself—; everywhere, in fact, but in these god-forsaken swamps. Do you understand me, Virgil?
Word for word.
Sit down, now—; there’s a boy. I’ll be back
tout de suite.
”

I did as I was told. The notion of abolition, however—the
possibility
of it, better said—had worked itself under my hide. “You seem to be listening to everybody but the people around you, sir,” I said at last. “The South will never stand for it. The idea that anyone would endorse—”

“They won’t need to endorse so much as a theater ticket,” the Redeemer replied. “The country we fatten ourselves on thinks of itself as a
democracy,
Virgil. Have you forgotten?”

“You know as well as I do, sir, that this country is a—”

“Nebraska and Kansas are to come into the Union as free states,” he said, cutting me short. “I received word this morning.”

I sat back in my chair, dumb-struck. I’d just come from New Orleans, and would certainly have heard such news down there, if anyone had known it—: there would have been rioting in the streets. “You got
word
—?”

The Redeemer nodded absently, as if the fact held little interest for him. “Don’t get into the habit, dear K, of letting your mouth hang open. An open mouth indicates feebleness of character—; it is also well known to affect the teeth.”

“I should very much like to know, sir, who you’re getting these reports from, and whether they’re in any position to give reliable, well-founded—”

But the Redeemer only turned on his heels in that odd pirouette of his, and said to me melodiously as he waltzed out of the room—: “So long as the present constellation of states persists—the Yankees fat and nimble, the South condescended to at every turn—then our way of
life,
dear K—” (and here he winked over his shoulder, as a vaudevillian might to an offstage admirer) “—remains permanently
en péril
!”

With that I was left to my disbelief. The fight over the territories had been raging for years, and I’d stopped paying attention long since. But the Redeemer was right on one score, at least—: the admittance of Kansas and Nebraska as free states would tip the balance of power irresistibly, irrecoverably toward the North. In time, the holding of slaves would be outlawed throughout the Union. It would take years— perhaps even decades—for the change to come about—; but come about it would, sure as pox and watered beer.

The Abolitionists were the cause of it—: the Abolitionists with their mirthless, glassy rhetoric, their funerary tastes in clothing and amusement, and their Bible that resembled our own in every outward respect but seemed the testament of an entirely different deity. The Trade ate away at the foundations of the South, of course—; but it took care only to nibble. That the Abolitionists (whose existence—irony of ironies!—made our enterprise possible) might actually
succeed
was an idea I’d never once credited. They’d always seemed too starched, too prim, too shrill to catch the fancy of the country. But things were changing everywhere you looked—; you felt it even on Island 37. The country itself was getting shriller, and the Abolitionists fervid speechifying was taking on the ring of prophecy.

I was floundering in this and other worries when the Redeemer reappeared, carrying a quill, a palm-sized note-book, and a penny-box of matches. He set the matches beside the candle on the table.

“Is it right?” he asked, as ritual required.

I shook my head. “It’s not right,” I replied.

Deliberately, silently, he moved the candle to the left, rotating it counter-clockwise as he did so.

“Is it right?” he asked again, more softly than before.

I took in a careful breath. “Yes,” I said. “It’s right.”

He smiled and snuffed the candle with his fingers. The room fell at once into a heavy, violet darkness. I made no effort to clear my mind of its usual clutter, to compose myself, or to locate the Redeemer in the room. I simply sat as I was and waited. The sound of the bar below us gradually fell away. The darkness thickened and set.

“I’m ready,” I said, straightening.

No sooner had I spoken than there came a sharp
pop
! and the head of a match flared to life a hand’s breadth from my left eye. If a powder-keg had caught fire in my left eye-socket the pain could have been no greater. I cursed and gnashed my teeth and cried aloud to heaven. The flame remained as it was for perhaps three seconds more—; then it sputtered and went out.

For a time there was only a hexagram of light in my left eye, and a rhombus of vaguer color in my right—; then, creepingly at first, but with ever-greater speed, a net of green sparks spread across my sight.

“What is it?” came the Redeemer’s voice.

“A six-pointed star. With a net drawn across it.”

“What color is the net?”

“Green.”

“Green? You’re sure?”

“Yes. Green and rust-colored.”

A pause. The sound of a quill being scraped against a cup. The smell of India-ink.

“And the net? Also green?”

“Yes. The net is fading now.”

“Does the star remain?”

“Yes. It’s beginning to turn.”

“Clock-wise?”

“Yes. Wait—: there’s a cloud behind it.”

“What color?”

“Yellow.”

Another pause. The rustling of paper. “Yellow, you said?”

“Yes. It’s already gone.”

“What now?”

“Nothing. Gray lines on a grid.”

“Is it the old grid?”

I opened my eyes with a sigh. “Same as ever.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” the Redeemer said smugly.

Now the candle was lit again, and slid closer to me, and I bent slowly forward till my eye was at its flame.

“What is it?” the Redeemer whispered.

I brought my eye closer still, so close that my brow began to prickle from the heat. The brightness was so severe that I could feel the flickering and bucking of the flame, like a curious finger-tip, on the lining of my brain.

“The net,” I said quickly. “The flare. The yellow cloud.” I paused a moment. “The same star as before.”

“What else?”

I sat back with a groan. “That’s all.”

The Redeemer nodded and closed his book. “Was there pain?” he said, touching my forehead lightly with two fingers.

I cursed him silently. “You know there was.”

“How much?”

“There was pain,” I said. I brushed his hand away.

“You’re becoming more sensitive,” he murmured, touching my face again. Something I’d seen had excited him—; that much was clear. “More pain with the candle, or more with the match?”

“More with the candle,” I said. “With the candle it was as much as I could bear.”