Canaan's Tongue (17 page)

I said nothing for a time. “That’s a fairy-story,” I said finally. “You’re farting into the breeze.”

“What would you say if I told you I’d heard that ‘fairy-story,’ as you term it, from the
chief
of the Nauva-Hoo nation?”

“You’ve never met a Nauva-Hoo in your life,” I said. “It’s Nauva-
Ho,
first of all. And they’ve long since been driven into the mountains.”

Morelle only shrugged. “Disregard the Nauva-Hoos then, if you like. The
rub
of my little parable is this—: the eagle of history sheltered them, in their hour of greatest need, in the crick of its great black wing. And it will do the same for us, Virgil, if we only let it.” His eyes snapped shut. “I see that mighty eagle coming, Kansas. I see its shadow sweeping towards us. Close your eyes for an instant—: both of them. Can’t you see it too?”

“It looks more like a buzzard to me,” I said.

“A
buzzard
then, if you prefer.” He opened his eyes and sighed. “You
do
see that it’s the only way left to us, don’t you? To the Trade?”

The mention of that word, grown so hateful to me since Memphis, brought my fists out of my pockets. I had only one question left.

“Will it be at Fort Sumter?”

There was no way he could have overlooked the violence in me now. He stepped to one side and gave me a thin, proud smile.

“You
have
had a vision, haven’t you! If so, then you must know that there’s no way of stopping things—none whatsoever—once the black ball gets to spinning. Things that
may
happen don’t appear in it—; once you see them they’re as good as done already.” His face clouded for a moment. “Not that I can see why you’d
want
to put a stop to things. What’s come over you, dear K?”

“Will it be Sumter?” I said again. In my mind’s eye he was already at the bottom of the river. A noise had sprung up somewhere behind me—the scream of a steam-whistle, shivering and shrill—but I paid it no attention. One hard push and I’d be free. “Is it going to happen there?”

He chuckled at this and wagged a finger. “Didn’t Beauregard explain things, google-eye? Didn’t he spell things out for you?”

The whistle blew again, much louder than before. “I’m not here on Beauregard’s account,” I murmured.

“What?” Morelle said, bringing a hand up to his ear.

“Beauregard never sent me!” I shouted, seizing him by the collar. To my astonishment he was heavy as a boulder.

Morelle looked up at me disdainfully. “Don’t touch people, Kansas, when you have occasion to address them. Catching people by the arms or shoulders, or nudging them to attract attention, is a violation of good breeding. It can’t help but provoke—”

“I’m here for Clementine! For
Clem,
you ghastly little thing,” I cried, meaning these to be the last words he would ever hear. Heavy as he was, I hauled him inch by inch toward the water’s edge. He put up no resistance whatsoever.

The steam-boat was close enough now that I could hear shouts coming from its deck.

“Why are you blubbering, Kansas?” Morelle asked gently.

“Shut your mouth!” I gasped. I was weeping freely now.

“Afraid you’ll never see your Clem again? Is that it?”

I tried to speak, to shut his mouth, to hurl him into the current—; but all I could manage was a groan of pent-up misery.

“In that event, take heart!” Morelle said brightly, slipping free of my arms. “Turn yourself about, dear K, and welcome her!”

The groan died in my throat. My head turned smoothly, like a weather-vane, to face the approaching steamer. Clem was there on the hurricane deck, her face as empty as a well—; Parson stood to one side of her, supporting her triumphantly by the elbow. Harvey cowered to her left. Clem looked neither at me nor at Morelle nor at the landing, and I saw by the dullness in her eyes that she was looking at nothing on God’s earth.

“A precautionary measure, in the event of war,” Morelle said, stepping past me. “Try to be brave and accept it, Virgil. As a Nauva-Hoo might do.”

William H. Seward,
Sec.
of
State.

THE MISSIVE WAS BROUGHT TO MY CHAMBERS still sealed in its envelope of foolscap—; I forwarded it to the Butternut’s office without delay. That afternoon, when I rapped at his door, I found him reclining in his mole-skin chair with a camphored handkerchief draped over his face. Lloyd Harris, his aide-de-camp, was reading to him with sleepy fatalism from
Paradise Lost,
Book VII. Harris shot me a desperate smile as I entered. From the looks of him, I reckoned they’d begun at Book I sometime before dawn.

Neither of us spoke for a goodly while after Harris left. The handkerchief remained
in status quo
across the bridge of his great Illinoian nose.

“Damn this April pollen,” he said finally, pulling it off his face.

“Has there been no change, Mr. President?” I said. “I’d hoped the rain of the past night might have brought some small abatement.”

“Abatement your granny,” the Butternut said, mopping at his nose.

“You’ve been reading Milton, I see.”

“Lloyd’s been reading, Mr. Seward. I’ve been doing my damnedest to drain my ducts.” He sniffed and sat forward, keeping his handkerchief at the ready. “Marvelous stuff. We’ll have to see to importing it to Illinois.”

“Yes indeed, Mr. President. Milton certainly is one of the pillars. At Exeter we had to learn it forwards and backwards, one canto after—”

“I was referring to the
camphor,
Mr. Seward.” He sniffed again, more profoundly. “They bring it over here from France.”

“Of course, Mr. President.” I paused. “I’ve come to see whether you found a chance to look over the letter I forwarded.”

He gathered up a sheaf of colored papers and made a fan of them, holding them up for me to see. He had yet to glance in my direction. “Which of these epics was it?”

“The briefest of them, I’d hazard,” I said, keeping my patience masterfully. “The quote from Revelations.”

He sighed and sat back in his chair. “I did read that one, as it happens. I was just asking myself which of my cabinet members could have forwarded me such a sterling specimen of the poet’s art.”

“Respectfully, Mr. President, I hade ample reason to forward it.”

He repositioned the handkerchief across his face. “Go on then, Mr. Secretary. Read it aloud.”

I took the letter from the heap in front of him and, bringing it close to my eyes, as I was without my enlarging lenses, read—:

A PROCLAMATION FROM THE LOWLY
TO THE PALACE OF THE PROUD.

REVELATIONS 13 : 6 —

AND THEY WORSHIPPED THE DRAGON WHICH GAVE POWER TO THE BEAST. AND THEY WORSHIPPED THE BEAST, SAYING, WHO IS LIKE UNTO THE BEAST? WHO IS ABLE TO MAKE WAR WITH HIM?

AND IT IS GIVEN TO HIM TO MAKE WAR WITH THE SAINTS, AND TO OVERCOME THEM: AND POWER WAS GIVEN HIM OVER ALL KINDREDS, AND NATIONS, AND OVER ALL TONGUES.

WHOEVER HAS EARS TO HEAR, LET HIM.

I let the paper fall flutteringly to the desk-top, and waited in silence for him to hand down a tablet from on high.

He said nothing for a time. I suppose that he was weighing matters to himself. “From our friend, I presume?”

“It would seem to have that flavor.”

“He doesn’t have his scripture right, I think.”

“That’s just the flavor I was referring to, sir.”

He chortled at this. His breath made the handkerchief furl and flutter. “Well, Mr. Seward? What do you make of his latest?”

“He doesn’t seem too pleased with the bi-partisan nature of the new commission,” I said, keeping my expression grave.

“Damn right of him. He shouldn’t be.” The Butternut gave a grunt of satisfaction. “They tell me there was a moment of silence in certain gentlemen’s clubs in this city, when news of our commission got round to them.”

“I hadn’t heard that, sir.”

“I can very well imagine, Mr. Secretary, that our friend wouldn’t be too pleased.”

I cleared my throat. “We expected no less, it’s true—”

“You needn’t have sent me this scrap of fol-de-rol at all, in fact. We expect to do quite a bit more than
upset
Mr. Murel, with the cooperation of our colleagues in the down-river states.” He gathered the handkerchief up in his fist. “I have great faith in this project, as you well know, to heal our legislature’s wounds.”

I allowed him perhaps ten seconds of complacency. Then I said—: “There were circumstances to the receipt of this letter, Mr. President, that convinced me to send it along to you.”

Another grunt, this time of exasperation. “Well? What in Moses were they?”

“The letter did not come to us through the post,” I said carefully.

“Not by post?” He was looking at me curiously now, snot-rag a crumple in his right hand, his wood-cutter’s features mustering into a frown. “Was it brought to you on mule-back? By carrier-pigeon? How?”

He waited impatiently for my reply, and I took my sweet time framing it. I confess I savored the occasion not a little.

“You’ll observe, Mr. President, that there is no stamp—indeed, no marking of any kind—on the exterior. The letter came to me in a cover of cream-colored araby paper, the sort our own memoranda are printed on.”

I allowed this clutch of details a moment to take roost in the topmost membrane of his mind, before pre-empting the question that was just then forming on his tongue—:

“That’s right, sir. This letter was—if not written, then at the very least transcribed—by a member of our own staff.”

“Huh!” said the Butternut. He looked me over for a time. Lloyd Harris ducked his head in—apprehensively, it seemed to me—and the Butternut waved him dourly away. At length he heaved a sigh and spoke.

“Mr. Seward, I know that you are embittered at having been passed over for the nomination, and that you accepted your secretaryship only under protest. I’m acquainted, furthermore, with the assortment of nick-names you’ve bestowed upon me. I know all this—; and I begrudge you none of it.”

I bowed to him politely. “That’s gracious of you, sir.”

“But if I ever came to believe that you were involved in—
flirtations,
of any kind whatsoever, with these god-forsaken nigger-mongers—”

“Quite so, Mr. President,” I said, cutting him short. “I should expect a swift and righteous punishment to follow. I thank Providence each day—to be frank with you, sir—that I have never been so tempted.”

I bowed a second time, paying his consternation no mind, and shuffled out of the room, bowing a third time from the corridor, like a mandarin at the Imperial Court of Han. Harris—waiting just outside—looked on in amazement. Let the Butternut think what he likes, I thought. I haven’t felt so light of heart in ages.

Ambling back to my office, replaying the scene in my mind, I murmured a quiet thanks to that lunatic midget and all of his doomed confederates. I entreated that the Lord might have mercy on them, insofar as it was feasible—; I was confident that their countrymen would not.

Leaded Glass.

THE WAR CAME TO ME IN STOCKINGED FEET, says Clementine.

I’d been on 37 less than a week when the guns fired on Fort Sumter. It was the R—— himself brought me the news. I was sitting in the room they had put me in, staring up at the rafters. The room had only one window and it was too high to see out of. The R—— came in with Kennedy and bowed to me. “You should have kept your appointment with me, Clementine,” he said. “You hurt me by your disappearance. And with Virgil Ball, no less.”

“My appointment with you was the half the reason I left,” I said. “You turn my guts.”

“Yes.” He sighed.

I looked up at the rafters.

“We seem to be at war,” he said after a moment. “Our nation.”

“Who with?”

His face furrowed. “With
ourselves,
Miss Gilchrist, as I understand it.”

I raised my eyes to his. I wanted to hurt him, to shame him with my look. I could feel the babe kicking and twisting inside me though it was too early yet by half. I’ve known for twenty days, I reminded myself, keeping my eyes on the R——. For twenty days I have been a family.

“Where’s Virgil?” I asked. I asked this every day.

The R—— only smiled.

“Gone,” said Kennedy. He came and squatted at my feet, meaning to frighten me. “Gone as last week. Gone as he can be.”

I spat onto the floor. I’d meant to hit him on the cheek.

“Mr. Kennedy doesn’t mean to pain you, Clem,” the R—— said. His voice was mild as honey. It slid across me like a fiddle-bow and stilled the feeling of the babe, the feeling of too soon. In spite of myself I wanted that damn bow to keep on fiddling.

“Clem,” said the R——, “Virgil is away on business. Virgil is away and I can’t say, exactly, when he will return. Until that time you must think of us—Mr. Kennedy and myself—not only as your servants, but as your kin.”

“I have all the kin I need,” I said. I cursed him levelly, my eyes never straying from his own. I cursed old Tesla for letting Harvey come and take me. I cursed Goodman Harvey for his trickery. Then I cursed the R—— again, louder and leveler than before.

“Speak ill of me if you must,” the R—— said. “But don’t speak ill of Mr. Tesla. He treated you generously, I believe.”

“How did you find me?” I said. “So blessed quick. Less than a day. And with so little fuss. You must have paid that damn Jew plenty.”

“Of course we paid him,” the R—— said. “But it didn’t come
too
dear, if that’s your worry. And as for fuss, there was none at all. Virgil had explained things in advance.”

“Virgil—had—explained,” I said. This was a lie, of course. But I could hear from the sound of my voice that I believed it. My face and neck went hot, as they do each time I apprehend a truth. I stumbled in that instant over all manner of ideas, and by the time I found it in me to answer I’d already taken his lie for gospel. He’d convinced me with his child’s mouth, wet and round and graceful. I believed what he said before I’d even understood it.

It was always that way with the R——.

So Virgil left me with Tesla as a token to the R——, I thought. A token he’d return. Like the silver hoops he passes out to his niggers. It made no sense, of course—; not then or after. But I believed it.

“The old man, his Jewy uncle,” Kennedy said. “He sent word where you were hid.”

“And that you were ill,” the R—— added.

“Ill?” I said. My head was running over with voices. The echo of the R——’s voice was loudest and behind it was Virgil’s voice and behind Virgil’s was my own, fear run through it like stitching through a hem. Ill? I thought. Is that how Virgil thinks of it?

The R—— and his monkey-butler of an Irishman said nothing. The R—— stood with his head cocked to one side. Exactly like a spaniel, I thought. But the thought didn’t help me much.

I believed that Virgil had given me to them but I didn’t understand it. Not yet.

“I’m confident you’ll recover, Clementine,” the R—— said. He gave me half a wink. “In a matter of six or seven months.
N’est-ce pas?
”

“I’m sure Virgil didn’t ask you to keep me locked up in this room,” I said.

The R—— nodded.

“What?”

“You’ve never visited Island 37 before, Mademoiselle—”

“I never was invited.”

He nodded again. “That’s right. And with good reason. This island may offer refuge, of sorts, from the United States government—”

“Govern
ments,
” Kennedy interrupted. “There’s two guh!—guh!— governments now. The Union and the other.”

“Quite,” the R—— said. The honey went out of his voice, talking to Kennedy. But he recovered it for me. “For that very reason, however, this refuge of ours holds an attraction for persons you’d not much care to come across unaccompanied. You might be mistaken for—”

“What I am, Mr. Morelle?” I said.

“What you are, Clementine, is a vision,” he said. “And you know it all too well.”

The look on his face put me on my guard. Later I’d come to despise Virgil Ball with all my might, but just then I imagined he was dear to me. So I studied the R—— long and hard. I’d never have believed that Virgil would give his family to such a man. I never would have credited it. I sat quiet on my bench and looked at the R——, trying to make out what Virgil adored in him.

His voice, I decided. His voice and the way he moved through the world, sure and full of spite for earthly things. The child Jesus might have moved that way, or John the Baptist. The end of the world in the body of a boy.

That afternoon they brought Parson for a visit. I hadn’t caught sight of him since we’d got off ship but I’d known that he was still about. You could see it in their faces when he was.

Parson came into the room and sat Indian-legged on the floor. He sat himself down in a dainty way, spreading his skirts like an old madame. He was so long in the body that his flat gray eyes were on a level with my own. My face began to chill at the sight of him.

“Afternoon, Parson,” I said in a careless voice. The R—— and Kennedy stood watching from the hall. From time to time an old woman doddered past with a slop-bucket in her hands.

“Afternoon, Miss Gilchrist,” Parson said, taking a fat-bellied mouse out of his pocket.

I kept my face slack, watching the mouse wriggling in Parson’s palm, working its wet gray nose into the gaps between his fingers.

“It looks to be in the way of having children,” I said.

“I found it on my way to see you,” Parson said. His voice was high and matronly. “It was building a nest under the stairs.”

I smiled at him. “What do you want with it?”

“For you to see it, miss. That’s all.”

“I’ve seen enough of mice, thank you.” I made a face. “I’ve no interest in her, Parson.”

“Do tell,” Parson said. Without another word he set the mouse on the floor and slipped a cork-soled slipper off his foot. He pursed his shriveled lips and brought the heel down on the mouse’s skull.

“Don’t!
Oh!
OH!” I hollered, feeling a knot of sickness loosening in my belly. The mouse’s head burst and a grayish jelly shot from its mouth onto the floor. I twisted my body to the left and vomited.

“She is with child,” Parson announced, sliding the slipper back onto his foot. “Five weeks gone.”

I looked up to find the R—— at my side. He took a yellow damask kerchief from his vest and gave it to me. Then he turned on Parson with a face gone gray with anger. “You disgust me,” he said. “I asked you to discover if the girl was sick.”

Parson heaved a sigh. “I have.”

“Abomination!” the R—— shrieked. “Out of my sight!”

“As you like,” Parson said. In another instant he’d gone, pulling the door shut behind him.

The R—— sat down beside me and folded his hands as if we were in a church. I hadn’t been fooled by his charade but it had pleased me just the same. “Please accept my apologies, Clem,” he said. “Parson has a prejudice toward your profession.”

I gave him a crooked smile. “If he’d brought a possum to step on, or a suckling pig, you might have found out the name of the father.”

“I know his name well enough,” the R—— said. He leaned across and kissed me on the nose.

“No!” I said, elbowing him away. “You’re wrong. It’s Virgil’s.”

All he did was cluck. “You’re sure?”

“I haven’t let any other gentleman spend,” I said. “Not without precautions.”

This didn’t put him out a bit. “Virgil Ball is not a gentleman,” he said, nuzzling my ear.

That was the beginning of it.

We sat together for a while and I began to feel better. He asked if I felt well enough to go for a walk. A constitutional, he said. A brief excursion. I reminded him that he had cautioned me the island was a dangerous place.

“It is, Miss Gilchrist,” he said, helping me to my feet. “It is, to the unescorted.”

We went downstairs and I stopped to admire the leaded-glass window above the bar. A scene was depicted on it, in leaves of lazuli and green, and I asked him what it was. He blew out the lantern sitting on the bar-top that I might see the picture better. This is what I saw—:

Two men sat on hour-glass-shaped stools under a low dark sky. The one on the right looked something like a young Simon of the desert, with long matted hair in curls. The one on the left I took for a likeness of Parson. Behind him, in the shadow of a little bush, a lapiscolored man was climbing out of the mouth of a sparrow.

The R—— took my hand and said—:

“That is Nachiketa being interviewed by the Prince of Death.”

“It’s been some time since I read my scripture,” I said. I felt small and mildewish in front of that panorama. The red of the clouds, the high green grass, the blue of the figures on their chairs brought tears to my face and I felt myself to be looking through a paper screen onto a finer world than our own. The colors began to lap together along the edges of my sight and this made the picture more beautiful even than before.

“Scripture wouldn’t help you, Clementine,” the R—— said. “This story was left out of the Good Book, on account of being too old-fashioned. You might say it comes from the
Old
Old Testament.”

I let the light from the picture fall on me. “Tell me the story,” I said.

The R—— took a breath. “Nachiketa, the son of a prosperous farmer, is sent by his father as an offering to Death. Death is out when he arrives, and Nachiketa waits unattended for five days. When Death finally returns, he apologizes for his impoliteness and offers Nachiketa a boon. Nachiketa asks Death for the secret of everlasting life.”

“Is that what’s in the picture?” I asked. “Is he being told?”

The R—— nodded. “Death says there are two choices open to the seeker—: to repeat this life—with all its agonies and pratfalls—in one body after another, or to renounce the pleasant for the good, vanity for the real, and thereby pass into eternity.”

I closed my eyes, trying to follow. When I opened them I said—: “Is that him? On the right?”

“Nachiketa?” the R—— said. “Yes.”

“Which does he choose?”

The R—— gave a laugh. “The second path, of course. Nachiketa lets all vanity fall away.” He turned his back to the bar and rested his shoulders against it. “You might say I had that window fashioned as a reminder to myself.” He brushed my cheek with the back of his hand. “Or possibly as a caution.”

I’d never before thought of the R—— as having religion. “What do you mean?”

“Only that I, in my life, have never failed to prefer the pleasant to the good. The idea of repeating this existence of ours, with all its countless disappointments, is a delightful one to me. Had I been Nachiketa’s father, I’d have wished him god-speed on his voyage to eternity and drunk his health that night at the nearest house of fun.”

He tipped the lantern on its side and lit it. The window paled but it was still a glory. I looked at the R—— in dim-witted wonder that he could love the pain of life so dearly, and at the same time I understood that this love was at the root of his power over Virgil, over the rest of his company, over me.

“I have need of a
successor,
Clementine. I may not live forever, but the Trade will—; I’m convinced of that.” He turned to me. “That’s why I take such an interest in you. In you,
chère Mademoiselle,
and in that babe you carry.”

I remembered now who it was beside me. I let out a bitter laugh. “Have you taken to breeding your lackeys now, Thaddeus? Aren’t you finding enough in the quimhouses and saloons?”

“Ah! Clementine.” He brought the lantern close to his face, that I might better see his eyes. They shone like candle-flames. “
This
child would be no lackey. This child would be master of this country—; master of this country, and of me.”

I said nothing, only looked from his face to the beautiful window, then back to his face again.

He took me by the arm and led me out into the dust and the heat of the afternoon. I’d not been out of doors for a week and my eyes went half-blind from the daylight. I’d become happy suddenly, in spite of my anger and suspicions. It was the R——’s doing, I knew, but I didn’t care to part with it. I closed my eyes and let him lead me on.

ONCE A MONTH VIRGIL CAME BACK TO 37. After a few hours with the R—— he’d be allowed to come and see me. Now that we were away from Lafargue’s—away from the red and yellow lights, away from the window and the bed—I began to see what kind of man he was. The R—— helped me to see it. Virgil was kind in his way, but womanish. When he visited he’d wait till he was sure we were alone—: then he’d stammer out every possible sort of nonsense. From his talk you’d have thought that he was helpless as a child. No power, no money, no say over anything in the world. No say over the sundry burthens that he carried.

“You have the Trade, Virgil,” I’d remind him. “You left us here, with the R——, and you went away. You left us here as a down-payment.”

That stopped him in his tracks. His mouth would open and close and he’d say nothing. I’d wait for him to speak, to stand up for himself, to explain, but a box of sorts would open in my guts and I’d hear my old voice clamoring, shrieking at his averted face, ordering him to leave me. He’d go off then in a fright, pleading with me to be quiet—; or else he’d start his fool story over from the beginning. Or he’d rush up all at once and hiss into my ear—: