Canaan's Tongue (23 page)

TRIST
—Flatly.
Straight and flatly as a plank.

COLONEL
—Did you sleep well?

TRIST
—I was up early. (SMILES)—I might well have been the first.

COLONEL
—At
what hour did you wake?

TRIST
(PAUSE)—Very nearly five.

COLONEL
—Did you get up?

TRIST
—Ah!
Uncle. No. I laid down flat.

COLONEL
—And
did you at any time hear—

TRIST
—I was sitting on the bed, in fact, Colonel D’Ancourt. Then all at once
out of the water came a sort of—(PAUSE)—A sort of beasties, and my
black dolly was among them. They were human in part, and a part of
them was animal—that much I saw clear. There was witchery in it. Do
you follow me, Virgil? I lay down flat. I think my own body was trying to
slide into the water—: into the river. Under it. And take me bodily out of
this world. (PAUSE)—It still happens to me now, when I lie still.

COLONEL
(PAUSE)—Oh Asa. (PAUSE)—Leave off your scribbling, Virgil.

TRIST
—Virgil
is looking at me with his fine white eye. He sees the nigger in
me plain.

COLONEL
—Virgil,
would you—?

TRIST
—I did hear a noise, Father. Sometime after dawn.

COLONEL
(PAUSE)—What’s that, Asa? What was it you heard?

TRIST
—Two
voices raised up in anger most foul.

COLONEL
—Whose
voices?

TRIST
—One
of them was black and the other was fair gone Harvey. I got out
of bed to see.

COLONEL
—A
black, was it? The mulatto?

TRIST
—Yes.

COLONEL
—Are you taking this down, Virgil?

TRIST
—Virgil
is putting it down on paper. Virgil is writing us a novel.

COLONEL
—And
what next? Did you see them, Asa boy? Did you open your
door and see them?

TRIST
(PAUSE)—Yes.

COLONEL
—Where
were they? On the landing?

TRIST
—They
were—

COLONEL
—Asa!
Look at me when I speak to you. Where did you see Harvey
and the mulatto?

TRIST
(INAUDIBLE)

COLONEL
—Virgil,
take him by the shoulder. Quickly.

TRIST
(INAUDIBLE)

COLONEL
—Asa!—

TRIST
(QUIETLY)—I’m—it’s all right. I’m awake. I’m the first to be
awake this morning. (PAUSE)—It’s nearly five.

COLONEL
—What
happens next, Asa? Do you get out of bed?

TRIST
—I should like to. I should like to get out of bed very badly.

COLONEL
—Why
don’t you get out of bed, Asa?

TRIST
—Why?
Why? (SHOUTS)—Because Harvey hasn’t finished his letter!

COLONEL
—What
letter? What letter do you mean?

TRIST
(SMILES)—This letter, Uncle. Why—

COLONEL
—Give
it over, Asa—; give it here to me. (SOFTLY)—Take it
from him, Virgil.

TRIST
—I’ll
give it to you! Here it is, Grandfather. You keep playing at your
history, Mr. Ball.

COLONEL
—Thank you, Asa. (PAUSE)

TRIST
—Is
it addressed to you, God-father?

COLONEL
—Good lord, Virgil.

TRIST
—Virgil’s
busy at his memoirs.

COLONEL
—Go find Kennedy, Virgil. Go and find him straight-away.

TRIST
—Yes
Mr. Ball leave off now of your papers and fetch that black
frightful Irishman. That black black fearful man. (RISING)—Lay down with
me now, Colonel. We’ll all of us lie down together. Lie down flat.

COLONEL
—Run
and get him, Virgil! Virgil! Do you hear?

An Encounter.

HERE COMES KENNEDY TO KILL ME, Delamaresays.

When I come out of the woods he’s laying for me with eyes like chips of dead gray mud. He has nothing in his hands, no club or knife or bottle-end, but I know from his far-away look what it is he’s after. He brings his left hand up, just slightly, to fix me in his sight. He might be preparing to render me in oils.

“Off chasing Federals, were you, blacks?” he says. “Or was it rabbits?”

I keep my eyes steady on his hands. “Why not get your shot off as I came out of the brush?”

“Ah! I wanted to
look
at you, Oliver.” He slaps playfully at his hip. “Besides, I might’ve dropped a Yank by accident. I’d never of forgave myself.”

Now he is holding his hands out for me to see.

“You’ve looked at me,” I say. “Now you can shoot.”

“Right,” says Kennedy. “Yes.” But his hands keep still. In his dirty buck-skin breeches with his dirtier body inside them he seems perfect to me—; consummate. There stands Kennedy, come to kill me. He wears his purpose like a crown.

“Been waiting on this to fall down on us, ain’t we, blacks. Ever since I muh!—muh!—mancipated you. And here it is.”

“Get your pistol out, Irish.” His hands are red, not yellow like the rest of him. They open and close like little bellows. “Get it out, or let me by. I’m late for an appointment.”

He laughs. “Ah! I could never let you go
now,
pretty fellow. You’re a fugitive of society, on account of murder.”

And then it makes itself known, like a pane of beveled glass laid against my chest—: the knowledge that he will kill me. The likelihood was there always—he’s put so many under—but until this moment it was no more than a thought. Now it fills my mouth like spittle.

“I had no part in Harvey’s death,” I say, but my voice has gone careless. Harvey is of no consequence any longer. Here stands Kennedy, come to kill me. Nothing else has truth to me, or weight.

He hears it in my voice, my willingness to let him, but still he makes no movement—: there’s a chance I’d get a shot off as I fell. I watch Kennedy consider this. He bunches his face together. He’s remembering my repeater and my youth.

“I’m an
old
cunt, blacks, it’s true.” He chews thoughtfully on his lower lip. “An old Irish.” He squints at me, then opens his mouth wide. “Half my tuh!—tuh!—teeth’s dropped out. Right? But look at
yourself,
now. You’ve still got juice between your legs.” He shuts his mouth and gives a little groan.

“I didn’t do Harvey,” I say quietly. “You know I didn’t.”

His eyes go narrower still, then shut for half an instant. I could have drawn on him just then.

“I’d kill you any-road, blacks,” he says. “But we’re all good and satisfied you
did.
I’m acting under orders, as it happens.”

I take a step. “Whose orders? D’Ancourt’s?”

His eyes fly open and his left arm jerks—: not his shooting arm but the other. If killing me were a drink he’d be wiping his mouth already. “’Tweren’t
him
I got my orders fuh!—fuh!—from.”

“Who, then? Parson?” I laugh in his face. “Taking orders from Parson, are you, Irish? What would Saints Patrick and Ebenezer say?”

“It were Virgil Ball,” he coos.

In spite of myself I flinch. “You’re lying. Virgil has no truck with you, Kennedy. Virgil would sooner—”

“Precious
young
yet, aren’t we, blacks. Not yet at the ripeness of our years.” He sniggers. “Too much white meat. Not enough porridge.”

The hinges of my nature begin to creak. I was born unable to hold my temper and God knows it and Kennedy knows it better. It’s for this that he’s kept me alive, worrying me, goading me, with his hands out in the open where I can’t help but watch them—; when finally I drop he wants it to be with foam at the corners of my mouth. And I know that I will drop, that I will give him that satisfaction, and still I can’t keep my temper in its britches. Could Virgil truly have sent Kennedy after me? Is he so cankered-through with bitterness? Kennedy is the lowest of God’s creatures but I’ve never yet heard him lie. What does Virgil think he knows? He saw me yesterday arguing with Harvey about the debt and the Redeemer and Christ knows what all else. Everything but that whore Virgil trails after in her calico shift. Might
that
be why—? Her smell’s run through my linens even now. I’ve never sought out her company, God knows, but perhaps Virgil doesn’t. Might that be why? It might. But Kennedy—

“I was thinking, blacks,” Kennedy says, digging a thumb into his eye. “About the day I come across you.” He grins. “Should’ve known
then
that it would come to this.” He coughs. “Perhaps I did.”

This, the old topic—: tried and proved. The old item. The house and the fat copper still and the curtain behind it and that filthy soot-stained room. The smell of boiling mash. My fists begin to open.

“I’ll not quickly forget that day, little man. Christ! Coming down the steps into that stinking kuh!—kuh!—kennel, saying my hellos to your mother, yanking the curtain back—”

Mother Annie Bradford. Mother Anne. She is coming toward me now in the half-dark of the hall and I try my best with her smell still on my clothes but the smell of the mash is stronger and my fine clothes are off, away, as if they’ve never been—

“Oliver,” says Kennedy. “Oliver De—la—mare.” Drawing it out, letting the pieces of it break off and fall steaming and abominable to the ground.

By God that woman was not my mother.

“—and here’s little buh!—buh!—blacks with his drawers about his ankles, scarf tied back around his arms. A lady’s rag. Why was that, now, blacks? Feared of falling in?”

Dearest madam, you who took my life—

“That
were
the cunt you come out of. Weren’t it, blacks?”

The forest lifts before me like a petticoat and I fall sideways into running. My jacket and waist-coat and repeater are nothing but burdens to me now and I cast them aside. The smell of the mash keeps me on my feet and I reel drunkenly forward and all the while I hear him hollering to stand where I am and let him. Blank air opens ahead of me, parts as fast as I can run, a peep-hole waiting to be plugged. My mouth opens and six years tumble out of it and still I smell the mash.

Past the trees is the great house, Virgil and the rest inside of it like mice inside a shoe. Kennedy comes after. The scarf was blue crêpe and it was a reward. Fine things, she said. Which she? She of the fat white belly, the sweet-meats, the sweating copper pipes? She of the sour mash? The Redeemer’s she, or Virgil’s? She who made me white, or she who made me black? A branch breaks just behind.

I have ever been a poppet for the ladies.

As if reflected in a puddle I see Kennedy’s form. More than that—: the cold against my chest tells me. Here he comes. Did I stop running? Did I sink to my knees? I did. I kneel slumped against a tree, the very last before the lawn, letting the mash pour out of my open mouth. I wait on Kennedy’s convenience. His shadow crosses against the light and there’s no house suddenly, no still, no boiler, no Mother Anne, no Delamare, no Trade.

I’m grateful for that much.

He stands still for a moment, potato-faced and breathless, wheezing and sputtering and cursing me to heaven. And yet pleased to see me—: to see me kneeling in the mud, the bright mess in front of me and down my clothes.

“You called my name,” Kennedy says, chambering his gun. He must have fired at least once. “You called it, Oliver, as you run.”

The cold climbs up my body like a reward. “I haven’t forgotten your name, Irish. You drove it into me. Remember?”

His potato-face pivots. “You shut your muh!—muh!—mouth.”

Three steps past him the forest ends. It’s raining on the naked ground and I can smell the clay. A pale blue blot, the figure of a man, moves toward us through the grass. Is it my end approaching?

“You dipped into a well meant for niggers, Kennedy,” I say. “You dipped into it and drank. What does that make you?”

“Nobody heared of it,” he says, thumbing back the hammer. “If nobody heared of it, it never was.”

“An honorary nigger, Stuts,” I say. “And something else besides.”

I look up at him against the trees, branches twitching in the rain, bullets dropping sweetly from the pines. A shout comes from the house. “You surely want to die,” he says.

I wait to see his features before I answer.

“Parson knows what you did to me, Kennedy. I told him. So does Dodds.”

He strikes me across the forehead with the barrel. My left eye shuts and gushes. “You,” says Kennedy. “You little nuh!—nuh!—niggra boy.”

I half-believe that he is weeping.

“Kennedy!” Virgil shouts, crashing through the brush. “Leave off it, Kennedy! Harvey left a letter!”

So Virgil was behind it, after all.

“Little boy,” Kennedy says, bringing down his boot.

Goodman Harvey’s Narrative.

On this the night of 11 May 1863 I make my peace with the Lord my
Creator & leave this record of my many errors, trusting in His
power
to see the causes that are hid to all but prophets. I am no
Papist & write these lines not to serve as a confession, for I do not believe
in redemption at the eleven’th hour; but rather to reckon with the Angel
of Death, pale & luminous as a pearl, who stands attentively at my left
shoulder.

I do so easefully, recollecting my forty-two years with the calm of one
about to forget them for all time. I have, in fact, been waiting on this night for
many months; I find myself embracing the prospect eagerly, almost
coquettishly, like a virgin bride. Had I not known my Friend was coming I’d have
done away with myself weeks ago; but this end, I believe, is better. My lot has
ever been to defer to those greater than myself.

I first heard of Thaddeus Myrell in the spring of my fourth year in the
Territories. A born child of Mormon, I’d been sent into the west at the age of
eighteen to herald the arrival of the Latter-day Saints to an gross &
unwitting nation. Mine was the particular honor of bringing word to the Indians
encamp’d in the Oklahomas, one of the fabled Lost Tribes of Israel; from my
earliest youth I’d been a passionate believer, & I set out on my mission in the
highest of spirits, greatly pleased with myself as an agent of God’s will. My
cousin Alva & I vow’d not to return home to Nauvoo, Illinois, until seven
years had gone by, or the entire country south of the Cimarron river had been
brought into the Church. We were happy, unencumber’d boys, younger than
our years, who imagined the west as a vast quilt of green gorges & dappled
fields—a somewhat grander Illinois. Neither of us was ever to see the country
of our youth again.

What happen’d over those first three years is of little relevance to this
accounting. Alva died four months into our mission, of gastritic fever; my own
trials, though less decisive, were hardly less severe. Important is only that I
suffer’d, that my zeal & good works were repaid with mockery & violence in
those God-hating swamps, & that my own house of faith was thrown open to
the four winds, so that the Prophet Himself was moved finally to abandon it.
It was in this fallen state, tired in flesh & sick in spirit, scraping a living
together by peddling liquor to the Chickasaws & Kickapoos & Choctaws in the
guise of medicinal tonics, that I found myself one evening on the porch of a
shabby grain depot, listening to two negroes chatter in hush’d tones about the
coming of a new Redeemer.

“He come to Onadee last week,” the taller of them said. He was a thick-set, amicable gossip I knew well from my monthly visits. There were always
one or two of his persuasion in attendance, listening slack-jaw’d to some gaudy
story or other. His given name was Tempie.

“What he come there for?” the second negro asked. “To preach?”

Tempie gave a knowing chuckle. “He come to serve notice to them dirty
Meth’dists up at de mill,” he said, glancing side-wise at me. Tempie had long
been prisoner to the suspicion that I was a Methodist myself; someone had told
him they went about in cast-o f suits of clothes.

“It’s all right, Tempie,” I said, sitting down on a sack of corn. “I won’t
corrupt your immortal soul this evening.”

In answer Tempie shot me a look I’d long since grown used to from
negroes & white men alike. “I ain’t one you sick Indians, Mr. Harvey.”

“Go on, already,” the other negro said. “How he sized? Big or little?”

Tempie puff’d his chest out as far as it would go. “Ah! He big enough,” he
said, spreading his arms wide. “Big as this. Voice like rattling thunder.”

His friend looked dubious. “Mr. Wallace say he call himself the Baby of
the West.”

“He a baby, all right,” Tempie said, grinning. “He gonna shake his
rattle till them rich folk in Onadee drops they purses & runs.”

“A confidence-man, is he?” I ask’d innocently.

At this the second negro looked at me as though I’d crawl’d out of a hole in
the ground. “He a prophet,” he said. “Come to set the peoples right. Mr. Wallacesay he gone sweep the territory clean of heathens.”

Tempie snorted & waved a hand. “Mr. Wallace say,” he japed, puffing
out his cheeks. Turning side-wise on his heels, he privileged us with a shuffling
dance in parody of John Wallace, his master, who su fer’d grievously from
fallen arches.

It was Tempie’s misfortune that Wallace, a hard man leach’d of all
generosity by ten years in the Territories, chose that moment to come out of the
house. “Tempie,” he said sedately. “You come over here to me.”

Tempie took off at once in the direction of the granary. His companion
back’d himself against the wall & stay’d there, quiet as a beam. Wallace
watch’d Tempie go, shifted his weight with a diffident grunt, cuff’d the other
negro across the ear & turned his attention grudgingly to me.

“Inciting my niggers to mischief, Harvey?” he said, looking at me with
unadorn’d distaste. “Been feeding them your cure-alls, peradventure?”

“Beg pardon, Mr. Wallace,” I answered quickly, my voice rising as it
always does when addressing men of property. “We’ve been discussing the new
preacher up in Onadee.”

“Ah! Him,” said Wallace, his manner suddenly much changed. He looked
me over for a time; I returned his look with bafflement. In two years of
acquaintanceship he’d not once looked me squarely in the eye.

“Come inside a bit, Harvey, if you like.”

The depot was no great establishment, cobbled together as it was of planks
of every size & pedigree; to me, however, it seem’d a very mansion. The walls
were paper’d from top to bottom with news-print, as in a negro’s cabin. I
found nothing unusual in this at first; but as my host busied himself with
a rusted co fee-pot & a lump of cold pork-shoulder, I saw that each wall
was cover’d in individual clippings, & that each clipping had to do with the
so-called “Indian Question” in one way or another. There must have been
twenty years’ worth, from any number of papers & bulletins, dating back to
the Territories’ natal days. My host sat me down at the little tin-topped table,
handed me a cup of tepid co fee & said in a close-mouth’d, conspiratorial
voice—

“One day, Mr. Harvey, the country hereabouts will be as fresh & unsulliedas humanity’s first garden.”

I said nothing for a time, stirring the co fee with my least filthy finger.
The faith of my fathers had sent me in search of just such a paradise four years
before; those four years, however, had done their share to educate me. “I find
that hard to credit, Mr. Wallace,” I said at last. Again, however, my voice
grew plaintive: “Of course, you’ve been here a great deal longer than I have.
I’d be delighted, sir, to believe—”

“Believe it then, young man! Believe it.” Wallace’s breath stank of chicory
& rancid butter. “We’re living next-door to Heaven out here on these plains.
Close enough to smell it, if the wind is right.”

At this juncture I felt bold enough to attempt a joke. “That may well be,
sir,” I answer’d. “But when the wind blows the other way, I smell something
else entirely.”

“Noticed that, have you?” Wallace said earnestly. “There’s some that
might agree with what you say.”

“I challenge any white man to deny it,” I retorted. “Which among us
hasn’t suffer’d at their hands? They’re a godless, joyless, hopeless race of mongrels, in whom the seed of Heaven has grown crooked. You’ll find no sanctity
in this territory, Mr. Wallace. And no Garden of Eden, either.”

I was as surprised as Wallace by the venom in my voice; I’d said far more
than I’d intended. The desire to please him, to win his good opinion, was as
strong in me as ever; but my tongue was thick with bitterness. Did this
flatfooted old ass not see that he was living at the center of a vast grid of human
misery? Did he actually think of this waste-land, this spiritual desert, this pissoirof the nation as the next best thing to Heaven? If so, then he believed what
my father believed, what my cousin Alva had believed, what I myself had
believed when I set out on my mission. The thought was almost more than I
could bear.

Wallace regarded me in plump, implacable silence, taking sips straight
from the co fee-pot. The image of my father & mother back in Nauvoo, so
complacent in their faith, appear’d as though stamp’d onto the news-printed
walls. It was all I could do to keep from bursting into tears, and if Wallace had
kept quiet an instant longer, I surely would have done so.

But he did not. Instead, he straighten’d in his wicker chair & without the
slightest warning slapped me viciously across the brow.

“I’ve cursed my luck often enough, Harvey, as God’s my witness; but I
don’t curse it now. A man has come into this country—a man with the vision
to recover everything we’ve lost, & a good deal else besides. A man to recover
our birth-right for us.” He stood up from the chair with a noise like kindling
catching fire.

“That man is Thaddeus T. Myrell, the Child of the New West.”

The old grange in Onadee that night was hung from floor to rafters with
gaudy crepe banners scavenged from forgotten fairs, cheap tallow torches &
bed-sheets painted with all manner of curious slogans—: WHAT LANGUAGEDO YE SPEAK, YE CHILDREN OF ANTELOPES—IS IT
GOD’S? and, nearby, TO THE WEST ITS PROMISED HUSBANDS—
TO EACH HUSBAND, NOW, HIS CHILDE!

I was unable to make the least sense of them, but they struck me in my
eagerness as full of hidden portents. Most obscure of all was a device stencil’d
here & there on the walls of the Grange itself, a figure made of intersecting
lines that I took at first to be a cattle-brand—

In spite of these trappings, however, & the smoke from the sap torches, the
mood of the assembly more resembled a gin-raffle or a country dance than any
sober-minded gathering. The laughter, lewdness & commotion on all sides
seem’d more in keeping with the medicine-shows I knew so well than with any
true revival. But a revival, of a sort, it was. There was the dark, quiet
stage—there the wooden lectern; & there, all at once, was the Child of the
New West, stepping forward to address the crowd, his pale face glowing in the
torch-light. His body was stretched to its fullest in every direction, like a squirrel falling from a tree; as he stepped up to the lectern, holding one pudgy fist
aloft, I smiled to myself at how little he resembled Tempie’s second-hand
accounting.

I’d pictured him in a buck-skin greatcoat, mud-spatter’d riding boots & a
wide-brimmed trapper’s hat, perhaps with a jay’s feather tuck’d into its brim;
the man at the lectern—if a man he was, & not a precocious truant—wore a
well-iron’d suit of clothes & high-heel’d city shoes. He look’d more like a
school-teacher or a claims-adjuster than any Hero of the New Frontier.
Everything about him bespoke a quiet reasonableness. He appear’d the perfect
gentleman in miniature; so miniature, in fact, that Wallace’s hosannas
seem’d as laughable as Tempie’s. This served the Child well, however; my surpriseat his great delicacy disarm’d me.

The crowd had a di ferent notion of the Child. The men about me seem’d
to treat him as they would any other beer-hall sermonizer—with beer-hall
tom-foolery & cheer. With time, I was to learn that Myrell’s great gift was to
convince each of his listeners that they’d caught a glimpse of his most secret
nature, & that they recognized themselves—their own desires, ambitions, &
hid-away beliefs—in what they saw. He’d fashion’d himself into an all-purpose
cipher, perfectly suited in his blankness to take on any meaning, any
color, any significance whatever.