Canaan's Tongue (36 page)

The Beginning.

SHE WAS OLD EVEN THEN, Parson says. Old and uneasy in her skin. A nurser of bitter appetites.

She lived in those days on a green forgotten tongue of bayou known as Les Cananes. Red-bones and Creek Indians were her only neighbors, and they kept clear of her affairs. The cottage was a plain one, little more than a room with a wattle-board roof over it, but it was enough. It had only to shelter her trunkful of books, her time-withered body, and her one idea.

A causeway ran out a dozen paces into the bayou and she’d walk to the end of it each morning with a pail, crouch stiffly down and part the duck-weed with her hand. The water underneath reminded her of cane syrup. Sometimes she’d bring the water to a boil exactly as it was, and drink it as a tea.

A man was coming to see her. She knew a man was coming, because there always came a man. Women came so rarely, waiting meekly by the door, and she never had the slightest use for them—; they came out of boredom, with little idea what they were after. The men knew what they wanted without fail. It was a matter of coaxing it out of them, nothing more.

Each time a caller arrived, she asked him first the date, then the day of the week, and then, if he was rich and traveled with a pocket-watch, the time of day. Then she took his gift—most often a book, or a small offering of money—and asked him why he’d come.

She passed the time between petitioners by reading. They’d let her take her trunk when they ran her out of the last town—Baton Rouge, sixty miles down-country—and each afternoon she’d open it and take out a volume at random, bound in marble-head or blue morocco, and bring it to the lantern as though offering up a sacrament. But she was not at prayer. She’d seen a fair piece of the country during the long years of her itinerancy, hounded from one village to the next like a devil, and an idea about America had begun to take shape in her mind. Religion was behind it. She’d been met with violence and censure wheresoever she went not for the reasons the deacons and bailiffs gave her, that they disdained her charms and fetishes—: just the opposite. She was made to suffer, she was pilloried in common view, she was cast out from society precisely because her teachings were believed.

There was power in this, if she could just catch hold of it. The steady stream of supplicants that came to her even now, a full day’s walk from the nearest town, was all the proof she needed. The country slept under a quilt of superstition, ragged and enormous, stitched together without thought to the design. She had only to map it out, to learn each piece of it in turn, and America would be hers to trifle with.

And so she’d begun her collection. The Bible,
Pilgrim’s Progress,
the Upanishads, the Book of Mormon. From each petitioner she received a book, or money with which to send for one—; and with each new book her map grew more detailed. The Lemegeton, Augustine’s
City of God,
the works of Swedenborg,
The Rights of Nations.
To believe in anything was to become passive, she discovered—; to believe was to submit. One had only to grasp belief properly, to take hold of it like a hatchet, and one could hack through anything one liked. Violence could be done with it—; great violence, in fact, could be done with nothing else. The country was not yet ready, perhaps, for a great violence. But it would be soon.

Her idea was terrible in its simplicity. It gnawed away at her in her solitude—; it troubled her nights, and made her days monotonous and cruel. She herself could not put the idea to use, as she was old, disquieting to look at, and a woman into the bargain. But a man was coming who would serve her. She had only to sit and bide at Les Cananes.

And while she waited for the man to come, she read.

She had taken lessons in Hebrew from a deaf old milliner in New Orleans specifically to read from the kabala, and the wisdom she drew from it, one morsel at a time, on man as the universe in miniature, was a solace to her in her loneliness. She contained all the universe in her tired body—; she felt this as clearly as the pain that came to her on cold mornings. She chose this book, in secret, to believe in, the way a dress-maker might put aside a fine bolt of fabric for private use. Her copy of the book was ancient and brittle, and she kept it in an old sugar-tin, at the bottom of her trunk, to safe-guard it from weevils and from thieves.

The book was far and away the most precious thing she owned and she thought of it many times a day, reciting whole passages from memory. She held it highest among the forbidden texts, and the Jews highest among the races, on account of the vast suffering it sprang from. Only through suffering could an understanding of life be won and held—; she knew this. She herself had suffered great privations, and by their grace her eyes had been pried open. Now, at last, a man was coming to her. He’d arrive without warning, calm and full of purpose, and she would be struck dumb at once by his entire perfection.

When at last the man came, and the cold flush of certainty broke over her, the disappointment was almost more than she could bear. He was narrow-eyed and dull, little better than a dwarf, and the drawl of the shanty-towns oozed from his mouth like molasses from a bucket. His companion, though similar enough to him to be his twin, was better dressed and cleverer-looking. She’d have much preferred this other—; but he was not the one she’d been waiting for, the one she’d been banished to that god-forsaken marshland to receive. That man stood slouching in the shadow of the porch, leering up at her out of close-set, callow eyes.

She worked her face into a smile and beckoned him inside. His companion made to follow but she turned him away, stifling her regret.

“He been follering me since Natchitoches,” the man said as soon as the door was closed. He was already rifling through her books.

“Who is he?” she asked. If anyone else had gone near that trunk she’d have driven them bodily from the house.

He made a face. “My
frère.
Morris Barker.”

“Barker.” She said the name slowly, getting the sound of it. “Is that your name?”

He laughed. “No, marm. You might say our fathers was unacquainted.”

“And your mother?”

“A lady-in-waiting. Nobody had to wait too long, though, that I seen.”

He said this flatly, without changing his look, and it took her some time to understand it as a joke. He went on rummaging through her belongings, glancing up now and again to measure her disquiet. She looked on helplessly. His every action was the stuff of her dreams made flesh, but mocked in the fulfillment—; made light of.

With a pick-pocket’s sense for hidden things he made straight for the sugar-tin. The breath stuck sideways in her throat.

“What’s this?” he said. He prized the lid open with his thumb.

“You couldn’t read it.” She managed to say this firmly, even defiantly.

“But
you
could, couldn’t you, marm.” The binding crackled under his fingers.

“What did you come for?” she asked, if only to ask him something.

He regarded her coldly. “Read this book to me,” he said.

That he should have sought
it
out, out of everything, was the last proof she needed—; but in truth she needed none. She was at his mercy. It was not a bodily desire—she was too old to care anymore for that—nor a desire of the spirit, but rather a fierce voluptuousness of mind. Her attention was held not by his face or his body or his miraculous presence before her in the room, but only by the book he held. He was proof of the book, after all. Proof of all she’d come over the past decade to believe. Proof, in his sly, remorseless way, of the hidden God within her.

“I can’t read it to you,” she said. “You’d not understand the words.” As she said this she tried to gauge the violence in him—; but he was a cipher to her still, unaccountable and unknown. She hadn’t even learned his name.

He grinned at her, showing her his teeth. They were blunt and white. “I’ll read it my own self,” he said.

She understood then that he was an illiterate.

“It’s in Hebrew,” she said. “I don’t fancy that you speak it.”

“
He-
brew,” he repeated, working his tongue around the word. “That’s a Jewy language.”

He guided his improbably slight body to the window and looked out at the bayou. His every act was both naïve and staged expressly for her benefit. “Have you read many Jewy books?” he said at last. The idea seemed to amuse him.

“Only that one,” she said. “I learned the language just to read it.”

He nodded at this matter-of-factly, as though it were the most natural of things. “A witching book, is it?”

She smiled down at him. “And a great deal else, besides.”

“Did you make a proper study of it, marm?” He scratched his nose. “Did you learn it through?”

“I did,” she said. She was wooing him now. “I could recite that entire book for you. In Hebrew first, then a second time in English, so that you could understand it. And you’d do well to listen.” She took a slow breath, steadying herself. “I could make you king of all this country, if I chose.”

“You could do that?” he murmured. There was wonder in his voice.

He held the book at arm’s-length, offering it to her.

“I could recite it for you this hour and this minute,” she said comfortably. “I carry that book inside me like a babe.”

“That must be quite a burden,” he said, and tossed the book into the bayou.

She let out a gasp, as the book hit the water, that held the next twenty years suspended within it like a row of wasps in amber. She saw the years arrayed before her, and guessed clear enough what they would bring, but still she couldn’t stop them coming. She took a quick step toward him, trembling as though she’d been struck. She knew that she must either kill him at once or give herself to him utterly.

He looked up at her, arms crossed, waiting patiently for her answer.

“It was,” she said finally, letting her body and mind go slack.

She would often think, in the years that followed, of that first flawless gesture of his, the act that both crowned him her Redeemer and set the machinery of his death in motion. He was always to treat her knowledge with distrust, learning only what he needed to learn, scorning all the rest. Had he studied that book himself, rather than throwing it into the bayou, he’d have become a sovereign among men—; he’d have pressed an entire nation to the floor.

As it was, he died.

But oh! how she’d adored him then. Her exhilaration was far greater than her pain. He was close beside her now, hands in his pockets, a mock-penitent smile on his flat school-boy’s face.

“Those things you done, in Natchitoches,” he said. “What they
say
you done.” He was quiet a moment. “You do those things?”

The pain was gone as swiftly as it had come. “Some of them,” she said.

The smile widened further still. “My name is Thaddeus Hejekuma Morelle,” he said, holding out a hand.

She took the hand in both of hers. “Mary Parson,” she replied.

Ascent to Heaven.

NOW THERE ARE THREE OF US, Virgil says. A trinity.

There is no Clementine in the room, no Redeemer. I’m still in the room, but barely. The spirit is leaking out of my belly like rose-water. A smell of roses is in the air, as when a saint is to be buried. Morelle smelled of tallow and stale piss when we dug him under. The memory is a sweet one, even now.

“No,” I say aloud, mustering my last breath. I’ll hold on to my body yet a while. Passing queer things are happening in this room, and I want to make mention of them in my memoirs.

Delamare sits propped against the head-board, his shooting arm buttressed by his knee. The Peacemaker rests prayer-book-like in his right palm. It’s pointed straight at Parson. Parson has gone rigid as a cat. There is no concern anymore for the body at the base of the wainscoting. The Redeemer, such as the Redeemer was, is gone.

“Confess,” Delamare says. The Peacemaker is steady as a rail.

“Fool half-caste nigger!” Parson answers through clenched teeth. But fear is writ large across his face. If he speaks through clenched teeth it’s on account of not wanting them shot out of his mouth.

“To bring Morelle down the ladder?” Delamare says. “Was that why?”

“There never
was
any damn-fool ladder!” Parson spits. He jerks his chin at me. “That was just a bit of Jewy pocus for Virgil Ball to suck on.”

“Talk sense, you old bitch,” Delamare says evenly.

“I take what I can
use,
” Parson says quickly, holding up his hands. “With Virgil it was the kabala—; with Clementine it was Trist’s bottles—; with Trist it was anything at all. You each had some manner of
fright
in you, some superstition, that I was able to make use of.” He grins coquettishly. “Belief in anything is a kind of madness, Oliver.”

Delamare leans back against the head-board. “Do you mean to tell me you have no beliefs? You, with all your charms and hoo-doos?”

“Not at all,” says Parson. “I believe in my charms and hoo-doos, as you call them—: I believe in them absolutely. They would have no power otherwise.” He shuts his eyes. “Thaddeus understood that well, God rest him.”

“What did
he
believe in, then?”

“Himself.”

Delamare hesitates. “But the Redeemer—”

“Is whoever I decide on, Oliver. Whoever
I
should please it be.”

“Why play checkers with us, then? Why set us to murdering each other?”

Parson sighs. “You’ve been desperate for a mystery, you and Virgil, when all along the facts were plain.
Nature,
Oliver, will out. You were thieves and murderers to a man—; I had only to stand aside and let you go to market.” He clucks. “If I’d wanted to
preserve
you, on the other hand—”

“But you didn’t,” Delamare says tightly. “You wanted us to kill each other off.”

“I wanted to see what became of you,” Parson says. “To see who managed, who was nimble—; who was left standing at the end of it, and why.” He purses his lips. “I’d lost my dearest boy, you see.”

“That’s right,” says Delamare. “Virgil and I took him from you.”

Parson bobs his head. “I can’t make do without a dearest boy, Oliver. It’s not in the
way
of things.” He clucks again. “Who could I speak the tongue to, with him gone?”

“Don’t fret,” Delamare says, palming back the hammer. “You’ll soon be reunited.” But his voice is fainter, more effortful than before.

Parson only shrugs. “I resolved to make the best of it—: to settle on whichever of you was left. Think of it as a
raffle,
Oliver, or an examination at school.” His looks demurely at the floor. “I needed a new Redeemer. A new dearest boy. Is that something you can understand?”

Delamare redirects the Colt from Parson’s forehead to his privates. “Who murdered Goodman Harvey?”

“Harvey did.” Parson all but blushes. “I may have—
encouraged
him, somewhat.”

“I suppose you encouraged Trist, as well.”

“Not at all, Oliver. I merely held the rope.”

Delamare narrows his eyes. “Don’t tell me Kennedy snuffed himself.”

“Small chance of
that,
sad to say!” Parson titters. “Stuts was a special case. Too stupid to be my dearest boy, too vicious to be let alone. A touch of hoo-doo, as you put it, was required.”

Delamare goes quiet. “Foster,” he says finally. “That’s what you used Foster for.”

Parson makes a curtsey.

“Why didn’t you use me? I’d have killed him for you gladly.”

“Of
course
you would,” Parson says dotingly. He hushes a moment. “I had a notion to, at first. But Kennedy was a dangerous man—; and you were precious to me, Oliver.” He bats his eyes at Delamare. “Can you not imagine why?”

Delamare bunches his face together. “And Foster? Did Virgil strangle him?” He glances toward Clementine. “She told me that he did.”

Parson only clucks.

Delamare curses him hoarsely. “How in hell did you manage it?”

“
Come
now, Oliver! Ball was never hard to manage.” Parson cocks his head at me. “Ball was a believer to the bone.”

“It must break your heart to lose him.”

Parson sucks in a sorrowful breath. “It does.”

Delamare says nothing. His face is hid from me now—; Parson, however, can still see it. He looks well pleased by what he finds there.

“It was a
way
I hit on,” Parson purrs. “No more than that. But it worked wonderfully well. The slack ones fell away.”

Delamare sits forward with a cough. “Fell away, did they? Dropped like peaches from the bough?”

Parson considers this a moment. “Not
unlike
peaches,” he says, delighted with the notion.

“What about Dodds?”

“I put Dodds to rest myself,” Parson says. “That is to say, I furnished him with poison.”

“And D’Ancourt?”

“Ah! The Colonel is a mystery.” Parson waves a hand, as if the question were a trifling one. “I suppose he must have doddered off somewhere.”

“Obliging of him,” says Delamare.

Parson nods solemnly. “I was left, in the end, with just you three. But you were devilish hard, Oliver, to choose between. I needed a
believer,
you understand. A modicum of faith. And each of you cherished certain doubts.” He looks down at Clementine. “In the end, to my great relief, one of you chose me.”

“Liar!” I shriek with my last breath. “Liar! Pharisee!”

But neither of them hear. Parson watches Delamare, humming quietly to himself—; Delamare fidgets under his bedding as though he were struggling to fall asleep. His skin has turned the color of wet paper.

“So now you’re down to none,” he says.

“Your reckoning is
o f,
dear boy,” Parson replies. He glides up to the bed. “Now, after no end of trouble, I’m finally down to
one.
”

An instant goes by before Delamare takes his meaning. He gives a low whimper. “If you calculate on using
me
—”

“
Reflect
a moment, Oliver! If you weren’t a believer, you’d never have brought out that Colt. You believed that poor tart had the Redeemer in her—; I couldn’t
ask
for better proof.”

“I could fire again,” Delamare croaks, burrowing back under the quilts. “I’ve got two bullets left.”

Parson cackles at this. The fear has gone out of him so utterly that I wonder whether it was ever there. “You
do,
sirrah. But why squander them? Your point’s already made!”

Delamare sinks lower still. All that’s left of him is the Colt. “Why explain the game, if you love belief so dearly?” he says, so faintly that I can barely hear. “Why reveal your hand to me?”

“Because the hand is
played,
Oliver. It’s played—; and you have won it.” Parson stands at the foot of the bed now, grinning like a lynx, his arms propped comfortably on the quilts. “What were your first nineteen years of life, after all, but an apprenticeship to the Trade? Have your hopes and ambitions—to say nothing of your lusts—
ever
had a life outside it? Now that tiresome apprenticeship is done. The Trade is ready to receive you, in body and in spirit, as you’ve so long desired.” Slowly, coaxingly, he pulls the quilts aside. “Put your revolver by. Leave the peace-making, dear boy, to those better
qualified
—”

All at once Parson hushes. A shiver runs the length of his body and he jerks his head sharply to one side. He has heard a noise, and no sooner do I harken than I hear it, too—:

Boards are bending down on the verandah.

I drink the sound in, gratefully and slowly, as I would a cup of beer. The hinges of the house-door creak emphatically open. A whispering begins, building on itself and on the silence, and the echo is pushed back before it like water before a broom. The whispers—low, capable commands—slip through clear as notes of music. As the echo recedes I take note of two things—: (I) Delamare’s Peacemaker has fallen to the floor, and (II) Parson is taking off his clothes.

He begins at the collar of his stiff-necked soutane, his hairy face rapt with listening. His fingers fly tremblingly from one button to the next. I do not wonder at what he is doing—: I feel content to watch, knowing that time will answer my last questions. Parson himself, given time, will answer them. He is answering them now.

Sounds are soon heard of a great multitude passing the house, and other sounds carry in from the hall—: hushed voices and groaning planks and tentative foot-falls on the stairs. Parson has undone the last buttons of his robe and beneath it I see the pattern and pleats of a faded summer dress. I do not wonder at this. I am rising past wonder. In another moment he has stuffed the robe under Delamare’s quilts and taken up position at the head-board, laying one hand next to Delamare’s head and taking up the Peacemaker with the other. Calmly and deliberately, with the thumb of the same hand, he cocks it. No sooner has he done so than his body folds in upon itself and there is no Parson anymore but instead an old spinster, rheumy-faced and mild. I’ve barely taken this in when the first blue-capped head appears around the door-frame.

The head belongs to a bone-thin, whiskered, rifle-clutching ghost. His eyes are sunk so far back in his skull that I can only guess at his expression. It could be righteousness, or anger, or surprise, or even sorrow. The room is filling steadily with blue jackets. I try to bring my hands up, to make a gesture of surrender, but my hands refuse to answer. The ghost looks side-wise at me, then back toward Delamare and the spinster. Now he sees the repeater in the spinster’s hand.

“Put that pistol away, ma’am,” he says. His voice is clipped and reedy. I guess him to come from Iowa, or Illinois.

“This pistol,” says the spinster, “is a Sam Colt .45 Peacemaker.”

The ghost looks about the room. He is trying to make sense of the pistol, of the mulatto, of the two bodies on the floor. I can see from his chevrons—two bars, in worsted—that he is a corporal. “Put that pistol away, ma’am, if you please, and explain yourself.” He blinks at her. “We heard two shots as we come up.”

The spinster collapses a half-inch further and lets the Colt fall—; it lands with a thump against Delamare’s ribs.

“I mind the negro,” says the spinster. “I can’t tell you much.”

“You can tell us who you
are,
ma’am, firstly,” the corporal says, his voice sharpening. But behind the sharpness there is good-will, of a sort—: I hear it and the spinster hears it. She lowers her eyes to the bed in sham simplicity. Her hands toy idly with the coverlet.

“Mary Parson, gentlemen, if you please.”

“Did you fire on these persons, Mary?”

“I did.” She gives a fretful nod. “They meant to harm me. Myself and the boy.”

The corporal squints at her. “The boy?” he says.

“Yes, sir. This one negro here.”

The curiosity of the soldiers shifts to the bed. “What ails him?” a red-faced private asks.

“Yellow fever.”

The mass of blue jackets, until that instant pushing forward into the room, flushes clear as though sucked out by a bellows. Only the corporal and the red-faced private remain, looking from Delamare to the spinster and back again. I try to speak, to put the lie to her, but my tongue has forgotten me. The corporal looks down at my body, then at Clem’s—; he’s trying not to breathe, on account of the fever. The sound of his not-breathing is deafening.

My good right eye shuts, never again to open. All I have now are the shapes. How fitting that they be the last thing.

A red cross, recumbent, over a yellow cloud. “We know this house was tenanted by the gang off of Island 37,” the corporal says. “Murel’s gang.”

“That’s two of them there,” says the spinster. “One of their whores and Virgil Ball himself.”

A violet wheel, spinning slowly to the right. “Ball?” the corporal says, stepping closer.

“A big’un, weren’t he?” the red-faced private whispers.

A six-cornered star. “The biggest,” announces the spinster. “There from the beginning.”

“And where were you, ma’am?” the corporal says, looking back at her.

“I—?” A pause. “Wherever they would have me, Corporal.”

“What is it, sir?” the private says.

The corporal says nothing for a spell. “Run and fetch Dr. Hooper.”

The private hesitates. “Dr. Hooper, sir? I wouldn’t have thought—”

“That man is dead, Corporal,” the spinster says. Her voice has gone shrill.

“It’s not for him, ma’am,” the corporal replies. “It’s for that boy of yours.”

“I see.” The spinster hesitates. That a doctor should be summoned to minister to a dying nigger is inconceivable to her. “I see. As I told you already, Corporal, the yellow fever—”

“I was in Memphis when the Yellowjack last hit,” the corporal says. “I saw enough of the stuff to recognize it—; and I saw a good deal else, besides. I’ll trouble you, Mrs. Parson, to step away from the bed.”

The spinster lets out a laugh at this—: a high metallic laugh, rueful and clear, run through with spite and condescension and defeat.