Canaan's Tongue (34 page)

Parson’s Witchery.

MY LAST DAY AT GEBURAH BEGINS SOFTLY, Virgil says. I’ve been sitting in the lampless parlor half the night when the house-door sighs open, delicate as hackled lace. A moment later Parson flutters by. He glances into the parlor as he passes, shading his eyes, but fails to see me slumped over in the dark. He moves on down the hall. The cellar door opens, then shuts, and I draw in a breath. I rise from the settee more carefully than a spinster. A draft curls about my shins, leafy with the smell of coming rain. Something is going to happen. It sits like a clot of river-bottom in my throat.

Parson is quiet as dust on the cellar steps but he can’t keep them from creaking subtly as he descends. His oversight has given me an advantage over him, the first in our long acquaintance, and I’m determined not to let it pass. I steal lightly down the hall. He’s left the cellar door unlatched. I reach the top of the steps just as he gets to the bottom.

To go any farther would be to lose straight-away, so I crouch at the top of the steps and bide. I see nothing but the rough pine boards leading down into the blackness—; I hear nothing but my own unsteady breathing. I’ve just begun to wonder whether Parson hasn’t vanished through some fissure in the earth when a voice comes out of the gloom, measured and precise, no more than an arm’s-length below me—:

“Open your mouth, Mr. Foster. Have a drink.”

Parson’s voice, talking to the prisoner. Somewhere just beneath the steps. A moment later he speaks again, so close that I fancy I can smell his breath. He speaks as though he and Foster were having a tea-time chat—: there is no cajolery in his voice, no spite, no menace. But Foster hasn’t said a word.

“I got this out of the river for you, Mr. Foster,” Parson says. “Mr. Delamare, the half-caste, is in the habit of dunking himself in the current, for the performance of his personal ablutions.” A pause. “Mr. Delamare was meant as a conduit for the Redeemer. To be what Thaddeus Morelle once was. But Mr. Delamare, unfortunately, is unwell. Mr. Delamare has been taken with the grippe.”

Another silence. In my eagerness to hear I nearly tumble down the steps.

“Not at all!” says Parson suddenly, as if in answer to a question. “Mr. Delamare is not the Redeemer’s successor—; you fail to take my meaning. The Redeemer is his
own
successor, Mr. Foster.”

A low, scudding sound, as of a barrel being pushed aside. Then Parson’s voice—:

“How long until the Yankees take this house?”

No reply. Parson heaves a sigh, then asks almost idly—:

“How many men are encamped above the shanty-town?”

This time an answer comes readily, but in a voice I’d swear was Parson’s own, grotesquely falsettoed, as though he were acting a part in a traveling theater—:

“Half—; a—; company. No—; cannon. Thirty—; muskets. Eighteen—; rifles. Seventy—; blacks—”

“
Seventy
blacks? Freed-men?” Parson says, interrupting.

Then, in his stage voice—: “Freed-men—; contrabands.” Another pause, and the voice resumes—: “Sundry—; blacks—; have—; knives.”

“I’d say our time is
dwindling,
Mr. Foster. Dwindling quite away. Is that also your opinion?”

No answer. A bright, dusty squeak, as of wood against wood—: someone is leaning against the steps. Parson clucks impatiently.

“The time is fast approaching, Mr. Foster, when there will be no Mr. Foster any longer. No Mr. Foster—; no opinions. Time enough to be quiet then.” He lowers his voice. “We’ll
both
be quiet then, you and I. Like school-boys when the master arrives, sets the day’s lesson on the table, and hangs up his long gray coat.” He hushes a moment. “I, of course, as teacher’s pet, may be permitted to raise my hand from time to time. But if I were
you,
Mr. Foster, I’d air your opinions while you may.”

Just then a hard, smooth object—glass, or perhaps iron—is run up the underside of the steps. This so startles me that I’m unable to make out the prisoner’s next words. I hear only Parson’s amused reply—:

“He’ll come to you painlessly, through your open mouth. You’ll swallow him, Mr. Foster, exactly as you would a biscuit.”

A tinkling now, as of glass against glass.

“Why? Because you’re
docile,
Mr. Foster. And reasonably pretty.” A pause. “The Redeemer has a terrible fear, you see, of awakening in the body of Virgil Ball.”

At the mention of my name I recoil from the cellar door as if I’ve been cuffed. The pantry is across the hall and I scurry toward it. Parson’s heard me now—: he must have heard me. I cast frantically about for a hiding-place, make a slow, stumbling circuit of the room, and crawl at last under the cutting-block. The pantry is empty and neglected-looking—; I wonder passingly what’s become of Dodds. Out digging a hole for himself, most likely.

No sooner am I settled than I hear foot-falls on the cellar steps. If Parson goes out to the verandah, he’ll pass through the pantry and discover me—; if he leaves by the front door, or retires to his attic, I retain my advantage over him. Out of a sense of propriety, a desire to act my part, I gather my coat around me and take in a breath.

He comes to the top of the steps, hesitates, then glides in his ecclesiastic way upstairs. Not bothering to look for me. It must no longer matter what I hear. Does he think me so incapable, so weak?

I listen until I hear the door to the attic shut, or fancy that I hear it. It seems to me that Parson paused a second time—perhaps outside of Delamare’s sick-room—but I’ve no way of telling. I picture Delamare to myself, flushed and wasting on his pallet—; then the prisoner in the lightless, airless cellar. I understood only a fraction of Parson’s dialogue with Foster—if dialogue it was, and not play-acting—but it was more than enough to guess at his design. I was right, then, about Dodds’ holes, about the map of the grounds, about the Redeemer’s return. “A conduit for the Redeemer,” Parson said. “What Thaddeus Morelle
once
was.” “Redeemer” was an office Morelle held for a time—; that much is clear. An office now come vacant. A position to be filled. I step out into the hall, undo the laces of my boots, and steal in my stockinged feet down the cellar steps.

It’s darker at the bottom than I’d expected. Foster’s breathing, slow and steady as a sleeper’s, comes from every side at once—: if not for the light from the open door I’d be done for. The room has no depth to it, no boundary, no form. But I have no intention of squandering my advantage. I work quickly and methodically, making forays to each side in search of Foster, returning always to the dim square of light at the base of the steps.

I’ve covered half the cellar, near as I can judge, when the door is quietly pushed shut.

A GROAN ESCAPES MY LIPS as the last light vanishes. The sound is mimicked by the prisoner, suddenly close beside me. A tremendous desire to bolt overtakes me, to exchange the dark of the cellar for the paler dark outside—; but I’ve lost all sense of where the steps might be. The prisoner’s breathing is louder and more urgent than before, as though he meant to guide me to him. I walk in a slow, in-curving spiral, expecting to reach him in a few short steps—; but the sound proves hard to follow, and I soon grow dizzy. I’ve just decided to stop a moment, to recover my balance and my breath, when my left hand brushes against a sack-cloth sleeve.

“Aaaah,”
says the prisoner. My hand whips back as though he’s bitten it. A body ought to give when touched, no matter how slightly—; but the arm under that shirt-sleeve was as rigid as mahogany.

I stand motionless in the dark, in Lord knows what attitude of terror or disgust, mustering the courage to press on. The prisoner makes no attempt to move. His breathing has grown quieter, more restful. Gritting my teeth, I lay my fingers first on his forearm, then on his shoulder, and then, in the manner of the aged and the blind, lightly on his forehead and his face.

The heel of my palm comes to rest on his chin—; his breath whistles through my fingers, tickling them. My middle finger traces the bridge of his nose, which I remember as high and peaked. The index finger traces the hair-line, the ring-finger the rim of his left eye-socket. The face stays fixed throughout, its breathing regular as clock-work. It’s Foster. I’m certain of it now.

“Foster,” I whisper, barely opening my mouth. “Can you hear me? This is Virgil Ball.”

“Aah,”
says Foster’s face.

“I’m going to liberate you, Foster. I’m going to get you out of here.”

No sooner have I said this than the breathing stops completely and his body snaps taut as a cable, flinging my hand away. The silence that follows is so absolute that I can hear his body shuddering. With a great effort of will I bring my fingers back to his face and find it convulsing wildly, as though the blood and ichor under the skin were coming to a boil.

In the next instant the mouth has formed a syllable, a name, and I’m stripped of my last understanding.

“Ball!” it says. It says my name plaintively—imploringly—and I recognize the drawl I first heard under a revival tent ten years ago—: the cane-sugar patois of the Delta flats. The voice that effortlessly, coyly, playfully undid my life.

“Morelle?” I stammer.

The body heaves and spasms. It was Morelle’s voice without question. A single word was enough to know it by. My hands make their way from the face to the throat, probing for its hollow. My left thumb finds its mark and my right joins it dutifully. I open my eyes wide—as if to reassure myself of their sightlessness—and drive both my thumbs in with all my strength.

Choked shrieks issue from the mouth, bestial and dull, but the body itself obliges me. Water begins to stream out of its eyes, running down onto my hands, but I do not mistake this watering for weeping. The darkness comes to my aid, helping me to forget the man before me, forget Morelle, forget even myself, and remember only Parson’s words—:

He’ll come to you painlessly, Mr. Foster. Through your open mouth.

I STAND IN THE DARK for I know not how long, throttling the prisoner. My thoughts begin to stray toward the future, and I see that I’ll suffer for this act as sure as I’m alive. The knowledge does nothing to discourage me, however. Every detail of the present moment—the heat, the dampness, the bleatings of the expiring body, the absence of all light—holds the promise of release, of expiation. Only strangling myself could bring me greater peace.

This man has never committed the least crime against me. He’s as near to an innocent as can be found in this house. And it’s this very fact—the arbitrariness of his killing—that lends the cold beauty of religion to my act. I feel sanctified, righteous—: a latter-day Abraham, holding Isaac aloft to heaven. Is this what the Christian martyrs felt? The knights of the Inquisition? The Union generals? What else could religion be, at its core, but this—: the cold-blooded sacrifice of an innocent, that an entire nation might be saved?

The beauty is enough to sear the lining of my soul. I am ready to wage war against the entire world in defense of this one idea.

A MOMENT LATER I STEP BACK from the body in disgust. The life has gone out of it like wind out of a sheet. The conduit, such as it was, is closed.

I have no time to reflect on this, however. The cellar door flies open without warning, fixing me in its sudden light like a butterfly on a pin. Parson has found me out, as I knew he would—; he’s smelled Foster’s killing, tasted it on the air, and come scurrying down from his attic to destroy me. I can’t laugh at this notion any longer, can’t shame myself into dismissing it as I might once have done. I have faith in Parson’s witchery now—: I must. If Parson has no power but that of superstition, no gift but that of cunning, then I’ve just murdered a man on their behalf.

I’m about to step forward, to challenge him at last, when Clementine’s silhouette appears in the door-frame. The air spills out of my mouth like water from a jar.

She stands raptly in the light, shifting from one foot to the other, believing herself unseen. Clementine, not Parson. I remain as I am, lifeless as the corpse beside me, cowering from the creature who was once my life.

Clementine Gilchrist.

HE’S THERE, JUST AS PARSON SAID HE WOULD BE. I knew he’d be there. I didn’t need Parson to guess that he’d be drawn to that cellar like a puppy to its mess.

He stands cowed and huddled, blinking up at me, with his feet in the light and his fingers in his mouth. Like a babe that thinks itself hidden if it closes its eyes. I wanted to look at him, to uncover him there, like a worm under a rock. Only that. I knew Parson had won but I wanted to see it. To have the fact of it before me. And the fact is before me now, white-faced and trembling, with a bundle of dead rags at its feet. The last proof I needed of the R——’s return.

Now I see how the rest of it will run. The R—— himself told me. The R—— himself told me and then Parson showed me proof. Go to the cellar, Clementine, he said. Open the cellar door and see.

“How Have I Been Used?”

SHE SHUTS THE DOOR QUIETLY, Virgil says.

No sooner is it closed than I dash headlong for the steps. I’m just short of them, to my reckoning, when I stumble over Foster’s body. A curse escapes my lips before I can stifle it. How the devil did he get there? I kneel and pass a hand over his face—: the nose is flat, the skin is loose and folded, but it takes me a long spell of quiet to admit this isn’t Foster. I find nothing in the pockets but tobacco-crumbs and dirt—; but that, taken with the smell off the body, is enough to tell me that this was Dodds.

I never imagined Dodds might go the way of the others, so necessary has he seemed to all the goings-on in this house. But soon this house will be as empty as Dodds’ own body. Cradling his head in my lap, supporting its lifeless weight, I feel a slight, cautious wind-change with the knowledge of his death. There was no such change when Harvey died, or Trist, or even Morelle himself. The rest of us grew more spectral with each day we passed at Geburah—; Dodds discovered his great purpose only after he arrived. I find myself regretting his passing not a little. Only Parson can answer the last riddles for me now.

Parson! I say, and give a hollow laugh. Parson is my last remaining hope!

I’ve just killed a man for no better reason than that he spoke with the Redeemer’s voice. One word was sufficient to convince me. My notion of myself as a lantern of reason, a sort of one-eyed Pinkerton Agency, has been put out of its misery at last. My investigation did nothing but confuse my mind and mortify my body. If it was an investigation at all, it was one in reverse, each new clue only stupefying me further. Any of the Gang would have done as well as I did—; each of them, in the end, would have lost their bearings, played into Parson’s hands, committed murder.

A thought strikes me now with such sudden force that I’m left breathless—: perhaps each of them did. Not one, but
all
of them, one after another. Perhaps they
did
act as I just have. Each of us was meant to overhear one such whispered conversation, to struggle with himself in bewilderment and panic, and to come to the only decision possible. It would suit Parson’s method perfectly. Trist murdered Harvey—; Dodds assisted Trist in hanging himself from the choke-cherry tree—; Foster, perhaps blindly, strangled Dodds in the cellar. And now I, as the next in line, have done the same to Foster.

Parson saw me in the darkened parlor, lingered a moment at the door, drew me after him to the cellar, left the cellar door ajar. The purity of it is staggering. The very grotesqueness of such an idea—its ugliness, its simplicity—bears Parson’s stamp like a coat-of-arms in wax.

The floor collapses underneath me. I force my jaws open, desperate for air—; black soil pours into my mouth instead. Blood swells and shudders in the sockets of my eyes. If I choose to disbelieve this theory, what is there to take its place? The only other solution to the killings is a mystical one, and absurd into the bargain—; yet if I choose to
disbelieve
in the Redeemer’s return, to reject it as a fantasy, then I’ve just killed a man for no reason at all. A perfect circle, sleek and impenetrable as a bullet. My sense of religion—of election—is dispatched by it forever. I work my mouth open wider still, as wide as it will go—: soil tumbles into it like gravel into a tomb. What purpose did Foster’s killing serve? How have I been used? I have to speak to someone, speak to them at once, if only to hear it said aloud that I’m the Trade’s instrument, its play-thing, and was fashioned and favored toward that end alone.

I have to speak to Clementine.

I FIND CLEMENTINE AT HER USUAL STATION, a hair’s-breadth from the window with her ear pressed against one of its jewel-cut panes. She seems fixed in place, inanimate, though she stood at the cellar door not ten minutes gone. A smell of sore neglect rises off her—; her hair stands in sweat-stiffened plaits, like a reef of Araby coral, at impossible angles to her skull. When it is that she sits, sleeps, or takes her meals I have no idea any longer. Delamare and I moved into more comfortable quarters as the second floor emptied, but there’s been no dragging her out of that cramped hat-box of a room. She eats flockpaper off the walls, and vermin that she picks from among her skirts–; the room has a smell to make you swear off breathing.

“Clem,” I say softly.

Her body gives a twitch, then settles. No more than that. Until today I could depend on a flicker of recognition in her eyes, however grudging—; now even that is gone. No matter. I’ll use her the same way she uses that window of hers.

“Clem,” I say again, stopping an arm’s-length from her.

She gives no reply.

“I’ve been to see Foster in the cellar,” I say. “Parson was with him. Parson means to use him as a carrier.” I study her reflection in the glass. “Perhaps ‘courier’ is a better word. For the Redeemer himself, Clem—do you understand me? When he comes down the ladder.”

The unlikeliness of what I’m saying breaks over me suddenly, forcing me to hush. But I’ve said just enough. A rustle of air escapes her lips.

“You remember about the
sephiroth,
don’t you, Clem? The ladder of the spirit?”

I wait for an answer, but no answer comes. I lay my hand on her shoulder. “Dodds’ holes form a pattern of sorts—; a grid. The geometry they follow is the geometry of the spheres.” I take a breath. “I’ve told you this before. Do you remember?”

Tentatively, almost imperceptibly, she bobs her head. The movement is so slight that I doubt it even as it happens. But her brow taps quietly on the glass.

“I couldn’t allow that to happen, Clem. I couldn’t just stand by. I took hold of Foster by the throat, and—”

“BALL!” she shrieks, spinning about with such strength that I’m sent tumbling backward. An infant—or a beast, perhaps—could produce such a cry. The Clementine I knew and loved could not.

“Was I wrong to do it?” I whimper. “Tell me, dearest, if you know! Was I wrong to take Parson at his word?”

She hovers in seraphic silence, violence both animating her and holding her fixed above me, as wires both direct and fix a marionette. She shakes her head slowly.

“He’s dead?” she says. “You’re sure?”

I nod. She brings a hand to her face and passes it from her brow down to her chin, as though she were closing the eyes of a cadaver. Each action she might take next flits past my mind’s eye, accompanied by its corresponding shape.

A net of yellow diamonds.

A silver cup, upended.

A ladder of eight stars, one for each of Dodds’ holes, over a blood-red field.

An instant later she’s away. The L-shaped room is empty. She has stolen down the hall, to him—: to Delamare. I can no more follow her than her bedstead could, or the peeling flock-paper, or the window she so adores. I stand in the center of the room, passive as a dust-mote, listening as her foot-steps fall away.

I’ve felt it before, this swooning of my will, this collapsing of my spirit like a spider-web in frost. I felt it when Clem was brought to 37, and on that first fatal night at Madame Lafargue’s, when she went down to Lieutenant Beauregard. It’s happened often enough—God knows!—and Clem has always had a hand in it. The feeling is not one of helplessness or bewilderment, and still less of fear—: it’s a gentleness, a modesty, a blushing cooperation in the destruction of all that I hold dear. Were I to follow Clem now—to take a single step in her direction—there might yet be some small hope.

Instead I prefer to remain as I am, dumb-struck in an empty room.

After an immeasurable length of time—perhaps a quarter-hour, perhaps much longer—I’m able at last to struggle to my feet. I find her at Delamare’s bed-side, her face dug hard into its quilts. She is sobbing madly, ecstatically—; the quivering of her body makes bright ripples in the air. Delamare seems not to see her. Clem takes up one of his hands as I enter, and passes it abjectly across her face—: without any change of feature, without so much as a sigh, he frees his hand from hers.

For three days now I’ve known it was Clem who filled Parson’s bottles for him, and that Delamare’s illness sprang from this act like a tulip from a bulb. Something in her way of clutching at him now reminds me of it.

“I hadn’t known you were so fond of Private Foster, Clem,” I say.

She answers without lifting her face from the quilts. Her voice, unlike my own, is passionate and clear.

“I’m not weeping for Private Foster. I’m not weeping for you, either, or for this boy here.” She raises her head, as if to take my measure, then lowers it again. “I’m weeping for nobody but myself.”

I move a half-step closer. A tingling has begun at the base of my skull, causing the palms of my hands to twitch—; I dig my nails into them to keep them quiet. I want to take Clementine by the hair, to scream into her tear-marked face, to drag her bodily from the room. Delamare is watching me now, his eyes full of fire, and I do not mistake his look. He means for me to free him, and so help me God I will.

I mean to take hold of Clementine, to pull her from the bed, but a timid voice, groveling and childlike, stays my hand—:

“Weep for me!”

I recognize the voice, after a brief, unwilling moment, as my own.

“Weep for me, Clem, I beg of you! I’m nearly gone—”

The laugh she gives is so giddy that I find myself breaking, in spite of my best efforts, into an embarrassed smile. Delamare groans and shuts his eyes. Clementine rolls back onto her haunches, laughing in little chokes. But when she speaks her voice is hollow as a well.

“Get the house in order, google-eye! Decorate it for a wedding! There’ll be a body in every bed, poor fool, when our Redeemer comes!”