Canaan's Tongue (9 page)

This pleased him better still. “A
full
reading!” he crowed, holding his notes aloft. “Fuller than most, at any rate.
Four
signs!”

Usually he said nothing when we’d done, and asked me no more questions—; the reading must have affected him profoundly. “Will it take long to puzzle out?” I asked.

“Don’t be impatient, Kansas. Bide here for a spell.” He snatched up his notebook and spun away again.

I sank wearily to one side, covered my eyes with my palms, and tried to make my own sense of what I’d seen. The result, as usual, was an over-powering urge to sleep. There was nothing wondrous, to my mind, in our sessions, other than the amount of pain they caused me. I had as much confidence in the power of my left eye to foretell the future as I had in my right ear’s ability to predict rain. From the next room, as if across a great body of water, the rustling of folio pages could be heard. A familiar voice intruded on my repose.

“A yellow cloud, Virgil?
Yellow?
Are you quite sure?”

I sat up with a start, as though prodded awake, to find the Redeemer sitting next to me at the table. His arms were folded tightly against his belly and he was watching me with violence in his look—: at first I thought I’d somehow spoiled the reading.

“What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong? I did my sovereign—”

“You’re to leave tonight,” he said, cutting me short.

I frowned at him. “Tonight, sir? But I haven’t—”

“You’ve heard about the trouble up in Memphis?”

“I’ve heard there’s some manner of epidemic making the rounds,” I said, pressing my fingers to my temples. “Pulmonary grippe. Catarrh.”

“Not catarrh,” the Redeemer said, his eyes brighter than before. “Yellowjack.”

“The fever?” I said hollowly.

“The same.”

I watched him for a moment before I spoke. Something in his manner made me circumspect. “They’ve certainly kept it quiet,” I said at last.

“There’s no keeping it quiet any longer, Kansas.” His voice was sedate and teasing, as though withholding the punch-line to a joke. “Eighty-score are dead—; thousands flee the city every hour.” He clucked his tongue against his teeth. He and Parson both made that same sound, usually as a sign of satisfaction. I began to grow skittish in my seat.

“It’s the seventh day of Judgment up there, according to the Colonel,” the Redeemer said finally.

“The Colonel’s in Memphis?”

The Redeemer shook his head, toying with two burnt matches on the table-top. “He left the day before yesterday, after finding his cook face-down in a pan of hopping-john.”

I tried in vain to catch his eye, hoping to guess the joke before he made it. “As good a sign to jump ship as any, I suppose.”

“Black bile and blood-puddles everywhere,” the Redeemer said, still twiddling the matches. “
Rivers
of it in the streets.”

I said nothing. My skin was going hot and cold by turns.

“Not everybody’s cleared out, though,” he added playfully.

Blearily, as if through a the bottom of a bottle, I began to see.

“Stacey’s clearing-house, for example, is still open for business. Goodman Harvey’s with old Stacey, managing things on our end.” He scratched his nose. “At present, of course, there isn’t much to manage.”

Goodman Harvey, I thought. Naturally. The only boot-licker in the whole chain of command more eager to please than I was. I knew exactly what the Redeemer wanted of me now. Seeing this, he said nothing more, content to watch me struggle against my better judgment—; the struggle, as always, was a brief one.

“How many?” I asked in a bloodless voice.

He closed his eyes, one after the other, like a tom-cat in a patch of sun. “How many what, dear K?”

“You know damned well, sir. How many niggers.”

He arched his back, cracked his finger-joints against the table, then settled down more comfortably into his chair. He was too content even to chide me for my language. I’d seen him take pleasure in his power over me before, but never with such ruthless, careless coziness. When finally he spoke I learned, in no uncertain terms, just how little I was worth to him.

“Fifty-seven souls,” he said coolly, pushing a dog-eared ledger toward me. I recognized the hand-writing—curlicued, girlish—as Parson’s. Fifty-seven Christian names were listed, each of them male. The list was divided into four columns—: (I) age, (II) weight, (III) disposition, and (IV) marketable skills. A fifth column, labeled “Sold For,” as yet remained blank.

The most I’d ever taken on a single run was seventeen head, and that mostly women. I should have bowed to him politely, walked down to the landing, and dog-paddled all the way to New Orleans.

“Why so many?” I asked. My voice was thick as custard.

“Because we
can,
Kansas! We can—; and we have the yellowjack to thank for it. It’s the fourth birthday of the Trade, and the fever has given us a present—: enough panic to run a herd of bison through. If Jefferson, or Rush, or even old Baron were still receiving, we’d ship every last darkie off this island
tout à fait
!” He quieted himself, with an obvious effort, and gave me a sober look. “But Pop Stacey—blast him!—won’t take more than fifty-seven.”

“You’d need seven barges to hold them, sir,” I mumbled, fighting the urge to fall blubbering at his feet. “And seven idiots to run them.”

By way of an answer he held up his fingers for me to look at, cracked them again, then bunched them together into dumplings. He regarded me a moment, brought the dumplings to his mouth, and blew across them once, twice, thrice in quick succession—: then his right hand opened. A ring of worked silver glinted in his palm. A tired trick, of course, but he had need of nothing better. I was already long since brought to heel.

He laid the ring before me on the table. “As it
is,
though, Kansas, I need only one.”

AND SO THE PUNCH-LINE arrived at last. The Redeemer meant for me to take fifty-seven grown men into a fever town and sell them. I sat up straight, arranged my collar and cravat, then slumped face-down onto the table. I wept in a series of dry-eyed little gasps. It was tantamount to a death-sentence, after all.

“Will I be running them alone?” I said. I saw nothing but the thick green felt covering the table. For some reason its blurry coarseness soothed me.

“I’ve sent across the river for Parson. I don’t expect you’ll require more camaraderie than that.”

“Parson,” I said, grinding my chin into the felt. I’d have preferred to make the run in a butter-churn.

“I’ve explained my scheme to him, of course. He’s given it his blessing.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Parson had invented yellow fever.”

The Redeemer smiled at this, indulging me. “A once-in-a-decade’s chance, Kansas. Once in a
lifetime,
possibly.”

“Once in mine, you mean,” I said. But I said it meekly. The more I learned about the Redeemer’s tricks, the better they seemed to work on me. He was capable of appearing entirely at your mercy, meek and vulnerable as a school-girl—: you pitied him, especially if his plan was flawed, while still trembling at the least thought of his displeasure.

A silence fell—: the silence of the tomb. I stared morosely at the matches the Redeemer had been fiddling with, then all at once noticed that they’d fallen, quite by chance—one straight, one broken—to form an arrow pointing out the door.

For some reason this jarred me from my bedazzlement like a blast of snuff. Memories of yellowjack victims I’d seen, the image of Memphis filling with bloated, black-tongued corpses, and the thought of myself in the thick of it all brought me suddenly to my feet.

“I won’t do it, sir.”

He shook his head at me. “Of
course
you will, Kansas! You’ve already told me so!”

“
I’ve
told you? I don’t follow—”

He covered his right eye, winked at me with the other, and my boldness disappeared like spit into a puddle. I knew what his pantomime meant, of course. My blighted eye had told him.

“What was it?” I said dully, sitting back down. “The star? The yellow cloud?”

The ghost of a grin played about his mouth-corners. “You
could
say it was the star, I suppose. Better yet, it was all the signs in sequence. Better
still,
” he said, his eyes narrowing to two coal-colored slits, “it was everything you’ve done since you stepped off the
Vesuvius.
And perhaps a bit before.”

My thoughts flew about in a panic, darting from one imaginary betrayal to another, and settled at last on the little Pinkerton I’d met. Quietly, gingerly, I slipped a hand into my coat-pocket, looking for the card Barker had given me.

It was gone.

“
Everything
I’ve done? What the devil does that mean?” I said at last. But my voice was as guilty as an adulterer’s.

The Redeemer picked up the ledger-book, by way of an answer, and laid it triumphantly in my lap. “It means you leave in half an hour, Mr. Ball.”

“YOU’LL HAVE ANOTHER WHITE MAN WITH YOU,
en passant,
” the Redeemer said as he walked me to the Panama House landing. It was dusk, and we made our way by the weak light that fell from the windows of the bar.

“Is that so?” I murmured, sunk in my misery like a carcass in a bog.

“More of an
observer,
really, than an active participant.
Un spectateur
objectif.
” He coughed into his hand. “Young Asa Trist.”

I laughed aloud at this. Let them all come to Memphis, I thought— madmen, naturals, epileptics, amnesiacs—what possible difference could it make? “You mean to put me to death, sir, I take it?”

He quickened his pace. “I needn’t explain the
importance
of the Trist family to the Trade, I hope. That boy’s been badgering me since the day he arrived. He’s harmless, really—; practically a child—”

“Kennedy’s told me what a cracked egg he is,” I said.

For once the Redeemer looked genuinely pained. “Asa wants to follow this delivery, that’s all. To get acquainted with the business. Does that seem so very cracked?”

“Everything to do with this run seems cracked,” I said. “Why is Trist so interested in the business, suddenly? He’s never cared a crumb before.”

“He fancies himself a
scientist,
Virgil. A rationalist, like yourself.
Un
homme de recherche.
”

He was leading me about by the nose now, and I knew it. “So Trist’s not coming along to learn the business, then,” I said. “It’s something else entirely.”

He shot me a plaintive look. “Don’t ask me to explain the ways of the gentry, dear K.”

“I swear to you, sir, if that loony mucks in my affairs—”

“Touché!”
the Redeemer cried, as though I’d reasoned him to his knees. His manner had become steadily more theatrical as we walked, as if he were performing for a hidden audience. He passed his arm through mine almost bashfully, and proceeded to recite at the top of his lungs, as one might at the edge of a cataract—:

“It’s the same run as
always,
really—; just a bit more freight. Aim to pull in at sun-up, so you’ll have light to get them coffled by. Lafitte & Dobbins have left for St. Louis—; you can tie up at their berth. You know Stacey’s clearing-house, of course—”

“That is my privilege, yes.”

“Of
course
it is. But they’ve moved two streets westward.” He stopped again, watched me closely for a moment, then handed me a peach-colored envelope, embossed with letters of strident blue—:

STACEY & TALON
DEALERS IN NEGROES & BONDSMEN
21 COURT STREET, MEMPHIS

I was to take one of three new boats the Colonel had commissioned for us, sleek twenty-yarders that ran on steam against the current and floated back down-river like a barge. They showed less profile than a decent-sized pirogue, and drew less than half a yard of water when full—: perfect craft for smuggling. The Colonel liked to joke that if the Abolitionists had thought to invest in half a dozen, Canada would be an African protectorate by now.

When the Redeemer and I reached the landing, I could see straight-away from the lay of the boat—low in the water, canting subtly aftwards—that the slaves were already in the hold. This discovery caused me pain, though it took me a moment’s reflection to understand why.

“You knew
before
looking in my eye that I’d make this run,” I said.

“Parson’ll be along soon,” the Redeemer said airily, leading me up to the pilot-house. (He took a childish pride in these new skiffs of his, though he himself had never run one.) “You’ve piloted her before, if I remember rightly. Do I remember rightly?”

“Never with fifty-eight head on board.”

“Fifty-
seven,
Virgil.”

“Fifty-eight, sir, counting that cracked egg of yours.”

He tut-tutted with a finger. “Don’t fret on Trist’s account, Kansas. Parson will be on this run, remember. Has a way with dilettantes, as you may know. He takes the stuffing out of them.”