Dark Series, The Color of Seven and The Color of Dusk (Books We Love Special Edition) (17 page)

“Oh, go on! Don’t know why I ‘spected a white nigger like you to understan’ a man like Cain! Go on back to yo’ precious Mist’ Paul!”

White nigger. That’s what he was, alright. Abe’s taunt hit the truth with a bullseye. What was all his work for?
What good would his education do him or them if he lost touch with his own people, if they saw him as an outsider, a white nigger?
And
so he moved forward once again. Walking towards Wharf Street. W
alking towards Paul’s destiny.

Chapter
Eighteen

Cain
stood in a clearing among the willow trees lining the banks of the Ocmulgee just north of the town proper.
He inspecte
d his followers as they arrived. Mostly
teenage boys with a smattering of teenage girls. He expected
maybe
twenty tonight. Not bad
. H
e’d started with a mere handful and their ranks swell
ed
with each gathering.

By next month the
twenty would
be
thirty,
forty,
fifty.
The pattern held a
ll the way from Mississippi to Alabama and over to Georgia. In the end, a private troop of devoted acolytes spread his gospel
through ever swelling numbers. A gospel
rooted in blood, nursed with hate. He looked back over his life’s work and found it sweet. He smiled.

Where he came from, no one knew.
He didn’t know himself.
Sometimes
he
thougtht
he
’d merely sprung, full-grown, from the depths of the deepest swamps, the darkest bayous, of Louisiana. No one remembers babyhood and early childhood
consists of
bright splashes of color highlighting fields of darkness
stretching
gradually into full memory, but Cain remembered no bright splashes
.

His first memories
were of hunger and wetness and cold nights. Of the
waterfront
stretching across New Orleans H
arbor. He didn’t think on
them
often
, t
hose memories
of
ru
mmaging through refuse like a starved cat, barely tall enough to reach over the tops of the garbage barrels
, all that kept him alive.

But he
survived. Many s
treet urchins did
n’t.
And he grew
.
Almost six feet tall in early adolescene, he
soar
ed
past that
to
six foot six at the approximate age of sixteen, with massive shoulders to match his towering frame. He never knew his
real
age
, or who
his parents were or
how he’d come to live on the streets. Of course,
by that time, he’d had been working the docks, one way or the other, fo
r the past ten or twelve years.

When he was roughly twelve, h
e made a great discovery
.
S
ailors and dock workers
drank. A lot.
When they d
id,
they stumbled out of the waterfront saloons and down into the alleys running beside them.
He’
d known that already.
What he hadn’t known was how easily t
heir skulls crushed when struck from the proper angle with the proper amount of force from the proper blunt instrument. He favored a length of iron pipe holding almost talisma
n
ic importance for him. They never offered any protest when he ransacked their pockets. It beat loading huge crates on and off shipboard to hell and back.

As h
is
strength increased, he
dis
covered their necks snapped almost as easily under the pressure of his huge hands as did their skulls under the iron pipe.
He found the sound of snapping neck bone more melodious than the sound of cracking skulls.
A true connoisseur, he
was an artist at his work.

Everyone makes mistakes, though. Cain’s mistake was Leo Salter.
Leo
looked just like every other drunken dock hand. But he wasn’t.
The owner of a large plantation outside of Baton Rouge, he was on the hunt for a runaway wife.
He’d been warned she was nothing but a little slut but he hadn’t listened.
Now she’d run away to New Orleans and taken up residence at one of the waterfront brothels. That made him madder than the initial desertion.
If she wanted to be a whore, she could have at least joined a classy whorehouse.
God knows, New Orleans had plenty.

Leo went undercover. He wan
d
ered the bars and brothels of the harbor. His clothes reeked of cheap whiskey, but h
is
head
was
clear. He was going to kill the little tramp when he found her and didn’t want sweet revenge blurred by an alcoholic haze.
He wasn’t a match for the huge hands pulling him into the alley, but he co
uld and did make a lot of noise
. Enough noise to attract the attention of New Orlean’s finest.

Leo wasn’t dead, and there was no proof of the scores of murders Cain had committed in those alleys. Most of the murder victims hadn’t been missed. Cain thus escaped the gallows.
But
Leo’s testimony at Cain’s trial sent Cain to a Louisiana prison camp in the depths of the snake and mosquito infested back bayous. His sentence was for thirty years.

For seven years,
Cain survived th
e Cat-o’-Nine Tails,
the
periodic sweats in the hot box, and the muck and mud of the sugarcane fields
. Then
a moccasin bit the inmate attached to the other end of the chain manacled on Cain’s ankle.
When they unshackled the men to carry the screaming inmate back to base camp, Cain saw his chance.
He took it. The chain itself was still attached to Cain’s ankle but he didn’t care. He ran.
A
ll the bullets fired at his fleeing back missed
a
nd
Cain
kept running.

He ran the rest of that afternoon and through that night, the baying of the bloodhounds ringing in his ears. The next morning, the officials shrugged, called in the dogs, and trotted back to the main prison camp. Odds were if the escaped prisoner hadn’t been apprehended by
now,
he was dead from a snake bite or an encounter with a rouge bull ‘gator.
Even if he wasn’t, he would be soon. A man didn’t survive
this
bayou alone and unarmed. Not for long.

Cain didn’t just survive.
He entered his second gestation period
. W
hen he emerged from that swamp, he was reborn. His past life didn’t matter anymore
. I
n the depths of the deep swamps, in a ramshackle shack standing on poles to guard against rising rain water and nestled among the knotty cypress trees, he found his destiny.

Destiny comes in many shapes and sizes.
This
particular destiny stood perhaps five feet two inches tall, and appeared smaller due to the stoop of her shoulders. She was black, wizened, wrinkled, and quite insane. He never knew her name.

He’d driven his huge body until he could drive it no further, collapsing on a relatively dry rise of land. He hadn’t heard the baying of the dogs at all that day and assumed he’d been left to perish in the swamps. He damn sure didn’t plan to perish, but he had to rest. When he woke, a gnome-life figure with the face of a witchy woman was bending over him
. She
laugh
ed
softly to herself.

“Lookee what de swamp done sent me now,” she chanted. “Jest lookee here.”

He sat up quickly
and
push
ed her away.
He looked around and sa
w a piece of a shack, sitting on poles to avoid surges of rising water that would come with heavy rainfalls. His eyes bulged
at the shack’s decorations.
Animal skulls. Ropes of bone. Amulets and crude figures, roughly human in shape, with slivers of bamboo thrust through them. The
y
hung all around the porch.

“
Shii
iii
iiit
!” he exclaimed softly. “Whu
t I done landed myself in now?”

The old woman rocked back and forth on her heels. “Swamp sent you. Swamp sent you. You mine now.”

“Swamp din’ send you nuttin’, old woman. An’ I ain’t nobody
’
s.” He got up and moved towards the house
. The old woman trailed
after him. He found
a rusted saw
and went
to work on the manacle around his ankle.
He ransacked the cupboards, shoving food into his mouth. Time to go. Old
woman
was crazy as a bedbug.

“You can’t leave,” she said.

“Like hell I can’t.”

She cackled, an eerie sound that echoed through the swamp.
She held up a crude figure, similar in shape to those h
anging on the
porch, wrapped in a rag torn from the shirt he was wearing.
Producing a short length of rusted chain, she wrapped it around the legs of the figure, still cackling. Cain snorted in derision and made to leave. Then he bellowed in rage.

“Take dat off!
Woman! You crazy!
I say take dat off!”

The more he bellowed, the more she cackled.
He couldn’t move. Literally.
Figuratively.
He couldn’t move.

“You mine, boy! Sent to serve me! You say so!”

“No!”

“You say so!” she or
d
ered, pulling the chain tighter. Feeling the circulation in his legs cut off, his eyes widened in amazement.

“Al
l
ri
ght!” he roared. “Al
l
right. Stop it! Take it off!”

She took it off
and
transferred one bird-like hand to the head of the figure
. She
smil
ed and
squeezed. Cain’s eyes bulged. He felt his head imploding. He screamed.

“Learn to mind yo’ betters, boy?”

“Yes! Yes! Stop it!”

“Dat’s better,” she said
. She
releas
ed
the pressure and Cain settled down for several weeks of virtual slavery.

Never one to miss an opportunity, Cain studied the old woman.
He a
ssum
ed
an attitude of placid obedience
while he studied her
bones and figures and skulls. She gave him
drinks made from swamp plants, mushrooms and fungi gr
owing
on the trunks of the overhanging trees.
The drinks left him floating in clouds of color.
She handed him home-rolled cigarettes with an aroma different from ordinary tobacco
.
And t
he
effect was
damn
sure
different. The world expanded
and t
here was nothing, nothing, he couldn’t do. If he ever decided to. Somehow the energy for action deserted him.
During one spell of lucidity, he realized the smoke and the drinks were sapping him of his will to leave, deterring him in his quest for future greatness.

He moderated their use considerably,
dis
posing of his rations when the old woman wasn’t looking
. He
cajoled her to initiate him into the rituals of the crude figures,
the bones and skulls.

One night, she took his hand and held it in front of the flickering firelight
. She
inspect
ed
it closely.

“When you born, boy?”

“Doan
know.”

“No idea a’tall?”

“Naw.”

“Dat too bad. Can’t know yo’ full power less’n you know de stars dat rule you.”

“Nuttin’, nobody, rule me.”

“I rule you, boy. Be you needin’ any reminder?”

“Naw.” Cain wasn’t ready to take on the old woman.
He knew it.

“But you got power, al
l
right. Strong power. Dark power.”

“What sort of power?”

“Power what ken make you
—boy,
is you de se
bbenth
son of a se
bbenth
son?”