John Wray - Canaan's Tongue

I looked past him at the river. “That wasn’t the fear of God, Asa.”

“They’ll be gentle as lambs, Captain. You’ll see.” He threw the cross-bolt open and stepped aside. “Call the all-hands down to them, sir. They’ll come to heel!”

Trist’s faith in Parson’s good works proved to be well founded. All twenty-two head came up orderly as you please, with their heads bent low and their wrists held out in front of them, as though positively eager for the chain. In a matter of moments the queues were coffled-up and ready. The faces of the niggers from the aft two holds looked sleepy and bewildered—; those from the bow looked as dead as cobblestones. They moved like dead men, too, once we got them moving. It took us the better part of an hour to reach the top of the bluff, but I can’t say I objected. If the Yellowjack was all it was rumored to be, most of them would breathe their last in old Pop Stacey’s pens. Who could fault them for regretting it a little?

The nearer we came to the top of the bluff, the more wooden their movements grew—: man followed man so mechanically you might have taken them for soldiers at a drill. “Quiet bunch,” Trist said as we rounded the last bend. I said nothing at all. The customs-house was close enough now that we could hear the flames lapping at its timbers and smell the sharp cloy of the boiling sap. I’d passed the house often on my visits, and had fallen into the habit of peering in — not a little enviously — at the clean, square parlor, and watching the customsmaster’s wife setting the table for breakfast, or for supper. I’d taken a fancy to that woman, and to the family I’d assigned her. Now they were dead, either in their rooms or on the street—: it was the custom during the worst bouts of Yellowjack to set afflicted homes on fire. As the coffles passed the house, its high slate roof commenced to shudder and bow, sending great hissing embers down onto the street. I began, with a calm born of my exhaustion and my pain, to weigh my odds of surviving the afternoon.

I was a different man than I was used to being. Nothing struck me as familiar, my own behavior least of all—; but that was only fitting. That day was to be the levering-point, the very pivot of my existence, and I knew it even then. This day must not be wasted, I said to myself. This day must be played out. I was both patient and resolute. I was, in a word, decided. I’d been brought back from the dead for a reason, after all—; and I intended to make good use of my reprieve.

If the fire in the customs-house had been set as a warning to passing boats — an illustration, however crude, of the disaster up in town— it might as well have been a match-flame. The sight that met our eyes as we came out onto Shelby Street could easily have been wrought by Moses. Hundreds of houses were in flames, and countless more had burnt down to their cellars—; the smoke from the combined conflagrations turned the mid-day sky the color of sodden brimstone. The citizens went about in perfect indifference to the smoke, to the fires, even to one another. Mountains of pulverized window-glass, roofingtile, dry-goods, offal, evening-gowns, gunny-sacks, and every other conceivable article of trade smoldered in the streets, festooned with the carbonized remains of shop-ledgers, mastiffs, bed-linens, saddles, daguerreotypes, and various other objects I did my solemn best not to recognize.

We’d come only four streets when we saw our first corpses—: three of them — another trinity — propped together at the intersection of Shelby and Union Streets like the legs to a looted end-table.

Their bodies were set back to back, each supported by the others, in a deliberate parody of wakefulness. I was reminded straight-away of Parson’s handiwork in the hold. Two were men, perhaps fifty years of age, and looked to have been dead for quite some time—; the third was a woman in the first flush of her youth. Her body had been stripped naked and doused with kerosene and an empty lantern lay beside her in the mud. The kerosene was freshly poured—: her belly and breasts shone under its glaze like preserved fruits in a jar.

“Damned waste of lamp-oil,” a passing citizen said tonelessly. He was dressed as if for Sunday service, all in pressed silks and linen, except that his feet were bare and caked up to the ankle-bones with ash. I made to speak to him but he walked away from us, into the looted skeleton of a shop, closing the shop-door conscientiously behind him.

I was staring after him, trying to puzzle out some sort of explanation for the man, the bodies, indeed for everything we’d seen, when Trist gave a tactful cough behind me. “Our charges seem to be coming to,” he said.

And so they were. The desolation and the stink hadn’t seemed to trouble them—; the sight of that trinity, however, laid out so artfully in the middle of the street, was beginning to do its work. I was certain now that it was Parson’s doing. Guessing the route that we would take, he chose, for some obscure reason of his own, to render it more scenic. But how had he found the time to assemble this little tableau? And why would he want to sabotage the run, so shortly after saving it from ruin? Out of contrariness, perhaps, or simply on a whim? Or possibly as a warning of some kind?

The thought struck me then that none of the fifty-seven head had been told about the Yellowjack, or even that the boat was bound for Memphis. Parson’s hoo-doo had sloughed off at last, and now the fact of the fever was breaking over them like surf.

Parson surely knew that this would happen, and decided it should happen here—: here, in the middle of a ruined city, with only Asa Trist to help me. Was this entire run, down to its last detail, only a baroque form of punishment for me, a penance paid out in advance against future crimes? Had the Redeemer guessed at my betrayal before I’d even thought of it myself? Had he seen it, plain as porridge, in my left eye?

The men in the nearest coffle were beginning to move nervously from side to side and to glance, almost shyly, into one another’s faces. A tinkling rose up along the coffle-chain as the hands grew restless in their shackles—: an innocent enough sound, on the face of it, but terrible in portent.

Trist, by contrast, was care-free as a dove.

“Doesn’t this put you out, Asa?” I whispered.

He grinned back at me. “No, Mr. Ball! It doesn’t. Not as such.”

“‘Not as such,’” I said to myself, turning the words over in my mouth. The phrase lingered in my mind, adding to my disquiet—; its blitheness was so wonderfully ill-suited to the Golgotha on every side.

We managed to get the coffles moving again, but it was tricky going. A few streets farther on, I found the perfect complement to Trist’s expression—: a bamboo-handled polo mallet, lovingly waxed and polished, lying in a puddle of iridescent yellow filth.

I glanced side-wise at Trist, meaning to point the mallet out to him, but what I saw made the words curdle in my throat. Trist’s eyes rested neither on me nor on the coffle nor on anything on God’s earth. They seemed less like eyes at all than like chips of milky bottle-glass, washed up by some caprice of the sea.

The rumors I’d heard about him came rushing back to me in a torrent. “Mind the coffles, Asa!” I said sharply, hoping to call him back from wherever he’d gone off to.

In place of an answer he held up his hat-box for me to admire. His face was flushed with a look of secret pleasure, as though he were sucking on a lump of sugar.

I gave a quiet curse and seized him by the shoulders. “We can’t have this, Asa! Not here! Do you hear me?”

“Dilly?” Trist said politely, turning as if to someone passing by.

“Who the devil are you talking to? There isn’t any—”