John Wray: Canaan's Tongue

I hold up Harvey’s room key, identical to every other on its gut-string loop. “This one, Colonel. I found it by the bed.”

He makes a low harrumphing sound. “What did you do next?”

“I rapped on everybody’s door. Then I came back here and waited.”

“I was awake already,” Parson whispers to the sash.

The Colonel looks hard at Parson. “And where were you sequestered, Your Saintliness, might I inquire?”

Parson turns lazily about to face him. (The Colonel is a parakeet—; Parson is a cat.) “I heard the fuss and come on downstairs,” he says.

“You were gone from your room all night, sirrah. I heard you as you left.”

Parson simply shakes his head. He looks at me and smiles. “Poor fat Harvey,” he says. His voice is sweet as clotted butter.

A new fancy strikes me then. We stand gathered about the body like delegates to a mock Confederate Congress—: the Colonel playing the part of Robert E. Lee, Harvey standing in for Stonewall Jackson, Parson for the blessing of the Lord, and Jefferson Davis, that paragon of Southern gentility, being played (of course) by—

The thought strikes each of us at once. Oliver Delamare is missing. The Colonel raises his head with a jerk and his eyes dart from one of us to another. I do my best to avoid his look.

“Where is the mulatto?” he demands.

“Back in Huh! — Huh! — Hominy ville by now, most likely,” Kennedy answers, letting out a snort.

“See if you can find that mulatto, Virgil,” the Colonel says tightly. “Tell him to get himself up here.”

“As you like, Colonel,” I say. But I say it too eagerly. Kennedy’s lips pull back from his teeth and Parson shoots me that look of his. No matter, I think—; in another moment I’ll be gone. Gone from the room, gone from the sight of them, out into the un-cankered air.

The Colonel crooks a finger at me as I go.

“You bring him straight up here, Virgil! No dallying! Do you hear?”

BY VIRTUE OF OUR DAILY WALKS TOGETHER, it’s supposed that Delamare and I are friends. The truth is that I adore him. My love for Delamare is not like the love I feel for my Clementine, of course, though his beauty plays a part in it. (Clementine Gilchrist! My catastrophe! My life! — No. I won’t think of her. Not yet.) Delamare possesses what the rest of us are desperate for—: Delamare possesses grace. He draws on it at whim, effortlessly, like a hawk tipping on the wind. The adoration I feel toward him is in no way returned—: he feels a lack of revulsion toward me, at best. But even that is no small miracle in this place.

I step out into the hall, force myself to take a breath, then shuffle in my heavy-footed way downstairs. The Colonel knows where Delamare is as well as I—: out on the verandah, dressed in his immaculate city clothes, gargling his Mississippi mud.

Each morning at six Delamare goes to the river, dressed as if for a banker’s holiday, then wades into the current and ducks his body under. He stays under-water until his sight goes black and the water clambers up his brain, until he forgets himself and Geburah, until death comes and tickles him on the ribs. Then he brings a jarful back to the house and sits cradling it in priestly silence, breathing in carefully plotted patterns, waiting for the breakfast bell to chime. Often the whites of his eyes are red with broken veins and his face is as yellow as the mud he sips. He swears by this ritual, and occasionally performs it a second time at dusk.

I’ve been in the water exactly once, and that by accident. The last thing I want is that damned river in my skull.

Delamare is not sitting as I pictured him, with his boots propped against the rail and a jar cradled in his kid-gloved hands, nursing his heroic spite. Instead I find him leaning out over the lawn, not so much to get a view of the river as to distance himself from the house at his back. The look on his face is that of complacency beatified by bitterness. He glances at me and I find myself straightening, waiting for him to address me—: there are moments when he inspires, quite carelessly, a behavior that borders on the courtly. For a time I thought it arose from his nobility of spirit—; for a time from his natural refinement—; for a time simply from his youth. After thirty weeks together in this charnel-house, however, I know that it can be traced to the calm disdain in which he holds each of us without exception, and to the violence that hovers about his perfect body like a cloud of bees over an exotic flower.

“Ah! It’s you, Virgil,” he says, as though I were bringing him out his slippers.

“Goodman Harvey is dead.”

He blinks at this. “Poisoned?”

I nod. “Permanganate of potassium, rules the inquest.”

He scratches his chin. “Kennedy’s my guess.”

I say nothing for a moment, considering. “I might reckon it a suicide.”

“Might you?” He grants me a smile. “And on what would such a ruling rest?”

“He was a sorry son of a bitch, that’s all. Perhaps he realized it.”

Delamare sighs. “By that logic, we should each of us be laid in our respective plots, Mr. Ball.” He winks at me. “Excepting present company.”

I make a courtly bow. “I might excuse Asa as well, the poor cracked egg.”

This proves a mistake. Asa Trist, mad-man and heir to this estate— both the gang’s protector, therefore, and its protégé—was born into everything Delamare covets, and has grown into everything Delamare hates. His madness has never been enough to excuse his wealth and pedigree. Delamare’s face goes dark and tight-cornered as a closet.

“Your generosity does you credit, Virgil. Historically speaking, however, young Asa has more blood on his hands than all the rest of us put together.”

I tip my head to one side, trying to catch his eye. “Look him in the face, Oliver, the next time you see him. He’s paying for the sins of his fathers every waking minute.”

Delamare looks out at the river. “That may be,” he says, in a voice drained of all humor. “Yes. I expect he is working at his atonement.”

From the kitchen-house comes the sound of old Dodds, the house-boy, busying himself with breakfast. I watch Delamare patiently, waiting on a sign. All traces of calm have rolled off his features like river-water from a bluff.

“I’m sorry, Oliver,” I say.

“Nonsense!” Delamare sing-songs, getting to his feet. “Shall we take our ceremonial turn through the grounds?”

This is less a proposal than a decree. He gives me a mock bow and glides elegantly away, out from under the shadow of the house and off toward the orchard without a single wasted movement. I think of my promise to the Colonel and hang back a spell, gazing over the red clay lawn at Delamare’s gracefully retreating form. The next instant I’m off the porch and gone, shuffling after the Redeemer’s prodigy no differently than I shuffled after the Redeemer himself, faithfully and doggedly, those seven swift years that led me down into this hole.

IT BEGAN at a respectable camp-meeting, Virgil says. I first laid eyes on the Redeemer in May of ’56, just up-river from Natchez. I was passing the head of Lafitte’s Chute in a pine-sap canoe I’d paid for honestly in Vicksburg when the immaculate white of a revival tent caught my notice, fluttering bravely at a spot that had been wilderness only a fortnight before. I banked my canoe in the shade and climbed up the muddy, stump-littered slope, aiming to satisfy my curiosity at the tent-flap. A water-stained bill stuck to the canvas by what looked to be a lady’s hat-pin caught my eye—: