John Wray: Canaan's Tongue

THADDEUS H. MORELLE

REDEEMER OF LAMBS

“The Same Came For A Witness;

To Bear Witness Of The Light”

On the far side of the tent, past a cluster of traps and wagons, thirty-odd horses stood tethered in a row. There were a few skiffs and bucket-boats farther up the bank, but not many. Most of the congregation looked to have come on foot. Up close, the canvas was frayed and weathered—: peering in through a thumb-sized gash, I saw the tent was already amply filled with lambs. I hung back a moment, overcome by a fit of bashfulness (I was a rather timid vagrant in those days) and looked straight above me at the sky. It was sapphire blue, I remember, and wonderfully calm. A warbling rose up now and then inside the tent, punctuating the reedy exhortations of the preacher. Even through the heavy cloth his voice had something queer about it, something out of place, as though a chimpanzee were lecturing a learned assembly. My prudence did battle with my curiosity, fired a brave volley, then collapsed in a heap of dust. I parted the tent-flap and slipped inside.

In doing so I sentenced my Christian self to death, though at the time I felt nothing but astonishment. Through a breach in the crowd I saw the preacher on his crate pulpit, gasping and spitting and proselytizing and weeping—: a delicate, sallow-faced, limp-haired dwarf, in a suit that looked cut out of butcher’s paper. I mumbled an oath and passed a hand over my eyes. Was this some manner of vaudeville? Had I mistaken a curiosity-show for a bona-fide camp meeting? I stood stock-still for a spell, my right hand clutching at the tent-flap, my left hand in front of me as if in expectation of a fall. Then I found a place for myself at the back of the airless, man-smelling tent and listened.

The preacher wore a bi-cornered hat of brushed black silk, the kind Napoleon favored at Waterloo. His left fore-finger rested lightly on a Bible, and he was declaiming in a tremulous voice, a voice riddled with earthly suffering—:

TRULY GOD IS GOOD TO ISRAEL, EVEN TO SUCH AS ARE CLEAN OF

HEART. BUT AS FOR ME, MY FEET WERE ALMOST GONE; MY STEPS

HAD WELL NIGH SLIPPED. FOR I WAS ENVIOUS AT THE FOOLISH,

WHEN I SAW THE PROSPERITY OF THE WICKED.

He paused the briefest of instants and raised his rum-colored eyeballs to survey us. I’d been to revivals before, and was used to their choked-back burlesqueries—; delighted in them, in fact. This was altogether different. The few women in the crowd clutched at their bosoms and wept in silent misery—; the men stood together in a clot, staring at the preacher with a look of unleavened murder. They did their best to drive the notion from their minds, of course, as the killing of a preacher is no small matter in the eyes of God and society. But the urge was there, and unquiet—: you could read it in their faces. And it was this very same urge held them in his power.

“ ‘For there are no bands in their Death,’ ” the preacher continued, lingering affectionately over his t’ s and s’ s in an unmistakable shanty-town lisp. I smiled a little to myself—: this sport of nature had come— of all places! — from the nigger-townships along the delta. But he was all the more marvelous for it.

THEY ARE NOT IN TROUBLE AS OTHER MEN: NEITHER ARE THEY

PLAGUED LIKE OTHER MEN. THEREFORE PRIDE COMPASSETH

THEM ABOUT AS A CHAIN; VIOLENCE COVERETH THEM AS A

GARMENT. .

He leaned slowly forward, the trace of a frown on his damp, rat-like face, and glanced up from the book as though he’d just recollected us. “This puts me in mind of an episode from my own life,” he said in a wistful voice. Planting a finger on the little book, as if to keep it from escaping, he began—:

“I was raised on an acre of black peat in Virginia, youngest boy to a simple, scripture-loving planter of plug tobacco. There were thirteen of us all told, minnowed into two eight-by-seven-foot rooms. But we lived modestly, and praised God nightly in our prayers.” The crate creaked angrily beneath his feet. “Up the lane lived a great patriarch, Yeoman Dorne, with his wife and seven sons. The youngest of them, Ezekiel, was my equal in years.”

His eyes grew melancholy and fixed. “Lord knows, our lot was not a disburthened one,” he said.

A chorus of anticipatory sighs.

“Hejekuma Morelle, my grandfather,” said the preacher, “was, to put not too fine a point on it, stricken with the pox” (assorted gasps and mutterings). “Contrary-wise, Yeoman Dorne — a Bostoner — was a wide-breasted squire of sixty-five, arresting in person and boisterous in manner. The cries and frequent imprecations to our Lord by my grandfather, who raved and cursed us in his misery, took their toll not only on my grandmother, Odette — who developed in consequence a nervous palsy — but also on my mother, Anne-Marie, who grew progressively weaker from lack of sleep, and presented an easy mark to the cholera which swept through the country in the winter of ’29” (brighter, more plaintive whimperings from the choir). “Morelia Dorne, wife of our neighbor — whose boots we buffed, whose wheat we threshed — never suffered the least complaint of health and bore seven healthy, plum-cheeked sons and daughters.”

The preacher regarded the assembly dolefully. Not a word was spoken during that very lengthy pause. The breeze rustled the canvas and moved the tent-poles from side to side, giving the illusion of a ship at sea, or at least of a barge in a heavy current. At last he cleared his throat.

“The premature end of my sweet mother sent my father, who’d never been entirely right in the head, into antics of filth and violence undreamt of by Christian man. My eldest brother, Thaddeus Everett— whose left side was withered from birth — made the error of reprimanding my father one evening for his profligacy, calling on Saints Peter and Albert as his witnesses. My father brained him with a cast-iron chimney pan.” The preacher paused again. “The sight of that drove my sister Sophia clean out of her wits, and troubled all of our sleep for six months thereafter. My grandfather’s blubberings, needless to say, continued without abatement.”

The preacher had not so much as blinked since the commencement of his narrative. His face was placid as a saint’s. Ignoring the mounting disbelief of the crowd, he continued—: “The eldest Dorne boy, Patrice, excelled at hunting, fishing, and the steeple-chase, in which last he took particular pleasure on account of the Libyan thorough-bred with which his father had lately furnished him. Contrary -wise, my second sister, Margaret, a bed-ridden cripple, witnessed the unrelenting recession of our family’s fortunes stoically from her pallet by the coke-stove. My younger brother Thaddeus Benjamin had the skin slowly peeled from his body for the sole offense of stuttering at the supper-table—; Ezekiel — my counterpart in the Dorne household — was never, to my knowledge, so much as shat on by a pigeon. My third sister, Isabel, was set upon, while still quite young, by a hungry sow and horribly disfigured. Each of the Dorne boys, contrary-wise, received a trained jacarundi at their confirmation, with a pearl-and-moleskin collar on which the Declaration of Independence, in its entirety, had been embroidered in platinum thread. Esperanza, our youngest, was seized by my grandfather in a fit of syphilitic delirium, taken hold of by the ears, and repeatedly, mercilessly—”

At this instant the preacher’s litany was cut short by the sobs of a woman to the left side of the pulpit. With a wink to the assembled crowd, he turned to her.

“You there,” he said. “You, little mother! Would you venture to affirm that you know your scripture?”

I could just make out the back of the woman’s head, if I stood on tip-toe. It shook a little, but she answered confidently enough—: