John Wray - Canaan's Tongue

“Ah! Him,” said Wallace, his manner suddenly much changed. He looked me over for a time; I returned his look with bafflement. In two years of acquaintanceship he’d not once looked me squarely in the eye.

“Come inside a bit, Harvey, if you like.”

The depot was no great establishment, cobbled together as it was of planks of every size & pedigree; to me, however, it seem’d a very mansion. The walls were paper’d from top to bottom with news-print, as in a negro’s cabin. I found nothing unusual in this at first; but as my host busied himself with a rusted co fee-pot & a lump of cold pork-shoulder, I saw that each wall was cover’d in individual clippings, & that each clipping had to do with the so-called “Indian Question” in one way or another. There must have been twenty years’ worth, from any number of papers & bulletins, dating back to the Territories’ natal days. My host sat me down at the little tin-topped table, handed me a cup of tepid co fee & said in a close-mouth’d, conspiratorial voice—

“One day, Mr. Harvey, the country hereabouts will be as fresh & unsulliedas humanity’s first garden.”

I said nothing for a time, stirring the co fee with my least filthy finger. The faith of my fathers had sent me in search of just such a paradise four years before; those four years, however, had done their share to educate me. “I find that hard to credit, Mr. Wallace,” I said at last. Again, however, my voice grew plaintive: “Of course, you’ve been here a great deal longer than I have. I’d be delighted, sir, to believe—”

“Believe it then, young man! Believe it.” Wallace’s breath stank of chicory & rancid butter. “We’re living next-door to Heaven out here on these plains. Close enough to smell it, if the wind is right.”

At this juncture I felt bold enough to attempt a joke. “That may well be, sir,” I answer’d. “But when the wind blows the other way, I smell something else entirely.”

“Noticed that, have you?” Wallace said earnestly. “There’s some that might agree with what you say.”

“I challenge any white man to deny it,” I retorted. “Which among us hasn’t suffer’d at their hands? They’re a godless, joyless, hopeless race of mongrels, in whom the seed of Heaven has grown crooked. You’ll find no sanctity in this territory, Mr. Wallace. And no Garden of Eden, either.”

I was as surprised as Wallace by the venom in my voice; I’d said far more than I’d intended. The desire to please him, to win his good opinion, was as strong in me as ever; but my tongue was thick with bitterness. Did this flatfooted old ass not see that he was living at the center of a vast grid of human misery? Did he actually think of this waste-land, this spiritual desert, this pissoirof the nation as the next best thing to Heaven? If so, then he believed what my father believed, what my cousin Alva had believed, what I myself had believed when I set out on my mission. The thought was almost more than I could bear.

Wallace regarded me in plump, implacable silence, taking sips straight from the co fee-pot. The image of my father & mother back in Nauvoo, so complacent in their faith, appear’d as though stamp’d onto the news-printed walls. It was all I could do to keep from bursting into tears, and if Wallace had kept quiet an instant longer, I surely would have done so.

But he did not. Instead, he straighten’d in his wicker chair & without the slightest warning slapped me viciously across the brow.

“I’ve cursed my luck often enough, Harvey, as God’s my witness; but I don’t curse it now. A man has come into this country — a man with the vision to recover everything we’ve lost, & a good deal else besides. A man to recover our birth-right for us.” He stood up from the chair with a noise like kindling catching fire.

“That man is Thaddeus T. Myrell, the Child of the New West.”

The old grange in Onadee that night was hung from floor to rafters with gaudy crepe banners scavenged from forgotten fairs, cheap tallow torches & bed-sheets painted with all manner of curious slogans—: WHAT LANGUAGEDO YE SPEAK, YE CHILDREN OF ANTELOPES — IS IT GOD’S? and, nearby, TO THE WEST ITS PROMISED HUSBANDS— TO EACH HUSBAND, NOW, HIS CHILDE!

I was unable to make the least sense of them, but they struck me in my eagerness as full of hidden portents. Most obscure of all was a device stencil’d here & there on the walls of the Grange itself, a figure made of intersecting lines that I took at first to be a cattle-brand—

In spite of these trappings, however, & the smoke from the sap torches, the mood of the assembly more resembled a gin-raffle or a country dance than any sober-minded gathering. The laughter, lewdness & commotion on all sides seem’d more in keeping with the medicine-shows I knew so well than with any true revival. But a revival, of a sort, it was. There was the dark, quiet stage — there the wooden lectern; & there, all at once, was the Child of the New West, stepping forward to address the crowd, his pale face glowing in the torch-light. His body was stretched to its fullest in every direction, like a squirrel falling from a tree; as he stepped up to the lectern, holding one pudgy fist aloft, I smiled to myself at how little he resembled Tempie’s second-hand accounting.

I’d pictured him in a buck-skin greatcoat, mud-spatter’d riding boots & a wide-brimmed trapper’s hat, perhaps with a jay’s feather tuck’d into its brim; the man at the lectern — if a man he was, & not a precocious truant — wore a well-iron’d suit of clothes & high-heel’d city shoes. He look’d more like a school-teacher or a claims-adjuster than any Hero of the New Frontier. Everything about him bespoke a quiet reasonableness. He appear’d the perfect gentleman in miniature; so miniature, in fact, that Wallace’s hosannas seem’d as laughable as Tempie’s. This served the Child well, however; my surpriseat his great delicacy disarm’d me.

The crowd had a di ferent notion of the Child. The men about me seem’d to treat him as they would any other beer-hall sermonizer — with beer-hall tom-foolery & cheer. With time, I was to learn that Myrell’s great gift was to convince each of his listeners that they’d caught a glimpse of his most secret nature, & that they recognized themselves — their own desires, ambitions, & hid-away beliefs — in what they saw. He’d fashion’d himself into an all-purpose cipher, perfectly suited in his blankness to take on any meaning, any color, any significance whatever.

For some minutes he tried, as if slightly pain’d, to check the hubbub in the hall. Then, in a low voice, hesitantly at first, he embark’d on what sounded more like a lecture in history than a political speech, let alone a sermon. This departed even further from the bellowing, whiskey-swilling charlatan I’d imagined. At no point did he allow the high spirits of the gathering to tempt him away from his sober tone; in time, out of simple curiosity, nearly everyone in the Grange had quieted enough to hear him. And in fact the Child grew more & more bewitching with every word he spoke.

I’ve often asked myself, in the course of the unquiet years that followed— what was it I found so remarkable in Myrell’s performance that August night in Onadee? Certainly not the substance of his sermon. He was expressing anxiety about the future of white settlers in the Territories — no more than that. Gradually, now, his shyness disappear’d; at times his voice grew strident. He spoke urgently & quickly. The mood he cast over the revelers was heady & violent,& went far deeper than the speech itself; try as I might, I can’t recall a single word of it.