John Wray - Canaan's Tongue

G*d moves under it.

Barefoot I stand among them and without shoes. At last I have finished singing, mocked behind my coat, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three times I sing—: Glory to my f*ther in the highest.

Good-will toward niggers, then pardoned.

HELL IS A WORD, says Clementine.

Imagine a place where your life’s errors hold fast. Hold fast for you to fondle and examine them, then be examined in your turn. Hell is a word that all of us were raised on—; fed and fattened on, then fed back to as we grew. But Geburah Plantation is a place.

The R— himself has shown me this. It is.

There’s to be a marriage, Parson said. He told me on the settee, with the prisoner between us—: Someone is to be married, Clementine. Married to the R—.

There will be an end to things that way, he said. The wedding itself will end things. He laughed. A wedding always does.

Today is the day after. Virgil calls on me at last. He finds me at the window as he did on that first day in Madame Lafargue’s, with my arms stretched out toward the glass. The R— is there too but Virgil doesn’t see.

“Asa Trist is dead,” he says.

“How?” I say. I turn away from the window. Back of my neck I can feel the R— escaping.

“By hanging,” he says. “We’ve just cut him down. And D’Ancourt’s gone missing. Kennedy’s searching the grounds.”

He looks around him now and blinks.

“Clem,” he says to me. “My life—”

Damn you, Virgil! I say. But not so loud that he can hear me. Damn you clear to hell.

It’s then that I think—: Hell is a word. Geburah is a place.

“I know what’s happening to us,” Virgil says. He steps past me as if I were a coat-stand or a potted fern and sets himself down on the bed. He pulls a scrap of paper from his pocket. “Look here at this,” he says.

I take the paper and look. “I see.”

“You see it?” he says, disbelieving.

“I see the grounds—”

His voice goes sharp. “And the ladder of the spirit? The sephiroth, with the paths run between them?”

“Yes,” I say. Virgil gapes and gawks at me. The R— has explained it all but of course he cannot know this.

“D’Ancourt thought I’d gone crackers,” he says, passing a hand over his eyes. “So did Kennedy.” He lets out a breath. “So did I.”

“What can it mean?” I ask.

He coughs. “Look here. Where we buried the R—. The old privy. I’ve marked it with an X. You see? And Harvey here.” He snatches back the paper and runs his finger over it. “Asa will get put here, in Dodds’ newest hole. That makes three.” He nods to himself. “Someone’s following the path. It’s all in order.”

“The path?” I say.

His head bobs like a pigeon’s. “The path from the grave up to heaven,” he says. “The ladder of the spirit.” He bites his lip. “Only he’s traveling the path in reverse.”

“Who is?” I say, cursing him.

“The R—,” he whispers.

I do my best to laugh. “Him?” I say. “Didn’t you and Dodds stuff his body down the—”

“We did. I stabbed him through the neck and watched the blood run out till he was dead.” He says this as though I were arguing with him. He shuts his eyes. “Then Dodds and I dug him under.”

“In that case, he can’t be traveling anywhere.”

Virgil hushes.

“Can he, Virgil?” I say, taking the paper from his hands and crumpling it.

“Someone in the house is helping him,” he says. “Parson, of course.” He looks at me. “Parson and another.”

“It’s Dodds that buries the bodies,” I say. “Not Parson.”

“Parson tells him where.” The old self-pity creeps into his voice. “But you think I’m the murderer, don’t you. I’d forgotten.”

“I know you didn’t kill Harvey.”

His brow goes up. “How so, Miss Gilchrist? Did your new amour tell you?”

At first I think he means the R— and the breath catches in my throat. Then I see he only means the boy. I laugh dully. “My new amour’s not one for talking,” I reply.

“Ah,” he says. He stares down at the floor. “I see.”

“What do you mean to do about Parson?”

He brightens. He’s been waiting for me to ask. “I brought down all the bottles with your name on them,” he says. “From Parson’s coop.” He brings four cut-glass vials out of his pocket. “This one here has a lock of your hair in brine.” He holds another up to the light, that I can see its yellowishness. “This is yours, too.” He blushes.

“You’re not the only one raiding my chamber-pot at night, I see.”

“These last two have your new friend’s name on them,” he says, paying my joke no mind. He smiles pitifully. “Or is he your old friend by now?”

I sit down next to him. I run my hand lightly through his hair. “You must mean Oliver Delamare, the gentleman who lifts my skirts,” I say.

He does not recoil at this but keeps himself quite still, letting my answer run the length of him. He bows his head that I might stroke it better.

“Until today I thought you wanted him because he was beautiful,” he murmurs. “Or to cause me pain. Now I know better.”

“What do you know?” I ask. My hand hovers at his neck. His nape is soft and pink, with blotches of red under the hair-line.

He holds up a bottle marked “Delamare.” The milky liquor looks so odd inside the glass I can’t imagine what it might be.

“Did Parson come to you with this?” he says. “Did he give it to you empty?”

“Yes,” I say.

He’s above me now, cradling the bottle in his palm. “When was that? After you’d taken your boy to bed the first time, or before?” His hand closes on the bottle. “Did you ask our good Parson what he wanted it for, Clem? Or could it be that you knew already?”

“I know all manner of things,” I hiss. “I know more than you know with that fat white eye of yours. I know what Parson does upstairs and I know who’s going to be next and I know how little meat-and-bones a man is made of. I learn from listening, Mr. Ball. I’m a right good listener. And what I’ve heard through these walls would turn your blood to vinegar.”

“Tell me,” he says.

I get to my feet before him. The R— has explained that he must stay the night.

“I’d thought of this house as our penance,” I say. “Worse than any other thing that could befall. I thought of us each as separate, each in a different cell, together in this house only to make each other suffer.” I smile at him. “I was such a fool!”

I’m close to him now. I pull my arms out of my shift. “I’ve been listening, Aggie. Listening and thinking. I’m much better educated than I was before.”

“It’s true. We aren’t separate,” he says. His eyes fall to my belly. The bruise at his temple goes livid. “Not you, not me—”

“We weren’t brought together as a punishment,” I say. I shrug the shift from my shoulders. “The punishment happened by-the-bye. We weren’t brought together for our own sakes at all—: do you see? We’ve been so selfish, Aggie, and so vain!”

Now the shift hangs from my hips like a bustle. The cloth is damp and patterned with the sweat of long-forgotten hours. Even this past hour, when the boy was beside me. Sunk away and gone.