John Wray - Canaan's Tongue

“You—: Harvey. Take off that swaddling,” the Redeemer said, rising from the table.

The man on the floor was arching his body with a languid, reptilian slowness, like a snake crushed under a cart-wheel. His head in its wrapping looked like a ball of fresh-ginned cotton waiting to be spun. Where the cloth met his shoulders a circlet of blood, the thickness and consistency of pig-suet, glistened in the fire-light. The man the Redeemer had spoken to pulled the cloth away in three easy jerks.

“This was Tull,” the Redeemer said thoughtfully.

The face thus revealed was split from forehead to chin like a kindling-wedge—: the two halves fell away from the wound as though forswearing any knowledge of it. Blood welled and receded in time to the body’s tiny, bird-like breaths. That there should be life behind that face was unthinkable—; but there was more than life. There was understanding. To either side of the gash, at its profoundest point, blue eyes looked out through a film of milk-white tears, blinking and trembling and rolling, flitting from one of our faces to the next. But always and again, as if at the tugging of a wire, they interrupted their circuit to fix beseechingly on the Redeemer.

With what emotion the Redeemer returned Tull’s look I couldn’t tell. I’d turned away from them both by then, fighting the urge to faint, holding on to the table for dear life. When at last I dared look, I saw only the Redeemer’s girlish back, and the faces of the three men watching him. They were cowed, spiteful, worshipful faces.

“Some manner of hatchet, was it?” the Redeemer said blandly.

“Shovel,” the man called Harvey mumbled. He spoke with a high, cloying lisp.

“Ah!” said the Redeemer. He chewed this over for a moment. “Where was he done?”

I could see only the left half of Harvey’s face in the fire-light. It was a weak-looking face, soft and all but chinless—; a tendon along his jaw-line tensed, relaxed, then tensed again. “Lawson’s farm,” he answered. His voice was brittle as a biscuit.

“Lawson’s farm, ” the Redeemer said, turning the word over in his mouth. “What were you looking for at Lawson’s, boys?” He turned to look at each of them in turn. “Not my boots, I take it?”

The faces assumed identical shame-faced looks.

“It’s been near on a month,” a stooped-over man to the left of Harvey said. “We’d thought possibly to pick up—”

“What you’ll pick up at Lawson’s, Johnson, is a dose of the private sorrows,” the Redeemer said. “And if that’s all you catch, consider yourself blessed of the Lord.”

“You left your own boots there,” the third man said in a quavering voice.

“What?” said the Redeemer, spinning about to face him. “What was that, now?”

The man’s mouth opened and closed to no discernible effect. The Redeemer took a few steps toward him, stared up a while into the poor fellow’s face, then reached quickly up and caught hold of his nose. The man let out a bright chirp of terror.

“Crangle, isn’t it?” the Redeemer said quietly.

“It is, Your Honor,” the man managed to reply.

“Don’t neglect the small hairs that project from your nostrils, Crangle—; or those that grow about the apertures of the ears. Such small matters of the toilet are often overlooked.” He let the man loose and glanced over his shoulder at the bar. “Am I right in saying so, Mr. Kennedy?”

“Ay,” Kennedy answered without looking up.

The man kept quiet for an instant, then took a deep breath and pointed at Tull’s feet. “Beg pardon, sir, but them’s your boots, I think.”

The Redeemer spun back toward the man, raising a hand to strike him—; then he stopped short, cocked his head, and looked at Tull. “Fry me for a chitterling!” he muttered. “Those are my little mollies.”

“Tull took ’em off Lawson,” Harvey put in. “Lawson took offense.”

The Redeemer was already pulling on the first boot. “What happened to Lawson?” he said, bracing a foot against Tull’s groin.

The third man made an indecipherable gesture with his hand. “Pffft,” he said. Harvey shook his head sweetly.

“Lend us a hand, Kansas,” the Redeemer said, tugging at my sleeve. As he did so I saw a vision of myself springing to my feet, throwing him aside and dashing head-long out the door. My skiff lay just at the bottom of the bluff—; I might easily have reached it. But I sat quiet as an owl.

“Ball!”

I looked up at him in alarm. “Present!” I stammered.

He smiled at me benignly. “Feeling a bit green?”

Before I could answer I found myself kneeling on the floor, holding Tull by the shoulders while the Redeemer worked a boot free. Tull was utterly unresisting now—: after a moment I realized he was dead. As the boot came away, exposing a filthy, butter-colored calf, a network of intersecting blue lines caught my attention. I raised the cuff of Tull’s trousers a half-inch further, disclosing the following design, not much larger than my thumb—:

“Ball,” said the Redeemer softly.

“Yes?”

“I asked whether you were feeling green.”

I passed a hand over my face. “What’s that mark there, on his leg?”

“Ah! That, ” he said, stifling a yawn. “That’s an old Choctaw figure. They were fond of scratching it into boulders, I believe.”

The figure was familiar to me somehow. Its pedigree hovered playfully along the margins of my thought, refusing to come forward into the light.

“Who told you it was Choctaw?” I asked.

“A colleague of mine—; a parson,” the Redeemer said, spitting on the boot and polishing its uppers with his sleeve.

“I’ve seen that figure before.” I endeavored in vain to catch his eye. “Do you know anything else about it?”

He sniffed at the boot’s lining and made a face. “Some consider it an ideograph for ‘ladder,’ ” he said distractedly.

“What sort of ladder?” A moment more and I’d remember. “Leading where?”

The Redeemer stopped fussing with the boot and frowned at me. “There are more things on heaven and earth, Kansas, than a one-eyed prelate’s boy can see.”

But I’d already remembered. “The Tree of Life!” I said, a good deal louder than I’d meant to. Kennedy and the others turned and stared. “The Tree of Life. That’s what that figure is,” I said again, more quietly. “My father had a picture of it. In a book.”

“That may well be what it spells for you, Kansas,” the Redeemer said crisply. “For Tull, contrary-wise, it spelled something else entirely.”

“I know that symbol, sir,” I said, surprised at my own stubbornness. “It comes from the kabala. That’s a book of Jewish scripture.”

“You have done some book-reading, in your time,” the Redeemer said, taking a boot in each hand and banging them together. “Nevertheless, you’re up the wrong tree altogether.”

He set the boots down and climbed into them. They were much too large for him: he wore them as a boy might wear his father’s slippers. He stood up, a good four inches taller than he’d been, and did a pirouette in front of me, kicking the boots up gaucho-style for me to admire. “What do you think, Kansas! Hey?”

I thought he looked like a trained raccoon. “They’re very fetching, sir,” I said.

He smiled at me with genuine affection. “You’re not too proud a man. I’ll say that much for you, Virgil Ball.”

“I’ve done nothing to be proud of,” I replied.

He stamped his foot at this. “For shame, Kansas! You’re a philosopher and a scholar, are you not? A veteran of six years on the Mississippi? A rationalist? A man of the world?”