John Wray - Canaan's Tongue

I mean to take hold of Clementine, to pull her from the bed, but a timid voice, groveling and childlike, stays my hand—:

“Weep for me!”

I recognize the voice, after a brief, unwilling moment, as my own.

“Weep for me, Clem, I beg of you! I’m nearly gone—”

The laugh she gives is so giddy that I find myself breaking, in spite of my best efforts, into an embarrassed smile. Delamare groans and shuts his eyes. Clementine rolls back onto her haunches, laughing in little chokes. But when she speaks her voice is hollow as a well.

“Get the house in order, google-eye! Decorate it for a wedding! There’ll be a body in every bed, poor fool, when our Redeemer comes!”

VIRGIL TURNS AND GOES, says Clementine.

A look of disgust is on his face, as I’d meant there to be. A few breaths later he is down the stairs and gone. Only Delamare is left, and he’s nearly fevered under. I’ll serve as sole witness, then, to my own passing. As the R— promised that I would.

A sound carries in from the hall—: a rasping. Parson is there in the doorway, looking down at Delamare. Virgil’s foot-falls sound on the verandah. He’s away, then. Gone out of the house. As the R— promised he would be. Parson looks down at Delamare, waiting on some sign. I’m still shivering from my fit. But Virgil is gone. It’s important that he be away, I said. Let him be gone when the R— comes down.

Promise me that, Parson. Will you promise me?

The room goes quiet as a church. Nobody breathes. Parson keeps his eyes on Delamare. What’s he waiting on? I wonder. Maybe Delamare needs to be gone, as well, for the wedding to begin.

Another while goes by. I begin to ask myself if now is not the Time. I stir on the floor and make a wondering sound.

Parson tilts his head toward me. He’s not surprised to see me crouched at Delamare’s bed-side. He’s pleased to see me there.

Get up, Clementine, he says.

I do. Parson stands before me now, or I stand before him. He brings a hand to my face and opens my mouth with two hooked fingers. He lets them rest atop my tongue. He takes a gentle hold of it.

Breathe, he says to me. He says it kindly.

The feeling is like when my Cecilia came, but back-to-front, and quicker. The pain comes sharp, then softens. I expect the change will come up through my belly but—!

But when it comes it steals in through my open mouth. One lonely breath, sucked quiet from day-light, that fills me like a bottle. A ravenous breath, and cruel. As careless of my fears and wants as the world outside my body is. The breath suckles my body, and my body suckles it in turn. The knowledge comes upon me in a swift and certain piercing—:

I’ve just gotten religion.

The breath trains itself upwards and outwards in every direction like a clambering vine. My bones and blood have nothing more to offer it—; neither does my name.

You may breathe out, Parson says.

I let a small breath loose.

I’M SENT OUT OF MYSELF on that last sigh. I fall straight down from my mouth and scatter like a cup of flour across the floor. My body has no further use for me. Neither does Parson. Neither does this room.

In the space of an instant I’m gone from all three.

I billow upwards through the rib-cage of the house, along the gaps between lath and plaster-work, through the air trapped between the floors, trellising playfully along the beams, running up and over the attic steps—; past Parson’s attic with its collection of jars and parchments, round the beveled eaves and gables, off the peaked roof at last and into the violet evening air. It took one breath—: one only. Parson raised two fingers and took my tongue between them. No secret is my secret now, but I might savor that one for a spell. Or I might tell it to Virgil.

Virgil!

I see Virgil below me, crossing the red clay park. I’ll follow him a ways. All it took was one breath! No more than that. One coin-purse’sworth of air.

Virgil moves with purpose-minded steps. He’s making for the tobacco-shed—; he drags a spade behind him. His head is bent low and his shoulders are set straight and stiff. He walks as though he expects someone to stop him. All of us, perhaps.

In fact he is no danger to anyone—: of course he does not know this. He believes the ball he’s set to rolling can be stopped. The ball that by now is become a boulder, a mud-slide, a cliff tumbling into the sea. The event he fears has long since come to pass. Its shadow has a greater weight than he has.

He arrives at the newest of Dodds’ holes. He’s amazed to find it already filled with dirt. Who is buried there? he wonders. He stares at it awhile, runs a hand over his face, mutters to himself. The soil is damp and rich, brought to the grave from elsewhere. He takes up the spade, glances back toward the house, and commences to dig.

The digging is easy—: the soil has not yet settled. Nothing resists his spade. He’s frightened now, frightened of what he might uncover, and his digging gets wilder and clumsier with each spadeful. He’s soon past the depth of burying, down in the wet, stubborn clay, fashioning a red sarcophagus for himself. And still he keeps on, hacking away as though the ground itself were between him and some deeper-buried thing, something ancient and indifferent to his fate. Finally he stops, defeated by his own resolve. He looks down into the empty, man-shaped hole.

One day, my son, he murmurs. All that you see before you will be yours.

He stands there a moment longer, mustering his breath. Then he takes up the spade and goes slowly and deliberately from one hole to the next. Some he clears to the red clay bottom—; some he takes down only a few feet. None hold anything but coffee-colored dirt, so fine that it looks sifted through a bed-sheet. At the last of the eight holes, the one in the orchard, he sinks wearily to his knees. It’s as empty as all the others, filled in carelessly, hurriedly, a theater-prop whose usefulness is past. He lies down mutely in the grass.

Now he begins to see the swamp belief has led him into. The events since Harvey’s death revolve in a wheel of transparent fire before his eyes, but try as he might to take hold of the wheel, to arrest its spin, his dirt-caked fingers find no purchase. The empty graves have bewildered him completely. Harvey’s letter, the sephiroth, even the name “Canaan’s tongue” seem less like clues to a great riddle, suddenly, than the punch-line to a joke. Tears marshal in his eyes.

Poor halved-and-quartered Virgil. Have you never once done a thing, looked upon your work, and been convinced of it? The fault lies in your mulatto self. The Jewish half of your brain flourished under the Trade—; the Protestant saw no fun in it at all. The Jew in you revolted at the abominations it was forced to witness—; the Protestant looked on in casual contempt. Was it this back-and-forth that made you question each idea, each urge, each desire you ever harbored? Was it this that made you late at every turn?

No. You harnessed yourself to a man whose every action was a certainty. Your R— was nothing if not a perfect whole. Your R— was consummate, indivisible. You paid tribute to him for seven years—; you learned certainty from him, or so you thought. And finally, by way of proof, you drove a sliver of pier-glass through his neck.

But you were late again, Virgil. You only murdered him by half.

You’re lying sideways in the grass, staring ahead of you at nothing, when a figure appears at the edge the woods. The sight clears your brain completely, even of thoughts of the R—. You welcome the sight, ill-omened though it is, for you know straight-away what it means. At long last something has happened that you can understand.