Canaan's Tongue (18 page)

“I can still do it, Clem. I mean to. Once you’re in safety with the babe.”

By “it,” he meant killing the R——.

“I’m in safety
now,
Virgil,” I’d say, looking back at him with my eyes half-closed. I said this to punish him at first. But as the weeks went by I managed to believe it.

The days passed easier and easier. I was free to come and go as I saw fit. My body being what it was, it got harder and harder to take my strolls, but I came to know the island very well. Outside the Panama House it was men everywhere but never once did any of them so much as look at me unless I asked them a straight question. The summer was a fierce one, hot and stifling as the tongue in my mouth, but by September the hours of the day were a single gilt delight. The island ended in a narrow spit of sand and reeds and I’d lie there on my back, surprised by everything I thought. The water would rush together into a V and the sound of it would brush against me and I’d close my eyes and remember what it was like before my life, when I had no life at all, only a body, a shape like the one that was fattening itself day by day in the hollow of my belly. I knew it was the babe that kept me in the R——’s favor, the babe and nothing else, and I wished to myself that it should never be born but stay inside me always, sheltering me.

Six weeks before my time Virgil went away and stayed gone. I asked the R—— what had become of him but he simply shrugged his shoulders. I’d always gotten letters from Virgil when he went off, stiff with vows and protestations—; but I seemed to have died to him now, and he to me.

The R—— brought Parson to see me every day. Parson would lay a long hairy ear-lobe against my belly and whisper to me that it was to be a boy. I understood that a boy was what the R—— wanted, and I set my will to it accordingly.

When my hour struck, the R—— informed me, Parson was to be my nurse. “You
must
have a nurse, Clementine,” he said. “You can’t go birthing the little chap into your night-pot.” He smiled at me and I understood that I had to have a nurse and that the nurse I had to have was Parson. I thought of the mouse and of Parson’s downy face and I said to myself that before I’d have him as my nurse I’d have the Mississippi River. But I smiled at the R—— and said that Parson was certainly very knowledgeable.

Every so often we’d have news of the war. In those first months there were hurrahs among the men at every Dixie victory, and high hopes for an autumn armistice. I’d never imagined thieves to be such patriots. The R——, of course, was not. He made a great show of support for the South, sporting a magnolia sprig on the collar of his jacket, but in private he fretted that the war might end too soon. When the tide first turned, that autumn, it was all he could do to keep from cutting capers.

One morning in mid-winter I was roused out of sleep by a chorus of yells, followed by all manner of stompings and bustlings on the stairs—: I opened my door to find the entire house filing out onto the bluff. I pulled a shift over my night-shirt and hurried after them. Not a hundred feet below us, creeping steadily up-river, were three of the most hideous monsters I had ever seen. They were as long as a house and covered in sheets of iron—; cannon stuck out of them like bristles from a sow. Each of them looked heavier than the whole D’Urberville Hotel. The men above-decks looked like maggots on a chop.

Goodman Harvey was there, in among the rest, watching them roll by. He blushed when he saw me and tipped his hat. I’d not seen him since he’d stolen me from New Orleans. My change in feeling toward the R—— had done nothing, I found, to lessen the violence I felt toward that canker of a man. I walked toward him through the crowd, meaning to push him head-first off the bluff. Instead I found myself asking him politely about the ships.

“What are they, Mr. Harvey?”

“Pook’th Turtleth, mith,” he said. “Union Navy.”

I said nothing. The R—— might cheer each defeat as loudly as each victory, but my heart quaked to watch that slow parade.

God have mercy on the river, I thought.

After that the war became a far-away thing again. I thought of it as I might of a disaster in a foreign place. The island, after all, was a kingdom to itself. What are the United States to me? I thought. The war kept 37 as free and as safe as the chap in my belly kept me.

I knew that time and the babe would change me, and they did. But not the way that I or the R—— or even Virgil Ball had reckoned. A different way altogether. We were all of us quite surprised.

One morning in May I found Virgil sunning himself on the Panama’s stoop. I’d come down to the bar for a glass of birch-beer and found him outside the door, clutching his tattered felt cap like a pan-handler’s plate. I saw at once that he was not in his proper mind. His mouth moved as if he was chewing on a piece of fat. He stood without a word and led me up to my room, wincing when the latch shut behind us. It was clear from his look that the old fear was on him.

“I want to tell you where I’ve been,” he said.

“Where?”

He stood carefully in the middle of the room, looking nervously about him and pawing at his cap.

His mouth opened.

“Well?”

“Shiloh,” he said. His voice caught on the
-oh.

I could see he expected the name alone to do his work for him. I’d heard of course about the battle there, from the R—— and sundry others. I’d heard the fighting had lasted two days. I’d heard a goodly number had been killed.

“What’s Shiloh to me, Virgil Ball?” I said.

His head tipped back, as though his body was tired of carrying it, and the story hissed out of his mouth-corner like a jet of steam.

Shiloh.

MORELLE SENT ME OUT TO KILL BEAUREGARD, Virgil says. He sent me and I went.

It was the end of 1861. Beauregard had become a burden to him, now that the war was under-way, just as I had become a burden. No doubt he’d have an equally burdensome citizen put a bullet in me at his convenience. I had no doubt of this, but I went just the same. Partly because of Clementine, partly out of habit—; but also because there was no life for me outside the Trade, no purpose, no safety. I’d forgotten this briefly, and it had caused me pain. I was never to forget again.

For sixteen weeks I stalked Beauregard through the hill-country of Kentucky and Tennessee, sometimes trailing him at a distance, sometimes mixing openly with his men. He was a full general now, snake-oiled and brocaded, and from morning till night he was surrounded by a gang of ragged, scrofulous thugs that proved to be his cadre of underofficers. I had no trouble moving about his camp—: I’d brought tobacco and soap and a bottle of laudanum with me, and found a welcome at every camp-fire I called at. There were so many hangers-on— refugees and peddlers and profiteers and whores—that no-one looked at me too closely. My kind had long since grown as familiar to them as chiggers.

Getting close enough to Beauregard to shoot him, however, was a different cut of meat. The good general, I soon discovered, was an accomplished coward. Even during the most fantastic skirmishes he kept himself out of harm’s way, if not out of sight completely—; a clutch of his most redoubtable aides-de-camp hovered about him at all times, enclosing him like a tent, to camouflage his dislike of cannonfire. I was a middling shot at best, and I didn’t fancy suicide. It would take a full-scale battle, I realized, and not a little luck, for me to catch my general unguarded.

By the end of March the wait had become intolerable. I’d been scoring the days into the soles of my boots—; by my reckoning Clem’s babe had been born not long after I left 37. It would be four months old now, perhaps a little more. I knew neither its sex nor its age nor whether it had survived its birth. The child was the only strand connecting me to Clem, or for that matter to the world. My nights grew steadily more difficult, my days too agonized to bear. With each passing day Beauregard seemed farther away than ever.

A chance was to be offered me, however. On the fifth of April—a wet, cloud-blanched Friday—word came down the line of a new offensive. Beauregard’s army had spent the past two days and nights hauling itself into place alongside General Johnston’s above the town of Corinth, Mississippi—; the plan was to attack at first light. It was rumored that the Union Army, led by that drunken melancholic, Grant, was hatching attack schemes of its own, and had been joined just that night by a large force under General Buell—; Johnston, however, would not be turned aside.

“Old Johnnie said he’d fight them if they was a million!” a corporal I’d gotten friendly with grumbled between spoonfuls of laudanum. “Even Little Napoleon”—as Beauregard was known to the rank-andfile—“couldn’t talk him out of it, the bastard!”

I muttered a heartfelt thanks to Lady Fortune, took a spoonful myself in celebration, and spent the next hour cleaning my revolver.

With the earliest streaks of day-light the order came to move into position. I scrambled forward with the rear line as had become my custom, but the banter and bravado I’d grown accustomed to was scarce. Word had spread that this was to be no ordinary skirmish. The men about me checked their rifles and bayonet-mounts feverishly, barely speaking to one another, discharging powder to test for dampness even though the officers had forbidden it on pain of death. No-one knew how many men were entrenched behind the clap-board church at Shiloh—; the infantry moved fitfully, at times surging forward, at times clumped together like livestock in a pen.

When we came to the forest’s edge, however, a cry went up such as I’d never heard before, bright and terrible and heedless, and the men dashed forward with such fatal eagerness that in the space of a breath I was left to myself. There were sounds of rifle-fire close by, and the screams of Beauregard’s men as they hurtled down the slope—; but the rustling of leaves under-foot, the sound of my breath, and the wind in the crowns of the trees seemed infinitely louder. I could hear the scraping of my trouser-legs against one another, and the squeaking of my boots, which were very slightly damp—; the other sounds—the sounds of the battle before me—were no louder than my thoughts.

I began to make out flashes of gun-powder now, to hear the report of rifles and the queer, repetitive shrieking of the wounded—; but my mind grew less convinced with every step I took. It seemed that I was walking in place, like a soldier on parade, and that the colors and noises were billowing toward me, growing duller and quieter with each passing moment. When at last the forest parted and I came out into the open, the battle was nowhere to be seen. There was only the sky, the grass, and a vision of the child that Clem had borne me, hanging on the horizon like a moon.

The child was beautiful—; more beautiful even than its mother. No trace of its father was visible, save possibly about the eyes. It was covered in a fine, luminescent down, like the down at the base of Clementine’s back—; but also like the fine, pale hair on Parson’s cheeks. Its fingers and toes were bunched defensively together, as though it had been rudely roused from sleep. Its eyes were raised knowingly to the heavens, like those in portraits of the infant Jesus. There was something about the eyes, however, that no such portrait ever showed. When I realized what it was I let out a cry of wonder.

Both the infant’s eyes were blind.

I shut my own eyes for an instant. When I opened them the child was close at hand—; almost close enough to touch. I began to hear the sounds of fighting again, very faintly, and see shadowy figures about me in the grass. As I reached toward the child a ball from a musket grazed my skull, clipping a penny-sized scrap of flesh from my ear and dropping me lightly to the ground. The fighting was suddenly all about me, full and murderous and shrill, but the child remained exactly as it was, indifferent to the shortcomings of the world. I lay flat on my back, easeful and expectant, and let the vision fall over me like a sheet.

As I watched it, the child commenced to revolve, imperceptibly at first but with ever greater speed, quickening and blurring along its edges, mustering itself into a ball. Blood was running down my neck and shirt-front but I paid it no attention. I felt invulnerable, sacrosanct. My heart and mind exulted, as though a question I’d long been on the verge of asking was finally going to be answered. Looking closely at the ball, I saw that it was not smooth, but rather cut into a myriad of facets, like the bell-weight to a chandelier. I recognized it at once as the shape from the
Hyapatia Lee.

It made sense that the shape should return to me now—: the future it had warned me of had finally come to pass. I let my eyes fall closed, not troubling further about the connection between the war, the spinning ball, and Clementine’s babe. That my child should visit me on the first day of the end of the world seemed altogether fitting.

I AWOKE PERHAPS AN HOUR LATER, blood-caked and bewildered, to a sight no manner of vision could have prepared me for. The grassy slope had been exchanged for a curved wall of mud in which bearded, naked corpses, whole or in bits, were set like crockery chips in an alley. Rain was coming down in sheets—; a man close by, who’d died in the middle of a yell, had a mouth overflowing with it. I recognized him after a moment as the corporal who’d told me about Johnston and Little Napoleon the night before.

I tried to get to my feet, but a heaviness at the back of my skull prevented me. I crawled toward the river-bank on all fours, searching for Beauregard among the dying, knowing that I would never find him there. The fighting ahead of me was as furious as ever—; the farther I crawled, the deeper the shell-holes and higher the heaps of offal grew. The Yankees had two Pook’s Turtles anchored in the river, and the explosions from their shells sent horse-cart-sized discs of mud whistling into the sky. Each wounded man I passed bade me desperately for something—a sip of water, a spoonful of laudanum, a bullet in the temple—but I paid none of them any heed. They were none of them my child, none of them my Clementine, none of them my Redeemer. And I had no further business with any living soul.

I kept doggedly on for perhaps another quarter-hour, oblivious to the shells and seemingly immune to them—: then sobriety returned to me. I dashed for the cover of a stand of choke-cherry trees, kicking like a mule, and had only just reached it when the field folded over on itself, bringing the sky down with it, and I hit the ground as heavily as a corpse myself.

I NEVER SAW BEAUREGARD AGAIN. The fighting at Shiloh went on for another night and day, as fierce and rudderless as ever, but by the time I’d recovered my strength I was miles behind Union lines. I spent the next week no differently than a genuine Rebel would have done—: scuttling from bush to bush, searching fallen men for victuals and water, making as straight as I could for the Confederate front. The Confederacy, however, seemed to be retreating faster than I could run.

News of my failure would reach 37 ahead of me, I knew. I was thus returning willingly to my own execution. And yet it was not self-hatred alone, nor desire for revenge, that drew me back to the Redeemer like a tick to blood—; there was also the fact—or the
company,
better said— of my miraculous child.

The child came to me each day, some days more than once, and always suddenly. As the weeks went by I saw it lose the sleek, feral look of a new-born and grow plump and wide-eyed and aware. It seemed a strong child, possessed of a fine, loud voice, possibly given to tantrums. Its eyes remained turned inward, as my own left eye is—; and it remained a child whose every gesture bespoke an other-worldly power. It was realer to me by far than the people I encountered, the battered country-side I traveled through, or my own filthy and bedraggled body. The thought that this child—my child—had been born into Morelle’s hands, that he might at that very moment be cooing over its cradle, rocking it to sleep, or looking on as it was fed, never failed to sicken me. By the time I got to Vicksburg I could think of nothing else.

The child would have a hard lot, gifted as it was—; hadn’t I suffered for my own small gift? It would have need of a friend, as it grew, to share its troubles with. That Morelle—or for that matter, Clem herself—had no further use for me was clear enough, but the child—? Surely this wondrous creature, blessed and blighted as it was, had need of practically no-one else.

It was with a fierce determination, therefore, to see my child—to see it and to cradle it, however briefly, in my arms—that I made the long and miserable journey south.