We were brought here to Geburah, after all, for no other reason but to die.
I WANT TO GIVE AN ACCOUNTING of the Trade, of the Gang from Island 37, and of the Redeemer most of all. I want to puzzle him out, if only for my own security of mind. The only way to get free of the past, I’ve decided, is to eat it—: to chew on it, digest it, and deposit it in pellets. So I mean to do just that. But first I have to get out of this room.
Colonel Erratus D’Ancourt, interim chairman of our Trade — a stuffed frock-coat of a man, as much like the Redeemer as a diaper is to a dinner-jacket — shuffles forward and gives Harvey a jab with the tip of his ash-plant. The body lies at a peculiar angle to the bed, its feet just shy of the foot-board, its speckled skull pointing toward the room’s south-east corner. The flesh of the shoulders and neck is still yielding and the head turns readily, with a barely audible popping of the vertebrae. I decide for myself that it was poison. The raw, strophed markings on the nape, likely made by his own fingers, and the fan-shaped bloom of broken vesicles under the skin point to permanganate of potassium, which I often laid out for prairie foxes as a boy.
A small amount of this same unctuous powder, sealed in a cut-glass vial, was given to each of us by the Redeemer at the Trade’s first meeting. He had a weakness for the trappings of dramatic theater, and we sought to ape him in this, as we did in everything. No gesture of ours was extravagant enough, no brutality too baroque. Looking down at Harvey, however — his eyes closed in parody of ever-lasting rest — I can’t help but marvel at the inappropriateness of this latest tribute. It doesn’t sit right, somehow. Harvey was not a man given to over-doing things.
It’s likely, then, that he was murdered. Each person in the room must now be suspicious of every other—: fresh killings will spring from this like flowers from a cow-pat. The Redeemer would have been delighted.
A sketch—:
We stand about in an assortment of stiff-necked postures, the sorry remains of a once-great enterprise, each wanting to slip away but feeling himself watched by all his fellows. Since the collapse of the Gang and our exile to this god-forsaken tongue of bayou, we’ve been gathered like this only once before, when I made my grand confession. The Colonel (A) crouches to my right, as low to the body as his lumbago will allow. To his left is Stutter Kennedy (B), who’d as soon stick a knife into your eye as look at you—; to his left skulks our Parson (C), who’d gladly sup upon your sweet-breads after Kennedy was done. These, then, are my peers—: the last three heads of the illustrious, blood-caked, gospel-sucking Trade. Colonel the bureaucrat, Kennedy the assassin, Parson the intriguer, Virgil Ball the fool. I wonder which of us did Goodman Harvey under.
Why kill Harvey at all, come to think of it, and leave me cozy as a pup?
The Colonel clears his throat and squints down at his liver-spotted knuckles, a sure sign that he’s about to launch into some new foolery.
“Boy come up at six from the depot,” he says, arranging Harvey’s shirt with the tip of his ash-plant. His expression is one of aggrieved nobility.
The “boy from the depot”—in fact a toothless, ageless Creole — is our last connection to society. One day soon he’ll turn us in.
“Did he bring any soap?” I ask.
“The news is in from Chancellorsville,” the Colonel says, ignoring me. “A Dixie victory, praise Jesus, after five days’ butchery.” He sucks in a melancholy gulp of air. “Our Stonewall Jackson’s sadly killed.”
“Not our Stonewall puh! — puh! — pissing Jackson,” Kennedy spits out. “Remember that, you damn butternut.”
It’s a gall to Kennedy that the Colonel (who was born and reared in Indiana) should treat the Confederate cause as his own—; Kennedy hates the South and all it compasses. The Colonel bites his lip and hushes.
From his position at the foot of the corpse Parson raises his left hand, holding it aloft in the attitude of the Magnificat—: “Magnificat anima mea Dominum.”
Parson’s contempt for papism is well known to me, and I do not mistake his tattered Latin for a performance of last rites. He is simply having his regular fun with Kennedy.
“Kind of you, Parson,” I murmur. “He’ll sleep better now, God rest him.”
Parson grants me his customary grin, one that leaves his eyes free to regard me coldly. “Thank you, Virgil. I try to match the verse to the occasion. Stonewall Jackson, after all, was birthed out of an Irish whore.”
“You shut your muh! — muh! — mouth,” Kennedy hollers. “God-damn organ-grinder’s monkey—”
“Steady, Mr. Kennedy!” the Colonel says, bringing his ash-plant down between them like a gavel. “That’s a lie, Parson. It was my privilege to know General Jackson well.”
“You knew bollocks,” Kennedy mutters, his eyes trained on Parson like a pair of cudgels.
Parson says nothing, content to honor me with a silent wink. I look at him a moment — at his black-robed bean-pole of a body, his cat-like face, his womanish gray hands folded piously together — then allow my sight to travel from point to point in the room, in the hope that I might find one single object that is not hateful to me.
I fail.
“Without Stonewall, I just don’t see it clear,” the Colonel says. When this draws no reply, he says again, more shrilly—: “Without Stonewall, the South may end up — no more than a place—”
“All the same to us,” Kennedy says. “Or should be. It weren’t ever but a place to me.”
The Colonel gathers in a breath. “But the Confederacy—”
“Will hang us as quick as the Federals will,” Parson cuts in. “Quicker. Let’s hope the trouble drags on a good while yet.”
“Hear, hear,” I whisper.
To my relief no one pays me the slightest mind.
MOST OF US, like the departed, are still in the clothes we passed the night in—; only Parson is fully dressed. He wears a floor-length soutane, clasped closely under the chin, trimmed with crimson satin at the hem-line and cuffs. He looks like a crypt-keeper to the Vatican. In ten years of working with him on the river, much of that time on flatboats and tar-bottomed nigger rafts, I’ve never once seen him out of his Sunday silks. In his cadaverish way he’s more terrible than Kennedy—: Kennedy is a killer, plain and simple. Parson is anything but plain. Each time I look at him I see a different animal.
“Poor fat Harvey,” Parson murmurs. “The Latter-days have taken back the most oblong of their saints.”
The Colonel gawks down at the body, running two tobacco-stained fingers through his beard. The rest of us keep mum and stiff. Parson plays with the window-sash, whispering to it fondly from time to time. I let my eyes fall closed. Sweet silence, oblivion, death-in-life—