“Well, dear Kansas!” he said at last. (We were both still on our feet—: the table and chairs had a definite purpose in our ritual, and its moment had not yet come.) “Well!” he said again.
“How runs the Trade, sir?”
“Weakly, Virgil. Totteringly.”
This answer took me quite aback—: the usual response was “ineluctably,” “indefatigably,” or some equally luxurious term.
“What is it, sir? Have the returns let up?”
“Oh, the returns are right enough! It’s nothing fiscal.” He smiled in a melancholy way, and tugged once — pensively — on his right ear.
My alarm deepened. “Tell me, sir! What is it?”
He made a delicate gesture of regret. “Politics, Virgil, since you press me.” His eyes met mine for an instant, then slid dolefully away. “I have it on good authority that we’re to be voted out of office.”
“What—! The Trade?” My voice rang out stupidly in the empty room. “I wasn’t aware — beg pardon, sir — that we’d ever been elected.”
A look of genuine bitterness crept into his eyes. “A poor choice of phrase, Kansas. Forgive me.” He went quiet for a time, then added softly—: “You can leave a man hoeing in a field his health, his hoe, and his liberty, mon frère. But that won’t do much good if the field’s pulled out from under him.”
I said nothing for a time, attempting, as I so often did, to sift for meaning in his blather. “The Abolitionists, sir?” I said at last.
He nodded. “Between those righteous angels above us, dear K, and the plantationers below, this confrérie of ours”—peppering his conversation with Frenchisms was a recent affectation of his—“may soon run out of runaways!”
I blinked at this a moment. “How, for God’s sake?”
“Through the complete and utter abolishment of slavery, both in the territories and the states.”
I let out an uneasy laugh. “Respectfully, sir, you can’t believe all the rubbish that gets talked downstairs. You’ve been holed up in this back-water too long. Nobody I’ve come across is ready to toe the Federal line—; not yet.” I shook my head decidedly. “They’d prefer to die.”
“They may have to,” the Redeemer said. When I tried to speak again he hushed me with a flutter of his kid-gloved hands.
“Enough talk. Let’s proceed.”
“But you can’t actually credit—”
The hand flew up again. “Repose, Virgil! Cultivate repose.” He frowned at me a moment. “I may be ‘holed up’ here, as you say—; but the world is so obliging as to come to me. It tells me things, on our little tête-à-têtes, and I listen very closely.” He stepped up to the table and motioned to me to sit. “Those boys down in the cellar, for example. Six butternuts from Indiana, and they’re saying the same thing as associates of ours in Boston, Baltimore, Louisville, even the capital itself—; everywhere, in fact, but in these god-forsaken swamps. Do you understand me, Virgil? Word for word. Sit down, now—; there’s a boy. I’ll be back tout de suite.”
I did as I was told. The notion of abolition, however — the possibility of it, better said — had worked itself under my hide. “You seem to be listening to everybody but the people around you, sir,” I said at last. “The South will never stand for it. The idea that anyone would endorse—”
“They won’t need to endorse so much as a theater ticket,” the Redeemer replied. “The country we fatten ourselves on thinks of itself as a democracy, Virgil. Have you forgotten?”
“You know as well as I do, sir, that this country is a—”
“Nebraska and Kansas are to come into the Union as free states,” he said, cutting me short. “I received word this morning.”
I sat back in my chair, dumb-struck. I’d just come from New Orleans, and would certainly have heard such news down there, if anyone had known it—: there would have been rioting in the streets. “You got word—?”
The Redeemer nodded absently, as if the fact held little interest for him. “Don’t get into the habit, dear K, of letting your mouth hang open. An open mouth indicates feebleness of character—; it is also well known to affect the teeth.”
“I should very much like to know, sir, who you’re getting these reports from, and whether they’re in any position to give reliable, well-founded—”
But the Redeemer only turned on his heels in that odd pirouette of his, and said to me melodiously as he waltzed out of the room—: “So long as the present constellation of states persists — the Yankees fat and nimble, the South condescended to at every turn — then our way of life, dear K—” (and here he winked over his shoulder, as a vaudevillian might to an offstage admirer) “—remains permanently en péril!”
With that I was left to my disbelief. The fight over the territories had been raging for years, and I’d stopped paying attention long since. But the Redeemer was right on one score, at least—: the admittance of Kansas and Nebraska as free states would tip the balance of power irresistibly, irrecoverably toward the North. In time, the holding of slaves would be outlawed throughout the Union. It would take years— perhaps even decades — for the change to come about—; but come about it would, sure as pox and watered beer.
The Abolitionists were the cause of it—: the Abolitionists with their mirthless, glassy rhetoric, their funerary tastes in clothing and amusement, and their Bible that resembled our own in every outward respect but seemed the testament of an entirely different deity. The Trade ate away at the foundations of the South, of course—; but it took care only to nibble. That the Abolitionists (whose existence — irony of ironies! — made our enterprise possible) might actually succeed was an idea I’d never once credited. They’d always seemed too starched, too prim, too shrill to catch the fancy of the country. But things were changing everywhere you looked—; you felt it even on Island 37. The country itself was getting shriller, and the Abolitionists fervid speechifying was taking on the ring of prophecy.
I was floundering in this and other worries when the Redeemer reappeared, carrying a quill, a palm-sized note-book, and a penny-box of matches. He set the matches beside the candle on the table.
“Is it right?” he asked, as ritual required.
I shook my head. “It’s not right,” I replied.
Deliberately, silently, he moved the candle to the left, rotating it counter-clockwise as he did so.
“Is it right?” he asked again, more softly than before.
I took in a careful breath. “Yes,” I said. “It’s right.”
He smiled and snuffed the candle with his fingers. The room fell at once into a heavy, violet darkness. I made no effort to clear my mind of its usual clutter, to compose myself, or to locate the Redeemer in the room. I simply sat as I was and waited. The sound of the bar below us gradually fell away. The darkness thickened and set.
“I’m ready,” I said, straightening.
No sooner had I spoken than there came a sharp pop! and the head of a match flared to life a hand’s breadth from my left eye. If a powder-keg had caught fire in my left eye-socket the pain could have been no greater. I cursed and gnashed my teeth and cried aloud to heaven. The flame remained as it was for perhaps three seconds more—; then it sputtered and went out.