A man was being tortured in the hold. I had a trap-door Derringer in my vest pocket, little or no confidence in its kick, and none at all in my ability to put the fear of God into a boat-ful of death-crazed niggers. Such things fell under Parson’s jurisdiction. I shouted his name, and Ziba’s, again to no avail. Where in heavenly blazes had they gone? Were they still on board at all? Had they perhaps heard the sound in the hold themselves, weighed its credits and its debits, and jumped head-first into the river?
I found Parson soon enough, as it happened, but it brought me little comfort. He was leant stiff as a musket behind the boiler-house door. I lit a match and held it toward him—: he neither twitched nor blinked nor shed a tear. His face was ungiving to the touch, like a plaster-of-paris mask—; for his final, immortal expression he’d selected a thin-lipped leer. That was not all, however. His tongue protruded a good half-inch from his mouth, slack and slate-colored and fat, like the tongue of a yellowjack victim.
At the sight of that tongue I lost my last crumb of composure. I screamed and cursed and abused Parson’s name every way I could think of, jumping up and down in front of him, slapping him, throttling him, shaking him back-and-forth by the collar. Parson remained effortlessly status quo. The sound from the hold was eclipsed, for the time being, by the workings of the boiler, and by my tantrum—; but the idea of the sound was more terrible than the sound itself. I screamed Parson’s name one last time — I could think of no worse insult — and left him as he was.
When I returned to the pilot’s house the sound was shriller than before, more plaintive, more severe. I couldn’t stand it another instant. I knew better than to send Trist down, and I’d found no sign of Ziba—: for all I knew Parson had swallowed him alive. There was no commandment set down in the scriptures of the Trade, of course, that the cargo need be ministered to at all, let alone at night-time, out in the black middle of the river, under a topping head of steam. But I was not interested in the Trade and its protocols just then. I was not acting out of sympathy, or humanity, or even out of fear—: I was spurred on by my hatred of that noise, by a passionate desire to kill it off, and by a curiosity that admitted neither of caution nor delay. I had good reason to hurry. Acting in concert, even a dozen men could easily have forced the hatch—; I’d seen it done before. This, at least, was the rationale I gave myself while I fumbled with the padlock and the bolt. I was to repent it bitterly, and soon.
When the bolt slid open the sound stopped short, leaving a sudden vacancy in the air, as though a piano-wire had snapped. A humid silence met me as I raised the hatch, broken only by a rasping — or a wheezing, better said — in the far corner of the hold. The smell of piss and sweat and excrement seized me by the throat and commenced to wring the breath out of me slowly. A step-ladder extended two rungs downward, perhaps three, before vanishing into darkness. The stench and the dampness and a steady tightening of my bowels, as though in anticipation of a blow, were all there was to tell me I was being watched by two-score pair of eyes.
I could not say how long this spell of quiet lasted. Finally there was a scuffling below me, and a single clap of hands—; then a low, easy whisper of command that frightened me worse than all the rest combined.
“We at yin chopping-block yet, Savior?” a voice said mellowly.
“What’s your name?” I called down. My own voice seemed grotesquely high and quavering.
A silence. “John yin Baptist,” the voice said at last.
“You take this, Johnny, and you light it,” I said, throwing down a match and a candle-stub.
This was my third error of the night.
A dull click followed, as of a jack-knife being opened—; then a scraping along the bottom of the hold. The match flared to life and was brought up to the candle. So dark was the hold, so much darker even than the night outside, that the match-flame all but blinded me. When I recovered my sight, I was dumbfounded by what I saw—: no more than an arm’s length down the ladder, near enough to touch, two dozen head stood crushed together like kippers in a jar. A white-haired titan of a man stood just below me, balancing the candle on his left shoulder and watching me out of bolt-steady, ginger-colored eyes.
His look took me so aback that I was unable to speak for a moment, let alone to act—; but I saw, looking past him, why the hold seemed packed so tightly. There was a gap half-way back, the size of a bale of cotton, where nobody wanted to stand.
“What have you got back there?” I asked the white-hair. My voice cracked as I said it, like the voice of a pubescent boy, and I knew in that instant that all was lost. “Well? Give me an answer, damn your eyes! What are you fussing with?”
“Nobody fussing, Savior,” he answered, his eyes widening as he spoke. All at once I saw the fear in them—: the fear, and the unmistakeable death-knowledge. My throat began to close, then, and my legs commenced to buckle. I had no intention of going down that ladder. There was a brightness, now, to every pair of eyes, the kind that comes to men with violence fermenting in their mouths. Those niggers knew what was waiting for them in Memphis. They didn’t reckon, or suspect—; they knew. All that could be done was to close the hatch and leave them to their knowing.
Toward the back of the hold, at the edge of the mysterious gap, someone shifted his weight and a sharp cry of agony rose up. The man with the candle took a deep breath, smiled sorrowfully at me, and let his eyes fall closed.
I took my pistol out and brought it forward to catch the light. “What the hell was that, you lying sons-of-bitches?”
The man looked up at me again. “Nobody trying to fraud you, Savior,” he murmured.
“Move aside or Christ-help-me I’ll unload into the middle of you!” I shrieked. My voice was tremulous and slight. I marveled at how far from the Redeemer’s easy bark of command it sounded. Panic was run through my voice like fat through a strip of bacon.
For perhaps the space of a breath all was quiet. Then came a shuffling and a scrambling and a falling of body over body and I made out a man pressed flat against the floor, his arms pinned beneath him, his face so badly beaten that I couldn’t have guessed his age within thirty years. I saw at once that the remainder of the poor wretch’s life would be measured in hours, if not in minutes.
A more prudent man would have let the hatch fall closed at that instant, stumbled back to the pilot-house, and let them pound their victim into pudding. The difference between fifty-seven head and fifty-six, after all, was not worth quibbling over. It was not prudence, however, that held me fixed above them—; nor was it Christian feeling. The only means of quieting that hold, I knew, was to make a show— however laughable — of sovereignty.
I leaned away from the square of candle-light, looked above me at the sky, and cursed the Redeemer, Parson, the Trade, and my own servile nature with a passion that was altogether new to me. Then I brought my face back into the light, wearing what I hoped was a look of homicidal ecstasy.
“You bring that man over here or so help me the Father, the Son, and the Heavenly Spirit,” I said.
Two things happened as I spoke—: (I) the white-hair began to laugh — a deep, unhurried laugh full of scorn and melancholy, and (II) the pulped and mangled body was carried forward to the ladder. I could tell from the way this was done — playfully, almost coyly — that I’d never be allowed near it. My panic was replaced at once by an overwhelming drowsiness. I wanted nothing more than to curl up next to the hatch and go to sleep.