“Who is it?” I said, once the body had been set down. I could see now that he was not a young man—: a bald spot was just visible at the crown.
“Just one of yin angels, Savior, sent down here amongst us,” the white-hair said. As he said this he rose, raised his right foot in the air, and came down with all of his great weight against his victim’s chest. I saw who it was in that same instant. It was Ziba Goss.
His shirt was ripped clean away, one of his feet was bare, and his breeches were in tatters—; but I saw, to my amazement, the butt of a one-shot pistol peeping from his boot. By some perversion of chance no-one had come across it in the dark. I knew then that I had to go down to them. So down I went.
The white-hair was so astonished to see me tumbling toward him that he simply stepped aside to give me room to fall. No sooner had I hit the floor than I snatched up Ziba’s one-shot, giddy at my own folly, and pulled the hammer back. The entire hold hushed at once. It took them a moment to accept this newest offering—; but a moment only. I turned to the white-hair just in time to see him nod to me respectfully and tip the candle from his shoulder.
My life in the Trade ended with that gesture. I could taste my own death, luke-warm and ferric, against the roof of my mouth, and my past was taken from me like a hat in a gust of wind. As the candle went out I emptied Ziba’s pistol at its after-glow and felt a jet of brackish liquor strike my cheek. The first pair of hands was already at my shoulders when I fired the second pistol, this time without any effect at all. Both guns were torn from my grip soon after and I heard furious curses when they refused to discharge. But even as I smiled at this my body was being tossed about and fought over and awareness was slipping out of me like a cat from out of a burning house.
MY FIRST SENSATION ON AWAKENING was pain—:my second was disbelief that I was still in my own body. For a time my eyes refused to clear, and when at last they did I shut them again at once. A great number of people were about me, muttering to one another and moaning, and behind them was the curved wall of the hold. This knowledge sickened me and gave the pain free run of my brain and body. I was not so well off as I’d thought. After a very great while, in which nothing whatsoever happened, I heard Parson’s voice behind me.
“I prefer my baptisms the old-fangled way, Virgil. I prefer them to be done with water.”
A drawn-out, comfortable sigh.
“People are amenable to it, you understand. They trust it—; they think of it as clean. I can see, of course, how such orthodoxy might bore you, free-thinker that you are. I’m often bored with it, myself. But this, Virgil — this display. .”
I kept as quiet as a fish. Never in my life have I felt such a reluctance to come back to my senses. As understanding returned, so too did the memory of the struggle in the hold, and a good idea of what I’d see when I finally looked about me. Or so, with my last scrap of innocence, I believed.
Eventually I could stand it no longer and let my eye-lids flutter open. The sight that greeted me was the following—:
Parson sitting Indian-style in the middle of the floor, swaying to and fro like a hindoo snake-charmer. Trist just behind him, fiddling with something or other in his hat-box. A power of black bodies to every side, twitching and shuddering and weeping.
I thought, at first, that there were fewer niggers in the hold—; then I saw that they were simply pressed back even more impossibly against the walls, as far from Parson as their tangled bodies would allow. I took a careful breath and tried to move my fingers and my toes. All appeared to be in working order.
“How goes it, Captain?” Parson said, seeing me awake. He straightened slowly as he spoke, closed his eyes and smacked his lips together. His vertebrae clicked against one another like dominoes in a paper sack.
I shut my eyes at once. I took a breath, then rolled over onto my belly and tried to stand. My legs seemed to answer, for which I mumbled a silent hosanna—; when I made to push myself up, however, the room went all the colors of the rainbow and my face smacked resoundingly against the floor. “Christ preserve us!” I gasped. My right shoulder felt as if it had been chewed away by ants.
Parson’s left eye opened. “Collar-bone’s broke, Captain.”
I could only sob in answer. Parson regarded me in his cold, contented way, keeping his right eye closed, shifting his weight every so often with an indolent little coo.
“We’re past due for Memphis,” he observed after a time.
“Bugger Memphis!” I hissed, trying a second time to rise. I must have looked for all the world like a pilgrim genuflecting in front of a wax effigy of the Pope.
“Tell me, Captain,” Parson said, looking down the crook of his nose at me. “That eye of yours—: that blessed far-seeing ball of jelly.” He turned his head clock-wise until his neck cracked. “Did it show you many wonders, as you quit this life?”
The pain in my shoulder lessened for a moment and I staggered to my feet. “It showed me all manner of things, Parson,” I said, struggling to keep from falling backwards. “I saw the cloud you travel under, for one. Your own portable saintly nimbus.” I spat onto the floor. “It was the color of rotten bile.”
“You do have the gift,” Parson said admiringly.
“It’s the Jew in him,” Trist offered.
Slowly, painfully, I worked the fingers of my right hand into a well-known gesture of contempt.
“He’s giving us the fig!” Trist said, pointing at me delightedly.
“The yellowjack take the both of you,” I croaked.
Parson bit his lip in mock concern. “You’ll have to get us a fair piece up-river yet, Captain, for us to honor that request. “
I spat at him and made wobblingly for the ladder. I’d not taken three steps, however, when a new thought struck me. I glanced back at Parson.
“How did Ziba come to be down here? He had no business in the hold.”
Parson raised his eye-brows. “Didn’t you know, Virgil? Our commander-in-chief had him stowed for safe-keeping. He’d gotten flighty, it appears.”
So this was Redeemer’s doing. His by order and design. Why it should have surprised me so, why it should have washed my mind clear of all else, I can’t rightly explain—; but it turned me irrevocably on my head.
I kept silent for a time, finding a place for this latest revelation in my thoughts—; relating it, slowly and painstakingly, to the history of my tenure in the Trade. The fact that I’d not been told about Ziba did not bode well for me, of course—; but I had no thoughts for the future. The present was more than enough for me. The Redeemer had brought this hell-on-earth about—: my own Thaddeus Morelle. My own.
“Where are the pistols?” I said, looking about me on the floor.
“Ah!” said Parson. “Trist has one of them—; you’re welcome to it, I’m sure. As for the other—”
He planted his palms lightly on the floor, lifted himself without untwining his legs, and slid a foot or so to his left. Trist stepped away as well, and thus three corpses were exposed, stacked one atop the other like sacks of rice at market. At the bottom was the white-hair, his immense frame loose and slack-boned now, Ziba’s pistol clenched in his left fist. Ziba himself was next, laid the other way round, with his battered head resting against the thighs of his executioner. Both were arranged neat as funeral-house cadavers, their arms bound tightly at their sides.