We’d come only four streets when we saw our first corpses—: three of them — another trinity — propped together at the intersection of Shelby and Union Streets like the legs to a looted end-table.
Their bodies were set back to back, each supported by the others, in a deliberate parody of wakefulness. I was reminded straight-away of Parson’s handiwork in the hold. Two were men, perhaps fifty years of age, and looked to have been dead for quite some time—; the third was a woman in the first flush of her youth. Her body had been stripped naked and doused with kerosene and an empty lantern lay beside her in the mud. The kerosene was freshly poured—: her belly and breasts shone under its glaze like preserved fruits in a jar.
“Damned waste of lamp-oil,” a passing citizen said tonelessly. He was dressed as if for Sunday service, all in pressed silks and linen, except that his feet were bare and caked up to the ankle-bones with ash. I made to speak to him but he walked away from us, into the looted skeleton of a shop, closing the shop-door conscientiously behind him.
I was staring after him, trying to puzzle out some sort of explanation for the man, the bodies, indeed for everything we’d seen, when Trist gave a tactful cough behind me. “Our charges seem to be coming to,” he said.
And so they were. The desolation and the stink hadn’t seemed to trouble them—; the sight of that trinity, however, laid out so artfully in the middle of the street, was beginning to do its work. I was certain now that it was Parson’s doing. Guessing the route that we would take, he chose, for some obscure reason of his own, to render it more scenic. But how had he found the time to assemble this little tableau? And why would he want to sabotage the run, so shortly after saving it from ruin? Out of contrariness, perhaps, or simply on a whim? Or possibly as a warning of some kind?
The thought struck me then that none of the fifty-seven head had been told about the Yellowjack, or even that the boat was bound for Memphis. Parson’s hoo-doo had sloughed off at last, and now the fact of the fever was breaking over them like surf.
Parson surely knew that this would happen, and decided it should happen here—: here, in the middle of a ruined city, with only Asa Trist to help me. Was this entire run, down to its last detail, only a baroque form of punishment for me, a penance paid out in advance against future crimes? Had the Redeemer guessed at my betrayal before I’d even thought of it myself? Had he seen it, plain as porridge, in my left eye?
The men in the nearest coffle were beginning to move nervously from side to side and to glance, almost shyly, into one another’s faces. A tinkling rose up along the coffle-chain as the hands grew restless in their shackles—: an innocent enough sound, on the face of it, but terrible in portent.
Trist, by contrast, was care-free as a dove.
“Doesn’t this put you out, Asa?” I whispered.
He grinned back at me. “No, Mr. Ball! It doesn’t. Not as such.”
“‘Not as such,’” I said to myself, turning the words over in my mouth. The phrase lingered in my mind, adding to my disquiet—; its blitheness was so wonderfully ill-suited to the Golgotha on every side.
We managed to get the coffles moving again, but it was tricky going. A few streets farther on, I found the perfect complement to Trist’s expression—: a bamboo-handled polo mallet, lovingly waxed and polished, lying in a puddle of iridescent yellow filth.
I glanced side-wise at Trist, meaning to point the mallet out to him, but what I saw made the words curdle in my throat. Trist’s eyes rested neither on me nor on the coffle nor on anything on God’s earth. They seemed less like eyes at all than like chips of milky bottle-glass, washed up by some caprice of the sea.
The rumors I’d heard about him came rushing back to me in a torrent. “Mind the coffles, Asa!” I said sharply, hoping to call him back from wherever he’d gone off to.
In place of an answer he held up his hat-box for me to admire. His face was flushed with a look of secret pleasure, as though he were sucking on a lump of sugar.
I gave a quiet curse and seized him by the shoulders. “We can’t have this, Asa! Not here! Do you hear me?”
“Dilly?” Trist said politely, turning as if to someone passing by.
“Who the devil are you talking to? There isn’t any—”
“I’ll be your Dante, Virgil!” Trist said, giggling into his hand. His eyes were back on mine, and they were lucid again—; he looked at me fondly for a time, then gave me a coquettish wink.
I decided, with all the force of desperation, that he’d simply been playing me for a fool. He was less an hysteric or a madman than a molly-coddled planter’s son—: he had to be. The alternative — at that moment, and in that place — was impossible to consider.
“No time for the classics just now, Asa, I’m afraid.” We’d halted at the crossing of Jefferson and Main. I looked back at the coffles, to see if any of the head were watching us—: all of them were, closely and intently.
“Take out your pistol, Asa,” I said quietly.
I smiled as I said it, hoping to give our audience the impression of business-as-usual. But even as Trist returned my smile — uncertainly, as though he were hard of hearing — the wistful look began to bloom again behind his features.
“No-one gets shot today, Captain!” he said, holding up his hands.
The change I saw gathering in his eyes was more frightening than the corpses in the street, than the coffle behind us, or even than the Yellowjack itself. I found myself gazing over Trist’s shoulder, unable to return his stare, desperate for something else to look at. On the far side of Jefferson Street three school-boys were smashing the windows of a rice-and-grain-depot—: their tools were a U.S. Army bugle, a dressmaker’s dummy, and the leg of a snow-white pianoforte.
“Give me that pistol, Asa,” I said, forcing my eyes back to his. “Where is it?”
A scrap of sobriety returned to him then—: his smile slid to the right and disappeared, like the moon on the face of a clock. “Is it — is it not in the case?” he stuttered, pushing the words across his tongue as if they were clots of dirt. No sooner had he said this, however, than both his eyes went perfectly blank—: I saw the pupils flare a final time, spasm, then seemingly vanish altogether.
This is the end of me, I thought, watching Trist sink to his knees. The Colonel had described his fits to me once — with obvious discomfort — and Kennedy had gleefully filled in the specifics. I prayed that the fifty-five niggers behind me hadn’t heard tell of them—; but it made not a whit of difference. What was happening to Trist was plain for all to see.
He gave a side-long jerk of the head, as though shooing away a fly, then set the hat-box down and undid its clasps. Keeping my good eye fixed on the coffles, I motioned to him to throw it open, thinking I might find his pistol there. The coffles still stood more or less in file—: only the first ten or fifteen head could see what he was about. I wondered how much longer they would bide. Not long, by the look of them. I’d just resolved to get them moving again, to make one last push to Pop Stacey’s, when Trist got the hat-box open and I stopped thinking about the Stacey, the coffles, and the entire city of Memphis altogether.
Packed together in the box’s velour-lined recesses, in neat, Linnaean rows, were vials and bottles of every conceivable color and description. Some were old kölnisch-water bottles—; others had once contained balms, perhaps, or menthe liqueurs. Each of them now held a dram of yellow fluid with a neatly cut square of what I first took to be oil-cloth suspended within it. Trist’s pistol was nowhere to be seen, but that was trivial to me now. The box had already yielded up its secret.