“Where are your shoes?” I asked, pointing at his feet. His stockings were dusted with ash from the fire.
“Lost,” he said flatly.
I grinned at him. “However will you preach?”
“Don’t fret on account of my stockings, Kansas. My boys are bringing round a pair of boots directly.” As he said this his eyes fell, seemingly idly, to my own feet—; but he found nothing there to tempt him. “With luck, they may have something in your size,” he added. He jerked his chin toward the bar. “Kennedy’s already placed his order. Haven’t you, Kennedy?”
“Just so they pull the fuh! — fuh! — feet out of them first,” Kennedy said. The Redeemer guffawed. Looking from one of them to the other, it seemed to me that I was in the company of two boastful and precocious children.
The Redeemer stared down into his little cup of rye, seemingly forgetting me altogether. For the first time it occurred to me that he might possibly be drunk. There was a candle between us and he brought his own left eye close to it, holding it open with his fingers, as if to demonstrate its beauty and its health. An instant later he sat up with a start. His greasy, half-fermented breath seemed to stain the air between us.
“Come in on a boat of some stripe, did you, Kansas?”
“Yes,” I lied. Why I did this I can’t say—; there was only the conviction that the canoe, the one thing of value that I owned, should be kept from him.
“What boat?” the Redeemer said, still studying his cup.
“A stern-wheeler from Natchez.” I took a breath. “Put me off at Thompson’s farm.”
His eyes met mine. “I didn’t hear of any boat passing,” he said. “What landing was it?”
“I told you,” I answered hurriedly. “Back up the river — three miles or so — family name of Thompson—”
At this moment the door was shouldered open and three men entered, shambling and sullen-faced, dragging a fourth between them. Catching sight of the Redeemer, they stopped and laid their burden, whose head was wrapped in a muslin sheet, down in the middle of the room. One of them called out to Kennedy in a tired voice and he commenced drawing drafts of beer. All eyes came to rest on the Redeemer.
“You—: Harvey. Take off that swaddling,” the Redeemer said, rising from the table.
The man on the floor was arching his body with a languid, reptilian slowness, like a snake crushed under a cart-wheel. His head in its wrapping looked like a ball of fresh-ginned cotton waiting to be spun. Where the cloth met his shoulders a circlet of blood, the thickness and consistency of pig-suet, glistened in the fire-light. The man the Redeemer had spoken to pulled the cloth away in three easy jerks.
“This was Tull,” the Redeemer said thoughtfully.
The face thus revealed was split from forehead to chin like a kindling-wedge—: the two halves fell away from the wound as though forswearing any knowledge of it. Blood welled and receded in time to the body’s tiny, bird-like breaths. That there should be life behind that face was unthinkable—; but there was more than life. There was understanding. To either side of the gash, at its profoundest point, blue eyes looked out through a film of milk-white tears, blinking and trembling and rolling, flitting from one of our faces to the next. But always and again, as if at the tugging of a wire, they interrupted their circuit to fix beseechingly on the Redeemer.
With what emotion the Redeemer returned Tull’s look I couldn’t tell. I’d turned away from them both by then, fighting the urge to faint, holding on to the table for dear life. When at last I dared look, I saw only the Redeemer’s girlish back, and the faces of the three men watching him. They were cowed, spiteful, worshipful faces.
“Some manner of hatchet, was it?” the Redeemer said blandly.
“Shovel,” the man called Harvey mumbled. He spoke with a high, cloying lisp.
“Ah!” said the Redeemer. He chewed this over for a moment. “Where was he done?”
I could see only the left half of Harvey’s face in the fire-light. It was a weak-looking face, soft and all but chinless—; a tendon along his jaw-line tensed, relaxed, then tensed again. “Lawson’s farm,” he answered. His voice was brittle as a biscuit.
“Lawson’s farm,” the Redeemer said, turning the word over in his mouth. “What were you looking for at Lawson’s, boys?” He turned to look at each of them in turn. “Not my boots, I take it?”
The faces assumed identical shame-faced looks.
“It’s been near on a month,” a stooped-over man to the left of Harvey said. “We’d thought possibly to pick up—”
“What you’ll pick up at Lawson’s, Johnson, is a dose of the private sorrows,” the Redeemer said. “And if that’s all you catch, consider yourself blessed of the Lord.”
“You left your own boots there,” the third man said in a quavering voice.
“What?” said the Redeemer, spinning about to face him. “What was that, now?”
The man’s mouth opened and closed to no discernible effect. The Redeemer took a few steps toward him, stared up a while into the poor fellow’s face, then reached quickly up and caught hold of his nose. The man let out a bright chirp of terror.
“Crangle, isn’t it?” the Redeemer said quietly.
“It is, Your Honor,” the man managed to reply.
“Don’t neglect the small hairs that project from your nostrils, Crangle—; or those that grow about the apertures of the ears. Such small matters of the toilet are often overlooked.” He let the man loose and glanced over his shoulder at the bar. “Am I right in saying so, Mr. Kennedy?”
“Ay,” Kennedy answered without looking up.
The man kept quiet for an instant, then took a deep breath and pointed at Tull’s feet. “Beg pardon, sir, but them’s your boots, I think.”
The Redeemer spun back toward the man, raising a hand to strike him—; then he stopped short, cocked his head, and looked at Tull. “Fry me for a chitterling!” he muttered. “Those are my little mollies.”
“Tull took ’em off Lawson,” Harvey put in. “Lawson took offense.”
The Redeemer was already pulling on the first boot. “What happened to Lawson?” he said, bracing a foot against Tull’s groin.
The third man made an indecipherable gesture with his hand. “Pffft,” he said. Harvey shook his head sweetly.
“Lend us a hand, Kansas,” the Redeemer said, tugging at my sleeve. As he did so I saw a vision of myself springing to my feet, throwing him aside and dashing head-long out the door. My skiff lay just at the bottom of the bluff—; I might easily have reached it. But I sat quiet as an owl.
“Ball!”
I looked up at him in alarm. “Present!” I stammered.
He smiled at me benignly. “Feeling a bit green?”
Before I could answer I found myself kneeling on the floor, holding Tull by the shoulders while the Redeemer worked a boot free. Tull was utterly unresisting now—: after a moment I realized he was dead. As the boot came away, exposing a filthy, butter-colored calf, a network of intersecting blue lines caught my attention. I raised the cuff of Tull’s trousers a half-inch further, disclosing the following design, not much larger than my thumb—:
“Ball,” said the Redeemer softly.
“Yes?”
“I asked whether you were feeling green.”
I passed a hand over my face. “What’s that mark there, on his leg?”
“Ah! That,” he said, stifling a yawn. “That’s an old Choctaw figure. They were fond of scratching it into boulders, I believe.”
The figure was familiar to me somehow. Its pedigree hovered playfully along the margins of my thought, refusing to come forward into the light.