Delamare’s voice, quavering and wild. He’s reached his limit sooner than I’d reckoned. He’ll be wanting a clearer shot at Parson—; I don’t blame him in the slightest. I bow to him and step aside, drawing Clem along with me. I shepherd her gently toward the open door. Parson hisses and rattles, cursing us all, but his voice barely cuts the air. His outline’s gone watery, as I thought it might. He’s a jumble of color, no more than that—: a memory, a child’s fable, a stray beam of light in an empty room.
Clem grows more Clem-like with each step we take. Her body, formerly so rigid, now bends willingly to mine. As we reach the door it occurs to me that I have won. I allow my eyes to fall briefly closed, then break into a helpless grin, wide as a revivalist’s bonnet. No more Trade. No more shadow-puppetry. No more visions. Clem’s body is soft and undeniable against my own. Tentatively, shyly, my eyes come open that I might see her. There she is.
A black globe, spinning silently, crosses my sight from right to left.
“B — A—L–L,” Parson spells out with his mouth.
A sound is heard. The report of a gun, miles away but fast approaching, overtaken as it comes by its own echo. An instant later it arrives. Clem is torn away as if by a rider on horse-back and hurled against the wall. She falls to the floor flutteringly, like an empty dress. Parson is screeching and thrashing behind me but I can’t hear him for the echo. It’s the echo of the echo that I’m hearing now. I stand as quiet as an engraving, enraptured by my freedom from the Trade, by my new and perfect knowledge, and by the warmth — already dwindling— of Clem’s tender body against my own.
DELAMARE SITS BOLT UPRIGHT on the bed, staring hungrily at Parson. The Peacemaker is unwavering in his right hand. The sight of him, of Parson beating his face and keening, and of the body, not even Clem’s any longer, heaped against the base-board, is so very strange that it takes me a spell of time — perhaps a single breath, perhaps a score — to understand that I’ve been shot as well. There is only sight at first—: the echo still holds everything suspended within it, coldly and transparently, like bubbles in a pane of glass. My hand when it comes away from my shirt-front glistens with blood and bile and a clot of hard, pearly matter that I can’t quite identify.
Perhaps it’s the last crumb of my belief.
As yet I feel nothing but a round, polished coolness, as though a dinner-plate had been pressed against my ribs. Perhaps my face will soon take on that knowing, self-contented look I saw on Goodman Harvey, that morning back at the beginning of the end. I shouldn’t wonder if it did.
The first echo — the bright one — must have been the shot that hit me. Delamare fired twice. I nod to myself, bring both hands up to my belly, then fall twitchingly to the floor.
“Nobody leaves this room,” says Delamare.
In spite of the echo I hear those four words plain as day.
The Beginning
SHE WAS OLD EVEN THEN, Parson says. Old and uneasy in her skin. A nurser of bitter appetites.
She lived in those days on a green forgotten tongue of bayou known as Les Cananes. Red-bones and Creek Indians were her only neighbors, and they kept clear of her affairs. The cottage was a plain one, little more than a room with a wattle-board roof over it, but it was enough. It had only to shelter her trunkful of books, her time-withered body, and her one idea.
A causeway ran out a dozen paces into the bayou and she’d walk to the end of it each morning with a pail, crouch stiffly down and part the duck-weed with her hand. The water underneath reminded her of cane syrup. Sometimes she’d bring the water to a boil exactly as it was, and drink it as a tea.
A man was coming to see her. She knew a man was coming, because there always came a man. Women came so rarely, waiting meekly by the door, and she never had the slightest use for them—; they came out of boredom, with little idea what they were after. The men knew what they wanted without fail. It was a matter of coaxing it out of them, nothing more.
Each time a caller arrived, she asked him first the date, then the day of the week, and then, if he was rich and traveled with a pocket-watch, the time of day. Then she took his gift — most often a book, or a small offering of money — and asked him why he’d come.
She passed the time between petitioners by reading. They’d let her take her trunk when they ran her out of the last town — Baton Rouge, sixty miles down-country — and each afternoon she’d open it and take out a volume at random, bound in marble-head or blue morocco, and bring it to the lantern as though offering up a sacrament. But she was not at prayer. She’d seen a fair piece of the country during the long years of her itinerancy, hounded from one village to the next like a devil, and an idea about America had begun to take shape in her mind. Religion was behind it. She’d been met with violence and censure wheresoever she went not for the reasons the deacons and bailiffs gave her, that they disdained her charms and fetishes—: just the opposite. She was made to suffer, she was pilloried in common view, she was cast out from society precisely because her teachings were believed.
There was power in this, if she could just catch hold of it. The steady stream of supplicants that came to her even now, a full day’s walk from the nearest town, was all the proof she needed. The country slept under a quilt of superstition, ragged and enormous, stitched together without thought to the design. She had only to map it out, to learn each piece of it in turn, and America would be hers to trifle with.
And so she’d begun her collection. The Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, the Upanishads, the Book of Mormon. From each petitioner she received a book, or money with which to send for one—; and with each new book her map grew more detailed. The Lemegeton, Augustine’s City of God, the works of Swedenborg, The Rights of Nations. To believe in anything was to become passive, she discovered—; to believe was to submit. One had only to grasp belief properly, to take hold of it like a hatchet, and one could hack through anything one liked. Violence could be done with it—; great violence, in fact, could be done with nothing else. The country was not yet ready, perhaps, for a great violence. But it would be soon.
Her idea was terrible in its simplicity. It gnawed away at her in her solitude—; it troubled her nights, and made her days monotonous and cruel. She herself could not put the idea to use, as she was old, disquieting to look at, and a woman into the bargain. But a man was coming who would serve her. She had only to sit and bide at Les Cananes.
And while she waited for the man to come, she read.
She had taken lessons in Hebrew from a deaf old milliner in New Orleans specifically to read from the kabala, and the wisdom she drew from it, one morsel at a time, on man as the universe in miniature, was a solace to her in her loneliness. She contained all the universe in her tired body—; she felt this as clearly as the pain that came to her on cold mornings. She chose this book, in secret, to believe in, the way a dress-maker might put aside a fine bolt of fabric for private use. Her copy of the book was ancient and brittle, and she kept it in an old sugar-tin, at the bottom of her trunk, to safe-guard it from weevils and from thieves.
The book was far and away the most precious thing she owned and she thought of it many times a day, reciting whole passages from memory. She held it highest among the forbidden texts, and the Jews highest among the races, on account of the vast suffering it sprang from. Only through suffering could an understanding of life be won and held—; she knew this. She herself had suffered great privations, and by their grace her eyes had been pried open. Now, at last, a man was coming to her. He’d arrive without warning, calm and full of purpose, and she would be struck dumb at once by his entire perfection.