He begins at the collar of his stiff-necked soutane, his hairy face rapt with listening. His fingers fly tremblingly from one button to the next. I do not wonder at what he is doing—: I feel content to watch, knowing that time will answer my last questions. Parson himself, given time, will answer them. He is answering them now.
Sounds are soon heard of a great multitude passing the house, and other sounds carry in from the hall—: hushed voices and groaning planks and tentative foot-falls on the stairs. Parson has undone the last buttons of his robe and beneath it I see the pattern and pleats of a faded summer dress. I do not wonder at this. I am rising past wonder. In another moment he has stuffed the robe under Delamare’s quilts and taken up position at the head-board, laying one hand next to Delamare’s head and taking up the Peacemaker with the other. Calmly and deliberately, with the thumb of the same hand, he cocks it. No sooner has he done so than his body folds in upon itself and there is no Parson anymore but instead an old spinster, rheumy-faced and mild. I’ve barely taken this in when the first blue-capped head appears around the door-frame.
The head belongs to a bone-thin, whiskered, rifle-clutching ghost. His eyes are sunk so far back in his skull that I can only guess at his expression. It could be righteousness, or anger, or surprise, or even sorrow. The room is filling steadily with blue jackets. I try to bring my hands up, to make a gesture of surrender, but my hands refuse to answer. The ghost looks side-wise at me, then back toward Delamare and the spinster. Now he sees the repeater in the spinster’s hand.
“Put that pistol away, ma’am,” he says. His voice is clipped and reedy. I guess him to come from Iowa, or Illinois.
“This pistol,” says the spinster, “is a Sam Colt.45 Peacemaker.”
The ghost looks about the room. He is trying to make sense of the pistol, of the mulatto, of the two bodies on the floor. I can see from his chevrons — two bars, in worsted — that he is a corporal. “Put that pistol away, ma’am, if you please, and explain yourself.” He blinks at her. “We heard two shots as we come up.”
The spinster collapses a half-inch further and lets the Colt fall—; it lands with a thump against Delamare’s ribs.
“I mind the negro,” says the spinster. “I can’t tell you much.”
“You can tell us who you are, ma’am, firstly,” the corporal says, his voice sharpening. But behind the sharpness there is good-will, of a sort—: I hear it and the spinster hears it. She lowers her eyes to the bed in sham simplicity. Her hands toy idly with the coverlet.
“Mary Parson, gentlemen, if you please.”
“Did you fire on these persons, Mary?”
“I did.” She gives a fretful nod. “They meant to harm me. Myself and the boy.”
The corporal squints at her. “The boy?” he says.
“Yes, sir. This one negro here.”
The curiosity of the soldiers shifts to the bed. “What ails him?” a red-faced private asks.
“Yellow fever.”
The mass of blue jackets, until that instant pushing forward into the room, flushes clear as though sucked out by a bellows. Only the corporal and the red-faced private remain, looking from Delamare to the spinster and back again. I try to speak, to put the lie to her, but my tongue has forgotten me. The corporal looks down at my body, then at Clem’s—; he’s trying not to breathe, on account of the fever. The sound of his not-breathing is deafening.
My good right eye shuts, never again to open. All I have now are the shapes. How fitting that they be the last thing.
A red cross, recumbent, over a yellow cloud. “We know this house was tenanted by the gang off of Island 37,” the corporal says. “Murel’s gang.”
“That’s two of them there,” says the spinster. “One of their whores and Virgil Ball himself.”
A violet wheel, spinning slowly to the right. “Ball?” the corporal says, stepping closer.
“A big’un, weren’t he?” the red-faced private whispers.
A six-cornered star. “The biggest,” announces the spinster. “There from the beginning.”
“And where were you, ma’am?” the corporal says, looking back at her.
“I—?” A pause. “Wherever they would have me, Corporal.”
“What is it, sir?” the private says.
The corporal says nothing for a spell. “Run and fetch Dr. Hooper.”
The private hesitates. “Dr. Hooper, sir? I wouldn’t have thought—”
“That man is dead, Corporal,” the spinster says. Her voice has gone shrill.
“It’s not for him, ma’am,” the corporal replies. “It’s for that boy of yours.”
“I see.” The spinster hesitates. That a doctor should be summoned to minister to a dying nigger is inconceivable to her. “I see. As I told you already, Corporal, the yellow fever—”
“I was in Memphis when the Yellowjack last hit,” the corporal says. “I saw enough of the stuff to recognize it—; and I saw a good deal else, besides. I’ll trouble you, Mrs. Parson, to step away from the bed.”
The spinster lets out a laugh at this—: a high metallic laugh, rueful and clear, run through with spite and condescension and defeat.
“It’s Miss Parson, Corporal. I’m as yet unwed.”
IF THE CORPORAL GIVES AN ANSWER I no longer hear it. I’m above Delamare’s sick-room suddenly, above the house altogether, spiraling like a dandelion-seed on a cushion of summer air. A vast plain of water lies below me, as though the river were in flood—; Geburah floats upon it like scum upon the surface of a pond. The grid that so enraptured me lies plain to see, but it holds no mystery any longer. The only mystery is on high.
An enormous slate-gray cloud is gathering above me, winding silently about itself like flax upon a spool. The little black ball, my namesake, has appeared at some point without my noticing—: it hovers at my left ear now, chirruping and squeaking, ferrying me upwards. The other shapes — the stars, the cups, the fiery wheels — are nowhere to be seen. I’m free of them at last.
On this, the ball’s third visit, I feel no sense of bewilderment. It’s familiar to me, an old acquaintance, more genuine already than my memories of the Trade—: realer than Parson, realer than Delamare, realer than Morelle. Realer, even, than my Clementine. I reach toward the ball but it whirls playfully away, whistling heavenward like a shell levered from a rifle.
In the blink of an eye it’s gone, swallowed by the cloud.
As the cloud lowers to receive me it grants, by way of welcome, one last vision of the future. The vision is brief, no more than a flicker across my sight—; but what little I see makes me cry aloud in awe.
The future of the Trade is the size of the world exactly. The world will fit into it perfectly, discretely, like a crawfish into its shell. The future of the Trade is made of quartz and salt-peter and burning oil. It will hide where belief hides — in language and in thought — and both will warp and buckle to accommodate it. The visible, tangible, culpable Trade will wither away, and the world will imagine itself cured. The Trade, however, will flourish—: as ever-present as language is, and as unnoticed.
The cloud is parting now into two equal halves, like a gate of wrought-iron, and I rise solemnly between them to meet with my reward. The ball waits above me, spinning giddily in place. It comes gradually to rest, and I see that it’s not truly ball-shaped at all—; I begin, as it slows further, to make out a human form. An instant later I’ve recognized it and let out a gasp of happiness.