by Blake, J
And now he began to address the brethren about the wages of sin, which were not only death but the everlasting tortures of hell, the horrifying punishments that were the destined lot of lost souls. He started out slowly and speaking so low that the brothers could barely make out his words at the rear of the crowd. But his voice rose as he warmed to his theme, rose and hardened and assumed the pounding stentorian tone of ordained authority. He spoke of roaring hellfire and sulfurous smoke and pains beyond imagination, beyond all nightmare. Spoke of horned and cloven-footed demons with thorned whips, demons whose aspects and essence defied all rational description and whose eternal delight it was to evoke the rupturing screams of the damned. Demons whose laughter was of the Devil’s madhouse and mingled with the incessant wails of the condemned and rang without pause off Hell’s burning walls. He spoke of smells that made the rankest jakes and the odors of the rotting dead seem the stuff of flower gardens by comparison, of stenches beyond any foulness ever known to human breath. He conjured one horrifying vision after another and the crowd had early on begun to moan in terror and self-pity and now some among them were weeping openly and some sobbing in their visions of what lay for them beyond the grave if they did not now act to ensure their soul’s salvation. And now some among them began to howl and roll their eyes and shudder convulsively as the preacher’s terrifying proclamations carried across the meadow and even as John and Edward exchanged uncertain grins their horses began to stamp and shy as they sensed the growing fear and madness around them and the brothers were obliged to rein the animals tighter and speak soothingly into their ear. In another moment the mass of the faithful was taken with jerking convulsions and some fell to the ground and rolled about and all of them moaning and praying loudly to Jesus to save their damned souls. And still the preacher bellowed his perditions. The horses now so spooked they fought against the reins and themselves seemed to be afflicted with the same jerking convulsions of terrified ecstasy that engirt the crowd.
“Damn this!” John yelled at Edward. “Let’s go!”
They reined their mounts around and dug their heels into their flanks and the horses in a single motion rocked back on their haunches and shot forward as if their tails were afire. They didn’t slow from a gallop until they were two miles down the trace and even then the mounts preferred to pace at a nervous canter than settle to a walk.
John said he hadn’t ever seen anything like that before and wouldn’t care if he never did again. Edward shook the sweat out of his hat and said he wasn’t too taken with it either.
“Why you reckon they-all got afflicted like that?” John said.
Edward said he didn’t know. Then said: “Could be they just real hard believers.”
“Believers?” John said. “Believers a what?”
Edward shrugged and now his mount seemed easier about being reined down to a walk.
John slowed his horse and fell back alongside his brother. “What could somebody believe that’d make him do like they was doin?”
Edward looked at him and shrugged again. “I don’t know. What-all they been told, I guess.”
“All them people believe somethin just cause they been told it?”
“I can’t think a no other reason for it.”
“Well, damn if ever I want to believe anything that much.”
Edward grinned. “I believe we aint got too much worry on that account.”
They looked at each other a moment as if each was suddenly seeing something of himself in the other. And then they laughed and rode on.
13
One late afternoon of lacy pink clouds they forded the Wolf River near a small town from which came such a clamor the brothers thought a celebration in progress. They chucked their mounts toward the settlement and soon spied a raucous crowd of about a hundred people gathered around a large live oak at the edge of town. A pack of dogs ran about in high excitement, barking and yipping, locking up in snarling skirmishes broken up by the kicks of laughing, cursing men.
As the brothers drew closer they saw the noosed end of a rope sail over a lower branch of the oak tree and jiggle down slackly to waiting hands. A moment later the rope went taut and the assembly roared as a barechested Negro with his hands tied behind him ascended into view above the spectators’ heads, his neck stretching to unbelievable length under the strangling noose, his legs kicking madly, his eyes as big as eggs and his tongue bulging and the front of his beige pants staining with urine.
The rope suddenly slackened and the Negro dropped hard to the ground and the crowd cheered lustily as some of the men rushed forward and kicked him and small boys hit him with sticks and women spat at him and the dogs bit at his legs. Then the rope stiffened with a quiver and jerked the Negro to his feet like an immense marionette and again hauled him up in the air and stones arced out of the mob and glanced off his head and now his kicking legs were hampered by his trousers which had been pulled down to his shins to expose his private parts.
A tall chinless man in a stovepipe hat stepped forward and reached up and grasped the Negro’s dangling genitals in one big hand and stretched them out and with a single smooth stroke of a straight razor neatly sliced them away. Blood jumped from the wound and ran bright red down the Negro’s black legs and the spectators howled. The tall man tossed the severed parts into the pack of dogs and there was a fierce brief fray among them and one hound tore away the scrotum and gulped it down and another raced through the laughing crowd with the tip of the dark phallus jutting from its jaws and the other dogs on his heels.
Again the rope went slack and the hanged man dropped hard to the ground. The noose was loosened and readjusted on his swollen misshapen neck and water was flung into his battered face and the mob crowed with delight as the word rippled through the throng: “He’s alive yet!”
The brothers exchanged wide-eyed looks. Edward leaned down in the saddle and asked a man standing close by, “Say mister, what’d that nigger do, anyhow?”
The man looked up sharply and squinted at him and then at John. “Somethin he damn sure wisht he hadn’t!” Several men and women within earshot laughed heartily.
Now the Negro’s pants were pulled off his feet and he was doused with lamp oil and again the noose was tightened and again he was hauled into the air. The man in the stovepipe hat struck a match that sparked sulfurously and put it to the black man’s bloody and oil-sheened legs and in an instant he was entorched. His legs churned wildly as though they might gain purchase on the air itself and bear him away from this horror. He was screaming through the strangling noose loudly enough to be heard above the bellowing mob and Edward had never heard such a scream from the mouth of man, could never have imagined the sound.
The flames rushed up to engulf the Negro’s head and his shivering shrieks rose higher and he convulsed and spun like a great dark fish on a line and now the ropes binding his hands fell away in flames and his arms flailed and streamed fire and then quite abruptly his hands fell and his screaming ceased and he hung limp and was dead.
The corpse continued to burn. The roasting flesh crackled and bubbled and dripped and now the crowd caught the horrid stench and women clamped kerchiefs to their faces and hurriedly pulled their children away. The brothers looked at each other and John said softly, “Sweet baby Jesus!”
The fire licked up along the noose knot and the rope abruptly came apart and the remains fell to the ground in a great burst of sparks and smoldering pieces and some of the spectators cheered and some guffawed and a few women shrieked, some in fright perhaps, some in exultation.
Now the man in the stovepipe hat started back toward the town and he was hastily followed by a sunbonneted woman and a half-dozen boys and girls of varying ages and all of them marked by their father’s lack of chin. Within minutes of his departing the rest of the crowd dispersed. Besides the brothers the only ones to linger were a handful of boys and a pair of men wearing pistols and neckties and aloof looks of authority as they leaned against the tree trunk and smoked
their pipes and conversed quietly. The boys closed around the charred corpse and pointed out various aspects of it to each other and elbowed one another and laughed. One of them kicked the dead man’s leg and knocked loose a crisped piece of what had so recently been living flesh and the boys all laughed louder. One of the men at the tree said, “That’s enough now you boys, git along,” and one of them muttered something under his breath to the others and the man straightened up with a sharp look and the boys raced away trailing peals of laughter.
The brothers looked upon the Negro’s mortal residue a moment longer and then reined their horses around and rode on.
14
They hankered for New Orleans—Dixie City, so called since the U. S. purchase of Louisiana, when New Orleans banks issued ten-dollar notes printed with an English “Ten” on one side and a French “Dix” on the other. The Americans pronounced the French word in their own fashion and more often called the bill a “dixie,” and the word quickly came to refer to the town itself. The brothers had heard about Dixie City’s wicked pleasures and were eager to sample them for themselves. But such pleasures would come dear and they had spent their last six bits on a jug of whiskey proffered by a peddler they met on the trace. So they took work at a timbercamp just east of the Pearl River to replenish their empty purse.
They felled and trimmed cypress and sledded the logs to the river where some were lashed together in rafts to be towed and some loaded on broad-horns or keelboats, depending on the timber’s destination and the waterways that must be navigated to get there. They worked hard the day long and put aside most of their earnings, but they allotted a little of their money each payday as a stake for Edward, the better gambler of the two, so he could sit in on one of the half-dozen poker games held every Saturday night in the crew barracks. Over the next few weeks he came out a few dollars ahead at the end of each of game, but there were too many sharps for him to win consistently.
Then one Saturday evening his luck ran riot and within an hour he’d won more than forty dollars. Whereupon a big Swede named Larsson accused him of cheating. As they stalked outside to settle the matter, stripping off their shirts as they went, the betting on the fight was clamorous. Because the Swede outweighed Edward by thirty pounds and stood a head taller, John had easily got three-to-one odds on his brother.
They fought in the torchlit clearing in front of the barracks, ringed about by the raucous timberjacks calling for blood, for maiming. For all his size and strength Larsson was like most timberjacks awkward and clumsy of foot. Edward was quick on his feet and fast with his hands and could punch with the force of a much larger man. He repeatedly sidestepped the Swede’s lumbering charges and nimbly dodged his great roundhouse swings and countered with flurries that soon made raw butchery of Larsson’s broad furious face. There were outraged cries of “Ringer!” from many in the crowd who had bet big on the Swede. After nearly fifteen minutes of mostly missing with his wild swings and being battered by Edward’s sharp counterpunches, the Swede howled in frustration and charged at him with wide-open arms and caught him up in a bearhug and lifted him off his feet and bit off the top of his right ear.
Edward yelped and brought his knee up hard between Larsson’s legs and the Swede’s eyes bulged and his grip loosened and Edward butted him square in the face and the Swede released him and staggered back on wobbly legs with blood pouring from his nose. Edward hit Larsson a terrific roundhouse on the jaw that sent him sprawling, then rushed in and kicked him in the head again and again and had to be restrained by a clutch of cooler heads before he killed him.
John won more than seventy dollars in the betting. He pounded Edward’s sore back in jubilation until Edward told him to stop it or he’d break his damned arm. On the following morning Edward’s scalloped ear was swollen and caked with dried blood and his back and ribs felt as if he’d fallen out of a tree. But they now had plenty of money and were set to go to Dixie City. They sold the mule to a camp foreman and hired on as polemen on an antique and much-modified keelboat bound downriver with a load of cypress timber and a half-dozen milk cows. They put their horses aboard in the cowpen and on a cool early November sunrise cast loose for New Orleans.
15
They rode the Pearl’s lazy current down to the delta, occasionally putting in at a river village for a big feed and a night of barndancing and scrapping with the local bullies. One late night on the river all heaven came ablaze with falling stars. “The Leonids,” the captain said. The grizzled crew gasped and pointed like children at a fireworks show. Barrages of comets streaked like burning cannonballs and lit the roof of the world in flames. The brothers gaped.
They took on supplies one early afternoon at a riverside hamlet where a fair was in progress within view of the dock. The keelboat captain gave permission for his crew to attend but warned them he’d brook no reports from the locals of fighting or ill behavior toward the women of the town.
“We’ll be in Dixie soon enough and ye can play the slap and tickle all ye want with the sportin ladies there. But here ye best keep it in your pants and be leaving your fists loose too. I have friends living here and I’ll not have them bullied nor their girls bothered.”
The fair was a small enterprise but a lively one. There were lines of tables whereat ladies exhibited their best quiltwork and men their wood carvings, where women sold servings of their best pies and cakes, bowls of their best stews, small sacks of their sweetest candies. There were pens for stock judgings and prizes awarded for the best hog, the finest steer, the most productive milkcow, the best-laying hen, the loudest cockiest rooster.
The largest tent was that of a traveling show that had but recently arrived in town and attached itself to the fair. A man in a derby hat and a red-and-white striped vest stood at the entrance flap and announced, “Step right up, gents, step right up and prepare yourselves to see some of the strangest sights ye’ll ever see. Marvels and curiosities of nature, aye! And all the more amazing for being true, every one of them, for there’s nought more amazing than the truth, don’t you know?” The brothers looked at each other and shrugged and then paid the ten-cent admission and went inside.
The tent had been partitioned into two rooms by a high folding divider extended from the front wall to the rear. In the first room the brothers saw a green-caped man on a dais eat fire. He shoved the flaming end of a rod deep into his throat and held it there for several impossible seconds and then withdrew it still aflame and brandished it with a grin and everyone applauded. He held the flaming rod out to one of the keelboatmen and asked if he’d like a taste and the boatman stepped back and said, “Hell, no!” and the crowd around him laughed. Then another man took the fire-eater’s place on the dais and this one carried a small sword with a bright thin three-foot blade and he held up a sheet of paper and neatly sliced it in two to show the sharpness of the blade’s edge. Then he put his head back and slid the length of the blade down his throat and as it disappeared into his mouth the spectators gasped. And when he extracted the blade and they saw not a drop of blood on it they clapped and cheered and whistled in awe.
John leaned towards Edward and whispered, “Damn, it’s some people’ll put any damn thing in they mouth, aint it?”
As if to prove exactly how correct John was, the next performer to ascend the dais was a tall thin man with bloodshot eyes and bad sores on his face who pulled a garter snake from his coat pocket and held its wriggling form up high for all to see. In a single swift motion he brought the snake to his mouth and bit off its head and the tent fell absolutely silent as the remaining portion of snake lashed wildly and wrapped itself about the man’s arm like an ancient Egyptian armband. The man then spat the head arcing into the air and the spectators jumped aside to let it fall clear in the midst of them. And then burst into the loudest cheers and applause yet.
The brothers heard a man behind them tell another that he’s once seen a man in Nashville bite the head off a damn chicken and then choke to death on it while the crowd was giving
him what was probably the biggest hand he’d ever got in his life.
And now there came onto the dais a brief parade of freaks. A fellow called the Rotting Man who was a biped festering sore. His nose and lips had rotted away and open sores covered his shirtless chest and ran with pus and the man indeed did stink like rotting meat. The Alligator Man had a normal-looking head and feet but was covered from neck to kneecaps with skin as thick and rough as gator hide. Then came a woman with a beard as bushy as any man’s, and a tall sad-faced woman with a third teat about the size of a boy’s fist between her two normal ones. And finally a little redhaired boy of about six who had eight fingers on one hand and nine on the other and no toes at all but for the big one on his right foot. Edward thought the boy had the saddest eyes he’d ever seen. Somebody standing close by the brothers remarked aloud that it looked like the boy’s toes must’ve slid up some kind of way to his hands, and another said maybe his momma bounced him around too much before he was born. Both men laughed and boy looked at them with his sad eyes and the freaks all glared at them in the only show of awareness they had made toward their audience. The Alligator Man put an arm around the redhead boy and led him off the dais and out through a rear flap in the tent and the other freaks followed them away.
Edward marveled at the Alligator Man’s gesture and the freaks’ display of injured pride, at the seeming comradeship of outcasts. For a fleeting and almost frightening instant he felt he should go with them, felt it in a way he could never have explained, yet felt it as surely as he did his beating heart. He looked at John and saw him staring after the departing freaks too. Then John cut his eyes to him and Edward felt an inexplicable sensation of being outside the world but for his brother and he knew somehow that John was feeling the same thing. The brothers showed their teeth at one another. John feinted a punch and Edward feinted a counter and they laughed and punched each other on the shoulder and went into the other room.