Canaan's Tongue Read Online Free PDF Page B

eschatologies. That’s all it was.”
    The Redeemer squinted at me. “His which?”
    “His views on the end of the world.”
    “Ah!” His squint changed, subtly, to a grin. “You preferred that the world
not
end, I take it?”
    “Not just then.”
    “And that’s when he stuck his foot in your eye?” the Redeemer said blithely.
    In six years no-one had mentioned my eye at all, let alone asked its whyfores. The topic was skirted around with no small measure of distaste by everyone I met with on the river, on account of its being my left eye, white as a boiled egg, and terrible to look at—; it was taken for a hex by old and young alike. Before me, however, was a man who not only considered my disfigurement fit subject for a fire-side chat, but plainly wanted to talk of nothing else. As I related the history of my escape from my father’s house, ploddingly and with no end of pauses, it became clear that he held my eye in the highest possible esteem. Again and again his attention, diverted by this or that trifle, would swing back to it like the door of a saloon—:
    “That
eye
of yours, now, Mr. Ball—: can you see aught out of it?”
    “Very little.”
    “But you
do
see?”
    I gave a deprecatory shrug. “If it pleases you to call it seeing.”
    His eyes moistened with excitement. “Describe it for us.”
    I hesitated. “I can’t make out anything at all, stupidly, unless the other’s closed—”
    “The hell you say!”
    “—and when I do close it, I see only in a shadowy sort of way, as if through the bottom of a bottle. Not much light gets in.” I tapped the side of my head forlornly.
    “No shapes?” said the Redeemer. He went quiet a moment. “No— forms of any sort?”
    I shrugged. “Sometimes I can make out forms. The
idea
of forms, better said.” I smiled at him. “As in Plato’s cave.”
    “I see,” he murmured. “Perhaps, however, your vision will improve?”
    For the first time since I’d left home, a man of intelligence— however eccentric—had taken an interest in me. And what an interest! In my loneliness and gullibility I practically did the work of seduction for him. The Redeemer had only to open his mouth, like a crocodile, and let me totter in. What’s more, in some back larder of my brain, unconquered as yet by his whiskey and his guile, I knew this full and well. Had I guessed what lay in store for me—the killings, the privations, the final apocalypse in Memphis—I might have recovered myself in time. Or perhaps not. It was clear enough, staring into his narrow, sharp-eyed face, that he didn’t mean me well.
    “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