None of which gave him a destination. The first few times he walked aimlessly and finally returned home after a suitable absence. But then one evening, as he headed down the street, he passed a group of three childhood cronies.
“Lord have mercy!” exclaimed Abe Ludlow, whose full and formal name was Abraham Emancipation Ludlow. “Josh! Yo’ master don’t need you wave a fan over him tonight?”
Joshua turned an icy stare on Abe, remembering the hot dusty mornings they’d sat in Doc’s driveway shooting marbles. From his lips came the unbridled inflections of his childhood.
“You watch yo’ mouth, nigger. Din’ nobody ask yo’ ‘pinion.”
“Whooo!” Eulises S. Jones chimed in. That was his name, Eulises S. His mother hadn’t known what the S stood for, and she hadn’t been sure of the spelling of ‘Ulysses’ either, but she wasn’t going to pass up the elegance of the rolling syllables on a minor technicality.
“Watch it, Abe!” called Jeremiah Andrews. His mother quoted Bible verses every other breath. She blithely worked her way through the Old Testament whenever she needed to name a new child, usually every eleven to thirteen months. “He fixin’ to get nasty!”
“No, I ain’t!” declared Joshua. “Y’all are. Ain’t done nuttin’ to any one of y’all!”
“An you ain’t done nuttin’ with us in so long we done forgot what yo’ voice sound like!” exclaimed Abe. “Why you done forget where all us lives, boy? You too good or somethin’?”
Joshua stared at Abe. Could it be that simple? Had his friends ignored him only because they thought he was ignoring them?
“’Course I ain’t. None of y’all wanted to have nuttin’ to do with me.”
“You ain’t give us a chance, boy. Never see you no mo’. Everybody gots to work, but they don’t do it all de damn time! What you do when you ain’t workin’?”
“I been—Mist’ Paul, he been teaching me—”
“Teachin’ you what? You already knows how to read, don’t you?”
“Sho.”
“Den what else you need?”
“Dere’s lots of things.”
“Well, it ain’t changed de way you talk, nigger. An’ you still black.”
Joshua wasn’t brave enough to show them it had changed the way he talked. And he certainly couldn’t dispute he was still black. He was more properly speaking brown, but he knew what Abe meant and didn’t feel it expedient to get into an argument over semantics.
“Yep,” he said finally. “I still is.”
“An’ you off yo’ leash tonight?”
Joshua bridled at the implied insult to Paul, but felt it best to be agreeable. He nodded.
“Well! Wanna’ mosey on with us a while?”
“Where you goin’?”
“Down to de river.”
“Why come? You ain’t got no fishin’ pole.”
“Ain’t goan fish.”
“Den whut?”
“You see iff’n you come. So is you comin’ or is you ain’t?”
Joshua stood for a moment, undecided. He didn’t like walking blindly into situations he knew nothing about. Besides, something about his old friends seemed different. There was something furtive, secretive.
“Guess you ain’t,” said Abe with a shrug, and the boys started off.
Joshua stared after them. Of course they seemed different. He hadn’t really talked to them in over four years, what did he expect? Probably they were just going skinny-dipping or maybe even meeting girls down by the riverbank. He called after them.
“Wait! I’s comin’!”
He caught up with them, driving the final nail into the coffin his brother’d be sleeping in by fall. During the daylight hours, anyway.
* * *
“So why for we goin’ to de river?” Josh asked again as they strolled briskly along towards Wharf Street.
“You see do we get dere. Got a meetin’.”
“Meetin’? What kind of meetin’?”
“Boy, you just full up of questions, ain’t you? Dat what all dat learnin’ do for you?”
“I just—” Joshua started, but Jeremiah broke in.
“Damn, Abe! Act like it be some big secret or somethin’! Josh, you seen dat new feller whut started showin’ up on Sunday at St. Barnabas?”
St. Barnabas was the black Episcopal church. It stood on the corner of Congress Street and Third Street and enjoyed a large attendance, consisting primarily of the house servants who worked in the big houses of the well-to-do streets.
Sadie’d hauled Joshua off to St. Barnabas every Sunday of his memory unless he was sick as sin. Sadie wasn’t terribly social, though, and didn’t linger after the sermon. So Joshua, confirmed member of the church though he was, really didn’t know much about the church’s social structure.
“Not really,” he admitted.
“Boy! How you not notice him? Big man, coal black, shaved head?”
“I just—Sadie doan stay aroun’ long after Brother Gorley finish. I just ain’t noticed nobody like dat.”
“Well, dat don’t make no never mind no how,” Abe assured him. “He be real special.”
“Special how? Whut his name?”
“His name be Cain,” said Abe, almost reverently. “An he say—he say his color be sebben.”
“He say whut?”
“His color be sebben.”
“Dat don’t make no sense a’tall. Colors ain’t numbers.”
Abe shook his head. “Can’t ‘splain. Can’t ‘splain nuttin’ ‘bout Cain. But you see. He—never mind. You see.”
Josh hung slightly back.He didn’t like the sound of this. He didn’t understand his friends’ fascination with a man who spoke in riddles. He almost turned around and headed back toward town and Abe, sensing his withdrawal, stopped dead in his tracks.
“Oh, go on! Don’t know why I ‘spected a white nigger like you to understan’ a man like Cain! Go on back to yo’ precious Mist’ Paul!”
White nigger. That’s what he was, alright. Abe’s taunt hit the truth with a bullseye. What was all his work for? What good would his education do him or them if he lost touch with his own people, if they saw him as an outsider, a white nigger? And so he moved forward once again. Walking towards Wharf Street. Walking towards Paul’s destiny.
Chapter Eighteen
Cain stood in a clearing among the willow trees lining the banks of the Ocmulgee just north of the town proper. He inspected his followers as they arrived. Mostly teenage boys with a smattering of teenage girls. He expected maybe twenty tonight. Not bad. He’d started with a mere handful and their ranks swelled with each gathering.
By next month the twenty would be thirty, forty, fifty. The pattern held all the way from Mississippi to Alabama and over to Georgia. In the end, a private troop of devoted acolytes spread his gospel through ever swelling numbers. A gospel rooted in blood, nursed with hate. He looked back over his life’s work and found it sweet. He smiled.
Where he came from, no one knew. He didn’t know himself. Sometimes he thougtht he’d merely sprung, full-grown, from the depths of the deepest swamps, the darkest bayous, of Louisiana. No one remembers babyhood and early childhood consists of bright splashes of color highlighting fields of darkness stretching gradually into full memory, but Cain remembered no bright splashes.
His first memories were of hunger and wetness and cold nights. Of the waterfront stretching across New Orleans Harbor. He didn’t think on them often, those memories of rummaging through refuse like a starved cat, barely tall enough to reach over the tops of the garbage barrels, all that kept him alive.
But he survived. Many street urchins didn’t. And he grew. Almost six feet tall in early adolescene, he soared past that to six foot six at the approximate age of sixteen, with massive shoulders to match his towering frame. He never knew his real age, or who his parents were or how he’d come to live on the streets. Of course, by that time, he’d had been working the docks, one way or the other, for the past ten or twelve yea
rs.
When he was roughly twelve, he made a great discovery. Sailors and dock workers drank. A lot. When they did, they stumbled out of the waterfront saloons and down into the alleys running beside them. He’d known that already. What he hadn’t known was how easily their skulls crushed when struck from the proper angle with the proper amount of force from the proper blunt instrument. He favored a length of iron pipe holding almost talismanic importance for him. They never offered any protest when he ransacked their pockets. It beat loading huge crates on and off shipboard to hell and back.
As his strength increased, he discovered their necks snapped almost as easily under the pressure of his huge hands as did their skulls under the iron pipe. He found the sound of snapping neck bone more melodious than the sound of cracking skulls. A true connoisseur, he was an artist at his work.
Everyone makes mistakes, though. Cain’s mistake was Leo Salter. Leo looked just like every other drunken dock hand. But he wasn’t. The owner of a large plantation outside of Baton Rouge, he was on the hunt for a runaway wife. He’d been warned she was nothing but a little slut but he hadn’t listened. Now she’d run away to New Orleans and taken up residence at one of the waterfront brothels. That made him madder than the initial desertion. If she wanted to be a whore, she could have at least joined a classy whorehouse. God knows, New Orleans had plenty.
Leo went undercover. He wandered the bars and brothels of the harbor. His clothes reeked of cheap whiskey, but his head was clear. He was going to kill the little tramp when he found her and didn’t want sweet revenge blurred by an alcoholic haze. He wasn’t a match for the huge hands pulling him into the alley, but he could and did make a lot of noise. Enough noise to attract the attention of New Orlean’s finest.
Leo wasn’t dead, and there was no proof of the scores of murders Cain had committed in those alleys. Most of the murder victims hadn’t been missed. Cain thus escaped the gallows. But Leo’s testimony at Cain’s trial sent Cain to a Louisiana prison camp in the depths of the snake and mosquito infested back bayous. His sentence was for thirty years.
For seven years, Cain survived the Cat-o’-Nine Tails, the periodic sweats in the hot box, and the muck and mud of the sugarcane fields. Then a moccasin bit the inmate attached to the other end of the chain manacled on Cain’s ankle. When they unshackled the men to carry the screaming inmate back to base camp, Cain saw his chance. He took it. The chain itself was still attached to Cain’s ankle but he didn’t care. He ran. All the bullets fired at his fleeing back missed and Cain kept running.
He ran the rest of that afternoon and through that night, the baying of the bloodhounds ringing in his ears. The next morning, the officials shrugged, called in the dogs, and trotted back to the main prison camp. Odds were if the escaped prisoner hadn’t been apprehended by now, he was dead from a snake bite or an encounter with a rouge bull ‘gator. Even if he wasn’t, he would be soon. A man didn’t survive this bayou alone and unarmed. Not for long.
Cain didn’t just survive. He entered his second gestation period. When he emerged from that swamp, he was reborn. His past life didn’t matter anymore. In the depths of the deep swamps, in a ramshackle shack standing on poles to guard against rising rain water and nestled among the knotty cypress trees, he found his destiny.
Destiny comes in many shapes and sizes. This particular destiny stood perhaps five feet two inches tall, and appeared smaller due to the stoop of her shoulders. She was black, wizened, wrinkled, and quite insane. He never knew her name.
He’d driven his huge body until he could drive it no further, collapsing on a relatively dry rise of land. He hadn’t heard the baying of the dogs at all that day and assumed he’d been left to perish in the swamps. He damn sure didn’t plan to perish, but he had to rest. When he woke, a gnome-life figure with the face of a witchy woman was bending over him. She laughed softly to herself.
“Lookee what de swamp done sent me now,” she chanted. “Jest lookee here.”
He sat up quickly and pushed her away. He looked around and saw a piece of a shack, sitting on poles to avoid surges of rising water that would come with heavy rainfalls. His eyes bulged at the shack’s decorations. Animal skulls. Ropes of bone. Amulets and crude figures, roughly human in shape, with slivers of bamboo thrust through them. They hung all around the porch.
“Shiiiiiiiit!” he exclaimed softly. “Whut I done landed myself in now?”
The old woman rocked back and forth on her heels. “Swamp sent you. Swamp sent you. You mine now.”
“Swamp din’ send you nuttin’, old woman. An’ I ain’t nobody’s.” He got up and moved towards the house. The old woman trailed after him. He found a rusted saw and went to work on the manacle around his ankle. He ransacked the cupboards, shoving food into his mouth. Time to go. Old woman was crazy as a bedbug.
“You can’t leave,” she said.
“Like hell I can’t.”
She cackled, an eerie sound that echoed through the swamp. She held up a crude figure, similar in shape to those hanging on the porch, wrapped in a rag torn from the shirt he was wearing. Producing a short length of rusted chain, she wrapped it around the legs of the figure, still cackling. Cain snorted in derision and made to leave. Then he bellowed in rage.
“Take dat off! Woman! You crazy! I say take dat off!”
The more he bellowed, the more she cackled. He couldn’t move. Literally. Figuratively. He couldn’t move.
“You mine, boy! Sent to serve me! You say so!”
“No!”
“You say so!” she ordered, pulling the chain tighter. Feeling the circulation in his legs cut off, his eyes widened in amazement.
“All right!” he roared. “All right. Stop it! Take it off!”
She took it off and transferred one bird-like hand to the head of the figure. She smiled and squeezed. Cain’s eyes bulged. He felt his head imploding. He screamed.
“Learn to mind yo’ betters, boy?”
“Yes! Yes! Stop it!”
“Dat’s better,” she said. She released the pressure and Cain settled down for several weeks of virtual slavery.
Never one to miss an opportunity, Cain studied the old woman. He assumed an attitude of placid obedience while he studied her bones and figures and skulls. She gave him drinks made from swamp plants, mushrooms and fungi growing on the trunks of the overhanging trees. The drinks left him floating in clouds of color. She handed him home-rolled cigarettes with an aroma different from ordinary tobacco. And the effect was damn sure different. The world expanded and there was nothing, nothing, he couldn’t do. If he ever decided to. Somehow the energy for action deserted him. During one spell of lucidity, he realized the smoke and the drinks were sapping him of his will to leave, deterring him in his quest for future greatness.
He moderated their use considerably, disposing of his rations when the old woman wasn’t looking. He cajoled her to initiate him into the rituals of the crude figures, the bones and skulls.
One night, she took his hand and held it in front of the flickering firelight. She inspected it closely.
“When you born, boy?”
“Doan know.”
“No idea a’tall?”
“Naw.”
“Dat too bad. Can’t know yo’ full power less’n you know de stars dat rule you.”
“Nuttin’, nobody, rule me.”
“I rule you, boy. Be you needin’ any reminder?”
“Naw.” Cain wasn’t ready to take on the old woman. He knew it.
“But you got power, all right. Strong power. Dark power.”
“What sort of power?”
“Power what ken make you—boy, is you de sebbenth son of a sebbenth son?”
Cain laughed. “Got no idea in hell, ol’ woman.”
“Ain’t seen none to beat you. ‘Cept me, o’course.” She cackled, the cackle that made his skin prickle.
“Ken you teach me? Whut you do?”
“Why I want do dat? So’s you can match power with me?”
“So’s I can help you. Ain’t dat whut you said? Dat I was sent? Why come, if you not goan show me whut you do?”
Cain didn’t know what the old woman actually did and he didn’t think she did either, but he didn’t doubt whatever it was, it packed a hell of a punch. When he learned her secrets, he’d be unstoppable.
She sat and cogitated a moment. “I think on it,” she finally allowed.
And so Cain entered into an intense study of things best left undisturbed. Three months later, when he judged he’d learned all she had to teach, he strangled her in her sleep and headed out of the bayou. “Don’t never pay to be too sure of yourself, ol’ woman,” he muttered. He never looked back.
He was the most dangerous of men, a man of charismatic power holding secrets he didn’t understand and certainly didn’t respect. Not exactly a charlatan, assuredly not a seer. Only two things mattered to him, his pleasure and his gain. As he moved out of the Louisiana swamps, over and up into the farmlands of middle Mississippi, he conceived his master plan. He stopped to try it out in a small township called Tonka Creek. It worked. Like a charm.
Chapter Nineteen
Tonka Creek was too small to have any central system of authority. It was far enough away from the next large town to prevent passers-through from noticing any marked changes in its population. It was perfect.
Cain’s only formal schooling came from that strange bayou college wherein his wizened, wrinkled professor presided over a class of one, but he was a natural psychologist. He recognized in religion a formidable tool, a means to ease his way into the fabric of community life gradually, drawing the population into his talons, into his control. By the time he gave his first demonstration of power, real power, his targets were so hypnotized they felt no revulsion for the rituals calling forth that power. By that time, they begged for it.
Dark Series, The Color of Seven and The Color of Dusk (Books We Love Special Edition) Page 10
