He did not die that night, nor the next, nor the next. I well remember the next day, because it was that day that I had the fight with Jack Kirby.
People will take a good deal from a bully, rather than to spill blood. Because nobody had gone to the trouble of killing him, Kirby thought the whole countryside was afraid of him.
He had bought a steer from my father, and when my father went to collect for it, Kirby told him that he had paid the money to me–which was a lie. I went looking for Kirby, and came upon him in a bootleg joint, boasting of his toughness, and telling the crowd that he was going to beat me up and make me say that he had paid me the money, and that I had stuck it into my own pocket. When I heard him say that, I saw red, and ran in on him with a stockman’s knife, and cut him across the face, and in the neck, side, breast and belly, and the only thing that saved his life was the fact that the crowd pulled me off.
There was a preliminary hearing, and I was indicted on a charge of assault, and my trial was set for the following term of court. Kirby was as tough-fibered as a post-oak country bully ought to be, and he recovered, swearing vengeance, for he was vain of his looks, though God knows why, and I had permanently impaired them.
And while Jack Kirby was recovering, old man Garfield recovered too, to the amazement of everybody, especially Doc Blaine.
I well remember the night Doc Blaine took me again out to old Jim Garfield’s farm. I was in Shifty Corlan’s joint, trying to drink enough of the slop he called beer to get a kick out of it, when Doc Blaine came in and persuaded me to go with him.
As we drove along the winding old road in Doc’s car, I asked: “Why are you insistent that I go with you this particular night? This isn’t a professional call, is it?”
“No,” he said. “You couldn’t kill old Jim with a post-oak maul. He’s completely recovered from injuries that ought to have killed an ox. To tell the truth, Jack Kirby is in Lost Knob, swearing he’ll shoot you on sight.”
“Well, for God’s sake!” I exclaimed angrily. “Now everybody’ll think I left town because I was afraid of him. Turn around and take me back, damn it!”
“Be reasonable,” said Doc. “Everybody knows you’re not afraid of Kirby. Nobody’s afraid of him now.
His bluff ’s broken, and that’s why he’s so wild against you. But you can’t afford to have any more trouble with him now, and your trial only a short time off.”
I laughed and said: “Well, if he’s looking for me hard enough, he can find me as easily at old Garfield’s as in town, because Shifty Corlan heard you say where we were going. And Shifty’s hated me ever since I skinned him in that horse-swap last fall. He’ll tell Kirby where I went.”
“I never thought of that,” said Doc Blaine, worried.
“Hell, forget it,” I advised. “Kirby hasn’t got guts enough to do anything but blow.”
But I was mistaken. Puncture a bully’s vanity and you touch his one vital spot.
Old Jim had not gone to bed when we got there. He was sitting in the room opening on to his sagging porch, the room which was at once living-room and bedroom, smoking his old cob pipe and trying to read a newspaper by the light of his coal-oil lamp. All the windows and doors were wide open for the coolness, and the insects which swarmed in and fluttered around the lamp didn’t seem to bother him.
We sat down and discussed the weather–which isn’t so inane as one might suppose, in a country where men’s livelihood depends on sun and rain, and is at the mercy of wind and drouth. The talk drifted into other kindred channels, and after some time, Doc Blaine bluntly spoke of something that hung in his mind.
“Jim,” he said, “that night I thought you were dying, you babbled a lot of stuff about your heart, and an Indian who lent you his. How much of that was delirium?”
“None, Doc,” said Garfield, pulling at his pipe. “It was gospel truth. Ghost Man, the Lipan priest of the Gods of Night, replaced my dead, torn heart with one from somethin’ he worshipped. I ain’t sure myself just what that somethin’ is–somethin’ from away back and a long way off, he said. But bein’ a god, it can do without its heart for awhile. But when I die–if I ever get my head smashed so my consciousness is destroyed–the heart must be given back to Ghost Man.”
“You mean you were in earnest about cutting out your heart?” demanded Doc Blaine.
“It has to be,” answered old Garfield. “A livin’ thing in a dead thing is opposed to nat’er. That’s what Ghost Man said.”
“Who the devil was Ghost Man?”
“I told you. A witch-doctor of the Lipans, who dwelt in this country before the Comanches came down from the Staked Plains and drove ’em south across the Rio Grande. I was a friend to ’em. I reckon Ghost Man is the only one left alive.”
“Alive? Now?”
“I dunno,” confessed old Jim. “I dunno whether he’s alive or dead. I dunno whether he was alive when he came to me after the fight on Locust Creek, or even if he was alive when I knowed him in the southern country. Alive as we understand life, I mean.”
“What balderdash is this?” demanded Doc Blaine uneasily, and I felt a slight stirring in my hair. Outside was stillness, and the stars, and the black shadows of the post-oak woods. The lamp cast old Garfield’s shadow grotesquely on the wall, so that it did not at all resemble that of a human, and his words were strange as words heard in a nightmare.
“I knowed you wouldn’t understand,” said old Jim. “I don’t understand myself, and I ain’t got the words to explain them things I feel and know without understandin’. The Lipans were kin to the Apaches, and the Apaches learnt curious things from the Pueblos. Ghost Man was–that’s all I can say–alive or dead, I don’t know, but he was. What’s more, he is.”
“Is it you or me that’s crazy?” asked Doc Blaine.
“Well,” said old Jim, “I’ll tell you this much–Ghost Man knew Coronado.”
“Crazy as a loon!” murmured Doc Blaine. Then he lifted his head. “What’s that?”
“Horse turning in from the road,” I said. “Sounds like it stopped.”
I stepped to the door, like a fool, and stood etched in the light behind me. I got a glimpse of a shadowy bulk I knew to be a man on a horse; then Doc Blaine yelled: “Look out!” and threw himself against me, knocking us both sprawling. At the same instant I heard the smashing report of a rifle, and old Garfield grunted and fell heavily.
“Jack Kirby!” screamed Doc Blaine. “He’s killed Jim!”
I scrambled up, hearing the clatter of retreating hoofs, snatched old Jim’s shotgun from the wall, rushed recklessly out on to the sagging porch and let go both barrels at the fleeing shape, dim in the starlight. The charge was too light to kill at that range, but the bird-shot stung the horse and maddened him. He swerved, crashed headlong through a rail fence and charged across the orchard, and a peach tree limb knocked his rider out of the saddle. He never moved after he hit the ground. I ran out there and looked down at him. It was Jack Kirby, right enough, and his neck was broken like a rotten branch.
I let him lie, and ran back to the house. Doc Blaine had stretched old Garfield out on a bench he’d dragged in from the porch, and Doc’s face was whiter than I’d ever seen it. Old Jim was a ghastly sight; he had been shot with an old-fashioned .45-70, and at that range the heavy ball had literally torn off the top of his head. His features were masked with blood and brains. He had been directly behind me, poor old devil, and he had stopped the slug meant for me.
Doc Blaine was trembling, though he was anything but a stranger to such sights.
“Would you pronounce him dead?” he asked.
“That’s for you to say.” I answered. “But even a fool could tell that he’s dead.”
“He is dead,” said Doc Blaine in a strained unnatural voice. “Rigor mortis is already setting in. But feel his heart!”
I did, and cried out. The flesh was already cold and clammy; but beneath it that mysterious heart still hammered steadily away, like a dynamo in a deserted h
ouse. No blood coursed through those veins; yet the heart pounded, pounded, pounded, like the pulse of Eternity.
“A living thing in a dead thing,” whispered Doc Blaine, cold sweat on his face. “This is opposed to nature. I am going to keep the promise I made him. I’ll assume full responsibility. This is too monstrous to ignore.”
Our implements were a butcher-knife and a hack-saw. Outside only the still stars looked down on the black post-oak shadows and the dead man that lay in the orchard. Inside, the old lamp flickered, making strange shadows move and shiver and cringe in the corners, and glistened on the blood on the floor, and the red-dabbled figure on the bench. The only sound inside was the crunch of the saw-edge in bone; outside an owl began to hoot weirdly.
Doc Blaine thrust a red-stained hand into the aperture he had made, and drew out a red, pulsing object that caught the lamplight. With a choked cry he recoiled, and the thing slipped from his fingers and fell on the table. And I too cried out involuntarily. For it did not fall with a soft meaty thud, as a piece of flesh should fall. It thumped hard on the table.
Impelled by an irresistible urge, I bent and gingerly picked up old Garfield’s heart. The feel of it was brittle, unyielding, like steel or stone, but smoother than either. In size and shape it was the duplicate of a human heart, but it was slick and smooth, and its crimson surface reflected the lamplight like a jewel more lambent than any ruby; and in my hand it still throbbed mightily, sending vibratory radiations of energy up my arm until my own heart seemed swelling and bursting in response. It was cosmic power, beyond my comprehension, concentrated into the likeness of a human heart.
The thought came to me that here was a dynamo of life, the nearest approach to immortality that is possible for the destructible human body, the materialization of a cosmic secret more wonderful than the fabulous fountain sought for by Ponce de Leon. My soul was drawn into that unterrestrial gleam, and I suddenly wished passionately that it hammered and thundered in my own bosom in place of my paltry heart of tissue and muscle.
Doc Blaine ejaculated incoherently. I wheeled.
The noise of his coming had been no greater than the whispering of a night wind through the corn. There in the doorway he stood, tall, dark, inscrutable–an Indian warrior, in the paint, war bonnet, breech-clout and moccasins of an elder age. His dark eyes burned like fires gleaming deep under fathomless black lakes. Silently he extended his hand, and I dropped Jim Garfield’s heart into it. Then without a word he turned and stalked into the night. But when Doc Blaine and I rushed out into the yard an instant later, there was no sign of any human being. He had vanished like a phantom of the night, and only something that looked like an owl was flying, dwindling from sight, into the rising moon.
Kelly the Conjure-Man
There are strange tales told when the full moon shines
Of voodoo nights when the ghost-things ran–
But the strangest figure among the pines
Was Kelly the conjure-man.
About seventy-five miles north-east of the great Smackover oil field of Arkansas lies a densely wooded country of pinelands and rivers, rich in folklore and tradition. Here, in the early 1850s came a sturdy race of Scotch-Irish pioneers pushing back the frontier and hewing homes in the tangled wilderness.
Among the many picturesque characters of those early days, one figure stands out, sharply, yet dimly limned against a background of dark legendry and horrific fable–the sinister figure of Kelly, the black conjurer.
Son of a Congo ju-ju man, legend whispered, Kelly, born a slave, exercised in his day unfathomed power among the darkest of the Ouachita pinelands. Where he came from is not exactly known; he drifted into the country shortly after the Civil War and mystery was attendant on his coming as upon all his actions.
Kelly did little work with his hands, and he did not mingle overmuch with his kind. They came to him; he never came to them. His cabin stood on the banks of Tulip Creek, a dark, serpent-like stream winding through the deep overhanging shadows of the pines, and there Kelly lived apart in dark and silent majesty.
A fine figure of barbaric manhood he was, perhaps six foot in height, mighty shouldered, supple like a great black panther. He always wore a vivid red flannel shirt, and great gold rings in his ears and nose heightened the bizarre and fantastic imagery of his appearance. He had little to say to white men or black.
Silently, like an uncrowned king of dark Africa he stalked along the roads, looming like a dark inscrutable wizard among the pinelands. His eyes were deep, murky, far-seeing, and his skin was black as tropical night. The very aura of the jungle hung about him and people feared him, perhaps sensing something sinister, something abysmal that lurked in the black waters of his soul and peered through his murky eyes.
He was, indeed, incongruous in his environments. He belonged in another age–another land–another setting. He belonged in the haunted shadows of a fetish hut, lapped by the monstrous, brutish slumber of ancient Africa.
Kelly the “conjer man” they called him, and to his cabin on lonely Tulip Creek came the black people on mysterious errands. Furtively they stole like shadows through the sombre blackness of the pinelands but what went on in that dim cabin no white man ever knew.
Kelly was a professed dealer in charms, and a dispeller of “conjers.” The black folk came to him to have spells lifted from their souls where enemies had placed them by curses and incantations. More, he was a healer–at least he claimed to heal the black people of their diseases. Tuberculosis was rare among white people in that locality, but negroes were subject to its ravages, and these victims Kelly professed to heal.
His methods were unique; he burnt snake bones to powder and sifted the powder in an incision made in the victim’s arm by means of a lancet made from an old razor. It is a matter of doubt whether anyone was ever healed by these methods–in fact, there is reason to believe the results were appallingly the opposite.
Perhaps Kelly did not himself believe he could combat tuberculosis in this manner; perhaps it was but a ruse to get the victim in his power; this is but a supposition, but primitive peoples have strange ways of bringing their fellows under their sway. Among some tribes it is but necessary to procure a lock of hair, a finger nail, a drop of blood, over which to utter certain incantations and perform certain rituals. Then, in the mind of the spell-weaver, and in the mind of the victim as well, the latter is completely under control.
And there is the magic of molding a figure of the intended victim from clay. Pins stuck in this figure cause the human model to die agonizingly; place the clay figure in a stream, and as the water dissolves it, the human victim withers and fades away into slow dissolution. All these things are solemn truths in the minds of the voodooists.
Be that as it may, Kelly soon began to exercize unusual powers over the darkies of the locality. From a dispeller of “conjers” he became, it would seem, a weaver of spells himself. Negroes began to go violently insane, and rumor laid their obsessions at Kelly’s door. Whether the cause of their insanity was physical or mental was not known, but that their minds were affected by some uncanny thing was well evident. They were obsessed by the horrible belief that their stomachs were full of living snakes, created by the spell of some master-conjurer, and at the mention of this nameless wizard, suspicion turned to Kelly. Was it hypnosis, some obscure malady or maddening drug, or the action of sheer fear? No white man knew, yet the victims were indisputably mad.
In every community of whites and blacks, at least in the South, a deep, dark current flows forever, out of sight of the whites who but dimly suspect its existence. A dark current of colored folks’ thoughts, deeds, ambitions and aspirations, like a river flowing unseen through the jungle. No white man ever knew why Kelly–if Kelly it were–drove black men and black women mad. What was the secret of grim power, what the secret of his dark ambitions, no white man ever knew.
And Kelly never spoke of them, certainly; he went his way, silent, brooding, darkly majestic, that satanic something
growing in his shadowy eyes until he seemed to look on white people as if they too were blind mewling puppets in the hollow of his black hand.
Then, in the late ’70s, Kelly vanished. The word is to be taken literally. His cabin on Tulip Creek stood empty, the slab door sagging open on the wooden hinges, and he was seen no more, stalking like a dark ghost through the pinelands. Perhaps the colored people knew, but they never spoke. He had come in mystery, in mystery he lived, and in mystery he went and no man knew the road of his going. At least no man ever admitted that he knew. Perhaps the gloomy waters knew. Perhaps Kelly’s victims turned on him at last. That lonely cabin in the black shadows of the moaning pines might have known a grisly midnight crime; the dusky waters of Tulip Creek might have received a form that splashed soggily and silently sank.
Or perhaps the conjure-man merely went his mysterious way in the night for reasons of his own, and on some other river pursued his fantastic career. None knows. Mystery hangs over his coming and his going, like a cloud impenetrable as night among the piney-woods, than which there is no blacker darkness this side Oblivion.
But even today his shadow haunts the long dim river-reaches and when the wind drones through the black pines under the stars, the old black people will tell you it is the spirit of the conjure-man whispering to the dead in the black shadows of the pinelands.
Black Canaan
I
CALL FROM CANAAN
“Trouble on Tularoosa Creek!” A warning to send cold fear along the spine of any man who was raised in that isolated back-country, called Canaan, that lies between Tularoosa and Black River–to send him racing back to that swamp-bordered region, wherever the word might reach him.
It was only a whisper from the withered lips of a shuffling black crone, who vanished among the throng before I could seize her; but it was enough. No need to seek confirmation; no need to inquire by what mysterious, black-folk way the word had come to her. No need to inquire what obscure forces worked to unseal those wrinkled lips to a Black River man. It was enough that the warning had been given–and understood.