Présentation de l'éditeur
Set in the American South in the years before and during the Civil War, John Wray’s hypnotic new novel is at once a crime story, a bravura work of historical fiction, and a fire-and-brimstone meditation on American credulity and corruption.
Thaddeus Morelle’s followers call him “the Redeemer.” Over the years he has led the Island 37 Gang from stealing horses to stealing slaves in an enterprise so nefarious that both the Union and Confederacy have placed a bounty on their heads. But now Morelle is dead, murdered by his puppet and protégé, Virgil Ball, who may rid himself of the Redeemer but can never be free of his Trade. Based on the true story of John Murrell, a figure once as infamous as Jesse James, Canaan’s Tongue is suspenseful and fiercely comic, a modern masterpiece of the American grotesque.
Extrait
HORSE - THIEVERY.
It began at a respectable camp-meeting, Virgil says.
I first laid eyes on the Redeemer in May of ’51, just upriver from Natchez. I was passing the head of Lafitte's Chute in a pine-sap canoe I'd paid for honestly in Vicksburg when the immaculate white of a revival tent caught my notice, fluttering bravely at a spot that had been wilderness only a fortnight before. I banked my canoe in the shade and climbed up the muddy, stump-littered slope, aiming to satisfy my curiosity at the tent-flap. A water-stained bill stuck to the canvas by what looked to be a lady's hatpin caught my eye–:
THADDEUS H. MUREL REDEEMER OF LAMBS"The Same Came For A Witness; To Bear Witness Of The Light"
On the far side of the tent, past a cluster of traps and wagons, thirty-odd horses stood tethered in a row. There were a few skiffs and bucket-boats farther up the bank, but not many. Most of the congregation looked to have come on foot. Up close, the canvas was frayed and weathered–: peering in through a thumb-sized gash, I saw the tent was amply filled with lambs. I hung back a moment, overcome by a fit of bashfulness (I was a rather timid vagrant in those days) and looked straight above me at the sky. It was sapphire blue, I remember, and wonderfully calm. A warbling rose up now and then inside the tent, punctuating the reedy exhortations of the preacher. Even through the heavy cloth his voice had something queer about it, something out of place, as though a chimpanzee were lecturing a learned assembly. My prudence did battle with my curiosity, fired a brave volley, and collapsed in a heap of dust. I parted the tent-flap and slipped inside.
In doing so I sentenced my Christian self to death, though at the time I felt nothing but astonishment. Through a breach in the crowd I saw the preacher on his crate pulpit, gasping and spitting and proselytizing and weeping–: a delicate, sallow-faced, limp-haired dwarf, in a suit that looked cut out of butcher's paper. I mumbled an oath and passed a hand over my eyes.
Was this some manner of vaudeville? Had I mistaken a curiosity-show for a bonafide camp meeting? I stood stock-still for a spell, my right hand clutching at the tentflap, my left hand in front of me, as if in expectation of a fall. Then I found a place for myself at the back of the airless, man-smelling tent and listened.
The preacher wore a bicornered hat of brushed black silk, the kind Napoleon favored at Waterloo. His left fore-finger rested lightly on a bible, and he was declaiming in a tremulous voice, a voice riddled with earthly suffering–:
Truly God is good to Israel, even to such as are clean of heart. But as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well-nigh slipped. For I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
He paused the briefest of instants and raised his rum-colored eyeballs to survey us. I'd been to revivals before, and was used to their choked-back burlesqueries–; delighted in them, in fact. This was altogether different. The few women in the crowd clutched at their bosoms and wept in silent misery–; the men stood together in a clot, stari
