Satisfied, or at least resigned, that it’s just the two of us, Henry circles the rug in front of the fireplace three complete times before collapsing in a heavy heap to the floor. I watch him watch the fire from my chair, head resting on his front paws, eyes slowly, slowly closing until finally fluttering shut, an extinguished candle on a drafty windowsill. Not forever, though. Not yet, anyway. Not like the Reverend King. Nearly eighty-three years of morning after morning of waking up—the world’s most ordinary miracle—and tomorrow morning he won’t. The truest truth that makes absolutely no sense.
Times like this, only Mr. Blake or whiskey will do. A time exactly like this, I need both. Henry’s eyelids slide open as I stand up, but he stays lying where he is. Although it’s Songs of Innocence and Experience that’s behind glass and under lock and key, it’s the whiskey I should probably be concerned with protecting. Not much chance that anyone in Chatham would ever want my 1831 first edition—the only edition preceding it the illuminated, engraved copies produced by Mr. Blake himself—as much as they’d want a bottle of whiskey. But sometimes philistines make good neighbours. I’m going to own one of those copies made by Mr. Blake’s own hands one day, and when I do, I won’t even have to lock my front door at night.
Favourite books are like old friends: beginnings and endings don’t matter, you take what you need when you need it. I swallow, savour the familiar burn of the first sip of whiskey, and set the glass on the table beside my chair, open up the Blake on my lap. The fuzzy black type reminds me that I’ve left my spectacles upstairs in the bedroom. If I bring the book nearer, I know I won’t need them, won’t have to get up again, but whenever Loretta catches me attempting to read without them, she warns me that my eyes will only get worse. But Loretta doesn’t really warn me, not about anything; warning isn’t Loretta’s way. Loretta explains the situation, points out the potential advantages and disadvantages, advocates the most reasonable course of action. I wonder if all Germans act the way that all Germans are supposed to act or just the only one I’ve ever known. If Loretta gets her way, I’ll find out for myself, and sooner rather than later. Only last week:
“You have the money, yes?” she said.
“I could afford to go, if that’s what you mean.”
“Do not be modest, David. You could afford to go one hundred times over. The only question that remains is whether or not your affairs here prohibit you from being away for an extended period.”
Loretta didn’t speak English until she arrived in Canada a little more than ten years ago, a sixteen-year-old girl knowing no one and not knowing where she was going to go, but in spite of a thick German accent, speaks with a clarity and exactitude unequalled by anyone I’ve ever known except one. And now, after today, the only one I still know.
“There are a lot of things that would need to be taken care of first, arrangements that would need to be made.”
“But these arrangements, they can be made. These affairs, they do not prohibit you.”
“They don’t prohibit me, no, but—”
“No, they do not prohibit you. And you would like to see the birthplace of Goethe, of Schopenhauer, of Beethoven, would you not? To learn their language, perhaps?”
“I don’t need a holiday, if that’s what you mean.”
“You say this word like it is a curse word.”
“What word?”
“Holiday, obviously.”
“I think you’re hearing things. I only meant that I’m not complaining about my life. You’ve never heard me say I’m unhappy. You’ve never once heard me complain about my life.”
Once I’ve retrieved my glasses, I decide that while I’m in the bedroom I might as well relieve myself. I was the fourth man in Chatham to have indoor plumbing, but I decide to use the chamber pot instead. Out of habit I aim for the left-hand side of the pot, let the urine silently run down the side and slowly gather and rise at the bottom of the bubbling bowl. It’s my mother’s pot—was my mother’s pot—and I can still remember how pleased she was when she was finally able to own a store-bought, Detroit-manufactured chamber pot decorated with blue horizontal stripes. When her rheumatism got so bad she rarely left the house except to attend church—the highlight of her day the dragging of her gnarled limbs out of bed to sit in her chair by the window—she still made a point of every day dusting that chamber pot. By then she’d bought another, cheaper pot to use for what it was intended for, but the blue-striped chamber pot sat pride of place on top of the bureau in her bedroom, right between her bible and a copy of the legal document declaring her and her son free Negroes.
In the five minutes it takes me to return to the library, Loretta has let herself in, is squatting on her heels and scratching Henry’s stomach, a long canine grin carved into his face, all four black legs pointed straight up in the air like he’s unconditionally surrendered. “This is a most unimpressive watchdog,” Loretta says, still scratching.
Sitting back down in my chair, “I’m afraid you’ve ruined him forever for that line of work.” We both know that’s a lie, that it’s only her familiar footsteps or mine on the front porch that elicit whimpers of expectation rather than howls of aggression. One of Loretta’s tenants is a butcher from Dresden who always gives her a cow bone along with his rent for what she tells him is her dog. Loretta’s business contacts, past and present, know as much about her as mine do about me.
She gives Henry an all-done slap on his belly that makes a hollow sound like a single tap on a drum and stands up. Henry flips over onto his side and we both watch her rise to her full height of six feet. Henry wags his tail; I smile. What man doesn’t want more—more whiskey, more money, more years? And yet, when it comes to women, it’s tiny feet they desire, a pinched waist, a doll’s dimensions. Enough! or Too much, Mr. Blake wrote. A world in a grain of sand wasn’t the only blessed vision he knew about.
“You are home early tonight,” Loretta says, settling into the other chair on the other side of the fire. She’s the only one who uses it—it’s covered in the blanket she knit while sitting in it—but like the key to the front door she carries in her bag, it’s never referred to as hers. It’s as if we’ve discovered a way to not be what we don’t want to be and yet still have what we want.
“I decided to close early,” I say, picking up my drink, reminded of why I poured it in the first place.
“Yes, of course, that is obvious. But why? This is not like you to not want to make money.”
I finish the rest of my drink in one long swallow and almost gag. Whiskey is not water, is made to do other things.
“Is that who you really think I am?” I say. “Just another greedy shopkeeper?”
I take my empty glass with me into the kitchen without asking Loretta if she’d like a drink too. It doesn’t matter. By the time I’ve finished refilling my glass, Loretta is beside me at the kitchen counter, taking another glass down from the cupboard as well as her bottle of schnapps. We walk back into the library with our respective drinks without exchanging a word.
Loretta will not argue—she’ll discuss, deliberate, even debate, but she will not argue—and the way she picks up her needles and yarn from underneath her chair and straightaway begins knitting without acknowledging either me or my sour mood has its intended effect, makes me madder than if she’d confronted me with the bile of my words and shown me I’d been wrong to use them. I reopen the Blake and bring the book close enough that I don’t need my glasses to make the type stop smearing. That’ll show her.
Except that in five minutes I’ve got a headache from reading without my glasses and a cloudy brain from drinking the whiskey too fast and a strong desire not to feel distant from one of the two human beings I know in this world whom I don’t ordinarily feel distant from. Good liquor and immortal literature are necessary but not sufficient.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
Loretta stops knitting, looks up. “You are forgiven,” she says. Needles immediately working again, “So. You closed early t
his evening. This is not like you.”
I want her to know what happened tonight—who died, what it means—but I’m not sure that I know yet myself.
“Can we just pick up where we left off last night?” I say. I say it like a child asking for a sweet, but that’s how I feel, so, so be it.
Eyes still on her work, “Are you sure that is what you need for yourself right now?”
I nod. She doesn’t look up, makes me say it. “It’s what I need,” I say.
She finishes a last row and then slides the yarn and needles back into the box underneath her chair; stands up and wipes away an imaginary mess from the front of her dress. She offers me her hand. I take it and we walk side by side up the stairs, the click of Henry’s nails on the steps behind us serenading us all the way to the bedroom.
By the time I’ve undressed and am already underneath the covers, Loretta is only just down to her undergarments. The light from the bedroom fireplace is less than what I’d like—watching Loretta bathe by the natural light of bright morning is my favourite way of beginning the day—but the gentle glow it creates all around her suits where we are and what we’re going to do.
She meets my eyes and doesn’t release them while unfastening her corset and then pulling off the white chemise underneath. Next, foot up on the metal end of the bed, the unhooking of the garters, always the left then the right, followed by the slow roll of stocking down thigh, calf, ankle, toes. Finally, the removal of the belt itself, tugged around to the front and unclasped and set on top of the heap of clothes on the fireside chair. I pull back the blankets from her side of the bed, let Loretta slide in.
What happens next, I don’t have to ask her to do. Loretta reaches across me, raises herself up on one arm above me, two identical pallid moons rising over me, perfumed warmth all around me. Getting what she’s after from the table on my side of the bed, she lies back down on her side. Begins.
“‘Warum nun aber erblickt man im Alter das Leben, welches man hinter sich hat, so hurz?’”
I close my eyes, let the heavy words smoke the air, mix and merge with Loretta’s scent that couldn’t be anyone else’s but Loretta’s.
“‘Weil man es fur so kurz halt wie die Erinnerung desselben ist.’”
I feel myself already drifting off, Schopenhauer’s words no longer words but music without worldly referents, a perfect, impenetrable language saying everything and nothing and all at once.
“‘Aus diesser namlich ist alles Unbedeutende und viel Unangenehmes herausgefallen,’” Loretta reads, “‘daher wenig ubrig geblieben,’ and sleep now, my David, sleep now, little boy of mine.”
And soon, very soon, I do.
2
I was seven or eight years old the first time I heard someone say, “If a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” As I was shovelling horse shit at the time, the wisdom of these words failed to leave a lasting impression.
Luckily for me, I was only one year old when the first fifteen settlers, my mother and myself included, along with the Reverend King, arrived at the Elgin Settlement in 1849, so the earliest, most difficult of those pioneering years I spent either cozied in my cradle or wandering around the Settlement barefoot and blithe, making life miserable for the chickens and any other farm animal I decided needed chasing. Unlike alcohol, which was forbidden in writing by the Reverend King as one of several non-negotiable conditions for purchasing Settlement land, dogs weren’t illegal in Buxton, but they might as well have been for the number of times you saw one, which, in my case, was exactly once.
The land that the Reverend King and the Presbyterian Church chose for the Settlement was six miles long and three miles wide, bounded on the north by the Thames River and on the south by Lake Erie. The swampy land was thick with oak, hickory, elm, and walnut trees—valuable timber in years to come, but also the first exhausting order of business upon the settlers’ arrival. I sucked my thumb and cried whenever I was hungry or needed changing, while everyone else cut and burned trees and cleared brush and opened roads and dug drainage and built housing and planted vegetable gardens; and by the time I was old enough to write my own name, what had once been silent miles of empty forest had become home to 130 families with their very own Negro-run post office, school, church, sawmill, gristmill, and potash factory. What was left of the surrounding woods was put to use, too, deer and wild turkey and rabbit in abundance to supplement the cattle and hogs and chickens raised right on the Settlement.
The dog I saw was when I was ten, hunting with my best friend, George, and his father, Mr. Freeman. Most of the men of Elgin were happy to include a fatherless boy in whatever it was that fathers and sons did together, but when the Reverend King would speak on Sunday about how self-reliance bred self-respect, about how a fulfilled, contented man before God and society was a man who didn’t ask another man to undertake his appointed tasks or shoulder his worldly burdens, I knew he wasn’t just talking about not buying with credit what you knew you’d never be able to afford with cash. In my case, it meant that an encouraging word and a shiny apple from a friend’s father wasn’t the same thing as a bond born of blood. It meant that if I really wanted a father of my own, it was up to me to find him.
Mr. Freeman was even kinder to me than any of the other fathers because George had been my best friend almost from the day he and his father arrived in Buxton in ’55; plus, he knew what it was like for a boy to grow up with only one parent, George’s mother having died giving birth to George. Mr. Freeman had been born a slave in Mississippi and had fled for the North Star three separate times, on each occasion that he failed and was recaptured, was beaten, lashed, starved, and sold off to a new master, the belief being that “You can’t let a peach get too ripe.” If it was hot when we’d go hunting, sometimes we’d detour to Deer Pond for a swim. The marks on Mr. Freeman’s back like long, fat red worms that wouldn’t leave him alone.
It was the season’s first snowfall, yesterday’s brown and green gone missing overnight underneath a frozen dusting of fine white baking flour. Sometimes, when we’d be walking in the woods, Mr. Freeman would suddenly stop on the path to bend down on one knee and finger the leaves of a plant or to rub the back of his hand over the bark of a tree, occasionally slicing off a bunch of leaves to take home with him or uprooting an entire plant with the long, shiny knife that always hung from his belt. He wasn’t a doctor, but for a long time was the closest thing Elgin had to one unless you were willing to ride all the way into Chatham.
When he’d lived in Mississippi, he said, another slave, an old man everyone called Tuttle, had taught him all about roots and herbs and how to use them to stop a toothache or to make a burn feel better or to cure sleeplessness. Mr. Freeman farmed like almost everyone else in Elgin—tobacco mostly, but corn and oats, too—but if it was cold and damp and the rheumatism in my mother’s knees would flare up, she’d send me over to George’s house with a nickel to ask for some of the powder that his father would grind up for her to mix in with her tea. She’d always make a face when she drank it—you were supposed to prepare the water as hot as you could stand it and to swallow the whole thing down as quickly as you could—but within a couple of hours the pain in her legs would have subsided and she’d be ready to get back on her knees to scrub the floors of the Reverend King’s house and to sweep underneath his and Mrs. King’s beds. My mother was the Kings’ housekeeper.
“Ah, Pa,” George said.
Mr. Freeman didn’t pay any attention, brought the winter-wilting limb of the plant he’d stopped to inspect closer to his nose; breathed in hard, like he was smelling an apple pie cooling on a kitchen table.
“We’re never going to get there,” George said, shutting an eye and following with his rifle end the flight of a bird taking off from a tree branch. Mr. Freeman had taught us never to shoot a gun except for food or protection. Higher up the same tree I watched a squirrel jump from branch to branch and then from that tree to the next, billows of powdery snow avalanching down with every ex
pert leap. Directly below this last, a dog sat determinedly scratching one of his ears, looking at me looking at him with no more concern than if I were just another elm or oak. Finished, he rose to all fours and shook his head from side to side several times, like he was trying to wake up. He stayed where he was, unsure, it seemed, whether to approach us.
“A dog,” I said, lifting a single finger, as if to do more would mean scaring him away.
“Where did he come from, do you think?” I heard George say, but didn’t turn around, didn’t want to break the connection the dog and I shared, didn’t want to startle him away.
“Lost, I guess,” I said.
“Somebody’s from Chatham who was hunting out here, maybe,” he said.
“Maybe.”
Like he knew we were talking about him, the dog wagged his tail; didn’t make a move toward us, but slowly wagged his black tail back and forth, back and forth. He was black all over, but with a white stripe running from just below his neck down his chest. I wanted to pet him like I’d seen white people do with their dogs in Chatham, but I didn’t know what to do next. Mr. Freeman would know what to do next.
Before I could ask him, though: a shotgun blast from behind me and a single, sharp-pitched yelp from the dog, and the crows in the treetops caw-cawing their angry escape. The dog tipped over onto its side like he’d all of a sudden frozen in place and been pushed by invisible hands, his eyes wide open but unseeing, his mouth opening and closing as he lay there on the snow-covered ground like a fish in a bucket of stale water running out of fresh air. For some reason, only his two back legs, and not all four, twitched and trembled and spasmed. Mr. Freeman walked between us and past us and carefully aimed the rifle just above the dog’s eye and pulled the trigger. He wiped down the barrel of his gun on the dog’s long back, four dirty red streaks for each cleaned side.
Seeing George and I still standing there, looking at the thing that two minutes before had been the dog, “Don’t you worry, boys, that’s one hound won’t be tormenting no poor Negro no time soon,” he said. Placing one of his big, warm hands on my shoulder, “No hellhounds on no poor slave’s heels in this free land of ours if we can help it.”
David Page 2
