*
Closing time isn’t for another couple of hours, but I’ve already scrubbed the bar and basin gleaming clean and washed every empty glass as soon as it’s been dirtied and hauled in enough fresh kindling from outside to get us through tomorrow night and probably the night after that. Bringing in the wood is Tom’s job ordinarily, but even if I hadn’t given him the time off for the wake tonight, I probably would have found a way to do it myself anyway, busy hands cooling medicine for a burning brain. I’m also extra diligent about keeping every glass filled, am toting the bottle of whiskey over to Thompson’s table before he’s had time to nod to me for a refill.
At the clink of my bottle to his glass, Thompson looks up and slides his notepad across the table his way, an experienced card player careful to keep everyone else in the game in the dark. I’m the only one in Sophia’s who knows what’s supposed to be written there, even if I don’t have any inkling what actually is, but I wouldn’t peek if I could. Prayers and suicide notes are privileged information.
“And how is Song of His Self this evening?” I say, sitting down in the empty chair opposite him.
Slipping the notebook into the inside pocket of his jacket, “Loafing and inviting my soul,” he says.
“As usual.”
“As usual.”
Together we silently observe the men all around us drinking and smoking and playing cards and laughing and looking at their watches and considering how much longer they can put off the inevitable: having to go home. Meyers’ voice, of course, is the loudest. It has to be—no one is listening.
“From Hitching’s, Hitching’s Baby Store. It’s where Queen Victoria bought her prams when she was a young mother. Now, the thing to remember when you’re buying a pram is that what you want is the wickerwork or bassinet model. This allows the child to be laid flat on its back with plenty of room to move about, but not so much that the little terror can get himself in any trouble. And you want the Silver Cross Bassinette. Believe it or not, some of these American versions are actually made of cane or some other beastly vegetable product. No, no, it’s always best to buy the best, that’s what I always tell Mrs. Meyers, so get the Silver Cross, it’s quite simply the finest there is. You can order them directly from Hitching’s Baby Store, you know. It’s where Queen Victoria bought her prams when she was a young mother.”
There are men standing on either side of Meyers at the bar, but both appear to be more interested in studying the row of whiskey bottles displayed along the wall behind it than in acknowledging Meyers’ words or even his simple physical presence. No matter—Meyers pulls his silver snuff box out of his vest pocket and snorts a fat line from the back of his fatter hand before continuing. “As I was saying to Mrs. Meyers just the other evening . . .”
It’s unfortunate Darwin wasn’t born twenty-five years later, or he wouldn’t have had to sail all the way to the Galapagos Islands to discover that only the most adaptable animals endure; all he would have to have done was spend some time at Sophia’s observing Meyers. Any lesser man would have decided years before to do his drinking somewhere where he wasn’t so steadfastly ignored. The survival of the oblivious.
Thompson is the only customer I’ve got whose conversation I’ll occasionally seek out for its own sake. Thompson is Scottish and a bachelor and an ex-lawyer, but most of all he’s an ardent admirer of Walt Whitman—evidenced by the cheap copy of Leaves of Grass that always shares the tabletop with his glass—for reasons not entirely aesthetic. And he’s a drunk. Which only somewhat explains the ex-lawyer part.
“Missed Tom on the way in this evening,” he says. Thompson always tips Tom a quarter at the end of the night.
“He’s in Elgin.”
“Everything’s all right, I hope.” Thompson’s long, Scottaught rolling vowels echo the same way as the Reverend King’s did. It used to sound as if the whole of history was in that voice.
“Someone died.”
“Oh?”
“Not anyone he was close to. He’ll be back tomorrow night. Everything will be back to normal by tomorrow night.”
I stand, wipe the table everywhere that Thompson’s drink isn’t. I didn’t sit down just so I could talk about what I’m trying not to think about. I lift his drink, finish wiping, set it back down.
“The minister, the white one who started the Negro settlement, I can’t recall his name—it’s his wake, I’m sure. There was something about it in the Planet.”
Thompson’s been in Chatham not even ten years, never knew Elgin when it was two thousand people thriving, when reporters from as far away as New York and Boston and even Britain would come to see and write about the Reverend William King and his exciting new experiment in free Negro living, amazed at how the children of former slaves would stand at the front of their log-cabin classroom reciting long passages of Virgil and Homer in their respective native tongues as part of the school’s everyday curriculum.
“No doubt,” I say.
“Well, here’s to Tom, then,” he says, lifting his glass.
I take my place back behind the bar, can sense my body readying my mouth to snarl at the next person impudent enough to ask me for something outrageous like another drink. Instead, I take a deep breath and interlock my fingers and rub my palms, hard, over and over again, like Loretta’s taught me to do whenever I feel myself getting angry. I do it below the bar so that no one can see me, and it helps, I don’t even snap at Meyers when he orders another round and there’s a speck of brown snuff clinging to his flabby white cheek.
I give Meyers two dimes and his drink and the first line of Lucretius that lifts off my lips. “Inque brevi spatio mutanteur saecla animantum et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt.”
“Sorry, David, old boy,” he says, pocketing the change and taking his whiskey. “I’m embarrassed to have to say that my French just isn’t what it used to be.”
*
Not just the newspapers wrote about the Reverend King. Harriet Beecher Stowe modelled a character by the name of Clayton after him in one of her novels, Dred, a Tale of the Dismal Swamp. In honour of the famous author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Reverend and the second Mrs. King returned the favour by naming their home Clayton House. Of course, by then, adding Mrs. King’s name to anything her husband did or said was considered merely being polite. By then, everyone—even me, the nine-year-old son of their housekeeper—knew something was wrong with Mrs. King. The only difference was, I didn’t mind. More than that: I liked the way Mrs. King was.
Married to the Reverend King in 1853, the second Mrs. King gave birth a few years later to a stillborn son and almost immediately began, as my mother and everyone else around Buxton used to say, to turn “queer.” For a while she gave free piano lessons to any child in the Settlement who wished to learn, but even these stopped when, one day, mid-lesson, she simply rose from the piano bench, went into the bedroom, shut the door, and refused to come out.
A cot was placed in the Reverend King’s study, the piano was moved into the couple’s old shared bedroom, and my mother would bring Mrs. King’s meals to her in her room. The bedroom door would always be closed, and everyone—the Reverend King included—would go about their business around Clayton House as if there was nothing at all unusual about the muffled sound of a piano playing Beethoven and Schumann sonatas hour after hour, day after day. Until the day the music stopped forever and every time my mother would bring Mrs. King her food, she’d find her in the exact same place, sitting silently at her bedroom window.
I was the house pet Clayton House never had. After school, and before school after my chores at home were done, I’d help my mother in the kitchen or push around the furniture while she dusted and swept or emptied out back the buckets of dirty mopping water. The jobs I liked best were the ones I got to do all by myself, like beating the rugs on the back porch or carrying in the firewood that would be left at the end of the front walk by Mr. Johnson or one of his sons and their horse, Midnight.
“Goo
d boy,” my mother would say, kindling piled high to my eyes. “When the Reverend King sits down at his desk in front of his fire tonight, it’ll be the wood you brought in that’ll be keeping him so nice and warm.” The Reverend King was almost never at home in the daytime, but would work in his study late every night, sometimes until midnight. “I don’t know when that man sleeps,” she’d marvel. “Lord, please look after our dear Reverend King.” I felt proud I was helping him do his work, felt a little like it was my work too.
There was a special stick for beating the rugs. It was oak and heavy and nearly the length of my arm. With every smack, I’d pretend that each fresh explosion of flying dirt and lint was actually hundreds of hurtling meteors like the ones we’d learned about in school, every one of them racing against the others to see who could collide with the earth first, competing amongst themselves to destroy every Slave State and all of the helpless slave owners and their slave-owning families along with them. I never worked out how the abolitionists and the slaves themselves would escape being crushed to death at the same time, but I knew I didn’t have to worry about it very much. God, I knew, would find a way.
*
“And this one?”
I pause before I say what we both know I’ll say, a moment’s hesitation meant to imply concentration, contemplation, consideration.
“Interesting,” I say.
Loretta doesn’t respond, probably doesn’t even hear me, flips over the photograph onto the pile of already-viewed others laid out on her skirt. What was once my large kitchen pantry is now her small workroom, but freshly developed photos are always formally scrutinized fireside, Loretta’s spread skirt the only desk she needs to do her job.
“And this one?”
I look up from the book I’m only staring at anyway, and Loretta holds up a new picture for me to see. Before I can automatic another “Interesting,” though, something makes my eyes stay where they are, linger longer than they ordinarily do. Loretta notices this. Loretta notices everything.
“Ah, this one—it is interesting, yes? And why is this? Please be specific.”
I stand up from my chair and take the photograph from her, step closer to the light of the fire. “I don’t know,” I say, lying, knowing that she knows I’m lying, knowing, too, that the lies we allow each other are one of the ways we know we’re in love. The flame flickers the picture brighter but not any clearer—turns it softer, even, as if the man belonging to the face in the photo had fallen asleep in his Sunday best on a bursting autumn orange afternoon. He’s not asleep, of course; Loretta doesn’t make it her business to take pictures of dozing gentlemen. Loretta is a portraitist of the dead. The only sleep her subjects sleep is their last.
“I suppose he reminds me of someone,” I finally say, handing her back the photo. I take the poker and push around the logs even though the fire is burning just fine on its own.
“That is all?”
“That’s all.”
“This is disappointing.”
I keep poking around where I’m not needed, eventually succeed in reducing a hunk of previously blazing white ash to a furious red lump. “I’m sorry if I don’t share your belief that pictures of the recently deceased are on par with lyric poetry,” I say. I know Loretta is staring at the back of my head, so I squat down where I am, keep prodding and rearranging.
“Must art be made only of words?” Loretta says.
“Of course not.”
“And can we agree that we would be wise not to decide what is and what is not art based solely on its subject matter, but to withhold our judgement until we have experienced for ourselves the essence of the piece of art in question?”
“I guess,” I say, waving away a sudden swarm of sparks, nearly tipping over on my heels in the process.
“You guess?”
“No—yes, I mean. Yes.”
“So perhaps the product of an art form in its infancy—photography, for instance—could be as valid as, say, lyric poetry? As practised by the right artist, I mean, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
I give up, abandon the fire for my chair. Never argue with a German woman with a dialectical mind.
“Good, then,” Loretta says, rising, just as I’ve sat back down. “And now we go to bed, yes?”
“I think I’m going to read a little more.”
“But you have not turned a page all evening.”
“Of course I have,” I say, holding up my book as if somehow this made it true.
“I see.” Loretta slaps her thigh once, twice. “Come along, Heinrich, it is time for all of us non-readers to retire for the evening.”
Henry is on his feet and stretching in place in front of the fireplace—nose to the carpet, ass-end in the air—as soon as he hears his name, or at least its Prussian translation. One more slap of Loretta’s thigh later and I watch the two of them, and then their shadows, slide up the stairs.
I take up and then set back down my book, consider and then reject the idea of a drink. And, just like I knew I would, just like she knew I would, I pick up the stack of photos left behind on Loretta’s still-warm seat. I begin at the bottom of the pile.
Even sightless, every one of them—every man, every woman, every child; the Whites, the Blacks, the single Chinese—wants you to know that they know something that no one alive can ever understand. I despise the smugness of the dead. The dead never look a man in the eye.
*
Eight years ago, I watched them lower a different dead person—Mrs. King—into the ground from the back of my horse, drunk but steady in the saddle. No one had told me I wasn’t welcome at the funeral, but no one had to. A carrion knows he’s not wanted.
I wanted more whiskey, not a woman—especially not a woman whose touch I had to pay for—but Dresden was closer to the Settlement than Chatham, and I remembered that there was a tavern there that would sell you a bottle and a room to drink it in if you paid for a girl to go along with them, so I rode right at Bear Creek where ordinarily I would have ridden left.
Every nearby Negro knew about Dresden—how it was the site of the real Uncle Tom’s cabin; how Josiah Henson, a slave for forty-one years who escaped with his family using the Underground Railroad in 1830, purchased a two-hundredacre tract of land as a refuge for fugitives from the United States; how he helped to establish the community in and around Dresden as well as the British American Institute, a school for the advancement of fugitive slaves; how he was the inspiration for the Uncle Tom character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel—but all this particular Negro wanted to know this steadily sleeting night was alcoholic asylum with as little accompanying chit-chat as possible. When the man who ran the place told me he had just the girl for me, a nice Prussian girl who didn’t speak English too well but who was a good girl who knew what to do, I handed him his money and took my whiskey and room key with me upstairs.
A full bottle, a clean glass, a door that locked from the inside—I had everything I needed until morning or unconsciousness, whichever came first. I was already on my second drink when I got up from the bed to answer the heavy knock on the door. I opened it and felt immediately disappointed with myself, not the ideal emotion you hope to inspire when deciding to spend the night at a brothel. The girl forced me to find her beautiful. Whorehouses are for a lot of things, but beauty isn’t one of them.
“It is expected for you to let me in, yes?” the girl said.
I stepped aside, closed the door with my free hand. I lifted my glass. “Would you like a drink?” I said.
She walked to the side table and inspected the label on the bottle. “Not of this, thank you, no.”
Face-flushing disappointment again, this time for swilling liquor that was, yes, the girl was right, fit only for someone who either didn’t know any better or—worse—did know better but who’d convinced himself it didn’t matter. I spilled out another two inches anyway and stretched out on the bed.
The girl stepped closer to the fire and bega
n to slowly undress while facing me with all the enthusiasm of someone dutifully carrying out an employer’s instructions, carefully placing each removed item on the small room’s only chair. To prove to her and me both that I didn’t particularly care, I stared at the end of the bed while sipping my whiskey. Draining my drink, reaching for the bottle on the floor, Damn it, I thought, this was not the way this evening was intended to turn out. I’d paid for oblivion, not titillation. And the customer is always right.
“You can stop,” I said. “We’re not . . .” I tried to think of some physical gesture to finish my sentence, but ended up just raising my glass to my lips. “You can leave your clothes on,” I said.
But don’t put back on what you’ve already taken off, I didn’t say that. Not that more exposed flesh could have made her any more appealing, everything about her body harvest-time ripe and robust, her black lace bustier shouting out her cantaloupe breasts, her matching stockings and heels screaming her cornstalk-long, surprisingly muscular legs. Just a big, healthy farm girl, I thought. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen.
“All right,” she said, moving her discarded clothes to the fire’s hearth so she could sit down, crossing one leg over the other, entwined hands resting on her knee. Her eyes never left mine, as if she was waiting for me to entertain her, like I was the one who was half naked and she was the one calling the tune.
“Where are you from in Prussia?” I said.
A raised eyebrow. “You are familiar with Prussia?”
“No.”
“Then where I am from will not make any difference to you, yes?”
“No, I guess not.”
“You guess?”
“No, it won’t.”
She nodded like I’d finally come up with the right arithmetic answer; idly scratched her kneecap through sheer black stocking. I’d never seen anyone do anything more erotic in my life.
David Page 3
