David

by Ray Robertson

  Mrs. King smiled—an honest smile, not like the ones she manufactured for strangers on the street or for my mother delivering the food she didn’t want.

  “Now, how can that possibly be? It’s my gift to you. Didn’t anyone ever teach you it is considered unkind to return a gift to a friend?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Well, thankfully, now someone has.”

  *

  I was a good boy. Of course I was a good boy. What other kind of boy could I have been? A stray dog no longer stray is a happy dog, an appreciative dog, an indebted dog. Understandably.

  In the classroom, I never spoke until spoken to. I did not giggle, whisper, or squirm in my seat. I used proper language at all times whenever speaking. I always abided by the Golden Rule hand-lettered and framed and hanging at the front of the classroom, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I always assumed good posture and always faced forward, my feet flat on the schoolhouse floor and my hands folded on top of the desk. I raised my hand when I wished to speak and I stood beside my desk before speaking. Whenever Mr. Rapier, our teacher, asked me to, I would assist a fellow student in disentangling a point of incomprehension, never vain in my superior understanding, only pleased to be able to share my knowledge with another.

  At home, I did all of my chores without ever having to be reminded to do them. I carried in old Mrs. Cross’s firewood for her and shovelled her walkway and never accepted the nickel she never forgot to offer. I took my mother’s arm when we walked to church and dropped my very own earned dime into the collection plate. When I was old enough, I helped the Reverend King and Mr. Rapier run the evening classes they organized to teach the older adults how to read. I wrote letters for the blind and the illiterate to their relatives and friends still in chains back in the South. I prayed every night for my mother’s and my souls and the swift death of slavery and the Reverend King’s continued good health. I breathed so that my mother and Jesus and the Reverend King would be proud of me.

  Understandably.

  *

  The bottle and two glasses and the bowl of ice and the silver tongs laid out on the kitchen table; Henry with a fresh busy bone, oblivious for hours in front of the fire; the new gramophone waiting in the corner, wound and ready to go to work: everything is set, all that’s missing is George. I get up and go to the front window and part the curtain, sit back down. I rearrange the contents on the table—this time the bowl of ice and the tongs on the left, the glasses side by side in the middle, the bottle flanking the right—then get up and go to the window again, the same result as before. I sit down and open the bottle. A watched door never darkens.

  At nine p.m. on the first Saturday of every other month for the last eight years, George has shown up on my doorstep like he’d just dropped by on the off chance I just might be in. We didn’t hear much of each other after the war, after we both turned eighteen—him staying behind in Buxton, intent on raising a family and working his way up to the top of the potash factory, me moving away to Chatham—until, eventually, from the ages of thirty to forty we didn’t even share that uncomfortable silence that is owed to those who discover one day that their best friends have turned into strangers. We don’t talk about what brought us back into each other’s lives, but for eight straight years now we’ve passed the first Saturday night of every other month sitting together drinking whiskey at my kitchen table, haven’t missed a single night yet.

  George’s tap at the door lifts Henry’s head from his chewing, springs him to his feet and peels back his gums, bone time over now and ready to protect his family, or at least die trying. Dogs are never less than exactly what the moment calls for. This more than compensates for them never visiting the World’s Fair or believing that they’re going to heaven. Dogs are born Buddhists.

  As soon as Henry sees George and me shake hands, he’s wagging hard and moving in, waiting for his new friend to give him the rubs between the ears that common greeting courtesy demands, but I tell him, “Lie down, Henry, get your bone and lie down.” Puzzled, he pauses, then does what he’s told.

  “He’s a good dog,” George says without looking at him, the same thing he says every time he arrives, and begins to unbutton his overcoat on the way to the kitchen. No former slave keeps a dog. None but me. I keep Henry away from George when he visits, and George acts like it’s perfectly normal to allow a wild animal that’s been known to hunt down our ancestors to live in one’s home.

  George settles his bulk around his chair while I pour out our first drink. I already opened the bottle to help pass the time, but my glass is as clean as his. The best part of drinking is getting drunk; or, if drinking with another, getting drunk together. Drunkenness itself is never as intoxicating as slowly sipping sobriety behind, everything not as it should be gradually dissolving into everything it should, body and soul both exulting with every additional swallow in the inevitable libation liberation.

  “You look good,” George says, watching me pour his drink. This is the second thing he always says.

  “You don’t look too bad yourself,” I answer. “Considering what you’ve got to work with, I mean.”

  George laughs, rubs his fat stomach like Henry wished he’d rubbed his. “Two weeks ago Mary made me go see the doctor on account of how I was a little short of breath whenever I’d climb the stairs at home and how the joints in my knees were aching a little. I told her it was nothing to worry about, I felt just fine otherwise, but she made me go anyway, that’s Mary.” George laughs harder now, pats his stomach even more affectionately. “Five dollars later, the doctor said the only thing I was suffering from was too much good living. I said to Mary when I got home, ‘He should have given me five dollars, I could have told him that.’”

  George laughs so loud this time, Henry looks up from his bone, wags his worship at the joyful noise coming from the kitchen. I hand George his whiskey.

  George wears every hard-earned badge of well-deserved worldly success there is: a hand-cut, three-piece suit; always-shining shoes, a different pair for every day of the week; a gold pocket watch he’ll one day hand down to one of his two sons; and a bulging, nearly perfectly round stomach that serves not only as a convenient resting place for his folded hands but also as an emblem of everything that his life—and the lives of his wife and their five children—has come to exemplify: accomplishment, satiation, pride. Skinny folks are poor folks are slaves. George, and George’s children, will never be poor again.

  We sit, sip. The first glass of whiskey is always for tasting, especially when it’s whiskey as good as this; after that, alcohol’s sundry other pleasures tend to elbow appreciation to the back of the line. We listen to the trees outside creak in the cold; to the wood in the fireplace crackle its warm, dry heat. It’s good to grow up poor together. To know that the wall that separates you from the freezing wind is as arbitrary as it is necessary. To know it and not have to say it.

  “How’s business?” George says.

  Business is Sophia’s, of course, but since Sophia’s is an illegal business, whenever George and I talk, it’s just called business.

  “Good, good. Not bad. You?”

  And, as usual, George proceeds to tell me all about all of the expansion they’re considering at the factory and all of the new products they’re hoping to develop and all of the new markets in Michigan and Ohio and as far away as Kentucky they’re hoping to one day reach, and I let him tell me and tell me. Potash and its resultant commercial uses aren’t, in and of themselves, enlivening conversation, but a Black-born, Black-owned, Black-run organization full of an everyyear-increasing number of Black men building, expanding, growing—I could listen to that all night. A team player? Me? No, never, not even if I wanted to be. But I can still cheer, I can still root for the home side. Can’t but cheer.

  Besides, as good as we both are at not talking about things that talking about can never change anyway, there’s one thing neither of us wants to acknowledge that we both know needs to be s
aid before we can spend the rest of the evening sitting in this house that I own mortgage-free, drinking expensive whiskey that I can easily afford, and feeling pleased with ourselves for how pleasantly our past has turned into our present. Any topic, then, just as long as it’s off-topic.

  “So they’re calling Mr. Brown a Father of Confederation now,” I say.

  George leans back in his seat. “Mr. Brown from the board?” George is a Buxton man, usually only comes into Chatham to visit me. George pays his taxes to the Dominion of Canada, but his real country is Elgin.

  “One and the same.”

  George Brown was not only the publisher of the Globe and an editorializing abolitionist and an early, outspoken supporter of the Elgin Settlement, but he, along with two Black businessmen from Toronto and Buffalo—who sent their children to the Buxton school because it was so superior to any coloured schools near where they lived—formed the Canada Mill and Mercantile Company to promote businesses in Elgin. The potash company, for one, was launched with seed money borrowed from them interest-free.

  “The only white man on the board of directors,” I say, tending to George’s empty glass. I’m behind the bar every night at Sophia’s—why would I pay someone else to do what I can do better and for free?—but the first Saturday of every other month, I’m George’s personal bartender.

  George takes his freshly poured glass of whiskey; looks at it, doesn’t drink it. “The only white man except for the Reverend King.”

  I finish fixing my drink but don’t waste any time staring at the glass. When I set it back down empty, George has turned his attention from his glass to me.

  “I didn’t ask you why you weren’t at the funeral,” he says.

  “You didn’t have to.”

  He holds up his hand like I imagine he does at business meetings when an idea is proffered that he wants to stop in its tracks before it can waste any more valuable time. “That’s all . . . your business,” he says.

  “That’s right, it is.”

  “And you know I’ve never made it mine.”

  I watch Henry lying in front of the fireplace getting serious with his bone, a paw slung over one of its gnawed ends to better keep it in place while he chews and chews his way to nothing. I don’t have any choice but to nod.

  “And I don’t see any reason to make it mine now.”

  “Good,” I say, picking up my glass.

  “But I’ll tell you this, too—I don’t think we should let this night go by without at least toasting him, David. I don’t think that would be right.”

  I look back at Henry.

  “We don’t even have to say anything, not out loud, anyway. Just raise our glasses and each of us can think whatever he wants to think and that’ll be that.” George lifts his drink, holds it in the air experimentally, like a man sticking his wet finger in the breeze to determine which way the wind is blowing.

  I clink my glass to his, hear the telltale ping of a genuine crystal-to-crystal kiss, and that’s that, it’s just George and me again.

  “Good,” he says, massaging his stomach clockwise then counterclockwise, already laughing at what he’s going to say next, as if it’s so damn funny he just can’t wait until it’s out of his mouth to start snickering. “Now how about some of that music you were talking about last time I was here, music that comes out of a machine?”

  I get up and go to the other room and can’t help almost laughing myself, although I don’t have a clue why, which only serves to make me laugh for real, which naturally sets George really roaring. Placing the arm of the gramophone on the record already in place, I realize why I’m laughing: I’m laughing because whenever I’m with George, we laugh.

  The needle digs out the sounds buried deep in the grooves of the thick black shellac, a minor musical miracle that even Mrs. King, the person who taught me how to listen, never would have believed possible. Mrs. Reverend William King.

  Some dead men simply refuse to stay dead.

  4

  Once, while Mrs. King was playing the piano, I was watching when I should have been listening.

  It wasn’t as if ordinarily she had to persuade me to pay attention. From the first time I’d been present when she played—leaning up against the ledge of her bedroom window while the music passed from her fingers to the piano to the air to my ears—I was compelled to listen. We always sang in church, and sometimes either George or I would start up a song when we’d be roaming alone in the woods, usually something we’d picked up from one of the older settlers, an old plantation song that didn’t, mercifully, make much sense to us word-wise but which still felt good on our tongues and, somehow, even in our souls.

  I’m going away to the Great House Farm! O, yeah! O, yeah!

  I’m going away to the Great House Farm! O, yeah!

  All those punctuating O, yeah!s were particularly stirring to sing, especially when you had someone else to shout them out with.

  The music Mrs. King made was different, yet wasn’t. Vocal-less, yes, and no tick-tocky rhythms to root you to the beat, but beneath the ostensibly tumultuous surface, bubbling up just underneath the ever-eddying notes, the same sounds of anguish and longing and even occasional jagged stabs of anger that characterized the slave songs. It was as if one rang out with the raw call for liberation while the other sang the sound of freedom finally achieved and Oh my God, now what?

  Like that very first time, Mrs. King had simply sat down at the piano and begun playing. I’d been her only audience for long enough now to know it was her favourite, Schumann’s Symphony no. 4 in D Minor, op. 120. She never tired of it, and neither did I. It was like Heraclitus’s river: every time you stepped into it, you heard something different.

  I liked to listen to Mrs. King play the piano while looking out the window, the view of the garden—whether tucked away under cold winter white or, as it was that day, bursting green throughout the hot, humid summer—a convenient place to set aside your eyes awhile so as to allow your ears temporary dominion over the rest of your senses. I must have been listening for fifteen minutes when it occurred to me that the bird I’d been watching hadn’t moved, not once, the entire time. How she knew I was paying more attention to the bird than the Schumann, I don’t know, but suddenly the room was quiet. I felt embarrassed that I was the one who’d made the music stop.

  “What is it?” Mrs. King said, hurrying, for her, to the window. “What’s out there?” She squatted down beside me, less, it seemed, better to see what I was seeing than to keep whatever it was that was out there from seeing her.

  Now I felt doubly ashamed, having managed to terrify an already emotionally fragile woman as well.

  “It’s just a bird,” I said.

  Still in her squat, Mrs. King inched closer to the window. It was as if she hadn’t heard me or had decided she couldn’t trust a mere child with detecting impending danger.

  “It’s just a bird,” I repeated, pointing it out for her. “But I think it’s sick, it hasn’t moved in a long, long time.”

  Instead of being relieved, Mrs. King seemed even more upset; stood, finally, but began rubbing her hands, gaze fixed now on the bird.

  “A sick bird,” she said. “A sick bird, today, of all days. Today, of all days, a sick bird.” She kept rubbing her hands, kept rubbing them so hard that they began to chafe red.

  “It might not be sick,” I said. “Maybe it just . . . doesn’t feel like flying right now.” Did birds ever grow tired of flying? I wondered. I hoped so.

  “You have to go outside and see if it’s all right,” she said.

  I was willing—anything to help Mrs. King calm down—but wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. Maybe when I approached it, it would fly away and everything would be like it was before.

  “Did you hear me?” Mrs. King said. She grabbed me by my shirt and shook me. “You have to go outside this instant and see if it’s all right. Now do as you’re told, David. This insolence is unacceptable. Such insolence. And today, of all days.�
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  I closed Mrs. King’s bedroom door behind me and let myself outside through the back door connected to the kitchen. There was no one in the house but us—my mother was at the butcher’s—and for a moment I considered simply going home and even telling my mother when she returned what Mrs. King had said and done. But I knew it hadn’t been really her—not the real her—who’d shaken me. Plus, my mother didn’t like me going into Mrs. King’s room without her as it was, and if she ever discovered how she’d acted, I’d never be able to hear her play the piano again.

  I knew the bird was dying as soon as I was close enough to pick it up. It wasn’t that it didn’t startle at my approach; it didn’t even move its tiny black eyes, just kept staring straight ahead like it was terrified of something it was impossible to look away from. Although it was only a bird, only a common grey chickadee, it had the same look that George’s father’s horse Missy had had just before she died the summer previous, her body pulled in tight to itself like she was attempting to keep herself from freezing, her eyes dull and faraway, her eyes not Missy’s anymore.

  “Pick it up,” Mrs. King said through the upstairs window. “Show the poor thing it has nothing to fear.”

  I knew there was no point. Besides, who knew what it was dying of? I didn’t want a dying bird that close to my skin. But I did what she asked anyway. I didn’t want anyone else to hear her.

  I picked it up with two pinched fingers and placed it as gently as possible in the palm of my other hand. The bird felt like nothing, like it was already the decay of feathers and paper-thin bones it was soon going to become.

  “Well?” Mrs. King shouted. “What is it doing? Tell me what it’s doing.”

  I saw Mr. Gordon, the man who sold butter and milk, talking to old lady Hampton, who lived directly behind the Kings. I didn’t think they could hear us, but I didn’t want to find out.

  “It’s starting to chirp,” I lied. Mrs. King was high enough up, she couldn’t tell if it was or it wasn’t.