“It’s still not right, and you know it’s not right,” George said, holding a thin branch back for me until I passed. George’s father had taught us to always hold down a branch in deference to the person walking behind you on the trail.
“Not right to consume alcohol in Buxton,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“But we won’t be in Buxton. Deer Pond lies outside the limits of the Elgin Settlement.”
George didn’t reply; didn’t need to. Even though all I could see was the back of his head, I knew what the other side looked like: purse-lipped and slit-eyed, angry at me for doing wrong, angry at me for making it sound right. It was a look I was becoming used to.
We let the sound of the mud slopping against the soles of our shoes do our chatting for us. By the time we were almost at the pond, “Woods’ isn’t in Buxton, and it’s off limits,” George said.
An Englishman named Woods had recently purchased one of the first settlers’ farms on the Middle Road, just beyond the Elgin boundary, and opened a grocery store there that sold whiskey. The Reverend King immediately called a meeting of all of Buxton’s residents and entreated them to shun Woods’s store until he ceased to sell intoxicants, reminding them how masters in the South would encourage their slaves to drink away their few hours not spent toiling in the fields and so remain subservient because they knew how alcohol made men lazy and violent and lustful. I’d stood at the back of the crowd that had gathered on the church lawn and couldn’t help but be impressed. Not by what he said—I’d never suffered under a manipulative master, I’d never known a morally degraded slave—but by the effect his saying had on every assembled listener. The entire crowd nodded their heads in unison whenever what the Reverend King said required agreement, just as they all shook their heads as if on cue when whatever he said was intended to inspire disgust. Talk about drunken subservience. And not an ounce of liquor acting inside a single one of them.
Before I had time to cleverly formulate another argument clearly illustrating how if X then Y, then therefore Z, we arrived at Deer Pond. We did the right thing—quit talking—without having to remind ourselves or each other, as sure a sign as any that you’re actually doing what’s right. I went and sat where we always sat and George went and stood where we always stood. The moon used the water as its mirror.
I looked at the pond from atop the small treeless hill while George stood at its edge skipping stones, thip thip thip glug after each new toss. The April air was cool enough that the coat I was wearing wasn’t just to conceal the whiskey, but the earth was thawing, you could feel it, you didn’t need a calendar to know it was spring.
A single thip, glug.
“I heard that,” I said.
George shrugged his shoulders. “Out of practice,” he said, looking for another rock. Since he’d graduated to full-time status at the potash factory, our visits to Deer Pond had become as rare as my secret trips into Chatham had become common.
I pulled out the bottle but didn’t open it, waited to see what George would do, a jumpy hunter feeling out his jumpier prey. When he didn’t motion to leave or even say anything, I slowly cracked the cap.
“Do what you want, I don’t care,” he said, sidearming a new stone, an extra thip added to his toss.
“Nice one,” I said. I raised the pint and pulled, made an effort not to show how terrible the whiskey tasted. It didn’t matter—George was looking for a good skipping stone.
I drank and George threw. I got gently drunk and George never missed. But most of all, the earth breathing easy again, new sap and fresh dew and even the sweet rot of dead leaves forcing you to feel alive. I lay face down on the hill, breathed. “Come here,” I said.
George stopped throwing but didn’t move any closer. “You’re drunk,” he said.
“No I’m not.” I pressed my nose deeper into the dirt, inhaled hard. The earth cleared my head of the whiskey yet made me feel drunker.
Glug.
“I’m going home,” George said.
“So I’m drunk.” I tossed the bottle and what was left inside it into the woods. “Come here anyway.”
The surrendered whiskey made the impact I’d hoped for; George stayed where he was, but at least he wasn’t leaving.
“Come here and smell this,” I said.
“Smell what?”
“The earth. Spring.”
“You are drunk.”
I knew what he was thinking—This was why the Reverend King was right, this was what drunken people did, lay around on the ground smelling dirt—but I refused to get mad, there was too much at stake. “If I wasn’t,” I said, “I wouldn’t have known.”
“Known what?”
“I can’t tell you, you have to see for yourself.”
“By smelling a hill.”
“Just do it, George, get down here.”
“I’m going home.”
“I threw away the whiskey.”
For a moment, just the hum of the blood in my ears and the rustle of the slight breeze in the trees.
“Will you come back with me if I do?” George said.
“Yes. Now come here.”
“You’ll come back straightaway?”
“Yes, I already said yes. Now lie down like me, push your nose right down to the ground, it won’t work if you don’t.”
I gave him some privacy, shut my eyes while he lay down a few feet away from me on the hill.
“Now breathe,” I said.
“I already was. That’s why I’m not underneath the ground.”
“Just do it once—just do it once right—and I won’t ask again.”
He didn’t say anything, so I knew he was contemplating either getting up or doing what I wanted. I heard him take a deep whiff, like the way the doctor made you inhale when he was listening to your heart. He whiffed again, more deeply than before.
“It’s good,” he said.
“Now do it with your eyes closed.”
This time he didn’t hesitate. “It’s like—it’s like it’s spring in there,” he said.
“Everything is being born again.”
George inhaled one more time. He rested his head on its side, stared in the direction of the pond.
“Well,” he said, “it’s spring, anyway.”
*
You can’t regret what has to happen. It’s not reasonable, is like being upset with a child for growing out of his Sunday shoes or castigating an old man for falling asleep in the sun. Born to grow, grow to die. And if unassailable logic and sage proverbs could cure a sick soul, we wouldn’t need God or whiskey.
I needed to flout my doubt. It wasn’t enough to be bored with my studies, it required that I call into question how anyone could find them compelling. Falling in love with illicit tomes, someone other than just me had to know what they were and why they were so wonderful. Someone—anyone—but my mother. For her I still believed that the sun revolved around the earth and that farther along we will surely understand why.
“‘If all be true that I do think,
There are five reasons why I drink:
Good wine, a friend, or being dry
Or lest we should be by and by—
Or any other reason why.’”
I waited for George to say he hated it. Nothing could have been finer—except, perhaps, him fearing it.
“It’s Latin, sixteenth century,” I added.
Human beings three centuries dead celebrating intoxication seemed almost as impossible as the idea of the very same people having sex or going to the bathroom.
“Is it your translation?” he said.
I’d picked him up after work at the factory on the way to Clayton House to collect my mother. Her rheumatism was so bad now she shouldn’t have been travelling anywhere farther than from bed to her window chair, but the more her fingers froze and the less her legs would obey her, the more determined she became to fulfill her duties. “The Good Lord give everyone something to do,” she’d say when I’
d plead with her to at least take a day’s rest. “And if He didn’t want me to take care of the Reverend King like I do, I expect He wouldn’t let me do it, then.” The way she struggled just to hobble around enough to oversee the new cleaning and cooking staff was reason to believe that He was very seriously considering her imminent retirement.
I pulled the copy of Benjamin’s Epigrams from my satchel. “It’s from here,” I said, holding up the book like a revival preacher his faithful bible.
“Oh. I thought you’d translated it. For practice. For Knox.”
I opened the book and read it while we walked. Finished, “Does that sound like something I’d read at Knox College?” I snarled.
We were at the gate of his property. “How would I know?” George said. “You’re the one going there, not me.”
“Why don’t you just listen this time, then,” I said, reopening the book to the same epigram.
George half waved and walked up his sidewalk instead. “Not today. I’m tuckered. And hungry. You wouldn’t believe how much you need to know about a furnace before they even let you get near one.”
When I got to Clayton House, my mother was waiting for me on the front step as usual. She didn’t like to keep me waiting when I had important studies to attend to when I got home. I kissed her on the cheek and entwined her arm tight with mine and we started our snail crawl home.
The fact that she was silent told me she had something to say. Ordinarily, I would have been hearing about how Liza put too much salt in the bread dough or how Harriet has to be told every single day to sweep under the beds, not just around them where everyone can see.
“The Reverend King say you not been at your special meetings with him two weeks runnin’ now,” she said.
“I haven’t been feeling well.”
“Seem to me you been feeling well enough to be sittin’ up half the night readin’.”
“I’ve been studying.” And I was—Lucretius, Horace, Heraclitus—just not the things I was supposed to be studying. “I just haven’t had the time to see the Reverend King. But I’ve been doing what I need to do on my own.”
She made a face like someone had slapped her. The shot of pain she must have felt only jiggled my arm still entwined with hers, the gentle tug on the fishing line that belies the torture going on below. I pulled her tighter to me, but she grimaced like it did more bad than good, so we stopped for a moment instead. I let go of her arm, let her stand on her own.
“Is it your legs or your back?” I said. Or your aching wrists or your warped hips or your swollen ankles or . . .
She shook her head, saying no to the pain as much as to my question. I looked away to allow her a moment of privacy with her agony.
The scent of fresh tree sap; the softness of a surprisingly warm breeze; the sight of so much bright new green where, just two weeks before, there’d been only grey skeleton limbs: all failed to cheer, only jeered, in fact, my poor mother’s poor broken body.
Carpe diem, I thought.
I turned back to my mother, the pain only now partially subsiding.
Of course fucking carpe diem. If your hands can close tightly enough without pain to do it.
“Don’t let the Reverend King down, son,” my mother said.
I hugged her, as gently, as tightly, as I could. “I won’t let you down,” I said.
My mother squeezed me back, stronger than I would ever have thought she could. “The Reverend King, he has such high, high hopes for you, son.”
10
Everything is unimaginable until it happens. The pitiless, punishing logic of inevitability. Your own mother, for instance, the woman who gave you life, dying. And the stupid symbolism of one damn thing after another, like the smoke rising from every chimney in Buxton, sooty souls eagerly departing this broken, useless planet.
Although she was entirely bedridden by now—either propped up in the daytime amidst a cocoon of pillows and cushions or carefully laid out for the night—it was hard to feel too sorry for her unless she was sleeping. She wouldn’t allow you to feel sorry for her. She rarely complained. She never expressed self-pity. She was actually most concerned with not being too much of a bother to others. Others being me, of course, as well as all of the Settlement women who were always there whenever anyone was ill or injured. The people of Buxton were good at circling the wagons, even in cases like my mother’s, where little could be done but making things as comfortable as possible until God in His infinite sadism decided He’d seen enough suffering and eventually allowed his forlorn child to stagger home.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like some breakfast? Maybe just some bread with honey. Mrs. Hamilton brought some by yesterday, from her own honeycombs.”
“I thought I told you to go to school, now, David. You going to be late.”
“I’m not going to be late. And it doesn’t matter.”
“Doesn’t matter.” My mother slowly turned her head to the left as far as the pain permitted; just as slowly, just as painfully, lifted it upward as far as possible to look Mrs. Jackson, who was arranging her pillows, in the face. The rheumatism, not unlike Grant’s army, had changed strategy, had stopped attacking this limb or that joint in favour of all-out assault. It was as if the rheumatism had moved from her bones to her blood, had finally captured her entire body. “Boy gonna be a minister someday, and he says it don’t matter if he goes to school today or not.”
Mrs. Jackson did what she knew she was expected to do, smiled and shook her head along with my mother.
“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to go.”
“So get,” my mother said, raising her arm, its wooden stiffness all the more an admonition.
And I’d go, because I knew the women of Buxton would take as good care of her as anyone could, and because I knew my going to school meant to my mother that I was one day closer to graduating and going on to Knox College and becoming the Reverend David King. It sounds vain—it sounds sinfully vain—but I think she even minded dying less because she could imagine that someday I was going to become the one thing she wanted more than anything, maybe even more than her own restored health.
So I would go to school and pretend to pay attention, and study what I really wanted to study at home, beside my mother’s bed while she sat staring out the window or dozing; and, after she’d fallen asleep for the night, in my room, where I didn’t have to hide my copy of Erasmus or Montaigne or Cicero inside a book large enough and hallowed enough to escape suspicion.
But every night I would awake to the sound of my mother whimpering in her sleep. Her mind at rest, her body said what it wanted to say in the waking hours that her will wouldn’t allow. She sounded like the dying deer George and I had come upon in the woods as boys. She sounded like what she was—a wounded animal asking for release. In the beginning I’d go to her and gently wake her, thinking I was helping, but the look of confused fear on her face upon first realizing where she was eventually convinced me she was better off asleep, no matter how fitfully. Besides, the pain would always wake her long before dawn anyway, eager to inflict another long day’s suffering.
And every day, the news from the war was better than the day before, the Confederate side collapsing, falling in on itself under the ceaseless pursuit of the North, retreating and retreating until, it was becoming clear, there simply wouldn’t be anywhere left to run.
*
Right up until the moment the Reverend King opened the door to his study for our Wednesday afternoon tutorials, I always knew what recently unearthed scriptural contradiction, what theological inconsistency, what intellectual illogicality I was going to raise and rail against and inevitably discredit. But then he’d shake my hand and escort me inside and calmly entwine his fingers before setting his large hands down on his enormous oak desk, and all I’d want to do was please him. By the time I got home I’d be so mad at myself for not doing what I’d promised myself I was going to do, I had no choice but to be furious with him. Next time, I’d promise myself, ne
xt time . . . Until, of course, next time.
This time, “Yes,” he said.
“So, basically, Luther’s essential importance is that he challenged the authority of the papacy by holding that the Bible is the only infallible source of religious authority and that all baptized Christians are a sort of spiritual priesthood. According to Luther, salvation was a free gift of God, received only by true repentance and faith in Jesus as the Messiah, a faith given by God and unmediated by the Church.”
“Yes. That’s correct.”
Evidently, boredom was contagious, or at least the tiresome strain that was afflicting me. I still studied whatever the Reverend King instructed me to study—Church history, theology, anything that would assist me in excelling at Knox College—but only with my mind, which is fine for gathering knowledge but entirely inadequate if what you are after is the truth. I’d discovered the distinction from Plato, from reading The Republic while my mother moaned in pain in her sleep in the other room.
I stared out the window behind the Reverend King. It was nearly May; the sky stayed lit a little bit longer every day. I had nowhere to go, only home to sit with my mother, but I felt my body crave to be anywhere but where I was. I might have felt guilty if the Reverend King hadn’t been examining his folded hands like he’d never noticed them before. There were ten minutes left in our hour, but I didn’t have anything to say, ask, or comment upon. Maybe we’ll break early today, I thought.
“The part I have most difficulty understanding is the timing of this . . . impudence.”
I looked from the window to the Reverend King. “Pardon?” I said.
“Never mind your studies, which are, as you are aware, at such a pivotal stage of their progress. But with your own mother suffering so, did not the obvious selfishness of your actions give you pause to reflect?”
I studied his face for a clue to what he was talking about. All I saw was anger scarcely held in check by disgust.
“You’re going to make me tell you what we both already know,” he said. “I see. This is what the depths of your dishonesty have led us to.” Before I had time to understand, never mind answer or even object, “Number one,” the Reverend King said, using the thumb on his left hand to keep count, not a heartening sign, “you were seen in Chatham buying liquor, not once, not twice, but on three separate occasions. Number two, you were seen consuming this same liquor—I assume it was the same liquor, although if it was otherwise, at this point I wouldn’t be surprised—in the woods of Buxton. Third, you kept a portion of this liquor in your poor mother’s own house.” He left his three fingers extended and accusatory for me to ponder.
David Page 13
