David

by Ray Robertson

  Up until our half-hour visit together, I’d been happy being no one, content to make a little money and read a few books and drink a lot of whiskey, and quite pleased with myself, in fact, for being wonderfully free to do all three in whatever measure I desired. For some reason, though, lifting twenty-pound bricks all day or hacking the leaves off tobacco plants for fifteen cents an hour didn’t seem like quite as satisfying a life plan anymore after inhabiting, however briefly, Dr. Abbott’s heady world of accomplishment, self-esteem, and simple but civilized pleasures. All of a sudden, callused hands and a sore back and a small rented room littered with empty whiskey bottles and half-understood books weren’t a satisfactory substitute for a university degree and framed community honours and a glass-encased gift from President Lincoln’s widow.

  But, I began to burn, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. I’d been raised for better things, just like Dr. Abbott. Raised by the Reverend King for better things. But because he’d broken the promise of financial support he’d made to me, I was marooned on my little island of freedom, was never going to sail away to university or live in Toronto or have an impressive home library like Dr. Abbott. Of course, I could have put away what little pay was left over at the end of each week and maybe, if I eliminated such superfluities as food and shelter, by the time I was fifty years old I’d have saved up enough money for my tuition. Or I could take up the Reverend King’s benevolent offer of returning to Buxton on my hands and knees, ready to redeem myself with the lie that I was a wholly reformed ex–opium addict. Or simply tell him the truth, that I’d murdered my mother, and, by the way, about that money for my education I’d been promised . . .

  So I wouldn’t be a man of the cloth. So I wasn’t going to be a scholar. So I was fated to work in a biscuit factory for the rest of my life. And if anyone asked me what I did during the War Between the States to help liberate my people from the bondage of slavery, I could tell them I read a lot of theology books.

  If I didn’t entirely disbelieve in God yet, it was only because I still needed Him to despise.

  Him and his earthly advocate, the Reverend William King.

  12

  Saturday night was for drinking and whoring, Sunday for resting and recovering. And then, too soon, Monday, and five more days of doing what I was told until, at the end of each, it was time to go home to whatever tiny room I was renting and read myself to sleep. Pissing away an entire day simply coaxing your body back to pre-hangover health wasn’t, I soon learned, the wisest way to make use of one of the one and a half days a week when your hours were all your own; but wasting time is what a young man does best. Now that I didn’t attend church anymore, my Sundays needed filling up anyway.

  A whiskey hangover is best endured outdoors. Idling underneath a shady tree long enough that the afternoon sun periodically nudges you to move a few inches toward a more soothing shadow is a good way to re-acclimatize your debauched body to nature’s healing essentials of time and quiet and fresh air. My favourite mending spot was underneath an old elm tree in Tecumseh Park that overlooked the Thames River.

  Cool earth for my bottom, smooth bark for my back, I’d watch the river flow and the birds drift by and even the occasional fish poke its head above the water’s surface. And doze, inevitably doze, waking up to not quite feeling good, but not as bad as before, which was something to be thankful for, which was a start.

  The only human beings I was ever happy to see—the elm sat alone on a small, grassless hill, so the majority of the arm-in-arm couples and ball-playing children were compelled to keep their happiness to themselves—were those on the decks of the steamships that would occasionally float by. Three, sometimes four levels full of people I’d never seen before and would never see again standing at the rails, some of the men smoking, some of the women peering through their looking glasses, men and women both sometimes observing a coloured man they’d never seen before and would never see again sitting leaning against an elm tree looking at people he’d never seen before and would never see again. Thames River Infinite Regress Reverie.

  Once, I even saw the steamer Lorena.

  During and after the Civil War, hundreds, probably thousands of newborn Southern girls were named Lorena, as well as several pioneer settlements and even the steamship that one Sunday afternoon passed through Chatham by way of the Thames River. All of them got their names in honour of the heroine in an old ballad called “Lorena” that for some reason became a favourite of the Confederate soldiers.

  The song was the usual sentimental sap that passes for art among people who, if they put in their stomachs what they put in their minds, would all be dead of malnutrition:

  We loved each other then, Lorena,

  Far more than we ever dared to tell;

  And what we might have been, Lorena,

  Had our loving prospered well!

  But then, ’tis past; the years have gone,

  I’ll not call up their shadowy forms;

  I’ll say to them, “Lost years, sleep on,

  Sleep on, nor heed life’s pelting storms.”

  As the War Between the States dragged on, the song grew even more popular among the increasingly battered Southern troops. One Confederate veteran swore that, by the time of the South’s surrender, he’d heard “Lorena” more often than “Dixie.” The same man also claimed that “Lorena” was banned by at least one Confederate general. Some of the men who heard it or sang it, it seemed, would grow so nostalgic for their homeland, the South, they wouldn’t be able to stop themselves from deserting.

  Maybe it was the hangovers, but those steamers passing by, and all those people aboard them, somehow always made me feel homesick. But I knew that didn’t make sense. After all, I was already home.

  *

  Thompson isn’t leafing through Leaves of Grass or ecstatically scribbling in his notebook or even scratching at his scalp while angrily slashing out what he’s already written; appears, in fact, almost pleased with himself, sips at his whiskey while slumped in his seat surveying the room with no particular purpose, slight smirk etched into his relaxed face. It’s probably just another false alarm, but I fill my coffee mug with water and wander over to his table anyway.

  “Evening, David.”

  “Thompson.” I sit and sprawl in the seat next to him. If I’m going to get him to tell me what I want to know, it’s important he not know that’s what I want. “I see Coopers’ has got a sale on,” I say.

  Coopers’ Bookstore is more stationery and writing instrument purveyor than bona fide bookseller, bearing out its retail locale on King Street right between McKeough Hardware and Miller’s Dry Goods. Thompson is a fellow antiquarian—or was, until he lost his barrister’s job last year and I began gradually relieving him of his above-average personal library in settlement of his burgeoning bar tab, eventually acquiring even his prized copy of Whitman’s own self-published first pressing of Leaves of Grass—but if we don’t buy our books at Coopers’, it is the only place in town where you can purchase Stephens’ ink and genuine Waterman fountain pens.

  Thompson’s grin grows wider, although he’s not smiling at me or at anyone else that I can see. “Wonderful,” he says.

  “Fifteen percent off all writing supplies is wonderful?”

  “Absolutely wonderful.”

  It’s not even midnight—Thompson hasn’t had time to get drunk yet. Besides, Thompson isn’t a happy drunk, isn’t your everyday, everything-is-all-right, everyone-is-okay drunk. That’s why Leaves of Grass is his bible, even in the cheap, mass-produced form he’s had to settle for since he became broke. All of the inexhaustible optimism and bounteous new world vigour between two covers that anyone could ever hope for. That’s the idea, anyway. Old world-weary Dr. Johnson opined that “nothing is more hopeless than a scheme of merriment,” and he was dead a century and then some before irrepressible Walt was alive and spreading the yawp of his bardic good news. But, then again, Dr. Johnson was disfigured as an infant by scrofula and suffered thr
oughout adulthood from dropsy, emphysema, gout, and insomnia, while dear old Uncle Walt stood six feet tall, weighed two hundred pounds, and, unless he was dining with strangers, preferred to drink directly from his water pitcher and his bottle of rum. Most philosophy is seventy-five percent chemistry.

  “Tell me what you need and I’ll pick it up for you tomorrow,” I say. “I have to go anyway.”

  Thompson clasps my shoulder—hard—his face a Halloween pumpkin burning with candlelit eyes and a jagged smile. “I don’t need anything anymore, David. That’s the thing, that’s the very thing.”

  Now that I know what I wanted to, I wish I didn’t, don’t have a clue what I’m supposed to say or do next. There have been a couple of close calls previously, but I’ve never seen Thompson this elated, this ecstatically confident that he’s finally done what he’s been attempting to do for years, what he confided in me late one night that I wished he hadn’t.

  “A clean goodbye. A flawless farewell that will leave absolutely no question unanswered. Executed properly—executed perfectly—just think how pure it would be. Just think of it, David.”

  “Is that it?” I say, nodding at the sealed, unmarked envelope lying in front of him four-square on the table. It’s not what I should say, I know, but it is what I do say.

  He leaves his hand on my shoulder, his grip not getting any looser, and joins me in looking at the envelope like we are admiring a treasured photograph of his first-born child. “Yes,” is all he says.

  I lift my mug and wish there was more than one magician adept at turning water into wine. “Stay here,” I say. “Don’t go anywhere until I get back, all right?”

  “No,” Thompson says, still staring at the envelope. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  I shout upstairs to Tom that I need him to sling drinks for a while, but before I can grab a bottle and two glasses, Meyers’ face is no more than six inches from mine on the other side of the bar.

  Holding up my hand, “Tom will get you whatever you need in a minute,” I say.

  “Very good,” Meyers says, “splendid, splendid. But I say, you seem to have a bottle handy right there, David, so perhaps you wouldn’t mind . . .” He holds out his empty glass like Oliver Twist begging for more gruel, just begging to have his bowl slapped from his fat hand to the ground.

  I surprise myself—don’t snap at him or even worse—pour him a drink, in fact—and, without stopping to watch the reaction on his face on my way back to Thompson’s table, tell him that it’s on the house.

  It’s not every day, after all, that someone you know composes the perfect suicide note.

  *

  Thompson with his never-without Whitman is proof that it doesn’t have to be the Holy Bible for a man to find shelter from the storm of life in a holy bible. Whatever keeps you warm and dry on the inside.

  As a young man, I employed the usual young-man methods—whiskey and women—to numb the dumbness of the labourer’s life I was leading and apparently was always going to lead. In the ancient battle between dissipation and desperation, however, Monday morning at six a.m. always wins. Supplementing my debauchery with hours of hard reading helped, but beauty and intelligence are almost as ephemeral as liquor and lust, life’s abundant ugliness and stupidities as instantly sobering as any dawn alarm clock. I tried switching subject matter—from the delights and discoveries of literature and philosophy to the long, purportedly consoling view of history—but names and dates didn’t dull the pain of trading my existence for a weekly pay packet as I’d hoped. Just the opposite, actually. As far as I could tell, the study of history was essentially the recorded particulars of how one country robbed another country. I didn’t need to read books to learn about exploitation, self-interested rationalization, and inevitable resentment; all I had to do was show up for work at the factory.

  And then I met Mr. Blake.

  Mr. Blake had already been dead for nearly fifty years, but it took Alexander Gilchrist’s The Life of William Blake to raise him from his grave of anonymity. An article in the Fortnightly piqued my interest enough for me to order Gilchrist’s Life, biography having become a recent favourite form, reading about someone else’s troubles a pleasant change of pace from living my own. Except that Mr. Blake, I learned, didn’t have any troubles. Or rather, he had them, plenty of them—was poor, artistically scorned, professionally ignored—he just didn’t suffer them.

  Instead of seeing the plaster falling off the walls, Mr. Blake saw angels on the bedposts. Rather than bemoan his deathbed poverty, he spent one of his last shillings on a pencil to continue sketching. As opposed to those who might agonize over an inability to shoehorn their heretical beliefs in full sexual freedom and racial equality and anti-materialism into comfortable contemporary Christianity, Mr. Blake merely shrugged and said, “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” Mr. Blake was the true anti-Christ. Not as in an evil-doing devil, but as in a suffering-eschewing, life-affirming god whose number one commandment was All deities reside in the human breast. And as far as I was concerned, a small-g god was better than no god at all.

  I read and reread Mr. Blake’s poems until they weren’t his anymore, weren’t even poems, were what I thought and how I lived and who I was.

  “You better put that book away, David, I don’t pay you to diddle-daddle.”

  “I’m on my lunch break.”

  “Then you should be eating lunch.”

  “I’d rather read.”

  “Reading no book isn’t going to help you get those boxes filled up by the end of the day.”

  “Right now I’m not filling up boxes. Right now I’m on my lunch break.”

  “You were on your lunch break. While we were talking, it just ended. You better put that book away and get back to work.”

  Listen to the fool’s reproach! It is a kingly title!

  Mr. Blake: a good god and an even better teacher, sagacious salves for every wound and irritation the world could possibly inflict.

  I called him—call him—Mr. Blake because when I was a young boy, the Reverend King introduced my mother and me to a man leaving Clayton House, the man and the Reverend King having just concluded a lengthy meeting in the Reverend King’s study. “David, this is Mr. McKellar,” the Reverend King said.

  I sent my little brown hand up to meet the big white hand coming down to me.

  While my mother showed the man out the front door, the Reverend King said to me, “People whom we respect, we always call them Mr., don’t we, David?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Even if he wasn’t a god—even if not a small-g god—the Reverend King, whatever else he was or wasn’t, he wasn’t such a bad teacher, either.

  13

  It’s not as if I wrote them down—that would have meant I was keeping track, that might have implied I cared—but each time I was able to junk another Biblical injunction, I couldn’t help but be pleased. It transpired, for instance, that you could serve two masters, if not actually concurrently. Because if the Reverend King had provided the promise of a better life, Burwell actually delivered one. And Burwell was certainly everything that the Reverend King wasn’t. Which is just the thing required if you’re a thief and a smuggler and an enterprising grave robber.

  I first heard his name from a man who heard it from another man that if a man was interested in making some quick and easy money, he should tell the first man who would let the second man know who would be sure to put the interested man in touch with a man called Burwell. I was twenty-eight years old, and ten uninterrupted years of hard, honest labour had netted me approximately seventy-five dollars in savings and a far less approximate awareness that hard-working, honest people tend to die alone in small rented rooms with worn-out bodies and washed-out souls. I told the man I was interested who told the other man who set up a meeting with Burwell.

  Considering that, whatever it was we’d be doing, I was fairly certain it wouldn’t be legal, I was surprised when instructed to show up in th
e Market Square on Saturday at nine a.m. There wasn’t a busier time or place in Chatham than Saturday morning in the market. I’d been told to wait near the wagon set up nearest to Wellington Street West, which I did, pretending to find the bushel baskets of apples and onions and tomatoes as interesting as I could. After another and then another young Negro added their own mute admiration of the vegetables, the farmer—the man, anyway, who’d been sitting in the buggy seat with his back to us—climbed down and joined us at the rear of the wagon.

  “Take a few, lads,” he said.

  The other two Negroes seemed as puzzled as me, didn’t know if he was referring to the produce or to what we were there to be paid for. The man laughed, enjoying our confusion.

  “The farmer charged me enough to borrow his wagon, we might as well take a few apples home with us.” Then the man, Burwell it would seem, did just that, loaded down the pockets of his jacket with as many apples as would fit. He was white and clean-shaven and wore silver spectacles, but his leathery-looking skin, and something about his eyes—the way they narrowed when he spoke—suggested someone who’d spent the majority of his life outdoors, who’d only recently taken to the relative ease of city life. There were spider veins, broken capillaries, up and down his nose.

  “I’ll put my cards on the table, lads. What I’m looking for is someone not unlike myself, someone smart enough to take advantage of an opportunity when it presents itself.” Burwell watched the assorted Saturday morning crowd wander past, tipped his hat at a blue-bonneted, busily made-up matron and her two equally fussily attired young sons. The three of us stood there with our pockets full of apples, watching him.

  “What I ask of my employees, lads, is simple: loyalty and common sense. What I can offer in return is just as straightforward: four dollars per man for a couple hours’ work per night, sometimes once, sometimes twice, sometimes more than that, every week.” His accent wasn’t Scottish—wasn’t anything—but the way he used “lad” reminded me of Scots I had met.