David

by Ray Robertson

  The only trouble with limbs covered in personally significant Latin inscriptions, however, was that virtually no one you met knew what they meant. It wasn’t everyone, after all, who read Horace and Virgil in their difficult dead tongue. Like me.

  Because the Reverend King had taught me.

  *

  Ostensibly to stretch my legs and rest my eyes, I stroll to the front window to see what the world outside is up to. As usual, not much. Waning winter’s first thaw, fresh garbage in full bloom: empty whiskey and medicine bottles, rusty cans and rotting vegetables, a single, laceless black boot. White snow then dirty snow then yellow slush then this. Nature tries its best to make the world nicer but always returns it naked. I return to my chair and my book.

  Moments made mellow like this, I can almost imagine myself accompanying Loretta abroad, black and white parading together in public not quite the colour clash it is over here. Reading all day atop the sunny deck of some luxurious steamer; quietly dining every evening with Loretta at our own private table; toasting the full moon and the foaming sea and our shared good fortune at starry midnight. Our actual time in Europe is a little less lucid, but would certainly include plenty of actual places where actual great men were born and lived and died, as well as, after docking at our first stop, as many first-rate London bookstores as I could talk Loretta into visiting. I’ve never been inside a proper bookstore before.

  But too much leisure feels dirty. Even today’s half day of rest will, I know, by the time the sun begins to sink, sour, the pleasant indolence of afternoon curdling into sinful sloth by evening’s first dimming. “‘For Satan finds some mischief still/For idle hands to do,’” the Reverend King would remind us from the pulpit. My mind knows it’s illogical—foolish, Loretta would say—to feel guilty for enjoying oneself, but my soul knows it’s a sin. Soul, that’s right. Did you think a soldier who loses a limb ever really believes it’s gone?

  Besides, I can’t run the risk of being bored. Because being bored isn’t possible—isn’t permissible. I might have remained a slave if the Reverend King hadn’t bought my freedom for me and brought my mother and me north, let us be thankful. I call no man sir and own my own home and have a woman I love and a friend I trust, let us give thanks. I stand free and rich and beloved high atop the shattered bones and extinguished hopes of every Negro who never knew any of these things, so how could I possibly be complacent or ungrateful or bored? To be bored would be an insult. To be bored would be immoral.

  I mark my place in my book and remove my spectacles.

  “Come on, Henry,” I say, “let’s bring in some wood,” and Henry is up from his spot in front of the library’s fire before I’ve even finished my sentence. When Henry’s eyes are closed, he’s not wondering whether or not they should be open. When Henry sleeps, he sleeps; when Henry’s awake, he’s awake. Too bad I’m not a Hindoo—maybe next time I could come back as a dog. But I’m not a Hindoo or a Buddhist or a Moslem or even the thing I was born to be. I’m . . .

  “Let’s go, Henry,” I say, slapping my thigh. “We’ve got things to do.”

  14

  One day Burwell informed me that not only did he require four bodies and not the usual one or two, but he also needed me to pack them in ice. I wasn’t to worry, though: the ice and the wooden crates that the bodies were to be stowed in would be supplied to me as soon as I gave notice I was in possession of all four samples. Samples was what we called bodies, just in case someone not so . . . scientifically advanced as us somehow overheard what we were saying.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my samples,” I said. A first-rate tailor prides himself on the cut of his suits, an expensive defence lawyer on his high acquittal rate, a successful grave robber on the quality of the corpses he delivers. A professional is a professional.

  “Easy, lad,” Burwell said. “No one said there was. These samples need to travel a little farther than usual, that’s all. And it won’t take you any more time, if that’s what you’re thinking. Will likely take you less time, if I know you. Once they’re packed, your job is done, Ferguson will take over from there.”

  “Ferguson’s never met our man in London.”

  “Don’t concern yourself, they’re not going to London.”

  “Where are they going, then?”

  Burwell smiled, studied the spring air, deciding, I could tell, whether or not to let me know the truth. Ferguson, sitting beside him in the driver’s-side seat of the wagon, stared straight ahead as usual at the horse’s behind. A significant portion of Ferguson’s life, it seemed, was spent studying Burwell’s horse’s ass-end.

  “A good bit south of here,” Burwell said. “Hence the need for the ice.”

  “How much south of here?”

  “Kentucky.”

  Climbing on my horse, “No,” I said.

  As was our meeting-place custom, it was just after twilight and nowhere at all; technically, near the Bloomfield road, but just bush and untilled fields for as far as could be seen. I’d gotten there first and was sitting on a rotting tree trunk waiting for them to arrive. I was always waiting for them to arrive.

  Burwell allowed a closed-mouth smirk, like I was a naughty child he didn’t want to encourage but simply couldn’t help being amused by. “It’s not as if you have to travel to Kentucky, lad. Your job remains essentially the same. As I said, you’ll hand off the samples to Ferguson and he’ll take care of the rest. Simple as simple could be.”

  Which was another reason I didn’t want the job: I’d yet to be alone with Ferguson and his three hundred pounds of silence, and I intended to keep it that way. But it wasn’t the main reason. Before the Civil War, slavery had given Southern medical schools a significant advantage in procuring bodies, because masters could sell the corpses of deceased slaves, and Southern schools rarely failed to use this as a recruiting tool. The Medical College of Louisiana, for example, promised incoming students that “subjects for dissection will be provided in any number free of charge.” I knew because a professional knows his profession. And this particular professional wasn’t about to send a single Canadian body—regardless of the colour of its dead flesh—south of the forty-ninth parallel. Let Dixie dig up its own dead.

  “I said no, Burwell.” I said no, but I remained where I was, on my horse, the reins loose in my hands.

  Burwell rubbed his bare chin as if contemplating some great mystery. “I don’t see it,” he said.

  “What? You don’t see what?”

  “How I can allow you to refuse.”

  “How you can allow me to refuse?” I’d intended it to sound like I thought what he said was amusing, but all that happened was I repeated him.

  Burwell finally released his chin from his hand and shook his head, the matter apparently settled. “No, I just can’t see it, lad. This is a transaction upon which much potential future business depends, a potential new market that could prove extremely lucrative for all of us. You’re the only one besides me who knows of our dealings, and I simply couldn’t take the risk of even one more individual saying something he shouldn’t say.”

  “What about Ferguson? He could blow the whistle, he knows as much as either of us.” I was furious, and not entirely at Burwell. I reminded myself of when I used to bargain with my mother to be allowed to stay up a little later than my normal bedtime.

  Burwell smiled again—indulgently, almost benignly. “Lad, there’s no risk of Ferguson ever talking.”

  “Just because he never says anything doesn’t mean he won’t talk,” I said. As angry as I was, I wasn’t unaware that Ferguson was listening to every word we were saying. Not that he seemed to notice, much less care. If he didn’t blink occasionally, he could have been a mammoth flesh statue dumped in the driver’s seat.

  “Well put, lad, well put. But it’s not by how he can’t speak but why that I know I can trust him.”

  The flame was beginning to go out of the sky, but not so much that Burwell couldn’t see the confusion on my face.

/>   “Show him,” Burwell said, and before I could determine which one of us he was speaking to, Ferguson turned to me and opened his mouth as wide as possible. He looked like a terrified horse braying at a rattlesnake but with nothing to sound for it. Ferguson didn’t have any tongue. His eyes stayed open and on me the entire time I stared at the dark hole where his voice should have been.

  “All right, that’s enough,” Burwell said, and Ferguson snapped his mouth shut.

  “How did he lose his tongue?” I said. Now I sounded like a five-year-old asking how the sun ended up in the sky.

  “The regular rate, David, and within forty-eight hours. Four samples are a lot, I know, but think of all that nice money you’re going to make.” Pulling down his cap, and to Ferguson now, “Let’s go,” and Ferguson tugged on the reins and the wagon moved off.

  It was dark now. Burwell was going to get his bodies. I raced home, although there wasn’t any reason.

  *

  Tom lives outside of town, halfway between Chatham and Buxton. He couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate location to call home if he’d tried. It’s only a coincidence, of course—Tom could never be bothered to correlate his geographical where to his biographical who—but it’s fitting all the same.

  When he asked me to stop by and see him—last night, while we were closing up—naturally I asked him why. I’ve known Tom for almost as long as I’ve had Sophia’s, and I’ve never had any reason to visit him, nor him me.

  I like Tom. I know I can trust Tom. Which are two things I can’t say about most people I know. But I’m not my black brother’s keeper any more than I am that of any other whatever-shaded sibling. The older I get, I’m not sure I even know any black or white people anymore. I only know for sure that I know Loretta and George and Henry and a few foggier and foggier others who only still breathe way back inside my brain.

  “I want to give you something,” he said.

  “Can’t you bring it with you to work tomorrow night?”

  Tom shook his head. “I wouldn’t care to do that, no.”

  “What is it?”

  “You come and visit me tomorrow. Around noontime?”

  “If you want me to.”

  “I do.”

  “All right.”

  Tom is standing on his front porch when I ride up, coatless and with a steaming tin cup of coffee in one hand, a cigarette burning in the other.

  I climb down from Franklin’s horse and tie the rein to the porch. I sold my last horse the same week my house was finished being built. The day I moved in, I knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere far enough away that I’d ever need to travel by horse again.

  “You can put him around back if you want, out back with Sister,” Tom says.

  “It’s a nice-enough day,” I say. “He’ll be all right.”

  “It is that,” Tom says, taking a sip of coffee followed by a long pull on his cigarette while enjoying the view from his porch, the towering trees and more trees surrounding every side of the cabin. Tom’s nearest neighbour is more than a mile away, and in spite of the snow-covered branches of the trees and the puddles of ice and the hard, frozen ground, the wind is only wintertime cool, the country air all the fresher for it. Everywhere you look is clean and quiet and empty of anything that isn’t supposed to be there.

  Splashing the little that’s left in his cup over the side of the porch, “Suppose you better come in,” Tom says. He steals a last puff from his cigarette before stamping it out on the porch underneath his boot, holds the door open for me, and closes it behind us.

  Inside is pretty much what I’d imagined: a table and a single chair; a small, neatly made bed; a few time-scarred pots and pans hanging by nails over the fire. If you had taken one of the original cabins built at Buxton forty-five years ago and simply moved it out here, it would be hard to tell the difference. The room is warm and dry, though, and the bare windows allow the entire cabin plenty of hard, bright sunlight.

  “Just a minute,” Tom says, kneeling on one knee beside the bed, dragging out a battered wooden gun box from underneath. Tom hasn’t offered me a chair, so I stay standing. Besides, whatever it is he wants to show me, it isn’t going to take long.

  Even though Tom arrived in Buxton when I was a boy, I didn’t meet him until I was much older, until I’d opened Sophia’s. Once I got to know him, though, I remembered hearing about him—the ex-slave up from Mississippi via the Underground Railroad who lived on the edge of the Settlement in an Elgin Association–approved house, right down to the regulation picket fence and mandatory flower garden out front, but who refused to farm like everyone else, earning his living instead on the railroad whenever there was work, hunting and fishing and somehow getting by otherwise whenever there wasn’t. The Reverend King strongly encouraged every new settler to initially work on the railroad, but only long enough to earn the first instalment toward his own plot of land so as to begin raising a money crop as soon as possible, a man’s legally owned land something that no other man, white or otherwise, could ever take away from him. Tom came up with the minimum down payment followed by the slowest repayment schedule allowable, taking the full twenty years permissible under the terms of his loan to finally pay it off.

  Tom even went about the business of education his own way, was front and centre at the evening adult reading classes that the Reverend King and the other teachers held for the new arrivals, but refused to learn to write, politely insisting he only wanted to know how to read, and then only enough to know how to read the Bible. Fittingly, a worn copy of it along with an old pipe, sharing space on top of a small, mirrorless dresser of drawers, looked to be his only luxury items.

  “I want you to have this,” he says, standing up from his crouch.

  I go over to get a better look at what he’s holding in both hands. Once I do, even though I’ve never seen one before, not in person, I immediately know what it is. “Whose is it?” I say. It’s not exactly what I meant, but it’s probably as close as I’m going to get.

  “Somebody’s. Back in Mississippi. Somebody’s from there.”

  Tom’s still holding it, and I’m still staring at it. “Is it—I mean, was it—yours?” I say.

  “Just somebody’s back in Mississippi.” He holds it out for me to take it from him, like a valet offering a king his crown.

  I take it and hold it like he did, cradled across both hands. Each shackle has its own keyhole, and there’s a chain about six inches long and three inches thick joining them together.

  Tom can tell what I’m thinking. “So he don’t run away,” he says, “but so he can still work.”

  I nod, keep looking. I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know what else to say.

  “Put it on,” Tom says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean put it on. Like you was having to wear it.”

  I don’t move, so Tom takes the thing back and sinks to one knee and pulls up my pant leg and clasps one of the shackles around my left ankle. “Ordinarily, that’d be tighter some, on account of it being locked.”

  I feel enraged. I feel unworthy. I feel honoured. I feel sick to my stomach.

  “See now how it feels like to wear both,” he says, but before he can attach the other shackle, I bend over and unclasp the first. We both stand up.

  “It’s okay,” I say, handing it back.

  Tom picks up his pipe from the dresser and carefully lights it with a match from the box he pulls out of his shirt pocket. He slowly shakes his head. “It belongs to you now,” he says.

  “Why do you want me to have it?”

  Patiently sucking at his pipe until it begins to burn to life, “A man don’t live forever.” Him, he means. He won’t live forever.

  “Fine, but why not. . .?” Exactly. Why not what?

  Tom points at me with his pipe. “I want you to have it.”

  “But—”

  “Boss, there ain’t nothing more to say.”

  “Tom, look—”

 
; “And you keepin’ on talkin’, you just sayin’ more of it.”

  *

  On our morning walk, on our way to Tecumseh Park, Henry and I detour along King Street in order to stop in at the post office. Schopenhauer and Goethe and Heine may all sound wonderfully beguilingly the same to me, but since Loretta actually understands every word she reads aloud, I need to periodically replenish my Germanic reading list. Obviously, Hegel is out—no musty metaphysics for either of us, no matter how dialectically dressed up to sound like science—and Loretta’s sole reading rule is nothing even remotely theological, so Feuerbach and Schleiermacher aren’t options either. I’ve ordered as many volumes as are available of a young philosopher whose name I’ve become familiar with through the pages of the Fortnightly, a Friedrich Nietzsche. The little I’ve read about his work is intriguing, but it’s the other names that his name is often linked with—Socrates, Heraclitus, Schopenhauer—that are most compelling. You know a person by the company he keeps. And it’s an astute autodidact who pays attention to who’s friends with whom.

  It’s election time in Chatham and most of the storefronts we pass have signs hanging in their windows urging the populace’s support for either the incumbent, Mayor Henry Smyth, or his challenger, Manson Campbell. Campbell is playing the radical this time out, advocating not only that Chatham officially change its status from town to city but that four hundred cords of cobblestone be purchased with taxpayer money with which to pave Queen Street. I’m all for progress and clean boots, so if I manage to remember where and when to vote, Campbell is my man. And if I don’t, Chatham will still be Chatham and Queen Street won’t be any muddier than it was before.

  I leave Henry outside the post office and let the bell over the door bring Larwill to the front counter. There’s no smug smile for me today, only the most nominal, barely detectable nod, as if a single genuine greeting costs two hundred dollars and Larwill has only a nickel to his name, and he retrieves my package and produces the piece of paper I need to initial so promptly that I’m almost back out on the street when I’m left wondering if I imagined the entire exchange. But when a woman and her young daughter enter through the door I hold open for them and I hear, “Good morning, Mrs. Carpenter, good morning, Elizabeth, and what can I do for you ladies today?” I’m reassured that my hold on reality is still secure, at least for now. The woman thanks me before replying to Larwill’s query, I tell her she’s welcome, and Henry and I are on our way again.