David

by Ray Robertson

  Ordinarily, I stayed out of the bars in the daytime, but I’d just returned from delivering not one, not two, but three perfectly preserved bodies to London, and after spending all night on the road, a sleep-inducing drink or two didn’t seem uncalled for. Besides, it was the day that the result of the plebiscite was to be announced in the afternoon Planet, and the saloons were a shoulder-to-shoulder sight to see. Not that there was much suspense about which way the vote was going to go.

  At the time, Chatham counted eighteen saloons, where good whiskey cost a dime a shot, and the sight of a man staggering down King Street was not in the least uncommon. Yet the Planet, “The Voice of the People,” weighed in on the Yea side of the question in editorial after editorial, local merchants proudly hung signs in their storefront windows illustrating their clear support for all things temperate and decent, and even the already-abstaining inhabitants of Buxton got in on the act, the Reverend King himself leading a procession of every voting-eligible Elgin Negro into town to cast their votes in favour of sobriety, civic responsibility, and clear-minded rationality.

  “Scott.”

  “Hey?”

  “I said, says here, ‘Officially known as the Canada Temperance Act, this measure, put through the Dominion Parliament by the Honourable R.W. Scott.’ That’s the fellow whose idea it was, it seems. Scott.”

  At the table next to me, a man hunched over a greasy copy of yesterday’s newspaper was talking to another man twirling one of the ends of his moustache like he was attempting to roll a cigarette out of it.

  “I suppose,” the man with the moustache said.

  “Not that much can be done about it now.”

  “Of course not. It’s going to be the law.”

  “It’s not as if you could open up your own saloon.”

  “Of course not. That would be against the law.”

  I swallowed the last of my drink, laid another quarter on the table for the bartender to see.

  “Says here there’s going to be a celebration next week to commemorate the Queen’s golden jubilee,” the man with the newspaper said.

  “Is that so?”

  “That’s what it says.”

  “I suppose I’ll attend, then. If there’s going to be a celebration.”

  “That’s what it says.”

  “I suppose I’ll attend, then. I suppose I’ll bring Candice and the children along. I wouldn’t be surprised if we made an afternoon of it.”

  Four weeks later, Chatham’s first renegade saloon was open for business. Coming up with a name had been the easiest part. Sophia means “wisdom” in Greek. It was the very first word that the Reverend King had taught me.

  *

  The revivalists have taken over Tecumseh Park, so Henry and I detour all the way around and end up on Prince Street, over by the new school. The new school that’s now ten years old, the new school no more. Another decade dead just like that. Used to be it was enough simply to stay out of churches; now you’ve got to be careful where you’re walking as well.

  Even a quarter of a mile away you can hear them. Not the preachers exhorting their tent-cramped parishioners to feel the saving grace of Jesus, to receive the loving embrace of Jesus, to accept Jesus Christ as their personal saviour, but the equally frenzied effect of their soapbox frothing, the thundering Amens and Hallelujahs and Help me Jesuses of the assembled. To each his own delusion, I suppose, but we’re most loyal to our first fairy tales. My Jesus was better. He just was.

  Jesus is a prism: hold the Son up to the sun a little to the right and He’s Anglican clean and haughty High Tory; slide Him a little to the left and He’s a dirty but dignified Everyman, bleeding hands and feet callused and sore just like anyone’s who dies a little bit more after a particularly bad day at work. The shriekers and the screamers back in Tecumseh Park know that all they have to do to be saved is say the right words and have faith in the right things, but I wasn’t raised that way, I wasn’t taught to believe that salvation was quite that easy.

  The Reverend King never spoke the word “Jesus” without somehow at least implying the word “work.” Work that made you a better person. You making the world a better place. A better you and a better world how we go about the busy business of glorifying God.

  Once, when George and I hadn’t done our Latin translation assignments because we’d been fishing at Deer Pond so late the night before we’d fallen asleep as soon as we’d gotten home, Mr. Rapier informed the Reverend King, who asked to see us after school the next day. Neither of us had ever been in trouble with the Reverend King before, so we didn’t know how frightened to feel on the walk over.

  After giving us an opportunity to explain our excuse and then helping us understand why it wasn’t an acceptable excuse and then extracting from us a promise to always take care of work before we allowed ourselves pleasure, “Jesus loves us all just the way we are,” he said. “But he loves us far, far too much to let us stay that way.”

  Time helps a mind forget what it doesn’t want to know.

  Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.

  I haven’t forgotten.

  *

  If I was going to set myself up selling illegal liquor, the first thing I needed to do was secure someplace that seemed relatively innocuous yet was still accessible enough that the average caterwauler could locate it even if he was already halfway in the bag. I found it the first day I went looking, a small house near King Street that was buried behind an all-enclosing fence of four tall rows of cedars and which rested upon a mildewy basement big enough to hold, by my own estimation, thirty men and enough liquor to keep them there. The house was empty, had been for months, and the absentee owner’s representative said that his client was motivated to sell because of the extensive water damage recently done to the basement.

  “A dirty business down there, I’m afraid,” the man said after we’d climbed back upstairs. Scarecrow thin, and with a warm Scottish burr stuck to his tongue, the man had shown me around the property with a polite forthrightness that I didn’t imagine extended to every agent whose potential client was an anonymous Negro.

  “There are dirtier ones,” I said.

  “A dirty business to make it clean again, I mean. Like a tomb down there now, it is, I’m afraid.”

  I held off telling him that, if it came to it, I had some experience in that field as well.

  He balked when I offered to pay him in cash—“This isn’t how transactions of this sort are ordinarily undertaken, Mr. King”—but whether because I’d accepted his price without bothering to make a counter-offer or because the property had already been up for sale for so long, he eventually took my money, almost every dollar I’d saved from a decade’s worth of dutiful digging and robbing. It had taken me forty years, but I was now the legal owner of my very own home and place of business both.

  After dumping my books upstairs along with what little I’d accumulated in my most recent rooming house, I got down to the real task at hand, transforming the damp, fetid basement into a habitable, illegal saloon. First I cleaned—there was no question of hiring any help, even if I’d had the money—which foremost meant scrubbing the mouldy walls and floor with bucket after bucket of chlorine and hot water. That there were no windows would, I knew, be an advantage eventually, but at the moment it only meant that an already long and tedious job was made even more so for having to frequently dash upstairs in order to gulp down reviving drafts of fresh air like a suffocating, half-expired miner.

  Creating an inviting atmosphere wasn’t a priority, at least not in the beginning—the booze would do all the inducing I needed—so I bought cheap straight-backed chairs anywhere I could find them, scoured the dump for broken ones of any kind and repaired them, and built several serviceable tables out of empty pickle barrels I purchased for practically nothing from Miller’s Dry Goods. And when I wasn’t cleaning up the basement, I was still digging up bodies for Burwell, whom I’d worked out a new arrangement with: in lieu of ca
sh, one fresh corpse in return for ten bottles of bootlegged liquor. Eventually, I knew, I had to get my own underground connection, which wouldn’t just be easier and cheaper but would allow me finally to be finished with Burwell. But for now the only thing that mattered was stockpiling as much rotgut as possible.

  Burwell’s initial amusement at my request for a change in the usual method of compensation ended as soon as he determined that the whiskey wasn’t for me. As long as he believed I was pouring his illegal booze down my own throat, he was happy, just one more rusty nail in the coffin of my grave-digging dependence. When he had trouble keeping up with my demand for more and more whiskey, though, and failed to see any obvious signs I was drinking myself into sodden submission, he started asking questions.

  “Just out of curiosity, lad, how much are you making?”

  “On what?”

  “Markup. I assume your thirsty new friends are paying a wee bit more per bottle than what I’m letting you have them for.”

  I’d known that this moment was going to come sooner or later, and since I hadn’t settled on the lie I was going to use to keep him off my entrepreneurial trail as long as possible, Burwell’s misunderstanding of what I wanted his whiskey for worked as well as anything I could come up with.

  “You agreed to sell the whiskey to me,” I said. “You even set the terms yourself. Whatever I do with it after it’s mine is my own business.”

  Burwell held up his hands as if intent upon proving he had ten fingers just like everybody else. “Easy, lad. Of course it’s your business. I was merely inquiring as to your profit margin. As one businessman to another.”

  There wasn’t any merely about it. Whatever I was up to, and no matter how little extra income he figured I was bringing in, Burwell wanted in on it. To own a piece of the burgeoning illicit-booze business, of course, but even more so, to continue owning me. The tongue that wasn’t in Ferguson’s mouth anymore told me that Burwell’s employees weren’t the ones who decided they didn’t work for him anymore.

  In the meantime, until he could determine the seriousness of my moonshine moonlighting, he could at least make it as difficult as possible for me to do it. Even after I’d delivered him two bodies just the week before, when I showed up with a third a week later he tried to convince me that I was mistaken, that our arrangement had been for only eight bottles per corpse.

  “Fuck you, Burwell,” I said.

  Ferguson and I had already unloaded the body from my wagon and into the boat that they sometimes used, but I grabbed it by its ankles through the thin sheet it was wrapped in and started yanking it out by myself, in the process setting the boat, and Burwell and Ferguson, gently rocking from side to side. The moon was the only light we allowed ourselves, but I heard Ferguson slowly unsheathe his knife. Burwell just laughed. Only when I’d dragged the corpse nearly free of the craft did he bother to speak.

  “Now, David. What are you going to do with a dead body?”

  “That’s my fucking business,” I said. “I fucking dug it up out of the fucking ground myself, so I’ll do with it whatever the fuck I want.”

  Over the course of the previous twenty-four hours, I’d spent approximately eleven of them on my hands and knees scouring the basement with enough chlorine that I’d literally burnt away most of my nose hairs—only to discover that, underneath the glaze of mould, there was a seemingly imperishable bloodstain the size of a large living room carpet—four of them at the dump scavenging for broken furniture and fixtures, and four more pilfering and delivering a recently deceased human being. It felt refreshing, invigorating even, to do something so irrationally self-destructive, a little insane something just for me.

  Only when the corpse’s neck was resting on the edge of the boat—rigor mortis keeping the head from falling backward—did Burwell finally relent. “You know, now that I think about it, lad, I believe you’re right.” He reached underneath the stern of the boat and held out the two missing bottles.

  I was too tired to feel victorious, simply took them. Ferguson slid his knife back into its sheath and untied the line from the dock.

  “Why lie?” I said, too exhausted to say more. “Why lie when you don’t need to?” Ferguson dipped the oars into the water. Over the soft splash of their first immersion, “That saddens me, lad, it really does,” Burwell said. “That tells me you haven’t learned as much as I thought you had from working for me for all these years.”

  Ferguson had found his rowing rhythm by now, the boat was disappearing down the Thames into the dark.

  “If you’re not cheating, lad,” I heard Burwell say, “you’re not really trying.”

  I put the bottles in the back of the wagon and started home. Thankfully, I was too tired to stay angry. I had more important things to expend my time on. I had blood to scrub out of my floor.

  *

  Busy getting Sophia’s ready for business, I hardly had time to eat or sleep, never mind notice a stray dog. When I did finally spot him, though, it was just a furry flash. As soon as he saw me see him, he rabbited out of sight through the line of trees at the back of the lot. I emptied my bucket of dirty water and chlorine and stood up straight, stretched. There weren’t any nearby neighbours, the closest thing being the brick rear wall of the bank several hundred feet from the front door of the house, so whomever he belonged to, or had belonged to, they weren’t likely anyone who lived close by.

  Then the dog and I began our cat-and-mouse game. Every time I would re-emerge outside with a fresh dirty bucket, there he’d be, waiting for me at the back edge of the property, lingering amidst the trees, but only long enough to see me see him before darting off until the next time, when we’d start all over again. I wanted to get a better look at him, but knew that if I made a move in his direction or even attempted to lure him closer, not only would he probably run away, he might run away for good.

  All that was left to do before I could transfer downstairs the tables, chairs, and bottles of booze I’d stockpiled was to rid the basement floor of the bloodstains I’d discovered hiding underneath the layers of mould I’d worked so hard to remove. Compared to the blood, eliminating the mould had been easy, like trying to erase the green of a leaf after first wiping away the morning dew. I told myself I’d give the floor one final scrub and that was it; if it wasn’t blood-free by then, I’d admit defeat and start looking for a rug. And this time, whatever the washing result, when I emptied out the bucket, I wouldn’t look at the dog. Not directly, anyway.

  It was the middle of the afternoon, but, lacking windows, I’d hung up oil lamps in every corner of the basement to go along with the one I kept beside me wherever I was working. The stain looked to be the end result of several different stains, like a number of slim rivers of blood had congregated to create a large lake of blood. The floor tilted slightly toward the middle of the room, so it made sense as far as that went, but where the blood had come from stumped me. I soaked the brush in the bucket and scrubbed the floor so hard I only stopped when it felt as if my wrist was going to snap. Duller, slightly diluted maybe, but still there. “Fuck it,” I said, standing up, bucket in hand. I was running an illegal tavern, after all, not a luxury hotel.

  From the moment I stepped outside, I made a point of not looking anywhere but at the ground or the bucket, kept at my task without even once so much as glancing at the dog. When the bucket was emptied and it and the brush were set out in the sun to dry, I occupied myself with whatever chore was at hand—pulling weeds, picking up rocks, gathering up debris. Even when I ended up as far as the middle of the lot, dragging a charred log back toward the house, as long as I didn’t look directly at the dog, he stayed where he was. From the corner of my eye I could see he’d even sat down now, like he was amused to watch me go about my business. I could also see, aside from the patches of fur missing from his black coat, that a good chunk of his right ear was gone, looked as if it had been bitten right in half, and that one of his eyes was permanently shut tight. Given the condition of the re
st of him, I didn’t doubt that the socket underneath the closed lid was empty.

  I stopped myself from doing what I wanted to do—turn to him, talk to him, tell him not to be afraid, that I wasn’t a threat, that I wanted to help—and walked as nonchalantly as possible back inside the house, but not down to the basement this time. Except for my books and the furnishings and supplies I’d been steadily assembling for Sophia’s and the few things I needed to cowboy it out on the parlour floor—a mattress, a suitcase of clothes, a bar of soap—the house itself was still as empty as the day I took possession. The kitchen was even barer: a bottle of whiskey, a water pitcher and a glass, a loaf of bread, and a couple of tomatoes. I didn’t have anything else to give him, so I tore off a chunk of bread. In spite of his wounds, it was obvious he was still alert and energetic, so he must have been drinking from the Thames, didn’t need any water.

  I shut the screen door behind me, careful not to let it slam, and walked in a straight line to the middle of the yard with my eyes focused on my feet. I got down on my knees and held out the bread in the palm of my right hand, stared at the earth directly beneath my chin. I could feel the dog creeping toward me a foot or two at a time, always stopping to reassess the situation, to be careful, to be sure. About twelve feet from where I was kneeling he stopped for good, sat down like he had when he was watching me working in the yard. I knew he wasn’t coming any closer, at least not for now, so I placed the piece of bread on the ground and walked back to the house.

  From the kitchen window, I watched him wait to make sure I’d gone inside before grabbing the bread in his mouth and running off through the trees at the back of the lot. I wasn’t disappointed he hadn’t let me feed him; if it had been me, I would have done the same thing. A stray has to be vigilant. A stray has to be self-reliant. If he decided to come back tomorrow, I’d make sure to have some meat for him. And a name, too. I decided I’d call him Waldo.

  *

  I knew Thompson was doomed the day he was moved to testify about Walt Whitman. I remember the precise date—July 11, 1887—because it was the first time he came into Sophia’s, only the second night I was open for business.