It wasn’t difficult to acquire an instant clientele. It might have been hard to find anyone—especially anyone who considered himself a respected member of Chatham’s business community—who didn’t publicly support the Scott Act, but if you paid attention to the eyes of the strangers you passed on the sidewalk or the faces you encountered while looking for roofing nails or a new sledgehammer at the hardware store, it was obvious that something was wrong, some stubborn collective itch wasn’t being scratched, some essential numinous nutrient was lacking in the local diet. The Planet cheerfully reported that church attendance had increased by more than fifteen percent since the implementation of prohibition, but it wasn’t God that packed the pews and heavied the collection plate, it was the need to get drunk. Which is just a different way of pronouncing God anyway.
The whiskey was barely drinkable and the basement smelt and was still damp and what we were all doing down there wasn’t legal, but within forty-eight hours of opening for business I’d already recouped my start-up costs. I was still finding my pouring/charging/refilling rhythm when I had my first security scare. Standing directly behind two bearded men pressing up against the bar with their outstretched empty glasses was another man I recognized but couldn’t quite place—rarely a promising combination. I served the two bearded men their drinks and took their coins and prepared myself to do whatever had to be done. One way or another, I wasn’t going back to the graveyard by choice.
“Well, well, hello again,” the man said.
As soon as the first Scot-splattered words flew from the man’s mouth, I remembered who he was: Thompson, the lawyer who’d sold me the house whose basement we were both standing in. Which still didn’t explain why he was here. Most of my customers were workingmen, drinking and smoking and doing what workingmen do and will always do, trying their best to forget the workday done and the too-soon one to come.
Thompson removed a five-dollar bill from his leather billfold and placed it on the bar. “Whiskey, please, Mr. King,” he said.
I looked at the bill then back at him. “Whiskey is twenty-five cents a shot,” I said.
“And given the present circumstances, quite reasonably priced at that,” Thompson answered, pushing the five dollars my way. “I was wondering, however, if I might pay in advance for tonight’s libations. I’m afraid that occasionally, when I’m enjoying myself as I expect to do this evening, I have a tendency to forget to settle my tab. Not for reasons nefarious, of course, but simply out of innocent absent-mindedness.”
“You want to pay in advance for twenty shots of whiskey?” I said, still not picking up the bill. Anyone who planned to drink that much alcohol in one sitting likely wasn’t anyone I had to worry about. Not to notify the police, anyway.
“Oh, no, of course not,” Thompson said. “That includes a dollar tip for what, I’m sure, will be your more than able service as well.”
I poured him his drink and took the money.
By the end of the night, three things had become clear. First, if I continued to provide alcohol and a safe place to consume it, it wasn’t unrealistic to imagine myself a very wealthy man someday. Second, that providing alcohol and a safe place to consume it weren’t my only job requirements; at the conclusion of every night’s labour I could expect to be as filthy and exhausted as I had ever been as a grave robber, with the added insult of smelling as if every cigarette and cigar smoked that night had used me as its ashtray. And third, working among the drunken living as opposed to the recently deceased wasn’t necessarily an improvement in working conditions. Over the course of that night’s twelve hours alone, I’d had to stop two arguments before they turned into fights, confiscate two blackjacks and one fishing knife, mop up a belch of vomit and a sleeping drunk’s pool of urine, and listen to enough lies, self-pity, and out-and-out twaddle to keep any confession-hearing priest busy until the arrival of the twentieth century.
Thompson won the job of being my sole work-shift voluntary acquaintance by default: didn’t get cantankerous, no matter how much he drank; didn’t carry any weapons; didn’t lose control of his bodily functions; and didn’t talk about himself unless directly asked, and even then remained elusive to the point of outright evasion. He liked to talk, but only about things that excited him. His own life, apparently, wasn’t one of those things. Walt Whitman was.
Wiping down a nearby empty table and noticing him desultorily pecking away at a small notepad, I’d asked, jokingly, if he was writing a poem. What I really wanted to know was if he had any idea where the bloodstains I’d discovered on the basement floor of his former client’s house came from, but I thought it best for now to separate work from pleasure, at least until I got a better fix on him. Thompson shut his notepad and deposited it in the inside pocket of his suit jacket and leaned forward with both elbows on the table and didn’t stop talking until he’d said what he had to say.
“There is only one poet alive today, and that man’s name is Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman the joyful liberator. Walt Whitman the unrepentant fornicator. Walt Whitman the secular man’s saviour. Walt Whitman the proud apostle of democracy, science, and steam. And yet, and yet—” Thompson gulped what was left in his glass, like he was afraid of something getting stuck in his throat. “And yet Walt Whitman remains a neglected martyr, continues to live in despair and loneliness and want, and whose immortal poems in their public reception have fallen stillborn in this country as well as in that of his native United States, immortal poems that have been met with denial and disgust and scorn and even charges of outright obscenity, and, in a very real pecuniary and worldly sense, have most certainly destroyed the life of their author.”
I’d finished cleaning the table just in time for three men just off their jobs on the railroad to sit down. Before I could get them their whiskey, Thompson continued. A little of the pleasant affability of before returned to his voice.
“Don’t misunderstand me, though. All of these admittedly unfortunate circumstances are no more than he himself expected. He had his choice when he commenced upon his task. But Walt Whitman bid neither for soft eulogies, big money returns, nor the approbation of existing schools and conventions. He has had his say and has put it unerringly on record that Walt Whitman’s value thereof will be vindicated by Time and Time alone.” Thompson noticed the empty glass in his hand. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to trouble you to replenish my drink, Mr. King.”
All three men from the railroad were now staring at Thompson. It was difficult to determine what they wanted more: their whiskey or Thompson’s neck.
I turned to the biggest, dirtiest one. “A bottle and three glasses, coming right up,” I said. And to Thompson, “Why don’t you sit closer to the bar, nearer to me?”
Thompson smiled. “So we can talk some more,” he said.
“Exactly,” I replied.
*
It’s time for Loretta to leave for Montreal again. Twice a year, every spring and fall, six nights and seven days of preening, pampering, and all-around polishing. She always stays at the same luxury hotel, the Rasco, supplements every breakfast, lunch, and dinner with plenty of beluga caviar and very cold Mumm champagne, and for several years has employed the same elderly female German masseuse, who arrives at her hotel room every morning at ten to give her her hour-long wake-up working-over. None of it is an indulgence, however, she never fails to point out, particularly when attempting to convince me to join her. Inevitably, it always comes back to my clock.
“No matter how well made a clock is, it still needs to be rewound, does it not?”
We’re both looking at the long-case clock standing in the corner of the library, watching it patiently counting the seconds and minutes, mindful of minding its own ticking business.
“Just like people,” I say, knowing my part.
“Yes, just like people. And remove that foolish grin from your face. This mocking of yours of things you do not understand, this is as good a reason you need to go away from time to time as any other.�
��
“Just because I don’t feel the need to take a holiday like other people doesn’t mean I’m mocking something I don’t understand.”
“I am sorry, but yes, it does. You are like the person who says, ‘I know what I like,’ but what they are really saying is, ‘I like what I know.’”
Loretta directs her attention back to the small box of photographs resting on her lap, but I’m still looking at the clock. I knew that one day I wanted to have my own long-case clock the very first time I saw the one in the Reverend King’s sitting room. Aside from the Reverend King himself, I’d never been in the presence of anyone or anything so quietly, unfailingly dignified. The first thing I purchased when this house was built and finally ready to be moved into was an eighteenth-century Scottish mahogany long-case clock made by James Howden of Edinburgh. After what I had to pay to have it shipped over, it ended up costing only slightly less than what I’d originally paid for the half-acre of land that the house is built upon.
“I know enough to know that I do—that I buy—plenty of things that aren’t just meat and potatoes.”
“You do not eat meat.”
“It’s an expression. It means things that are only essential.”
Loretta considers this. “This is not an effective expression. Particularly for one such as yourself who does not eat meat.”
“Anyway, the point I was making is that I buy things—rare books, for instance—that—”
“You buy things, you buy things—what you need is not to buy things, what you need is to look at the things you already have with new eyes. This is what every person needs.”
All the while she’s talking, Loretta is sifting through her most recent collection of photographs. If anything, it seems only to sharpen her focus on what she’s saying.
“And I suppose I’ll get these new eyes if I travel three hundred miles to eat expensive dead fish eggs and have my back rubbed by a stranger?”
Loretta looks up, sighs for effect. “Please do not try to be foolish. This is not something you need to try to do.”
Just for that, I decide to punish her by denying her the pleasure of my continued conversation on the slim chance that she’ll actually even notice, pick up where I left off in my book. Actually, it doesn’t matter where I last was, as I’m skipping and skimming anyway, one illusion-loosening page of Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man as good as any other to revisit and delight in all over again. Whether because my eyes, like the rest of me, are older—itch and burn if I read too long—or because I’m just getting lazy, I prefer to reread beloved books now rather than search out new favourites. In point of fact, it’s much simpler than that: I like to hear familiar voices. The Martyrdom of Man was, yes, one of those books—portrayed Jesus, for instance, as neither the son of God nor even a great moral teacher, but simply as a fallible, if admittedly alluring, human being, and only one of a number of very similar contemporary Jewish fanatics. But just as much as his liberating message, it was Winwood Reade, the thoroughly sensible but always sprightly messenger, who compelled me to listen and learn. As I do now, this time as to why Rome really declined and fell:
Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung.
History made human, all too delightfully human. Just as feisty and refreshing as the very first time I read it.
Probably because she’s detected yet another foolish grin on my face, “You are a confused man,” Loretta says.
Still smiling, “I was just amused by something I read,” I say. “Listen to this. Reade—that’s the author, Winwood Reade—he—”
Loretta waves away my kind offer of a complimentary lecture. “I am speaking of you—you, David—as confused.”
Well, I’m confused about one thing, anyway. “What am I supposed to be confused about?”
Now that she has my attention, Loretta resumes sorting through her box of photographs. “On this hand, you are a very brave man. You choose a life for yourself—a good life—and you live it as you wish. This is not common, I do not have to tell you this.”
I easily avoid any danger of sinning from an excess of pride because I know there’s another hand coming. Whenever there’s occasion to feel good, you can usually count on the other hand.
“But on the other hand . . .” I say.
“But on this other hand, you are very much afraid.”
I lower my eyes to my book without bothering to read what’s there. “Ah, I see. And what exactly is it I’m afraid of?”
“How would I know such a thing? But always the way you are unwilling to go anywhere or do anything you have not already been or done before, this is how you are confused, yes? You are a brave man and you are an afraid man.”
“That’s not what ‘confused’ means. What you mean is—” What does she mean? “What you mean is, I’m a contradiction.”
“Is a contradiction not confusing?”
“I suppose so, but—”
“Then they are the same, yes? And you are surely one who is confused.”
Even if I did know what she’s talking about, I know it’s better to nod instead of argue. I pick up my book again. Almost immediately I put it back down.
“When did you say you leave for Montreal?”
17
I’d quit plenty of other jobs before, and this, I told myself, was just one more, albeit one I’d held longer than any other. I’d finally found someone who would supply Sophia’s with the ever-increasing amount of whiskey I needed and who didn’t demand dead bodies as currency, and at a much better rate, too. I knew Burwell wouldn’t be pleased to lose a veteran grave robber, but he was a businessman, he’d understand. He’d have to.
“So that’s it, then,” I said.
I’d informed Burwell that this was the last human being I’d ever disturb from his supposedly eternal resting place, and Burwell had motioned for Ferguson to give me the last ten bottles of whiskey I was ever going to purchase from him. I’d decided I would tell him about Sophia’s if he asked me again what I needed all the whiskey for, but he didn’t. Burwell was sitting in the passenger seat of his wagon, I in the driver’s seat of mine. It was our usual sort of meeting place, an empty road beside a fallow field just before sundown.
Ferguson handed me the box of whiskey and I placed it in the back of the wagon without getting out of my seat. Part of me said to climb down and go and shake Burwell’s hand; another part of me said to stay where I was, don’t get out of the wagon no matter what. I stayed in the wagon.
“I’m sure I’ll be seeing you around,” I said, neither sure nor desirous of any such thing.
“Of course you will, lad. Why wouldn’t you?”
Ferguson had climbed back in the wagon and grabbed the reins.
“So, that’s it, then,” I said.
“So you’ve said. Twice.”
I rustled the reins; there wasn’t anything left to do but leave.
As I pulled away, “I’ll be seeing you soon, lad,” I heard Burwell call out.
I wondered whether or not I should turn right around and tell Burwell no, he wouldn’t, not if I had anything to do with it. But before I could make up my mind, it was too late, I could hear Burwell’s wagon going the other way.
*
For some, it’s love gone wrong. For others, money gone missing. For still others, good health going going gone and not coming back. To each prospective suicide his own unique inspiration. For Thompson, it was Walt Whitman’s garbage.
It was December 24 the entire month of July in the summer of 1887, Sophia’s first summer of business, Thompson for weeks before he was supposed to travel to London to hear speak and quite possibly even meet Walt Whitman suffering one long, continuous, nervous night before Christmas. Thompson had learned th
at not only did Whitman have a younger brother living under the care of the insane asylum in London, Ontario, whom he periodically visited, but its superintendent, Richard Maurice Bucke, was both a disciple and an intimate of the aged poet, and that Bucke had persuaded Whitman to read from his work for the local literary society the next time he was in town. Only by nightly numbing himself with my whiskey and just as unfailingly monologuing my ear raw with what he expected the great man to look and talk and act like and how he honestly didn’t know what to expect of himself if he was permitted, however briefly, actually to occupy the same physical space as his long-time hero, was he able to avoid boiling over before the big day even arrived and to limit himself to a low but steady daily simmer.
One night—after closing time, no one left but Thompson and me—he talked and talked until I think he said something true. Because, whether or not you want it, run a hot water tap long enough and you’re eventually going to get scalding water. It began with a poem. No matter how much whiskey he’d had, Thompson saved his recitation of Whitman’s verse for when Sophia’s was empty except for us. You don’t survive as an outcast by being stupid.
“‘Of two simple men I saw today, on the pier, in the midst of the crowd, parting the parting of dear friends,
“‘The one to remain hung on the other’s neck, and passionately kissed him,
“‘While the one to depart, tightly pressed the one to remain in his arms.’”
I looked up from my mop. Thompson was so rarely quiet these days, the sudden silence sounded loud. He picked up his glass and swallowed without appearing to notice it was empty. He shut his eyes and kept them that way once he began talking again.
“Please understand, in Whitman’s conception of comradeship—and here’s the thing one needs to understand, here’s the thing that desperately needs to be understood—in Whitman’s conception of comradeship as best exemplified, of course, in the poem ‘Calamus,’ he allows for the possibility—and that’s all I’m saying—all he’s saying, rather, all Whitman is saying—he allows for the possibility of the possible intrusion—the wrong word, I’m afraid, but it’s all that comes to mind at the moment—allows for the possible intrusion of those possibly amorous emotions and actions that no doubt—because there is no doubt, there really is no doubt—do occur, occasionally, between men. According to Whitman, you see, such emotions and actions are to be left entirely to the inclinations and conscience of the individuals involved. The individuals who are comrades. True comrades. True individuals who are true comrades.”
David Page 22
