David

by Ray Robertson

  Thompson opened his eyes to me looking at him. He looked back at me like he was waiting for me to say something he’d been slowly dying his entire life for someone to finally, mercifully, say. And because I wasn’t the one to say it—could only nod into my bucket and nervously re-soak my mop and sincerely hope that one day he’d hear it—Thompson stood up from his table and wordlessly exited upstairs to merge with the night slowly dissolving into morning. It wouldn’t be the last time he quoted from Walt Whitman while I cleaned up, but he never recited another line quite so explicitly . . . comradely ever again.

  The day he returned from London, I found him sitting on the ground with his back flat against the locked door of Sophia’s when I arrived to open up for the night. Thompson’s wrinkled, whiskey-stained suit showed he’d been sleeping in it, probably since the day he’d left Chatham. There was another, more recent stain spread across his crotch that I was fairly certain wasn’t whiskey but that had certainly started out that way.

  There are two kinds of regulars: those who drink so as not to have to speak and those whose sole purpose in public drinking is to speak and be heard. Everybody gets served the same whiskey, but a successful publican knows whom to politely ignore and whom to patiently endure. Thompson waited until I’d lit the lamps and poured him his first drink before starting to talk. It takes a few minutes for one’s eyes to entirely adjust to the lamps’ soft defeat of the basement’s darkness. Thompson’s voice mingled with light and dark like a smoke ring on a damp fall night.

  “Yes, he spoke, I heard Walt Whitman speak,” he said, answering the question I hadn’t asked. “He spoke on the subject of Thomas Paine. Of how Thomas Paine wasn’t the notorious infidel that the Christian clergymen have made him out to be, but, instead, was a man who had done more to secure the independence of the United States than any other. He didn’t read from his poetry. He never mentioned his poems.”

  I kept busy readying Sophia’s for the evening’s second customer, but kept an eye on Thompson’s glass as well.

  “The assembly hall was ill lit and dank. There were only thirty odd of us, although ten times that, at least, could easily have been accommodated. But I took a chair in the middle of the first row and it wasn’t long before the dimness and the mustiness and the scraping of empty chairs didn’t matter. I—” Thompson finally took a sip of his whiskey. “We waited for Whitman to appear.”

  The lamps had done their job by now, tricked night into day one more time.

  “A few minutes later, Whitman appeared on the platform. He walked slowly—he used a stick—and his carriage was stiff, as if another, concealed stick was keeping his spine in place and his body upright. He must have had a stroke—he must have—because he talked even slower than he walked, he talked like every word he spoke cost him physical effort. His beard was long and white. What has been said about his long white beard is accurate.”

  I topped off Thompson’s glass. He didn’t thank me, didn’t even acknowledge me.

  “And his jacket was buttoned wrong.”

  Thompson drained his drink, set it back down on the table with a smack that could only have meant either he was done for the night or he wanted another without delay. I didn’t have to ask to know which one it was.

  “The last button on his jacket was buttoned where the second button should have been. He looked like a confused old man. He looked like a damn fool.” Thompson downed the refill like he was attempting to kill the disgust that the words he’d just spoken had left behind in his mouth.

  “So he looked unkempt,” I said from behind the bar. Bartenders get paid to listen, not lecture, but this seemed as good an exception to the rule as any. “Dottiness is an old man’s privilege.”

  Thompson didn’t appear to hear what I said, let alone consider it. “Then it was over. People clapped their hands and some people pressed around him to talk to him, but I had to get outside. I walked and walked without knowing where I was going. The fresh air helped. I sat down in a park when it seemed safe to stop moving.”

  A man, a workingman, with a newspaper underneath his arm and dead eyes where his life should have been, found a table far enough away from us that, after I served him his whiskey, Thompson continued where he’d left off.

  “I don’t know how long I sat there—half an hour, an hour maybe—but when I got up, I knew what I had to do, there was only one thing I could do. My ex-colleague at the practice, the one who knew Bucke, the one who had told me about Whitman coming to town, had also told me that Whitman was staying at the Noyes Hotel. I needed to speak to him. Privately. I needed to speak to him immediately. I hired a carriage and was there in ten minutes.”

  I poured Thompson another drink, but he ignored it, went to the cold fireplace and put his hands in the pockets of his jacket and stared at the empty grate.

  “I told the concierge I had a message for Mr. Whitman from Dr. Bucke, and he gave me the room number without asking any questions. His room was on the third floor. I didn’t know if I possessed the courage to knock until the instant I felt my knuckles against the grain of the wood on the door, but once I did, I knew everything was going to be all right. When there was no answer, I knocked again, twice this time, and knew that, even though I didn’t know what I was going to say, once I saw him, I would.”

  Thompson squatted on his heels in front of the fireplace, took the poker from its stand, and pushed around the coal-black dead embers inside. “But no one answered. I knocked again, and again, but no one answered. I still don’t know how I managed it, but I tried the door handle, and it turned, and I found myself inside the room. But the room was empty of anything that had been Walt Whitman. He’d obviously left. Whitman was gone.”

  Thompson scraped the same six-inch expanse of the fireplace’s hearth with the poker, back and forth, back and forth, a filthy windowpane that won’t come clean. “And then I saw it. In the corner, beside the bed. A tin canister. Walt Whitman’s garbage. I grabbed it—I hid it underneath my coat as best I could—and went out the hotel’s back door.”

  I knew I was hearing a confession, not having a conversation, but, “You took his garbage?” I said.

  Thompson stood up and put the poker back in its stand but didn’t turn around from the fireplace. “I locked myself in my hotel room and didn’t rush myself—I made myself be thorough, I forced myself not to miss anything—and I went through every item in that canister as meticulously as anyone possibly could.”

  “The canister filled with Walt Whitman’s garbage.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been more careful with anything in my life.”

  I don’t think I’ve ever believed anything anyone’s ever told me more.

  “And do you know what, David?”

  “What?”

  “It was just fucking garbage.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so Thompson said it for me.

  “It was just fucking garbage.”

  *

  Who knew? Apparently there really does exist too much of a good thing.

  “A pair of pants—that I can believe, I said. Come springtime, what man hasn’t had occasion to pull on a pair of pants only to find that they’re a little snug. That’s what winter is for, isn’t it? Plumping up? To help keep warm? That’s what all of God’s creatures do, don’t they?”

  Even if our bimonthly Saturday night bottle of whiskey wasn’t half empty, I’d still know George is drunk. I would never take his Saviour’s name in vain in George’s presence, and he’d never invoke his Lord’s limitless love, might, or forgiveness in mine.

  “But a jacket?” he says. He swallows the last of his drink, sets the empty glass back down on the kitchen table. “I told Mary it must have shrunk—over the winter—we must have put it away in the fall when it was wet, it must have shrunk.”

  I’m watching George tell his story while I pour two more drinks. When the bottle hits the halfway mark, I always mix the whiskey with two fingers of water. Diluting liquor this good is a bartending crime,
I know, but the whiskey has done its part—elevated each of us to a place where only mystics and poets and other lucky madmen are intended to linger—and now it’s up to us to stay afloat here just as long as we can, to not cross over and up to that next level of intoxication that turns bards into babblers and seers into sentimental bores. Nirvana isn’t easy work.

  “Because this is a jacket, understand. Not a shirt or a vest—a spring jacket. And it won’t . . .” George begins to laugh: I set down our drinks and myself at the table, feel my own smiling face bubbling beginning to join him. “. . . it won’t button up. ‘Maybe I have put on a few pounds this winter,’ I tell Mary.” George sips his fresh drink, places it carefully back down like he knows, if he’s holding it while he finishes his story, he’s bound to spill it. “And Mary says . . .” George laughs again, shuts his eyes, and nods his head in time with every fresh exhalation. “. . .Mary says, ‘Either that, or all your clothes are getting smaller.’”

  The two of us fall about ourselves so loudly, Henry just has to come into the kitchen to see what all the fuss is about. He sniffs at the air with a raised snout; he looks at me and then George and then back at me; finally decides that, whatever it is we’re up to, it’s not nearly interesting enough to stay awake for, trots back into the library to lie back down on the rug in front of the unlit fire, tail wagging contentedly the entire time.

  Since Loretta is in Montreal, not only is the house unheated, every window is pried wide open to the crisp early April air. As a boy, my favourite season was winter, every overnight snowfall another frozen morning miracle, months and months of a cold confetti sky and the entire world just as fresh and clean as the inside of a brand new prayer book. Now I prefer the spring. But that’s no surprise. Once one’s own endless winter starts to creep into sight, beginnings, not endings, are much more pleasant to contemplate.

  George looks around the kitchen like he expects to see something that isn’t there. “And how long is your friend away?” he says.

  My friend is Loretta. Loretta the unmarried white woman I occasionally cohabit with. Which isn’t how I’d prefer my oldest friend to think about the woman I love, but which is in keeping with the accepted Buxton line, namely, that only married people live together, and only people who have the same skin colour get married. And George is a Buxton man, so that’s all right. And I’m not a Buxton man, and that’s all right too.

  “Monday,” I say. “She’ll be back on Monday.”

  George shakes his head. “Don’t you get lonely?”

  “It’s only a week.”

  “I couldn’t do it. If I’m away from my Mary for even just an evening—like tonight, for instance—I can’t wait to get back home.”

  “And your company is just as enjoyable to me.”

  “Ah, you know what I mean.”

  I smile, nod, because I do. But it feels good sometimes to feel sad missing someone. Missing them reminds you why you want them around. Which isn’t the same as being lonely.

  “I never feel lonely,” I say.

  “Come on. Everybody gets lonely.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Ah . . .”

  “I don’t. But when it’s time for her to come back, I do start to get lonely for her. For Loretta.”

  Now it’s George’s turn to nod and smile.

  “But maybe you’re right,” I say. “The longest she’s ever been away are the trips she takes to Montreal. Lately she’s been talking about going overseas. Back to Germany. Maybe a month straight of myself will make me lonely.”

  “Or crazy.”

  “Or crazy.”

  A brisk breeze flutters the Meyers’ Drugstore calendar on the wall by the window. Each month features a different poorly sketched British landmark—Big Ben, London Bridge, Westminster Abbey—and on the once-a-year occasion Meyers hands them around Sophia’s, he’s like a brand new father passing around celebratory cigars.

  “Why don’t you go too?” George says.

  “We’ve talked about it. But someone would have to run things for me. For a month, maybe more. And then there’s the cost.”

  “Ah, go and see the world. None of us is getting any younger.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that,” I say, massaging my sore right elbow, my pouring elbow. “But like I said, there’s the matter of—”

  George waves away the rest of my sentence. “Shut that place of yours down for a month. Or two. Or however long you need. You can afford it. I may not know much, but I know when a man has set himself up right, and you’ve set yourself up real, real nice.”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  George raises his glass; holds it there until I see he wants to offer a toast. I lift mine too. “You’re a good man, David,” he says. I wait for more—a punchline, a jokey disclaimer—but all there is is George still holding his glass aloft. “You deserve good things.”

  “Everybody does,” I say.

  “Yes. And that includes you too.”

  We finally clink and drink, set down our glasses.

  George is tasting his lips like he’s trying to determine the precise flavour of something.

  “What?” I say.

  Now he licks his lips, pushes his drink toward me. “Try this,” he says.

  “I mixed it the same as mine.”

  “I didn’t say you didn’t. Just try it.”

  I don’t tell George how to run his factory, so he should let me handle how the drinks get made, but I lift his glass anyway.

  When he sees me lick my own lips, he picks up my glass, samples what’s in it.

  We both start laughing at the same time. And laugh, and laugh, and laugh. Long enough that Henry gets up from the rug and goes upstairs.

  Once we’ve settled down:

  “Here, give me that,” I say, taking back what had been my drink, four generous shots of one hundred percent water.

  “You think I’m going to trust a man who served himself a glass of four parts water and no parts whiskey?”

  I pour some of George’s drink into my glass, I pour some of my drink into George’s. His elbow on the table, George leans his big head on his big fist and watches me attempt to undo my mixing mistake. “Very professional,” he says.

  I pour some more of my drink into George’s glass, then some of George’s drink into mine. I give each glass a final clockwise swirl and hand him back his drink. “Judge them by the fruits of their labour,” I say.

  George sips, shuts his eyes, leans his head back on the back of his chair. “Mmm,” he says.

  “You approve?”

  “Mmm hmm.”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  Head still tilted backward, eyes still closed, “I never doubted you for a minute,” George says.

  *

  The woods make more sense after you’ve moved to the city. The annoying nothing of before, miraculously transformed into the wonderful absence of after. Conversations you don’t want to have with people you wish you didn’t know rarely transpire while out walking with your dog in an early morning mist with only the squirrels and the birds and the occasional brave or foolish hare witnesses to a forty-eight-year-old man surprising himself as much as his delighted, barking dog by suddenly running figure eights between and around a long row of just-budding elms for no other reason than his body tells him to.

  When I reach the finish line at the last tree, I can feel my lungs inhaling and exhaling my heart rate back to normal without my having asked them to. I’m wet and cold from the mist, but my hands in their gloves and my feet in their boots and my head underneath its hat are dry and warm and content. I shut my eyes and stand in place and am certain that anyone who has ever claimed to have been any happier than I am right now is a liar.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  The warming sun and the cool wind take turns showing my exposed face what they can do. The wind and the leafless branches of the still spring-naked trees work together to say what they have to say.

  �
��Thank you,” I shout.

  It’s been thirty years since the last time I prayed.

  My voice—my thanks—echoes back to me.

  18

  A man has to work, but a man who works for himself is happier. I was happier. Not just because I was making and not spending and so saving plenty of money, but because the only person who told me what to do and when to do it was me. Even if I did have to tell myself to do everything and to do it all of the time.

  Then some fool had to go and dynamite the house of Hugh F. Cumming.

  Ordinarily, the well-being of someone like Cumming—banker, insurance agent, failed West Kent Liberal nominee—wouldn’t have concerned me in the least, except that this someone also happened to be the president of the County of Kent Temperance Association. Dynamitings weren’t an everyday occurrence in Chatham (the front page of the Planet screamed DYNAMITE FIEND! STARTLING OUTRAGE! Peaceful Town Startled from Its Slumbers by Human Thunder. Providential Escape of H.F. Cumming and Wife from a Horrible Death), and if public opinion was correct, the explosion that took place at Cumming’s home on Victoria Avenue the night of August 7 was somehow instigated by those whose business interests were suffering as a result of prohibition. And since my business interests were, in fact, flourishing for precisely the same reason, I had a keen interest in the perpetrators being caught and law and order being promptly restored. Odd how all that needs to happen for you to become respectable is have somebody threaten to take away your money.