Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  Although the sun set later in February, the extra light gave no promise of anything but the joyless days lasting a few minutes more every evening. When, in the middle of the month, the temperature rose, it presented Torontonians with the vision of dead birds revealed under the snow, half dissolved in the grass, as well as gray litter and decomposing dog scat. The worst thing of all, however, was the specter of a man who had hanged himself on the windmill you could see at the lakeshore from most vantages below King Street. At the beginning of March, when the worst seemed over, a vast storm blew into the city and dropped temperatures to well below minus twenty, and the wind came in on the back of it and made it impossible to walk or speak or hold a coat closed around oneself. Abandon all hope, the storm seemed to say, winter is not leaving this country after all.

  The man had made himself a noose and slipped it over his head, then tied the other end onto a heavy gaff that he eventually managed to jab through a passing mill blade. No one wanted to speculate how long he’d stood in the wind-thrashing dark, throwing the end of his life into the air, hoping to lash it to the elements. To imagine how determined he was on death would be to invite thoughts of where one’s own limit lay. What if there was, in every person, a threshold beyond which only death could sate you? After succeeding, the suicide spun in a small circle around the center of the windmill, and wilted there for three days, a ghoulish figure in the squall, seen in the distance through the snow, rising and falling like a marionette. When they cut him down the blood had pooled in his feet and frozen solid and his leather shoes had burst from the pressure like overripe gourds.

  A death, it was said in the restaurant, that could have come to pass only in Canada.

  HALLAM HAD NEVER really seriously contemplated failure. He’d always thought he had been chosen over his older brother to bring the family name to Canada because his father had more confidence in him. Now he thought perhaps he was Isaac sent up the Lord’s mountain. And yet his lot was worse than that of the original son betrayed: his father’s face was hidden. Who would accompany him? Who would intervene on his behalf?

  He’d long since canceled his ads in the papers, but he continued to advertise his success to his wife and his father. If anything, his letters became more fulsome with news of his burgeoning affairs. He thought perhaps he could dream his life into existence by writing it down. But what was more, he had plenty of time to write letters. After the encounter at the Cockburns’, business continued as usual, “usual” being the glacial pace of custom in and out of his door. The elder Cockburn’s influence, if in fact he’d tried to exercise it, would not have had any effect on Hallam’s business, as he had had no cause to try to replace any of his stock yet.

  He buffed bottles with an application that seemed to him theatrical. He made perfect towers and pyramids out of popular brands, tins and boxes that would seem to crow their efficacy even to those who walked on the south side of the street. But a caul had grown over his door, no one entered but for those few souls immune to the mischiefs of fate. He sold a powder for bunions here, a box of liver suppositories there, even had the pleasure, in an otherwise empty day, of explaining their use to the unfortunate young man whose lot it was to take them. He’d kept a strict professional manner while describing their use to him, altering his expression not a whit while the man’s face whitened, and was able to say with the utmost professional comport, “Not very,” when the man had asked how big they were.

  But otherwise, his pleasures were restricted to meal-taking and sleep induction. In the evenings, he made himself a supper of bread and honey, drank tea, opened a book or a newspaper (a book was safer, with its promise of order), then poured a sherry or two, or a whiskey or two. When the dark was full enough and he could begin to feel the little waves of panic lap at him — these little waves like childhood fears and their attendant revelations of utter loneliness, the feeling that there was nothing safe in the world, not one’s favorite foods, nor one’s parents or friends, nor the promise of getting older and being able to do whatever one wanted, there was no succor in any of this because it was dark and night was beginning — Hallam would dose his drink, a little more each night, and let the drug settle on his mind like a shade. In his sedated state, he sometimes imagined a bustle of activity in the darkness of the rear of the apartment: he’d learned from other tenants in the building that an enterprising Christian gentleman of some description had occupied his tiny home before him. He’d used the back of the rooms to operate a printing press on which he produced religious tracts. It was fortunate there hadn’t been a disaster, thought Hallam, with two apartments below. No one had said anything, of course; such an enterprising person would be allowed to go about his godly business even if it presented a hazard. Imagine the noise. Then the man went out of business and vacated the rooms, leaving the cumbersome press behind. Hallam imagined them taking the machinery apart and putting it in boxes, or better, throwing the whole thing out the window, a splinter and crash in the street. The demolition of a room where God had failed to turn a profit. What hope had he? With the aid of his sherries and decoctions, sometimes Hallam thought he could hear the desperate man bootlessly clacking out his salvation on the huge machine, and no one listening, not even God Himself.

  ONE VISITOR TO the shop had more to offer him than a small purchase. Adrian Cockburn emerged from the shadows one night as Hallam was locking up and looked at him in such a way as suggested it would not be dangerous to reopen and go back in. Adrian was the mildest-seeming of the three brothers, all of whom could fairly have been called strapping, and his face was kind and open. He waited until Hallam’s door was shut again, and the lamp relit, before speaking.

  “My father asked me to come speak with you.”

  “Did he.”

  “I know you must be heading off to Jewell’s for your supper, so I won’t waste your time. My father offers to buy out your lease as well as your inventory. We know that your agreement with your landlord runs to the end of August. My father thought you might welcome the opportunity to recoup some of your losses.”

  “Your father is a very generous man.”

  “There’s something you don’t know, Mr. Hallam. Joseph Lennert isn’t in Buffalo, he’s in jail. Here in Toronto.”

  “That’s no concern of mine,” said Hallam, keeping his expression flat. Was this the “pity”? That Mr. Lennert was in jail? He barely heard Adrian Cockburn continue as he tried to calculate the cost of the remaining inventory in the shop.

  “He got old and his eyesight got poor. He couldn’t tell the difference between a minim and a drachm. About three months before your family bought the business, he killed, in succession, a child, an elderly woman, and a pregnant woman with two children already in her care. Accidentally, of course. He wasn’t a murderer. But he couldn’t read his formulary anymore and started guessing.”

  “Mr. Lennert sold this business free and clear. How stupid do you think I am?”

  “He’s in a cell right now, a seventy-year-old man. A murder convict.”

  “An accident is not murder.”

  “It is if you are charged with ensuring the public’s health. People go to doctors and druggists to get better, not to be put down like animals.”

  Hallam could not reply to this. If it were true, it was terrible, but it would be easy enough to find out. And yet you would think that this small detail might have come out in the negotiations. Mr. Lennert had written them himself.

  “This is why you have no customers. People do not want to come into this store.”

  “There’s a different name out front, Mr. Cockburn. People aren’t blind.”

  “People are informed, you’re right,” replied Cockburn. “They know you bought Lennert’s supplies.”

  “Ah, but you just said it was human error. The chemicals are blameless.”

  Adrian nodded the way one does when an acceptable argument is forwarded in service of an entirely erroneous presumption. “The magistrate may have concluded that there wa
s nothing wrong with his physic, just his measurements. And yet people know you’re pouring and measuring from the same vessels, they know whatever emanated from this store started in those bottles and tins. They’re not interested in gambling with their lives. My father, on the other hand, will come in here, put our name on the door and above the counter; he’ll throw out all the old stock and invest in new stock and we’ll put our regular ads in the papers, stating we’re on King Street now, in the heart of the shopping district, in fine new surroundings, with all new supplies of the most valuable and healthful compounds known to man. And people will not say, Well, it’s no longer Lennert’s, or That Mr. Hallam no longer owns the shop. They’ll say, That’s Cockburn’s, the most trusted name in chemistry. That’s what it will take to make this store profitable in this location. Can you argue with it?”

  “Fine surroundings . . .” was all Hallam could say. Adrian Cockburn started to make a round of the shop, leaving his host to think, and looked the shelves up and down. It struck Hallam that when he’d been visited by Adrian’s brother, that Cockburn had also gone around taking the measure of the place. Peter Cockburn had been sent by his father as well, and Hallam had been under siege ever since he arrived. The moment his ship put in at Tenning’s Wharf, it was done but for the weeping.

  “Nothing short of starting over will give this shop back its livelihood,” said Adrian. “And you can’t do it, Mr. Hallam. My family is prepared to pay you the cost of your remaining lease, plus the cost of all your stock — even though we plan to dispose of it — plus fifteen percent. My father calculates you will be able to leave the city with much of what you came with. Less your passage home.”

  Hallam regretted having had even one charitable thought about this young man, and he went directly to the door, which he wrenched open. The bell erupted into sudden peals. “You tell your father,” he said, “that I will go home on my shield before I sell this business to the Cockburns.”

  Adrian Cockburn smiled warmly as he walked toward the door. “My father is a reasonable man, Mr. Hallam. I’m sure he’d throw in a shield if I ask him to.”

  “I’ll run this business into the dust before I willingly give your family a grain of it.”

  “It’ll cost us less then,” said the young man. “We can wait.”

  “Get out.”

  Adrian Cockburn began to leave the store but then stopped and held out his hand to Hallam, as if the ferocity of his denials only underscored that a deal would very soon be struck. With every fiber of his Englishman’s being, Hallam resisted taking the young man’s hand (either by instinct to shake it, or by inclination to haul him near and shatter his nose), and closed the door behind him. He stood then in the open space, which he had thought he was done with, finally, for the day, and for the first time felt a powerful affection for the shop, which was his, his family’s, and which suffered, as he did (he now understood), from ghosts.

  THE FEELING OF being cursed — the proof of it — lightened Hallam’s spirit considerably. He felt that there was nothing to be done and nothing to fight. And so he went back and forth from his home to the store in the lengthening days of March and waited to see what would happen to him. It was not at all like being mid-ocean in a storm-tossed ship; it was like being in the ocean itself, under a warm and invigorating sun, whilst clinging to a bit of wood. No immediate threat was obvious, but the situation was, like life itself, clearly fatal.

  In the middle of March’s idle hopelessness, the first atom of a new life drifted into Hallam’s shop in the guise of a man with a rare request. He was a shambler in a ratty coat and straw hat, and he placed on Hallam’s countertop an empty bottle of lunar caustic — Argenti nitras — and asked if Hallam could replace the contents.

  Hallam wasn’t at all certain that he actually carried any silver compounds. It was difficult to discern the man’s condition, since he appeared so generally unwell. One eye was almost eclipsed by a growth that could have been anything from syphilis to fungus. He warned the man that if he’d already consumed the contents of one bottle, he was well on his way to being unpleasantly tinted, but the customer laughed this off, saying he was a photographer. The same reaction that turned a man’s skin blue could render his image on a piece of glass, he explained. Hallam hunted through the tall shelves behind him and did find a single full bottle of the compound, and he put it beside the old one. The man sighed with pleasure on seeing it, like a drunk at a bottle of rum with the custom house label intact.

  “There it is,” said the man. “I am still in business.”

  “That makes one of us.”

  The photographer looked around the inside of the shop. “The place seems a little lonesome,” he said. “It could be the light. You put an armature beside the window out there and put a mirror on it, it would brighten this place considerably.”

  “It’s not the light,” said Hallam, trying to imagine what the store would look like with actual sunlight in it. “There’s a curse on the place.”

  The man pulled his head back on his neck and turned his face away. It was a fierce expression. “Which one?”

  “Which one, what.”

  “Which curse?”

  “It’s a general one, sir. Do you want this or not.”

  “General curses are harder to deal with. Try dowsing.”

  “Does it work?”

  “No,” said the other. “But it can make you feel better, if and all you believed in the curse in the first place.” He smiled. “I don’t believe in them.”

  “I didn’t used to,” Hallam said, “until I got to Toronto.”

  “A lot of people say that.”

  Hallam pulled the empty bottle off the counter and put both of them into a paper sack. “I’ll charge you one shilling and you can keep the empty one. I doubt I’ll restock it.”

  The man paid Hallam in small coin. “I’ll tell you what. Say I guarantee return business, would you agree to carry it again?”

  “That would be difficult,” said Hallam. “It’s little used and I order direct from London, from my father, and —”

  “It’s a risk you’d rather not take.”

  “There are other chemists who may already have it in stock,” said Hallam.

  The man nodded, his thick hands laid on the counter. He had fingers like bread rolls. “My credit’s all used up is the problem,” he said.

  “Well, I can’t afford to give you any.”

  “I understand.” The man took his bag and rolled it up before dropping it into a pocket. It clanked against something and he instinctively put his hand over the pocket to hush it. “What if I put you on commission?” he said. “You front me the silver, I give you what you’re owed out of my portrait fees, plus twenty percent.”

  His mother had always told Hallam he had an innocent face. He wasn’t sure it was the best quality to have in business. He felt insulted that the man thought him so easy a mark that he hadn’t even bothered warming up to the subject. “Why would I want to do that?”

  “I can’t see why you wouldn’t. You’re all alone in a dark store with no customers and a curse to boot.”

  “But I just said I don’t have the means to give you credit.”

  “Fine,” said the man. “Let’s start over.” He took the bag back out of his pocket and removed a small snuff tin as well and laid it on the counter. “Open the tin.” Hallam did. There was a total of eight shillings in coin, just about. “You keep the money, and the bottle you just sold me, until you gather enough to fill an order for nine shillings. That’s nine phials in total. You’ve made a tidy profit, plus I give you twenty percent of what I clear with the pictures I make from all of it. After that, you give me the compound on credit, I pay a wholesale cost, and I continue to share my profits with you. Now who’s the sucker, Mr. Hallam, me or you?”

  “How did you know my name?”

  The man speared him with a concerned look. “It’s on the door, man! Do we have a deal or not?”

  Never in his life had
Hallam bargained before, so he wasn’t sure where the sudden instinct to say forty percent came from, but it was out between them before he could think of a reason.

  The man was staring at him. “Good,” he said, and he held out his hand. “Samuel Ennis.”

  “J. Hallam.”

  Ennis held his hand tight. “J? You lack a first name?”

  “In a business venture, I prefer to remain J.”

  “Very well,” said Ennis. “Thirty.”

  “Thirty what?”

  “You have a scant memory, J. Hallam. Thirty percent.”

  “Oh. Let’s say thirty-five.”

  “No, son, I say twenty, you say forty, I say thirty, and we’re done.” He pumped Hallam’s hand and released it.

  “How do I know I can trust you?”

  “What is there to trust? You have everything I own in the world in front of you.”

  “But this is too easy.”

  “You’re right. No one stranger should trust any other. That is, I grant, the very best way to be. You can’t know if you should trust me.”

  The man couldn’t have said anything more inspiring of trust than that. Right? This is how my fool’s errand ends, thought Hallam. “Fine,” he said. “We have a deal.”

  Ennis looked at him with admiration. “If you were my son, I’d have you on the first ship home and I’d put you back in school so fast your teeth would rattle. But I think you’re going to save my life.”

  “I am quite certain, Mr. Ennis, that this will make not a whit of difference to either of our fortunes,” said Hallam.

  “You’re young to give up, son. You should wait a few more years, you’ll enjoy it more.” He laughed, expecting to be joined in it, but he wasn’t. There was an awkward pause. “This is the moment you give me back that bottle of silver nitrate, Mr. Hallam, in a show of good faith.”