Are you her? he will ask her.
Yes, she says. But his interest in her soon disappears. (He casually pushes away the arms that try to embrace him.) He will dress himself then take his place at the table, the sun spilling its copper glow into and across the room, Thomas lathered in golden light, honey, amber, stuck inside his silence with deliberation. (Why should the sunlight care?) Dressing, she will be heartily uncertain (afraid?) about who she has become and who he is and what he has become and what he recalls. Does he remember or has he forgotten who she is? After all it has been eleven years, eleven long years. Or perhaps something about her has changed? Smell? Sound of her voice? The way she walks? Sound of her footsteps? Or could it be, might it be, that this is somebody else in the supposed form of her son, a somebody who bears her son’s name? Three brief knocks on the door summon her to open it, and an orphan (always a boy) standing there on the other side hugging a large silver serving tray, his smile reaching out to her through the open door. Ma’m, I have been instructed to bring the morning’s repast. The orphan’s voice causes Thomas’s body to move. She knows the hunger behind his face, but throughout the day he limits what he consumes, the brooding taste of a glass of goat’s milk (still his favorite) to move each morning along, and some morsels of bread perhaps with a dollop of jam or a sprinkling of sugar, then for dinner a fistful or two of meat (hen, guinea fowl, goat) and a few forks of potato or vegetable (the utensils’ bright clatter and chime), and not much more than that for supper, every part of his body unsatisfied.
She studies the creases edging his eyes, the bones pressing up from under the cheeks—he needs to eat, he must eat—the places (temple, forehead) where the skull turns outward, revealed, and his clothes sagging from his bones. His face, his whole bony frame—he looks like he might dissolve. (The body through time.) He must eat because she wants to see him looking like a man, the way he looked when she first saw him again after eleven years, all thickened and broadened into man skin and man muscles, but in her presence he eats almost nothing and drinks almost nothing and never goes to the (indoor) toilet. (When does he go?) Something in him has turned, settled, quieted down, something essential. (The chapel is lonely-still just like Thomas.)
When she knew him, when he was still hers, eleven years ago, it took two or three hours of him roaming through the countryside to tire him out sufficiently to keep him seated long enough to have his supper. She, Mingo, and the girls had grown used to Little Thomas wandering off from the cabin into fields (white to the very door of the mansion with cotton and green to the wraparound porch with coffee) and meadows, up the tall rock (the way he sat on top of it)—down by the sides of the deep river and lonely streams, bounding over the hills or rolling like a log across the plain, headstrong into the deep and gloomy woods. Like a kitten playing through the falling leaves. Wherever Nature led. No fear of a world he couldn’t see, since his sense of smell and taste missed nothing—see his hands reaching to bring leaf and flower and insect and bird and fish to his mouth, an entire afternoon in the shape of that touch. She remembers the fluid fascination that every thing and person exercised upon him. Trees pushing at sky. Maggots churning inside the cold corpse of an opossum rotting in the grass where worms gather in testament. The way birds let loose their three-toed grip on the earth. Something moving through air, moving through him. Life changed to landscape and landscape life. Thomas made sleepy by the expanse. She would call his name in that long dragging way, extending the syllables accordion-like. Then his face would poke out into the tunnel of her seeing from some hiding place (brush, bush, or briar patch; trough, kennel, or pen; outhouse, cave, or coop), a child’s grin pushing up through his drowsy features, and she would take him, Little Thomas dirt-faced and barefoot, her hand firm in his hand, and start back to the cabin in the failing light of sunset, a red river of ribbons above them. (How many times had she and Little Thomas strolled, hand in hand, in the murmuring shade of the water oak trees?) His voice would flood the evening with stories he couldn’t tell fast enough. (Feeling the language run over her body, a garbled stream, so she had to listen closely and sort through the flow, fishing out a word here and there and stringing them together in meaning.) Figures homebound at sundown, flashing past—he forces her breathing to catch up—a constellation of niggers (men, women, and children alike) still crouched in the fields under wide-brimmed hats, coursing in and out of smoke-and steam-fueled factories and mills with an infinite supply of materials (lumber, textiles, leathers, metals) in constant circulation through doors and windows, she and Little Thomas zipping past vistas such as these and other scenes of normal life. His frenzied uneven way of walking—each uneven step took an ambitious piece of ground—threatened several times to steal her balance, but she held fast until they reached the entrance to Hundred Gates, where they followed the long gravel road lined with cottonwood trees on either side up to the white house, only to go around the house and off into the deep recesses of the estate to their cabin, which commanded its own modest place in the world. And when they bounded through their cabin door—the flutter of moths in the waning light of the lantern—Mingo and the girls could see that Little Thomas was different, could tell him from the restless boy who couldn’t keep still even when he was sitting down, fidgeting, fussing with his clothes and limbs and face, blowing on his hands or knees or feet as if trying to extinguish flames nested in his flesh. The boy would be innocent off in a corner of the yard imitating the twittering sounds of birds, each chirp small, clear, and sharp. (The sound comes to her unexpectedly every so often. She can hear it even now.) In a pitched assault he would ram himself into a wall over and over again—like the ocean out there smashing into the island of Edgemere, and slapping up against the dhows, calling them back to water—until someone managed to tackle or trip him to the ground. Those aggravated presences from earlier in the day would still be lingering in the cabin in diminished form, force, and capacity, echoes that would hum and snap back into Little Thomas shortly upon his stepping across the threshold. Quiet and steady, he would sit down to a heavy supper—fatback sandwiches, black apples, two or three helpings of sweet root lathered in lard and corn cakes glazed with molasses, two or three Seminole potatoes, some red grass, and a pitcher or two of lemonade or iced tea—that proved to be no challenge for him. Feed me bushels of light. At the first sign of any agitation, the girls would remove every article of his clothing until he was butt naked and quiet, stripped of music and words. Supper done, with the slightest roll of the tongue Charity could sing him to sleep. And she too could now bed down for the night after a long day of labor and the exhaustive challenge of Little Thomas. (Asleep, his body hummed with the expectation of sunrise—Let us cast off deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light—the yearning outside world anxious to have him return, the impatient moon nosing about the window, trying to peek through.) Daylight would set him ablaze with some song—if he had one he had a thousand—that he would be bellowing at the top of his small voice. He would take his station at the table, the fingers of both hands moving in every direction in the air until they settled down onto the splintered surface, where they would glide along the wood thirsting for music. And he would eat and drink whatever they put before him, songing through a mouth filled with food. Even before he had had his fill, he would say to her, Please leave me now, repeating the words ever and again until she stood up from the table and selected from one of the few garments she owned. She would sling the dress over her shoulders and comb her hair back into a ponytail, cover her head with a scarf tightened in a knot at her nape, and take him up from the table and quit their cabin for their yard. There she would hold him close. (The only image she can see now, in the silence, the only image of herself that she likes, in which she can recognize herself, in which she delights.) After a few stumbling steps, they would start hand in hand for the house, past the flower garden that Miss Toon tended with all the loving care that a green thumb is capable of and on to the house itself, where she would turn the copper
doorknob and fling the door wide. They would make their entry into the foyer on the Oriental carpet. Miss Toon was never long to meet them. Standing there in her flounces and high collar that came all the way up to her chin, Miss Toon would smile at Little Thomas with keen interest and longing. Then she would take him into her company and they would slip behind the French doors into the parlor, shutting the doors behind them, the two glass doorknobs like big diamonds, and Charity’s breath would catch for a small expectant moment. Charity wanted nothing more than to stay in the parlor and hear what Little Thomas would play and what he and Miss Toon might play together. (Charity forgave them their inclination toward companionship, their wanting to be alone with Music, this blameless act, for she had seen the way their hands moved across the keys, the impossible made possible.) However, without an excuse to linger, she soon went about her employment, her body emptying through the house and the reaches of the estate. Little Thomas—my Thomas, my Tom—moored at the piano with Miss Toon at his side for a period of instruction whereby the spirit flowing between them had a chance to reveal itself, as each had it in her or his person to test the mettle and endurance of the other with melodies, ditties, and songs, for each seemed to know where the other was strong or weak, she carrying the first verse and he either repeating it or carrying the next. And so on. Music would fill in the hours, would come to Charity through walls and shut doors. A line of melody would sit on the laundry lines like a flock of birds, would gush out of the well with every pump of the handle. How untroubled she felt. Indeed, it would have been a double burden to fulfill her duties and also keep Little Thomas entertained. With the arrival of noon, she knew then that he was sharing in repast with the Bethunes at their long mahogany table, even as she headed back to the cabin for dinner with Mingo and the girls. She saw Little Thomas lick the music off his fingers in preparation for food. And after an hour, dinner done, chores resumed, she was brought back to herself. Recoiled from afternoon sun, light and heat wearing her out, her body opened. (The body is made up of things that grow stiff and accumulate pain.) Was it actually weariness that had overtaken her or simply the idea of going back to Little Thomas? For soon the moment would come (an hour or two later) when the General would put an end to the time he had granted Little Thomas and his wife for instruction that day and summon Charity to the parlor. Take this boy from my house. Easier said than done, for even then Little Thomas would be playing at the piano and it would seem that nothing could deter him in the effort. On a fortunate day, a sugarplum or two could lull his hands still, lure him away from the piano and lead him out of the house. And there she and Thomas would be, brightening in the colors—petunia, zinnia, chicory, four-o’clock—of Miss Toon’s garden, with her chores to get back to.
I am the one, he would say. (Even now she has no idea what he meant, not the slightest clue, despite the many times she heard him say it.) And he would wander off into the woods. No—try again—she would allow him to wander off while she stood watching. If only he could spend—had she the power—all of his waking hours at the piano. It was this alone that could pull the wildness out of him. Had he been so allowed—had she the power—he would have played until his fingers bled. (And bled they had on two or three occasions.) Of course, the General never would have granted permission—no way—generous (for a woogie) of him to allow what time he did.
Song of the Shank Page 12
