My Name's Not Friday

by Jon Walter

  I don’t know what they’re saying.

  You wouldn’t believe how many there are here. All the people – screaming.

  *

  I remember a cabin in the woods. The scratch of squirrels in the branches. The hoot of an owl overheard at dusk.

  There are frogs close by. Croaking. They’re all up inside my head, smelling of whiskey. All stretched out in a window, sleeping.

  Though mostly I’m alone.

  *

  A man belts out ‘Home, Sweet Home’. He’s singing out of tune. Croaking. When he finishes he starts the same song over again.

  Sometimes he sings, Hold on, Abraham, I’m going down to Dixie.

  One time I heard the church bell ringing. Four chimes. And all of ’em for me.

  *

  I seen a pond that’s frozen over.

  Men come and cut the ice with big knives.

  Some of ’em got saws.

  They’re up inside my head, all of ’em, with their big knives, cutting the ice into blocks to take it away on carts.

  And they have their hands up on my face.

  *

  There’s a man I hear more often than the others, but mostly I’m alone.

  *

  He says, ‘Come in. Thank you for coming.’

  There’s another man. A voice I don’t remember. He says, ‘I can’t stay long. Prop him up and let’s take a look.’

  They take hold of me. Turn me right side up. Touch my shoulders. Touch my legs. He puts his hands on my head.

  ‘The danger is the other eye.’

  ‘Yes, you told me.’

  ‘Deprived of the loss of one, the other will often react in sympathy and swell. It can become diseased. Be a shame to lose ’em both.’

  The men unwind my head and dazzle me with a light that puts out my eye.

  I don’t want to look, but they make me. They pull the lid apart and I see a man with a telescope. He’s staring right at me. He puts his finger in my cheek till it comes through the other side and it’s only when I’m screaming that he takes it out and winds my head back round the right way.

  He says I’ll live.

  *

  ‘“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals. Despise riches. Give alms to everyone that asks. Stand up for the stupid and crazy. Devote your income and labor to others. Hate tyrants. Argue not concerning God. Have patience and indulgence toward the people. Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men. Go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families. Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life. Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book. Dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency, not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”’

  *

  When I open my eye, there’s a man.

  A white man. A soldier.

  He’s sitting on a chair a few feet from my head, reading out loud from a book. We’re in a white room.

  That’s why I opened my eye.

  To look at him.

  Now I seen him, I shut it tight again.

  *

  When I look another time, he sees me. I know he does. He puts his book aside on the table by his chair and walks across to me, his heels and toes tip-tapping on the floorboards.

  I got my eye tight shut before he gets to me.

  He touches the part of my face that ain’t bandaged. Asks me, ‘How are you feeling?’

  But I can’t speak.

  I don’t want to, and even if I did, I couldn’t do it.

  ‘Does it still hurt?’ He has a kindly voice. Or so it seems. ‘We couldn’t spare the morphine for more than a few days, so I’ve been giving you whiskey to help with the pain.’ He laughs gently. ‘I think you’ve got a taste for it, but I intend to stop. The doctor tells me I should let you get used to managing the pain on your own, and I suppose he’s right. Anyway, it’s pretty difficult to ignore a man who charges his prices.’

  I open my eye. See his face and the ceiling to the side of his head, all turned upside down. The man looks older than his voice. He’s got some sort of a wild animal for a moustache and his hair rears up to one side, like I imagine how a wave might break onto a beach.

  He says he don’t need me to talk. He tells me it’s too soon.

  *

  My eye is watering. If I blink, it’ll trickle down the side of my cheek like a river.

  I’m just one great big eyeball – it’s like there ain’t nothing else of me at all – though if I concentrate I can feel the other parts of me. I touch my hip – put a finger on it, just to make sure I’m still all here. When I put a finger to my face it hurts like hell. And it don’t feel right.

  *

  When I turn my head I see the bed at the other end of the room where the soldier sleeps. I hear him breathing in the night just like Hubbard used to, the proper deep breath of a big man. He’s got a desk with books and papers. He’s got clothes hung up on rails and a trunk on the floor and there’s people who wait on him, day or night, if that’s what he needs. They come and go and tidy his things. They bring him clean shirts that are folded or they bring water for his washbowl and they call him Major.

  *

  My body punishes me every day, insisting I take notice, and nagging at me in aches and pains that I haven’t the energy to resist. My bladder and bowels humiliate me. When I call for a bedpan a man arrives. A Negro. I don’t know his name. He sees to my needs in silence and is rough with me when the soldier’s not here. Sometimes he changes my sheets.

  There’s a girl comes too. Another Negro. She brings a bowl full of broth with bits chopped up so small I won’t have to chew, and she spoons it into my mouth faster than I can eat. She won’t look at me and I don’t like to look at her either cos she makes me think of Sicely or Lizzie – all those I’ve lost who might look after me.

  Sometimes I choke and then she lets the spoon rattle back into the bowl, frightened, and she hurries out.

  *

  Mostly I am here on my own. Often I get lonely.

  Sometimes, if the Major returns in the evening, he sits and reads his books out loud, and when he breathes the leather on his braces creaks like I imagine the ropes of a ship might do if I were at sea. They let me drift away.

  He tells me who wrote the books he reads – says whether it’s Emerson, Thoreau, Walt Whitman. I don’t know any of ’em and I ain’t never heard their like before. They leave their words inside my head.

  One evening he brings his chair close. ‘I’d like to know your name. Do you mind me asking?’

  I don’t know if I do. I don’t know what to think of this man.

  ‘My name’s Solomon Winchester,’ he tells me. ‘It was me who bought you here.’ He waits for me like we have all the time in the world.

  ‘Samuel,’ I tell him eventually.

  ‘Well Samuel, the bad news is you missed Christmas completely and pretty much slept through the New Year.’ He walks away to the door. ‘You’ll have to wait till next year.’

  *

  Samuel. My name is Samuel.

  I got a brother by the name of Joshua. I got a brother.

  I was going to meet him when … I was out upon the road … walking.

  I was getting there slowly.

  *

  Often there is singing from the porch outside my room. Always the same old songs – always out of tune.

  Today I put my feet upon the floor. First one and then the other, taking small, slow steps towards the window as the pain shoots up my legs. I can’t straighten my back. I take one step and then a second, like an old man, hobbling towards a Bath chair, putting one foot in front of the other at the end of his days.

  When I reach the glass I grasp the sill and hold on tight to steady myself cos I’m all
out of breath. Outside my room, the weather is fair. There are rows of huts and beyond that there are tents. To the left of me, three buildings built of brick are set around a courtyard, and there are Union soldiers everywhere. There’s horses and wagons full of supplies and they’re coming and going and it seems like no one’s still for longer than a moment, ’cept for an old man who sits on the porch beneath our window and sings his heart and soul out. His dark skin is stretched tight around his neck and cheeks, like he ain’t never been indoors, just lived outside under rocks and trees, like he’s a lizard or a tortoise.

  ‘That’s Old George.’ I didn’t hear the Major come in through the door. ‘Must be ninety years old, I reckon, though he doesn’t even know himself.’ He looks out over my shoulder. ‘He’ll be singing till his dying day, I swear he will. That boy won’t ever stop.’ The Major fetches his chair from across the room and brings it over to the window. ‘You’re shaking, Samuel. You should sit and rest.’

  My legs are weak and I’m thankful for the chair. I sit down heavily.

  ‘I’m glad you’re walking,’ he says to me proudly. ‘I wasn’t sure I’d see this day.’

  ‘What happened to me?’

  The Major hesitates, searching for the right words. ‘You took an awful big whack to the head, Samuel. I guess you already knew that. You lost a lot of tissue and bone, right there around the socket of your right eye. I found you a good doctor, but he had to operate and remove the globe in order to save the vision in your remaining eye. I’d say he saved your sight.’

  Every piece of me knows this must be true but I concentrate on my face, try to sense if my eye is there or not and I move my good eye, hoping for some movement in the other. I don’t feel it move but I can’t be sure.

  ‘I want to look.’ I touch the bandage on my face. My fingers search the back of my head for the pin that holds it in place. ‘Do you have a looking glass?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I can maybe—’

  ‘I want to see.’

  ‘Hold on.’ The Major hurries for the door. ‘Hold on and let me see if I can find one. I expect someone here will have … Just hold on a moment.’ He leaves the room in a hurry and I hear him shout again from somewhere down the hall.

  I wait for him with a hand on the back of my neck and another on my cheek, holding my head as though it’s about to break apart. Outside the window, Old George is singing a mournful song ’bout a man and his horse going off to war.

  The Major comes back with a looking glass, but offers it to me reluctantly. ‘Are you sure you want to?’

  I take hold of it. ‘Would you help me with this pin?’

  He comes to stand behind my head. ‘You’re going to be pretty raw under there, Samuel. Do you understand? It ain’t a pretty sight right now, but it will heal if you give it time. You got to remember that, because it’s bound to come as a shock. It’s bound to.’

  I hold the mirror up to my face and it shows me the side I know, my mouth and eye and an ear that has always stuck out a little too much for my liking. That’s me for sure, good as I’ll ever get.

  The Major unclasps the pin and loosens the white bandage from about my head until the end falls limp across my shoulder and I see myself revealed in the glass, a face I’d mapped out in bruises and the parts I couldn’t touch for hurting.

  Only this ain’t me. Not any more. This face I see ain’t mine.

  My nose is flattened and points out at a strange angle. The right nostril stays flared, allowing me to breathe, but the socket of my eye has dropped an inch below the place where it should be, like it has slipped onto my cheek. And it’s empty as a crater.

  I touch it ever so gentle, run a fingertip around the smooth bowl where my eyelid has been laid across and stitched up tight to close the wound.

  If I turn the mirror to the left, my good eye stares back at me, all fierce and bright, but when I turn it back and take in my face fully from the front, it’s an awful portrait, as though someone has sketched me in charcoal then smudged me with the heel of their hand or used their thumb to rub me half away.

  Above the eye and below it, my face is a mess – red and scabbed and stitched with thread. The Major is right – that will heal in time – but I still won’t look right, not in the eyes of God, because my face has lost all symmetry and I am a horror to behold. I have become unnatural – all the bad in me exposed.

  I put the mirror to my lap, unable to look at my reflection any more. ‘Why’d you do it?’ I ask the Major. ‘Why’d you have to save me?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he says quietly. ‘I suppose I reckoned on being kind.’

  *

  I have folded the bandage and left it to one side. I won’t wear it again, since it serves no purpose now, except to hide me from the gaze of others. I asked to keep the mirror and have used it often, trying to become accustomed to my face as it heals.

  Now when the Major reads to me I sit up and listen. He assumes I can’t read it for myself and I don’t tell him any different.

  On the days that I’m happy with the Major, I’ll sit with my best side towards him, but when I hate him, I present myself to him as an open wound, weeping.

  *

  He lets me stay a month with him. He lets me stay another.

  I think he must want me for a servant or some such, but he never asks anything of me, and when I offer to work he tells me I’m not strong enough and that I need to rest. I sense he doesn’t want me to leave but I don’t know why.

  I ask again why he saved me. This time he gives it more thought, then leans forward in his chair. ‘I believe in this war, Samuel. It’s about justice and freedom and those things are worth fighting for. But the struggle itself – and by that I mean the actual fighting – well, that ain’t something to be proud of. You have to do things that make it hard to believe you’re any better than a savage.’ He pauses, sucking at his bottom lip, perhaps wondering about me being a Negro.

  ‘I have seen such things, Samuel … I have done … things. And when I think of them it’s hard to see how this war is good in any way and I lose sight of what I believe in. So when I found you there in the mud, when I knew you were still alive, I decided to save you – I had to at least try – and I picked you up and carried you back through the lines. I made sure you had the best care possible. And now, every day that I see you here, always improving, I can tell myself I’ve done something good in this war. Whatever else happens, whatever else I gotta do, I’ll know I’ve at least done one good thing before I die.’

  *

  One night the Major asks me about myself, and I tell him about growing up with Father Mosely at the orphanage and how I was sold at the auction and became a slave on the Allen plantation, only to run away when the war reached us and the Allen place was burned. I tell him about Gerald and Hubbard dying.

  ‘I thought I was doing God’s work by becoming a slave. I thought because He’d brought me there, He’d keep us all safe. But He didn’t.’

  ‘Why would God want you to be a slave, Samuel?’

  ‘To teach ’em how to read. And I didn’t mind – not once I understood.’

  ‘You’re telling me you can read?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I can read just about as good as anybody. I should’ve told you sooner.’

  The Major takes the book he has been reading, opens it and hands it to me. ‘Would you read to me now?’

  So I do. I read to him as he has read to me for so many months now, and when I finish he shakes his head and smiles at me, like the proudest of fathers might smile at his son. ‘The world is a strange and beautiful place, Samuel – and it never ceases to surprise me.’

  *

  When I ask for my clothes, the Major brings me a pile of new things; red trousers and a navy blue jacket, all laundered and folded up neat. They’re well made and the jacket is warm. On the top of ’em is a pair of black leather boots.

  ‘Did you save my shoes?’

  The Major shakes his head and lifts the boots from the pi
le. ‘These are better. They’ll keep your feet dry when you walk. Here, try ’em on.’ He kneels to put ’em on my feet and they’re a good fit. They’ll keep my feet warm and dry, like he said, and Gerald wouldn’t mind if he knew. He’d be pleased I have my own boots.

  I get dressed slowly, feeling like my arms and legs have forgotten how to do it. I get my foot stuck in the leg of my trousers and I can’t lift my arm above my head without a sharp pain shooting up my neck. I have to sit in the chair to put my boots back on and the whole thing must take me half an hour or more and I have to rest again before I go outside.

  But I do go outside. I take a first step, then another, and the air tastes fresher than I ever knew it could. I make it as far as the bottom of the porch before I start the long trip back.

  *

  On my next trip I go further. I reckon on people staring, but the soldiers that I see don’t look at me any longer than they have to. Perhaps they know that come tomorrow it might be them instead of me, and most of ’em avert their eyes, taking a sudden interest in their feet as I pass ’em by.

  I go further the next day too. I stay out longer. Within a week I’ve got some strength back in my legs and I wander through the camp finding new paths.

  Today I reach a clearing in the tents, a circle of ground maybe twenty feet across. Opposite me is a tent with one side opened out to create a canopy that’s held taut by guy ropes and pegs. Inside it is an altar. It has a table with a stiff white cloth and paper flowers in a pewter vase – bright yellow, red and blue. No one’s here, so I walk closer to look. There’s a wooden crucifix about a foot high, and next to it a framed picture of a blue-eyed Christ, a crown of thorns around His head, staring up into a blue sky. It looks just like the pictures that Father Mosely had in the orphanage, the same Christ, so beautiful and peaceful, that I talked to every day, knowing He was listening to me.

  Why won’t He talk to me now? I step closer. Why won’t You say something? Ain’t You got anything to say to me at all? But He won’t even look at me. He’s staring away into heaven. He’s looking at nothing at all, ‘cept a piece of blue sky. And suddenly I’m shouting at him. ‘You ain’t being fair! You can’t ignore me!’