David

by Ray Robertson

  Twenty-four hours later, I got my audience with the Reverend King. My mother picked invisible lint off my jacket and straightened and restraightened the tie I’d gotten the year before for my thirteenth birthday, a gift from Mrs. King that she’d selected from her husband’s wardrobe and that everyone pretended she hadn’t. A muffled piano sonata drifting down the stairs testified to her unseen presence.

  “You pay attention to what the Reverend King says, now,” my mother said. She’d been at Clayton House when I’d arrived, the rheumatism in her hands and knees slowing her down enough now that another housekeeper had been hired to take over most of the heavier work, my mother making up for her mounting lack of mobility by doubling her dusting duties and supervising the preparation of all the meals and generally making sure that the rest of the house staff kept to their schedules.

  At twelve o’clock—not 11:59, not 12:01—my mother allowed me to knock on the door of the Reverend King’s study, the hands on the long-case clock in the sitting room praying together perfectly high noon.

  “Come in, David,” the voice inside said.

  The Reverend King stood up behind his desk to shake my hand and offer me a seat in one of the three chairs across the desk from his. Helping to settle controversies, working to defuse conflicts, assisting in building consensus: those three chairs were never empty for long. He folded his hands and rested them in front of him on the desk.

  “Tell me why you want to enlist in the army, David,” he said.

  “To help defeat the South.” I was as ready with my answers as I knew he would be with his questions.

  The Reverend King nodded his approval. “And it will be defeated, David, and the evil of slavery along with it. God is on the side of the just. And those who would be free must strike the blow.”

  I nodded back. What else was there to say? And the Reverend King, as always, had said it the best way it could be said.

  “And have you given proper consideration to your mother?”

  “Yes, sir. I told her of my intentions yesterday.”

  “Yes, of course. Which is how I know them as well. But have you considered her ailing condition and how she would manage without you—you, her only relative, away from home for God Himself only knows how long?”

  “No, sir. I hadn’t.”

  He nodded again, this time like he knew I hadn’t but he forgave me.

  “Another aspect that you might want to take into consideration is the plight of Buxton itself. Once the government realizes the ignorance of their decision to deny coloured men the right to fight alongside their white brothers, we can expect at least one hundred men to leave us for the war. This means that young men like yourself will be expected to occupy increasingly important roles here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And finally, there are your studies.”

  I at least had an answer for that one. “I thought I could pick up where I left off, when I got back.”

  “Yes, of course. But even though all of God’s children have important work to do in His world, the work He has intended for some of us requires especially long hours of dedicated study and practice, while others can abide His will with less concentrated preparation.”

  Like George, for instance. We’d ABC’d together, worked side by side memorizing the catechism, and even set sail on the same schoolhouse voyage over the blue Aegean with Odysseus as our captain in his own Grecian tongue, but just that year George had happily left his books and me both behind to take a position as an apprentice in Elgin’s new potash factory.

  The Reverend King went to one of his bookshelves—the walls of his study were his bookshelves; it seemed as if every book that had ever been written was helping to hold up the ceiling—and pulled down a slim black volume. He placed the book face down in front of him on the desk.

  “I have known—indeed, I have taught—many bright boys and girls during my years as an educator and religious instructor. And each has benefited in his own unique way—and, according to God’s plans, society has also benefited—from the time and effort expended upon his studies.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Aside from his Sunday sermons, if the Reverend King quoted anyone, it was usually from the Bible, usually the New Testament, but one of the few pagan references he allowed room for was Epictetus’s “Only the educated are free.” Odds were good that the potash factory in Elgin was the only one in existence whose newest employee could read Greek and recite Virgil.

  “But yours is a special gift, David. Your swift mastery of any and all assigned materials. Your desire for new intellectual challenges. Your clear leadership abilities both in and outside the classroom. All have compelled me to conclude that your path in life has surely been laid out for you by God’s hand. Whether you follow that sanctified path, of course, will be your decision alone.” He handed me the book. “I want you to have this, David, something my own father gave to me at a pivotal point in my life, such as you find yourself at now.”

  It was a copy of Clark’s Commentary on the Scriptures, essential reading material, I later discovered, for anyone considering entering the ministry.

  “Thank you,” I said, taking the book.

  “You’re very welcome, David.”

  Until that day in the Reverend King’s study, I had known him—him, my mother’s and my liberator, our resurrector, our redeemer—like someone knows the seasons, like a lake or a river, like sundown and sunrise. Now I knew him as something else. Now he was my mentor.

  *

  My timing was perfect, Providence once again seeing to it that what had been hard for others was easy for me. It wasn’t difficult to arrive at the conclusion that God had chosen me to serve Him and, through Him and His blessed sacrificed Son, the consecrated cause that was the deliverance of my people from the evil of slavery. Why else would I have been eleventh-hour rescued from a lifetime of certain bondage by an abolitionist minister and endowed with talents and inclination enough that this same minister would see fit to encourage me in the enlistment in Christ’s army as one of his sanctified soldiers? A, B, C and 1, 2, 3 couldn’t have been any more obvious.

  It hadn’t been as straightforward for the first crop of Buxton graduates. Of the initial seven who were deemed university suitable, only three had parents who could afford to send them. To the Reverend King, this was unacceptable. He personally canvassed for donations throughout North America and when on Church business trips back to England and Ireland. He solicited funds from every Church sympathetic to the goals of the Settlement, and some, it turned out, that weren’t. He appealed for, and received from the Presbyterian Church, a bursary specifically endowed for needy families of promising Buxton students. And he reminded us from his pulpit every Sunday that faith and observance and prayers alone were not enough to do the Creator’s will. God loved a self-starter.

  “Unless the seed is allowed to grow, to grow and bear the fruit that nature has surely intended it to, one great object of our mission here will be frustrated. I speak, of course, of the training of young men of piety and talents for further usefulness in the Church. Never was there more need for such young men as at present. The slave trade, as we all know, is still carried on along the coast of Africa, notwithstanding the vigilance of the British navy. Nothing but the preaching of the everlasting Gospel will put an end to that inhumane traffic.”

  Amen, we’d say, and praise the Lord and the Reverend King.

  After our meeting in his office, after he’d convinced me not to leave for the war, the Reverend King gave me the same time and attention he bestowed upon every other student whose mind he wished to help hone to an even sharper point, so that when I eventually entered Knox College, no white man, no matter what his background or advantages, would be my intellectual superior. His library was mine now, and after my chores and homework were done for the evening, I’d sit at the kitchen table and read what he’d instructed me to read, to learn what I needed to learn so that one day I could give back to God and socie
ty both all that I’d so bountifully received myself.

  “Don’t you eat that apple core, David. You do, it’ll grow in your stomach.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Whenever I was studying, my mother—whether cooking or sewing or cleaning—might have been invisible for all the noise she made for fear of disturbing me. Officially, Presbyterians don’t talk about the doctrine of the Trinity, but my mother worshipped her very own three-pointed path to personal holiness anyway: I was going to be an educated man; I was going to be a minister; I was going to carry on the Reverend King’s work. I was going to be all of these things, and I was her son.

  “You still hungry? You want me to make you some warm milk?”

  “No, ma’am.” Warm milk, particularly the way my mother made it, with just the right splash of molasses, was my favourite, especially on cold winter nights, but it made me sleepy.

  “All right, you get back to your studies, your old mother won’t bother you no more now.”

  “You’re not bothering me.”

  “Hush now, you get back to your learning.”

  I moved my book, the Reverend King’s copy of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologia, closer to the lamp. I had two more arguments for the existence of God to memorize before I went to bed. Whatever I didn’t understand tonight, the Reverend King would explain to me tomorrow.

  7

  In the beginning was the word. The curse word.

  Profanity was almost as forbidden in Buxton as drinking or blasphemy. “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” was for Sunday, but “Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost” was an everyday edict. Bad language, moreover, was like bad grammar, was slave talk, the talk of a people denied the education and opportunities that I, for instance, most certainly hadn’t been.

  “How can a man expect to gain another man’s respect if he doesn’t first respect himself?” the Reverend King said more than once. Foremost, the white man’s respect, he meant but didn’t say. I censored my mouth and mind as well as anyone and never said me when what I meant to say was I.

  Taking George and me along with him once to Chatham, Mr. Freeman stopped the wagon near Pork Row to ask directions to the glassworks. A coloured man with one hand resting in the pocket of his unbuttoned vest, the other lazily picking at his long yellow teeth with a thumbnail, said, “Just a cunt hair away, gentlemen, just go back the way you come some and no more than ten doors down, is right there beside Gunsmith Jones’ place.”

  George’s father surprised us, didn’t thank the man for his help, didn’t even acknowledge him with a farewell tip of his hat or a simple “Good day.” Mr. Freeman may not have had the schooling that his son and I had, but he limited his cursing to when he was working the field and thought he was alone, and was a stickler for “Please” and “Thank you.” You didn’t have to know ancient Greek to know good manners.

  “What is it, Pa?” George said as his father turned the wagon around. “Do you know that man?”

  Mr. Freeman waited for a buggy to pass the other way down King Street. “Did it seem like I knew him, George? Did he seem like the kind of man your father would know?”

  We both understood that Mr. Freeman’s questions weren’t the sort that wanted answers, so kept quiet, although I knew George was as confused as I was. It was funny the way the man had called us gentlemen, the same way we always laughed every time George’s own father would ask us if we were taking our wives with us when we’d set out for a morning’s fishing at Deer Pond.

  We stayed in the wagon while Mr. Freeman went inside the glass-shop. George slid into his father’s seat as soon as he was out of sight. He picked up the switch, rested it on his shoulder.

  “You know why Pa was mad, don’t you?” he said.

  I nodded.

  George looked at me, shook his head. “Sure you do.”

  I didn’t mind so much not knowing, but the way he was smiling to himself, like he knew something that I didn’t, made me cross. “If you know so much,” I said, “why did you have to ask him, then?”

  George bounced the switch on his shoulder a couple of times. “I wanted him to say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “The word that that man said that made him so mad.”

  I nodded again, although with even less hope of looking clever than last time. I wished I was sitting up front in the wagon too.

  We saw Mr. Freeman through the glass-shop front shaking the hand of the man behind the counter. George stuck the whip back into place and scrambled out of the driver’s seat into the back.

  Cupped hand to my ear, “Cunt,” he said.

  I kept my eyes on Mr. Freeman, still inside the shop but soon to be out the door and on the sidewalk and in the wagon.

  “It’s the only word it could have been.”

  For the rest of that day and all of that evening—at supper with my mother; head down to my studies; on my knees saying my prayers—the word remained a word, just something someone said that had gone on to where all words went once they’re spoken, the ether of endless alphabets, up there for the good ones, down below for the bad. I slept the sleep of a child: immediate, deep, empty.

  I woke up in the middle of the night with the word stuck in my throat, a tiny tickling bone that wouldn’t come clear. Every time I attempted to cough, to get rid of it, the word would grow larger and that much more difficult to dislodge. I knew it was wrong to think of it, never mind actually say it, and I tried to go back to sleep—prayed to go back to sleep, albeit without mentioning why I needed heavenly help—but the cool side of the pillow soon grew as hot and damp as the other, and eventually it felt as though, if I didn’t say it, I would surely choke to death in my own bed.

  “Cunt,” I whispered, not knowing what the word meant now any more than I had that afternoon, but knowing instantly that I had sinned; knowing, too, that no matter how dark the night had seemed before, it was about to get much, much darker.

  The smell of my mother’s pancakes was the next thing I remember. A shaft of sunlight lay on the pillow beside my head, impatient for the curtain in my room to be parted and the day to officially begin. I couldn’t remember falling asleep.

  “David,” my mother called from the kitchen. “Time for you to get up now, son.”

  *

  I could lie and say it simply made sense. That, being a logical being, I’d merely followed the dictates of logic and come to my decision purely logically. Just as any rational being should have. Should have would have could have didn’t.

  Darwin wasn’t the first naturalist to assert that evolution had taken place right underneath our upturned noses, but he was the first to assemble so much evidence that to deny it was only possible by a wilful act of self-inflicted ignorance. And if one accepted the evolutionary kinship of all animals, one not only lost a heavenly father but gained an extended orphaned earthly family, the family of all living, breathing beings. Except that being kin comes with responsibilities—most importantly, that you don’t eat your relations, no matter how tasty they might be covered in barbecue sauce. Because if one doesn’t acknowledge certain rights that must be granted to all members of the family, there remains the risk that these same sacrosanct rights might be arbitrarily and illogically denied to certain other members. Perhaps, say, the human faction of the family. Perhaps, say, a selected segment of that human faction. Perhaps, say, the coloured segment.

  So, one had a choice: either right was might or everyone had the same incontrovertible rights. I didn’t have a choice. My last day as a cannibal was November 7, 1881, my thirty-fifth year.

  But those are the reasons I quit eating other animals, not why. Why never comes from the head. Why begins much lower in the body and only becomes reasons after first passing through the bowels and the heart and the throat. The brain takes all of the credit, but it’s always the last to know what’s on its mind.

  Twenty years earlier, George and I were on our way to Deer Pond when we spott
ed one of its four-legged namesakes, except that it wasn’t running away from us this time but was lying on its side in the brush. Someone had shot it—there was a neat, blood-rimmed hole no bigger around than a half-dollar—halfway down its long neck, but the shooter must have thought he’d missed and so not done what Mr. Freeman never failed to remind us to do whenever we went hunting: always finish the kill, never let the animal suffer.

  George and I crept closer, but the deer stayed where it was. I’d never been this close to a living deer before. Both of its eyes were wide open, but I don’t think it saw us. It looked without blinking—not once—in the direction of where its head lay on the ground.

  George was standing beside me, pointed at the rising and falling of the deer’s rib cage. “It’s still breathing pretty good,” he said. “There’s no telling how long it’ll keep going.”

  If you ignored the bullet hole and the glassy brown eyes, the deer looked like a large, tamed cat sunning itself on the forest underbrush. Then he slowly opened his mouth like he was going to amaze us and speak. Which he did—with a low, guttural groan that sounded like the wailing of a man suffering so much pain he’s denied the power of words.

  “We’ve got to kill it,” I said.

  George looked at me, looked terrified, as if he suddenly realized he’d done something terrible. “I didn’t bring my gun,” he said.

  “We’ll have to find a rock.”

  “It better be a big one.”

  “Start looking.”

  It was actually a relief to be out of the deer’s sightless sight, to be far enough away that in case he cried again, I wouldn’t have to hear it. Not having to look at him or listen to him, I could almost believe he wasn’t there and we didn’t have to do what had to be done.