David

by Ray Robertson

  “You should eat something,” he said.

  “If I was hungry, I would.”

  In fact, in spite of myself, I was. I’d discovered that nothing cut through a whiskey hangover like a cold roast beef sandwich dressed with plenty of horseradish, but at the moment, doing what was good for me seemed wrong. The throb in my temples and the churn in my stomach, on the other hand, felt absolutely right. George looked at the loaded-down plate in his hand like a thief caught with his fingers in the till.

  “It should get eaten, though,” I said. “A lot of people went to a lot of trouble putting it all together.”

  George nodded, pushed around his ham with his fork. I watched Mr. Freeman bending over to hear better what Mrs. Hampton, the Kings’ nearest neighbour, was saying to him from her chair. Mrs. Hampton had been “old lady Hampton” since we were boys. Now we were men, and she was still old lady Hampton.

  “When is your father leaving?” I said.

  “Soon. As soon as he hears from his people down there that they’re ready for him.”

  “If they’re his people, they’re your people too, aren’t they?”

  George took a bite of his ham. “I suppose.”

  Now that the service was over and the body was in the ground and everyone was together inside eating and chatting, if one hadn’t known what had been going on that morning, the spirited conversations taking place throughout Clayton House might have seemed like a communal lunch intended to celebrate the imminent end of the war. And if more people were talking about the death of slavery than that of my mother, who could blame them? The Confederacy’s demise meant, finally, freedom for all our people. My mother’s death didn’t mean anything.

  “Are you going to stay on in your mother’s house?” George said.

  He knew I wasn’t. I knew he knew. I told him no anyway, that I’d already sold it back to the Settlement. The Reverend King had assured me that my expulsion was no one’s concern but his, mine, and God’s, and that as far as the villagers knew I was simply making a fresh start after my mother’s death. George knew better. Even without anyone telling him what had happened, he knew better.

  “Where are you going to go?” he said. He used his fork to drag his green beans from one side of his plate to the other.

  “I don’t know.”

  He divided his beans into two, then three, then four separate piles. “I suppose you can go anywhere you want now. Do anything you want.”

  It took me a moment to understand what he meant. “I’m free now,” I said.

  George stabbed a green bean and stuck it in his mouth. “We’re all free now.”

  11

  I liked living in Chatham.

  I liked the crowded shops and the congested streets in the daytime. I liked the loud saloons at night. I liked waiting out a hangover sitting in the shade on the bank of the Thames watching the steamboats glide by in the afternoon. I liked it that no one knew who I was and that I wasn’t expected to know who anyone else was. I even liked the polite insolence that frequently met my questions, or sometimes just my face. Partly, I knew, the result of having a black face, but partly also the result simply of mixing among strangers, of living in a city whose citizens weren’t united by a proud historical pedigree or a higher moral purpose, of being just one of many thousands of people whose primary societal obligation was to try to not bother anyone else too much.

  My first night at Griffin House, once I’d unpacked my clothes and my books, I decided to go for a walk. The porter, a Negro from Detroit not much older than me, told me the name and address of a saloon I should visit if I liked good whiskey and pretty women. After walking for over an hour in the after-dinner dusk, not minding terribly that I wasn’t sure where I was or where I was going, I stopped in front of a house where an old white man in a rocking chair was sitting on his porch. It wasn’t near being warm yet, but people were beginning to reappear, slowly recovering from winter’s long assault.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m looking for Eugenie Street.”

  The man didn’t bother to stop rocking. “It’s a free country,” he said.

  I kept going, couldn’t help laughing. That sonofabitch, you know, he wasn’t wrong.

  *

  I wasn’t particular about how I kept myself in cheap whiskey and expensive mail-order books. Not at first, anyway. I made bricks at the James Cornhill Brick Yards, flour at the Kent Mills, barrels and casks at the Chatham Pump, Stave and Barrel Factory, candies and biscuits at Chatham Confectionery Works. The only thing I wouldn’t do was anything agricultural, not so much a reasoned decision as a spiritual injunction. No matter that no omnipotent overseer reigned over the fields anymore, the picking of crops was somebody else’s job as of the day the South surrendered, my people having spent more than their fair share of time sowing the soil for someone else’s reaping. The closest I came to bringing in a harvest was the six months I worked at the Thames Cigar Company. The Turko-Russian War was every newspaper’s number one news story, and the owner of TCC decided to capitalize on the public’s interest by renaming several of his products after the war’s most famous figures. I helped manufacture the Czar, the Sultan, the Ali, the Suliman, and the Iron King. “Be a King, Smoke an Iron King,” the advertisement in the Chatham Planet said. There must have been a lot of men who secretly imagined they were kings—the Iron King was our most popular brand by far.

  Most factories wouldn’t hire Negroes, but because I could spell and count and compose a proper telegram to suppliers, I generally worked at white-owned businesses. If they’d had their preference, of course, a white man would have been in my place, but because few white men who could spell and count and compose a proper telegram wanted a filthy, exhausting, tedious factory job, an exception could be made in my case. Once I’d demonstrated my usefulness, it wasn’t unusual for the man who’d hired me to inform me, usually come payday, that he was pleased I’d managed to fit in as well as I had. Handing me my pay packet, “You’re a credit to your people, David, a real example of what they can accomplish if they put their minds to it. I’m just glad I was able to offer you a helping hand when I did.” I’d take the money and remind myself that this fucking fool had never read Plato’s dialogues or even a single aphorism of Lichtenberg’s and that I was the superior, not to mention happier, human being because I had. You find your worldly compensations where you can, and self-righteous condescension is in no way the least satisfying.

  I could have gotten a job at a Negro-owned business. There were restaurants, grocery stores, barbershops, even shoe stores that sold exclusively to Chatham’s darker-skinned citizens. But white-run businesses were bigger and paid better. And to be honest, working alongside whites turned out to be easier than the time I spent at the all-Negro mills and warehouses on the Boyd Block, where the bulk of the coloured businesses were located. At worst, whites would ignore you, leave you alone with your lunch, never call you by your name, only by “Hey.” Eventually, though, in tiring time, just one more overworked, underpaid Us. Us as in Us and Them. No matter where you ended up working or whom you ended up working with and for, always Us and Them.

  Negroes didn’t trust me. A white man might ignore you, might not even acknowledge you as a fellow man, but even if I didn’t want allies when I worked among my own kind, only to do my job and collect my pay, I didn’t want to be mistaken for a spy. Yet every time I preferred a book as a lunchtime companion, every time I didn’t want to wager that week’s pay at a Friday night dice game, every time I said “isn’t” instead of “ain’t,” “you” instead of “youse,” my skin turned another degree paler. I was invisible to the white man, I was a white man to the coloured man. I chose to be a ghost instead of a devil.

  I did my job and made my pay and went my own way. When a better-paying job became available, I took it. When my rooming-house room became too small for my growing library, I moved. Every night, I read myself to sleep, except for Saturday night, when I got drunk at a saloon and let whiskey and a stran
ge woman put me to sleep in a bed not my own. My mother was dead, I might as well have been dead to everyone in Buxton, and if I died in my room, the only reason anyone would care would be because of the smell my corpse made.

  One Saturday night, instead of going to a whore after the saloons closed, I went to a man on Lacroix Street who gave tattoos, mostly to sailors stopping off in Chatham during their travels down the Thames.

  “What do you want it to say?” the man said, dabbing alcohol along my forearm, preparing my flesh for his instrument.

  For the past several weeks I’d been reading Paradise Lost when I wasn’t selling my time to the biscuit factory, surprised but pleased to learn that Satan had most of the best lines. Alone late one night in my small, under-heated rooming-house room—motherless, friendless, my back still sore from a long day’s heavy lifting—Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven, I read.

  “Non Serviam,” I said.

  The man stopped rubbing, looked at me. “You better write it down.”

  When he was done, there were ten raised letters stencilled across my right forearm, a long scar of language that reminded me of George’s father’s scars. Except that my scar was self-inflicted. And my scar meant that I was free.

  *

  The day begins with Loretta shaking me awake. The day begins in the middle of the night, sunlight still hours until showtime.

  “You must stop this,” she says. She’s leaning back on both elbows, squinting down at me in deference to the table-side lamp she’s lit.

  I concede a second opened eyelid. “What is this?” I say.

  “You know what you do.”

  “What—snore?”

  “Hah. I wish it was snore.”

  I close both eyes with the intention of deciphering what she means, but immediately drift back to . . .

  The day begins with Loretta shaking me awake, this time hard enough to qualify as a soft punch, or at least a serious shove. I join her on my elbows to prove I’m really alert and concentrating.

  “Okay,” I say, “enough. What do you want me to stop?”

  She takes an angry moment to accept that I really am oblivious to what she’s so obviously aware of. “Bathroom sounds. In the bed. This is not the place.”

  I take my own moment—to translate “bathroom sounds in the bed” into English—and, after doing the alphabetical arithmetic, am more surprised than chastened. It’s Loretta, after all, who has to be occasionally reminded to close the bathroom door behind her. It’s Loretta, not me, who needs to be asked to please cut her toenails when she’s sure she’s alone. Besides,

  “How can I stop something if I don’t know I’m doing it?” I say.

  “You do not know.” It’s an accusation, not a question.

  “I’m asleep, how would I know?”

  “I do not know,” she says, putting out the lamp and flipping over her pillow, punching it in the middle—once, hard—before laying her head down, facing away from me. “But this is unacceptable.”

  Unacceptable, maybe, I think, staying flat on my back, the most flatulence-frustrating position possible, but inevitable. I’ve grown tired of spending the majority of my time the last two days in the bathroom waging a silent contest with my taciturn bowels, but I get up from the bed and go anyway. Henry, nose tucked deep into his curled front legs at bed’s end, looks up long enough to see me slip into my slippers then disappears back beneath his limbs. Henry doesn’t get constipated. It’s not the first time I’ve been envious of a dog.

  I lock the bathroom door and light the lamp on the wall and turn the wick until I get an adequate reading light. I used to keep copies of the Fortnightly and the Quarterly in here; now it’s Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The object is not to notice what you’re doing, to force your bowels to say what you want them to say by pretending not to care if they stay quiet forever. Eight pages of how “The Doctrine of Future Life contributed to The Rise of Christianity” later, my bowels still aren’t talking to me. Arrogant organs. They say that Lincoln suffered from lifelong constipation, that he required a powerful purgative delivered to the White House once every week. They also say that Lincoln suffered from extreme melancholy. I’m not a doctor, but . . .

  Since I’m already here and have nothing else to do, I decide to shave—the top as well as the front of my head old habit now—then manage to get dressed without waking Loretta. Henry seems puzzled by the early hour but jumps out of bed and follows me downstairs nonetheless, liking his odds of being served an early breakfast. I first light the fire in the library and then the stove; put the kettle on for me and get Henry’s food out of the cold room. The rice and carrots and corn and peas and squash are already mixed up, but I give them a fresh churn anyway, ladle out half a bowlful.

  Except for a single serving of porridge every morning, the vegetables and rice we both eat is the only cooking I do, Loretta the sole semi-member of the household who uses the stove for more than the kettle and another fire to help keep the house warm. Cooking is for cooks. I’m not anyone’s servant, not even my own. I buy my bread from the baker, my milk from the milkman, my vegetables from the vegetable seller. Let someone else till the soil and serve the food this lifetime.

  I pass the hours of darkness into dawn in the library, riding along Gibbon’s looping Latinate sentences, trying to hold on while following the fortune of his hero, human reason, as it falls, as it will always fall, before the usual list of ancient enemies. Meyers won’t be opening his drugstore door for another hour, but I could use a longer than usual walk this morning. My blocked bowels could use a longer than usual walk this morning. Henry is always game for extra walking, the more the better, even if his bowels never need any extra encouragement. No wonder people believe that animals don’t have souls. Small compensation for not being born perfect.

  It’s not even nine o’clock in the morning and there’s an old man voluntarily freezing just for the opportunity to be mesmerized by the sights and sounds of the man who lives a quarter-mile over from me milking his cow for his family’s morning milk. Old men who can’t work anymore like to stand around and watch young men who can. Their entire adult lives are one long moan about how they Gotta go to work, about how Work is killing me, about how they can’t wait for the day to be over so they can finally get home from work. Then, the day after their last day on the job, they’re poking around the house looking for something to fix, or else are roaming the neighbourhood in search of someone lucky enough to be patching a hole in the roof or digging a new well. Servitude is habit forming, the same as whiskey and tobacco. Fresh air and plenty of exercise can maim a man too.

  My anger keeps me warm and occupied all the way downtown. Meyers is just turning around his closed sign to the open side when I leave Henry beside the lamppost out front. There’s a new display in the front window he’s obviously put a lot of time and consideration into. Such a variety of shiny bottles affixed with such healthy names and happy promises (Dr. Pierce’s Golden Medical Discovery, Dr. Dalzell’s Nasal Douche, Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, Dr. Hercules Sanche’s Oxydonor, Pink Pills for Pale People, Thayer’s Slippery Elm Lozenges, Galvanic Love Powder, The Invalid’s Friend and Hope, Princess Lotus Blossom’s Vital Sparks), it’s almost a shame not to be sick.

  Meyers is always glad to see me come through his door, happy for the opportunity to impersonate a respected member of Chatham’s professional class and not be just one more King Street shopkeeper with a personality so impossibly grating he’s reduced to doing his socializing at an illegal, underground saloon owned and operated by a former slave. Meyers still sells simples and chemicals, which he uses to compound and dispense medicine, still spreads his own plasters, and duly prepares pills, powders, tinctures, ointments, syrups, conserves, medicated waters, and even perfumes. But since the big American companies have started offering up cheap patent medicines that pharmacists previously had to make by hand, he’s had to pick up the sales slack, has started to stock confectioneries, spices, tob
acco, paint, even groceries and liquor. Poor Meyers has even had to install a soda fountain. Self-delusion is man’s greatest gift, but it’s difficult to successfully masquerade as a dignified man of medicine when just a fraction of your working day is given over to exhibiting your vast knowledge of artificial flavours and carbonated water to every snotty six-year-old armed with a nickel.

  Meyers doesn’t know what I’m here for and I’m in no hurry to enlighten him. Asking for constipation medicine is simply embarrassing. It’s not even the pills themselves or what they’re made for that are the problem. It’s only that, I know Meyers knows I shit—well, ordinarily—but I don’t like the idea of needing him in order to do it.

  “And how is Mr. King today?”

  “Just fine.”

  “Jolly good.”

  I nod in appreciation of my surfeit of goodness and fineness. Now if only I could crap.

  Meyers nods right along with me, last man nodding wins.

  “I wonder,” I say, “if you have anything for . . . I mean to say, lately, I haven’t been . . .” I discover I’m pointing at myself, clearly indicating that there’s something definitely wrong with either my heart, my lungs, my stomach, or perhaps my genitals.

  Meyers nods again, but this time just once, and with solemn purpose, as if he actually knows what ails me and has just the thing to cure me of it. Before I can tell him to forget it, not to bother, he’s left me alone for his backroom. I consider simply leaving, but instead walk to the door to check on Henry. He sees me see him and wags. I smile back.

  “Here we are,” Meyers says, holding up a small brown bottle. “Just take one of these a day until you’re feeling more yourself.”

  I want to say, Meyers, you fool, you don’t even know what’s wrong with me, how can you possibly prescribe something for me? but because that would entail having to tell him what actually is wrong, I just take the bottle and drop it in my coat pocket without so much as glancing at it. Meyers adds the cost to my tab in his accounts book.