by Esi Edugyan
Silence passed between us; strange birdcall echoed from beyond the walls.
“You are happy here?” I said.
He looked warily at me. “There are several kinds of happiness, Washington. Sometimes it is not for us to choose, or even understand, the one granted us.”
It was supposed to be a wisdom; it sounded instead like something he said to comfort himself these cold nights when only the sound of wind and strange cries could be heard.
I felt the cold running into my bones. I shivered, gripping my coat close around me.
“Shall we go inside?” said Titch.
“Where did you go, when you left your father’s camp?” I said. “Peter said you spoke some madness about it—that you had been there among us the whole time, that you could see us. But where did you truly go?”
He moistened his lips, but said nothing.
“A search party was sent out to find you, from your father’s encampment. Did you never chance to cross paths? How is it they never discovered you?”
Again he seemed disinclined to say anything.
“I have travelled all this way,” I said.
He exhaled a slow breath, and I thought he would speak, but he was silent a long while. Finally he said, “I knew you would never leave me.” He paused. “I could not go in a simple way.”
“So it was a ruse? You only made it look as if you left?”
“I left.” He frowned out at the air before us, as though he saw something in it. But he said nothing more.
“I might have died there,” I said.
“You had Peter, you had my father. I would not have left you otherwise. I knew you would be well cared for.” He turned to me. “You were with my father, when he died?”
I stared, nodded rigidly.
“That was always a great comfort to me, that you were there. My brother died also, some two years ago. I had thought his death would shatter me, but it did not. I was shocked at myself, at the callousness I could feel. We were boys together, we were blood. And yet, nothing.”
What would he have me say to this? His brother had been a cruel, evil man and it struck me as only just that no one should cry at his passing. I was only surprised that Haas and Solander had spoken so differently, had said Titch had been devastated.
“I went some years ago to clean up Faith. I put all its records in London, as you know.” He glanced in pity at me. “I saw your Kit on the list of the deceased. I had not known it then, that she was your mother.” He frowned softly. “She died naturally, I understood.”
I knew it was a kindness he was trying to extend, an attempt to bridge the distance he sensed between us. And yet I did not wish to share this wound with him; I did not wish to share it with anyone.
“You told me once, when I was drawing, ‘Be faithful to what you see, and not what you are supposed to see.’ ”
“Did I say that?” Titch seemed genuinely surprised.
“You did. And yet it always did seem to me that you never lived by it yourself.”
He paused. “What do you mean?”
“You did not see me—you did not look at me, and see me. You wanted to, but you didn’t, you failed. You saw, in the end, what every other white man saw when he looked at me.”
He frowned softly. “That is untrue.”
I moistened my lips, and it was as though I could finally ask it, the question that had twisted and defined my life.
But he wanted to go, and starting to walk ahead, he said, “Come, there is something I would show you.”
“Titch,” I said sharply, and it surprised me, the depth of the anguish in my voice.
He stopped. There was an expression of sad warning in his face, as if he wished to ward off what I might say.
I stepped forward, my heart punching in my rib cage. “Why did you choose me?”
He stood expressionless.
“That first evening, when Big Kit and I were serving dinner for your brother. You chose me quite deliberately that night. I remember it. You said I was just the right size for your Cloud-cutter. You chose me because I would make the perfect ballast.”
There was a curious look on his face.
“Do you deny it?”
He frowned. “Why do you ask me this?”
“That is your answer?”
He shook his head. “I said it quite plainly at the time. Your size is indeed why I chose you. I made no secret of it.”
I smiled angrily, feeling both vindicated and desperately heartsick.
“What else would I have had to go on, not knowing you at the time? It is why I chose you, but it is not why I engaged you to help with my experiments. It is not why I befriended you. Do you suppose just anybody could have grasped the complexity of those equations? You were a rare thing.”
“Thing?”
“Person. A rare person.”
“Not so rare that I could not be abandoned. Not be replaced.” I felt a pain high up in my throat, and when I spoke, there was a pressure in my voice I could not control. “And so you took in a young black boy, and you educated him as if he were an English boy. For his benefit, though? Or so that you might write about it?”
He looked quietly shocked. “I have never written about it.”
“You took me on because I was helpful in your political cause. Because I could aid in your experiments. Beyond that I was of no use to you, and so you abandoned me.” I struggled to get my breath. “I was nothing to you. You never saw me as equal. You were more concerned that slavery should be a moral stain upon white men than by the actual damage it wreaks on black men.”
Even as I spoke these words, I could hear what a false picture they painted, and also how they were painfully true.
He stared at me. Slowly, ever so slowly, he shook his head. He peered calmly at me with his dark-green eyes.
I stood, my mouth dry, waiting.
Again he shook his head. “I treated you as family.”
How strange, I thought, looking upon his sad, kind face, that this man had once been my entire world, and yet we could come to no final understanding of one another. He was a man who’d done far more than most to end the suffering of a people whose toil was the very source of his power; he had risked his own good comfort, the love of his family, his name. He had saved my very flesh, taken me away from certain death. His harm, I thought, was in not understanding that he still had the ability to cause it.
“Please,” said he, “just let me show it to you.”
I felt the blood shifting in my body, a heat rising to my cool skin.
“Washington,” he said.
I looked upon his pained face, and I went.
16
HE LED ME BACK to the passageway I’d come from, through the twisting, fragrant halls of the house and into the courtyard outside.
It took my eyes some moments to adjust to this new darkness. And I glimpsed in the courtyard, rising blackly into the sky, the shadow Tanna and I had passed upon first entering. It had been uncovered, and squinting, I could just make out a tangle of wood and cloth and metal rods. And then at once I was struck silent.
For there, lying sideways on the pale ground, was the elegant shape of a small two-man boat. Its strong white masts rose at a slant towards the sky. I saw, stretching from either side of its hull, wings of prehistoric proportions—the wings of a creature frightening and mythic.
I stood aghast, the masts thrumming above me in the high wind.
“I have been constructing this some years now,” Titch said, frowning up at the masts. “I still mean to cross the Atlantic. I had been thinking, actually, of Barbados as a destination. It would seem to me fitting to take the craft to the shores there.”
I stared at him, and every account of his madness came flooding back. And yet I knew he was not mad—I knew he was simply re-enacting his
past as a form of comfort, conveniently forgetting all that had been bad and wrong about it. And I understood too that he was setting himself up for a second failure, that this craft would not take him even halfway to that lost island, that he would either have to give it up or die in the trying.
As I peered at the glorious white masts, the hull’s dark, polished wood, the wings splaying from either side, I felt again the wet winds from the turquoise sea, the touch of the royal palm’s leaves in bloom, the fine, dry grass under my heels. I felt the damp of cane toads and leaf-toed geckos in my fists; I smelled the hot rust of machetes in the heat; and a bright pain came into my head then, filling it, so that I grimaced and shut my eyes.
17
WE SAT ON opposite sides of the floor, drinking mint tea in the near dark. Outside, the wind had picked up, blew in powder-white gusts against the windows. The boy had wandered sleepily inside, lay snoring softly on the floor in the far corner.
Titch dredged a bent spoon through the leaves in his glass, silent. We had lit a single candle, its flame so little that our hands and faces were just visible. I noticed a sore on the back of his thin white hand, saw he had been troubling it much; it looked weeping and raw.
“How far are we from Dahomey?” said I.
He yawned, rubbed at an eye. “Dahomey?” He paused, searching my face.
“What is it?”
“When your face was injured,” he said softly. “I remember you mentioning Dahomey. You thought you had been reborn there.” He sensed he had embarrassed me, and ventured, “It is not near. The journey would be most dangerous for one such as you. I would not risk it.”
We were silent some moments. He gave a great yawn.
“You should go to bed,” I said.
He regarded me sleepily some moments. “Do you remember Mister Edgar Farrow?”
“I do.”
“He is dead. I only just had the news.”
I struggled to remember that strange man’s face. I recalled his kindness, how it bore no correlation to his darker, unsavoury hobbies. “I am very sorry.”
“He had been ill. Indeed, I was surprised to find him still able in body when we last saw him.”
“He did look ill.”
“He was a great man. All that he did for people.”
Silence passed. Then, in some surprise at myself, I began to speak of Ocean House, of what I hoped it would be, in the end. And I knew then, in my very mention of it, that I would return to London and fight to undo the expunging of my name, that I would devote myself wholly to the project and seek some credit for it.
As he listened, I could see in Titch’s face something of the ferocious interest of his days at Faith, when the sight of even a beetle sent him rushing for his magnifiers, to lose the whole day following its trail on an ironwood leaf. “I know you do not desire my affirmation, Wash,” he said, “but what you are building—it sounds astonishing.”
I looked momentarily down at my hands, glanced back up.
Titch was hesitating. “When I said outside that you were family—” He paused. “That was always my feeling towards you, at least. I hadn’t any idea of mistreating you. I tried to be kind.”
I looked at his tired, anxious face, saying nothing.
It seemed as if he would speak something more, but he fell silent.
“John Willard died,” I said.
Titch glanced up warily. “I had heard that as well. And that it was no pretty death.”
“You hear much here at the edge of the world.”
“Indeed—I am more abreast of things here than I ever was in England.”
I thought of his father, Mister Wilde, at his outpost in the North. How long ago that life seemed. “I was there, at John Willard’s hanging.”
Titch looked surprised. “You might have spared yourself, Wash.”
“It was as though I had been fated to see it.” I stirred my tea, felt the soft resistance of the mint leaves. I raised my eyes. “I thought I saw you there. In the crowd. I even followed you.”
He smiled exhaustedly. “Perhaps it was my spirit,” he said, and I thought of what he’d told Peter Haas, his explanation for where he had gone in the snow.
“Peter Haas gave me his old quadrant to give to you.”
“But that is much too large an instrument to transport. However did you manage it?”
“I didn’t. It’s back in Amsterdam, I’m afraid. As you said, it was simply too big. I paid to have it delivered back to him.” I shrugged. “It did not seem right to take it from him, in any case. Even if he will never use it, it marks his life.”
Titch took a slow sip of his tea. “And how was he?”
“Very well.” I hesitated, adding, “Concerned for your sanity, I think.”
Titch appeared surprised.
“Robert Solander, too. He said your clothes were too tight.”
“My clothes too tight? What the devil?”
And I described what Solander had said, about his arriving at the Abolitionist Society wearing what seemed to be another’s clothes. Titch began to laugh.
“I had sent my luggage ahead to Amsterdam, in anticipation of my visit to Peter,” Titch said. “I was left only with what was on hand at Granbourne. As I had been many years away, not much fit me. I was forced to make do.”
“That is just what a madman would argue to save face.”
Titch smiled again, though it did not touch his eyes. “All the while I was wearing them, I kept thinking, What would Philip think to see me dressed so? He who prized his clothing so much.”
Hearing that name, I was flooded with images: The slow white fingers on the hunting rifle; the way, after a great meal, he would lick those same fingers thoughtfully, as if considering again each herb and spice and vinegar. The tiredness of his ever-darkening face throughout the days of autumn. The look of him on the field that evening.
I did not know why Titch would mention him, if not to wound me. But I could see now, in his face, the desire to explain.
“Earlier, outside, you asked about the North, what happened.” He rubbed at the sore on his hand. “I was not myself, walking into that storm, I did not feel myself at all. I was so—” He paused as though he knew not how to begin. “Erasmus, Philip and I—we were very close as boys. We played together like brothers all three. And yet Erasmus and I, we did not quite see Philip as our equal. His family was poorer, his manners less refined—all the things boys find to twit each other over. We teased him mercilessly.” He lifted his eyes, abashed. “But then things seemed to go rather beyond that.”
I peered across at him, silent.
“It was little things, at first. We’d speak of Granbourne’s being haunted, then lock him up in one of the disused rooms overnight. We’d take him off into the woods on the estate as if on a leisurely hike, then suddenly we’d turn on him, demanding he remove all his clothing. When he began to cry, we would strip him bare and leave him to walk naked home.” He looked uneasily at me. “I am not proud of this.
“Things, they began to take a grimmer turn. We began to beat him, Erasmus especially, he would punch and punch and punch and Philip would drop to the ground, and Erasmus would kneel and keep beating him. Only when Philip lost consciousness would it all come to an end.
“We had the taste of it, we simply could not stop. The violence was in us. I sometimes wonder if that is not where it all began for Erasmus, with Philip.”
I shifted on the floor where I sat, said nothing.
“Me, I never felt I understood Philip. He seemed always a being from another world. As we age, most men solidify, become more of what they are. Not so Philip. He seemed to only grow more obscure. There were so many odd things about him, so many details that made no sense. After he died, we had many surprises, things no one had ever suspected of him. Every month he donated half his income to a ladies’
aid society that had established a home for orphaned children. Why? I cannot begin to fathom. And this while he owed significant gambling debts in Whitechapel, debts that could easily have been repaid with his charitable contributions. Why did he do it—did he secretly have children somewhere? I do know that he used to brag about being engaged to a widow in Lisbon, but she turned out to be a phantom—no record was ever found of her. He loved fine food and fine clothes but frequented the most disreputable clubs, places one could never mention in daylight. He socialized, spent wildly. He had not a friend in the world.
“We were so awful to him.” Titch glanced at me, but would not let his eyes come to rest. “On the very night his father would die, Erasmus and I insisted Philip join us on an outing to a public house, though he resisted and resisted. His father had been sick for weeks, you see, and Philip never left his bedside. Well, finally we convinced him. Philip returned to Grosvenor that night half-blind with drink, to learn his father had passed.
“When he took his life at Faith—” Titch shook his head, let the sentence drop away.
I sat in the blackness on the hard stone floor, feeling the events of the past shift and splinter. I remembered Titch’s silence on that night I’d run to him in his study, speechless and shaking and drenched in blood. How responsible I had felt for that death, though I had laid no hand on Philip. I had felt so helpless at what I could not stop.
“Retrieving his body from the field that night,” Titch said, “I could not do it, I could not touch him. I thought only, these pieces, this flesh, this is not Philip.” He shrugged softly. “It suddenly seemed that the physical properties of the world were not all there is, that there is more.”
The boy stirred in the corner. I spared him no glance. I looked instead to my hands, thinking of the years spent running, after Philip’s death. And I thought of what it was I had been running from, my own certain death at the hands of Erasmus. I thought of my existence before Titch’s arrival, the brutal hours in the field under the crushing sun, the screams, the casual finality edging every slave’s life, as though each day could very easily be the last. And that, it seemed to me clearly, was the more obvious anguish—that life had never belonged to any of us, even when we’d sought to reclaim it by ending it. We had been estranged from the potential of our own bodies, from the revelation of everything our bodies and minds could accomplish.