Song of the Shank

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  He looks at Eliza from under his hat—Ma’m, just giving my arms a rest—before he starts loading the luggage onto a handcart. Takes the last bag from Tom—tugs once twice before Tom relinquishes it—and stacks it neatly on top of the others. Stands there under the roof, head hanging like a horse’s above her and Tom, his face glistening with sweat of the earned type, like a polished badge proudly announcing its achievement. He wants to be paid.

  Of course, the Negro will prefer banknotes to sugar. (Common sense.) Thinking such, she removes the three lowest denominations of bills from the drawstring purse she keeps on her person (dress pocket) and holds them up to him.

  He throws her a hard disapproving look. No’m, he says. You ain’t got to pay me.

  Hearing confounds sense. Had she understood every word, Eliza asking herself although she knows that she has, knowing bringing change. All of this is quite different from the way she has been conceiving it. He simply wants to help her (them). She continues to sit, staring up at him with an amazed and incredulous question. Why?

  I’ll tote them on for you.

  Sir, Eliza says, I must not detain you any longer. What she says, although she would be happy enough to accept his offer, even let him do it all again, right down to his clumsy performance at the end (luggage dropped in dirt), a mishap that she is willing to forgive, seeing that in these three or four or five seconds they have established something noteworthy between them, formed an alliance to make the best of the worst.

  Ma’m, you ain’t got to worry bout that. I’ll just tote them then—

  Sir, she says, I must decline. You’ve gone out of your way, her refusal almost lost between whines of gratitude. Let us manage henceforth.

  His eyes dart at Tom, as if to read the meaning of what she is saying. As you see fit, ma’m. Beneath his hat he looks disappointed. I should take my leave. He seems reluctant to move. Safe passage. He lifts his hat and tilts his head.

  I bid you a very good day, Tom says.

  Eliza watches the Negro disappear around the corner of the station, and she continues to watch, not knowing where he has gone any more than she knows where he came from, and debating whether anyone had ever bestowed upon her a greater act of charity. She gets up from the settle, leaves Tom—The tickets, Tom, I’m off for the tickets—and walks with brisk purpose inside the station to the ticket booth, where she sucks in the dense air of the room and coughs a wave of gagging unstoppable coughs (heaves). Greets a small naked face crossed by three black iron bars. A face with too narrow a forehead; the eyes seem to be starting out of the sockets. The face sees only the one standing before him requesting two tickets, but this face does not question her purchase, bestowing the tickets on her with a courtly motion.

  She returns to find Tom standing up, on the verge of panic, his cane waving about in the air like a confused insect feeler. She touches his arm and they sit down together on the settle and wait for the train. Plenty of time to kill. More than an hour. The journey here by foot had seemed slow, their own dust getting ahead of them, but it had not been, only seemed that way because (perhaps) of moving through country without another soul around.

  The train is just a sound at first. Then it comes all at once, punctual to the minute, great iron wheels and rods slowing beneath the tossing ringing bell, black smoke flaring out of the stack and steam wailing through the whistle, the station full of cloud and noise, Tom moving beside her, his mouth urgent and wide.

  The conductor is standing on the steps of the dining car, directly behind the engine, a heavy-built man with a red strong-boned face, bodied like someone better suited to hard labor, laying tracks rather than riding on them. For a brief moment, more a gesture than an act, he glances from his perch toward Eliza, travels on to Tom and sees all there is to see of him, then directs his gaze elsewhere, a dismissal. Steps down hurriedly to the platform and starts a slow walk down the length of the station, but there is nothing to supervise, conduct, since she and Tom are the only boarding passengers.

  All aboard!

  Never acknowledges her. Never collects their tickets. His dismissal multiplied by heads framed in windows, faces pressed to glass, peering out in judgment. Determined not to let the insult inside her, Eliza takes the time (seconds) to study everything that is grotesque about the conductor, irritated by her powerlessness to force the issue. She gets up easy, like she has no weight to herself, and touches Tom in such a way as to let him know she is not going far and she will not be long. Makes her way over to the handcart and takes down the first item of luggage from the mound, aware that the conductor has already reached the end of the station and started the walk back. Seeing too something else that beggars belief, the Negro emerging from around the station corner, a black mass of speed, moving determinedly with head forward and a fixed from-under stare like a charging bull’s. This entity that shoulders right past the conductor, who, startled, understanding, stops dead still for a moment, looking at the Negro, the Negro continuing on, coming straight for her.

  Ma’m. He lifts his hat, and before she can react he takes (snatches?) the bag from her hand, gets another bag and a third, then climbs onto the first passenger car and deposits them into the carrying space, loading and reloading two bags at a time, working with a kind of furious patience, a calmness and authority that surprise Eliza after his deferential antics earlier on. The conductor assumes his perch and hangs there in frozen immobility, his gaze calmly following the Negro, the conductor looking (trying to) more unconcerned than perturbed. (Just for a moment, she catches the fire of anger in his eyes.)

  All aboard!

  After he loads the heavy trunk, the Negro sees to it that she and Tom assume a berth on the train—moving single file down the narrow aisle, the Negro, Tom, Eliza—one (his decision) all the way at the rear of the car, meaning that they must pass row after row of their fellow passengers—the car half full—proper ladies and gentlemen who are nevertheless shocked and alarmed at this occurrence, drawing back in disgust and (even more) willing to express their feelings through faint cries of protest and indignation and (probably) derision and scorn. Tom takes the inside seat, near the window, passing his malacca cane off to Eliza for safekeeping. Eliza relieved that at least this much is settled. Duty fulfilled, the Negro stands poised in the aisle, waiting quietly—loud breath, silent sweat—looking down at them, eyes bright, as if the lifting and carrying and conducting had been a form of play. She takes it that he is waiting for her to discharge him.

  Sir, I’m both sorry and thankful, she says.

  Much obliged, ma’m.

  Please allow me to compensate you something for your time and effort.

  No, ma’m.

  Are you certain?

  Yes’m.

  Iron scrape and drag, the train begins its sluggish pull out of the station.

  Well, I best be leaving. The Negro bows slightly and lifts his hat. Ma’m. He shifts his attention to Tom. Mister. Tom neither moves nor speaks. The Negro stands, watching and waiting, the great iron wheels slowly rotating in hope of greater momentum, and succeeding somewhat, a beat or two. Mister. Momentarily he leans all the way over her and touches Tom’s shoulder. Tom turns his unseeing face at the contact. Only then does she notice that the Negro is staring at Tom with a marveling smile. Now she gets it. One poor son of Ham helping out another. Kindness, generosity—it was more than that with the Negro. It was Race and blood, shared suffering and circumstance. But wait—watching him watch—is that the true sum of it? She feels privy to an even greater, deeper, emotion. Apart from anything else, what—she sees in his gaze—can only be described as admiration and devotion, sentiments fully evident—unmistakable—from something in his manner and posture that had nothing to do with strength or height or poise or clothes or their cut and fit.

  You can help us again, Tom says.

  Much obliged. The Negro tilts his head-hat. Safe passage. Turns and starts down the aisle, swinging his shoulders lazily as he walks, unconcerned about what they think and a
t the same time very much concerned that they get a good look so as to recognize and remember this man, this Negro, moved by his own words, his own thoughts, made significant and present in the world because he has accomplished something of value for none other than the one and only Blind Tom.

  It makes Eliza smile to herself as she watches.

  And then he is gone, out there in the steam and smoke. She eases back and relaxes in her seat. Glances at Tom beside her, almost indistinct in bright light blaring through the window, a smile on his face, enjoying the movement of the train as it follows the curve of a hill, leaving the edges of the town to their left, scattered farms and homesteads hugging hurtling earth. A gradual thickening of brown and green until soon nothing but vegetation is visible through the windows (left right). The thought that they are finally leaving the country for the city becomes irresistible.

  Mile after mile the other passengers maintain an illusion of civility and pay her and Tom no mind. Only shifting corner-eyed glances. Tensely hissed whispers. Words drifting between words. Diction strikingly precise. A general sense of touchiness all around. She has the greatest desire to start a discussion with these people. To confront them. (Something of the defiant Negro rubbing off on her.) So why doesn’t she?

  The conductor enters the coach at the far end with a smile-commissioned face, squat and out of proportion to the visible rest of him under his short-brimmed cap. Starts his way down the narrow aisle, cumbersome and bulky, dodging knees and elbows, exchanging greetings (automatic discourse) and collecting tickets with a supplicating nod of his gray cap. At the appropriate time, Eliza holds her tickets up, and, shoe-leather hands, the conductor makes as if to take them, actually lowers and targets his brim, only to move on to the passengers seated in the row behind. A crude deliberate formula in his treatment.

  Sometime later—the next station, the one after that—a soldier boards their car, brass buttons bright against the dark blue cloth of his tunic, varicolored medals splayed across his chest, mapping for the world the war he has returned from (that has returned him). The field saber holstered in its scabbard alongside him an awkward appendage, a rudder steering him this way and that down the aisle. And the hat he’s wearing, the biggest she’s ever seen, looming large on his small head, some powerful ocean-crossing ship bouncing on the peaked waves of his ears. (Does she even see his face?) Taken by glory, another passenger relinquishes a seat at coach front so that the soldier need not suffer the slight indignity of sitting in the rear where Eliza and Tom sit. (Does the soldier thank him?) Before he has comfortably put himself between the cushions—saber removed—even before the train has pulled out of the station, the conductor enters the car and speaks to the soldier with a catch in his voice and a smile hung on the end of his words. Takes his ticket. Nods his thanks and good wishes. Then he brings himself before Eliza and asks for her tickets with triumphant malice, his eyes lit sharply with exactly what he thinks about her. She produces them and he accepts them, satisfied with having the power to diminish and delay, even if he must capitulate and perform his job.

  He slides away down the glistening aisle. They are speeding through space, tracks catapulting them toward the low sun, the city, toward home. Her bones jerking and shaking. She feels no more solid than the disparate streams of smoke swimming past the window, kicking their skinny black legs, bringing (now) the smell of fire with them.

  Traveling north through a continual cascade of trees, moving between dialects and regions, a rise rich in territorial overtones. Unclear to her the national claims, where (before the war) what federation begins or ends, no line of demarcation, no sharp defining difference—they cross the river—separating one state from another, between there and here, only this river curving them into a view (window) of a halo of motion on the horizon, then, an hour later, sun sinking into the dark waist and a flaming flower rising up, the glass glistening with its fuzzy light, the city’s brooding skyline, growing across the distance with each closing mile, waving its petals of roofs and towers, domes and belfries, factories surmounted by smokestacks and churches surmounted by the cross.

  The conductor jams his body in the door to keep it open, wind rushing in and something inside the coach emptying out, all speech and sound snatched free into the world. Eliza actually feels her insides suck; drowning in the air. But the conductor only stands there smiling (back) at them, features distorted under the rushing wind. After a gradual easing off of speed, they pull into the iron-vaulted shed of Grand Central Depot, a structure as big as a cathedral and possessing many of the same Gothic affectations.

  The entire production of leaving the train, walking through the station, and passing out of its wide portals takes only a few minutes. Panic and anger and the beginnings of elation all in an instant. The point is to hide right out in the open, put up a front of normalcy and routine. Nothing out of the ordinary here. No crossing of boundaries that should not be crossed. But suspicion permeates every syllable and glance. They think he is dead. “Blind Tom,” the eighth wonder of the world, the Negro Music Box, for her eyes only. His three-year absence from the stage having produced tenfold theories about his death. Strung up during the draft riots. Frozen in Alaska. Drowned in a Pennsylvania flood. Consumed by fire in a London hotel. Caught under the wheels of a railcar in Canada. The victim of a soldier’s bullet in Birmingham. Felled by his own heart in Paris. Felled by his own hand in Berlin.

  Tom gives her hand a little tug, meaning, Let’s move a little faster, Miss Eliza. Distracted by their return to the city, she only now notices his distress. A timid destitution has closed over him, a folding in on self (collapsible flesh), which forces him to walk in a slouch, Tom conscious of being watched. Wisps of panic begin to flicker through her brain.

  Eliza is already searching for a taxi among the many lined up one after another curbside, horses parked head to behind, their drivers outfitted in ragged and ill-fitting frock coats and stovepipe hats, attending to their carriages cheerfully, dancing around the wet slap of dung hitting hard ground. If only their good mood could work in her favor. The first just looks at her in a dull unresponsive way, her request left stinging in her throat. The next waggles his head from side to side. It gets worse after that—shouts and curses, faces turning away, glares that promise pain. She approaches the final driver in the queue, thinking that this may be the occasion when they will have to walk home. But why give him a chance to refuse? But the driver only smiles back at her delightedly from his perch as if he has never seen anything funnier. She calls out to Tom. Tom passes her his cane then heaves his considerable bulk into the cab next to her, leaving the porter to attend to their luggage. The taxi does just hold it all.

  They ride out into the strange wonders of the city, trundling across dry bridges and wet streets rivering up out of twelve canals, a city stitched together by water. Houses and buildings pushing against each other like contentious waves. The glow and hum of the gaslights clinging silt-like to their frames. Their windows crawling with lurid light. Shadows of people moving behind them as if performing (for her). The factories and mills burning even at this hour. The shops still open for business, many hundreds of objects arranged so as to arouse desire. People tumbling out from restaurants and saloons or leaning against the crossed telegraph poles from which black bodies had hung during the draft riots. The entire city welcoming her back. How happy she is that they are safely hidden within the hooded cab. They took something away from Tom, and he’ll never get it back.

  As they drive deeper into the city, it seems to her that hundreds and thousands of facts crowd into memory. The reek of feces and urine, lime and kerosene. The air stinging her skin with some invisible but definite spray. This crisscrossing of the senses too much and achingly familiar. The tiniest details recognizable. (Seeing them now?) Before long she can feel her whole body revive. Strange how altered the city seems after a summer away. Unreal. The wagon moving faster than warranted, bouncing them into the unmistakable dimensions of Broadway, a wide well-lit b
oulevard running like a river of whiteness from one end of the city to the other. (The boundaries stay clear.)

  Tom’s ears perk up. They have only to take the next corner, follow this last street, empty and mute and dark (dim lamps stationed far apart), which presses in on them like the walls of a narrowing tunnel. Tom relishing (smiles, grins) these bumps and declensions. Under inspection, the corners and lanes scramble to order, form a neat row of identical nondescript five-story residences reflecting the crude elemental law of symmetry, which has directed much of the layout of the city. She tells the driver where to stop. The facade pleases the observer (the broader view) because it looks so gray in keeping with its actual age, but sturdy, able to withstand. The brick—she wants to believe she has memorized each one—honeycombed with bullet holes. Every window is open, except theirs—a sultry night despite the time of year.

  The driver will take the luggage into the vestibule and no farther.

  Tom gets out of the cab unassisted and, golden-headed cane in hand, hops shifts and hobbles along the sidewalk up to the building entrance, his hat flying away from his head, Eliza behind him struggling to keep up, walking deeper into the darkness, away from the gaslights. They walk through the heavy door, pull moonlight in, and start the five-flight climb, Tom wheezing fitfully from the effort of lifting his ample bulk, voices from the street following them up, loud, night-singers, and frenzied laughter and shouts, mixed with the erratic barking of neighborhood dogs.

  She rattles keys at their door. The one that should won’t turn the lock. Tom clings to the banister, alert and listening.