Song of the Shank

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  I’ll need to go fetch Mr. Hub.

  Tom makes a slow sound of assent. As might be expected.

  Forcing himself to immobility, remaining at the banister while she descends five floors—six?—to the basement in search of Mr. Hub. The Hubs inhabit the smallest dwelling in the building, the sort of place you see all at once upon entering. (And she has, once or twice over the years.) They have a bell and a knocker at their door. She tries both. For quite a long time nothing happens. Mr. Hub is someone who usually rushes to answer a bell. She knocks and rings again. That sensation that has to do with a shut door. Mr. Hub answers, a ripple of surprise passing over his face, that shapeless lump jammed into the angle of opening, little circles where the eyes should be as if thumbs have gouged in. (How he always looks or only the pallor of the late hour on his cheeks?) He smiles, nods—Mrs. Bethune—trying to hide his discomfort. Hovers anxiously in the doorway, looking leaner than usual, perhaps because of the bedclothes. Eliza used to seeing him in denim overalls, a rag fraying away in his hand.

  Now his wife, a gaunt woman with stern pale features, is standing behind him, holding her dressing gown at the collar, flanked by their children. Eliza cannot recall a single instance when she has heard the woman speak, even in greeting or to chastise one of her offspring.

  I’m sorry to draw you from your bed. She tells him succinctly about the key and asks him to look into the matter.

  Yes, Mrs. Bethune. Of course.

  They hasten along, Mr. Hub rising before her with a three-foot candle, which he carries like a sword at his side. He is low and stout but lunges his body up the stairs with long strides as if someone is pushing him from behind.

  A most peculiar thing, she says, the key.

  It ain’t the key, Mr. Hub says. A lock can shrink and swell. Like most things.

  She sees the logic of that.

  Mr. Hub reaches the landing where Tom is standing against the banister. He barely acknowledges, a peep, a nod. Puts his whole body before the door, hands working, and the door springs open. There. He lights the candle, stops at the threshold of their inviolate privacy before passing off the candle to her.

  That tallow’s still got some life. The wife will be wanting it back.

  She looks at him dubiously. This small matter. Burning wax. Will the morn be soon enough?

  Certainly, missus. Make as much use as you need.

  She informs Mr. Hub about their luggage waiting down in the vestibule. Okay squeezes out of his eyes faster than his mouth. He holds out a new key to her. You’ll be needing this, he says.

  She takes the shiny new key, wondering how it confirms or contradicts his theory of contraction and expansion.

  He starts back down the stairs, Tom still, waiting. Only when Mr. Hub’s footsteps have died away does he move, half-stumbles half-dances into the apartment. Continues on, the fingers of one hand touching the wall, a map to orient him, the carpet muting the sound of his and her feet.

  They gain the sitting room. Using the candle, she lights a lamp and steps to the center of the chamber, surprised to find that the entire space has been dramatically transformed into a cube of dazzling white. In their absence someone—Mr. Hub?—had entered the apartment and liberally coated the walls in several layers of fresh wash. The room seems otherwise undisturbed, furniture and lamps collecting dust and spiderwebs. Tom’s piano is the dominating object, black and shining (had Mr. Hub polished it?), rising like some rocky formation—a butte or cliff—out of the carpeted floor. Overall, the room produces (the long view) a strange impression, spacious (airy) but subdued, because of the limited light, the shadows, black vectors. The first thing she’ll have to do is to open all the windows, for the apartment has not been allowed to breathe for months now.

  We have returned, she thinks. Feels her body subsiding to the calm thrill at being home.

  Tom gives her a sudden and delighted embrace, squeezing her to his steeping softness, her body crushed against his. The back of his jacket is wet with sweat, and his body reeks of coal and exhaustion. He speaks into her neck.

  Lait, please.

  A clean form in her line of sight: Tom seated on the piano stool, arms crossed at his waist, clutching the corners of his body (elbows), guarding his borders, trying to remember where he is. He is in a bad fix, dejected, has been for days, since their return. Has seen reason to do little more than position his slack pounds on the stool, head bowed, the piano blankly waiting for him. No music has broken from his fingers for hours, having long since moved away from the morning’s mazurkas, inventions, and variations. The only sound that of her struggling to remain upright on the thickly upholstered settee, along whose velvety seat she has been sliding all afternoon. All of the furniture feels wet—the room filled with the pungent smell of salt, scales, and sand—as if deep in the insides of something living. Sitting with her feet in water hour after hour, that dark expanse of carpeted floor beneath her, she could not have gauged with any accuracy the duration of the silence. (What is it she wants to say?) Sunlight expanding and contracting with passing clouds, creating the feeling that the room is a great bellows, opening and closing around them. The whole while her own quiet voice carrying across this fluidity of space, nothing to answer to, its sound coming back at her again and again, never failing to make her feel useless and alone, at fault, as if they have both failed. A gradual falling away of words until no words at all. This is just how he is, mute and inaccessible, he looks flat and unreal, like a silhouette cut from paper, the resident shadow flickering in and out of vision, lips folded, biting something back, and she must suffer the effort of watching him. She smiles to comfort him, an instinctive but utterly useless response. Strange how she still slips up even after so many years. Of course, he can’t see the smile, can’t even guess at her expression, since all he knows is confined within the reach of his fingers. Other acts of kindness surface in her mind but she knows better than to try. (Her claim on honesty.) Only Time will put everything to rights.

  He shifts his bulk on the stool, and she bobs slow passage across the room, trawling past the piano’s oblong front to windows that cut the sky into four sparkling pieces. Where sea and boats can be had. Why this feeling of out of placeness? She lifts one window as high as it will go and props her elbows on the sill, upper body on the other side, head lowered. What is it that she hopes to see? Edgemere perhaps, but the dazzling light hides the island from view although she knows it is out there only a few miles away. Is Edgemere where Tom belongs? Would he find life on the island with other black people more suitable? The urge to take him there sometimes comes over her. (Admit it.) However, the world below her window (the city) is absolute in both its certainties and its dangers.

  She thinks of her life with Tom as necessary, pressed on her. Not that her situation is all bad since there is the music to console and comfort her. (When he plays.) And when she gets her fill of his company, when she needs to put some distance between herself and Tom, she can put her head outside like this. She compels her aching chest to hold in lungfuls of pure ocean air and lose them quietly, breath rattling along her ribs. Her unbound hair drops, thick, flying, far short of the street five stories below. Empty distance. Nothing touching. Nothing close. (Is that what this is about, things falling short?) Perhaps it is best that way. Birds dive close to the water, too close, catch the currents, carried under. (This detail strikes her as excessive, pure invention.) The boats—white triangles, tiny pillars of black smoke—going backward now, like retracted thoughts, half-told secrets.

  She remembers it this way, how she came to on the settee, faint moonlight floating in the air, unsure what had awakened her, unwilling to believe that she had actually dosed off. In truth she could not tell, having lost track of time, a terrible lightness to her body. Deprived of sleep over the past crush of days, maintaining a pitch of vigilance at the windows for hours at a time, mornings/nights curling around her like smoke, taking in shouts screams gunshots hurled obscenities sobbing pleads hurried pray
ers spit-laced laughter rollicking applause invading her apartment from the streets below. Heard urgencies that sounded completely different, depending on whether her eyes were open or closed. Which brought pictures upon entering the brain, her attempt to map the featureless surround, for what she could actually see—flickers of fire shooting upward—was limited since her apartment offered no view of the street, only the usual, the sea.

  The more she watched the sea, the more it proved it could hold: a dozen crashing colors, schools of Negroes gone fish—fleeing the city was not a thought that had crossed her mind; her husband was out there—in the dhows that made their livelihood possible (fishing, ferrying, the transportation of cargo), in other small crafts, or with nothing but their bodies, a kind of oceanic monster of faces and limbs, sails and oars, tossed around in the rough exhaustive currents. Lights shining far across the water from the island of Edgemere—how else could it be seen?—were uncertain and distant. She supposed the island was within reach, even for those with only their bodies to carry them. In reach but far away. Some would not make make it, would drown. If only these Negroes had some Moses who could part the water. If only—not to put too fine a point on it—they could walk on water.

  Had she already put an end to any form of hoping? How many days had it been since Tom had left the apartment in the company of Sharpe and the manager? Close to a week? Even as chaos was breaking loose in the city neither her husband nor the manager had considered canceling the concert. Days of waiting and wondering—Sharpe?—spreading in her head, on the verge of shattering it. Sleep was compensatory. Stripping her of consciousness.

  What had she missed sliding in and out of sleep? The room sounded soft and hollow. The world seemed to have quieted down outside her windows. Was it over? That question in her mind, she shifted her gaze to the shadow cast by moonlight striking a lamp shade when she sensed a new kind of darkness, different from the darkness she had been experiencing until that moment, bleeding into the edgy air, beginning to burrow into her consciousness. She sat up and looked around. At first she thought she was hearing the outside, a resumption of the chaos, the violence. Then in the illuminated darkness she could make out a form curled up under the piano. She went over for a closer look and found Tom wedged in the cave of space formed by the piano’s spindly legs and heavy chassis, knees tucked to his chin. She gave herself time for two deep breaths. She had not heard him enter the apartment. Back without a sound. (She had fallen asleep.) How had he found his way back? How had he gotten in? No key of his own that she was aware of. Sharpe’s key? And what about the others? Where were they?

  When she spoke his name, he shuddered, stirring up the dust floating in the darkness. He raised his head in her direction, his face in the shape of a snarl.

  She took in the brutal aspect of his person. She dared not strike a lamp. Only this light to prove that he was actually there. He was still outfitted in recital dress. One jacket sleeve had been almost completely ripped away. The front of his shirt had a large black stain shaped like a butterfly. And his pants legs looked as if they had been singed, one cuff nothing more than straggly ash. His head and face had been spared, except for missing hat and one ear that was aglow with dried blood.

  You found your way home.

  Tom remained perfectly still.

  Where are they? Sharpe? Your manager? Thinking, Tom has the answers.

  He let out a breath she didn’t know he was holding.

  Dawn came, a tiny crack separating one world from the next. A new day began to take shape. An unbroken covering of white clouds—clouds few enough to count—hung in the sky, clear and precise, textured as never before. From somewhere smoke funneling black and back on the wind. A single gull lent its monotonous cries to the scene.

  The sun angled high and struck the surface of the piano, day giving her her first clear view of Tom, throwing too much light on his form. The boy holding himself, clutching the sum of his life. Then his arm lifted, a long shadow cutting across the emptiness and venturing out toward her—Miss Eliza (did he actually say it, or is she only remembering?)—and she stepped back, out of reach, a body reaction. He opened his mouth and the sound escaping it was all Negroes in one mouth.

  No, Tom. They’ll hear. It’s not safe.

  Trying to quiet that sound twisting through her head. (What the human mouth can bring into being.) After a time, it weakened and finally gave out altogether, only a few clumps of noise that still hummed in his body. In the stairwell outside, someone was passing by, speaking in a loud voice. She couldn’t catch the words. She had to wait, too soon to try Tom again. So for a while he stayed put and she stayed, only three feet—maybe four—separating them, Tom hanging in her eyes, an intrusive speck that couldn’t be blinked out.

  Miss Eliza, he said, almost as if he realized she was waiting for him to speak, give her a full report.

  She tried her questions again.

  That sound tolling a response. Enough with the questions for now. Is it that she sensed more than the tongue could say? Coated his mutters and groans with emotion, hearing them as her own?

  The piano seemed to assume Tom’s shape, the flesh hiding underneath it, covering it. So it was, he believed that she couldn’t see him nestled inside the hard black excess of his containment. Tom (indeed) in a place far removed from the bounds of her consciousness. She felt both pity and frustration for this boy, hiding, with or without her, innocent of outcome. Could not recall a single instance of being alone with him, always a trio with her husband or the manager, a quartet with her husband and the manager. How to breach the divide? Sharpe had given Tom much patience and correct words. He spoke to Tom in a quiet voice that he made stern when he had to, and tolerated her awkwardness around the boy.

  Before she knew what was happening, something wet streamed down Tom’s face, one long spill. On closer inspection she saw water puddling at the concave of his shut eyelids, a drop slowly separating from the lash and speeding to the floor. A discovery: the blind can actually cry. (How had she escaped noticing this among the blind children at the Asylum those many years ago?) Might it be that the images she needed, the unsayable truths—where is Sharpe, where is my husband?—were trapped inside the salty liquid, dripping to the floor, lost forever?

  With her eyes closed, she saw Sharpe, the manager, and Tom leaving the apartment, their coats cut generously to accommodate them, three attitudes of self-assurance. Stacks of programs—under whose arm? in whose hand?—still smelling of the printer’s ink. Everything connected with their departure remarkably fresh and distinct to her.

  Time wound around her. All right, then, she thought: here I am with Tom. Backed up on all fours under the piano, like some animal in hibernation. Still for hours at a time but for fevered motion that quaked through his shoulders and teeth. Now bent over, a praying Mohammedan, driving his face into the floor. Crawling on his bloody knees to one corner, and crawling back to his cave. Or twisting and turning like a troubled dreamer, the backs of his hands shining with bruises. Whole days of this, Eliza hovering in clear orbit above him, afraid to sleep, for without constant attention her floating body would be carried off to another world. Tethered directly overhead while the boy’s torso swelled and his limbs cramped, while his skin grew gray, his body giving off waves of stench, a sour orange-yellow smell, and the air in the room (she felt) thinning out little by little.

  Then she heard something snag, and the boy let loose with a flood of urine. She watched, poured into a strange heaviness. Only the sound of Tom’s heart fluttering around inside the empty birdcage of his chest. Then nothing. Not a twitch or twinge. Bereft of sound, of movement, he seemed so far away. She knew he was dying.

  She had to move her body, begin working toward some goal. She went over and touched him. (Touch is the body’s sense.) He was cold to her hand. She lifted his forearm and it flopped back to the floor. She shook it vigorously once or twice like a dog with a branch between its teeth, but even then he didn’t stir. Nothing. But she was sure
she felt a current just under the skin. A stuttered beat. Which could only mean that she had to do more. Kneel now into that puddle of urine and get wet, her petticoats gathering in the warm scent of his shadow, her knees squishing, her ear pressed close to his chest—she bent so easily—a thorough examination. (How else?) In an instant, he began to warm, as if something of her was seeping into his skin. Her hands bearing down on his back. And this body that had been holding its shape unfolded, extended into the room. The heavy down-directed sun seemed to aid her, pressed his mouth open, the black inside punctuated with teeth, a heavy expression of breathing and hunger.

  Before long, the first sip of water, the first nibble of bread, the first bite of an apple. Then utterances, words or parts of words, language springing back. Food and liquid reviving his tongue. Why was she so entirely agreeable to the task? And why did he accept her comfort so easily, trust in her voice and her touch?

  With his damp nose nudged deep into the crook of her elbow, she began to run through ways she might gain more, what she might resurrect, bring forth from the blood, stink, and sorrow. He was and was not like what she was. (A young Negro of the male sex. A musician. A southerner.) Before anything else, she had to draw him out from under the piano. But he wanted her to sit beside him on the floor, his insistent hands stretching up to her own, and when she was there, he pressed her and touched her as if she had just returned after a long absence. He wouldn’t tolerate any separation. (This body holding her.) Came upon her like a shadow, forever hovering around, getting in her way. Whenever she was seated on the settee, he settled near her on the floor, trying to get comfortable, with his head propped against her knees. The need, attention, filled her with a strange elation.

  His hands came flickering up through the light, like dark moths, as if they would tell her something. They didn’t.

  She told him, If I could have a word.

  Put one question after the next to him. He told her nothing. But she had better say the words while she could. No intention to speak them ever again. (Too hard with words.) Truth to tell, weren’t the questions a form of avoidance? What she had been moving along to in her mind was this: What will I do with the boy? But she was too balled up with comforting him—mothering?—to think past this moment. (The future sensed beneath the present.) What would come later she could think about later. The last thing she wanted to do was think, acknowledge the sum of what was, Sharpe, her marriage. Could she have changed the outcome had she accompanied them to the concert?