Song of the Shank

by Jeffery Renard Allen

  Tom is quick to notice her change.

  Time for our bath.

  No better time to.

  He stands quietly before her while she undresses him. Holds her hand in a tight grasp during the short walk to the tub, open and waiting and poised to pounce on four lion’s-paw feet balanced against the floor. The whole of him bending into the tub once the water is ready. They hunker down like two passengers setting out on a long journey, two soaking in the soft sounds of liquid prosperity, little concern for where they are headed.

  From somewhere indistinct the moon begins to shine, red light thick and slow-moving on the water like wax. In a rapid sinking action Tom disappears beneath the surface, some time before he comes up again—she starts to count—choking and spitting.

  They are digging a canal in Egypt, he says, water still in his mouth, shining against his teeth.

  Here is the soap. Her breasts give in to the buoyancy of water, two pointed canoes riding the surface.

  Two pounds of powder

  Two pounds of soap

  If you ain’t ready

  Holla billy goat

  Billy goat!

  Seems to spill out of him, uncontrolled, the soap sliding over his body with a kind of furious impatience.

  My mouth is closed, my ears are open, he says.

  The cloth, she says.

  He commandeers the cloth and proceeds to rinse the soap from his body. After a long thoughtful pause, he puts all his fingers deep into her hair and holds her head then leans forward in order to deliver his instructions, doing his best to be gentle, reassuring, his fingers moving with a bargaining touch that indicates that this natural familiarity will take nothing from her.

  They stamp upon the mat to get rid of excess water. She whitens his entire body with lemon-scented talcum powder that Sharpe once brought back from Spain. Tom in her world again and she in his. Calm, helplessly so. How does it all become so familiar?

  Perfectly content in the skin he calls home, Tom lives inside his body like a turtle, his world limited to the extremities of his skin. He can never escape his own head through the distractions the world offers sighted people. Perhaps he suffers from some mental deficiencies, Sharpe said. Still, I wonder how much of his mental state can be attributed to my father’s neglect. Because of Tom’s genius my father was reluctant to apply the correcting hand. But he gains much more in compensation, fortunate that his lack of sight, lack of mind does not permit him to know that he is of the despised Negro race, a former slave. Hellfire, Sharpe said. Maybe he even thinks he’s a white man.

  For a time she is able to forget everything as she looks at the watery light, this sensation that the building has unmoored itself from the earth and set sail, Eliza captain at her window station, rocking between lower and higher joys of journey. Still, after days, after weeks, why is she not able to get completely used to this thing in Tom, in herself?

  Tom gives a whole clear utterance, holding neither promise nor blame.

  In the ashen noontime Dr. Hollister enters the parlor, dressed too heavily for the weather in an outer coat hanging over a fine woolen jacket and creased black trousers, his legs stocky, like sawed-off trunks, his feet shod in half-shoes half-boots that rise above his ankles. His white shirt seems to supply a soft light of its own, and Eliza wonders who has pressed and ironed it, since the Doctor as far as she knows travels without servants. Indeed, he is well dressed but needs some touches to be added, matters that fall under the purview of a good servant.

  She hears his words but she feels nothing for the Doctor. Always this pretense once a month that he is only dropping in to visit on his way up to Saratoga Springs, where he keeps a stable of racing horses, his supposed reason for venturing here, even during the off-season. She allows that she is glad to see him. He brings her a bundle of two or three books. Lets himself express natural affection for Tom, certain in his touch that Tom can understand him.

  How long was it after Sharpe’s disappearance (death) that he turned up one day, unexpected? She heard the knock, put one eye to the cold glass of the peephole, and discovered Dr. Hollister put before vision. Half a mind not to open the door since the Doctor was General Bethune’s man, and she had no way of gauging his intentions. But to deny him, she risked his return.

  He walked in that first time, mouth tight, eyes cold, took her hand and kissed it, barely greeting her before he made his way across the room to Tom. The emotion brought on at the sight of Tom occupied his face for a full minute or more. He began the examination, but Tom’s skin was selfish, hugging to his frame, making it necessary for Dr. Hollister to use certain instruments again and again.

  Dr. Hollister looked at her then looked past her, which she thought boded ill for Tom. He treated Tom with substances contained inside a dozen or more small glass-stoppered bottles. Tom moaned with the relief at these ministrations. He drank green liquid from a tiny urn, draining the vial. Slowly color began to come back to his skin. At the end of it all Dr. Hollister prepared Tom a bath with salt from Saratoga Springs.

  Is the comfort the same, what the good doctor offers Tom and what she offers? Her arms and his, her bath and his?

  Dr. Hollister pats Tom on the head. Don’t I know what you hate by this time? he says.

  His leather bag is open just enough to allow her a glimpse of a caliper, pincers up. Why is it that he chooses to perform his examination, take measurements, in front of her? Why does she watch?

  He furiously registers his findings—“data” he calls it, part of Tom’s ongoing “medical history”—in a vellum ledger, after writing his notes, then writing them again on cleaner paper in a cleaner hand, careful strokes, more beautiful lettering, not a single smudge.

  He continues to eat well, beyond what he needs?

  Eliza throws up her hands. He always has.

  Well, do what you can to regulate him.

  I will make much effort. How is his water?

  Dr. Hollister takes a seat on the settee, the fingers of both hands laced on his head. Looking like a hot mess, overcoat still in place, blanketing his body. Sweat outlining his cleanly barbered hairline. The moisture has decreased some, but fortunately there’s still a valuable surplus. The orbs have not deformed any and are effectively preserved inside the chambers.

  So there’s still a chance for sight?

  Very much so.

  Dr. Hollister’s diagnosis—Tom’s pickled eyes biding time—was opposite that of Dr. McCune’s. He can detect some light, Dr. McCune said. But expect no improvement in his condition. The orbs will slowly putrefy. However the experts differed, upon first meeting she impressed Dr. Hollister with her interest in and understanding of the facts and details of ophthalmology, all she had gleaned from Dr. McCune in their rounds at the Asylum.

  Continue to keep the orbs moist.

  I should by all means. His seriousness imposes a silence on her, on Tom, and she senses that if anything important is to get said it will have to be said quickly. Someone was here.

  Dr. Hollister ceases to move, sits rigid for a few moments, as though making any motion at all might be of unintended and dangerous consequence. She sees the way age has set into his skin, a map crumpled and creased, folded too often, overhandled. When?

  I’m not sure.

  You’re not sure?

  I received a report.

  The Doctor does not appear startled, as if in the common ease of these surroundings nothing can put danger in the front of his mind. And when was this report received?

  It takes her a bit of calculating to arrive at an approximate date.

  Yes, the Doctor says. I see. So then you were actually away?

  We were away. Foremost in her thoughts facts she decides to withhold: A Negro. Two.

  Yes, the Doctor says. Yes. Who could it have been? He cracks for her benefit a small understanding smile. Why shouldn’t he? At this late time the watching eye and listening ear know better than to expect any upheaval that would end up leaving things radically different
from the way they are. Well, send word if you have to.

  Certainly, Doctor.

  I should say my good-bye. He gets to his feet, puts away his instruments, shuts his bag, touches Tom, bows his farewell. Remember his appetite.

  Certainly, Doctor. Certainly.

  A door open and shut, and already the strong smell of damask roses is taking over the apartment. Each breath brings with it a smell of flowers. The smell lifts the corners of Eliza’s mouth.

  Tom moves the vase one inch to the right in obvious irritation. That inch won’t do so he moves it another.

  She sits down on the settee, trying to conceal her uneasiness, hands clasped together in front of her.

  Tom tries the vase an inch or two more, in one direction or the other. And she searches his face for something she didn’t know was lost until then.

  We can place them elsewhere, Tom.

  You, Miss Eliza, you keep them there. This is my piano.

  Wasn’t that nice of Mr. Hub? Mr. Hub was only trying to be nice. The roses. And fish, too.

  I’m Blind Tom, he says. I’m one of the greatest men to walk the earth. Nostrils flared, he goes about in the shadowed cool sniffing the room, from corner to corner, length to length. Dressed by his own hands today, a finely tailored suit, the wale in his pants close together as if stitched by miniature fingers.

  He removes his jacket, revealing the harness of his suspenders. Folds the jacket across the settee at the end opposite her and resumes his walk, moving quickly and lightly about the room, with his hands wrapped around the shoulder-looped straps of his suspenders, navigational tools directing him this way and that.

  Tom—

  I have dominion over my life.

  Tom, if you will—

  Now he begins to parrot every word that comes from her mouth, having an easy time of it, an exact reproduction of all the nuances of diction and tone of voice. Strange to hear yourself coming out of another person’s mouth, that person of the opposite sex, and a full-blooded Negro.

  She gives up trying to engage and distract him. Later he will be all softness and apology, but she’ll make him pay. All she can do for now to maintain a fruitless distance, sound cutting the air in half. Rose petals shudder with the piano’s vibrations. Move like little knives in the air, trying to cut free.

  Vexed, Tom measuring her wants against his, showing and giving her a sampling of his worst, but not the worst he is capable of, the store of inflictions he directed at the manager Warhurst. Tom readily accepted Sharpe’s authority but was every bit the disobedient child with Warhurst. A terrible irony since the manager, unbeknownst to Sharpe, indulged Tom in ways that would never have met with Sharpe’s approval, honoring every demand, only for Tom to repay this gluttonous generosity with resistance and outright refusal—in the end the reasons for Tom’s recalcitrance are unclear, stemming from more than the mere consequence of age, Tom’s youth—until Sharpe, shouting, shoving, stepped in to exercise the restraining hand.

  He thinks you’re a nigger, Sharpe said.

  A nigger? Warhurst said. He has Coachman for that.

  You work like a nigger. And you worry like a nigger.

  I do my job.

  Yes, you do your job, but you take everything for a sign.

  She wakes up feeling tired and at fault. Feet aching as if she had spent the night walking sleep. Tom had done the walking. Roving about the apartment all night. (What she heard.) Why the sudden restlessness?

  He drinks his milk after it cools to the right temperature. Replaces the stagnant fluid in the vase with fresh water. Despite the dominant scent the roses are already wilting, becoming less noticeable, like a flag receding in size and color with distance. The vase (glass) seems to be decreasing in size too. Losing to the piano’s black shine, hard-set radiance.

  The piano is growing, subtracting the world around them. A little more each day. She fears that it will soon take over the parlor. Dead center in the room now, so that you can’t help but see it, have to walk around it to get from one side of the room to the other. The furniture redefined, going miniature, one object crowded up against the next, some actually forced out into the hall.

  Little by little. The universe constricting in front of her eyes.

  Tom is seated on the bench with his legs spread wide apart, the expansive globe of his belly propped on black wood, hands serving a supportive role at his sides, some upset nesting in the hollows of his abdomen. He sits that way for a time, a pattern of dying light stretching across the ceiling.

  An owl night, he announces. Sitting on a tree.

  Having enough of the dark, she strikes a lamp, the smell of kerosene weighing down upon them. Tom’s mouth cannons open and before long his entire body is erupting into convulsions, retching up a stomach-warm lump stillborn inside an orange-yellow puddle.

  Takes her some time to move, since she is in no great hurry to clean the floor. Fears that any movement will touch off his belly again. And even after she performs the task she takes the precaution of preparing a tablespoon of cod liver oil to help settle his stomach.

  Heavy with the oil he sits for a time before joining her on the settee, stomach noisy. Twists his fingers into hers, her smooth pink hands and his smooth brown hands forming a single fist. His face stunned and drained, yellow flecks of vomit in the corners of his mouth. She has of necessity to clean his face too. Already pitched beyond her limit. (Isn’t it enough?)

  Dr. Hollister arranges his gauges and instruments on top of the piano.

  Here you are at last, Tom says.

  Yes, I am here.

  You came because of me.

  I shall not pretend. I came because of you.

  Dr. Hollister makes quick work of his examination. Records his findings.

  Perhaps you can give him something for his belly, Eliza says. He suffered a bad stomach last week. Tom touches his abdomen in verification.

  He has too much flesh, Dr. Hollister says. He’s gained more than ten pounds since my last visit. He looks at her, making sure she understands.

  She does. For the good doctor how one looks is of first importance.

  He mixes Tom a tonic with medicines drawn from several vials.

  He closes his bag in less time than it takes to tell. He will require a daily constitutional. Facing her again while he talks.

  Where will we walk? Where would they walk? Of course, Dr. Hollister can imagine (knows) only too well the life they live here.

  He will do well to walk. And you would do well to give him relief from his person whenever possible. His continuance depends on these conditions.

  What exactly does he mean by that?

  Did you hear that, Tom? Dr. Hollister asks.

  Good doctor.

  Dr. Hollister takes the time to fasten every button on his overcoat. He grips the handle of his bag. Already she is wondering about his instructions.

  Tom turns toward the Doctor. What kind of time is this to leave, to go home?

  I’m all done here. You’ve made my stay light.

  I have. I hope you’re not too tired. Tom gets up from the bench. You’re dropping with sleep.

  Am I now? The Doctor touches Tom’s head.

  Even your hand. I ask you, where’s the sense in your leaving?

  You wish to delay my going? Dr. Hollister takes a seat on the bench with his bag at his feet. Who will look in on the horses?

  Tom sits down beside him.

  Yes. I see. I see.

  It’s good you do. So we’ll sit for a time. My afternoon is totally dependent on you.

  Is Dr. Hollister offering her an opportunity to escape as he had on that mad afternoon three years ago during the violence?

  We can travel at nightfall, Dr. Hollister said, drawing himself up in his seat.

  No, she said.

  Do your best not to worry. I have agents here in the city who will see to our safe passage.

  I’ve suffered a shock. I need to consider my options.

  Her words te
mporarily shunted Dr. Hollister into a disbelieving silence. Yes, you’ve suffered a shock, he said. Now you must let it end.

  No, she said.

  Madame, if you entertain thoughts of a respite—

  No I do not. But I do entertain other thoughts.

  He gave her a woebegone look.

  I will go out for a short time and you will remain here with Tom and see after him until I return.

  I cannot honor that arrangement.

  So Tom must accompany me.

  Madame.

  Doctor.

  You don’t want to see what’s out there, he said.

  I can quite believe it. But I will go all the same. She wouldn’t have him coming in her home telling her what’s dangerous and what’s safe.

  Accepting that he had no voice in the matter, Dr. Hollister looked at Tom again and again, as if trying to read the saving solution in the boy’s expression.

  She walked out into a maddeningly sunny afternoon, some underworld creature slinking into light, into air, after a long hibernation. Blinking off the shock of sudden glare. Then taking the light inside her, blazing from inside out like a dream. She walked awkwardly, her feet unreal, feeling exposed beneath a dress falling in stiff folds. Even with the sun scouring everything, drops of water were hanging from the trees, reminding her that it had indeed rained last night. Either that or the trees were sweating.

  In any direction she looked she saw long ropes of smoke rising in gray-black rebellion against the sun. The sidewalks and streets paved in shards of glass—hop, skip, jump—like some sparkling but reckless carpet, her passage across it accentuating her amazement that the city was still in place, the houses and buildings standing. Telegraph wires had been cut. Along the shore lay scattered the rusting remains of rifles and cannons, tools and field equipment, canteens, shovels, picks, and axes. The ocean drowned in a frantic proliferation of debris—hats, blouses, scarves, shoes and boots, staves and paddles—along with bloated cow-like forms bobbing in the surf. Avenues clogged with streams of rioters spilling out from smashed-in doorways, with booty floating on their shoulders: cumbersome lengths of carpet, heavy iron bedsteads, finely crafted desks and tables, leather-topped stools and chairs, and porcelain basins and commodes. Hands pushed through broken windows burdened with bulging sacks that they quickly dropped to other hands raised greedily in wait at street level below. This was what she saw. This was what I saw.