Going Down Slow

by John Metcalf

  Discs of green jade carved and pierced, flowers, curled dragons.

  “How would you like that bird?” said David.

  “Let’s go in and look round,” said Susan.

  “You could say, ‘Oh, that? That’s my stuffed bird.’”

  From the end of the long red strip of carpet, Mr. Liebermann looked at them over his glasses but did not get up. David was drawn past Samurai armour, marble busts of Bach and Beethoven, an elephant’s foot bristling with swords and walking sticks, to a square glass case containing a stuffed squirrel.

  Strips of gilt beading ran round the base of the squirrel’s black lacquered case – tarnished, crackled gilt but splendid – a surviving, a reminder . . . It had not all been floral horror and overstuffed armchairs.

  The bird’s case, on the other hand, was domed and suggested the worst of wax lilies and cemeteries and the Albert Memorial.

  He studied the squirrel; even its eyes were dusty. It was faded, mangy, moth-eaten, wired to its branch at a drunken angle. Yet the squirrel, he decided, was more attractive than the bird. It was difficult to relate to birds.

  And for another thing, the papier-mâché flora of the squirrel’s background was of distinctly superior workmanship.

  Description:Squirrel Falling Off a Branch

  (Gift of D. Appleby Esq.)

  Or the authority of Latin?

  Nutty Nuttimus

  “Was there something?” said Mr. Liebermann. “What were these jade things for?” said Susan.

  Or simplicity?

  A Squirrel

  It was strange that one never met those kinds of people. Or met anyone who had met them. The people who made wax lilies, or papier-mâché flora, or plastic swords and pistols for antique bars, or giant bottles, or poker-work mottoes, or sang scoobiedoobie for a living behind pop stars. At a party, in a bar, what could one reply?

  Well, I’m in the plastic dogturd business.

  Oh. . . .

  “A lovely piece. They used to sew them on their clothes,” said Mr. Liebermann.

  “Look, David!”

  She held out the jade disc on her palm. Its green was mysterious, grey in some lights, colour changing with the shadows of her fingers underneath it. She turned the soft, cool stone admiring the intricacy of the carving, the dragon’s convolutions.

  “Some ladies wear them as pendants,” said Mr. Liebermann.

  “Do you like it?” said David.

  “Touch it,” she said.

  “Two hundred years old. More,” said Mr. Liebermann.

  “How much is it?” said David.

  “It’s ridiculous,” said Mr. Liebermann. “I don’t know why I do it. Forty dollars.”

  “We’ll take it.”

  “No, David! That’s far too much.”

  “With a chain.”

  Mr. Liebermann took a length of tarnished chain from a big cardboard box of oddments and ran it through a handful of damp wadding. The shop smelled suddenly of lemons.

  “A nice little box?”

  “Put it on,” said David. “Wear it.”

  “Can you do the clasp?” she said.

  “Ten for the squirrel,” said David, looking up.

  After the close warmth of the shop, the raw wind funnelling down the street from the mountain seemed to cut more bitterly than before.

  “Jesus Christ!” exclaimed David, rigid as the wind hit him. “I must be stark bonkers! England’ll be knee-deep in bloody daffodils by now.”

  The downtown streets and pavements were clear and dry but in the suburbs out towards Merrymount, down side streets, in gardens and the corners of parking lots the blackened banks of rotting snow lingered on and on.

  Susan turned her back to the wind and held the top of her coat open.

  “Beautiful,” she said.

  “They certainly are,” said David.

  “You know what I like? I like to think of the people who wore this before. And now I’m wearing it.”

  “Garry was telling me a thing about that,” he said. “That he’d heard in Vancouver.”

  “Westlake?”

  “Umm. He said that very old Chinese men there get together in a darkened room over a grocery store and drink tea and feel pieces of jade under water.”

  “That’s beautiful,” said Susan. “Like the cherry blossom.”

  “Right. And it’s beautiful,” said David, “because . . .”

  “Because they’re going to die,” said Susan.

  David set his squirrel down on the pavement. He pulled Susan against him and kissed her.

  “That’s why I love you,” he said. “Because you understand that. Really, really understand.”

  “And I love you because you know things like that to tell me.”

  “Why else?”

  “Because you’re beautiful,” she said.

  “That’s very true,” he said, bending to pick up the squirrel. Overbalancing, scooping the case, he staggered into a juggling run for five or six yards. Then he stood facing her clutching the glass case safe against his chest, laughing.

  “You’re drunken,” she said.

  “Hey, I’ve just thought of something. Won’t your parents ask you where you got the jade thing?”

  “I’ll tell them I got it in Chinatown or something. They wouldn’t know the difference.”

  “How goes the Home Front?”

  “Same. She’s crazy. Tonight she said, ‘I suppose you’re going out with that man, little whore,’ and then as I was going out the door she said, ‘Enjoy yourself while you’re young, dear.’”

  “Unsettling,” said David.

  “And my dad calls you The Teacher and shaykh – The Old Man.”

  “That’s not nice.”

  “Oh, and when he came in tonight and they were having supper he was tearing a loaf of bread in half and . . .”

  “Tearing?”

  “It’s Syrian bread – flat sort of like a pancake but bread.”

  “Oh.”

  “And he said, ‘Look, missy! This going to happen to the shaykh.’”

  “Charming!”

  “‘When the muscle finished with him,’ and he dropped the piece of bread on the floor and stamped on it.”

  “Well, that’s not very nice,” said David. “What’s ‘the muscle’?”

  “Oh, he says he’s hired two guys to beat you up with baseball bats. Cost him a hundred and fifty.”

  David laughed.

  “And where would one hire such desperadoes?”

  “You’re really weird,” said Susan. “You’re so British, you know that?”

  “Why?”

  “Because it happens every day, that’s why. For debts and gambling. Don’t you read the papers?”

  “And you mean – you really think he has?”

  “No. It’s all talk.”

  “Hey, wait a minute. If he has, that means he knows who I am.”

  She shrugged.

  “I mean, if they know,” said David, “why don’t they do something? Phone the school, the Board.”

  “They’re crazy.”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “They don’t know,” said Susan. “But even if they do, they wouldn’t really know what to do about it. They’re not educated people.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said David. “It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

  They turned up Stanley Street towards The Delta. The squirrel was getting heavy. Who had told her mother in the first place? And why not his name? Incomprehensible. His left hand and forearm felt numb, pins and needles. Was it merely the awkwardness and weight of the glass case? Or was it a message from the DEW line? He imagined his heart. He would, in future, drink less.

  Warm light poured out onto the pavement from the Pam-Pam. They could smell coffee.

  “I’ve been banned from there,” said Susan.

  David shifted the case and worked his hand.

  “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t understand what’s go
ing on.”

  The Delta was divided into two sections. The front sold paperbacks, records and artistic oddments; the back room, under the same management, was a folk-song centre. There was half an hour to wait before the first set.

  Susan had wandered off and was flipping through a tray of records. David stood facing one of the book racks. The fluorescent light seemed extraordinarily bright; it also seemed to be humming. He stared mesmerised at the shiny books. He felt as if he was enclosed in a transparent envelope, remote from the sounds about him yet sudden words and sentences rang strange and clear. He had to concentrate to read the words on pages for the line kept slipping into a blur of black on white, designs, grey abstractions. He found himself accompanying the light fixture in a monotone hum. He did not want to move; he just wanted to stand where he was, staring at the shiny covers and doing his hum. It had become important to him not to let the hum falter or fail. Yet he also felt anxious, anxious that people would stare at him, think him drunk, challenge him, demand things of him.

  Two girls with lots of thigh were leaning on the counter talking to the bearded man, the manager. The bearded man said,

  “In the mountains we were free.”

  Most of the books in the section in front of him seemed to have been printed in California and had introductions by Doctors of Philosophy from Berkeley.

  . . . this searing document . . .

  He moved the squirrel along with his foot.

  . . . little-known aspects of Victorian . . .

  . . . a compassionate exploration of the copraphiliac’s world . . .

  Would it not be passing brave to be a Doctor of Philosophy? And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

  At the end of the book rack was a stand of things on thongs and hairy ties. The labels said,handwoven by Michael

  A record-player suddenly produced Joan Baez.

  “Arnold! Where’s the Nescafé?”

  He looked round for Susan. She was bending over a table which displayed a lot of misshapen Eskimo carvings; lumpy owls, ducks with glued necks and beaks, walruses with missing tusks, lobotomized-looking seals.

  “No,” said the bearded man, “I always add wheat-germ.”

  It was sinister, really. Eskimo carvings were on sale in department stores, airports, boutiques, craft shops, galleries and gift stores from Glace Bay to Vancouver. Had ever such a tiny people produced so many artists, so many artifacts?

  NO. Such a tiny people never had.

  Nobody was really fooled.

  Herds of Eskimo rounded up by the bully-boys of the Eaton-Simpson-Morgan Combine. Into the compounds. Disciplining under Major Grigson. Distribution of soapstone, and the pictorial How to Carve With Your Black and Decker booklets.

  “Have you got the blue tickets, Arnold!”

  He was aware of movement, people; the shop was filling up. One of the girls at the counter had a hole the size of a dime in her black tights through which a lump of white leg protruded. It looked like a disease.

  More books. Many copies of Black Like Me. Astrology ca-ca. Diabolism ca-ca. Occult ca-ca. Zen ca-ca.

  Guitar Manuals:Sing Out With Pete Seeger

  Bluegrass for Beginners

  Woodie Guthrie Simplified

  Somebody bumped into him. He swayed and turned.

  The woman – Mrs. Bearded? – a lank-haired slattern wearing a black turtleneck and a handcrafted skirt, was setting up a baizecovered card table at the entrance to the back room.

  “Thank Christ,” said David. “My legs ache.”

  They joined the line beside the tray of $1.39 Bargain Records.

  “I hope he’s good,” said Susan.

  Latvian Ensemble

  Folkloric Favourites

  “That bearded man’s called Arnold,” said David.

  Songs the Wobblies Sang

  The World’s Greatest Cantor

  For two dollars, the woman tore off a blue cloakroom ticket and sloshed hot water into a cup of Nescafé, stirring it with a plastic spoon. On the top of each cup whirled a brown lump of undissolved coffee. Another plastic spoon was stuck in an open fivepound box of sugar. Under the guise of adding sugar and stirring, David captured his lump and buried it in the sugar-box.

  Sitting down in the semi-gloom at a table covered with a red and white checkered cloth and a candle in a bowl-thing covered with nylon netting was nicer. He tucked his squirrel under his chair. He had ignored the ill-bred stares and comments. Sipping the coffee, he looked round at the faithful; most of them were kids but there were a few older people. Four tables away was the black shape of a man with a monstrous hunchback.

  David began to feel stronger; the coffee was doing him good. Susan was picking at the candle, feeding it dribbles of wax. The chairs, though a welcome relief from standing, were authentically uncomfortable. He had haunted jazz and blues clubs since the age of fifteen; the chairs were always uncomfortable whether the club was in England, France, Germany, or Canada. Non-commercial chairs, chairs untainted by materialism, pure chairs, folk chairs.

  Under the spotlight on the tiny stage, a stool and a large black guitar case waited.

  David looked away, staring into the candle flame which climbed and flared as Susan fed it wax. He giggled. Woodie Guthrie Simplified. A difficult feat. The room was filling quickly. Sentences, phrases kept coming to him out of the heat and babble. People pushing past against his chair. The hunchback got to his feet, calling, “Marcie! Over here, Marcie!” As the hunchback moved into the soupy yellow light of one of the spots, David saw that he wasn’t a hunchback at all. He was wearing a long bongo drum. And stranger still, he was wearing checked Bermuda shorts with a matching jacket.

  Bearded Arnold, to much applause, made his way to the tiny stage and raised the microphone.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen! Tonight it’s my pleasure to introduce to you and to the Montreal folk-scene one of the Grand Old Men of the blues. I’m proud to present one of the truly great bluesmen – Blind Foxy John!”

  Arnold fumbled in the curtains and led the old man out. During the applause, Blind Foxy John felt for the edge of the stool and sat down. His fingers searched out for the microphone. He was wearing a blue serge suit, white shirt, a black string-tie. His black work boots gleamed. The light flashed on his dark glasses.

  His fingers found the catches of the guitar-case and lifted out a battered old Steel National. He ran a yellow duster over the neck and then played a few notes, tuning.

  Into the silence, he began to play chords, plaintive runs which descended into the continuing base. He raised his head and spoke over the music.

  “Some people say that the blues is a cow wanta see her calf, but I don’t say it like that. I say it’s a man that’s got a companion, and she turn him down, and things like that happens, you know – and tha’s where I gets the blues – when I wanta see my baby and wanta see her bad – ”

  Blues figures accompanied and punctuated the flow of his voice. Some words half-lifted into song.

  “. . . . . . . well, I tell you, it really worries me just to think, I used to have a sweet little girl – you know, name Estelle. An’ we used to go to school together, an’ we grew up together, you know, grew up together . . . in other words, I wanted to love her . . . and axed her mother for her . . . and whereat she turned me down – and that cause me to sing the blues. They turned me down, and then I just got to sitting down thinking, you understand, and then I thought of a song, and I started to drinking . . . the blues the only thing that gives me consolation.

  A blind man he seen her,

  A dumb man called her name!

  Little Estelle. Down in Arkansas. Goatshead, Arkansas.”

  The old man chuckled and mumbled something. A long descending blues run ending in a chord.

  “We coloured people have had so much trouble, we’s the one nation is, we try to be happy anyway – you ever noticed that? – it’s because we have never had so much, you understand.... And I remember we cleaned up a whole bottom, you know, bot
tom with willows. Willows was thick and I stalled four mules to a wagon, you understand, four mules, you know, out in the bottom cleaning it up. We had to clean it up in the winter so that we could work it that summer....”

  Something began to circle in David’s mind, nagging, worrying, a feeling of recognition.

  “The thing I think about the blues is – it didn’t happen in the North – in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, wha’soever it is – it didn’t start in the East – neither in the West – it started in the South, from what I’m thinkin’.

  Where the Yazoo cross the Yellow Dog. . . .”

  The old man nodded.

  “Yeah, all the nigra want to go to the North. Travel on, you know. Travel on down the line.”

  “Yeah!” said the young man with the bongo drum. “Travel on down that line.”

  His voice climbing, the old man sang,Michigan water taste like sherry-wine,

  Mississippi water taste like turpentine . . .

  He chuckled, nodding again.

  “Taste like turpentine,” he repeated.

  “And that’s a bitter taste, man!” said the bongo boy.

  David felt puzzled. The song was one of Jelly Roll Morton’s. Recorded by Lomax for the Library of Congress – a series recorded not long before Morton’s death. The old man’s voice had even climbed towards Morton’s thin, whimsical tone. Perhaps he had known him, heard him sing?

  “We really want to know why, and how come a man have the blues. I worked on levee camps, extra gangs, road camps and rock camps, cotton, worked near every place, and I hear guys singin’ unhmm this and mmmmmmm that, and I want to know and I want to get to think plainly that the blues is something that’s from the heart – I know that and it expressing his feeling about how he felt to the people. I’ve known guys that wanted to cuss out the boss and he was afraid to go up to his face and tell him what he wanted to tell him, and I’ve heard them sing those things – sing words, you know, – back to the boss – just behind the wagon, hookin’ up to the horses or somethin’ or ’nuther – or the mules or something, and then he’d go to work and go to singing and say things to the horse, you know, horse, make like the mule stepped on his foot – say ‘Get off my foot, goddam it!’ or something like that, and he meant he was talking to the boss. ‘You son of a bitch, you’ say ‘you got no business on my – – – , stay off my foot’ and such things as that. . . .” “Way to go!” said the bongo man.