David (13 page)

I finally stood up from the rock, smiled.

“What the hell are you smiling at?” George said. I knew he'd never been madder because I'd never heard him curse before.

“Let's go to the pond,” I said. It was where we'd been headed in the first place.

George didn't move while he considered what I'd said, his chin still lifted and his arms still stuck out at his sides like a shit-drenched scarecrow's.

“Hurry up, let's go to the pond,” he said.

I took the lead. I stayed upwind, as far ahead of him along the path as I could get.

*

“Five dollars. Each. Me and you each.”

I look at Franklin, then back at the buggy full of Sunlight soap boxes.

“I understand that part,” I say. “The part I don't understand is why McKeough doesn't dispose of it himself.”

“Like I said, the dump—the town—won't let him, say they're worried it might be poison, want him to send it back, which would end up costing him triple what it would for us just to get rid of it.”

It's foolish enough to make sense: Chatham's city fathers concerned that a shipload of soap, however fouled, might contaminate the local garbage. What the hell. It's not like I have to do anything to earn my half but say yes.

“Two things,” I say. I've found that if I number my instructions, Franklin has a slightly better chance of successfully carrying them out. “First, you give me my cut now, out of your own pocket.”

“Sure.”

When Franklin finally realizes I'm not about to continue until I get my money, he burrows deep in his pocket, emerging with three crumpled one-dollar bills and a single ten-cent piece. “Can I get you the rest later?” he says.

I take the bills, fold them, place them in my billfold. “You can bring the other two dollars to Sophia's tonight.”

“Sure.”

“Second, I don't care how hard that ground is, I want you to dig deep enough to put it all in the same hole. I don't want the entire yard dug up.”

“Sure.”

I can't think of anything else, yet can't help hesitate, not entirely comfortable with the idea of entrusting Franklin with doing away with a hundred boxes of washing soap. One thing is for certain: there's no danger he's going to forgo his shovel and keep the stash for himself. Franklin never touches the stuff. Not out of laziness or privation, but principled argument. “Soap's just another way for them to make more money off you, the way I see it,” he'd said when we'd first begun working together and I'd offered to pay for a visit to the steam house, my nose winning out over my wallet. “And it's not good for you, too, it wipes off all of nature's healthy oils and such. Even too much water is bad for you. It gets in the pores and gives you influenza.”

“Okay,” I say. “Just have it done by the time I come back tonight to open.”

“I'm on it.”

“And I don't want to see any of those boxes lying around here, either.”

“Sure, sure,” Franklin says. “Like I said, I'm on it.”

Franklin shows up just before midnight, orders a whiskey and lights a cheap cigar. By the end of every night, even without Franklin's stinking contribution, Sophia's is cigarette and cigar overcast, enough so that even the people who don't smoke, like me, might as well, considering how bad they end up smelling.

Handing Franklin his whiskey, “Everything go all right?” I say.

Franklin straightens on his stool like he'd forgotten a corpse outside in the rain.

“The soap, Franklin.”

“Oh, right, that, oh yeah, no problem. Which reminds me.” He pulls two moist dollar bills out of his pocket and places them on the bar. I decide to let the money dry off for a while.

Meyers looks up from his week-old
Times
. “Do you know, just this month, in Braemar, in Aberdeenshire, the lowest-ever English temperature was recorded. I was just telling Mrs. Meyers not two nights ago . . .”

Mercifully, Franklin interrupts him, is the only one who ever addresses Meyers directly, and then only to ask, “So, who's dead these days, Meyers?” at which point Meyers will obligingly turn the pages of his
Times
looking for the most famous formerly once-alive he can find.

Coming up short, “It appears Louis Pasteur is mortally ill,” Meyers says, pronouncing it “Lewis Pastor.”

Franklin sips his whiskey, pets his greasy billy-goat beard. “I've heard of him. A bishop, I think he is. Way high up in the Church of England, I think.”

Meyers reads on. “Must be a different Pastor,” he says. “This one used a microscope to discover germs, apparently.”

“Germs,” Franklin spits, sucking hard on his cigar, blowing a cloud of fresh stink my way across the bar. “Some bigwig government type, I bet. Just one more rich sonofabitch out to bleed the workingman dry any way he can.”

I decide now's as good a time as any to get another couple of bottles of whiskey from the back.

Henry opens his eyes when I open the door but doesn't bother to get up from his blanket. Not because he's disappointed that I only own an after-hours saloon and haven't
furthered modern medicine, but because he knows we've got hours to go before we can go home. Besides, Louis Pasteur may have been Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Lille, but it was a man called Bigo who worked at a factory that made alcohol from sugar beets who put Pasteur on the trail to tracking down germs in the first place. Because Bigo wanted to know why so many of his vats of fermented beer were turning sour, Pasteur got busy with his microscope and became the Patron Saint of Hand Washing. Just in case anyone needed any further proof that civilization began with distillation.

“Boss,” I hear Tom say out front, and I know there's trouble; Tom would never leave his post otherwise. The whiskey can wait. I lock the door to the backroom behind me.

“Boss, you best come upstairs.”

I grab a roll of twenty-dollar bills from the cash box underneath the bar. I don't know what sort of problem it is—a bad drunk, a nosy neighbour, a prying policeman—but there aren't too many kinds of trouble that money can't solve.

On the way up the stairs, following Tom, “Who is it?” I say.

“No
who
—a
what
.”

Before I can ask what kind of what, we're standing outside in the rain. The money is tight in my right hand, but there's no one I can see to show it to. Reading my mind, Tom raises his lamp, limps into the middle of the yard. I follow until he stops and lifts the lantern still higher for me to see. Peering through the cold, hard rain left and then right, “Tom?” I say, and he motions with his head at the ground directly in front of us.

What
used
to be the ground.

If an artist needed a model for a depiction of the lake of fire, and if fire was white and bubbled and smelt like fresh lemons, Franklin would have achieved something truly remarkable.
Unfortunately, what he was supposed to do was get rid of a hundred boxes of soap.

“My God,” Franklin says.

“I say,” Meyers says.

Until now, I hadn't noticed either one of them behind us. I look at the lake of bubbling soap again. It's at least six feet square and who knows how many deep.

“Went to relieve myself and nearly walked right through it,” Tom says. “Thought you should know, Boss.”

“But what is it?” Meyers says.

“You're going to deal with this, Franklin,” I say.

“Yes.”

“Tonight.”

“But David, the rain—”

“Tonight, Franklin.”

“Don't get me wrong, it's not that I'm personally afraid of a little weather—I'm not made of sugar, I know that—but it seems to me that the rain is what in fact has caused this very problem in the first place, and if we wait—”

“
Tonight
, Franklin.”

The four of us stand in the rain, watching the gush and gurgle of the lemon-scented lava of the world's only backyard volcano.

“And Franklin,” I say.

“Yes?”

“Give me the other five dollars.”

Franklin fishes in his pocket, counts what's in his hand, holds out a palm full of silver coins, rainwater, and a single soggy dollar bill.

“Seems like I'm a little short,” he says. “Any chance I can get the rest to you later?”

*

Loretta's asleep and I'm not and it's all Saint Hippolytus' fault. Henry's asleep too, at the end of the bed, but animals have nothing to feel guilty about. That's their reward for never knowing how happy they are.

When Henry and I arrived home from work tonight, Loretta was already here, the fire fortified, both of her knitting needles wagging, and halfway through her second glass of schnapps. A shame that the older one gets, the more the despised clichés of one's youth turn out to be true, but a sight for sore eyes to see her snug as a bug in her chair and smiling at me without speaking, an expression that always says the same thing:
You're home—wherever else you've been today and tonight, whatever else you've been doing, this is where you belong, home.
I took off my hat and coat and watched Henry wag her hello.

I read, Loretta knitted, Henry dozed, and whatever combination of cold and menace the world could conjure up, we were warm and safe inside, at least for one more night. When I returned from the kitchen with our refilled drinks, Loretta had gotten up to stretch her legs and was flipping through the book I'd left on my chair, Saint Hippolytus's
The Refutation of All Heresies
. Seeing Loretta handle a book is like seeing a dog sitting beside a cat. I handed her her drink and she gave me back my book.

“Very big, this one,” she said.

“It has to be,” I said, sitting down. “The good saint gave himself a big job. Nothing less than discrediting every pagan Greek writer who he felt had been a bad influence upon the doctrines of the early Christian Church.”

Still standing, and not before tasting her schnapps, “And what possible pleasure is there in studying such a thing?”

I laughed, because she meant exactly what she said. “Because in the course of six hundred pages of being consistently wrong, he inadvertently preserved many otherwise unrecorded quotations from many men who were right.”

“And this amuses you?”

“It's an irony I can certainly appreciate.”

Henry yipped, and we both sipped our drinks and watched him twitch in his sleep in front of the fire.

“Mr. Pythagoras, your Mr. No Meat. He is one of the ones this man records?”

Fifty years ago, vegetarians were known, if at all, by their most illustrious exemplar, Pythagoras, who was advocating the avoidance of slaughtering animals—and not just human ones—six centuries before Christ was up to saying something almost as altruistic. I smiled and thumbed to where I thought I remembered the short section on Pythagoras was located, thought I'd appear extra clever and answer her question with a choice injunction against the killing of all living creatures. But before I could find the right quote:

“This saint, I suppose he would find you ironic, too, yes?”

Still skimming and flipping, “I don't follow you,” I said.

“Look around you.”

I looked up from the page I was on with that impatient look people wear when trying to illustrate just how patient they're attempting to be. I shook my head. “What am I supposed to be looking at?”

Gesturing around the room with her glass, “A man who does not eat the flesh of animals has covered an entire room with their skins. This is ironic, yes?”

My library is colour-coded, a different shade of binding for each different genre.
The Refutation of All Heresies
, for example, is bound in red—wine-red calfskin. But it's a book, it's different, it's . . .

“It's different,” I said.

“Now it is I who do not follow.”

“Any good library's best editions are always bound.”

“Of course. My father did the same with his. With skin of animals.”

“You're missing the point.”

“I see.” Loretta settled back down and picked up her needles and went back to work.

And now Loretta's asleep and I'm not. And I don't count sheep, and I don't care how many angels can fit on the head of a single pin. But if Saint Hippolytus happens to be listening, here's another big job for you, maybe your biggest yet: Tell me, Saint, whose hands are ever really clean?

All men by nature desire to know.

Aristotle wrote it, I read it, and wouldn't you know it, he was right. And because the copy of his
Metaphysics
that I first encountered it in belonged to the Reverend King, I copied out this and whatever other snatches of wisdom I wanted to remember into a hardback black leather notebook that my mother surprised me with for my fifteenth birthday, “For the special schooling you doing now with the Reverend King.” When, every Wednesday afternoon at three, the Reverend King would shake my hand at his study door and usher me inside for our weekly tutorial, my mother would somehow always manage to be nearby, broom or rag or mop and pail in hand, incapable of looking any prouder unless it had been my study door, the Reverend David King's, I was disappearing behind.

As long as I kept up with the reading I was supposed to be doing—the
Iliad
to sharpen my tongue,
A Brief Outline of the Evidences of the Christian Religion
to buttress my mind,
The Genuine Epistles of the Apostolic Fathers, St. Clement, St. Polycarp, St. Ignatius, St. Barnabas; the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Martyrdoms of St. Ignatius and St. Polycarp, Written by Those Who Were Present at Their Sufferings
to nourish my faith—I
was allowed to take home with me whatever books I wished from the Reverend King's crowded shelves. And after we'd reviewed to the Reverend King's satisfaction whatever I'd been assigned to learn that week, there would always be a few minutes left over at the end to discuss my supplementary studies, any questions, comments, or confusions I might have come up with. One Wednesday, I had a few of all three.