David (18 page)

“You're going to make me tell you what we both already know,” he said. “I see. This is what the depths of your dishonesty have led us to.” Before I had time to understand, never mind answer or even object, “Number one,” the Reverend King said, using the thumb on his left hand to keep count, not a heartening sign, “you were seen in Chatham buying liquor, not once, not twice, but on three separate occasions. Number two, you were seen consuming this same liquor—I assume it was the same liquor, although if it was otherwise, at this point I wouldn't be surprised—in the woods of Buxton. Third, you kept a portion of this liquor in your poor mother's own house.” He left his three fingers extended and accusatory for me to ponder.

I had honestly thought no one would ever discover what I'd been up to. I'd been so careful, expert even. I should have known better. The Reverend King's eyes were everywhere.

“I—”

Boom!
The flat of the Reverend King's hand collided with the top of his desk—the desk, and my ears, the worse for it.

“I, I, I,” he said. “Precisely. That's correct. You do not know the degree of truth of what you say.”

I resolved not to try to speak again.

“Your selfishness is sinful to a degree I sincerely never expected you capable of. And your mother, your poor, poor mother, did you never consider the shame she would feel if she were to discover that her only son, whom she has such fine, pure hopes for, was a drunkard?”

“I'm not a drunkard.”

Boom! Boom!
This time loud enough I was afraid that one of the members of the domestic staff would hear.

“You have not seen as I have—first-hand, with my own eyes—how masters use alcohol as a tool to subdue the will and extinguish the spirits of otherwise hard-working, morally upright, good Christian men and women, who become little
more than debased animals under the spell of the evil effects of hard liquor. Is this the condition you would willingly, voluntarily, inflict upon yourself?”

“I'm not a slave,” I heard myself say.

For a moment—the slight narrowing of his eyes, the slow constricting of his fists—I was afraid that my face might take the place of his desk. He must have seen what I feared. He inhaled and exhaled equally deeply through his nose; carefully reintwined his fingers, locked them in place on the desktop.

“This can never happen again, David,” he said. “Never. Your academic and professional future. The sanctity of the Settlement. The welfare of your mother. All of these things depend upon you pledging never to consume another drop of liquor.”

I didn't think. I didn't have to. “I promise you,” I said. “I swear.” I felt tears dripping down both of my cheeks, but I didn't feel embarrassed, only cleansed of my sins.

The Reverend King looked surprised. “It's not me you have to swear before,” he said. When I didn't say anything, “
God
, David,” he said. “It's God you need to swear before.”

I shook my head, understanding now.

“Let us pray,” the Reverend King said. “I will pray with you, David.”

And we did.

A tear slid over my upper lip while the Reverend King prayed for us both. I licked it away. It tasted hot and salty.

*

I stayed away from Chatham. I condemned my mind to my school work. I even began to voluntarily read the Bible again, snubbing the company of my growing outlaw library for a better class of ideas and stories intended to slake the spirit, not inflame it. If it had been any other season but spring, and
if my mother hadn't decided to stop eating, I might have had a chance.

It helped that the very next Wednesday after the Reverend King had confronted me with my aberrant ways, he handed me a large grey envelope with my name on it, care of himself. In the upper left-hand corner was the crest of Knox College; inside, another set of forms to be filled out by me and mailed back to Toronto as part of my application package. I'd expected still-simmering anger or at least understandably lingering irritation, but all I received was forgiveness.
Practise what you preach
could never be mere words to me again.

I spent every evening at my mother's bedside, sometimes talking, sometimes reading Scripture to her, but mainly just being there. Even when she was first bedridden, she would have liked nothing more than hearing how the Reverend King was arranging the financial component of my education, or what sorts of things a minister-in-training studies, or even simply the details of what Mr. Rapier had written to say the student accommodations at Knox College were like.

“If my hands didn't trouble me so, I'd make you a nice new cover for your bed next year.”

“I don't need a new cover, the one I've got now is fine.”

“And a sweater, a nice warm sweater. It gets cold up there, you know.”

“It gets cold down here too, and I haven't frozen yet.”

“You make fun all you want, but you make sure to wear your hat all the time you outdoors once you're up there. You can't afford to be missing no time learning just because you go and forget your hat at home.”

Even though using her chamber pot was the only physical exertion she was capable of—this for a woman for whom a twelve-hour day keeping Clayton House spotless and smoothly running was never anything but an honour—and she still moaned me awake most nights, talking about what
my life was going to be like or listening to what the neighbourhood women had to report about the ever-increasing number of Union victories kept my mother's eyes clear and her spirit strong.

Then, slowly, as slowly as the buds on the bare tree limbs began their green bursting, my mother lost her appetite.

The doctor from Chatham, whom the Reverend King had paid to come all the way out to Buxton, told us what was coming, said there was nothing that could be done, that my mother's body would sooner rather than later begin to simply shut itself down until it eventually just stopped. But understanding what was happening didn't make watching it any easier. That look again. That same not-themselves-anymore look in their eyes that every dying animal I'd ever seen had had. And not in a dying bird's eyes or a dying deer's eyes, but in my mother's eyes. My dying mother's eyes.

Even the little hot tea and honey she could be coaxed to drink didn't seem worth it, didn't merit the pain that swallowing brought. Every hour of every day now, it looked as if it hurt her just to breathe. It
did
hurt her just to breathe.

Instead of trying to talk now, I read. She was too weak to tell me what she wanted to hear, so I just started with Genesis and kept reading. And read and read, until one night, near dawn—I'd taken to reading through the night, to keep myself company, if not her—I read:

I set down the bible on the side table beside a cold, untouched cup of tea. I turned down the lamp until the room was dark.

“Jesus,” my mother moaned.

I took her hand, as tenderly as I could, but it didn't matter. Her hand spasmed; she screamed; but she didn't wake.

“Oh, Jesus,” she yelled. “Help me.”

I let go of her hand and got down on my knees. I put my elbows on the bed and prayed for the pain to stop, for God to please stop my mother's pain. I told Him He'd never had a more faithful servant and that she deserved to be at peace.

With the warmer weather, all of the windows were open, even at night. The cruel caress of drape-fluttering, soft spring breezes. The inconsiderate taunting of busy, twittering sparrows. The obscene freshness of another perfect spring morning. All while I prayed to God to please let my mother die.

“Oh, Jesus,” she said.

With first light, I got up from my knees. I sat back down and waited for the initial shift of Buxton women to arrive.

“Oh, Jesus,” my mother said.

She wasn't speaking to me, but I was the one who was listening.

*

“Just push it in, like this, see? Push it in all the way until you get right to the end. And then pull it all the way back out. That's all there is to it.”

“Just one?” I said.

The cigarette stuck in the corner of the man's mouth rose with his bisected grin. “Sure, just one. You don't want to overdose, do you?”

“Of course not,” I said, taking far too much umbrage for someone purchasing morphine in the dirty backroom of a Chatham saloon. “But how many shots would someone have to take to have an overdose? Just to be sure I don't, I mean.”

The man placed the loaded hypodermic needle in the cigar box with the four others I'd already paid for. “Just do like I said: one shot, nice and clean, throw out the needle as soon as you're done. Nobody needs more than one shot.”

No doubt. I'd done a little research. The German pharmacist who'd first isolated pure morphine from opium named it
morphium
, after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams.

The man walked me to the back door and clicked open the padlock with the key dangling from a brown shoelace tied to his belt. “You need more after these are gone, you come and see me, okay?”

“Sure.”

The man stuck his head out the door like he was looking to see if it was raining; didn't see anything or anyone coming, moved aside to let me leave.

Before he could shut the door, “If someone did overdose,” I said, “they wouldn't feel anything, would they? Any pain, I mean.”

The man grinned again, the cigarette on his lip nearly vertical this time. “If they felt anything, they'd feel like they'd gone straight to heaven.”

I untied George's father's horse. I headed back to Buxton, back home.

*

It was easy. Killing my mother was easy. I kissed her brow and simply let the morphine give her what nothing else could. I allowed the women who had cared for her so well while she was ill to look after her just a little while longer now that she was dead. George came to the house directly from work as soon as he heard the news, but I convinced him to go back to the factory, that I would need his support more tomorrow, at
the funeral. I carried the empty needles in a satchel to Deer Pond and buried them behind the big hill. From its summit I watched the sun go down and the stars come out and the pond turn black. When I got home, one of the women told me that the Reverend King wished to see me, no matter how late I returned.

He met me at the door of Clayton House. All the members of the house staff, each of whom my mother had personally selected and supervised, were tending to her body and the preparations for tomorrow. Still, it was odd to have the Reverend King himself answer his own door. He'd been to our house earlier in the evening to offer his condolences, so I assumed he wanted to discuss the eulogy. Whatever he wanted to say was fine with me. I'd already said my goodbye.

When he didn't accept my hand to shake, I knew something was wrong. When he wordlessly led me to his study, I couldn't help but suspect the worst. But even God's eyes can't see what's not there. Or hardly there. Only three of the tiniest, virtually imperceptible pinpricks on the back of my mother's right bicep even hinted at how she'd died. By the time we were seated across his desk from one another, though, I'd reconciled myself to my naïveté. That it was impossible that he knew didn't matter. He'd always known everything else, so of course he knew about this. Surprisingly, I didn't feel scared or even nervous, only curious, as if what was taking place were happening to someone else.

“I . . .” The Reverend King paused, made a triangle of his hands, balanced his chin gingerly on top. He appeared to be reconsidering what he was about to say. He refolded his fingers and rested them back on top of the desk. “I have hesitated whether or not to allow you an opportunity to explain your actions. Because we both know that what you have done is incontestably, inexcusably wrong. Even now—even in your
present, undeniably debauched state—I know that you know, David, that which is right and that which is wrong. Even if you have failed to act upon this knowledge.”

I wasn't sure what option he had, in fact, ultimately decided upon, but it didn't matter. “The pain was too much,” I said. “I couldn't allow it to go any further. I couldn't.” There wasn't any guilt attached to my confession. If I hadn't known before that I was right to do what I had, I did now.

The Reverend King silently nodded, although whether in even partial understanding I couldn't tell. It didn't matter. Either way, I knew he was going to turn me over to the Chatham police, probably as soon as the funeral was over.

“And do you hold that this pain justifies your act of weakness?” he said.

“Weakness?” I said, tasting the word's worth in my mouth. “What I did wasn't weak.”

“What would you call such an act, then?”

“I don't know.” I thought about it for a moment. “Merciful,” I said.

The Reverend King lowered his eyes. Without looking up, “I don't believe you mean that,” he said.

“I do. I do mean that.” I'd never meant anything more.

He raised his eyes and stared hard into mine, searching to see if I was telling the truth. Deciding that I was, “Then you don't understand what the word means.”

“I think I do. I think I understand it as well as anyone possibly can.”

The Reverend King's eyes were still on mine, but he wasn't looking for anything anymore, he'd seen and heard all he needed to. “I can forgive you your ignorance, but not your arrogance. You may stay on for the funeral tomorrow, of course, but I'll ask you to take your leave of Buxton within the week. The Settlement of Elgin will buy back your mother's house at the price she originally paid, plus interest, and the
money will be forwarded to you in full. Anything you don't wish to take with you will be distributed among those wanting something to remember your mother by.”