David (20 page)

*

The day begins with Loretta shaking me awake. The day begins in the middle of the night, sunlight still hours until showtime.

“You must stop this,” she says. She's leaning back on both elbows, squinting down at me in deference to the table-side lamp she's lit.

I concede a second opened eyelid. “What is
this
?” I say.

“You know what you do.”

“What—snore?”

“Hah. I wish it was snore.”

I close both eyes with the intention of deciphering what she means, but immediately drift back to . . .

The day begins with Loretta shaking me awake, this time hard enough to qualify as a soft punch, or at least a serious shove. I join her on my elbows to prove I'm really alert and concentrating.

“Okay,” I say, “enough. What do you want me to stop?”

She takes an angry moment to accept that I really am oblivious to what she's so obviously aware of. “Bathroom sounds. In the bed. This is not the place.”

I take my own moment—to translate “bathroom sounds in the bed” into English—and, after doing the alphabetical arithmetic, am more surprised than chastened. It's Loretta, after all, who has to be occasionally reminded to close the bathroom door behind her. It's Loretta, not me, who needs to be asked to please cut her toenails when she's sure she's alone. Besides,

“How can I stop something if I don't know I'm doing it?” I say.

“You do not know.” It's an accusation, not a question.

“I'm asleep, how would I know?”

“I do not know,” she says, putting out the lamp and flipping over her pillow, punching it in the middle—once, hard—before laying her head down, facing away from me. “But this is unacceptable.”

Unacceptable, maybe, I think, staying flat on my back, the most flatulence-frustrating position possible, but inevitable. I've grown tired of spending the majority of my time the last two days in the bathroom waging a silent contest with my taciturn bowels, but I get up from the bed and go anyway. Henry, nose tucked deep into his curled front legs at bed's end, looks up long enough to see me slip into my slippers then disappears back beneath his limbs. Henry doesn't get constipated. It's not the first time I've been envious of a dog.

I lock the bathroom door and light the lamp on the wall and turn the wick until I get an adequate reading light. I used to keep copies of the
Fortnightly
and the
Quarterly
in here; now it's Gibbon's
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. The object is not to notice what you're doing, to force your bowels to say what you want them to say by pretending not to care if they stay quiet forever. Eight pages of how “The Doctrine of Future Life contributed to The Rise of Christianity” later, my bowels still aren't talking to me. Arrogant organs. They say that Lincoln suffered from lifelong constipation, that he required a powerful purgative delivered to the White House once every week. They also say that Lincoln suffered from extreme melancholy. I'm not a doctor, but . . .

Since I'm already here and have nothing else to do, I decide to shave—the top as well as the front of my head old habit now—then manage to get dressed without waking Loretta. Henry seems puzzled by the early hour but jumps out of bed
and follows me downstairs nonetheless, liking his odds of being served an early breakfast. I first light the fire in the library and then the stove; put the kettle on for me and get Henry's food out of the cold room. The rice and carrots and corn and peas and squash are already mixed up, but I give them a fresh churn anyway, ladle out half a bowlful.

Except for a single serving of porridge every morning, the vegetables and rice we both eat is the only cooking I do, Loretta the sole semi-member of the household who uses the stove for more than the kettle and another fire to help keep the house warm. Cooking is for cooks. I'm not anyone's servant, not even my own. I buy my bread from the baker, my milk from the milkman, my vegetables from the vegetable seller. Let someone else till the soil and serve the food this lifetime.

I pass the hours of darkness into dawn in the library, riding along Gibbon's looping Latinate sentences, trying to hold on while following the fortune of his hero, human reason, as it falls, as it will always fall, before the usual list of ancient enemies. Meyers won't be opening his drugstore door for another hour, but I could use a longer than usual walk this morning. My blocked bowels could use a longer than usual walk this morning. Henry is always game for extra walking, the more the better, even if his bowels never need any extra encouragement. No wonder people believe that animals don't have souls. Small compensation for not being born perfect.

It's not even nine o'clock in the morning and there's an old man voluntarily freezing just for the opportunity to be mesmerized by the sights and sounds of the man who lives a quarter-mile over from me milking his cow for his family's morning milk. Old men who can't work anymore like to stand around and watch young men who can. Their entire adult lives are one long moan about how they
Gotta go to work
, about how
Work is killing me
, about how they can't wait for the day
to be over so they can finally get home from work. Then, the day after their last day on the job, they're poking around the house looking for something to fix, or else are roaming the neighbourhood in search of someone lucky enough to be patching a hole in the roof or digging a new well. Servitude is habit forming, the same as whiskey and tobacco. Fresh air and plenty of exercise can maim a man too.

My anger keeps me warm and occupied all the way downtown. Meyers is just turning around his closed sign to the open side when I leave Henry beside the lamppost out front. There's a new display in the front window he's obviously put a lot of time and consideration into. Such a variety of shiny bottles affixed with such healthy names and happy promises (Dr. Pierce's Golden Medical Discovery, Dr. Dalzell's Nasal Douche, Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, Dr. Hercules Sanche's Oxydonor, Pink Pills for Pale People, Thayer's Slippery Elm Lozenges, Galvanic Love Powder, The Invalid's Friend and Hope, Princess Lotus Blossom's Vital Sparks), it's almost a shame not to be sick.

Meyers is always glad to see me come through his door, happy for the opportunity to impersonate a respected member of Chatham's professional class and not be just one more King Street shopkeeper with a personality so impossibly grating he's reduced to doing his socializing at an illegal, underground saloon owned and operated by a former slave. Meyers still sells simples and chemicals, which he uses to compound and dispense medicine, still spreads his own plasters, and duly prepares pills, powders, tinctures, ointments, syrups, conserves, medicated waters, and even perfumes. But since the big American companies have started offering up cheap patent medicines that pharmacists previously had to make by hand, he's had to pick up the sales slack, has started to stock confectioneries, spices, tobacco, paint, even groceries and liquor. Poor Meyers has even had to install a soda fountain.
Self-delusion is man's greatest gift, but it's difficult to successfully masquerade as a dignified man of medicine when just a fraction of your working day is given over to exhibiting your vast knowledge of artificial flavours and carbonated water to every snotty six-year-old armed with a nickel.

Meyers doesn't know what I'm here for and I'm in no hurry to enlighten him. Asking for constipation medicine is simply embarrassing. It's not even the pills themselves or what they're made for that are the problem. It's only that, I know Meyers knows I shit—well, ordinarily—but I don't like the idea of needing him in order to do it.

“And how is Mr. King today?”

“Just fine.”

“Jolly good.”

I nod in appreciation of my surfeit of goodness and fineness. Now if only I could crap.

Meyers nods right along with me, last man nodding wins.

“I wonder,” I say, “if you have anything for . . . I mean to say, lately, I haven't been . . .” I discover I'm pointing at myself, clearly indicating that there's something definitely wrong with either my heart, my lungs, my stomach, or perhaps my genitals.

Meyers nods again, but this time just once, and with solemn purpose, as if he actually knows what ails me and has just the thing to cure me of it. Before I can tell him to forget it, not to bother, he's left me alone for his backroom. I consider simply leaving, but instead walk to the door to check on Henry. He sees me see him and wags. I smile back.

“Here we are,” Meyers says, holding up a small brown bottle. “Just take one of these a day until you're feeling more yourself.”

I want to say,
Meyers, you fool, you don't even know what's wrong with me, how can you possibly prescribe something for me?
but because that would entail having to tell him what actually
is wrong, I just take the bottle and drop it in my coat pocket without so much as glancing at it. Meyers adds the cost to my tab in his accounts book.

“Quite a remarkable little pill, actually,” he says. “Called Blue Mass. The key ingredient is mercury—that's what gives it its real acting power. The late President Lincoln was a devoted user, I understand. Can't ask for a stronger recommendation than that, can one?”

I don't know what to say.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Why, you're most welcome, Mr. King.”

*

I couldn't prove it, but when I received a letter from Anderson Abbott—Dr. Anderson Abbott—inviting me to come and visit him at his new home soon after he moved back to Chatham, the year after the war ended, I knew that the Reverend King was behind it. I'd met Dr. Abbott only twice, when he'd returned to Elgin for short visits during his time studying in Toronto, but I'd only been a boy, little chance he would have remembered me, or remembered me well enough to want to see me again ten years later. But I pressed my suit and shined my shoes and showed up on the appointed day anyway. If the Reverend King believed he could accomplish with his proxy what he hadn't been able to do in person—get me to admit I was a chronically lying, spiritually lost drug addict—it would be a pleasure to have his appointed messenger deliver him the news that I was a man of unassailable integrity and conviction, even if what I was convinced of wasn't entirely clear.

The Reverend King was clever, I'd grant him that; he knew whom to have check up on me. Dr. Abbott was who I
was supposed to have been if everything had gone according to plan, God's and otherwise. Although his father had been a free-born Negro, the family had fled Alabama when the Mobile city council passed a law requiring all free Blacks to post a bond signed by two white men guaranteeing their good behaviour and to wear badges proving they'd been bonded. The family eventually immigrated to Toronto, where Dr. Abbott was born, but, wanting his son to have the best education available, Mr. Abbott sent him away to study at the already renowned Buxton school, where he was among the Reverend King's first six graduates. From there to Knox College, of course, but, instead of going on to study theology, matriculating in medicine at the age of twenty-three at the University of Toronto, becoming Canada's first native-born Negro doctor. Soon after enlisting in the Union army as a surgeon, he was appointed overseer of two different Washington hospitals for the duration of the war. The Reverend King would keep the entire Settlement informed of each graduate's achievements and honours, but made a special point of ensuring that I was personally aware of every step, no matter how small, along the way of Dr. Abbott's exemplary professional ascension.

“You put me in mind of Dr. Abbott when he was a young man,” he'd said.

It didn't matter how, it was an honour just to be compared, but, “In what way?” I said.

The Reverend King looked at me for a moment. We were in his office, going over that week's supplementary reading assignment. “Tenacity,” he finally answered.

I was flattered, but confused. The Reverend King could tell.

“When confronted with a problem or a task, no matter how difficult, neither of you will repine.”

I was still flattered, but just as confused, so simply nodded and put my head back down to the page. There was work to do.

The letter said that Dr. Abbott lived on Maple Street, so I didn't have far to walk from my rooming house. Even though I was standing out front and had double-checked the address twice, I still wasn't convinced I had the right house. It didn't make sense somehow that someone that I knew—someone
coloured
that I knew—could live somewhere this large or this nice.

There were green, cooling vines crawling up all three brick storeys and an enormous maple tree shading the majority of the front lawn. The windows on the upper floors were bare and mirrored back the bright July sunshine, each windowpane its own four-square sun. I turned the brass bell handle and Dr. Abbott himself opened the door.

“David. Please, come in.”

We shook hands inside.

Paintings hung from every wall, landscapes and religious scenes and portraits of people Dr. Abbott must have known. There was a mahogany side table just inside the door supporting a vase of freshly cut flowers, from his own garden no doubt. A cylinder-top writing table and bookcase appeared more ornamental than operational.

“Let's go into my office,” Dr. Abbott said, and I followed him to the rear of the house.

Men and things sometimes shrink, seem disappointingly reduced in size or status once one has grown up. Not Dr. Abbott. He was still taller than me and still walked with perfect posture and an unhurried step and still looked like, if he hadn't decided to use his long fingers and dinner-plate-sized hands to heal the sick, he could have easily survived as an executioner without having to resort to anything so crude as a noose.

“Please, David, sit down.”

Unbelievable. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves bursting with many of the same titles; the placement of the desk directly in front of the window; the dual reading chairs stationed at the exact same angles on either side of the fireplace—it was as if he'd imported the Reverend King's office directly from Buxton to Chatham. The only thing substantially different was significant, however: an anomalously ornate carved gilt table with a marble top supporting a decanter full of what appeared to be whiskey alongside an ice bucket and several glasses. Most Elgin residents remained lifelong teetotallers.