David (26 page)

A practised grave robber by now, I knew that the dead neither want nor need our respect; but the dying are a different matter. I didn't know what I wanted to tell Mrs. King before she passed away, but I decided at once that I was going to tell her anyway. Burwell had an order for two more bodies he wanted me to fill, but I told him I was busy, they'd have to wait.

“It's not like you to postpone a payday, lad,” Burwell said, amused, if inconvenienced, by my independence.

“I need to visit a sick friend.”

“Nothing too serious, I hope.”

“She's dying. She might be dead already.” Burwell only understood absolutes: money, death, money.

“Perhaps you can mix a little business with pleasure, then.”

Knowing he was only trying to upset me made it possible not to appear angry but didn't do anything to counteract what
I was feeling. Or thinking. What was the point of being cruel if nothing practical could be gained by it? Burwell, I decided, was wicked for the sake of being wicked. I rode off to Buxton for the first time since my mother's death twenty years before, unable to help being awed by the purity of Burwell's malice.

On the way out of town, I passed by the biscuit factory. It was lunch break, and a string of stoop-shouldered, sun-stunned employees were wordlessly filing outside, a dozen worker moles struggling to adjust to the twin shocks of fresh air and hard winter sunlight. There but for the grace of Burwell once-upon-a-time hiring me to exhume dead bodies for a very lucrative fee go I, I thought.

I'd taken along a half-pint of whiskey for companionship and nipped at it while I rode, puzzling over how someone so obviously bad could have done me—however inadvertently—so much good. By the time I reached the Settlement, I was drunk, but only enough to make me slightly numb to the prospect of meeting the Reverend King again, someone, it occurred to me, so obviously good who had done me—however inadvertently—so much bad.

I tied up my horse at the post office and walked to Clayton House unrecognized. Most of those I'd known there as a boy were either dead or gone. Because of the exodus south after the war, Buxton had shrunk, was a village that used to be a town. Everything was the same, but nothing was as it used to be.

Unlike during my mother's last days, Clayton House was empty but for a single nurse sitting beside Mrs. King's bed. It was obvious from the uniform the woman wore that she was an actual nurse and not a caring neighbour. I was relieved that the Reverend King wasn't there.

It was the middle of the afternoon, but the blinds were drawn and the room was dim. I pushed the already halfway-open
door another few inches, hoping to get the woman's attention but not wanting to wake Mrs. King. I used to do the exact same thing with the same door when wanting to visit her as a boy. When the woman didn't respond, I cleared my throat and took a couple of steps farther inside, only to realize she was asleep. I cleared my throat again, louder. The woman snorted herself awake.

“I'm a friend of Mrs. King's,” I whispered.

The woman stared up at me from her chair, taking a moment to adjust to the all-of-a-suddenness of the waking world.

“I don't want to wake her, but I'd like to pay my respects,” I whispered again.

The woman stood up and stretched her arms over her head, emitted a yawn louder than anything I'd said. “You're welcome to stay and visit as long as you want,” she said. “And don't worry yourself with being quiet—poor old thing couldn't hear you if you yelled.” The woman, a plump white woman dressed all in white, looked down at the prostrate figure and slowly shook her head and tsked several times like a disapproving but understanding teacher. “Poor old thing.”

I only really looked at Mrs. King once I was alone, sitting in the abandoned chair beside the bed. First, though, I'd removed the pint from my shoulder satchel and taken a long pull, strained my eyes in the dark attempting to locate the piano. But there wasn't any piano. I screwed the top back on the bottle and turned my attention to Mrs. King, and braced myself.

But it was just an old, shrivelled woman I hardly recognized. I forced myself to focus, but Mrs. King wasn't there. I was heartbroken I wasn't heartbroken. I didn't know what I'd expected, but it wasn't this, wasn't nothing. There was foamy white spittle at the corners of her mouth and she began to rasp, like she was trying to catch her breath after a long run
she shouldn't have undertaken in the first place. I went and got the nurse, making herself a cup of tea in the kitchen.

“Something's wrong,” I said.

My surprise at how the woman immediately dropped her spoon rattling to the countertop and passed me on the stairs on her race back into the bedroom was short-lived. After taking Mrs. King's pulse at her wrist and tucking a strand of long silver hair behind her ear, the woman stood up straight and surveyed her patient again, shook her head again.

“It won't be long now,” she said. “I've seen a thousand cases like this before if I've seen one.”

“Isn't there anything you can do? Or a doctor can do?”

“Just try and reassure her we're here and we care.”

“But you said she can't hear anything.”

The woman looked at me, blinked twice. “That's true,” she said, and returned to the kitchen.

There wasn't any point in my staying. There wasn't any reason for me to stay.

I sat back down beside the bed and took the copy of Montaigne's essays out of my satchel, started reading where the book fell open. When the nurse returned with her tea, she'd just have to get another chair from the kitchen.

*

Even the good ones aren't very good. Even the best of us aren't blameless. I rub both of my eyes, hard, until they crunch in their sockets like fresh gravel underfoot, but I still see what I saw, what I wish I hadn't seen. I stuff Meyers' copy of the
Planet
into the garbage pail behind the bar. Serves me right. You read the newspaper, you deserve what you get.

A couple of years back, England invaded the small country of Matabeleland because, it claimed, English trade emissaries
on an innocent mission were attacked and killed there and no satisfactory justice was subsequently dispensed. The warriors' spears were little match for the British army's guns, and the Matabele people were stripped of most of their land and the majority conscripted to work in the British gold mines. Many shiny pocket watches and gold candlestick holders were purchased by many respectable, patriotic British citizens in the years that followed.

And in today's newspaper, signs of a freshly brewing imperialist tea storm, this time originating on this continent, the United States making loud war noises over Cuba. Not, of course, because of a need to safeguard substantial American investments in Cuban sugar plantations, processing plants, and railways, but simply because the magnanimous American people feel a growing desire to liberate the unfortunate Cubans from the tyranny of the horribly repressive Spanish government they've been reading so much about in their newspapers of late. Woe unto them about to be liberated.

But, today, a singular voice of sanity in Meyers' copy of the
Planet
, a concerned congressman from the state of Massachusetts despairing of the United States' most un-Christian embracing of social Darwinism, this never-satisfied lust for yet more and more territories and power. Invoking the recent memory of Britain's latest foray into imperialist action, the congressman from Massachusetts lamented the five hundred casualties the British forces reportedly suffered there, “each one,” he emphasized, “a tragically, pointlessly sacrificed Christian soul.”

Apparently, the ten thousand Matabelian soldiers who died defending their homeland didn't have souls to lose.

And tomorrow morning, as I breakfast with Loretta—no lying newspaper sliming
my
kitchen table, no gilded stuff-lust sullying
my
untainted soul, thank you very much—she'll ask
me to please pass her the sugar for her coffee and I'll answer, “Of course,” and hand her the bowl, and the proud American flag of imperialism will flap in the wind just a little bit louder, world domination one sugar spoon at a time.

“I say, David,” Meyers says, back from the washroom, “have you seen my newspaper? I left it right here when I stepped away to use the loo.”

I look where Meyers can't, at the garbage pail with his copy of the
Planet
and an already-browning apple core resting beside it. I shake my head. “Someone must have taken it,” I say.

Meyers peers down the length of the bar in each direction, half turns around with one hand still on the bar to survey the room for the thief. “Honestly, what kind of rounder . . .” Meyers rests both flabby forearms on the bar, stares down at the wood grain like a pouty child whose toy has been taken away. I place a fresh drink in front of him. Meyers looks up. “What's this?”

“Drink up,” I say. “You're not missing anything.”

*

When Mrs. King's eyes were open, which wasn't often, it was the same as when they were closed: long periods of empty silence interspersed with sudden bursts of gasping, rasping, wheezing, and desperate panting for air. She didn't know who I was even when looking directly at me and when I reminded her of my name, but then, the last years of my time in Buxton hadn't been much different. I didn't stop reading to her, though.

Actually, I did, once—when reading aloud one of Emerson's essays and pausing to puzzle out a sentence—and Mrs. King didn't gasp, rasp, wheeze, or pant, but whimpered, like
an animal not so much in pain as abandoned. It was probably only happenstance, but as soon as I resumed reading, the whimpering ceased. It was all the coincidence I needed to keep going.

I visited regularly enough that the nurse would leave Mrs. King and me alone whenever I arrived. Occasionally I'd hear voices in the house—the cook's, a member of the cleaning staff's—but never the Reverend King's. Two decades later and the old man still knew what I was up to.

Sitting there day after day in the silence of Clayton House, it wasn't surprising that I began to hear other voices, dead voices, my mother's louder than any other. I remembered how, once, my mother had been preparing the Reverend King's supper and I was helping, the first damning dusting of arthritic rust on her fingers only slowing her down, not nearly stopping her yet. It was July and hot and humid and the Reverend King was eating light—cold salmon, summer-gushing sliced tomatoes, crunchy fresh radishes, strong iced tea. My job was to arrange the food on the plate and deliver it on a tray to the Reverend King's office. “Food that looks nice tastes nicer,” my mother always said. I was pleased with my work: I'd bookended the vegetables, which I'd arranged in rows top to bottom in decreasing size, with two equally long slices of fish. I filled up a tall glass with iced tea from the pitcher and picked up the tray.

“Hold on, now,” my mother said. “You isn't done one job yet and you already on to another.”

Frowning down at the tray, not wanting to upset the symmetry of my careful design, “What did I forget?” I said.

“You put together Mrs. King's plate first, then you go and give the Reverend King his supper. I want to put all this away so I can make sure tomorrow's breakfast's all set before we leave.”

“Okay,” I said, and set down the tray. And stared at it.

“C'mon, now, hurry up, that plate not gonna make itself up.”

I hadn't visited Mrs. King for over a year, maybe longer, ever since she went silent and stopped playing the piano and didn't recognize me anymore. But now I'd forgotten about her. Not overlooked her, not slightly slighted her, but fully forgotten her. To compensate, I placed bigger tomato slices and extra radishes and a whole other piece of fish across the top of her plate, but my mother shook her head, said, “No use wasting good food, she never eat all that,” and cleared it to almost half of what lay on the Reverend King's plate.

The Reverend King thanked me for his meal and asked me to please thank my mother for preparing it. Mrs. King didn't so much as look up from her lap when I set hers on her chair-side table. Once we were home and eating our own supper, “Does the Reverend King . . . I mean, does Mrs. King ever recognize him when he talks to her?” I said.

“You know she don't. Poor woman don't know nobody from nobody.” My mother forked another piece of salmon onto my plate. My mother was the one in charge of deciding when I'd had enough to eat, which was rarely ever.

“Do you think she's lonely?” I said.

“Who?”

“Mrs. King.”

“Don't talk such nonsense,” my mother said, helping me to some more warm green beans. The pad of butter she smoothed across them with her fork melted almost instantly. “You eat your supper, now. I seen those books you brought home from your meeting with the Reverend King the other night. You finish your supper and I clear the table so you can get down to work.”

I sliced through the soft pink flesh of the salmon although there wasn't any need to use a knife. My mother's salmon
steaks were just as moist and tender as her pork roasts and her beef steaks.

“What about when she was all right, though?” I said. “Even when Mrs. King was all right—I mean, when she still talked and still played the piano, I mean—I can count on one hand the number of times I can remember her and the Reverend King speaking to one another.” Now that I thought of it, I couldn't remember them
ever
speaking to one another.

My mother stood up from the table and took away my plate even though it was still half full, even though I was still eating. With her back to me at the kitchen counter: “No man ever suffered so much for his wife as the Reverend King done. Such a good man, such a good, hard-working man—good to so many people in so many ways, and always working so hard,
so
hard—and no wife to come home to and no children to find his joy in.” My mother emptied my plate clean into the refuse can with two sharp scrapes of her fork. “Mrs. King, she blessed to have such a man as the Reverend King as her husband.
Blessed
.”