David (29 page)

“Just because I don't feel the need to take a holiday like other people doesn't mean I'm mocking something I don't understand.”

“I am sorry, but yes, it does. You are like the person who says, ‘I know what I like,' but what they are really saying is, ‘I like what I know.'”

Loretta directs her attention back to the small box of photographs resting on her lap, but I'm still looking at the clock. I knew that one day I wanted to have my own long-case clock the very first time I saw the one in the Reverend King's sitting room. Aside from the Reverend King himself, I'd never been in the presence of anyone or anything so quietly, unfailingly dignified. The first thing I purchased when this house was built and finally ready to be moved into was an eighteenth-century Scottish mahogany long-case clock made by James Howden of Edinburgh. After what I had to pay to have it shipped over, it ended up costing only slightly less than what I'd originally paid for the half-acre of land that the house is built upon.

“I know enough to know that I do—that I
buy
—plenty of things that aren't just meat and potatoes.”

“You do not eat meat.”

“It's an expression. It means things that are only essential.”

Loretta considers this. “This is not an effective expression. Particularly for one such as yourself who does not eat meat.”

“Anyway, the point I was making is that I buy things—rare books, for instance—that—”

“You buy things, you buy things—what you need is not to buy things, what you need is to look at the things you already have with new eyes. This is what every person needs.”

All the while she's talking, Loretta is sifting through her most recent collection of photographs. If anything, it seems only to sharpen her focus on what she's saying.

“And I suppose I'll get these new eyes if I travel three hundred miles to eat expensive dead fish eggs and have my back rubbed by a stranger?”

Loretta looks up, sighs for effect. “Please do not try to be foolish. This is not something you need to try to do.”

Just for that, I decide to punish her by denying her the pleasure of my continued conversation on the slim chance that she'll actually even notice, pick up where I left off in my book. Actually, it doesn't matter where I last was, as I'm skipping and skimming anyway, one illusion-loosening page of Winwood Reade's
The Martyrdom of Man
as good as any other to revisit and delight in all over again. Whether because my eyes, like the rest of me, are older—itch and burn if I read too long—or because I'm just getting lazy, I prefer to reread beloved books now rather than search out new favourites. In point of fact, it's much simpler than that: I like to hear familiar voices.
The Martyrdom of Man
was, yes, one of
those
books—portrayed Jesus, for instance, as neither the son of God nor even a great moral teacher, but simply as a fallible, if admittedly alluring, human being, and only one of a number of very similar contemporary Jewish fanatics. But just as much as his liberating message, it was Winwood Reade, the thoroughly sensible but always sprightly messenger, who compelled me to listen and learn. As I do now, this time as to why Rome really declined and fell:

History made human, all too delightfully human. Just as feisty and refreshing as the very first time I read it.

Probably because she's detected yet another foolish grin on my face, “You are a confused man,” Loretta says.

Still smiling, “I was just amused by something I read,” I say. “Listen to this. Reade—that's the author, Winwood Reade—he—”

Loretta waves away my kind offer of a complimentary lecture. “I am speaking of you—you, David—as confused.”

Well, I'm confused about one thing, anyway. “What am I supposed to be confused about?”

Now that she has my attention, Loretta resumes sorting through her box of photographs. “On this hand, you are a very brave man. You choose a life for yourself—a good life—and you live it as you wish. This is not common, I do not have to tell you this.”

I easily avoid any danger of sinning from an excess of pride because I know there's another hand coming. Whenever there's occasion to feel good, you can usually count on the other hand.

“But on the other hand . . .” I say.

“But on this other hand, you are very much afraid.”

I lower my eyes to my book without bothering to read what's there. “Ah, I see. And what exactly is it I'm afraid of?”

“How would I know such a thing? But always the way you are unwilling to go anywhere or do anything you have not already been or done before, this is how you are confused, yes? You are a brave man and you are an afraid man.”

“That's not what ‘confused' means. What you mean is—” What does she mean? “What you mean is, I'm a contradiction.”

“Is a contradiction not confusing?”

“I suppose so, but—”

“Then they are the same, yes? And you are surely one who is confused.”

Even if I did know what she's talking about, I know it's better to nod instead of argue. I pick up my book again. Almost immediately I put it back down.

“When did you say you leave for Montreal?”

I'd quit plenty of other jobs before, and this, I told myself, was just one more, albeit one I'd held longer than any other. I'd finally found someone who would supply Sophia's with the ever-increasing amount of whiskey I needed and who didn't demand dead bodies as currency, and at a much better rate, too. I knew Burwell wouldn't be pleased to lose a veteran grave robber, but he was a businessman, he'd understand. He'd have to.

“So that's it, then,” I said.

I'd informed Burwell that this was the last human being I'd ever disturb from his supposedly eternal resting place, and Burwell had motioned for Ferguson to give me the last ten bottles of whiskey I was ever going to purchase from him. I'd decided I would tell him about Sophia's if he asked me again what I needed all the whiskey for, but he didn't. Burwell was sitting in the passenger seat of his wagon, I in the driver's seat of mine. It was our usual sort of meeting place, an empty road beside a fallow field just before sundown.

Ferguson handed me the box of whiskey and I placed it in the back of the wagon without getting out of my seat. Part of me said to climb down and go and shake Burwell's hand; another part of me said to stay where I was, don't get out of the wagon no matter what. I stayed in the wagon.

“I'm sure I'll be seeing you around,” I said, neither sure nor desirous of any such thing.

“Of course you will, lad. Why wouldn't you?”

Ferguson had climbed back in the wagon and grabbed the reins.

“So, that's it, then,” I said.

“So you've said. Twice.”

I rustled the reins; there wasn't anything left to do but leave.

As I pulled away, “I'll be seeing you soon, lad,” I heard Burwell call out.

I wondered whether or not I should turn right around and tell Burwell no, he wouldn't, not if I had anything to do with it. But before I could make up my mind, it was too late, I could hear Burwell's wagon going the other way.

*

For some, it's love gone wrong. For others, money gone missing. For still others, good health going going gone and not coming back. To each prospective suicide his own unique inspiration. For Thompson, it was Walt Whitman's garbage.

It was December 24 the entire month of July in the summer of 1887, Sophia's first summer of business, Thompson for weeks before he was supposed to travel to London to hear speak and quite possibly even meet Walt Whitman suffering one long, continuous, nervous night before Christmas. Thompson had learned that not only did Whitman have a younger brother living under the care of the insane asylum in London, Ontario, whom he periodically visited, but its superintendent, Richard Maurice Bucke, was both a disciple and an intimate of the aged poet, and that Bucke had persuaded Whitman to read from his work for the local literary society the next time he was in town. Only by nightly numbing
himself with my whiskey and just as unfailingly monologuing my ear raw with what he expected the great man to look and talk and act like and how he honestly didn't know what to expect of himself if he was permitted, however briefly, actually to occupy the same physical space as his long-time hero, was he able to avoid boiling over before the big day even arrived and to limit himself to a low but steady daily simmer.

One night—after closing time, no one left but Thompson and me—he talked and talked until I think he said something true. Because, whether or not you want it, run a hot water tap long enough and you're eventually going to get scalding water. It began with a poem. No matter how much whiskey he'd had, Thompson saved his recitation of Whitman's verse for when Sophia's was empty except for us. You don't survive as an outcast by being stupid.

I looked up from my mop. Thompson was so rarely quiet these days, the sudden silence sounded loud. He picked up his glass and swallowed without appearing to notice it was empty. He shut his eyes and kept them that way once he began talking again.

“Please understand, in Whitman's conception of comradeship—and here's the thing one needs to understand, here's the thing that desperately needs to be understood—in Whitman's conception of comradeship as best exemplified, of course, in the poem ‘Calamus,' he allows for the possibility—and that's all I'm saying—all he's saying, rather, all
Whitman
is saying—he allows for the possibility of the possible intrusion—the wrong word, I'm afraid, but it's all that comes to mind at the moment—allows for the possible intrusion of those possibly amorous emotions and actions that no doubt—because there is no doubt, there really is no doubt—do occur, occasionally, between men. According to Whitman, you see, such emotions and actions are to be left entirely to the inclinations and conscience of the
individuals
involved. The individuals who are comrades. True comrades. True individuals who are true comrades.”

Thompson opened his eyes to me looking at him. He looked back at me like he was waiting for me to say something he'd been slowly dying his entire life for someone to finally, mercifully, say. And because I wasn't the one to say it—could only nod into my bucket and nervously re-soak my mop and sincerely hope that one day he'd hear it—Thompson stood up from his table and wordlessly exited upstairs to merge with the night slowly dissolving into morning. It wouldn't be the last time he quoted from Walt Whitman while I cleaned up, but he never recited another line quite so explicitly . . . comradely ever again.

The day he returned from London, I found him sitting on the ground with his back flat against the locked door of Sophia's when I arrived to open up for the night. Thompson's wrinkled, whiskey-stained suit showed he'd been sleeping in it, probably since the day he'd left Chatham. There was another, more recent stain spread across his crotch that I was fairly certain wasn't whiskey but that had certainly started out that way.

There are two kinds of regulars: those who drink so as not to have to speak and those whose sole purpose in public drinking is to speak and be heard. Everybody gets served the same whiskey, but a successful publican knows whom to politely
ignore and whom to patiently endure. Thompson waited until I'd lit the lamps and poured him his first drink before starting to talk. It takes a few minutes for one's eyes to entirely adjust to the lamps' soft defeat of the basement's darkness. Thompson's voice mingled with light and dark like a smoke ring on a damp fall night.

“Yes, he spoke, I heard Walt Whitman speak,” he said, answering the question I hadn't asked. “He spoke on the subject of Thomas Paine. Of how Thomas Paine wasn't the notorious infidel that the Christian clergymen have made him out to be, but, instead, was a man who had done more to secure the independence of the United States than any other. He didn't read from his poetry. He never mentioned his poems.”

I kept busy readying Sophia's for the evening's second customer, but kept an eye on Thompson's glass as well.

“The assembly hall was ill lit and dank. There were only thirty odd of us, although ten times that, at least, could easily have been accommodated. But I took a chair in the middle of the first row and it wasn't long before the dimness and the mustiness and the scraping of empty chairs didn't matter. I—” Thompson finally took a sip of his whiskey. “
We
waited for Whitman to appear.”

The lamps had done their job by now, tricked night into day one more time.

“A few minutes later, Whitman appeared on the platform. He walked slowly—he used a stick—and his carriage was stiff, as if another, concealed stick was keeping his spine in place and his body upright. He must have had a stroke—he
must
have—because he talked even slower than he walked, he talked like every word he spoke cost him physical effort. His beard was long and white. What has been said about his long white beard is accurate.”

I topped off Thompson's glass. He didn't thank me, didn't even acknowledge me.

“And his jacket was buttoned wrong.”

Thompson drained his drink, set it back down on the table with a smack that could only have meant either he was done for the night or he wanted another without delay. I didn't have to ask to know which one it was.