David (3 page)

By the time I've undressed and am already underneath the covers, Loretta is only just down to her undergarments. The light from the bedroom fireplace is less than what I'd like—watching Loretta bathe by the natural light of bright morning is my favourite way of beginning the day—but the gentle glow it creates all around her suits where we are and what we're going to do.

She meets my eyes and doesn't release them while unfastening her corset and then pulling off the white chemise underneath. Next, foot up on the metal end of the bed, the unhooking of the garters, always the left then the right, followed by the slow roll of stocking down thigh, calf, ankle,
toes. Finally, the removal of the belt itself, tugged around to the front and unclasped and set on top of the heap of clothes on the fireside chair. I pull back the blankets from her side of the bed, let Loretta slide in.

What happens next, I don't have to ask her to do. Loretta reaches across me, raises herself up on one arm above me, two identical pallid moons rising over me, perfumed warmth all around me. Getting what she's after from the table on my side of the bed, she lies back down on her side. Begins.

“‘Warum nun aber erblickt man im Alter das Leben, welches man hinter sich hat, so hurz?'”

I close my eyes, let the heavy words smoke the air, mix and merge with Loretta's scent that couldn't be anyone else's but Loretta's.

“‘Weil man es fur so kurz halt wie die Erinnerung desselben ist.'”

I feel myself already drifting off, Schopenhauer's words no longer words but music without worldly referents, a perfect, impenetrable language saying everything and nothing and all at once.

“‘Aus diesser namlich ist alles Unbedeutende und viel Unangenehmes herausgefallen,'” Loretta reads, “‘daher wenig ubrig geblieben,' and sleep now, my David, sleep now, little boy of mine.”

And soon, very soon, I do.

I was seven or eight years old the first time I heard someone say, “If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing right.” As I was shovelling horse shit at the time, the wisdom of these words failed to leave a lasting impression.

Luckily for me, I was only one year old when the first fifteen settlers, my mother and myself included, along with the Reverend King, arrived at the Elgin Settlement in 1849, so the earliest, most difficult of those pioneering years I spent either cozied in my cradle or wandering around the Settlement barefoot and blithe, making life miserable for the chickens and any other farm animal I decided needed chasing. Unlike alcohol, which was forbidden in writing by the Reverend King as one of several non-negotiable conditions for purchasing Settlement land, dogs weren't illegal in Buxton, but they might as well have been for the number of times you saw one, which, in my case, was exactly once.

The land that the Reverend King and the Presbyterian Church chose for the Settlement was six miles long and three miles wide, bounded on the north by the Thames River and on the south by Lake Erie. The swampy land was thick with oak, hickory, elm, and walnut trees—valuable timber in years to come, but also the first exhausting order of business upon the settlers' arrival. I sucked my thumb and cried whenever I
was hungry or needed changing, while everyone else cut and burned trees and cleared brush and opened roads and dug drainage and built housing and planted vegetable gardens; and by the time I was old enough to write my own name, what had once been silent miles of empty forest had become home to 130 families with their very own Negro-run post office, school, church, sawmill, gristmill, and potash factory. What was left of the surrounding woods was put to use, too, deer and wild turkey and rabbit in abundance to supplement the cattle and hogs and chickens raised right on the Settlement.

The dog I saw was when I was ten, hunting with my best friend, George, and his father, Mr. Freeman. Most of the men of Elgin were happy to include a fatherless boy in whatever it was that fathers and sons did together, but when the Reverend King would speak on Sunday about how self-reliance bred self-respect, about how a fulfilled, contented man before God and society was a man who didn't ask another man to undertake his appointed tasks or shoulder his worldly burdens, I knew he wasn't just talking about not buying with credit what you knew you'd never be able to afford with cash. In my case, it meant that an encouraging word and a shiny apple from a friend's father wasn't the same thing as a bond born of blood. It meant that if I really wanted a father of my own, it was up to me to find him.

Mr. Freeman was even kinder to me than any of the other fathers because George had been my best friend almost from the day he and his father arrived in Buxton in '55; plus, he knew what it was like for a boy to grow up with only one parent, George's mother having died giving birth to George. Mr. Freeman had been born a slave in Mississippi and had fled for the North Star three separate times, on each occasion that he failed and was recaptured, was beaten, lashed, starved, and sold off to a new master, the belief being that “You can't let a peach get too ripe.” If it was hot when we'd go hunting,
sometimes we'd detour to Deer Pond for a swim. The marks on Mr. Freeman's back like long, fat red worms that wouldn't leave him alone.

It was the season's first snowfall, yesterday's brown and green gone missing overnight underneath a frozen dusting of fine white baking flour. Sometimes, when we'd be walking in the woods, Mr. Freeman would suddenly stop on the path to bend down on one knee and finger the leaves of a plant or to rub the back of his hand over the bark of a tree, occasionally slicing off a bunch of leaves to take home with him or uprooting an entire plant with the long, shiny knife that always hung from his belt. He wasn't a doctor, but for a long time was the closest thing Elgin had to one unless you were willing to ride all the way into Chatham.

When he'd lived in Mississippi, he said, another slave, an old man everyone called Tuttle, had taught him all about roots and herbs and how to use them to stop a toothache or to make a burn feel better or to cure sleeplessness. Mr. Freeman farmed like almost everyone else in Elgin—tobacco mostly, but corn and oats, too—but if it was cold and damp and the rheumatism in my mother's knees would flare up, she'd send me over to George's house with a nickel to ask for some of the powder that his father would grind up for her to mix in with her tea. She'd always make a face when she drank it—you were supposed to prepare the water as hot as you could stand it and to swallow the whole thing down as quickly as you could—but within a couple of hours the pain in her legs would have subsided and she'd be ready to get back on her knees to scrub the floors of the Reverend King's house and to sweep underneath his and Mrs. King's beds. My mother was the Kings' housekeeper.

“Ah, Pa,” George said.

Mr. Freeman didn't pay any attention, brought the winter-wilting limb of the plant he'd stopped to inspect closer to
his nose; breathed in hard, like he was smelling an apple pie cooling on a kitchen table.

“We're never going to get there,” George said, shutting an eye and following with his rifle end the flight of a bird taking off from a tree branch. Mr. Freeman had taught us never to shoot a gun except for food or protection. Higher up the same tree I watched a squirrel jump from branch to branch and then from that tree to the next, billows of powdery snow avalanching down with every expert leap. Directly below this last, a dog sat determinedly scratching one of his ears, looking at me looking at him with no more concern than if I were just another elm or oak. Finished, he rose to all fours and shook his head from side to side several times, like he was trying to wake up. He stayed where he was, unsure, it seemed, whether to approach us.

“A dog,” I said, lifting a single finger, as if to do more would mean scaring him away.

“Where did he come from, do you think?” I heard George say, but didn't turn around, didn't want to break the connection the dog and I shared, didn't want to startle him away.

“Lost, I guess,” I said.

“Somebody's from Chatham who was hunting out here, maybe,” he said.

“Maybe.”

Like he knew we were talking about him, the dog wagged his tail; didn't make a move toward us, but slowly wagged his black tail back and forth, back and forth. He was black all over, but with a white stripe running from just below his neck down his chest. I wanted to pet him like I'd seen white people do with their dogs in Chatham, but I didn't know what to do next. Mr. Freeman would know what to do next.

Before I could ask him, though: a shotgun blast from behind me and a single, sharp-pitched yelp from the dog, and
the crows in the treetops caw-cawing their angry escape. The dog tipped over onto its side like he'd all of a sudden frozen in place and been pushed by invisible hands, his eyes wide open but unseeing, his mouth opening and closing as he lay there on the snow-covered ground like a fish in a bucket of stale water running out of fresh air. For some reason, only his two back legs, and not all four, twitched and trembled and spasmed. Mr. Freeman walked between us and past us and carefully aimed the rifle just above the dog's eye and pulled the trigger. He wiped down the barrel of his gun on the dog's long back, four dirty red streaks for each cleaned side.

Seeing George and I still standing there, looking at the thing that two minutes before had been the dog, “Don't you worry, boys, that's one hound won't be tormenting no poor Negro no time soon,” he said. Placing one of his big, warm hands on my shoulder, “No hellhounds on no poor slave's heels in this free land of ours if we can help it.”

*

Closing time isn't for another couple of hours, but I've already scrubbed the bar and basin gleaming clean and washed every empty glass as soon as it's been dirtied and hauled in enough fresh kindling from outside to get us through tomorrow night and probably the night after that. Bringing in the wood is Tom's job ordinarily, but even if I hadn't given him the time off for the wake tonight, I probably would have found a way to do it myself anyway, busy hands cooling medicine for a burning brain. I'm also extra diligent about keeping every glass filled, am toting the bottle of whiskey over to Thompson's table before he's had time to nod to me for a refill.

At the clink of my bottle to his glass, Thompson looks up and slides his notepad across the table his way, an experienced
card player careful to keep everyone else in the game in the dark. I'm the only one in Sophia's who knows what's supposed to be written there, even if I don't have any inkling what actually is, but I wouldn't peek if I could. Prayers and suicide notes are privileged information.

“And how is Song of His Self this evening?” I say, sitting down in the empty chair opposite him.

Slipping the notebook into the inside pocket of his jacket, “Loafing and inviting my soul,” he says.

“As usual.”

“As usual.”

Together we silently observe the men all around us drinking and smoking and playing cards and laughing and looking at their watches and considering how much longer they can put off the inevitable: having to go home. Meyers' voice, of course, is the loudest. It has to be—no one is listening.

“From Hitching's, Hitching's Baby Store. It's where Queen Victoria bought
her
prams when
she
was a young mother. Now, the thing to remember when you're buying a pram is that what you want is the wickerwork or bassinet model. This allows the child to be laid flat on its back with plenty of room to move about, but not so much that the little terror can get himself in any trouble. And you want the Silver Cross Bassinette. Believe it or not, some of these American versions are actually made of cane or some other beastly vegetable product. No, no, it's always best to buy the best, that's what I always tell Mrs. Meyers, so get the Silver Cross, it's quite simply the finest there is. You can order them directly from Hitching's Baby Store, you know. It's where Queen Victoria bought
her
prams when
she
was a young mother.”

There are men standing on either side of Meyers at the bar, but both appear to be more interested in studying the row of whiskey bottles displayed along the wall behind it than in acknowledging Meyers' words or even his simple physical
presence. No matter—Meyers pulls his silver snuff box out of his vest pocket and snorts a fat line from the back of his fatter hand before continuing. “As I was saying to Mrs. Meyers just the other evening . . .”

It's unfortunate Darwin wasn't born twenty-five years later, or he wouldn't have had to sail all the way to the Galapagos Islands to discover that only the most adaptable animals endure; all he would have to have done was spend some time at Sophia's observing Meyers. Any lesser man would have decided years before to do his drinking somewhere where he wasn't so steadfastly ignored. The survival of the oblivious.

Thompson is the only customer I've got whose conversation I'll occasionally seek out for its own sake. Thompson is Scottish and a bachelor and an ex-lawyer, but most of all he's an ardent admirer of Walt Whitman—evidenced by the cheap copy of
Leaves of Grass
that always shares the tabletop with his glass—for reasons not entirely aesthetic. And he's a drunk. Which only somewhat explains the ex-lawyer part.

“Missed Tom on the way in this evening,” he says. Thompson always tips Tom a quarter at the end of the night.

“He's in Elgin.”

“Everything's all right, I hope.” Thompson's long, Scottaught rolling vowels echo the same way as the Reverend King's did. It used to sound as if the whole of history was in that voice.

“Someone died.”

“Oh?”

“Not anyone he was close to. He'll be back tomorrow night. Everything will be back to normal by tomorrow night.”

I stand, wipe the table everywhere that Thompson's drink isn't. I didn't sit down just so I could talk about what I'm trying not to think about. I lift his drink, finish wiping, set it back down.