David (2 page)

Before the fourteen soon-to-be ex-slaves and the man can board the steamboat he'd booked north, however, one of the fourteen pleads with the man to buy back her only child—recently sold to a neighbouring plantation—so that mother and son can be reunited and the boy can accompany
them to freedom. This the man does, for the sum of $150.

The woman is so thankful—not only that her only offspring is to be free but that they are to live together again as mother and child—she gives her son the man's last name as his own, a tribute to the white man's remarkable beneficence.

The boy born a slave had been known as simply
David
. The boy reborn a free man became
David King
.

*

After I've counted and recorded and put away the evening's take into the safe, I decide to go home after all. Sometimes owning your own bar isn't a good thing. All the liquor you can drink and no human voice or face to say you shouldn't try. In my case, Loretta's voice and face.

“Henry, let's go,” I say, slapping my thigh twice to let him know I mean it, and Henry pushes open the door to the backroom with his nose and trots beside me up the stairs, overtaking me as usual by the time we get to the top. Ordinarily, the spin of the safe's lock after I've deposited the money inside and shut its door is his cue to come out of the back, where he sleeps during business hours, and sit and wait by the bottom of the stairs—the spin, a walk, home, then bed—but tonight he's thrown off by the early hour. Me, too.

Especially if it's winter, the only sounds we're likely to hear on the walk home are ourselves: the crunch of freshly fallen snow under my shoes; the sniffing of Henry's snout; the hot hiss of urine whenever he lifts his leg. I know I've made a mistake in taking our usual route home along King Street as soon as we pass the Rankin Hotel. The Rankin advertises itself as one of the finest hotels in Canada, with fifty-five different dishes on its menu, including lamb chops and buffalo tongue, but the people laughing and shouting and climbing into their carriages out front aren't after anything
different than the people who come into Sophia's every night. Oblivion is oblivion. The only difference is the hours of operation and the overpriced food I don't serve.

Pascal said that the sole cause of man's unhappiness is that he doesn't know how to stay quietly in his room. The last time I saw the Reverend King, I had a copy of Pascal's
Pensées
underneath my arm and the smell of whiskey on my breath. Mrs. King had been ill—not with the illness that had cost her her mind, but the illness that would eventually kill her, an illness of the lungs that made it almost impossible for her to breathe, like she was drowning in her own body—and I'd been coming back to the Settlement every couple days for the first time since I'd left for good twenty-two years earlier, after the War Between the States was over, the year I turned eighteen.

Of course he knew I'd been visiting Mrs. King, sitting beside her bed, reading to her for hours even if she couldn't hear me. Nothing happened at the Settlement that the Reverend King didn't know about. When I was a boy, I believed that not only did he know everything that I'd done and was doing, but everything that I was going to do, even if I didn't. But that was when I believed that God's eyes were everywhere. Back then I would have believed that Mrs. King's moans were somehow all a part of His divine plan. Back then I did believe that the man who raped my mother, her master, wasn't my real father, that my real father was waiting for me in heaven.

The Reverend King looked as surprised as I felt as I exited Mrs. King's bedroom. Someone must have told him I'd left already. Someone had been wrong.

“David,” he said, nodding but not stopping.

“Reverend King,” I said, doing the same.

It wasn't until I was outside and getting on my horse and went to put on my hat that I realized I'd taken it off when I'd
passed him in the doorway. I had sworn to myself that I would never do that again. Halfway back to Chatham, I'd almost convinced myself that the tears I was crying were all for Mrs. King.

*

As soon as Henry sets paw inside the house, he tears upstairs; before I've had time to light the lamp in the library, he's scouring the main floor, including the pantry, the door of which he pries open with his nose. Nothing. Not much chance that Loretta would have been in there waiting for us to come home anyway, but dogs don't like secrets, not even closed doors.

I leave the fire alone. If Loretta was here, I'd have to add another log—Loretta can never be warm enough—but when it's just Henry and me I keep the house cool, the temperature outside one's head an honest thermometer of what's going on inside. Imagine Socrates on a clear Athens morning in the fresh open air of the agora, busily corrupting the city's youth in the art of being virtuous. Then think of the thousands of slithering gods and goddesses of India hatched from the steaming brains of overheated believing millions. People or places, weather is soul.

Satisfied, or at least resigned, that it's just the two of us, Henry circles the rug in front of the fireplace three complete times before collapsing in a heavy heap to the floor. I watch him watch the fire from my chair, head resting on his front paws, eyes slowly, slowly closing until finally fluttering shut, an extinguished candle on a drafty windowsill. Not forever, though. Not yet, anyway. Not like the Reverend King. Nearly eighty-three years of morning after morning of waking up—the world's most ordinary miracle—and tomorrow morning he won't. The truest truth that makes absolutely no sense.

Times like this, only Mr. Blake or whiskey will do. A time exactly like this, I need both. Henry's eyelids slide open as I stand up, but he stays lying where he is. Although it's
Songs of Innocence and Experience
that's behind glass and under lock and key, it's the whiskey I should probably be concerned with protecting. Not much chance that anyone in Chatham would ever want my 1831 first edition—the only edition preceding it the illuminated, engraved copies produced by Mr. Blake himself—as much as they'd want a bottle of whiskey. But sometimes philistines make good neighbours. I'm going to own one of those copies made by Mr. Blake's own hands one day, and when I do, I won't even have to lock my front door at night.

Favourite books are like old friends: beginnings and endings don't matter, you take what you need when you need it. I swallow, savour the familiar burn of the first sip of whiskey, and set the glass on the table beside my chair, open up the Blake on my lap. The fuzzy black type reminds me that I've left my spectacles upstairs in the bedroom. If I bring the book nearer, I know I won't need them, won't have to get up again, but whenever Loretta catches me attempting to read without them, she warns me that my eyes will only get worse. But Loretta doesn't really warn me, not about anything; warning isn't Loretta's way. Loretta explains the situation, points out the potential advantages and disadvantages, advocates the most reasonable course of action. I wonder if all Germans act the way that all Germans are supposed to act or just the only one I've ever known. If Loretta gets her way, I'll find out for myself, and sooner rather than later. Only last week:

“You have the money, yes?” she said.

“I could afford to go, if that's what you mean.”

“Do not be modest, David. You could afford to go one hundred times over. The only question that remains is
whether or not your affairs here prohibit you from being away for an extended period.”

Loretta didn't speak English until she arrived in Canada a little more than ten years ago, a sixteen-year-old girl knowing no one and not knowing where she was going to go, but in spite of a thick German accent, speaks with a clarity and exactitude unequalled by anyone I've ever known except one. And now, after today, the only one I still know.

“There are a lot of things that would need to be taken care of first, arrangements that would need to be made.”

“But these arrangements, they
can
be made. These affairs, they do
not
prohibit you.”

“They don't
prohibit
me, no, but—”

“No, they do not prohibit you. And you would like to see the birthplace of Goethe, of Schopenhauer, of Beethoven, would you not? To learn their language, perhaps?”

“I don't need a holiday, if that's what you mean.”

“You say this word like it is a curse word.”

“What word?”

“
Holiday
, obviously.”

“I think you're hearing things. I only meant that I'm not complaining about my life. You've never heard me say I'm unhappy. You've never once heard me complain about my life.”

Once I've retrieved my glasses, I decide that while I'm in the bedroom I might as well relieve myself. I was the fourth man in Chatham to have indoor plumbing, but I decide to use the chamber pot instead. Out of habit I aim for the left-hand side of the pot, let the urine silently run down the side and slowly gather and rise at the bottom of the bubbling bowl. It's my mother's pot—
was
my mother's pot—and I can still remember how pleased she was when she was finally able to own a store-bought, Detroit-manufactured chamber pot decorated with blue horizontal stripes. When her rheumatism
got so bad she rarely left the house except to attend church—the highlight of her day the dragging of her gnarled limbs out of bed to sit in her chair by the window—she still made a point of every day dusting that chamber pot. By then she'd bought another, cheaper pot to use for what it was intended for, but the blue-striped chamber pot sat pride of place on top of the bureau in her bedroom, right between her bible and a copy of the legal document declaring her and her son free Negroes.

In the five minutes it takes me to return to the library, Loretta has let herself in, is squatting on her heels and scratching Henry's stomach, a long canine grin carved into his face, all four black legs pointed straight up in the air like he's unconditionally surrendered. “This is a most unimpressive watchdog,” Loretta says, still scratching.

Sitting back down in my chair, “I'm afraid you've ruined him forever for that line of work.” We both know that's a lie, that it's only her familiar footsteps or mine on the front porch that elicit whimpers of expectation rather than howls of aggression. One of Loretta's tenants is a butcher from Dresden who always gives her a cow bone along with his rent for what she tells him is her dog. Loretta's business contacts, past and present, know as much about her as mine do about me.

She gives Henry an all-done slap on his belly that makes a hollow sound like a single tap on a drum and stands up. Henry flips over onto his side and we both watch her rise to her full height of six feet. Henry wags his tail; I smile. What man doesn't want more—more whiskey, more money, more years? And yet, when it comes to women, it's tiny feet they desire, a pinched waist, a doll's dimensions.
Enough! or Too much,
Mr. Blake wrote. A world in a grain of sand wasn't the only blessed vision he knew about.

“You are home early tonight,” Loretta says, settling into the other chair on the other side of the fire. She's the only
one who uses it—it's covered in the blanket she knit while sitting in it—but like the key to the front door she carries in her bag, it's never referred to as
hers
. It's as if we've discovered a way to not be what we don't want to be and yet still have what we want.

“I decided to close early,” I say, picking up my drink, reminded of why I poured it in the first place.

“Yes, of course, that is obvious. But why? This is not like you to not want to make money.”

I finish the rest of my drink in one long swallow and almost gag. Whiskey is not water, is made to do other things.

“Is that who you really think I am?” I say. “Just another greedy shopkeeper?”

I take my empty glass with me into the kitchen without asking Loretta if she'd like a drink too. It doesn't matter. By the time I've finished refilling my glass, Loretta is beside me at the kitchen counter, taking another glass down from the cupboard as well as her bottle of schnapps. We walk back into the library with our respective drinks without exchanging a word.

Loretta will not argue—she'll discuss, deliberate, even debate, but she will not argue—and the way she picks up her needles and yarn from underneath her chair and straightaway begins knitting without acknowledging either me or my sour mood has its intended effect, makes me madder than if she'd confronted me with the bile of my words and shown me I'd been wrong to use them. I reopen the Blake and bring the book close enough that I don't need my glasses to make the type stop smearing. That'll show her.

Except that in five minutes I've got a headache from reading without my glasses and a cloudy brain from drinking the whiskey too fast and a strong desire not to feel distant from one of the two human beings I know in this world whom I
don't ordinarily feel distant from. Good liquor and immortal literature are necessary but not sufficient.

“I'm sorry,” I say.

Loretta stops knitting, looks up. “You are forgiven,” she says. Needles immediately working again, “So. You closed early this evening. This is not like you.”

I want her to know what happened tonight—who died, what it means—but I'm not sure that I know yet myself.

“Can we just pick up where we left off last night?” I say. I say it like a child asking for a sweet, but that's how I feel, so, so be it.

Eyes still on her work, “Are you sure that is what you need for yourself right now?”

I nod. She doesn't look up, makes me say it. “It's what I need,” I say.

She finishes a last row and then slides the yarn and needles back into the box underneath her chair; stands up and wipes away an imaginary mess from the front of her dress. She offers me her hand. I take it and we walk side by side up the stairs, the click of Henry's nails on the steps behind us serenading us all the way to the bedroom.