David (10 page)

Ordinarily, the tinkle of the bell over the door announcing he has a customer summons Larwill from the rear of the post office with a smile on his face and a spring in his step right up until he sees that I'm the one it's his job to help. Then his face will fall blank and he'll slow his pace and make
sure to make me wait for as long as he possibly can while rummaging around in the drawer underneath the counter looking for the nothing we both know he's only pretending to look for. Today, though, the smile stays stuck where it is, even after he realizes it's me, even while he sorts and collects my mail. I can't help but wonder if there's something lodged between my teeth or if I've spilt something down the front of my coat.

Larwill speaks as he sorts. “Mr. King . . . no . . . no . . . no . . . no . . . Mr. King . . . no . . . no . . . no . . . Mr. King . . . no . . . no . . . Mr. King . . . no . . . no . . . no . . . and . . . no. Here we are. Two periodicals and two books for Mr. King, it appears.”

He slides across my copies of the
Fortnightly
and the
Quarterly
and the two slender packages containing, no doubt, the two latest instalments in the English Men of Letters series I've been waiting for—Leslie Stephen on Swift, Cotter Morrison on Gibbon—with a smirking courtesy it's like he's daring me to find offensive.

“And will there be anything else today, Mr. King? Or is that everything for you today, Mr. King?”

Of course. Up until this very moment, a surly, exaggerated “Sir” is as close as Larwill has ever gotten to referring to me by name, his only way of not endangering his job yet still shamelessly withholding his acknowledgement of me as as much of a Mr.—of a man, of a human being—as he is. Now all of a sudden I'm Mr. King. Like Mr. King my namesake. Like Larwill's father's one-time nemesis, the Reverend King. Like the recently deceased Reverend King. The King is dead, and Larwill wants me to know just how pleased his demise has made him.

It's harder to impersonate a fool than a wise man, but I do my best.

“No, that will be all, Larwill,” I say, like he's just lit my cigar to go along with the final brandy of the evening and I'm
granting him permission to retire until tomorrow morning, when it will be once again time for him to serve me my breakfast in bed. I take my mail but turn around at the tinkling door. “Now that you mention it, Larwill, there
is
one more thing.”

“Oh, and what is that, Mr. King?”

“I'm expecting the transfer of a very large sum of money in the next few days, and I'd appreciate it if you took special care of it for me when it arrives. It turns out that the bank I would normally have it deposited into can only insure my account up to ten thousand dollars. It seems as if I need to find someone else to hold on to my money for me. Well, if it's not one thing, it's something else, isn't it, Larwill?”

I don't stick around to enjoy the fruits of my labour. The only thing men like Larwill and his father hate more than a nigger is a rich nigger.

*

You never heard the Reverend King himself recount the story of his showdown with Edwin Larwill. Too busy, too occupied with fresh scuffles to be fought and won. Besides, legends don't advertise—it wouldn't be dignified, myths can become mottled. That's what legends have disciples for.

My mother told me—told me more than once—about how Edwin Larwill was a Chatham businessman and local politician who had founded the Free and Easy Club to offset local temperance tendencies and promote saloon society. “That tell you all you need to know right there,” my mother would say. “Town leader goin' 'round promotin'
sin
.” Told me how, as soon as Larwill learned of the Reverend King's plans to settle the land that was to be Buxton, he got busy drafting and delivering petitions and resolutions of opposition in abundance through his roles as a school commissioner,
a Raleigh Township councillor, and a Member of Provincial Parliament. Told me how “Larwill was their leader, but it wasn't just him either,” how the letter Larwill wrote in protest to the Crown Commissioner was signed by hundreds of Chatham's most prominent citizens. Years later I read the actual letter for myself, was glad my mother never had:

George's father told me about Larwill too—told George and me both while we were fishing. About how, while in Chatham arranging a survey of the land, the Reverend King was warned by a stranger on King Street not to remain in town after dark, that his life was in danger. How, instead of fleeing Chatham, he immediately set up a meeting to confront his foes head-on as soon as it could be arranged, how the Reverend King always said that “‘procrastination is the thief of time.' You boys remember that, you hear?” How another meeting was organized—this time by Larwill's forces—a couple of months later, and how the Reverend King, after travelling to Toronto on Settlement business, arrived in Windsor by lake steamer the night before the meeting as planned only to discover that
Brothers
, the Thames River steamer bound for Chatham, had developed engine trouble and would not be able to sail the next morning, and how the Reverend King, determined that his enemies would not be given a single opportunity to believe that either he or his cause was faltering, immediately rented a horse and buggy and drove all night, arriving only a couple of hours before the
afternoon assembly. The next part of the story was the part my mother liked to tell best.

“The Reverend King, he knew things might get unruly as soon as he step foot in town, was not just peoples from all over who come to hear what was goin' to be said, but twelve special constables that was sworn in that very morning to keep the peace just in case. Now in them days there weren't no town hall or the like in Chatham, and the meeting commenced in an old barn out back of the Royal Exchange Hotel. And not only was that old barn filled right up, there was men pushin' and shovin' and tryin' to get in at the same time that the speakers was tryin' to speak, and with all that hollerin' and shoutin' it was impossible for a body to hear a single word being said. So finally somebody decide let's move the meetin' to the street and let the speakers have their say from the balcony, and after everybody file out and get settled, the Reverend King is given ten minutes by the chairman to say his piece from the balcony of the Royal Exchange Hotel.”

At this point my mother would rest her hand on my knee or my elbow, like she still didn't believe that the Reverend King was safe from harm, like her future and mine and that of the other first thirteen ex-slaves to settle in Buxton was still in doubt.

“But every time the Reverend King try to speak, Larwill's men shout and curse and holler and wouldn't let him be heard. They only settle down when Larwill himself come forward, and that to tell them that because the Reverend King was a Yankee, he had no right to say nothin' to nobody. Well, that crowd, if it was loud before, it was ten times that now, like it can't wait to get its hands around the neck of this here Negro-loving Yankee daring to show his face in their hometown. But the Reverend King”—my mother would lower her voice and lean in closer now, and even if you hadn't heard her tell the same story ten times already, you knew that
something special, something miraculous, was about to happen—“he just stood there standing his ground with his arms crossed and let them peoples hoot and holler all they want, moved as close to that rail as he could get, and let them men of Larwill's scream and yell for him to go back where he come from until they get blue in the face, until finally they see he ain't going nowhere no time soon and they just get sick and tired of the sound of their own yellin'. And so the Reverend King, he finally get his chance to speak.

“And he said to them, ‘I have come two hundred miles to attend this meeting and you cannot put me down. Besides, I am from Londonberry, and Londonberry never did surrender.'”

And, unbelievably, some of the men couldn't help but laugh. And after the Reverend King told them he had been born a British subject and was a ratepayer too, just like them, he went on to outline the vision and the goals of the Elgin Association—how education and religious instruction and economic self-sufficiency were the bywords of Buxton, and how a man, any man, was not unlike a crop, any crop, was only likely to grow and thrive if afforded the right mixture of good soil and a fair climate and ample precipitation—and to explain that the Elgin Settlement would add to their tax revenues and increase the value of the land—their land—surrounding it.

“And you know, those men—some of 'em anyway, maybe not all of 'em, but some of 'em—they change a little bit that day. They change not so much by what the Reverend King say as how he say it, the way he show no fear, the way he believe in every word he say.”

My mother would take my hand and place it in hers, cover it with her gnarled other.

“Show no fear and mean what you say, son.”

Amen.

Because it attracted runaway slaves, Chatham also attracted slave hunters. An industrious slave catcher could make a more than passable living tracking down and returning a Southern master's runaway property. The Fugitive Slave Act, which compelled American citizens to assist in the return of escapees, wasn't recognized by the government of Canada West, so slavers' agents who ventured north needed to be extra cunning. A notice posted outside the Chatham courthouse, which George and I had come across when in town with his father to help pick up building supplies for the Freemans' new chicken coop, wasn't unusual:

What was unusual was the hand-drawn rejoinder scrawled across the width of the poster in thick strokes of bright white paint:

TROUBLE MAKKERS STAY OUT OF CHATHAM

On the way home, I told Mr. Freeman what we'd seen—he'd given us a nickel each to buy candy while he attended to some other business in town. It was my first firsthand experience of bad people doing bad things, and I was more confused than angry. How could anyone in Chatham possibly believe that people trying to assist slaves were troublemakers? It didn't make sense, I complained. Slaveholders, all right, at least they had a reason—money—to want to preserve the institution of slavery. But what could someone from Chatham gain from keeping Negroes in chains? It just didn't make sense.

While Mr. Freeman listened to me speak, he slowly nodded his head as if I'd just informed him it was going to rain presently and that he'd better bring in the wash off the line. When I was all done, he told George to go in the back of the wagon and make sure that the large roll of chicken wire we'd loaded near the very rear was still tied down properly. I thought he was thinking about how he was going to answer me. When George climbed back beside me and reported that everything was fine, Mr. Freeman answered, “Good,” and cracked the reins and was silent again. The sun was going down and the leaves in the trees along the road back to Buxton looked as if they might amber into flame at any moment. I got tired of waiting for Mr. Freeman to make me understand.

“Just bad people, I suppose,” I said, and that was that. I caught George with his hand palm down on his knee and slapped it. He pulled it away, but it was too late, I'd gotten him good. He knew it, too, just shook his head and rubbed the back of his hand.

“Ignorant people,” Mr. Freeman said.

Ignorant
meant not knowing something, I knew that, so Mr. Freeman must not have understood everything I'd told him.

“Whoever did it, they knew what they were doing,” I said. “They wrote ‘Troublemakers stay out of Chatham.' They were calling the people who were warning the slaves troublemakers.” It was wrong to correct one's elders, but I was right. Besides, maybe saying what was true regardless of who said otherwise was how one ended up becoming an elder oneself one day.

Mr. Freeman was in no hurry to answer me, kept his eyes on the horses and the road. I kept my hands balled and at my sides, knew that George was waiting for his revenge.

“Don't pay no attention to ignorant people,” Mr. Freeman finally said. “Scared is all they is. Ignorant and scared.”

“Why would they be scared?” I said, confused. And angry. It sounded as if George's father was feeling sorry for the bad people who'd defaced the poster. “The runaways, they're the only ones who should be scared. Of getting captured. Of being sent back.”

“George, see if that wire still tied good,” Mr. Freeman said.

“I already did, Pa.”

“Don't talk back, now, go and check it again.”

“Ah,” George said, but going.

There was no one else on the road, either behind us or coming our way, but Mr. Freeman watched where we were going as if one inattentive moment would send us into the woods.

Eventually, “Scared man is a dangerous man,” Mr. Freeman said. “Maybe most dangerous man of all. Who done what they did in Chatham likely don't even know what they scared of. Don't make 'em any less dangerous, though. Maybe make 'em
more
dangerous.”

Mr. Freeman, I thought, was a nice man—a good man—but he knew more about what plants could make you feel better when you had an upset stomach and how to get your chickens to lay more eggs than he did about what made people good and bad. Somehow I needed to help him understand.