Authors: Ray Robertson
Trying to figure out how to say it without hurting his feelings, “Got you!” George yelled, whacking me hard, harder even than I had him, on the hand I'd forgotten to protect.
“George,” Mr. Freeman said, “sit yourself down and stop that foolishness, both of you.”
George slid beside me on the seat and kept quiet, but was smiling like someone had just told him he'd won a hundred dollars.
“Is that wire all right?” Mr. Freeman said.
“Same as it was before.”
“Don't sass me, boy, I didn't ask you that, I ask you if it all right.”
“It's fine, Pa,” George said. “It's not going anywhere.”
I scratched the back of my hand. He'd gotten me so good, it itched.
*
Walking, pointing, “A full moon,” I say.
“Yes,” Loretta says, without looking.
“At least pay me the courtesy of pretending to be impressed.”
“I have seen the moon before.”
“It's a particularly beautiful full moon tonight.”
“It was beautiful before too.”
It's not the moon's faultâit
is
beautiful, is a shimmering soft, perfectly round orb expertly suspended somehow high in the sky above us for our, and absolutely no one else's, planetary viewing pleasure. And I haven't had a drop all day.
Sometimes the world is intoxicating enough straight-up.
But Loretta doesn't trust nature. Nothing that hasn't had human hands on it can hope to impress her. Even the faces she collects, it's their reproduction that interests her, not the cold flesh-and-blood source. No living person, not as long as I've known her, has ever held her attention like a single photograph of the dead.
Her
photographs of
her
dead. God died, so Loretta created a new one. When Loretta says, Let there be light, you can be damn well sure there's going to be light.
It's cold and snowing, but it's still disappointing there's no one on King Street except for us and Henry. Time-tested couples don't need words to communicate, so although neither of us has ever said it, we know we both enjoy the act of making passersby at least uncomfortable, and preferably angry, when seeing Loretta and me arm in arm on the sidewalk. What their mouths are afraid to say, or only whisper, their eyes have no hesitation shouting:
The only thing worse than a nigger and a German ex-whore is a nigger and a German ex-whore acting as if they're actually a respectable couple entitled to enjoy the fresh morning air just like any other respectable couple.
That's the cue for Loretta to entwine her arm even tighter with mine, for both of us to lean into each other just a little bit closer.
The bells of the Presbyterian church on Wellington Street, the first of ten identical ringing echoes. The sound of a church bell still soothes me, just like I can't help but salivate every time Loretta fills the house with the warm smell of an all-afternoon-roasting, every-hour-basted roast. Knowing what's true and feeling what's right are rarely the same thing. A wise man once said that if you sit on a fence for too long, you'll end up splitting your pants. Actually, that was no wise man, that was me. But just because I'm no La Rochefoucauld doesn't mean my pants don't need mending from time to time.
“It is time to go home now, yes?” Loretta says.
There's a fresh body upstairs at Franklin's that I know she's eager to get at, but I'm not especially eager to do anything, and walking through the falling snow with Loretta on my arm and Henry by my side is as pleasant a way of doing it as I can imagine. “Ten more minutes?” I say.
Loretta doesn't speak, is thinking, I know. It took me a while to get used to her contemplative silences. When Loretta doesn't know the answer to a question, she makes her interlocutor wait until she does. It can be irritating, like waiting on a judge to deliver a verdict when all you want to know is if you can add a few minutes to the end of your walk; but, on the other hand, when she does answer you, you can be assured it's what she really thinks. Like when she was surprised to spot my mother's bible on my bookshelves and I asked her if, even as a non-believer, she wouldn't have liked to have had the bible her father read from from his pulpit every Sunday, if only as an heirloom. “If I am going to read fairy tales,” she immediately answered, “I prefer Grimm's, yes? At least then I get pretty pictures to amuse me, too.”
“You hated him, didn't you?” I said, surprised at myself for wanting to hear her say yes.
“Of course not. He was my father. I loved him. I did not like him, but I loved him.”
The church bells have stopped ringing, their last notes fading, eventually evaporating in the frozen morning air. Henry stops to sniff something near the doorway of McKeough's hardware store. Loretta and I stop too, let Henry handle the sniffing.
“We will walk for five minutes more, then we will go back. This way we both get what we want, yes?”
I just smile, don't say anything, but not because I'm thinking.
“Yes?” Loretta says.
“Yes,” I say.
It's started to snow harder now, and there's no one coming our way, no one anywhere at all, but I tuck Loretta's arm tighter into mine and draw her nearer to me anyway.
A nigger, a German ex-whore, a stray.
A man, a woman, a dog.
David, Loretta, Henry.
Sometimes logic makes sense.
*
I was fourteen when Fort Sumter fell to the South and the men of the Elgin Settlement began to enlist in the Union army.
Attempted
to enlist in the Union army. It would take two long years of continual Confederate victories and increasing northern casualties for Lincoln to finally relent and allow Negroes the privilege of risking their lives for the sake of the Union cause. And even though, by then, anyone who wasn't simple knew that the Civil War was a white man's war meant to settle white men's scoresâto keep the Union intact, to keep trade routes open for northern big business, to keep the tariffs in place that were making rich men in the North richerâthe men of Elgin met with the Reverend King and asked him to petition the government on their behalf for the right to fight anyway. Emancipation might have turned out to be an afterthought, but it was an afterthought worth killing for.
I told my mother I wanted to enlist soon after Lincoln's first inaugural address, after he assured the nation that “I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists.” The official age of enlistment was sixteen, but everyone knew that during wartime every government became careless with its arithmetic.
“I'll ask if the Reverend King can find some time for you when he get back from Sarnia,” she said. Time to discuss my
plans with me, she meant. “Big meeting of ministers going on up there.”
I couldn't help but feel a little hurt. Mothers of young soldiers were supposed to weep uncontrollably and plead with their brave young sons not to leave for warânot to counsel patience until the pastor returned home to either give or withhold his permission. Hurt, but not really surprised. The unspoken motto among the settlers, especially the first settlers like my mother, was In the Reverend King We Trust.
Twenty-four hours later, I got my audience with the Reverend King. My mother picked invisible lint off my jacket and straightened and restraightened the tie I'd gotten the year before for my thirteenth birthday, a gift from Mrs. King that she'd selected from her husband's wardrobe and that everyone pretended she hadn't. A muffled piano sonata drifting down the stairs testified to her unseen presence.
“You pay attention to what the Reverend King says, now,” my mother said. She'd been at Clayton House when I'd arrived, the rheumatism in her hands and knees slowing her down enough now that another housekeeper had been hired to take over most of the heavier work, my mother making up for her mounting lack of mobility by doubling her dusting duties and supervising the preparation of all the meals and generally making sure that the rest of the house staff kept to their schedules.
At twelve o'clockânot 11:59, not 12:01âmy mother allowed me to knock on the door of the Reverend King's study, the hands on the long-case clock in the sitting room praying together perfectly high noon.
“Come in, David,” the voice inside said.
The Reverend King stood up behind his desk to shake my hand and offer me a seat in one of the three chairs across the desk from his. Helping to settle controversies, working to defuse conflicts, assisting in building consensus: those three
chairs were never empty for long. He folded his hands and rested them in front of him on the desk.
“Tell me why you want to enlist in the army, David,” he said.
“To help defeat the South.” I was as ready with my answers as I knew he would be with his questions.
The Reverend King nodded his approval. “And it will be defeated, David, and the evil of slavery along with it. God is on the side of the just. And those who would be free must strike the blow.”
I nodded back. What else was there to say? And the Reverend King, as always, had said it the best way it could be said.
“And have you given proper consideration to your mother?”
“Yes, sir. I told her of my intentions yesterday.”
“Yes, of course. Which is how I know them as well. But have you considered her ailing condition and how she would manage without youâyou, her only relative, away from home for God Himself only knows how long?”
“No, sir. I hadn't.”
He nodded again, this time like he knew I hadn't but he forgave me.
“Another aspect that you might want to take into consideration is the plight of Buxton itself. Once the government realizes the ignorance of their decision to deny coloured men the right to fight alongside their white brothers, we can expect at least one hundred men to leave us for the war. This means that young men like yourself will be expected to occupy increasingly important roles here.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And finally, there are your studies.”
I at least had an answer for that one. “I thought I could pick up where I left off, when I got back.”
“Yes, of course. But even though all of God's children have important work to do in His world, the work He has intended for some of us requires especially long hours of dedicated study and practice, while others can abide His will with less concentrated preparation.”
Like George, for instance. We'd ABC'd together, worked side by side memorizing the catechism, and even set sail on the same schoolhouse voyage over the blue Aegean with Odysseus as our captain in his own Grecian tongue, but just that year George had happily left his books and me both behind to take a position as an apprentice in Elgin's new potash factory.
The Reverend King went to one of his bookshelvesâthe walls of his study
were
his bookshelves; it seemed as if every book that had ever been written was helping to hold up the ceilingâand pulled down a slim black volume. He placed the book face down in front of him on the desk.
“I have knownâindeed, I have taughtâmany bright boys and girls during my years as an educator and religious instructor. And each has benefited in his own unique wayâand, according to God's plans, society has also benefitedâfrom the time and effort expended upon his studies.”
“Yes, sir.”
Aside from his Sunday sermons, if the Reverend King quoted anyone, it was usually from the Bible, usually the New Testament, but one of the few pagan references he allowed room for was Epictetus's “Only the educated are free.” Odds were good that the potash factory in Elgin was the only one in existence whose newest employee could read Greek and recite Virgil.
“But yours is a special gift, David. Your swift mastery of any and all assigned materials. Your desire for new intellectual challenges. Your clear leadership abilities both in and outside the classroom. All have compelled me to conclude
that your path in life has surely been laid out for you by God's hand. Whether you follow that sanctified path, of course, will be your decision alone.” He handed me the book. “I want you to have this, David, something my own father gave to me at a pivotal point in my life, such as you find yourself at now.”
It was a copy of Clark's
Commentary on the Scriptures
, essential reading material, I later discovered, for anyone considering entering the ministry.
“Thank you,” I said, taking the book.
“You're very welcome, David.”
Until that day in the Reverend King's study, I had known himâhim, my mother's and my liberator, our resurrector, our redeemerâlike someone knows the seasons, like a lake or a river, like sundown and sunrise. Now I knew him as something else. Now he was my mentor.
*
My timing was perfect, Providence once again seeing to it that what had been hard for others was easy for me. It wasn't difficult to arrive at the conclusion that God had chosen me to serve Him and, through Him and His blessed sacrificed Son, the consecrated cause that was the deliverance of my people from the evil of slavery. Why else would I have been eleventh-hour rescued from a lifetime of certain bondage by an abolitionist minister and endowed with talents and inclination enough that this same minister would see fit to encourage me in the enlistment in Christ's army as one of his sanctified soldiers? A, B, C and 1, 2, 3 couldn't have been any more obvious.
It hadn't been as straightforward for the first crop of Buxton graduates. Of the initial seven who were deemed university suitable, only three had parents who could afford to send them. To the Reverend King, this was unacceptable.
He personally canvassed for donations throughout North America and when on Church business trips back to England and Ireland. He solicited funds from every Church sympathetic to the goals of the Settlement, and some, it turned out, that weren't. He appealed for, and received from the Presbyterian Church, a bursary specifically endowed for needy families of promising Buxton students. And he reminded us from his pulpit every Sunday that faith and observance and prayers alone were not enough to do the Creator's will. God loved a self-starter.