David (12 page)

“Unless the seed is allowed to grow, to grow and bear the fruit that nature has surely intended it to, one great object of our mission here will be frustrated. I speak, of course, of the training of young men of piety and talents for further usefulness in the Church. Never was there more need for such young men as at present. The slave trade, as we all know, is still carried on along the coast of Africa, notwithstanding the vigilance of the British navy. Nothing but the preaching of the everlasting Gospel will put an end to that inhumane traffic.”

Amen, we'd say, and praise the Lord and the Reverend King.

After our meeting in his office, after he'd convinced me not to leave for the war, the Reverend King gave me the same time and attention he bestowed upon every other student whose mind he wished to help hone to an even sharper point, so that when I eventually entered Knox College, no white man, no matter what his background or advantages, would be my intellectual superior. His library was mine now, and after my chores and homework were done for the evening, I'd sit at the kitchen table and read what he'd instructed me to read, to learn what I needed to learn so that one day I could give back to God and society both all that I'd so bountifully received myself.

“Don't you eat that apple core, David. You do, it'll grow in your stomach.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Whenever I was studying, my mother—whether cooking or sewing or cleaning—might have been invisible for all the noise she made for fear of disturbing me. Officially, Presbyterians don't talk about the doctrine of the Trinity, but my mother worshipped her very own three-pointed path to personal holiness anyway: I was going to be an educated man; I was going to be a minister; I was going to carry on the Reverend King's work. I was going to be all of these things, and I was her son.

“You still hungry? You want me to make you some warm milk?”

“No, ma'am.” Warm milk, particularly the way my mother made it, with just the right splash of molasses, was my favourite, especially on cold winter nights, but it made me sleepy.

“All right, you get back to your studies, your old mother won't bother you no more now.”

“You're not bothering me.”

“Hush now, you get back to your learning.”

I moved my book, the Reverend King's copy of St. Thomas Aquinas's
Summa Theologia
, closer to the lamp. I had two more arguments for the existence of God to memorize before I went to bed. Whatever I didn't understand tonight, the Reverend King would explain to me tomorrow.

In the beginning was the word. The curse word.

Profanity was almost as forbidden in Buxton as drinking or blasphemy. “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain” was for Sunday, but “Curses are like young chickens, they always come home to roost” was an everyday edict. Bad language, moreover, was like bad grammar, was slave talk, the talk of a people denied the education and opportunities that I, for instance, most certainly hadn't been.

“How can a man expect to gain another man's respect if he doesn't first respect himself?” the Reverend King said more than once. Foremost, the white man's respect, he meant but didn't say. I censored my mouth and mind as well as anyone and never said
me
when what I meant to say was
I
.

Taking George and me along with him once to Chatham, Mr. Freeman stopped the wagon near Pork Row to ask directions to the glassworks. A coloured man with one hand resting in the pocket of his unbuttoned vest, the other lazily picking at his long yellow teeth with a thumbnail, said, “Just a cunt hair away, gentlemen, just go back the way you come some and no more than ten doors down, is right there beside Gunsmith Jones' place.”

George's father surprised us, didn't thank the man for his help, didn't even acknowledge him with a farewell tip of his
hat or a simple “Good day.” Mr. Freeman may not have had the schooling that his son and I had, but he limited his cursing to when he was working the field and thought he was alone, and was a stickler for “Please” and “Thank you.” You didn't have to know ancient Greek to know good manners.

“What is it, Pa?” George said as his father turned the wagon around. “Do you know that man?”

Mr. Freeman waited for a buggy to pass the other way down King Street. “Did it seem like I knew him, George? Did he seem like the kind of man your father would know?”

We both understood that Mr. Freeman's questions weren't the sort that wanted answers, so kept quiet, although I knew George was as confused as I was. It was funny the way the man had called us gentlemen, the same way we always laughed every time George's own father would ask us if we were taking our wives with us when we'd set out for a morning's fishing at Deer Pond.

We stayed in the wagon while Mr. Freeman went inside the glass-shop. George slid into his father's seat as soon as he was out of sight. He picked up the switch, rested it on his shoulder.

“You know why Pa was mad, don't you?” he said.

I nodded.

George looked at me, shook his head. “Sure you do.”

I didn't mind so much not knowing, but the way he was smiling to himself, like he knew something that I didn't, made me cross. “If you know so much,” I said, “why did you have to ask him, then?”

George bounced the switch on his shoulder a couple of times. “I wanted him to say it.”

“Say what?”

“The word that that man said that made him so mad.”

I nodded again, although with even less hope of looking
clever than last time. I wished I was sitting up front in the wagon too.

We saw Mr. Freeman through the glass-shop front shaking the hand of the man behind the counter. George stuck the whip back into place and scrambled out of the driver's seat into the back.

Cupped hand to my ear, “Cunt,” he said.

I kept my eyes on Mr. Freeman, still inside the shop but soon to be out the door and on the sidewalk and in the wagon.

“It's the only word it
could
have been.”

For the rest of that day and all of that evening—at supper with my mother; head down to my studies; on my knees saying my prayers—the word remained a word, just something someone said that had gone on to where all words went once they're spoken, the ether of endless alphabets, up
there
for the good ones, down below for the bad. I slept the sleep of a child: immediate, deep, empty.

I woke up in the middle of the night with the word stuck in my throat, a tiny tickling bone that wouldn't come clear. Every time I attempted to cough, to get rid of it, the word would grow larger and that much more difficult to dislodge. I knew it was wrong to think of it, never mind actually say it, and I tried to go back to sleep—
prayed
to go back to sleep, albeit without mentioning why I needed heavenly help—but the cool side of the pillow soon grew as hot and damp as the other, and eventually it felt as though, if I didn't say it, I would surely choke to death in my own bed.

“Cunt,” I whispered, not knowing what the word meant now any more than I had that afternoon, but knowing instantly that I had sinned; knowing, too, that no matter how dark the night had seemed before, it was about to get much, much darker.

The smell of my mother's pancakes was the next thing I remember. A shaft of sunlight lay on the pillow beside my head, impatient for the curtain in my room to be parted and the day to officially begin. I couldn't remember falling asleep.

“David,” my mother called from the kitchen. “Time for you to get up now, son.”

*

I could lie and say it simply made sense. That, being a logical being, I'd merely followed the dictates of logic and come to my decision purely logically. Just as any rational being should have. Should have would have could have didn't.

Darwin wasn't the first naturalist to assert that evolution had taken place right underneath our upturned noses, but he was the first to assemble so much evidence that to deny it was only possible by a wilful act of self-inflicted ignorance. And if one accepted the evolutionary kinship of all animals, one not only lost a heavenly father but gained an extended orphaned earthly family, the family of all living, breathing beings. Except that being kin comes with responsibilities—most importantly, that you don't eat your relations, no matter how tasty they might be covered in barbecue sauce. Because if one doesn't acknowledge certain rights that must be granted to all members of the family, there remains the risk that these same sacrosanct rights might be arbitrarily and illogically denied to certain other members. Perhaps, say, the human faction of the family. Perhaps, say, a selected segment of that human faction. Perhaps, say, the coloured segment.

So, one had a choice: either right was might or everyone had the same incontrovertible rights. I didn't have a choice. My last day as a cannibal was November 7, 1881, my thirty-fifth year.

But those are the reasons I quit eating other animals, not why. Why never comes from the head. Why begins much lower in the body and only becomes reasons after first passing through the bowels and the heart and the throat. The brain takes all of the credit, but it's always the last to know what's on its mind.

Twenty years earlier, George and I were on our way to Deer Pond when we spotted one of its four-legged namesakes, except that it wasn't running away from us this time but was lying on its side in the brush. Someone had shot it—there was a neat, blood-rimmed hole no bigger around than a half-dollar—halfway down its long neck, but the shooter must have thought he'd missed and so not done what Mr. Freeman never failed to remind us to do whenever we went hunting: always finish the kill, never let the animal suffer.

George and I crept closer, but the deer stayed where it was. I'd never been this close to a living deer before. Both of its eyes were wide open, but I don't think it saw us. It looked without blinking—not once—in the direction of where its head lay on the ground.

George was standing beside me, pointed at the rising and falling of the deer's rib cage. “It's still breathing pretty good,” he said. “There's no telling how long it'll keep going.”

If you ignored the bullet hole and the glassy brown eyes, the deer looked like a large, tamed cat sunning itself on the forest underbrush. Then he slowly opened his mouth like he was going to amaze us and speak. Which he did—with a low, guttural groan that sounded like the wailing of a man suffering so much pain he's denied the power of words.

“We've got to kill it,” I said.

George looked at me, looked terrified, as if he suddenly realized he'd done something terrible. “I didn't bring my gun,” he said.

“We'll have to find a rock.”

“It better be a big one.”

“Start looking.”

It was actually a relief to be out of the deer's sightless sight, to be far enough away that in case he cried again, I wouldn't have to hear it. Not having to look at him or listen to him, I could almost believe he wasn't there and we didn't have to do what had to be done.

“David,” George said, and I went to where he was.

He'd found a large, mossy rock with a single jagged side that was perfect, like it was created for killing. We each knew what the other one was thinking.

“I found it,” George said.

I would have argued with him, but in spite of being a hundred feet, at least, away, the deer moaned again, another long, wordless whimper. I picked up the stone.

I gripped the rock as tightly as I could and staggered back to where the deer was, almost running, somehow knowing that if I thought about what I was going to do, I wouldn't be able to do it. I willed myself enraged and slammed the rock down on the deer's head. The impact was as hard as stone on stone and as soft as sliding a knife through just-churned butter. I think it groaned one last time, but my ears had been full of the hate I'd needed to kill it. I probably didn't need to, but as soon as I felt the collapse of its skull, I raised the rock again and brought it down a second time, just as hard.

I let go of the stone and half stumbled, half ran, toward the path home, not knowing, not caring, if George was coming or not. But of course he was, was right there alongside me. After about five minutes of silence,

“Do you think it's dead?” he said.

I didn't answer.

“Do you think it's dead, David?”

“It's dead.”

George did all of the talking on the way back to Buxton, and because I never responded, by the time we got there I'd tacitly agreed that it would be wrong to just leave the deer to rot and that we should get Mr. Freeman's cutting knife and go back and gut the deer for meat.

“There's enough good venison there to last us a whole year,” George said. His growing excitement was better, at least, than what we had been feeling.

By the time we returned with the knife and some rope, I knew I wasn't going to be much help. I picked out a thick tree limb about eight feet from the ground to string and quarter the deer, but that was about all I could manage.

“I'm gonna cut a stick,” George said. “Then you can stick it through the ankle tendons and hoist it up the tree.”

I sat down on a rock—another rock, not the one I'd used to kill the deer—and watched George work. He didn't ask me to help him again.

George stabbed the animal in its belly and sliced downward in one smooth motion, got right to work with the skinning. His father had taught him well. As he worked to pull off the deerskin, clouds of fur drifted by, slowly floated by our faces, falling snow in July.

As much as George slashed and stabbed and pulled at the deer's hot insides, though, the organs refused to fall, were still attached to the deer's rectum. Then, without warning, the rectum suddenly tore free and sprayed him with liquid deer shit like a blast of winter sleet. All he could do was keep his chin raised, away from the suit of shit he was now wearing, arms outstretched and dripping with the digested remains of the deer's last meal.