David (25 page)

“What about Ferguson? He could blow the whistle, he knows as much as either of us.” I was furious, and not entirely at Burwell. I reminded myself of when I used to bargain with my mother to be allowed to stay up a little later than my normal bedtime.

Burwell smiled again—indulgently, almost benignly. “Lad, there's no risk of Ferguson ever talking.”

“Just because he never says anything doesn't mean he won't talk,” I said. As angry as I was, I wasn't unaware that Ferguson was listening to every word we were saying. Not that he seemed to notice, much less care. If he didn't blink occasionally, he could have been a mammoth flesh statue dumped in the driver's seat.

“Well put, lad, well put. But it's not by
how
he can't speak but
why
that I know I can trust him.”

The flame was beginning to go out of the sky, but not so much that Burwell couldn't see the confusion on my face.

“Show him,” Burwell said, and before I could determine which one of us he was speaking to, Ferguson turned to me and opened his mouth as wide as possible. He looked like a terrified horse braying at a rattlesnake but with nothing to sound for it. Ferguson didn't have any tongue. His eyes stayed open and on me the entire time I stared at the dark hole where his voice should have been.

“All right, that's enough,” Burwell said, and Ferguson snapped his mouth shut.

“How did he lose his tongue?” I said. Now I sounded like a five-year-old asking how the sun ended up in the sky.

“The regular rate, David, and within forty-eight hours. Four samples are a lot, I know, but think of all that nice money you're going to make.” Pulling down his cap, and to Ferguson now, “Let's go,” and Ferguson tugged on the reins and the wagon moved off.

It was dark now. Burwell was going to get his bodies. I raced home, although there wasn't any reason.

*

Tom lives outside of town, halfway between Chatham and Buxton. He couldn't have chosen a more appropriate location to call home if he'd tried. It's only a coincidence, of course—Tom could never be bothered to correlate his geographical
where
to his biographical
who
—but it's fitting all the same.

When he asked me to stop by and see him—last night, while we were closing up—naturally I asked him why. I've known Tom for almost as long as I've had Sophia's, and I've never had any reason to visit him, nor him me.

I like Tom. I know I can trust Tom. Which are two things I can't say about most people I know. But I'm not my black
brother's keeper any more than I am that of any other whatever-shaded sibling. The older I get, I'm not sure I even know any black or white people anymore. I only know for sure that I know Loretta and George and Henry and a few foggier and foggier others who only still breathe way back inside my brain.

“I want to give you something,” he said.

“Can't you bring it with you to work tomorrow night?”

Tom shook his head. “I wouldn't care to do that, no.”

“What is it?”

“You come and visit me tomorrow. Around noontime?”

“If you want me to.”

“I do.”

“All right.”

Tom is standing on his front porch when I ride up, coatless and with a steaming tin cup of coffee in one hand, a cigarette burning in the other.

I climb down from Franklin's horse and tie the rein to the porch. I sold my last horse the same week my house was finished being built. The day I moved in, I knew I wouldn't be going anywhere far enough away that I'd ever need to travel by horse again.

“You can put him around back if you want, out back with Sister,” Tom says.

“It's a nice-enough day,” I say. “He'll be all right.”

“It is that,” Tom says, taking a sip of coffee followed by a long pull on his cigarette while enjoying the view from his porch, the towering trees and more trees surrounding every side of the cabin. Tom's nearest neighbour is more than a mile away, and in spite of the snow-covered branches of the trees and the puddles of ice and the hard, frozen ground, the wind is only wintertime cool, the country air all the fresher for it. Everywhere you look is clean and quiet and empty of anything that isn't supposed to be there.

Splashing the little that's left in his cup over the side of the porch, “Suppose you better come in,” Tom says. He steals a last puff from his cigarette before stamping it out on the porch underneath his boot, holds the door open for me, and closes it behind us.

Inside is pretty much what I'd imagined: a table and a single chair; a small, neatly made bed; a few time-scarred pots and pans hanging by nails over the fire. If you had taken one of the original cabins built at Buxton forty-five years ago and simply moved it out here, it would be hard to tell the difference. The room is warm and dry, though, and the bare windows allow the entire cabin plenty of hard, bright sunlight.

“Just a minute,” Tom says, kneeling on one knee beside the bed, dragging out a battered wooden gun box from underneath. Tom hasn't offered me a chair, so I stay standing. Besides, whatever it is he wants to show me, it isn't going to take long.

Even though Tom arrived in Buxton when I was a boy, I didn't meet him until I was much older, until I'd opened Sophia's. Once I got to know him, though, I remembered hearing about him—the ex-slave up from Mississippi via the Underground Railroad who lived on the edge of the Settlement in an Elgin Association–approved house, right down to the regulation picket fence and mandatory flower garden out front, but who refused to farm like everyone else, earning his living instead on the railroad whenever there was work, hunting and fishing and somehow getting by otherwise whenever there wasn't. The Reverend King strongly encouraged every new settler to initially work on the railroad, but only long enough to earn the first instalment toward his own plot of land so as to begin raising a money crop as soon as possible, a man's legally owned land something that no other man, white or otherwise, could ever take away from him. Tom came up with the minimum down payment followed by the
slowest repayment schedule allowable, taking the full twenty years permissible under the terms of his loan to finally pay it off.

Tom even went about the business of education his own way, was front and centre at the evening adult reading classes that the Reverend King and the other teachers held for the new arrivals, but refused to learn to write, politely insisting he only wanted to know how to read, and then only enough to know how to read the Bible. Fittingly, a worn copy of it along with an old pipe, sharing space on top of a small, mirrorless dresser of drawers, looked to be his only luxury items.

“I want you to have this,” he says, standing up from his crouch.

I go over to get a better look at what he's holding in both hands. Once I do, even though I've never seen one before, not in person, I immediately know what it is. “Whose is it?” I say. It's not exactly what I meant, but it's probably as close as I'm going to get.

“Somebody's. Back in Mississippi. Somebody's from there.”

Tom's still holding it, and I'm still staring at it. “Is it—I mean,
was
it—yours?” I say.

“Just somebody's back in Mississippi.” He holds it out for me to take it from him, like a valet offering a king his crown.

I take it and hold it like he did, cradled across both hands. Each shackle has its own keyhole, and there's a chain about six inches long and three inches thick joining them together.

Tom can tell what I'm thinking. “So he don't run away,” he says, “but so he can still work.”

I nod, keep looking. I don't know what else to do. I don't know what else to say.

“Put it on,” Tom says.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean put it on. Like you was having to wear it.”

I don't move, so Tom takes the thing back and sinks to one knee and pulls up my pant leg and clasps one of the shackles around my left ankle. “Ordinarily, that'd be tighter some, on account of it being locked.”

I feel enraged. I feel unworthy. I feel honoured. I feel sick to my stomach.

“See now how it feels like to wear both,” he says, but before he can attach the other shackle, I bend over and unclasp the first. We both stand up.

“It's okay,” I say, handing it back.

Tom picks up his pipe from the dresser and carefully lights it with a match from the box he pulls out of his shirt pocket. He slowly shakes his head. “It belongs to you now,” he says.

“Why do you want me to have it?”

Patiently sucking at his pipe until it begins to burn to life, “A man don't live forever.” Him, he means. He won't live forever.

“Fine, but why not. . .?” Exactly. Why not what?

Tom points at me with his pipe. “I want
you
to have it.”

“But—”

“Boss, there ain't nothing more to say.”

“Tom, look—”

“And you keepin' on talkin', you just sayin' more of it.”

*

On our morning walk, on our way to Tecumseh Park, Henry and I detour along King Street in order to stop in at the post office. Schopenhauer and Goethe and Heine may all sound wonderfully beguilingly the same to me, but since Loretta actually understands every word she reads aloud, I need to periodically replenish my Germanic reading list. Obviously, Hegel is out—no musty metaphysics for either of us, no matter
how dialectically dressed up to sound like science—and Loretta's sole reading rule is nothing even remotely theological, so Feuerbach and Schleiermacher aren't options either. I've ordered as many volumes as are available of a young philosopher whose name I've become familiar with through the pages of the
Fortnightly
, a Friedrich Nietzsche. The little I've read about his work is intriguing, but it's the other names that his name is often linked with—Socrates, Heraclitus, Schopenhauer—that are most compelling. You know a person by the company he keeps. And it's an astute autodidact who pays attention to who's friends with whom.

It's election time in Chatham and most of the storefronts we pass have signs hanging in their windows urging the populace's support for either the incumbent, Mayor Henry Smyth, or his challenger, Manson Campbell. Campbell is playing the radical this time out, advocating not only that Chatham officially change its status from town to city but that four hundred cords of cobblestone be purchased with taxpayer money with which to pave Queen Street. I'm all for progress and clean boots, so if I manage to remember where and when to vote, Campbell is my man. And if I don't, Chatham will still be Chatham and Queen Street won't be any muddier than it was before.

I leave Henry outside the post office and let the bell over the door bring Larwill to the front counter. There's no smug smile for me today, only the most nominal, barely detectable nod, as if a single genuine greeting costs two hundred dollars and Larwill has only a nickel to his name, and he retrieves my package and produces the piece of paper I need to initial so promptly that I'm almost back out on the street when I'm left wondering if I imagined the entire exchange. But when a woman and her young daughter enter through the door I hold open for them and I hear, “Good morning, Mrs. Carpenter, good morning, Elizabeth, and what can I do for you
ladies today?” I'm reassured that my hold on reality is still secure, at least for now. The woman thanks me before replying to Larwill's query, I tell her she's welcome, and Henry and I are on our way again.

There was one election I didn't cast a vote in but would have if I'd had the opportunity—would have had to have been imprisoned or dead to have missed. Or been only nine years old at the time, which I was.

Although Larwill's father's attempt to stop the settling of Buxton had been ultimately unsuccessful, Larwill Senior continued to be a dedicated adversary of both the Elgin Settlement and Archie McKellar. When, in 1856, Mr. McKellar decided to run against Larwill for his seat in Parliament, the Reverend King went right to work, helping to get the 321 Negroes who owned property in Buxton and who had been residents for the necessary three years naturalized and eligible to vote. But, being the Reverend King, voting wasn't enough for him, it was just as important
how
the Negroes of Buxton voted.

When the day of the election arrived, the Reverend King gathered all 321 men in front of St. Andrew's Church and marched with them through Duck Pond Swamp all the way into Chatham. Once there, they entered the courthouse together and each man signed his name in the register, not one having to make his mark, unlike nearly half of the whites who voted. Some of the men who cast their vote that day had been slaves little more than three years before. The Reverend King and the 321 men of Buxton marched home the same way they came, and Larwill lost his seat to Mr. McKellar by the largest count in the history of Kent County.

I let Henry go from my side as soon as we get inside the park, let him chase after a squirrel he thinks he can catch but that I know will make it up a tall maple tree before he can reach him. I put my hands inside my coat pockets and watch
Henry jump up against the tree, his front two feet as high as he's going to get. I let him bark a couple more times before I start walking again.

Henry barks one last time, just to let the squirrel know that he knows he's there, and then he's beside me.

The trickle of
hope-you're-well
s and
I'm-just-fine
s that constituted the first ten years or so of George's and my post-Buxton relationship eventually dribbled to the desert of good intentions and fond recollections that all unirrigated friendships must become. A yearly Christmas card is not a nourishing springtime thunderstorm. By the time I received George's postcard informing me that Mrs. King was dying, I hadn't heard a word from him, nor he from me, in over a decade.