David (27 page)

I hadn't finished eating, and I knew I was going to be hungry later, but I didn't say anything.

*

I
decided when Mrs. King wouldn't suffer anymore. When the gasping and rasping and wheezing and panting began to occur more often than the quiet unresponsiveness, I returned to Buxton with more than a book and a bottle of whiskey in my satchel. There weren't any final words and she didn't recognize me at the last moment and I didn't feel anything but satisfaction that I'd done for her what I'd want someone to do for me. What I'd want a friend to do for me.

And then Chatham voted itself dry. It wasn't my first lesson in how what seems so wrong today can become so right tomorrow, but it was the most profitable. When Chatham's most stolid citizens conspired to take advantage of the newly passed Canada Temperance Act and hold a referendum on the ban of the consumption and sale of alcohol, all I'd initially felt was rage and contempt. Rage, that technically I was now a teetotaller; contempt, that someone other than myself had made that decision for me. I'd orphaned my past and murdered my future for the right to obey or break my very own tallied-up Ten Commandments, and the idea that the decision had been made by a roomful of pasty-faced do-gooders who'd never even heard of Mr. William Blake or knew that he'd ordained that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” would have driven me to drink if I hadn't already been so inclined.

Ordinarily, I stayed out of the bars in the daytime, but I'd just returned from delivering not one, not two, but three perfectly preserved bodies to London, and after spending all night on the road, a sleep-inducing drink or two didn't seem uncalled for. Besides, it was the day that the result of the plebiscite was to be announced in the afternoon
Planet
, and the saloons were a shoulder-to-shoulder sight to see. Not
that there was much suspense about which way the vote was going to go.

At the time, Chatham counted eighteen saloons, where good whiskey cost a dime a shot, and the sight of a man staggering down King Street was not in the least uncommon. Yet the
Planet
, “The Voice of the People,” weighed in on the Yea side of the question in editorial after editorial, local merchants proudly hung signs in their storefront windows illustrating their clear support for all things temperate and decent, and even the already-abstaining inhabitants of Buxton got in on the act, the Reverend King himself leading a procession of every voting-eligible Elgin Negro into town to cast their votes in favour of sobriety, civic responsibility, and clear-minded rationality.

“Scott.”

“Hey?”

“I said, says here, ‘Officially known as the Canada Temperance Act, this measure, put through the Dominion Parliament by the Honourable R.W. Scott.' That's the fellow whose idea it was, it seems. Scott.”

At the table next to me, a man hunched over a greasy copy of yesterday's newspaper was talking to another man twirling one of the ends of his moustache like he was attempting to roll a cigarette out of it.

“I suppose,” the man with the moustache said.

“Not that much can be done about it now.”

“Of course not. It's going to be the law.”

“It's not as if you could open up your own saloon.”

“Of course not. That would be against the law.”

I swallowed the last of my drink, laid another quarter on the table for the bartender to see.

“Says here there's going to be a celebration next week to commemorate the Queen's golden jubilee,” the man with the newspaper said.

“Is that so?”

“That's what it says.”

“I suppose I'll attend, then. If there's going to be a celebration.”

“That's what it says.”

“I suppose I'll attend, then. I suppose I'll bring Candice and the children along. I wouldn't be surprised if we made an afternoon of it.”

Four weeks later, Chatham's first renegade saloon was open for business. Coming up with a name had been the easiest part.
Sophia
means “wisdom” in Greek. It was the very first word that the Reverend King had taught me.

*

The revivalists have taken over Tecumseh Park, so Henry and I detour all the way around and end up on Prince Street, over by the new school. The new school that's now ten years old, the new school no more. Another decade dead just like
that
. Used to be it was enough simply to stay out of churches; now you've got to be careful where you're walking as well.

Even a quarter of a mile away you can hear them. Not the preachers exhorting their tent-cramped parishioners to feel the saving grace of Jesus, to receive the loving embrace of Jesus, to accept Jesus Christ as their personal saviour, but the equally frenzied effect of their soapbox frothing, the thundering
Amen
s and
Hallelujah
s and
Help me Jesus
es of the assembled. To each his own delusion, I suppose, but we're most loyal to our first fairy tales. My Jesus was better. He just was.

Jesus is a prism: hold the Son up to the sun a little to the right and He's Anglican clean and haughty High Tory; slide Him a little to the left and He's a dirty but dignified Everyman, bleeding hands and feet callused and sore just like
anyone's who dies a little bit more after a particularly bad day at work. The shriekers and the screamers back in Tecumseh Park know that all they have to do to be saved is say the right words and have faith in the right things, but I wasn't raised that way, I wasn't taught to believe that salvation was quite that easy.

The Reverend King never spoke the word “Jesus” without somehow at least implying the word “work.” Work that made you a better person. You making the world a better place. A better you and a better world how we go about the busy business of glorifying God.

Once, when George and I hadn't done our Latin translation assignments because we'd been fishing at Deer Pond so late the night before we'd fallen asleep as soon as we'd gotten home, Mr. Rapier informed the Reverend King, who asked to see us after school the next day. Neither of us had ever been in trouble with the Reverend King before, so we didn't know how frightened to feel on the walk over.

After giving us an opportunity to explain our excuse and then helping us understand why it wasn't an acceptable excuse and then extracting from us a promise to always take care of work before we allowed ourselves pleasure, “Jesus loves us all just the way we are,” he said. “But he loves us far, far too much to let us stay that way.”

Time helps a mind forget what it doesn't want to know.

Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.

I haven't forgotten.

*

If I was going to set myself up selling illegal liquor, the first thing I needed to do was secure someplace that seemed relatively innocuous yet was still accessible enough that the average
caterwauler could locate it even if he was already halfway in the bag. I found it the first day I went looking, a small house near King Street that was buried behind an all-enclosing fence of four tall rows of cedars and which rested upon a mildewy basement big enough to hold, by my own estimation, thirty men and enough liquor to keep them there. The house was empty, had been for months, and the absentee owner's representative said that his client was motivated to sell because of the extensive water damage recently done to the basement.

“A dirty business down there, I'm afraid,” the man said after we'd climbed back upstairs. Scarecrow thin, and with a warm Scottish burr stuck to his tongue, the man had shown me around the property with a polite forthrightness that I didn't imagine extended to every agent whose potential client was an anonymous Negro.

“There are dirtier ones,” I said.

“A dirty business to make it clean again, I mean. Like a tomb down there now, it is, I'm afraid.”

I held off telling him that, if it came to it, I had some experience in that field as well.

He balked when I offered to pay him in cash—“This isn't how transactions of this sort are ordinarily undertaken, Mr. King”—but whether because I'd accepted his price without bothering to make a counter-offer or because the property had already been up for sale for so long, he eventually took my money, almost every dollar I'd saved from a decade's worth of dutiful digging and robbing. It had taken me forty years, but I was now the legal owner of my very own home and place of business both.

After dumping my books upstairs along with what little I'd accumulated in my most recent rooming house, I got down to the real task at hand, transforming the damp, fetid basement into a habitable, illegal saloon. First I cleaned—
there was no question of hiring any help, even if I'd had the money—which foremost meant scrubbing the mouldy walls and floor with bucket after bucket of chlorine and hot water. That there were no windows would, I knew, be an advantage eventually, but at the moment it only meant that an already long and tedious job was made even more so for having to frequently dash upstairs in order to gulp down reviving drafts of fresh air like a suffocating, half-expired miner.

Creating an inviting atmosphere wasn't a priority, at least not in the beginning—the booze would do all the inducing I needed—so I bought cheap straight-backed chairs anywhere I could find them, scoured the dump for broken ones of any kind and repaired them, and built several serviceable tables out of empty pickle barrels I purchased for practically nothing from Miller's Dry Goods. And when I wasn't cleaning up the basement, I was still digging up bodies for Burwell, whom I'd worked out a new arrangement with: in lieu of cash, one fresh corpse in return for ten bottles of bootlegged liquor. Eventually, I knew, I had to get my own underground connection, which wouldn't just be easier and cheaper but would allow me finally to be finished with Burwell. But for now the only thing that mattered was stockpiling as much rotgut as possible.

Burwell's initial amusement at my request for a change in the usual method of compensation ended as soon as he determined that the whiskey wasn't for me. As long as he believed I was pouring his illegal booze down my own throat, he was happy, just one more rusty nail in the coffin of my grave-digging dependence. When he had trouble keeping up with my demand for more and more whiskey, though, and failed to see any obvious signs I was drinking myself into sodden submission, he started asking questions.

“Just out of curiosity, lad, how much are you making?”

“On what?”

“Markup. I assume your thirsty new friends are paying a wee bit more per bottle than what I'm letting you have them for.”

I'd known that this moment was going to come sooner or later, and since I hadn't settled on the lie I was going to use to keep him off my entrepreneurial trail as long as possible, Burwell's misunderstanding of what I wanted his whiskey for worked as well as anything I could come up with.

“You agreed to sell the whiskey to me,” I said. “You even set the terms yourself. Whatever I do with it after it's mine is my own business.”

Burwell held up his hands as if intent upon proving he had ten fingers just like everybody else. “Easy, lad. Of course it's your business. I was merely inquiring as to your profit margin. As one businessman to another.”

There wasn't any
merely
about it. Whatever I was up to, and no matter how little extra income he figured I was bringing in, Burwell wanted in on it. To own a piece of the burgeoning illicit-booze business, of course, but even more so, to continue owning me. The tongue that wasn't in Ferguson's mouth anymore told me that Burwell's employees weren't the ones who decided they didn't work for him anymore.

In the meantime, until he could determine the seriousness of my moonshine moonlighting, he could at least make it as difficult as possible for me to do it. Even after I'd delivered him two bodies just the week before, when I showed up with a third a week later he tried to convince me that I was mistaken, that our arrangement had been for only eight bottles per corpse.

“Fuck you, Burwell,” I said.

Ferguson and I had already unloaded the body from my wagon and into the boat that they sometimes used, but I grabbed it by its ankles through the thin sheet it was wrapped in and started yanking it out by myself, in the process setting
the boat, and Burwell and Ferguson, gently rocking from side to side. The moon was the only light we allowed ourselves, but I heard Ferguson slowly unsheathe his knife. Burwell just laughed. Only when I'd dragged the corpse nearly free of the craft did he bother to speak.

“Now, David. What are you going to do with a dead body?”

“That's my fucking business,” I said. “I fucking dug it up out of the fucking ground myself, so I'll do with it whatever the fuck I want.”

Over the course of the previous twenty-four hours, I'd spent approximately eleven of them on my hands and knees scouring the basement with enough chlorine that I'd literally burnt away most of my nose hairs—only to discover that, underneath the glaze of mould, there was a seemingly imperishable bloodstain the size of a large living room carpet—four of them at the dump scavenging for broken furniture and fixtures, and four more pilfering and delivering a recently deceased human being. It felt refreshing, invigorating even, to do something so irrationally self-destructive, a little insane something just for me.

Only when the corpse's neck was resting on the edge of the boat—rigor mortis keeping the head from falling backward—did Burwell finally relent. “You know, now that I think about it, lad, I believe you're right.” He reached underneath the stern of the boat and held out the two missing bottles.

I was too tired to feel victorious, simply took them. Ferguson slid his knife back into its sheath and untied the line from the dock.

“Why lie?” I said, too exhausted to say more. “Why lie when you don't need to?” Ferguson dipped the oars into the water. Over the soft splash of their first immersion, “That saddens me, lad, it really does,” Burwell said. “That tells me you haven't learned as
much as I thought you had from working for me for all these years.”