David (34 page)

After he'd obliged me by eating a little bit of everything, I asked him if he'd like a cup of coffee or tea.

“You don't have any whiskey?” he said.

“You don't drink,” I said.

“Oh, so you mean there might be things about me you don't know. I can't imagine the same thing about you.”

George laughed and rubbed his belly and I took a bottle and two glasses down from the cupboard.

We haven't missed a first Saturday of every other month for the last eight years.

Loretta's excited: there's a blind man on the undertaker's table.

“What's the difference?” I say. “The dead can't see.”

Loretta is applying the finishing fidgeting to her camera set-up. “This is something you believe you need to tell me?”

Artists
. I cross my legs and keep my mouth shut and am thankful for a chair in which to pass the time. Ordinarily, Loretta likes an empty room when she works, but today she said she'd like some company. How often does someone have a chance to watch a beautiful woman take a picture of a blind dead man?

“Are you sure I'm all right here?” I say. The chair Loretta has pushed against the wall is directly behind the table covered with her subject.

“You are where you should be.”

“Are you sure? I don't want to interfere with your picture. I can easily move.”

“You are where you should be. Now please do not be restless. It distracts me, yes?”

The blind man looks blind, even with eyes that wouldn't be seeing anything anyway. It's the pupils, the way they look used up, callused, like he'd been straining unsuccessfully to see his entire life, long after he knew he couldn't.

“So,” Loretta says. “I have given you sufficient time to consider our journey to Germany, yes?”

“
Our
journey? It sounds like you've already decided for me.”

“Of course not. This is a journey no other can decide to take for you. But I have decided I am to go at the end of this June. I have begun to make the necessary inquiries.”

Loretta is behind her camera now, clicking and adjusting things I don't even know the names of. That I'm surprised she's settled on going, with or without me, surprises me. I've known she was planning on returning to Germany for months now. I stare at the body on the table.

Sometimes, as children, George and I would take turns pretending that one of us was blind while the other was his guide. Being the blind man was by far the better role. There was always the worry you'd trip in a pothole or bang your head on a tree branch if your seeing guide got lazy or distracted, but that was what made it so much fun—not knowing what was going to happen next. You weren't going to fall down or hurt your head being the guide, but the entire time you couldn't wait until it was your turn to be the blind man again.

“How long do you think you'll be gone?” I say.

“This depends. If you accompany me, not so long—perhaps one month—but if you do not, perhaps longer. Perhaps then I will visit France as well.”

France. Montaigne, Voltaire, Rousseau. France sounds like a place in a book, even more than Germany. Not having been there, I suppose that's what it is. Unless I went.

“Understand, I recognize the appeal,” I say.

Loretta is focusing on the dead man through her camera.

“Like I said before, though, there are a lot of loose ends I'd need to tie up first.”

“Yes, you have said.”

“I'd have to free up some money as well. I don't even know how much money.”

“Yes.”

“And don't travellers . . . don't they need something to show someone when they go somewhere?”

“A passport.”

“A passport, right. I don't have a passport.”

And then Loretta is done, is taking apart her equipment. “Yes, you would need to get a passport.”

I feel embarrassed. I feel eight, not forty-eight. I wish Loretta's face was still busy behind her camera so she couldn't see mine. “Passports need pictures, don't they? I don't even have a picture of myself.”

Laying away her camera in its black, felt-lined storage case, “You do now,” she says.

It takes me a moment to realize that I was the blind dead man whose photo she was taking. “You fooled me,” I say.

“Of course,” Loretta says.

*

“I'm the man you want to talk to. I can get you anything you need—peaches, pears, beets, corn, yams—and every can just as fresh as a daisy.”

“I do appreciate the generosity of your offer, but Mrs. Meyers does all of our fruit and vegetable shopping at the farmers' market.”

“You see,” Franklin says, setting down his glass on the bar, “right there, that's where you're going wrong. A pear in a can is a
clean
pear, one hundred percent guaranteed, no questions asked. You can't get that kind of freshness from a pear off a tree, you just can't. My God, you're a man of science, Meyers, you of all people should understand that.”

Meyers pushes his glasses up his nose. “You might have a point there,” he says, taking out his snuff box.

“You're darn right I do.”

I wouldn't miss this. Listening to Franklin lecture Meyers on modern science is like horseradish on an empty stomach.

“I'm thinking of the children,” Meyers says. “Mrs. Meyers and I want only what's best for them.” Meyers takes a snort of snuff up each nostril.

“That's what I'm saying. You want to put your children's health and happiness first. Which is why you want to eat clean food. Canned food.”

“I say, I do see your point.”

“You're a man of science, I knew you would.”

I would
not
miss this.

*

“Good evening, David.”

“Thompson.”

Thompson sits and settles at his usual table while I pour him out his usual drink, both of us committed to pretending that the other night didn't happen, that Thompson hadn't come about as close as anyone can to killing himself while still being around to feel ashamed about it the next morning. It's difficult to make friends—real friends—after adolescence; having things in common to lie about helps.

“Well, it's finally starting to feel like spring,” Thompson says as I set down his glass.

“It's about time.”

“Feels as if it's going to rain again, though.”

“That's spring.”

“That it is.”

I take care of a couple of other customers at the bar, Meyers included, before stepping into the back. Henry, lying on
his side, wags his tail without opening his eyes, an aging dog's entitlement. I get the package I brought with me to work and bring it out front to the bar. Henry wags goodbye as I close the door.

I unwrap the book from the cloth bag I carried it in and take it with me to Thompson's table. “I believe this is yours,” I say, but Thompson looks at it like he's never seen it before, only heard about such an antiquarian wonder in bibliographic lore.

“It
was
mine,” he finally says, taking it from me without opening it, holding it open-palmed in both hands.

“Do you want it back?”

Still admiring the book, the dark green cover with the words
Leaves of Grass
splashed in gilt across the front, “I believe my days of owning first editions are over,” he says. “But I'm sure you won't have any trouble finding an interested buyer. Copies of Whitman's own self-published first pressing are very, very rare.” Thompson is still holding the book like it's a cushion with the rarest of emeralds resting on top.

“How about a trade?” I say.

Thompson searches my face—hard—for even the most nominal hint of pity. Not finding any, “What do I have that you could possibly want?”

“I'm going away for a while. I'm not sure for how long—a month, at least—and I need someone to look after Henry for me.”

“Your dog?”

“It's the only Henry I know.”

Seeing I'm serious, Thompson carefully rests the book on his knee, holding on to it with one hand, taking a sustained drink of whiskey with the other. To himself as much as to me, “I'm afraid I don't know much about the care of animals,” he says. “I'm afraid I wouldn't know the first thing about looking after a dog.”

“There's not much to know. You feed them and walk them and make sure they've got water. Believe me, Henry's easy to get along with. If you can't get along with Henry, you can't get along with anyone.”

“I'm sure, I'm sure, it's just . . .”

“Just what?”

“Just that this is a very valuable book.”

“And Henry is a very valuable dog. So much so, if when I come back he's just the same as when I left him, you can have the rest of your library back. I haven't got room for all my books anyway, let alone yours.” I pick up Thompson's empty glass. “You think about it. And if you decide to do it, I left you some advice inside the book.”

I leave Thompson alone with
Leaves of Grass
and the page I bookmarked, the one with the poem “Animals.”

A few minutes later, I return to Thompson's table with a fresh drink.

“You've got a deal,” he says.

*

Tomorrow is set: Chatham, to New York, to Liverpool, to somewhere else over there—over the ocean—until, somehow, to Germany. I don't know the details, but I don't have to, Loretta does. For the next six weeks I plan to depend on Loretta's dependability.

Tomorrow isn't the problem, though; it's tonight I'm having trouble with. Sleeping, specifically. Not that there's anything to worry about. But then, that rarely has anything to do with it.

Sophia's is shut tight and locked up until I return, and Tom is going to look in on things anyway just to make sure, as well as keep an eye on Franklin. It's time Tom had a holiday too. I gave him fifty dollars when I handed over the keys and told him to buy himself something he didn't need. Tom gave it some thought. “I don't suppose I'm in the market for any of that,” he said. I know Sophia's will be here when I get back.

Thompson has his instructions as well: what and how much to feed Henry; where and how long to walk him; where and whom to seek help from if he takes sick or is injured. But I know Henry will be fine, if a little confused and lonely at first. Henry was a stray, just like Waldo, but he's been with me long enough that there'll have to be a period of adjustment. But he'll adjust. That's one of the things that us strays do best.

And since Thompson will be staying at my home while I'm gone, looking after the house as well as Henry, he has another responsibility to attend to. Thompson has to take care of my rose bush. I seem to have become a gardener by accident.

One of the Reverend King's conditions of residence on the Settlement was a picket fence with a garden out front that had to include flowers. By the time I was living in Chatham, I swore that the first home I owned—the first home I could legitimately call my own—was going to be wilfully barren. Besides, although my body had never had to rise before
sunrise with the master's bell to begin a long day's enforced labour in the fields, my brain had heard enough stories about what it was like to suffer thirteen hours under the unyielding Southern sun picking, ginning, and pressing cotton to feel an uncomfortable ache of empathy whenever I passed a farmer's field, or even a large vegetable garden. This was one Negro whose hands were never going to get dirty—at least not with dirt.

True to my word, even the half-acre upon which my house was built is untilled and unembellished, a stone fence enclosing the entire property the only improvement I can be held responsible for. But somehow a rose has appeared. A pink rose. I didn't put it there, but there it is anyway.

Stacking a delivery of firewood behind the house—it's never too early to ready fall's first cords—I noticed what I assumed to be a larger than normal weed that needed plucking. Except for a single large maple tree, the backyard is bereft of anything alive, simple soil the majority of the time, mud whenever it rains. What I'd thought was just a weed, though, wasn't. A small rose bush had taken root; how, I don't know. My instinct was to yank it out of the ground—it was young and delicate enough, it wouldn't have been difficult—but I left it where it was, decided to let nature takes its course and do the job for me.

A week or so later, I checked back, ready to remove the uncared-for corpse. But between the steady April rain and spring's increasingly sunshiny days, the thing had managed not only to survive but actually to grow, three tiny buds sprouting at the ends of three separate spindly branches. I couldn't help but be impressed.

I got into the habit of following its progress every couple of days, after a while Henry picking up on the new routine and accompanying me on my inspection. It was like a much slower version of when Loretta had shown me how she developed
her photographs before she began sending them away to be done, the thing you were waiting to see slowly becoming itself, taking all the time it needed to be exactly what it was.

After work one night, I told Loretta about the rose bush, about how it reminded me of her developing her photographs.

“You are talking about a living bush?” she said.