David (6 page)

After the baby was buried, Mrs. King didn't play the piano at church anymore, and when one did spot her on the street, which was rare, she'd always be wearing a black shawl, which she'd use to hide her eyes as she hurried by. And then one day you never saw her around the Settlement at all. Which didn't mean I didn't see her.

My last after-school job of the day, before I walked my mother home at the end of her long day's labour, was helping her serve Mrs. King her evening meal in her room. My mother would carry the tray of food and utensils and I would follow behind, carrying the water pitcher and a glass. Especially during the summer, when Mrs. King spent most of her time fanning herself by the window, my mother was always trying to get her to drink more water. My mother was an indefatigable believer that there existed no ill in this world that reading the Bible every day and keeping well hydrated couldn't overcome.

“Why, good evening, Mrs. King.” My mother would knock twice and then immediately enter, something I was taught never to do. When I asked her why she did what I wasn't supposed to, “Because I be out in the hallway knocking all night otherwise, that's why,” she said.

“Look what we've got for you for your supper tonight, Mrs. King—some nice green beans, a corn on the cob, some nice cold ham right off the bone, and look at this nice peach cobbler Mrs. Semple make up just for you and Reverend King 'specially.” My mother would carefully place the tray on
the table beside Mrs. King's chair by the window and proceed to lay out the silverware and unfold the linen napkin like a salesman presenting his most irresistible wares. Mrs. King would turn around just far enough in her seat to manage a nearly indecipherable little smile and an accompanying slight nod before returning her attention to the window and her fanning, no sale today, thank you, maybe next time.

That was my cue to pour from the pitcher and for my mother to say, “You drink up now, dear, a nice cool glass of water is just what a body needs in weather like this.” Mrs. King would do as she was told, like a child who knows it's pointless to argue, and raise the glass to her lips. “That's a good dear,” my mother would say. “Now you enjoy your nice dinner now and I'll see you bright and early tomorrow morning with your breakfast.” And then my mother and I would close Mrs. King's bedroom door behind us and make sure there wasn't any final thing that the Reverend King needed if he was home, which he usually wasn't, and we'd walk home together, fireflies and crickets and hard bright silver stars splashed across the summer sky.

And then one day Mrs. King looked at me; looked at me, for the first time, as something more than the person who lugged in her pitcher of water and her glass. Hearing the Reverend King at the front door returning home from somewhere, my mother had stepped out of the room, leaving me to wait for Mrs. King to take her obligatory swallow of water. It was August and I wanted to be finished and outdoors, where at least there was a breeze, if only a steamy warm one. A line of sweat ran from my forehead into my right eye, and it stung. I blinked, rubbed my eye, blinked again.

Mrs. King stood up from her chair. I didn't know what I'd done, but whatever it was, I knew I shouldn't have done it. I don't think, up to that moment, I'd heard her speak more than twenty words, let alone ever seen her rise from her window-side
perch. I wished my mother was there to protect me. I thought of Mrs. King's nameless dead baby buried underneath the ground and how no one said it but everyone knew she was crazy.

“You poor child, take this,” she said, handing me her fan.

I was too surprised, too scared, not to. Her words shared the same overseas lilt as the Reverend's, but whereas his were big and booming, hers were tiny and seemed almost apologetic.

Somehow, “No, ma'am, this is yours,” I managed.

Mrs. King smiled—an honest smile, not like the ones she manufactured for strangers on the street or for my mother delivering the food she didn't want.

“Now, how can that possibly be? It's my gift to you. Didn't anyone ever teach you it is considered unkind to return a gift to a friend?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Well, thankfully, now someone has.”

*

I was a good boy. Of course I was a good boy. What other kind of boy could I have been? A stray dog no longer stray is a happy dog, an appreciative dog, an indebted dog. Understandably.

In the classroom, I never spoke until spoken to. I did not giggle, whisper, or squirm in my seat. I used proper language at all times whenever speaking. I always abided by the Golden Rule hand-lettered and framed and hanging at the front of the classroom,
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
. I always assumed good posture and always faced forward, my feet flat on the schoolhouse floor and my hands folded on top of the desk. I raised my hand when I wished to speak and I stood beside my desk before speaking. Whenever Mr. Rapier,
our teacher, asked me to, I would assist a fellow student in disentangling a point of incomprehension, never vain in my superior understanding, only pleased to be able to share my knowledge with another.

At home, I did all of my chores without ever having to be reminded to do them. I carried in old Mrs. Cross's firewood for her and shovelled her walkway and never accepted the nickel she never forgot to offer. I took my mother's arm when we walked to church and dropped my very own earned dime into the collection plate. When I was old enough, I helped the Reverend King and Mr. Rapier run the evening classes they organized to teach the older adults how to read. I wrote letters for the blind and the illiterate to their relatives and friends still in chains back in the South. I prayed every night for my mother's and my souls and the swift death of slavery and the Reverend King's continued good health. I breathed so that my mother and Jesus and the Reverend King would be proud of me.

Understandably.

*

The bottle and two glasses and the bowl of ice and the silver tongs laid out on the kitchen table; Henry with a fresh busy bone, oblivious for hours in front of the fire; the new gramophone waiting in the corner, wound and ready to go to work: everything is set, all that's missing is George. I get up and go to the front window and part the curtain, sit back down. I rearrange the contents on the table—this time the bowl of ice and the tongs on the left, the glasses side by side in the middle, the bottle flanking the right—then get up and go to the window again, the same result as before. I sit down and open the bottle. A watched door never darkens.

At nine p.m. on the first Saturday of every other month for the last eight years, George has shown up on my doorstep like he'd just dropped by on the off chance I just might be in. We didn't hear much of each other after the war, after we both turned eighteen—him staying behind in Buxton, intent on raising a family and working his way up to the top of the potash factory, me moving away to Chatham—until, eventually, from the ages of thirty to forty we didn't even share that uncomfortable silence that is owed to those who discover one day that their best friends have turned into strangers. We don't talk about what brought us back into each other's lives, but for eight straight years now we've passed the first Saturday night of every other month sitting together drinking whiskey at my kitchen table, haven't missed a single night yet.

George's tap at the door lifts Henry's head from his chewing, springs him to his feet and peels back his gums, bone time over now and ready to protect his family, or at least die trying. Dogs are never less than exactly what the moment calls for. This more than compensates for them never visiting the World's Fair or believing that they're going to heaven. Dogs are born Buddhists.

As soon as Henry sees George and me shake hands, he's wagging hard and moving in, waiting for his new friend to give him the rubs between the ears that common greeting courtesy demands, but I tell him, “Lie down, Henry, get your bone and lie down.” Puzzled, he pauses, then does what he's told.

“He's a good dog,” George says without looking at him, the same thing he says every time he arrives, and begins to unbutton his overcoat on the way to the kitchen. No former slave keeps a dog. None but me. I keep Henry away from George when he visits, and George acts like it's perfectly
normal to allow a wild animal that's been known to hunt down our ancestors to live in one's home.

George settles his bulk around his chair while I pour out our first drink. I already opened the bottle to help pass the time, but my glass is as clean as his. The best part of drinking is getting drunk; or, if drinking with another, getting drunk together. Drunkenness itself is never as intoxicating as slowly sipping sobriety behind, everything not as it should be gradually dissolving into everything it should, body and soul both exulting with every additional swallow in the inevitable libation liberation.

“You look good,” George says, watching me pour his drink. This is the second thing he always says.

“You don't look too bad yourself,” I answer. “Considering what you've got to work with, I mean.”

George laughs, rubs his fat stomach like Henry wished he'd rubbed his. “Two weeks ago Mary made me go see the doctor on account of how I was a little short of breath whenever I'd climb the stairs at home and how the joints in my knees were aching a little. I told her it was nothing to worry about, I felt just fine otherwise, but she made me go anyway, that's Mary.” George laughs harder now, pats his stomach even more affectionately. “Five dollars later, the doctor said the only thing I was suffering from was too much good living. I said to Mary when I got home, ‘He should have given
me
five dollars, I could have told
him
that.'”

George laughs so loud this time, Henry looks up from his bone, wags his worship at the joyful noise coming from the kitchen. I hand George his whiskey.

George wears every hard-earned badge of well-deserved worldly success there is: a hand-cut, three-piece suit; always-shining shoes, a different pair for every day of the week; a gold pocket watch he'll one day hand down to one of his two sons; and a bulging, nearly perfectly round stomach that serves not
only as a convenient resting place for his folded hands but also as an emblem of everything that his life—and the lives of his wife and their five children—has come to exemplify: accomplishment, satiation, pride. Skinny folks are poor folks are slaves. George, and George's children, will never be poor again.

We sit, sip. The first glass of whiskey is always for tasting, especially when it's whiskey as good as this; after that, alcohol's sundry other pleasures tend to elbow appreciation to the back of the line. We listen to the trees outside creak in the cold; to the wood in the fireplace crackle its warm, dry heat. It's good to grow up poor together. To know that the wall that separates you from the freezing wind is as arbitrary as it is necessary. To know it and not have to say it.

“How's business?” George says.

Business is Sophia's, of course, but since Sophia's is an illegal business, whenever George and I talk, it's just called
business
.

“Good, good. Not bad. You?”

And, as usual, George proceeds to tell me all about all of the expansion they're considering at the factory and all of the new products they're hoping to develop and all of the new markets in Michigan and Ohio and as far away as Kentucky they're hoping to one day reach, and I let him tell me and tell me. Potash and its resultant commercial uses aren't, in and of themselves, enlivening conversation, but a Black-born, Black-owned, Black-run organization full of an everyyear-increasing number of Black men building, expanding,
growing
—I could listen to that all night. A team player? Me? No, never, not even if I wanted to be. But I can still cheer, I can still root for the home side. Can't
but
cheer.

Besides, as good as we both are at not talking about things that talking about can never change anyway, there's one thing neither of us wants to acknowledge that we both know needs
to be said before we can spend the rest of the evening sitting in this house that I own mortgage-free, drinking expensive whiskey that I can easily afford, and feeling pleased with ourselves for how pleasantly our past has turned into our present. Any topic, then, just as long as it's off-topic.

“So they're calling Mr. Brown a Father of Confederation now,” I say.

George leans back in his seat. “Mr. Brown from the board?” George is a Buxton man, usually only comes into Chatham to visit me. George pays his taxes to the Dominion of Canada, but his real country is Elgin.

“One and the same.”

George Brown was not only the publisher of the
Globe
and an editorializing abolitionist and an early, outspoken supporter of the Elgin Settlement, but he, along with two Black businessmen from Toronto and Buffalo—who sent their children to the Buxton school because it was so superior to any coloured schools near where they lived—formed the Canada Mill and Mercantile Company to promote businesses in Elgin. The potash company, for one, was launched with seed money borrowed from them interest-free.

“The only white man on the board of directors,” I say, tending to George's empty glass. I'm behind the bar every night at Sophia's—why would I pay someone else to do what I can do better and for free?—but the first Saturday of every other month, I'm George's personal bartender.

George takes his freshly poured glass of whiskey; looks at it, doesn't drink it. “The only white man except for the Reverend King.”

I finish fixing my drink but don't waste any time staring at the glass. When I set it back down empty, George has turned his attention from his glass to me.

“I didn't ask you why you weren't at the funeral,” he says.

“You didn't have to.”

He holds up his hand like I imagine he does at business meetings when an idea is proffered that he wants to stop in its tracks before it can waste any more valuable time. “That's all . . . your business,” he says.