David (7 page)

“That's right, it is.”

“And you know I've never made it mine.”

I watch Henry lying in front of the fireplace getting serious with his bone, a paw slung over one of its gnawed ends to better keep it in place while he chews and chews his way to nothing. I don't have any choice but to nod.

“And I don't see any reason to make it mine now.”

“Good,” I say, picking up my glass.

“But I'll tell you this, too—I don't think we should let this night go by without at least toasting him, David. I don't think that would be right.”

I look back at Henry.

“We don't even have to say anything, not out loud, anyway. Just raise our glasses and each of us can think whatever he wants to think and that'll be that.” George lifts his drink, holds it in the air experimentally, like a man sticking his wet finger in the breeze to determine which way the wind is blowing.

I clink my glass to his, hear the telltale ping of a genuine crystal-to-crystal kiss, and that's that, it's just George and me again.

“Good,” he says, massaging his stomach clockwise then counterclockwise, already laughing at what he's going to say next, as if it's so damn funny he just can't wait until it's out of his mouth to start snickering. “Now how about some of that music you were talking about last time I was here, music that comes out of a
machine
?”

I get up and go to the other room and can't help almost laughing myself, although I don't have a clue why, which only serves to make me laugh for real, which naturally sets George
really roaring. Placing the arm of the gramophone on the record already in place, I realize why I'm laughing: I'm laughing because whenever I'm with George, we laugh.

The needle digs out the sounds buried deep in the grooves of the thick black shellac, a minor musical miracle that even Mrs. King, the person who taught me how to listen, never would have believed possible. Mrs. Reverend William King.

Some dead men simply refuse to stay dead.

Once, while Mrs. King was playing the piano, I was watching when I should have been listening.

It wasn't as if ordinarily she had to persuade me to pay attention. From the first time I'd been present when she played—leaning up against the ledge of her bedroom window while the music passed from her fingers to the piano to the air to my ears—I was compelled to listen. We always sang in church, and sometimes either George or I would start up a song when we'd be roaming alone in the woods, usually something we'd picked up from one of the older settlers, an old plantation song that didn't, mercifully, make much sense to us word-wise but which still felt good on our tongues and, somehow, even in our souls.

All those punctuating
O, yeah!
s were particularly stirring to sing, especially when you had someone else to shout them out with.

The music Mrs. King made was different, yet wasn't. Vocal-less, yes, and no tick-tocky rhythms to root you to the beat, but beneath the ostensibly tumultuous surface, bubbling
up just underneath the ever-eddying notes, the same sounds of anguish and longing and even occasional jagged stabs of anger that characterized the slave songs. It was as if one rang out with the raw call for liberation while the other sang the sound of freedom finally achieved and Oh my God, now what?

Like that very first time, Mrs. King had simply sat down at the piano and begun playing. I'd been her only audience for long enough now to know it was her favourite, Schumann's Symphony no. 4 in D Minor, op. 120. She never tired of it, and neither did I. It was like Heraclitus's river: every time you stepped into it, you heard something different.

I liked to listen to Mrs. King play the piano while looking out the window, the view of the garden—whether tucked away under cold winter white or, as it was that day, bursting green throughout the hot, humid summer—a convenient place to set aside your eyes awhile so as to allow your ears temporary dominion over the rest of your senses. I must have been listening for fifteen minutes when it occurred to me that the bird I'd been watching hadn't moved, not once, the entire time. How she knew I was paying more attention to the bird than the Schumann, I don't know, but suddenly the room was quiet. I felt embarrassed that I was the one who'd made the music stop.

“What is it?” Mrs. King said, hurrying, for her, to the window. “What's out there?” She squatted down beside me, less, it seemed, better to see what I was seeing than to keep whatever it was that was out there from seeing her.

Now I felt doubly ashamed, having managed to terrify an already emotionally fragile woman as well.

“It's just a bird,” I said.

Still in her squat, Mrs. King inched closer to the window. It was as if she hadn't heard me or had decided she couldn't trust a mere child with detecting impending danger.

“It's just a bird,” I repeated, pointing it out for her. “But I think it's sick, it hasn't moved in a long, long time.”

Instead of being relieved, Mrs. King seemed even more upset; stood, finally, but began rubbing her hands, gaze fixed now on the bird.

“A sick bird,” she said. “A sick bird, today, of all days. Today, of all days, a sick bird.” She kept rubbing her hands, kept rubbing them so hard that they began to chafe red.

“It might not be sick,” I said. “Maybe it just . . . doesn't feel like flying right now.” Did birds ever grow tired of flying? I wondered. I hoped so.

“You have to go outside and see if it's all right,” she said.

I was willing—anything to help Mrs. King calm down—but wasn't sure what I was supposed to do. Maybe when I approached it, it would fly away and everything would be like it was before.

“Did you hear me?” Mrs. King said. She grabbed me by my shirt and shook me. “You have to go outside this instant and see if it's all right. Now do as you're told, David. This insolence is unacceptable. Such insolence. And today, of all days.”

I closed Mrs. King's bedroom door behind me and let myself outside through the back door connected to the kitchen. There was no one in the house but us—my mother was at the butcher's—and for a moment I considered simply going home and even telling my mother when she returned what Mrs. King had said and done. But I knew it hadn't been really her—not the real her—who'd shaken me. Plus, my mother didn't like me going into Mrs. King's room without her as it was, and if she ever discovered how she'd acted, I'd never be able to hear her play the piano again.

I knew the bird was dying as soon as I was close enough to pick it up. It wasn't that it didn't startle at my approach; it didn't even move its tiny black eyes, just kept staring straight
ahead like it was terrified of something it was impossible to look away from. Although it was only a bird, only a common grey chickadee, it had the same look that George's father's horse Missy had had just before she died the summer previous, her body pulled in tight to itself like she was attempting to keep herself from freezing, her eyes dull and faraway, her eyes not Missy's anymore.

“Pick it up,” Mrs. King said through the upstairs window. “Show the poor thing it has nothing to fear.”

I knew there was no point. Besides, who knew what it was dying of? I didn't want a dying bird that close to my skin. But I did what she asked anyway. I didn't want anyone else to hear her.

I picked it up with two pinched fingers and placed it as gently as possible in the palm of my other hand. The bird felt like nothing, like it was already the decay of feathers and paper-thin bones it was soon going to become.

“Well?” Mrs. King shouted. “What is it doing? Tell me what it's doing.”

I saw Mr. Gordon, the man who sold butter and milk, talking to old lady Hampton, who lived directly behind the Kings. I didn't think they could hear us, but I didn't want to find out.

“It's starting to chirp,” I lied. Mrs. King was high enough up, she couldn't tell if it was or it wasn't.

“That's good!” she said.

I saw Mr. Gordon place a hand over his eyes and look in our direction.

“I think it was just scared,” I said. “It seems better now.”

“A cat,” Mrs. King said.

“That's probably it. It probably just got scared by a cat and was afraid to move.”

“But now it knows it's safe.”

“I think you're right. It's really chirping now.”

“I can hear it!” Mrs. King said.

“I think I'll take it home with me, just in case that cat is still around.”

“I can hear it! I can hear it now! It's just so happy it's been saved, the poor thing can't stop.”

“I better go now, Mrs. King.”

“Good heavens, David, have you ever heard such a chirping before in all of your life?”

*

Gerald Dawson isn't an ideal corpse. Loretta prefers her subjects family-groomed and feted, part of the appeal of the pictures she takes and collects being capturing how the left-behind living best see fit to send the dearly departed off to their appointment with eternity. On orders of the bill payer, though—Dawson's brother—Franklin collected the deceased's one and only suit hanging in the closet of the room he kept on William Street and personally made the changeover from the work clothes he'd died in, skipping over the optional shave, hair care, and general cleanup. Where Gerald Dawson is headed to next, no one cares what he looks like, at least not on the outside. Loretta pulls her camera out of its black casing and begins to set up anyway. You play the corpse you're dealt.

“This plastic flower in the top button, it is not necessary?”

“No,” I say, and pluck out Franklin's attempt at demonstrating that, although body snatchers, we're not entirely heartless. There's no one left to lie to—Franklin and the body both are off to the medical school within the hour—but good liars don't get that way by deciding beforehand whom to deceive.

It doesn't take Loretta long to get ready. In just the eight years or so that I've known her, her tool of trade has metamorphosed from a hulking, glass-plated daguerreotype machine to the seven-inch by about four-inch camera she's been using recently, with a spool inside long enough to hold one hundred exposures. And when the roll is finished, all she has to do is mail it off to the Kodak factory in Rochester, New York, for development, no more having to float each shot individually in a bath of silver nitrate. The camera is expensive, twenty-five dollars, and at ten dollars a turn the reloading fee is dear too, but the ease and efficiency are worth it. Besides, even at triple that, at quadruple that, Loretta can afford it.

“Now, please leave me alone, yes?” she says, and before I can step out of the room, she's snapping away. I don't go far, lean against the wall just outside the door, cross my arms and shut my eyes for a moment while waiting for her to be finished so that, as soon as Franklin arrives, he can load up the body and be on the road to London.

Loretta demands complete silence while she works but, because of the new Kodak, no more than ten minutes in total to get the job done. It wasn't so click-click quick in the beginning. It helped, though, that one of her newest clients provided her with easy access to a steady supply of fresh subjects, even if I didn't understand what she wanted them for.

“But don't the people who pay you—don't they . . . I mean, isn't it their family members whose pictures you're taking?”

“Who is it that says I am being paid?”

“No one, but . . . but why else would you do it?”

Before the daguerreotype machine gave way to the camera, a post-mortem keepsake was out of the question for most people, was very expensive not only because of the cost of the process but because the photographer had to come to his
subject. Of course, why anyone would want such a morbid memento had always been beyond me.

“I do it because I enjoy it, yes?”

“You enjoy taking pictures of dead people. Dead people you don't even know.”

“That is part of it. I also enjoy afterward looking at the pictures.” She didn't wait for me to ask the obvious next question. “I enjoy looking at the faces of the dead,” she said. “They are so much more honest than those of the living.”

Anyway, intercourse in exchange for corpses, life paid for in full with death. Loretta's and mine was a match made in alchemy, if not quite in heaven. Even then, it took a few visits to Dresden before carnality became part of our covenant. At first I paid Loretta in cash, and only to read to me—Schopenhauer, Goethe, Fichte, all in their own impenetrable Teutonic tongue—because the only topic I could remember Mrs. King broaching more than once was the trip she spoke of wanting to take to Vienna, home of all of her favourite composers. And if the chances of Mrs. King making it there someday were slim before, they were a whole lot slimmer now that she'd been planted in the ground. Some people might have said that frequenting a whorehouse wasn't the best way of honouring the recently deceased, but Loretta wouldn't have been among them. Even if she had known why I'd come to knock on the door of our usual upstairs room more and more.

“In allem was unser Wohl und Wehe betrifft, sollen wir die Phantasie im Zügel halten: also zuvörderst keine Luftschlösser bauen; weil diese zu kostspieleg sind, indem wir gleich darauf sie unter Seufzern wieder einzureißen haben.
Primum vivere, deinde philosophari.
”

I looked up from the fire. “Only the German. Only read the German, please.”

Loretta set the book down on her knee, slipped a double-ringed finger inside to mark the page. “But it is here, these is the author's words.”

“
Are
the author's words.”

“
Are
the author's words. Because more than one. Of course.”