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  David

  ALSO BY RAY ROBERTSON

  Home Movies

  Heroes

  Moody Food

  Mental Hygiene: Essays on Writers and Writing

  Gently Down the Stream

  What Happened Later

  Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live

  David

  RAY ROBERTSON

  BIBLIOASIS

  Copyright © 2012, Ray Robertson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Robertson, Ray, 1966–

  David / Ray Robertson.

  ISBN 978-1-926845-87-6

  I. Title.

  PS8585.O3219D32013C813'.54C2012-901705-1

  Biblioasis acknowledges the ongoing financial support of the Government of Canada through The Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Heritage, the Canada Book Fund; and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Arts Council.

  Mara Anita Korkola

  Roll on Babe

  If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

  — WILLIAM BLAKE,

  The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  1

  God and whiskey have got me where I am. Too little of the one, too much of the other.

  Aristotle said that the virtuous man is a man of moderation, the kind of man who avoids excess and scarcity in both action and feeling. But then, Aristotle wasn’t born a slave. And Athens, Greece, is a long, long way from Jackson, Louisiana.

  The man who owned my mother and whoever grew in her womb didn’t need to read Aristotle to know that Some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these slavery is both expedient and right. Wouldn’t have disagreed, of course, and probably would have been pleased to be reminded of just one more virtue of procuring a classical education for one’s male offspring. To care for one’s children materially but to neglect their intellectual and spiritual needs would be simply uncivilized.

  Fate or luck—take your pick, both have their backers—meant that the teacher my mother’s master hired to instruct his sons in the wisdom of Western literature was William King, the same man who taught me to read Greek, to recite Virgil, to know the best that has been thought and said.

  Knowledge is power. Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan, 1668.

  I learned that one on my own.

  *

  “One more, David, if you please.”

  I walk the bottle to the other end of the bar; pour out the shot, take the twenty-five cents. No one carries credit at Sophia’s. Even after-hours saloons need rules, even criminals need laws.

  A chill, and everyone looks up, waits to see who’s going to push through the heavy green velvet curtains hanging over the doorless doorway. In the wintertime the cold always calls ahead, whenever Tom at the door upstairs lets someone inside, the freezing air rushing ahead and down the stairs to mingle among the living. Sometimes someone will complain that Sophia’s is like a cave—the low ceiling, the absence of any windows, the fact that we are in the basement of an undertaker’s—especially when, no matter how well the fire is kept, it’s winter and unavoidably damp. But no one ever complains when all the other saloons in town are locked tight for the night and mine is the only one with liquor for sale.

  It’s just Franklin—Franklin who runs the mortuary upstairs—so everyone looks back down. I nod, pour him a whiskey. I’ve known him long enough for my nose to know he’s been working on a body. An undertaker’s hours are never his own.

  “Thank you, David.”

  Franklin drinks his whiskey standing up and sets the shot glass back down on the bar, pulls a wad of bills—this month’s rent—out of his pants pocket. It’s already the sixth, but Franklin’s been my tenant for nearly seven years now and has never missed the rent yet. Besides, we’ve got a side business together and I wouldn’t be partners with any man who didn’t honour his debts.

  I take the money and count it. I know it’s all there, but I count it anyway. Why not? It’s my money to do with what I want. I put the bills in my pocket and rap the bar and pour Franklin another whiskey. I always feel generous on rent day.

  Franklin holds up his hand. “I’m just resting, I’m not done upstairs.” The shot glass is almost half full by the time I stop pouring, but I splash it into the basin behind the bar. I hate to waste good whiskey—or even the stuff I sell at Sophia’s—but even if it was the jug of Wild Turkey I keep locked away in the back, I only drink among friends. Work is for working.

  “I’ve got a rush job, but it ain’t no rush job, if you know what I mean,” Franklin says.

  “A real mess, is it?” Meyers says from the other end of the bar, snorting up some snuff from the back of his hand. Meyers runs the chemist shop over on King Street and fancies himself a man of medicine, a doctor lacking only a degree. What Meyers really is is a glorified dry goods merchant who believes that if he gets a new suit made for himself every year from Savile Row, then he qualifies as an honorary English gentleman. But he’s a regular. And people don’t come to Sophia’s to be what they are. They can get that at home.

  “Nah, just old age, I guess. All things considered, looks as fit as you or me or David.”

  Some people believe that formaldehyde is a miracle cure, can erase the torture of six months of TB or straighten out a broken neck. Formaldehyde just buys time. Some undertakers have started to offer grooming and cleaning services for the deceased, but I advised Franklin to forget it—who would pay a stranger to be the last person on earth to care for their loved one? Besides, Franklin can barely groom himself, and the same goes but double for his personal hygiene.

  “His people want him preserved because there’s lots of folks out there who want to pay their respects, I guess,” he says. “But them coloured boys that brought him in, they let it be known in no uncertain terms that he was to be returned to them looking in the exact same condition as when he arrived. Didn’t even go back to Buxton to wait, said they was gonna wait right out front until I was finished.”

  I set down the glass I’m drying. “Who is it?” I say.

  “Who is what?”

  I force myself to take a deep breath before I answer. One tends to do that a lot when talking to Franklin. “Who is it that the coloured men are waiting on?”

  “The Reverend King,” Franklin says. “The Reverend King, he died tonight.”

  I pick the same glass back up. It’s already clean, but I wipe it again anyway.

  “Well, I better get back at it, not unless I want them coloured boys upset with me.” Although he’s only going to be outside long enough to walk around to the front of the building, Franklin pulls his cap back on. Elbow on the bar, leaning my way, “A little too high-profile to be a candidate for us,” he whispers, winks.

  I watch Franklin disappear back through the curtain. I pick Meyers’ shot glass up off the bar and toss out what’s left into the basin. Everyone can feel the creeping chill of the door opening upstairs.

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t quite d
one with that, Old Boy,” Meyers says, pushing his glasses up his nose. Whenever Meyers attempts to make a point, he pushes his glasses up his nose.

  “Yes, you were,” I say. “And so is everyone else.” It’s early for an after-hours saloon, I’ve only got four other patrons—three men in one corner playing cards and, in the other, Thompson sitting by himself as usual, with his opened notebook on the table in front of him for company—but I raise my voice anyway. “That’s it, I’m closing.”

  “But it’s”—Meyers pulls his watch out of his vest pocket—“it’s not quite even eleven.”

  “I don’t need you or anyone else to tell me what time it is, Meyers. And what time it is is time for you to go home—all of you.” I stare Meyers into his hat and coat. The men in the corner finish their drinks standing up, slip into their coats and hats. Even Thompson, whose company I usually have time for and whom I sometimes let nurse a final whiskey while I tally up the till, knows it’s time to leave.

  As soon as the men and Meyers and Thompson have left, I hear Tom limping down the stairs. Tom’s worked the door for me almost from the beginning, since I opened Sophia’s back in the summer of ’87, during prohibition, but he still parts the curtains when he comes inside like he might be in the wrong place, isn’t sure he isn’t somewhere he’s not supposed to be. I was only born a slave; Tom was a slave, came to the Elgin Settlement in ’52 after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, when it became not only allowable but legally compulsory to assist in the return to his Southern master of any escaped slave living in the free states. Some people continued calling them the free states even after that. Some other people didn’t.

  “Early night tonight, Boss,” Tom says.

  “Early night,” I say.

  I peel a five-dollar bill from the roll in my pocket and slide it across the bar. Tom looks at it, then at me, like a smart bear at a trap.

  “Take it,” I say.

  This time Tom looks just at me. “Everything all right, Boss?”

  “Everything is just fine.”

  Tom keeps looking at me. If he was a white man, I would ask him what he thought he was staring at.

  “You know the Reverend King died today,” I say.

  “I do.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Don’t recall, Boss. Everybody knows. Is all anybody talkin’ about.”

  I nod. “You’ll be going to Buxton tomorrow to pay your respects,” I say.

  “I will.”

  I pick up the bill and hold it out to him. “Then get yourself cleaned up at the baths.”

  “Don’t cost five dollars to get cleaned up at no baths in this town.”

  “Take it anyway,” I say, shaking the bill like autumn’s last, barely hanging leaf. “And it wouldn’t kill you to buy a new shirt.”

  This time Tom accepts the money, more for my sake than for his. “If you say so, Boss.”

  I walk Tom upstairs, want to lock the door behind him. I won’t be going home tonight.

  Tom takes his coat down from the nail over the stool he sits on every night, turns down his lantern until it flickers the stairwell black. We both step outside. The stars in the sky a thousand August suns. I shut my eyes and see an explosion of silver, listen to Tom start down the frozen walkway. Before he gets too far:

  “An important man died today, Tom.”

  Tom limps to a stop but doesn’t turn around. He’s waiting for me to say something else.

  “Good night, Tom,” I say.

  “Good night, Boss.”

  *

  You could never plan it out the way it happens. Too complicated, too many twists and turns to culminate simply in the circumstances of one human life. But no one’s life is ever simple. Only seems that way when it’s your own.

  An Irish-born, Glasgow-educated, American-immigrated man marries the daughter of a Louisianan plantation owner while teaching at a private school for the sons of wealthy planters. Unable to live with himself for being the owner of the four slaves his wife brought into their marriage, he soon emigrates again, this time with his wife and two infant children, and enrolls as a theology student at the University of Edinburgh. The son dies on the journey there, the daughter and wife two years later, the same year the man is ordained a minister of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland and selected to do missionary work in Canada West. While working among the Black refugees in the area, the man formulates his idea of founding a self-sustaining Black settlement where former slaves will be free not just in form but in function—education, religious instruction, and economic self-determination the practical prescription for both spiritual and material self-elevation and lasting emancipation, a City of God on earth. But before the man can put his plan into action, his father-in-law dies, leaving him fourteen slaves as his personal property. The man returns to Jackson, Louisiana, with the intention of travelling with his human inheritance to his parents’ and brothers’ farm in Ohio, where he will legally set them free but also offer them the opportunity to spend the winter on the farm, going to school and learning about northern farming, before joining him in Canada to live as truly free men and women on the proposed settlement.

  Before the fourteen soon-to-be ex-slaves and the man can board the steamboat he’d booked north, however, one of the fourteen pleads with the man to buy back her only child—recently sold to a neighbouring plantation—so that mother and son can be reunited and the boy can accompany them to freedom. This the man does, for the sum of $150.

  The woman is so thankful—not only that her only offspring is to be free but that they are to live together again as mother and child—she gives her son the man’s last name as his own, a tribute to the white man’s remarkable beneficence.

  The boy born a slave had been known as simply David. The boy reborn a free man became David King.

  *

  After I’ve counted and recorded and put away the evening’s take into the safe, I decide to go home after all. Sometimes owning your own bar isn’t a good thing. All the liquor you can drink and no human voice or face to say you shouldn’t try. In my case, Loretta’s voice and face.

  “Henry, let’s go,” I say, slapping my thigh twice to let him know I mean it, and Henry pushes open the door to the backroom with his nose and trots beside me up the stairs, overtaking me as usual by the time we get to the top. Ordinarily, the spin of the safe’s lock after I’ve deposited the money inside and shut its door is his cue to come out of the back, where he sleeps during business hours, and sit and wait by the bottom of the stairs—the spin, a walk, home, then bed—but tonight he’s thrown off by the early hour. Me, too.

  Especially if it’s winter, the only sounds we’re likely to hear on the walk home are ourselves: the crunch of freshly fallen snow under my shoes; the sniffing of Henry’s snout; the hot hiss of urine whenever he lifts his leg. I know I’ve made a mistake in taking our usual route home along King Street as soon as we pass the Rankin Hotel. The Rankin advertises itself as one of the finest hotels in Canada, with fifty-five different dishes on its menu, including lamb chops and buffalo tongue, but the people laughing and shouting and climbing into their carriages out front aren’t after anything different than the people who come into Sophia’s every night. Oblivion is oblivion. The only difference is the hours of operation and the overpriced food I don’t serve.

  Pascal said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he doesn’t know how to stay quietly in his room. The last time I saw the Reverend King, I had a copy of Pascal’s Pensées underneath my arm and the smell of whiskey on my breath. Mrs. King had been ill—not with the illness that had cost her her mind, but the illness that would eventually kill her, an illness of the lungs that made it almost impossible for her to breathe, like she was drowning in her own body—and I’d been coming back to the Settlement every couple days for the first time since I’d left for good twenty-two years earlier, after the War Between the States was over, the year I turned eighteen.

  Of course he knew I’d been visi
ting Mrs. King, sitting beside her bed, reading to her for hours even if she couldn’t hear me. Nothing happened at the Settlement that the Reverend King didn’t know about. When I was a boy, I believed that not only did he know everything that I’d done and was doing, but everything that I was going to do, even if I didn’t. But that was when I believed that God’s eyes were everywhere. Back then I would have believed that Mrs. King’s moans were somehow all a part of His divine plan. Back then I did believe that the man who raped my mother, her master, wasn’t my real father, that my real father was waiting for me in heaven.

  The Reverend King looked as surprised as I felt as I exited Mrs. King’s bedroom. Someone must have told him I’d left already. Someone had been wrong.

  “David,” he said, nodding but not stopping.

  “Reverend King,” I said, doing the same.

  It wasn’t until I was outside and getting on my horse and went to put on my hat that I realized I’d taken it off when I’d passed him in the doorway. I had sworn to myself that I would never do that again. Halfway back to Chatham, I’d almost convinced myself that the tears I was crying were all for Mrs. King.

  *

  As soon as Henry sets paw inside the house, he tears upstairs; before I’ve had time to light the lamp in the library, he’s scouring the main floor, including the pantry, the door of which he pries open with his nose. Nothing. Not much chance that Loretta would have been in there waiting for us to come home anyway, but dogs don’t like secrets, not even closed doors.

  I leave the fire alone. If Loretta was here, I’d have to add another log—Loretta can never be warm enough—but when it’s just Henry and me I keep the house cool, the temperature outside one’s head an honest thermometer of what’s going on inside. Imagine Socrates on a clear Athens morning in the fresh open air of the agora, busily corrupting the city’s youth in the art of being virtuous. Then think of the thousands of slithering gods and goddesses of India hatched from the steaming brains of overheated believing millions. People or places, weather is soul.