David Read online

  “I am from Rocken,” she said. “It is in the province of Saxony. Rocken, it is farming town, there is no reason for you to know it even if you did know Prussia. For anyone to know it.”

  A farming town, I was right. “And why did you come here?” I immediately regretted my words. “Here to Canada West, I mean.” Canada had been its own country for nearly twenty years by then, but I still hadn’t gotten used to calling it by its new name.

  “Someone I knew from Rocken I come here with two years ago.”

  “Does she live in Dresden too?”

  “Him. In America, perhaps, the last time I saw him. If he has not returned to Rocken by now. A very weak man this man was.”

  “But still your friend.”

  “Never my friend—the father of my baby.”

  “Oh.” I tipped my drink, hid my eyes in my glass.

  “And so you do not have to ask, the baby, he die coming here from Halifax, after we come from Rocken.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She recrossed her legs and tilted her head a little to one side, as if registering a previously undetected physical deformity on my face. “But this is surely not the thing to say?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean, how can you be sorry for something you have nothing to do with, obviously.”

  “Had nothing to do with,” I said before I knew I was saying it. Ten years of Latin grammar lasts a lifetime.

  The girl sat silent for a moment. Eventually: “Had nothing to do with.” The way she repeated it made you believe she would never use the wrong verb tense again.

  “It’s just an expression,” I said. “A way to show someone sympathy.”

  “But it is not true.”

  “No, it’s not true.”

  “No.”

  She got up from her chair and picked up the first item of clothing on top of the pile beside the fire; stepped into her dress and made her long legs disappear, a cruel magician, sad magic. Now I was back where we’d started, me disappointed at myself for being disappointed. I lifted my glass, but it was empty.

  Hand on her hip, head tilted again: “You are disappointed my clothes are going back on,” she said. And smiled, if only a little, more amused than actually pleased.

  “No, I was just . . .” I raised my glass. “I didn’t know I was out of whiskey.”

  “I see,” she said, the corners of her mouth journeying a little higher this time, her chestnut brown eyes smiling along for the ride.

  I swung my boots over the side of the bed, stood and stuck out my hand. “My name is David,” I said.

  “Hello, David. My name, it is Loretta.”

  *

  “I think we have a candidate.”

  “Have a drink, Franklin.”

  Franklin’s idea of discretion is to wink at you when he says something too loud in the company of people who shouldn’t be hearing what he’s saying.

  “I’m not thirsty.” A promising candidate can do what little else can, make Franklin decline an offer of free whiskey.

  “Have one anyway,” I say, making it clear—clear enough even for Franklin—by the way I look only at him when I pour his drink that magnanimity isn’t the source of my suggestion.

  Cluing in, “Well, I suppose I wouldn’t mind wetting my whistle just a little bit,” he says, taking up his glass, although not before letting me know he knows what’s going on with a long, lazy wink.

  I walk to the other end of the bar. “The devil’s boots don’t creak,” the Reverend King used to say, but even proverbs can’t be right all of the time.

  I part the curtain at the bottom of the stairs, call out for Tom.

  “Yes, Boss?”

  “Watch the bar for me for a few minutes, will you, Tom?”

  “Sure thing, Boss.”

  I wait for Tom to limp downstairs. It hadn’t been enough for his last master to have him whipped when he was caught attempting to run away again, he’d personally broken both of his knees with a sledgehammer, the loss of an able-bodied slave easily worth the valuable lesson it would impart to all his other slaves about what happens to itchy-footed, uppity niggers.

  “And tell Franklin to wait five minutes and then to meet me upstairs.”

  “Sure, Boss.”

  “And remember, no credit, I don’t care who’s asking.”

  “Never have yet, Boss.”

  I bow my head to the sideways-blowing snow and walk around to the side of the building, am letting myself in with my own key when Franklin is suddenly at my side with his.

  “Here, I’ve got my key, David,” he says, pushing his way past me.

  I leave mine lodged in the lock. “Franklin, you can clearly see I’ve already got my key in the door. Why would I need to use your key?”

  Franklin stares at the key in his hand like he’s waiting for it to tell him the answer to my question. Putting it away, “Well, you’ve got yours out already, we might as well use it.”

  “And didn’t Tom tell you to wait five minutes before you left?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And it clearly hasn’t been five minutes. There was a reason I wanted it to seem like you weren’t following me out the door.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I inhale, I exhale, I watch the freezing air transform my breath into what it wants. “Am I sure of what, Franklin?”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t five minutes? I’d swear I waited five minutes. Just like Tom told me you told him to tell me to do.”

  I give up and unlock the door. He probably did think he’d waited long enough, time as illusory to Franklin when there’s money to be made on the quick turnaround of a fresh corpse as it is to a child suffering the torture of a neverending night before Christmas. Without saying a word, we both head for the arrivals room. We’ve done this before, we know why we’re here.

  A little over a year after it became law, prohibition was repealed, so I became overseer of an after-hours saloon, not nearly as lucrative a job as my previous vocation as all-hours illegal liquor supplier, but better, anyway, than being a mere law-abiding publican. By this time I’d met Loretta and was already having a house built on some land I’d purchased on Park Street and wondering what to do with Sophia’s soon-to-be-vacated upstairs. Then Franklin—a weasel-faced little man with a plump cherry red wart in the middle of his right cheek—showed up at Sophia’s one night asking for whiskey. By the time of his third free drink I asked him if he wanted a job. By the look of him, I knew he needed one.

  “I’m thinking of opening a funeral parlour,” I said. “I’m looking for a mortician.”

  Franklin scratched his head, not entirely because he was thinking.

  “Undertaker,” I said, refilling his glass.

  “I don’t know anything about being an undertaker.”

  “That’s not important.”

  “I mean, all I know about corpses is that they’re dead.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  When I moved into my new house nine months later, Franklin moved in upstairs as undertaker and tenant, and it wasn’t long before I was making more money than I had before liquor was legal again.

  Franklin ignores the naked body lying on the table and picks up his ledger, flips through a couple of pages until he finds the one he’s looking for.

  “Gerald Dawson, labourer, fifty-two, only living family member a brother who lives up near Kingston—he’s the one who’s paying, already paid up in full, by post—heart attack, Doc thinks, organs and all the rest of him just fine and dandy.” Franklin looks up from the accumulated facts of the life and, now, death of Gerald Dawson; looks at me like a dog waiting for permission to eat the treat balanced on the end of his nose.

  “Pine, oak, or lead?” I say.

  “Pine.”

  I nod. A pine coffin is the cheapest Franklin sells, which means that the family isn’t overly concerned with their l
oved one’s material afterlife, which is good news for us. Lead coffins are more expensive because they’re most effective at holding off the worms. A guaranteed five hundred years of undisturbed sleep, Franklin tells them. No one ever asks what happens after that.

  “No funeral?” I say.

  “Nope.”

  “And the doctor’s all done with him?”

  Franklin flips again, holds up the form he’s after. “Signed, sealed, and delivered.”

  The call is mine to make, we both know it, so I give Gerald Dawson, labourer, fifty-two, a silent, head-to-toe once-over to make the decision feel official. There’s not much to see, to say.

  Sad, yes, but not because he’s dead—I’ve seen too many corpses in my time to be moved to melancholy by looking at one more—but because of how he probably lived. Although over fifty, and silver and thinning on top where he isn’t balding, his biceps and forearms are still sinewy strong, none of that old-man flesh turkey-necking from the bone, the long, blue, healthy veins rivering up each forearm nature’s sole reward for likely decades of day-after-day, soul-starving drudgery. And now, his heart exploded, his labour’s still not done; he’s going back to work one more time, no resting in peace for you quite yet, Gerald Dawson. The working class are history’s niggers.

  “Okay, let London know we’ve got a delivery for them.”

  “Right, good, right,” Franklin says, already spending, I can tell, his cut of our usual twenty-five-dollar payment plus the cost of delivery. I wouldn’t be surprised if he hasn’t got the cable already written and ready to send.

  “And don’t skimp on the sandbags,” I say. “I want that casket filled up pound for pound.”

  “Sure, David.”

  “Which means weighing him and the bags.”

  “Sure, sure, of course.”

  I let myself out, let Franklin get on with his work so that the medical students in London will be able to get on with theirs, so that we’ll be able to get paid. Officially, indigents and condemned murderers satisfy the demand for bodies in university anatomy classes, but the dean of any medical school will tell you that, unfortunately, there just aren’t enough poor people and convicted killers around these days. Ergo, Franklin and I, supply and demand, laissez-faire economics, study your Adam Smith.

  When I was a young man, when finding bodies meant doing it the old-fashioned way—at night, by moonlight, with a shovel and a pick—it was easier to believe that Lucretius was right, that The greatest wealth is to live content with little, for there is never want where the mind is satisfied.

  But a satisfied mind isn’t easy to achieve when you’re walking around with shackled feet. Later on, I found what I was looking for in Voltaire. Books, gods, people—if you’re lucky, you find the right ones at the right time.

  Liberty is power, Voltaire said.

  But don’t take his or my word for it. Just ask Gerald Dawson.

  3

  Sometimes it seemed as if I was the only person in Buxton who didn’t embrace July and August’s back-to-back blasts of broil as a long-lost, much-missed friend, the summer sun so hot, the still air so sticky thick, the flicker of a single fly’s wings almost cooling relief. I may have been born in Louisiana, but the air I breathed from my second year onward blew a thousand miles north. For two entire months and parts of two others on either side, my mother, George, his father—everyone, one way or another, who followed the North Star to Canada—savoured the damp of their clothes and the sweat on their faces as some sort of seasonal blessing.

  Of course, I wasn’t the only person who suffered the heat and humidity, just the only dark-skinned one. Summertime found the Reverend King’s brow as dotted with wet as mine, my mother dutifully struggling at the washbasin to supply him daily with a clean white collar. But the Reverend King was always too busy to be bothered by anything as trivial as the weather. The original settlers liked to tell the story of how, that difficult first winter, chopping down trees and burning their stumps and boiling the smelly black ash, the Reverend King worked as hard and as long as anyone, how he once called out during an outdoor supper break when they were one plate short, “Give me a wood chip. I can eat off a wood chip as well as off any plate of china.”

  It was the heat that made Mrs. King and me allies.

  Mrs. King’s bedroom wasn’t officially off limits; to have forbidden entry to it would have meant admitting something inside was wrong. Instead, it was simply understood that Mrs. King needed her rest, was busy embroidering or practising the piano, wasn’t feeling well and shouldn’t be disturbed. But I wasn’t anyone who had to be put off anything, I was just David, the housekeeper’s little boy.

  I was eight years old when Mrs. King gave birth to her stillborn child. Until then, she played the piano at services at St. Andrew’s Church but was otherwise seldom seen around the Settlement, and when she was, she walked with lowered eyes and a thin-lipped, nervous smile and with her arm tightly entwined in the Reverend King’s like she was afraid, if she let go, she’d lift off and disappear like a lost balloon. Everyone had high hopes when it was announced she was pregnant, no one more so than my mother.

  “She have her baby, she be fine, you see. A woman without a child never be happy, never. All she need to do is have her baby to look after and she be fine, keep her mind off her own self.”

  And everyone was just as pleased for the Reverend King, who had already lost a wife and two infant children so early on in his own life.

  “God is using the Reverend King to teach us all a lesson,” my mother said. “Such a good man don’t deserve all the family hardships he have to endure so far, and him being so young. But God gonna reward his patience now, gonna give him a new baby child, a son to grow up to be just like him, too, I bet, you see.”

  Actually, my mother did see, was one of the few people besides Mrs. Abbott, the midwife, to view the little lifeless body that passed through Mrs. King into the unwelcoming world. I overheard my mother tell Mr. Johnson, when he came to deliver the Kings’ firewood the next day, “It want no sickly child, either, not like most that die before they’s born. Was a good weight and had all its ten fingers and toes. It like the Good Lord, He wanted that child to be born just so as not to live. And I was right, too, it was a boy, just like I told everyone it would be.”

  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 returnin
g 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.