David Read online

  “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.”

  Aside from the dollar I paid her, I threw in the occasional English lesson free of charge.

  “But these are the author’s words,” she said. “It is Latin, yes?”

  “Yes.” I grabbed the whiskey from the side table and inched up my drink. I’d taken to lying lengthwise on the bed while Loretta read from the chair by the fire. I held up the bottle. “May I?” Our relationship was still essentially that of buyer-seller, but lately she’d come to share a drink or two with me over the course of our hour together. The whiskey never affected her reading or anything else she did. I didn’t like people who couldn’t hold their liquor any more than I did people who didn’t drink. That didn’t leave a lot of room to like too many people.

  “The way I read the Latin, it does not please you?” She upended what was left of her drink and came and stood beside the bed, stuck out her glass.

  I poured her her whiskey. “You read it fine. Just only read the German from now on, that’s all. That’s what you’re getting paid for.” I hadn’t wanted to remind either of us why we were really there, but money—who’s paying it, who’s getting it—stops any conversation you really don’t want to have. Ordinarily.

  “No.”

  “No? What do you mean, no?”

  “I mean, until I understand why one language you do not understand is better than another language you do not understand, I stop reading.” She stayed standing where she was; sipped, looked at me over the lip of her drink. I knew she wasn’t bluffing. This was a woman, I could tell, who wasn’t the bluffing type.

  “‘First one must live, then one may philosophize.’”

  “I beg pardon?” she said.

  “‘First one must live, then one may philosophize.’ That’s what the Latin you read means in English. Approximately.”

  She sat down beside me on the bed without asking. Considering what she could have been doing on it to earn her dollar, I suppose she didn’t need to. “You know how to read?” she said. “And Latin? You read Latin too? I must say, I am much surprised.”

  “Surprised because I’m a nigger, you mean,” I said, resplashing my glass.

  “Of course not.”

  “Of course not,” I snorted. “Why ‘Of course not’?”

&nbs
p; “Because you ask me to read to you.”

  “So?”

  “So, why else would you ask me? Of course I think it is because you cannot read. It is only what makes sense, yes?”

  I hung a smug smile on my face and nodded into my glass like I knew something she didn’t. Because I actually didn’t, kept smugging and nodding until I could think of something I did. Before that had time to happen, though:

  “My father, he knew Latin like you, too,” she said. “A minister, you see. Part of his job.”

  “Your father was a minister?”

  “I am sorry, you do not understand English either? I thought it was just German you need my help with.”

  I could feel my face stretching into a smile in spite of myself. I poured some more whiskey into her glass. “I suppose I was just surprised to learn that you don’t know Latin,” I said. “What with your father being a minister, I mean. It would seem to come with the territory. Was it because you were a girl?”

  She stood up and walked to the fire and warmed an open-palmed hand; switched the hand her glass was in and warmed the other hand the same way. “Oh, no. It was not because he did not try that I do not know. Believe me, he try.”

  I knew I didn’t have to ask, knew that if I waited long enough, she’d tell me what I wanted to know. Finally, still facing the fire:

  “But I try harder,” she said.

  I thought I hadn’t heard her right. “Sorry? You tried harder at what?”

  She turned around, the glass in her hand empty again. She took the bottle from me this time and refilled her drink and handed it back without bothering to do the same with mine. Toasting herself, “I tried harder not to learn,” she said.

  *

  The first time I saw Loretta naked, I thought: You could crack an egg on that stomach, you could fry it on that ass. I’d known from the beginning she wasn’t what most men would consider beautiful—it was as if nature had gotten tired three-quarters of the way through the job, couldn’t be bothered to make the final effort to mould her nose just a little less wide, to place her eyes just a little farther apart—but until I saw her naked, and what she did with her nakedness, I didn’t know that what I had imagined made a woman beautiful, didn’t. An expertly painted face or a perfectly formed nose or a tantalizingly shaped figure seemed, seeing Loretta readily release herself from the bondage of her clothing and move toward me already lying in bed, simplistic at best, embarrassingly puerile at worst. Climbing atop me, sticking me inside her, unthinkingly moving every muscle in unison to help create the perfect friction for the long final shudder she was after, I found myself being fucked for the first time. I had always thought that was what men did.

  I was never a customer—I never once paid for her body, only her translating tongue—so what other men saw and felt when they were in bed with her, I don’t know. What I saw was honest desire and healthy greed, the same unmistakable satisfaction I later came to expect when watching her cut into a thick, greasy pork chop or when she snuggles down deep for the night underneath the small mountain of blankets she likes to pile high on top of our bed when it’s particularly cold. Loretta’s flesh told you precisely what her soul was thinking. Loretta’s flesh was her soul. Loretta solved the mind–body problem for me once and for all, and she didn’t need René Descartes or any other long-winded bore to help her do it.

  Finished, then waiting for me to finish, then climbing back off me like a satisfied rider after trying out a new horse, Loretta walked away from me to where she’d left her discarded clothes. She bent over to pick up a stocking and didn’t attempt to disguise the fact she had an asshole. I’d never witnessed anything so honest, ever. I felt myself getting hard again and went to her.

  Later, Loretta on my mind led straight to Mr. Blake in my brain:

  The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.

  The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.

  The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

  It was the first time I’d thought about Him in a long, long time.

  *

  Of course, there was the matter of Loretta fucking other men for money.

  Like most things too important to talk about, we didn’t, not directly, anyway. She would simply say she had to go to work and I would never ask her how work was, and sooner than you’d imagine, anything becomes ordinary, even the extraordinary, such as your one and only beloved performing sexual intercourse with strangers in return for financial compensation. And when it didn’t feel normal, it felt nasty, like I was eighteen all over again and discovering who I was by mocking who I was supposed to be. If I was finally going to settle down, it was going to be on my terms, with a Prussian-born white woman who sold her body for money. I wanted to have my cake and to toss it too.

  The nearest Loretta ever came to addressing what she did was when she let on she wouldn’t be doing it for very much longer, that not only did she have a strategy, it was a strategy she was determined to carry out and accomplish. Taking a stroll with me one spring morning, Loretta insisted we eschew our standard turn around Tecumseh Park in favour of a walk down Hartford Street. I didn’t complain; as long as I was with her and moving, I was happy.

  She stopped in front of a large, less than impressive house halfway down the street. It sorely needed a fresh coat of paint, new shutters and eavestroughs, and an entirely rebuilt porch.

  “What do you think of this?” she said.

  “Not much.”

  “Maybe not now not much, but after fixing, very much.”

  It didn’t appear to be occupied. “You talk like you’re thinking of buying it,” I said. Loretta still lived above the tavern in Dresden where I’d first met her.

  “There is no thinking. I have already bought it.”

  I was almost as flattered as I was surprised. That she had enough money to purchase a house was one thing; that she would use it to live closer to me, for us, was another. “Congratulations,” I said, as much to me as to her.

  “Thank you,” she said, appraising her new home.

  “When do you move in?”

  “I do not. My tenants, they move in in September. It is not so bad as it looks. I have men do fixing for me beginning next week. I am promised no longer than ten days to make all necessary changes.”

  As well as surprised and flattered, now I was confused. “You’re not going to live here?”

  “Of course not. I buy to make money, not spend.”

  It turned out that, through one of her work contacts, Loretta had learned that the Canada Business College on Queen Street was looking to locate a permanent, centralized boarding house for the young out-of-town females attending what was at that time Canada’s only business college. At five dollars per week per young lady, Loretta had been quick to see the possibilities.

  I joined her in silently admiring her investment. “Congratulations,” I said.

  “Yes, you have said,” she said. She slid her arm through mine and turned us around, back toward the park.

  A couple that was our double in everything—age, dress, evident relationship; everything but colour combination—passed us, making no effort to disguise their weary, head-shaking disapproval. Loretta pulled me closer. She was strong enough, she could.

  “One more year and I buy one more house. The year after that, two more, I am certain. After that, I make enough money owning houses, I do no other work but own houses and buildings. Buildings for businesses. Many, many buildings for businesses and houses.”

  “That’s a good plan,” I said. “An ambitious plan.”

  “This is no plan. This is what is going to happen.”

  5

  We knew his name before we knew him.

  John Brown was a white man with a three-thousand-dollar bounty on his head who’d founded the League of Gileadites to terrorize the legions of slave catchers who’d crawled out of the ground after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Here was another man who knew his New Testament as much as he despised slavery. Fo
r as the Lord instructed Gideon, “Whosoever is fearful or afraid let him return and depart early from Mount Gilead,” so John Brown required his recruits to swear to “Stand by one another, and by your friends, while a drop of blood remains; and be hanged, if you must, but tell no tales out of school and make no confession.” After Brown and some of his men, including two of his sons, butchered five pro-slavery Kansan settlers in retaliation for a sheriff-led posse’s destruction of an abolitionist newspaper office and the beating of an anti-slavery senator, Brown was called a freedom fighter by some and a terrorist by others. When he arrived in Chatham in the spring of 1858, we didn’t know what to call him.

  I may have been only eleven years old, but even I knew that making John Brown feel welcome in Buxton wasn’t as simple as fattening a chicken and putting out an extra plate. The Bible said Thou Shalt Not Kill, but our heads and hearts said that five fewer breathing slaveholders didn’t feel much like a broken commandment. From the moment we found out that John Brown was in Chatham, we were waiting to hear what the Reverend King would say. As usual, he said what we were thinking.

  “Of course, he’s a dangerous man. Only a fool would deny that. But he is dangerous because he is angry. And anyone who would deny his right to be angry would be an even greater fool.”

  The Reverend King was talking to Mr. McKellar as they came out of the Reverend King’s study. Mr. McKellar was a Chatham lawyer and an early friend and supporter of the Reverend King, one of the few prominent white ones he’d initially had. Ordinarily, no matter the order of business, when the study door opened, whatever had been going on inside was over, at least until the door was closed again. This time it seemed as if whatever they had been discussing would never be over. I was helping my mother in the kitchen put together Mrs. King’s dinner tray.

  “I’m not in disagreement with you, Reverend, you know that,” Mr. McKellar said. “It’s just that a man like this Brown—a man like this doesn’t believe in compromise.”

  “We don’t know what he believes. We won’t know that until we meet him.”