Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

Ears pressed to air, you, Tabbs, stand for nearly an hour without words and listen, sound rushing in and piling up inside your head in copious abundance. His fingers tap the seconds into melodies, tick the chords into minutes — you stand for another hour — and you have the difficult task of maintaining your discipline, of somehow staying silent and inconspicuous. Dare not even shift your weight from one foot to the other. Aware of a certain pulsing. A tall man, you can cross the stage in five steps, erase time and distance, if you so choose. He pulls you toward him. Lightheaded, weak, you don’t care. In this nowhere, you, Tabbs, feel yourself more solidly, no longer worrying about the mundane this or that. Something to behold.

It could have ended there — in a way it did — with the end of the concert. But signs — changing times, the war going badly for the South — flooded in. General Bethune took ill, the nature of his affliction a matter of speculation. As it is, the slave owner and Confederate provocateur rarely travels, certainly never to set foot on free, Northern soil. Furthermore, he almost never traverses his own Southern climes with his shackled subjugate, young Tom, according that responsibility to the stage manager, Mr. Thomas Warhurst. Whatever his reasons for touring of late, he has apparently done so at considerable risk to his own health. Tabbs hunkering down at his table with newspaper and a glass of wine as his imagination and hopes caused the air across from him to shape into the boy’s hunched-over form, some timid insect with wings folded, lunging toward words, unable to suppress his impulse to higher efforts. Water plopped against the table, one drop, two, and another. A man setting out to war weeps.

For many years the outspoken Southerner’s name, General James Neil Bethune, had been mixed up in the controversy over severance, minority rights, and expansion, no phase in that strange life that could not have graced the leaves of a medieval history or romance. From the fiery and impetuous young lieutenant who stole as his bride the daughter of a ruler-elect of the land — the Anglo-Saxon loves a soldier — to the cool and ambitious agitator of the platform and page, the podium and the press, who took upon himself the duty to voice his nation’s cause — secession — before it was either a cause or a nation.

In Tabbs’s reading of the man, General Bethune was less a product of his country and more an aberrant self-creation, a self-directed and sovereign nation of one.

A month after the concert, Tabbs found himself seated in a sun-bleached office, all nerves. (A Negro maid had led him down a long hall and put him before a desk. Led without speaking a single word. He had stood for a good ten minutes knocking on the door, under a hard hot wind flouncing the awning. The door finally drew open to a second Negro maid, a girl in her teens, blinking him into focus and understanding. Early morning and the girl already looked tired, gazing back at him as if looking through him for a quiet place to rest.) Morning light pouring through louvers, making white walls whiter. A legal text open on the desk, broken at the spine. A (third) Negro maid crawled on hands and knees about the floor, wiping and scrubbing, suds gathering and disappearing. Her pail came up, her rag went in, the water went out, her rag waved hither and thither, lingered to rub and massage, her knees and palms creaked forward or back. Tabbs flicked eyes over the delicacy of her thin legs, small frame and hands. Caught her face revealed under rows of bruises. Then the door flapped open and still another (fourth) Negro maid appeared. A narrow woman — a life spent in tiny kitchens and tinier outhouses — the light (bone?) buttons shining on her dark smock. She waved at him — come this way — without either entering or speaking. He removed his hat from his lap, got up from his seat, and followed her down the unlit hall. He had received a wire from General Bethune’s lawyer, a Mr. Geryon, directing him to this location at this hour — no other instructions or information — but no signs so far of either the lawyer or General Bethune. Was General Bethune present? Would he actually appear? Important to make an imposing first impression, for General Bethune would know him without ever having first met him.

She stopped before an open door, pointed — in there — and he entered the room without hesitation, as if it was his right to be there. Whenever he considers it later — now — he finds it impossible to recollect what thought guided his first movement, unsure even if he had formulated any thoughts at the moment he entered the room. Remembers some force drawing him inside, not prompting but actually guiding his legs and hands and mouth. The room had no window — was it a pantry or closet? — and hence no source of natural light, but bright illumination radiated out from two tall thick candles burning on a small card table stationed in the center of the room, where General Bethune sat on the far side in a plain chair, staring blankly up at Tabbs. He gave no indication that Tabbs’s fearless entry had disturbed or upset him, that it (he) was anything out of the ordinary.

He stood up from behind the table and extended his hand in offering. A man of medium height, perhaps slightly taller, in any case far shorter than Tabbs by several inches. And he appeared, despite rumors about ill health, to be quite fit, his body worked to the rhythms of regimented exercise, impressive for a man twenty years Tabbs’s senior. A good-looking man on top of that — yes, admit it — with a full head of wavy back-combed hair, dark eyes, and nicely cut features. Tabbs stepped forward, this erasing of distance affording a closer examination that revealed that the General’s face was beginning to show signs of (early) aging, the skin cracked in the places you might expect for a man in his midfifties rather than midforties.

Tabbs took the older man’s warm hand into his own, and they shook firmly — which hand moved the other? — while General Bethune smiled in greeting. Tabbs forbade any smile to cross his lips, determined to show the other before him the coldness of profound, even deserved, respect. Their hands parted — who was the first to let go? — enough reason for Tabbs to casually take a seat in a second chair positioned before the table without General Bethune’s invitation.

The next words out of General Bethune’s mouth came in the form of a question. What has been the holdup? Excuse my asking, but why have you, sir, been so long in coming? I’ve been waiting here a good half hour or more. Completely cordial, expressing no rudeness or displeasure in his asking.

Took Tabbs a minute to respond. Sat gazing through wick-generated patterns bouncing off the table and gliding across General Bethune’s face. He said that he actually had arrived several minutes before their appointed time. Then he realized that he had not checked his watch. (Couldn’t do so now.) Nor did he know for sure how long he had actually sat waiting in the other room.

I regret to inform you, General Bethune said, that you are sadly mistaken about the hour.

Tabbs detected the scent of tobacco smoke, invisible fumes rushing into his nostrils. (Yes, someone had been smoking.) Calmly and without unnecessary words, he told as if giving a sworn deposition the circumstances leading up to their meeting today at what he knew to be the correct and agreed upon time. He wanted to be forceful and direct. Yet his words sounded cautious to his own ears.

I have listened, General Bethune said. I will henceforth consider the matter settled. You simply misunderstood. Let us leave it at that.

This caught Tabbs off guard. What should he say now? Review the facts again? Voice a complaint? Set this alabaster straight?