Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

Yes.

These. Tom holds his hands up and wiggles his fingers. And you bought tickets when you heard me?

Yes.

And you heard me sing too?

So you remember?

Yes.

How amazing it must have been, playing for all those people.

You want to know?

Yes.

I can show you.

Okay.

They walk to the piano. After some time:

It’s not as hard as I thought, Tabbs says.

Your hands are easy.

For the first time the boy appears in good spirits. I would like to learn more, but I don’t want to take you away from your own work.

Don’t try.

Would you like me to send for an instructor?

I can teach you.

Not for me, Tom. For you.

I’ll teach you.

The piano shines, animated in late afternoon. Tom plays with a powerful joy, a melody played too fast or too slow. It’s got things that shouldn’t be in there, foreign tones, melodies taking wrong turns, bass notes darkening passages that should be clear, chords with so many notes they cancel any understanding, foot hand allowing chords to resonate and invade where they shouldn’t, a deliberate display of excess, of error, of noise, Tom having his way, one side of the floor rising, the other falling, a rocking, storm-tossed sea. Time assumes the shape it should. Tom where Tabbs wants him, taking a song from start to finish. Tom, Tabbs, and piano at a point of decision, agreement.

Tabbs sits forward in his chair, interpreting a new toughness in the boy’s face.

Wire walks in, walks into his house and finds them there, trespassers occupying space that belongs to him. So you’re here? Unfleshed speech against the mute surface of the furniture, Tom quiet at the piano, chin high as if straining to hear, Tabbs trying to puzzle together words and phrases, his head heavy, his body cold. What can he say with the freakishly tall preacher standing there, his right to stand on his shiny floor under yellow light hanging from the ceiling? Ruggles must have summoned him, and the mother too, not that it matters now. Mother or no mother, Tom will return to the stage.

Wire looks around. Nothing out of the ordinary. It’s no accident you are here, he says. The Almighty has impeccable timing.

I only thought to—

Stay. The sheep has heard your voice. He must follow. Wire shifts direction, moves to another side of the room, a walking tree, strange to watch. The Almighty spoke to me and told me to treat you like a son. (Noah had three.) He wants you, us, our race, to prosper. That’s why you couldn’t walk away.

As if I had a choice, Tabbs thinks.

Expectation is a cord that binds.

Wake me, Tom says. Wire beside him now, putting a hand on his shoulder.

See, isn’t my piano everything I said it was?

A promise, Tom says.

More than that. The Almighty has blessed you so that you can bless others.

You can’t preach like Peter

You can’t preach like Paul

One thing you can say

Our Lord Jesus died for us all

Tabbs holds still, pressed against the chair. I don’t feel so blessed. He surprises himself, his willingness to speak aloud his feelings to the preacher. Less surprising the unspoken distinction he makes in his head — not blessed but deserving, deserving what’s rightfully his.

But you are.

Always one more thing to say, Tabbs thinks.

You will lay hands on a million people. Wire is soothing the boy’s shoulders.

The boy sings,

One two

Buckle my shoe

Three four

Open the floor

Yes, Tom, yes. Smiling, touching the boy’s shoulders. If the Bible is silent, we should be silent. If the Bible talks, we should shout a clarion call.

Tabbs can think of nothing to say. The ease of the preacher’s assurance almost annoys him.

You have come far, and you still have far to go. What you are willing to walk away from, leave behind, determines what the Almighty will bring to you. The abundance.

You brought her? Tom asks.

Wire takes a beat to consider the boy’s face. I’m sorry, son. She should be here, right now, with you, but she stayed behind, in the city.

Tabbs hears. The words assume a shape in him.

Yes, the city woman.

Wire presses both hands into Tom’s shoulders as if he is trying to keep the boy seated on the piano bench. We were in the camps, as regular as rain. Doing our work. Then one day, she just up and — it’s just some misunderstanding. What else could it be? Wire’s face holds some reticent knowledge that seals him off from Tabbs and Tom, some harmful (damaging) facts.

And you don’t know where?

I know. She is out there. In the city. Somewhere.

Tom’s face goes wild.

We will find her.

We can go across the water, Tom says.

That’s just what we’ll do, Tabbs says. Believe it if you want, he thinks.

Yes, we will find your mother. She wants to be with you.

Always mother, Tom says.

Wire walks about the room in his high-shine shoes, looking everywhere at once with his three heads. How have I ended up back here, again?

Wire watches the slow stirrings of the chapel come to life. Swears that he has been in this scene before, with these very men, positioned about the pews as they are. A dream. A presentiment even. (Sight is anticipatory sense.) Did he dream it last night? Is he dreaming it now? Were it not for the smell (burning trees, gunpowder, blood) he might doubt the reality of what he is seeing and hearing.

Drinkwater is speaking in a loud insistent voice, his throat wild with words, words undoing words, his mouth open so wide that Wire can see his small teeth. His body appears tense with a terrible effort of will to remain standing where he is, clutching his hat in his hand like a messenger sent on an errand. He no longer has the aura of someone exceptional, with his troubled disposition, his overexcitement, and his shoddy appearance, his skin and clothes speckled with mud and soot.

The five soldiers scattered around him in various poses of disheveled collapse chime in where they think necessary with expressions of incredible assurance— uh huh and that’s right and yeah and you know it —and constantly nod their heads, small movements of spasmodic affirmation (and shock) as if Wire, Double, and the other deacons are not impressed by Drinkwater’s account of murder and tragedy, the stark facts of the city’s offensive against them in Central Park, which has claimed the lives of all the men in their unit except those present. Double sits motionless on a pew in front of them, his manner extraordinarily composed as always, head bowed, one hand clutching his chin. Wire can feel the Deacon thinking, his mind fidgeting with the future. The Deacon has strong ideas — more than once Wire has thought about telling him so — but he is also reserve personified, never the first to speak, never a loud word, a man so at a remove listening and observing that his silence seems to cancel out his presence altogether, a man so purely inward and oriented toward the duties of his church that he enlarges the world around him by an erasure of self, occupying (filling) space but without taking space away from other things around him. Sometimes Wire will sit and think about how he wishes he knew more about the Deacon’s life.

After a long introduction containing many unusual words, Drinkwater’s second-in-command, dark and solidly built, his ears too big, picks up the story in minute detail, going beyond the bare facts — life making its extensions — narrating entire conversations, throwing himself into the attitudes of the participants, changing the expression of his face and voice like a professional actor. As Wire listens, his thoughts blow backward, the stench of donkey dung, the troughs filled with donated rations, the creaky dhows, the unkempt tents, the barefoot vendors, the half-naked children sporting in the glare of the noonday sun — all a background to thoughts and feelings not easily gauged, never completely assayed.