Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

I watched and listened tonight and after watching and listening, after what I saw and heard tonight, I had to bring myself here before you. The preacher’s voice is needlessly loud, as if he is addressing an audience. Judging by the wrinkles on his face, the preacher is over sixty years old, a bad sign. The old like to talk.

They will have to suffer the inconvenience (no way around it), but Seven hopes that the preacher will avoid beating around the bush and simply hurry into the purpose of his visit — a donation for his church? He wants to pray with Blind Tom? Bless Blind Tom? Have Blind Tom bless him? — the sooner the better.

You’ve done a fine job — speaking to Seven now. The preacher lets his gaze drift over Seven.

And Seven stumbles in his thinking. Thank you. Trying to smile, the words carrying with their own insistence since Seven has no idea what the preacher means. And now he notices a faint but deep forest smell coming from somewhere inside the gallery, a wood and leaf and soil scent, green and brown against the marble floor and smooth granite walls.

Bemused, the preacher gazes steadily at Seven. But sometimes another is chosen in preference who by all rights should not even be considered your equal.

The meaning and importance of the words escape him, but Seven feels (detects) something in the preacher’s vocabulary that is rallied against him. Just who is this nigger preacher anyway?

Still, to your credit your illusions and confidences and deceptions are of sufficient approximation to confidence most people, especially those least in the know.

It’s up to him now to talk this nigger preacher out of whatever it is he thinks he believes. Reverend—

Your present condition comes as no disclosure. We have to know what we want from the start. Already as children we have to be clear in our minds what it is we want, want to have, have to have.

Reverend, perhaps we could visit your church? Seven sees the old woman in the oil canvas behind the preacher, her hands stiff on her lap, the skin pale, the hurtful rheumatic veins — life as it is. Given the vagueness of this black body, this Blind Tom, surely the preacher is only drawing upon all he can remember or guess.

Out the mouths of babes, the preacher says. Do you really think so little of me?

It is hot inside the hallway and quiet, the air full of thoughts and things to say. Seven stares into the preacher’s impassive face. Gives the signal for Vitalis to take Juluster down to the driver and the carriage, but Vitalis does not move, only looks at Seven as if he has never seen him before. Stands there looking like a damn fool, with that tear-shaped rush of hair rising skyward from his forehead, six inches tall at the tip. Then Wire smiles as if to encourage Vitalis to follow Seven’s instructions. He touches Vitalis’s back, quick firm pats. Vitalis and Juluster hurry purposefully ahead. Juluster, his movement constrained by the weight of Vitalis, accelerates to escape his navigator, and they disappear from sight, leaving Seven and the preacher staring across confrontational space.

Now Wire starts to walk away too, huge and lumbering, a black moving wall, and Seven sets off after him through the grandest structure in the city, all pristine neoclassical stone with an interlacing arcade. A marble labyrinth of stairways and galleries, gangways and corridors, pillars and porches, halls and dead ends.

I see no reason why you can’t revive the name of Blind Tom on every tongue in the civilized world, Wire says, for the replica in your charge is no person of ordinary means. He is an extraordinary talent, the genuine article. Perhaps the spirit anointed him in this purpose. So I ask you, is it for me to stand in your way?

Words vie in Seven’s mouth. No, he says. But you want something.

They exit the building and come down the wide grand staircase situated like a series of descending bridges between two stone lions, the memory of roar and kill long drained from mouth and claws. Walk past a little booth at the foot of the staircase, where earlier that evening hundreds had purchased tickets. Seven’s body acts without him.

Yes, I do.

Here it comes, Seven tells himself. He is leaning toward the idea that this preacher will take him for all he can.

In the receding light, crowds of people walk in small groups by the sea, some of them holding hands. All of their movements seem identical, the same pace, the same stride, arms swinging. A dream. If anyone knows if Tom is alive or dead, this preacher does. He is sure of it. He feels powerless against this unforeseen enemy. The preacher’s mind remains against them, against him and “Tom.” Nothing good can come out of their time together.

And you will want to know that I seek nothing for myself since my private needs are few. However, the needs of my collective are wide-ranging and extensive, and will require means of both a material and an immaterial nature, in the present moment as well as long term.

It is more than Seven expected, too much. No two ways about it, he must lie to earn the preacher’s trust and to win himself more time to devise a true course of action.

But already I am at fault in assuming that our goals are not at cross-purposes. Ignorant of your character, I should not pretend to understand your motives behind this venture let alone assume that we can arrive at a meeting of the minds.

The sun coming through the branches of the trees makes the sidewalk look reddish, like a river.

I will do all I can, Seven says.

The big nigger preacher looks down at him with eyes the size of plums. No, Wire says. You will do more than that. You will do whatever I tell you to do.

Seven hears the words like something coming from very far away, from the top of a hill or mountain. Thinks: Things can change in a day. Beneath history is another history we’ve made without even knowing it. Blind Tom is a name that he can no longer claim, a name that perhaps no one can claim or that everyone can claim. A million Blind Toms.

Later, he will think that this nigger preacher was worth killing.

Tabbs crumples paper to encourage the flame. Getting to what he wants will be slow going and mostly smoke. How many weeks has he been laid up in bed now? Can’t say for sure, only knows that he was already coming down with something serious, something severely debilitating on that day right before the start of winter when Wire came to visit him, made him sit down, then spoke to him with utter directness about an imposter Wire had chanced upon several days earlier, a prevaricator going under the stage name the Original Blind Tom. Tabbs no longer recalls Wire’s exact words, but can still feel the way the words worked into his chest and moved up into his throat and face. Although the preacher’s visage (eyes, mouth, jaw) was distorted with outrage, Tabbs did not let Wire know what he was feeling —so that’s it, I’ve finally lost, it’s over now —his straining body sealed tight so that no sound or movement could escape. They sat quietly for some time in a semblance of mourning and reflection until Wire took to his feet. Tabbs saw Wire to the door and managed to remain standing until the preacher left. Then days of sickness. Fever. Chills. Thirst. Delirium.

His mind freezes on the image of Tom coming to his aid with a circle of hands and comforting words, Tabbs growing in the shade of the other male’s nursing presence. Tom so particular in his touch, Tom so familiar, so pleasing. Just when Tabbs’s recovery had appeared complete, he was seized by another fever. So he dragged his wretched body back to the safety of this bed where sleep eludes him.

Sometimes smoke rising from the kerosene lamp fools him, mirages created by light and heat, the city’s reach into his memory mapped along whatever streets he can name. Looking out through the giant glassy eye of window from his supine position on the bed, he cannot see the city. No city. No sun. Only the sky’s dull palette of gray with ocean beneath it. A dhow passes, the captain swinging the tiller from one gunwale to the other, the man looking for all the world like someone sitting in the bowels of some oceanic monster. Another man passes in the street atop his donkey, the animal’s movements at once awkward and perfectly poised in the cold. And whatever other sights distract Tabbs’s eye in drift. Such is life on Edgemere. A practical people, a sober people. They make allowances, make way with whatever measly means they have at their disposal. No crying or complaining. So why not remain here? Remain here on the island and make Edgemere home.