Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

After some time he stopped walking, light collecting around him. (She bedazzled, swayed by movement, words, light.) He lost the sense of inexhaustible and energetic joy and gained a certain mundane solemnity and rigidity, but even as he stood in place directly before her he kept touching himself — his shirt pockets, his trouser pockets, his hair — as if he were searching for something. Talking always, holding counsel. From all evidence he was a man who had lived and still lives a God-fearing and God-directed prayer-stained life. All of the schemes and deceptions of the past are past. You are with us now, you are among us now, you are one of us now. Here you have found sanctuary. This is your resting place. So be patient, sister. The hour of our redemption is soon near. Once he ceased to speak, he stood for a time in silence until she observed his right hand cross his body, disappear into the cavernous sleeve of his robe, and withdraw to her astonishment a weathered copy of the Good Book. He brought the tome to his lips, kissed it, allowed his book-heavy hand to fall to his side, then remained silent and completely still as if in preparation for more. A strong possibility that he had a second heavy book up the other sleeve. For all she knew this man full of words had an entire library hidden in the recesses of his garments or his body. He opened the book, the smell of an earlier time (Bible days) leaking out of the pages, and read some passage—… an old battleground (limbs strewn around) — the pages whispering as he turned them. He touched her arm. Spread his fingers on her back. Sister, I hope you are ready. Time is waiting. We — you, Tom, the church — we have much work to do. Multitudes will sing his name once again. But this time he will sing for us.

Would it be that a dozen or more of the brightest orphans with their teachers (light shining through their dresses) paid her a brief visit the next morning, her fifth day? Not that they meant to tell her anything or take anything away from her. (Unlike her other visitors.) She was still an other, but they had decided to take her in with compassion and trust. How tender of them. After all she was somebody’s mother, somebody’s wife. Later she sat in the foreign evening thinking about the deacon’s words from the day before, seeing this place the way he saw it, as a getting-away place. And just as her thoughts began to settle, she heard the door. Found a man in his prime neatly tucked into his blue uniform, with his little cup of cap above his uneven eyes, his hair in glossy slicked-back waves, and a brass-buckled belt encircling his waist, with a revolver sheathed inside a polished leather holster, a braided cord looped in its handle. Lieutenant Drinkwater. His hand moved in swift short strokes, and their blood neared in a quick clasp, a brisk intensity. Wire brought word of your arrival, he said. He was so excited. I don’t think I have ever seen him so excited. So I was dandering by and thought I might as well call. The line of his thin brown lips eluding his words. What was there for her to say? (She brings little to the scene.) These simple facts closed an evening.

Although she often wondered that week why Mr. Tabbs was taking so long to return with Thomas, truth be told, she was also happy to remain confined in her quarters, looking at dhows fixed on the sea, lapping waves, and the sun bobbing weightless on the horizon. (Where is the earth? Nowhere.) She knew nothing worth knowing, for the walls silenced all trace of the world, could keep any voices in earshot out of her, the small floating lives of all those orphans. (Some excitement puddling into laughter.) Nothing slowed or sped her. For her time was not divided into seconds and hours but into light and sound. (Hold sound and light apart.) So she assumed small guilts and was content to eat her meals, tolerate her visitors, retire to bed, enjoy a night of unbroken sleep, and wake at daylight looking at the floor.

She was among people far too eager to have her, to receive her. Their admiration, their enthusiasm. (If only she could feel incredible to herself.) Only her last caller seemed to express any reluctance, that small-hours visitant on the sixth day. As the door opened, he was slightly turned as if ready to go away, sensing he had disturbed her. Perhaps the candor of the light dismayed him. Then he turned to face her and her throat dried quicker than a match put to a kerosene-wet wick. He was well groomed and slim with a muscular elegance — how would you have him? — his medium-height frame encased in a perfectly tailored suit. She immediately felt underdressed in her new clothes and her old scarf on the sweat-wet nest of her hair. He made his sign, spoke his greeting. His well-shaved face did not know what expression to hold. She was happy to feel him take her hand, touch that convinces the hand. (Let’s see how she felt that day.) His voice rose up thick and comforting. You can take me or leave me. At her invitation he sat down easily in a chair at the table. The story is his thick hands holding a glass of water in the unruly afternoon light. So much is misunderstood about your presence here, he said. And your son. Especially him. His left hand pressed the loose fabric of his waistcoat to his chest. It is my sincere hope that both you and he come out the better for it. And that was the start of it, this Mr. Ruggles putting words together for her purpose.

With him hunkered into his angle at the table she came to know his seasoned intelligence. I’ve had some dealings with the planters, I’ve been there, I’ve seen. (Who can prove one place more than another?) Surely there must be something they share beyond that? And then he said something else to her, and she spoke back, the table becoming conversation where nothing had been. She felt grateful and grounded as they lived against each other, their talk widening and widening. Indeed, she did what she could to hold him at the table as long as she could. He gentled the long afternoon by sitting with her. Her feet twitched. And her hands. They took the evening as it came. Darkness moving under the table and along the walls. Aware of the smell of burning wax, the heat of the flames, the cool night air. She ate her supper, and he watched her. (The orphan pleaded with him to sup too, but he would not.) They sat in the dark until she got up to light the candles. What was the conversation about for three hours, for all evening?

Her head cleared in the hard morning light. She watched the wind fall back across the water and birds caught in midair by her own wonderment. Watched them drift through layered currents like white lace torn away from a dress. And rake their claws into the ocean. She had to bend and twist — oh her aching back — to register these clear occurrences of Nature. A few notes from a piano floated across the water — she heard it — a flat sound on the waves, music that suggested some gathering in the distance, and she seemed to remember something that she thought long forgotten.

But before memory could resurface, yet another orphan called upon her. Ma’m, you are wanted in the chapel. The orphan’s voice joyous in telling her this. He gave her his brightest smile. So she followed him, her footsteps attached to those of this boy who preceded her, her gaze held by the narrow openings into the classrooms and workshops side by side with one another — none of the rooms connect — crammed full with children and piled high with books, tools, and materials (leather, brick, iron), orphans at their desks working on their letters and numbers. (She likes the sound of words doing what they do.) At their workbenches and anvils, sewing machines and looms, side-glancing her as she passes them. (Mamma, she could hear them whisper. Mamma.)

When they entered the chapel she saw that the vast open stage was crowded with Mr. Tabbs and the men she had come to know over the previous days as Mr. Ruggles, Lieutenant Drinkwater, Deacon Double (a tight smile on his face), and Reverend Wire, along with other men she had not met and did not recognize against the big wooden cross, the Bible (bound in animal hide) open on the podium at the center of a stage and the humiliating glare and polish of other objects she could not name on the altar. And there he was (the ocean air and light found his form), a man-boy clearly outlined against the piano shaped like a spreading stain (puddle). She saw him and thought, That can’t be him. That can’t be my Thomas. My Tom. Long white tunic with buttons big as medals and gold fringe on the chest. White trousers with black stripes down the sides. His shoulders as broad as Mingo’s. And a string of other features she can no longer remember. (What she saw.) She opened her mouth to speak, but only muddled sound stumbled out. So she moved toward him to feel what remained, but at her touch, he peeled his bulky frame away from her skin.