Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

Are you her? he said.

Seeing the trouble, Reverend Wire laid his hands firmly on Thomas’s head in the same steady manner that she was to see time and time again.

Finding speech, she thanked the Reverend for his intervention, although inside she was locked up in a curious double mood: angry (would that be the word?) that her reunion with Thomas had assumed this public form, the anger even more so, even more acute after she had been forced (no other way to put it) to live in pause for a week waiting for this reunion, no reason given, no apologies offered.

And all of this was true. Still, that first day back in their chambers she was delighted. She had her Thomas back with her at last. (Praise be His name.) But as time went on — the next day and the day after that and the others that followed — he remained detached from her in the guessing silence. Not that it troubled her. She told herself that if Tom remained deaf (to her) that was only because she had not tried hard enough, spoken loud enough. So those first weeks, she tried so hard, would say whatever words drifted onto her tongue. But still he said nothing and kept her firmly at a distance. Silence on the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the nose in the palms of her hands. In fact, he gave no indication that he could even hear the sound of her voice — had he become deaf? — continued to shrink and shrivel away, only a little bread each day to keep the taste of the world on his tongue. Feed me banks of light. Perhaps he was sick. Perhaps he needed a doctor.

Meeting her concern, Reverend Wire, a man of the cloth and a healer (two hats, two-heads), examined him. Dr. Wire watched Thomas’s chest rise and fall, put his ear to Thomas’s chest and listened as if to a broken watch, held down his tongue with two fingers and looked into his throat, picked up each hand by the wrist, counted the pulse of his blood.

His body is perfectly fine, the two-headed preacher-doctor said. But this business of reunification is too much for him, too upsetting, a shock to what he knows and expects. You must give him time. The return to himself will take time.

A return she is still waiting for. In this life I have heard your promise and I am ready to serve. Waiting for Thomas her Thomas to emerge from this man. She spends each day looking for ways to fill in the hours, to stretch them out so that they can run into each other. How bout we play our game now? W aiting is one thing a nigger knows how to do. So she can wait a little longer. Time on her hands. All the time in the world. She reserves all of patience and tolerance for Thomas as she did at Hundred Gates so many years ago. I am the only one. She feels justified in her determination, thinking only about the person he can become, she can become. But each day rebuilds itself like the one before. Tomorrow he will install himself there onstage before the piano at his body’s insistence and so will she on this same pew. So have all the days been and perhaps they shall be for a long time to come. How deeply must he be touched to enter?

Now she hears it, a breath breaking open, almost like a strangled cry that comes again and again — listen to it — huh, huh, huh. His mouth causing the shape of his face to change, some new face trying to be born. She falls under the spell of the cadences of her son’s breathing, the two of them sounding as one, until his breath quiets after a final whistle.

The bell rings, signaling the end of instruction for the day, the orphans released from learning and labor. Time now for an orphan to escort them back to their quarters — as if they don’t know their way by now, as if they will get lost in the halls — and for her and Thomas to retire their troubled skin until tomorrow. The strangeness of light between Thomas and his piano, the fine edge gleaming around his body. He is touched with heat, flushed — could it be? — a little red even. She sees the reflections of his hands in the piano’s laminated shine, hands that are useless on Edgemere. Thomas, leave that piano be. W hat will put them back into motion?

Let us join hands in prayer, Reverend Wire said.

Your hand hot, Thomas said. Fire. A faggot of fire.

Now she hears it, her breath a flat tune limping its way out of her mouth. She cannot trust what even her own body tells her. The thing she is feeling now fits nothing she knows. Pain but she can’t say where. Now she understands that this is a new hurt, an all-over hurt happening beneath the skin, the grinding friction caused by two bodies, past and present, moving up against each other inside one skin. (That accounts for why she feels so heavy all of the time.) Or is his silence taking her apart nervewise? (No, that can’t be it.) So she starts to say what she has actually wanted to say but had put off saying because it had seemed premature, begins to remind him (again?) about the blackberry patch that grew wild off the road to Hundred Gates, the crooked tree with its white peeling bark, the horse behind the rock quarry, the hills like beached whales, all the rises and curves of the land, the sloping riverbank, the minnows wheeling in the shallows — even now there’s something she keeps trying to say that never comes out right; what is the language that will keep their past as it should be? — the earth odors and rock odors and plant odors and animal odors. (His spirit lives for her in such odors.) The light on Sunday mornings, those Sunday mornings. She sees his face move, sees it go sideways on his neck, tracing a movement from one end of the keyboard to the other then back again, and so on, as if he were reading a book. But nothing manifests. She feels blocked about saying anything else. Perhaps her words come too late. She can admit the letdown to herself.

She looks at his face, his lidded-over eyes, and something in her unhouses itself. Now she understands. He does not remember because he cannot remember. What the eyes see is preserved in the orbs themselves, where sight is stored in the seeing. Tom cannot see; hence, he cannot remember, has nothing to see to remember. Something opens between them. Who is she to want to hang back there? None of that matters anymore. It is less a question of where and when — the hills that go doubling back, the bedding straw piled to one side — and more of how and what —she knows the why— her useless nostalgia draining away. She must create the right conditions. Unless she does something now, right now, tomorrow will be the same, him up there and her down here. Is it possible for her to learn to do what he does? (What better way?) The space for it exists in her, now that she has been freed from Hundred Gates, freed from labor, her time and body her own. (If you have a song to sing then sing it right this minute.) Not that she could ever get music the way he got it, from the getting place. Called. Marked. Sounds planted deep inside him. (Why he moves the way he moves, walks the way he walks). A story foretold.

She can pinpoint the day when music claimed him. The day when in the haze of a rainy afternoon a wet wind, with him still unborn in her womb, she stumbled into the center of town, Broad Street, more relaxed than she should have been for someone expecting a child. She might have been six months belly-round then. She had been sent on some errand — sweep the floor into the fire, shake the dust into the wind — but she can no longer recall who sent her or for what reason. The first thing she remembers seeing: niggers bent over or kneeling cleaning up a wagonload of apples that had burst open on the road. The wind brought the sound of whistles, drums, and fifes. She let her gaze float in the direction of the sound just as a brigade of woogies and niggers in plumed regalia came marching into view at the other end of the street. She stopped walking and stood facing fixedly this disturbance. Eight musicians in all — if memory serves — two whistles and two fifes and two bass drums and two kettledrums that kept them in stride. What was the occasion, the reason for the jubilation? The nodding accepting crowd granted the band passage. Wagons and carriages halted to let them through. For some reason she remembers more about the woogies and niggers who were walking on the sidewalk and in the street that day than she can about the individuals who made up the brigade, can actually picture one bent woogie head after another concealing a grim gaze, heavy heads under bright parasols — so was it some sad occasion? a mourning? — and a nigger herdsman (all the herdsmen were niggers) driving his bell-tinkling flock — cows? goats? Sheep? — down the street. High-stepping, the brigade paraded their bannering sounds from one end of Broad Street to the other, then circled back again. Then the fife players called out a line, and the drummers whooped and moaned in response, and they all began to dance and sway. And so did she.