Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

Although the hour is late, the first thing he does when he arrives at the Home is to go visit with the boy Tom and his reserved mother in the rustle of fine fabric that Tabbs has provided her (at considerable expense).

Preacher, Tom says, you smell like dirt.

“… gossiping with two hands.”

HE CAN’T SEE IT, CAN ONLY FEEL ITS WARMTH ON HIS SKIN, feathers of light and shadow. Steady light. Everything waits to be seen, wants to be seen, and remembered. The world taunts him with its sights. But touch is his primary means of witnessing the world. Taking stock. Fingers the patterned ridges of tree bark, which reveal less of what is actually there — weight, density — offering only the skeletal outline of some longing.

Sound too. Birds warbling in motionless air. A barking dog. Snakes in tree branches that repeat the same songs. And frogs that croak slowly in day and crickets that chirp quickly in night. And ants that dance a frenzy over a meal. And the crackling noise of a flame.

Animation surprises him. (What lives leans into the sun.) Flies hovering about his nose, a mingling of pleasure and suspense. He does not drive them away. The world rushes at him alarmingly from every side. How do his fingers measure and remember?

In vibrations of grass earth records the sound and intensity of falling shafts of sun. And things man-made too: the peanut-shelling machine’s gyrations forever imprinted in the soil below. Arms and legs moving at the same time. Big circles and small circles. Tiny rituals (ceremonies). Accidents of air.

Nothing strange about sound pressing in, showing a sense of mission. Place. Names rise from locations. Hundred Gates. These few sounds, segments of breath, he rehearses. The syllables of his name skip across his tongue. Thomas. Where do you live? Whose boy are you? Boy, where do you live? Even if there is tangible distance between saying and meaning, a distance that keeps enlarging in breadth and range.

The sun drifts back inside, hidden behind a curtain of clouds, already damp, beginning to swell. Stars penetrate along with the smell of the fields, the stable, the shed and the gardens, paths and roads. Freshness, a shift in the way he feels.

His legs hold him upright, his head floating off where birds fly past. This body isn’t his (he doesn’t own it) but moves when he moves, takes him traveling. Easy-gaiting. The long way round. Knows it, knows it all the way.

He can hear the sound of his own breathing. (Does he own it?) His feet working harder now on the earth.

Home. (What else would he call it?) The keys line up like hogs in a pen. They are cool when he touches them, as if he is submerging his hands in a cold stream. Trees bend toward earth in strong wind, the longest leaning touch, each a shadow of the other.

Is it any wonder he sang like that? Why he played like that?

A pail of water remains near the stovepipe in case of fire. Its cousin, a larger wooden tub, positioned a few yards in front of their cabin. When the door is open it frames a tree-occluded sky. Dirt, the solitary chair, the rough table — all that is sparse here makes it enough to see this wooden tub, set off in a grass-free area of the yard, where they often wash in the morning. It is here that what she remembers happened.

No one missed his shadow moving before the house. Nothing unusual there. Familiar in fact. Little Thomas quick and secretive that way — some shadow scurrying across your shoulder beyond vision. It is a struggle even to hold him, to cuddle him, Little Thomas, all vigor and resistance. So easy to lose the chain of connection. His form appears clearly among the leaves, and just as quickly, in a surge of color and motion, you see two brown legs sticking out of the wooden tub like ladles, your eyes surprised, well before understanding catches up. (And this part she has either reconstructed or invented: his head disappearing, one arm thrust out of the water and then nothing more.) Words of panic. She runs to the tub and sees him splashing beads of light. An onrush of angry swells, all of the world’s seas lashing at the baby. Remembers lifting him from the tub, hugging his chill limbs to warm them as she carried him to the cabin. Heads and bodies rising in guilt and alarm — you must keep up with Little Thomas — everyone (her daughters) except her husband, Domingo, who continues to slouch, a bony-shouldered hump. He is a small slim man, quietly sensitive about both his height and his weight, refusing to allow things of denser body or stronger elements to torment him. (No sun or heat is enough. No spiraling rainstorm.) He even resists the ease of a man-made chair, preferring the uneven planks of the floor. She hugs the baby against her chest, his breathing infinitely far from his heart. She closes her eyes. Whispers a prayer in the dark. Her body is cautious and will not ask too much, just this one thing. Let him live.

She opens her eyes to find herself looking through the open doorway. Sees herself taking a clean rag to wipe down the baby’s body. Her hands lifting him like a plant destined for a pot and plunging him into the wood tub. A sound slips out of the corner of her mouth.

Mingo gets to his feet, shaking off tension and fret. Casually — do not get caught up in the uproar of the moment — takes the baby from her and holds him up and out for inspection, rough assurance. Kisses the baby and hands him back over to her. But he doesn’t have quite the skill to pull it off, to calm and convince. (Which comes first?)

In the days that follow, the near tragedy works on and into all of them, even the girls, everyone silent and uncomfortable, nervy and on edge, muted and mutual disgust at their failings, although Little Thomas’s injuries are few. This will not be the last mishap, his last escape from serious harm in the formative years. Her unusual son. (She prefers the term curious. He seems receptive to things that usually escape our notice or that notice tries to escape: shit, piss, spews of dirt, foul odors such as the smell of stagnant water or boiling chitlins, what crawls or flies, buzzes or hisses. Seems to imbibe as much pleasure from the sound of sucking sap from the stalk as from the taste of the sap itself.) So she devises this method of keeping an eye on the baby as she goes about her work. She puts him in a cotton-bale box that she can carry around with her. But he soon masters the ability to crawl over its high sides and scramble away, on the prowl, the border between him and the world thin. (He can’t observe the universe so the universe is without boundaries.) In this way rusty nails puncture his knees. (She is convinced to this day that the metal found its way to his skin less by accident than by choice. Put simply: he had unearthed them. Recall the dirt under his fingers and impacted in the map-like creases of his palms.) Splinters embed themselves under his fingernails and make wood claws out of both hands. His injuries become a discernible point of reference, crawling and walking one continuous thing to her. For the first fifteen months of life he either lies or sits, shaking in his own noise. Then the helpless scatterings that typified his first attempts to push and pull himself. He never seemed to get better at it. Never seemed to move forward or back, but remained, immobile, confined to his belly, like a worm. (Forgive her for thinking this about her own child. Forgive me. ) Almost never saw him sitting in an upright position unless he was propped up against a leg of the piano while Mary Bethune or one of the Bethune girls sat prim and proper playing above him. Even took his food while prone on the floor on his belly.