Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

Years.

The best I can do is to provide you with a powder that might restore the use of his tongue. Otherwise he might lose his voice forever.

Once he is outside, he angles his hat on his head to let his hair breathe some. How different was the former age of healing. Jesus cured the blind with his own spittle. In the beginning was the deed. If only the methods of modern medicine were equally effective. Unfortunately, the body is holy no longer but a thing of Nature. Every day, knowledge of how to put the constitution in such a state that it will have no disease, or that it can recover from disease, takes a higher place. Thus, it is most annoying to have to deal with facts that cannot be completely or adequately grasped, and only right to expect a doctor to hate the things he cannot explain. Invisible and unknowable things.

Such are his musings and meditations, the line of inquiry and examination, as he leaves the house on approach to his carriage. His horse raises its face at the sound of his shoes on crunching gravel. Neighs and lifts one hoof then another, all four in turn. It is only then that a simple fact registers. He can’t see me. The thought strikes him again. He can’t see us.

Listen, Tom says. Rain fall and not a drop fall on me.

But, Tom, your clothes are all wet.

My clothes is all wet, but my skin is dry as can be. He lifts his arms outward from his body shoulder-high and cranes back his head like a bird in flight.

The thought of the lives and houses embedded in her skin. The stresses on head, legs, feet, and hands. Still, she holds together well after all these years. (The testimony of the mirror.) She awakens with all her past hardened into the blue of morning. Perhaps it is for this reason that her first activity of the day is to sit alone at the table, with her palms flat against the wood. She stares down and sees light breaking through between the fingers, light that is nailing her to this place, fixing her in the moment. She turns her hands over, palms up to the light, either a morning offering or a morning collection. Dues paid, debts settled. Let’s be plain about it. Her head is full of so many pressing memories. While she is safely lost in one thing or another, in an instant and without provocation, all the dingy rooms and dusty cabins of her past pass through her mind. Friends long vanished, their words and prayers now hers, part of her. (Belonging. By one name or another she has always known him. His silence is mine. His eyes, mine. His hands and feet, mine. ) How many times has she entered a new house and parted from it? (Count them.) A parting that lingers, no way (what way?) to transfer the bitterness. There is this: not a single day, not an hour passes that she does not tell herself, I have four left and four is better than nothing.

Look, she says. I see three of you, and only two of us. Do what we ask. Keep Thomas outta the house.

Although the girls are caught between waking and sleep, they are quick to speak; their apologies seem already formed on their lips, calculated in advance.

There three of you, she says. Girls. She has long held the belief that the female sex are the most capable of managing the world. Three of you can keep him out of the house.

The girls raise a chorus of excuses.

I tried to.

He too fast.

I was doing my choirs.

She feels an irrepressible rage building up inside of her. Far from learning from their blunders the girls, her three daughters, continue to heap more errors on top of the existing ones. Little by little, they are destroying everything that she has been trying to build, this cooperating workforce — call it family — she and Mingo have both longed for all these years and have tried to nurture since their arrival here at Hundred Gates.

Take your brother out and bathe him.

The girls raise a chorus of refusal.

We did.

He won’t stay in the water.

He bit my hand.

Do it every day, she says. You must. Can’t you smell him? Smell him. Do it when you do it, she says. The girls are also creatures that hate water. And don’t let your brother waste himself in the house.

He just went.

He always smell like that.

I can’t smell.

Find a rag and clean it up. You help her. And, you , come and help me wash him.

They prepare the tub. Get his clothes off with minimal damage. He will not step into the water. She has to lift him into the air, and when she does, he spreads his arms wide, believing he can fly. Although he is far larger than the tub, he steadies himself inside it, careful to remain completely still, water silent under him. She and her daughter wash him while making sideways glances at each other. Soap and water and dirt are easy enough to understand. Plain facts her girls can’t deny or disown. But how can they know the tremendous effort required to build this union? A whole history lost to them. Unaware of the many who’ve come already. (Once again back in her mind. How much easier to roll through the day under a stray tumble of thoughts.) Can’t recall the last time she counted all twenty on her fingers, one by one, a way of remembering their names. The sixteen she will recall although even in recollection she no longer speaks their names. Gal, you’ve set a record. How many loaves can you bake in that there oven? When was the last time? A ritual she used to often perform. Certain things she never speaks aloud — some days how painful it is simply to open her mouth — even to a husband, especially to a husband — Domingo. The silences, the distances. (How can she hear the void?) So much the eyes don’t see when they examine another.

She imagined (defined) her history (theirs) as a single rush of air sweeping all their past days toward the Bethune mansion and their own cabin of logs hacked sloppily and fitted together in haphazard hurry. (They did not build it. Have built many others but not this one. The smell of the previous occupants, a thousand men and women, all that remains.) You are born where you are born, but a person’s true soil is not the place of birth. You bide your time, you continue to make all the small improvements you can — more food, more clothing, less toil and torment — with quiet hopes for the future. But more than hoping and waiting. More a matter of scheming and planning — although you are at the mercy of chance — of figuring out a way to position yourself so that the next shuffle will land you a few inches higher than your present state, and knowing the right thing to say or do when you are so positioned for such a move. All of this contingent upon life lasting and things holding out, for how quickly the world can change in an hour.

How well she remembers that moment when Domingo first spoke to General Bethune, a man whom she (they) had no knowledge of, save the name she heard spoken only moments earlier—

Why yes, General Bethune. It’s an honor, sir. Glad to have you with us today. I was just down at the printing office.

— as the trader began positioning them in a horizontal line before his buyers. The words trickled down her body with the sweat. At first she misunderstood the nature of the General’s physical condition. She realized that he walked with a limp. No, that was not the word. (Even now she can’t describe the moment properly.) He did a little wobble to throw one leg forward then the other, as if each weighed a ton.

A number of men began circling them at top speed, their wives remaining behind in their buggies and carriages. A constellation of white faces shooting past her eyes, orbiting this band of eight or nine niggers, of old-marrieds and their unsightly children, standing — some just barely — tattered in the wind, heads slumped, feet swollen, drowsy and cold in bright clean heat.