Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

What a wild state he is in. Clattering, hissing, whistling, blowing off gauge cocks. Fire up the engine! Ringing his bell, thundering over bridges, whooping through tunnels. Fire up the engine! What muscles and what wind, dreadful hour after hour. Heavens, she thinks, will his devil never run his viewless express off the track and give her a rest? Fire up the engine!

Tom chases his own voice about the room from one corner to the next:

Tell him to come up

I’ll do your Topley

I met my mother in the morning

Poor thing

There there there

Now comes the tutti

Don’t be in a hurry

Poor thing

You hurt your Topley last night

There there there

Now he has gone up

Into his mansion

Poor thing

Don’t be uneasy

Until I see you

Tom bites into the hard green apple. (Whale of an appetite.) The cold sweet grain against the roof of his mouth. Seeds perhaps. The shape of words enter and play at making sense. Leaves hover on the verge of speaking. Clutching at the air. Words rise to sky with the chickens but drop back to earth after a brief flight. Worms whisper marvelous things into his fingers and feet. And when others speak he can taste their language and thoughts in his mouth.

She taps the backs of his hands, just hard enough to hurt. No, Tom. Don’t put that in your mouth.

No, Tom. A horse is not a big mouse.

Tom, don’t eat standing up like a cow.

This is food, Tom. Feel its heat enter your teeth.

This is water, Tom. Feel the cool on your tongue. Note how it gives way like nothing else. And this is a flower. Put your nose right here and smell. Each color also has a smell. Both scent and touch allow us to distinguish one color from another.

He repeats what she says, word for word. Tries it again, doing her voice a little longer.

Tom punches the keys, pinches her awake.

Miss Antoinette, he says. Who your pappy? He lets out a little scream of delight. Miss Antoinette, who your pappy?

Tom makes a motion of swatting at the keys, as if warding off a swarm of flies. His arms are too short to span the entire ivory length, eighty-eight in all. (Proportions at work.) So he rocks from side to side on the stool to reach them. Music so foreign to the figure of the boy.

Tom is a delight. A happy rumble. A welcome change of pace from her previous students. Rarely has she had one worthy of her efforts. Most of the parents refuse to invest in a piano at home, and when they do, it is something secondhand and second-rate. Might she make a diligent effort to drum up a better breed of trainees, because taking up with the inhabitants of their town doesn’t bear thinking about. She is in no mood to waste any more time at the pretense of instruction. Tom is a solid way to pass the time, seconds, hours, and minutes otherwise impoverished. Either in the town itself or on her estate how few entertainments or distractions. How similar it all seems after a while. A series of laboriously linked actions. Many affinities here. A sameness intensified by this uniform landscape and climate. No change in the weather really, no turning of the seasons, just an easing off of sun and heat twice each year, like the lowering and dimming of a lamp. (The female sex are said to be more tolerant and resistant.) And how deep the dark gets. The dim liquid lights of the lamps no match. How seldom have they gone on holiday in their many years of marriage. Such are the drawbacks of lifelong attachment to a man of importance, a Race man. And how seldom to spend sundry affairs with the man you love when he is rarely at the house, busy days and some nights, taken up with the dealings of his newspaper and politics. (Is she right in bemoaning her fate? After all she lives in a free city.) People’s real home is where they lay their head. She prefers Culture, and for this reason she prefers big cities, the bigger the better. They live in a town offering a poor impersonation of a city, empty miles stretching left and right. She would love to relocate to New Orleans — she has expressed this to James one or twice — Charlotte, or Atlanta, but preferably somewhere up North. (Blasphemy! If James knew. She dare not confide in him, although he wants it too.) True, age brings the advantage of history, insight, and wisdom, but also the disadvantage of the exhaustion of experience. The mind is locked in the fortress of the skull as the soul is forced to join the congregation known as the temple of the body. And the tired mind, tired soul, requires a new stimulation.

Her pupils have repented. They are urging her to return, to take up their guidance and instruction again. They have drawn up a letter and taken the trouble of direct and immediate delivery through the quick medium of a servant’s hand, having subscribed themselves on the best paper in the best ink. The missive assures her that they need her, that they are lost without her. They swear to listen. They swear to obey. They swear to practice. They swear hard work and deep sweat. They will look lovingly at sheets of sound during all of their free hours. But Tom is her judgment, the solid basis of all her hopes. It is not the miracle that makes a realist turn to religion. A true realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find the strength and the ability to believe in a miracle, and, faced with a miracle as an undeniable fact, he will sooner disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact.

After the rain, the air is rinsed clean, the light precise, every line and edge firmly in sight, the farthest distance diminished, as near as your hand, lands across the oceans captured in a single glance.

The wood is dry. Who will saw it?

Tom.

The fireplace crackles and smokes. Smoke whistles and sings, rising its way through the chimney and out into the world where the pines run. Tom’s arms rush forward at acute angles.

What is that you are playing?

The fire sounds like loud kisses.

I am playing the rain, he says.

She takes several clean sheets of paper with staffs already printed on them. Tom has already moved on to another piece, one she recognizes.

Tom, would you play it for me? she asks.

Tom does not answer.

Play the rain for me, she says.

He switches melodies without interruption. Once he finishes it, she has him repeat it, and once more after that, five times in all until she has completely scored the composition. At the top of the sheet where the first bars begin she writes “The Rain Storm.”

James, look at this. She holds the pages of sheet music before his face. Good God. The woman has lost her mind. Trying to get him to read music was like trying to teach Sanskrit to a Choctaw.

Mary—

He wrote it, she says.

He looks at her distrustfully. Mary, now this too. He actually stands up, bad legs and all. What are you trying to tell me? Have me believe only so much.

No, James, she says. He wrote it.

Sound lending sense.

His first composition. (Could you call it that?)

She sits with her husband. We should have it published, she says.

He does not answer her right away, a good sign. Whenever she outlines some idea that he doesn’t agree with, he interrupts her before she fully lays it out. But if he agrees he keeps quiet until she concludes, then closes his eyes as if searching his dark places only to discover that the words she had spoken were the same ones he had already formulated himself.

Nothing of that now. He gives her an odd look, one she has never seen before. Why? he asks. Suspicion in his look, watching her like a potential thief.

The following day he purchases an upright piano for his printing office.

Would you use the word composer?