Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

As if to rest her voice for a moment before she continued her narration, Mrs. Rudge performed a casual turn of her head in Seven’s direction, saw the boy, and trembled with a little shock of recognition. Dear, boy, she said. You must find this talk disagreeable. How could I have lost track? Please, join me in the parlor.

Perry Oliver declined. Mrs. Rudge and Seven retired to the parlor where she promised to entertain the boy on an upright piano, while Perry Oliver departed for his room highly satisfied with the conversation if not the supper. He was not displeased at having heard the most recent details about General Bethune’s state of mind and health, for whatever he learned he could use. He was not unlike a general planning his strategy the night before a big battle. (So he viewed himself.) For this reason he couldn’t help wondering why she had omitted Tom from her narration. He had wanted to ask, And what about their strange nigger boy? Any word about him?

A month earlier while he was enjoying his morning coffee, he saw a notice in the paper about the death of Mary Bethune. He set the paper aside, even as the black words he had perused remained in his mind like a bird perched on a high limb. Sunlight caught the glossy surface of his coffee cup, and he leaned forward and perched his chin on the metal rim. Peered down into the hollow interior, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever might be hidden in the darkness feet or miles below.

He ordered Seven to ready the carriage. The speed with which he responded was astounding, as was the speed with which he drove. Their little house was a good thirty miles out from the edge of town, but they reached his lawyer’s office in what seemed a single moment of action. He hurried through the door, Seven behind him, pulled up a chair, and put forth everything directly and boldly. With attentive calculation, his lawyer took up a pen and wasted no time in drawing up a contract registering nuances both foreseeable and unforeseen.

The settling of ink brought the first moment of pause. Perry Oliver tried to remember the appropriate code of conduct and obligation. By the time they left the office with the dried contract, he had decided that such code required his wiring a few words of condolence to General Bethune. That done he purchased two first-class train tickets, and it was only his realization that they had neither suitcase nor clothes that stopped him from actually boarding the train. While his first mind told him to strike while the iron was hot, meaning arrive in time for the funeral and the burial, after which he would seek the most opportune moment to take the widower aside and lay out his proposition and produce his contract, this deficiency in items of travel afforded his second mind to direct him to wait a week, even two. Certainly that man is greedy of life who should desire to live when all the world is at an end. Yes, he would have to hold back and wait a week or two. No purity of heart motivating his decision but clear cold awareness that he could not risk being so dangerously blunt.

He spent the next week drafting a letter to General Bethune, applied himself with extreme calm and single-mindedness — he didn’t take to writing easily — to construct long studied sentences appealing to the widower’s political sympathies. Bethune’s newspaper, the Columbus Observer , made no pretense at hiding his nationalism; the General wanted freedom now, independence now: Fellow citizens, ready our sharpshooters. The best army will be the army with the best eyes —crafty calculated words that both concealed and revealed their true significance. He made himself wait another week before he mailed the letter, day after day sitting and glaring down at the contract glistening on the table before him. In the third week he got his response in the form of a one-word telegram: Friday.

General Bethune would sign. Little doubt there. Perry Oliver banked his success on a simple observation. Through his limited travels, he had come to believe that no one in the South knew what to expect or what was supposed to happen without a war. (One thing he was certain about: he would not be maimed or killed in battle since he had no plans to enlist, for he was no patriot.) These existing expectations would provide his means of winning over the General. But what would happen after General Bethune accepted his proposition? Management was an understood business, Perry Oliver’s way of earning his bread, but a raw black feeling moved through his body — charcoal clunking through the blood — whenever he tried to picture in anticipatory outline managing a peculiar talent like Tom.

He undressed at the open window, the air on his body stiff and heavy, a second set of clothes. It came as no surprise that night here came suddenly, quick as a guillotine. Followed by a soft gradual blooming as people lit lamps in their houses and on the streets. Then a smell like dead cows clumped through the window. He guessed that niggers and women were boiling wax for candles. Hardly had he completed the thought when the sound of the piano came up through the floorboards and walls as in counterpoint or accompaniment to the smell, the light, the scene. The only good thing about Mrs. Rudge’s playing was that the piano was in tune. If her hands were pedestrian, her voice was worse. She sang so loudly it was impossible to hear anything else. But without knowing why he listened so intensely it tired him out.

Perry Oliver awakened when he heard the door to the adjacent room open, then he hurried out of his room and caught Seven just as the boy sat down on his bed to remove his boots. He stood silently in front of the boy. In the lamplight the boy’s eyes were large and black. Perry Oliver was trembling with anger.

Seven.

Yes, suh.

Sir.

Sir.

Must I remind you yet again to think before you speak?

I do think, sir.

If only you did. He went over and took the boy’s face in one hand and studied it as if it were a gem. Seven.

Yes, sir.

Use this tool between your two shoulders.

Either reflection or confusion reshaped the muscles in Seven’s face.

He returned to his room, put on his nightshirt, and got into bed. He waited fifteen minutes then knocked three times on the wall. The boy answered back with three knocks.

He was so tired that his eyes closed of their own accord. Far away a steam engine whistled its cry. His last waking thoughts were about Tom. In dream or reality he heard the boy signal three taps on the wall. He did not answer.

Even in sleep he shivered now and then despite the heat. At some point during the night the cold forced him to get up and shut the window. He returned to bed and pulled the covers over his body, one layer after another, these layers that brought a force of buoyancy and motion. He felt the bed drifting on waves of black water.

Perry Oliver did not begin to feel any better until the following morning when they were in the moving taxi, the carriage squeaking and trembling on the slow uneven approach to Hundred Gates, some ten miles south of the city. And the lifting of his spirits was either so sudden or so gradual he hadn’t noticed it. He found himself reflecting on what Mrs. Rudge had said about General Bethune’s acts of charity and found solace in the reflection. (Was it something in her gestures this morning, her acts of kindness toward Seven that brought it on?) As far as he knew, Bethune made his money solely from his newspaper. (Perhaps he had some investments. Only a fool would rule out that possibility.) His charitable acts caused Perry Oliver to suspect that General Bethune might have some personal debts that he would be too ashamed to tell anyone about and that caused him considerable distress, these facts demanding the necessary cover-up and temporary relief that certain public spectacles might provide.