Jeffery Allen: Song of the Shank

The entire production of leaving the train, walking through the station, and passing out of its wide portals takes only a few minutes. Panic and anger and the beginnings of elation all in an instant. The point is to hide right out in the open, put up a front of normalcy and routine. Nothing out of the ordinary here. No crossing of boundaries that should not be crossed. But suspicion permeates every syllable and glance. They think he is dead. “Blind Tom,” the eighth wonder of the world, the Negro Music Box, for her eyes only. His three-year absence from the stage having produced tenfold theories about his death. Strung up during the draft riots. Frozen in Alaska. Drowned in a Pennsylvania flood. Consumed by fire in a London hotel. Caught under the wheels of a railcar in Canada. The victim of a soldier’s bullet in Birmingham. Felled by his own heart in Paris. Felled by his own hand in Berlin.

Tom gives her hand a little tug, meaning, Let’s move a little faster, Miss Eliza. Distracted by their return to the city, she only now notices his distress. A timid destitution has closed over him, a folding in on self (collapsible flesh), which forces him to walk in a slouch, Tom conscious of being watched. Wisps of panic begin to flicker through her brain.

Eliza is already searching for a taxi among the many lined up one after another curbside, horses parked head to behind, their drivers outfitted in ragged and ill-fitting frock coats and stovepipe hats, attending to their carriages cheerfully, dancing around the wet slap of dung hitting hard ground. If only their good mood could work in her favor. The first just looks at her in a dull unresponsive way, her request left stinging in her throat. The next waggles his head from side to side. It gets worse after that — shouts and curses, faces turning away, glares that promise pain. She approaches the final driver in the queue, thinking that this may be the occasion when they will have to walk home. But why give him a chance to refuse? But the driver only smiles back at her delightedly from his perch as if he has never seen anything funnier. She calls out to Tom. Tom passes her his cane then heaves his considerable bulk into the cab next to her, leaving the porter to attend to their luggage. The taxi does just hold it all.

They ride out into the strange wonders of the city, trundling across dry bridges and wet streets rivering up out of twelve canals, a city stitched together by water. Houses and buildings pushing against each other like contentious waves. The glow and hum of the gaslights clinging silt-like to their frames. Their windows crawling with lurid light. Shadows of people moving behind them as if performing (for her). The factories and mills burning even at this hour. The shops still open for business, many hundreds of objects arranged so as to arouse desire. People tumbling out from restaurants and saloons or leaning against the crossed telegraph poles from which black bodies had hung during the draft riots. The entire city welcoming her back. How happy she is that they are safely hidden within the hooded cab. They took something away from Tom, and he’ll never get it back.

As they drive deeper into the city, it seems to her that hundreds and thousands of facts crowd into memory. The reek of feces and urine, lime and kerosene. The air stinging her skin with some invisible but definite spray. This crisscrossing of the senses too much and achingly familiar. The tiniest details recognizable. (Seeing them now?) Before long she can feel her whole body revive. Strange how altered the city seems after a summer away. Unreal. The wagon moving faster than warranted, bouncing them into the unmistakable dimensions of Broadway, a wide well-lit boulevard running like a river of whiteness from one end of the city to the other. (The boundaries stay clear.)

Tom’s ears perk up. They have only to take the next corner, follow this last street, empty and mute and dark (dim lamps stationed far apart), which presses in on them like the walls of a narrowing tunnel. Tom relishing (smiles, grins) these bumps and declensions. Under inspection, the corners and lanes scramble to order, form a neat row of identical nondescript five-story residences reflecting the crude elemental law of symmetry, which has directed much of the layout of the city. She tells the driver where to stop. The facade pleases the observer (the broader view) because it looks so gray in keeping with its actual age, but sturdy, able to withstand. The brick — she wants to believe she has memorized each one — honeycombed with bullet holes. Every window is open, except theirs — a sultry night despite the time of year.

The driver will take the luggage into the vestibule and no farther.

Tom gets out of the cab unassisted and, golden-headed cane in hand, hops shifts and hobbles along the sidewalk up to the building entrance, his hat flying away from his head, Eliza behind him struggling to keep up, walking deeper into the darkness, away from the gaslights. They walk through the heavy door, pull moonlight in, and start the five-flight climb, Tom wheezing fitfully from the effort of lifting his ample bulk, voices from the street following them up, loud, night-singers, and frenzied laughter and shouts, mixed with the erratic barking of neighborhood dogs.

She rattles keys at their door. The one that should won’t turn the lock. Tom clings to the banister, alert and listening.

I’ll need to go fetch Mr. Hub.

Tom makes a slow sound of assent. As might be expected.

Forcing himself to immobility, remaining at the banister while she descends five floors — six? — to the basement in search of Mr. Hub. The Hubs inhabit the smallest dwelling in the building, the sort of place you see all at once upon entering. (And she has, once or twice over the years.) They have a bell and a knocker at their door. She tries both. For quite a long time nothing happens. Mr. Hub is someone who usually rushes to answer a bell. She knocks and rings again. That sensation that has to do with a shut door. Mr. Hub answers, a ripple of surprise passing over his face, that shapeless lump jammed into the angle of opening, little circles where the eyes should be as if thumbs have gouged in. (How he always looks or only the pallor of the late hour on his cheeks?) He smiles, nods — Mrs. Bethune — trying to hide his discomfort. Hovers anxiously in the doorway, looking leaner than usual, perhaps because of the bedclothes. Eliza used to seeing him in denim overalls, a rag fraying away in his hand.

Now his wife, a gaunt woman with stern pale features, is standing behind him, holding her dressing gown at the collar, flanked by their children. Eliza cannot recall a single instance when she has heard the woman speak, even in greeting or to chastise one of her offspring.

I’m sorry to draw you from your bed. She tells him succinctly about the key and asks him to look into the matter.

Yes, Mrs. Bethune. Of course.

They hasten along, Mr. Hub rising before her with a three-foot candle, which he carries like a sword at his side. He is low and stout but lunges his body up the stairs with long strides as if someone is pushing him from behind.

A most peculiar thing, she says, the key.

It ain’t the key, Mr. Hub says. A lock can shrink and swell. Like most things.

She sees the logic of that.

Mr. Hub reaches the landing where Tom is standing against the banister. He barely acknowledges, a peep, a nod. Puts his whole body before the door, hands working, and the door springs open. There. He lights the candle, stops at the threshold of their inviolate privacy before passing off the candle to her.

That tallow’s still got some life. The wife will be wanting it back.

She looks at him dubiously. This small matter. Burning wax. Will the morn be soon enough?

Certainly, missus. Make as much use as you need.