Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

And you prospered.

Yes, I have. Is that what this is about? You want more money, a percentage? That can easily be—

No.

Then what, sir? You are an honorable man, having spilled blood and directed others to spill blood, including their own.

Mr. Oliver, General Bethune says, no matter how self-activated, every man finds himself caught in the grip of forces that hold suzerainty over every vessel of his person and every aspect of his life, small to big. Despite his uniform — his medal-decorated chest, the heavy epaulets perched on his shoulders like upturned birds’ nests, his sleeves thick with insignia, his legs leathered in black boots up to the knee — General Bethune is an ailing old man now it seems, beard and hair completely gray, a gaunt man now, hollows behind his jaw and beneath his eyes, his arms and legs thin, grotesque twigs, his hands brittle and weightless, bone on bone.

Perry Oliver speaks a reply, his voice quiet and serious, but his words seem to drop midair and plunge to the floor, exhausted, doomed.

I cannot put you before my family, Mr. Oliver.

Nor would I expect you to.

No, you wouldn’t. But you are, Mr. Oliver. Do you see now? You are asking me to elevate you above my family. Understand, this is a family matter, not a matter of commerce.

I understand. But we helped the cause again and again.

We all did our part.

But we did more than most. More. And we can still—

Your country will recognize and thank you. You have my word and assurance. There is sadness then tenseness (worry, anger) on the General’s face. A meager music hovers in the air (somewhere). The fireplace is trying to flame. In his gray suit General Bethune seems the focus of darkness in the room, under the ceiling repellent of light. Perry Oliver can’t talk back to the other man’s power.

But why now, just when—? Something has gone out of his voice.

You don’t see it, do you, Mr. Oliver? But of course you do. The South will fall, no two ways about it. As a military man I can tell you that there is no chance for us to win this war. So what I am supposed to do: lose everything?

Perry Oliver removes his tie. Free now, unguarded, the tie coiled around his fist like a constrictive serpent. His tongue is equally constricted, trying to form words but curling up to the roof of his mouth and getting stuck on his teeth. So Seven knows at that moment that he has to speak for him, utter words that can save Mr. Oliver, save Tom, save himself. All he has to do is tell the General what he himself feels. That he is closer to Tom than to any person he has ever known. Tom sees what he sees, feels what he feels. Each of them is alone in the world. If he tells it just like that then the General will understand and let them be. All there is to it. As simple as that. Now if he can just say it, cover this gap of the silence with speech.

Now, look. I have nothing more to say. I have given you reasonable explanation for the termination of our contract. That is the only explanation I need give you. So let’s get on with it.

No, Perry Oliver says.

What? General Bethune speaks a bit more savagely, his face unguarded about what it reveals, and Perry Oliver’s mouth flinches. So stop me. There ain’t a goddamn thing that a person like you could do ever to stop me. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not never. Now, remove yourself from my presence. Go buy a farm. Go build a factory, or go do anything else you want with your worthless life.

The General’s words go deep and draw out Perry Oliver’s history like a splinter in a finger. Seven is appalled. He vows: never (again) will he put himself in a position where he can so easily be humiliated, hurt, shamed, treated like a nigger.

On the train afterward — after it is done, Tom relinquished, Tom gone — Perry Oliver keeps his gaze directed on the coach window, looking out at the passing world with a vision smudged with grief. (Seven looking as he looks, looking through his eyes.) Looking through not-tears at houses and barns, hills and valleys, lakes and rivers (the South, Confederacy, Dixie), scrolling countryside, birds untroubled in the sky, sunlight fractured by the thin trunks of tilting trees. Seven tries to hold the thought of Tom in his mind. Then the train takes a bend, and he can see through the window one coach linked to the next like sausages. Where does one begin and the other end? All those months moving together, all those years gone. (So the earth moves to make time.) And thinking thus sees the past shrink to a black dot behind them, him and Perry Oliver.

Never forget. Never forgive.

“Only the mistakes have been mine.”

MANAGER OF THE PERFORMANCE WHAT THEY CALL HIM, Seven. What he calls himself, although he has never felt easy with the term. Nothing unusual about the title, nothing striking or distinctive. The few or many he has known in his twenty-plus years of existence who’ve carried it, including Perry Oliver. And now him, Seven. (Mr. Seven to some.) Dreaming (still) out of that slow ship that carried him here to the city a many, oh a many months ago, years ago. Manager of the Performance. What it means: he must spend hours of negotiation in a room he won’t be able to describe a minute after leaving it, this negotiation a slippery process of transforming the spoken into the written (a contract) through word and look, things said, things accepted or disputed through nods or shakes of the head, but mostly by what’s unsaid, looking, listening, holding his ground, seeing down to the other man’s base self, his breaking point, Seven’s mouth curled slightly in dismissive disgust to give the impression that he is ready to walk out the door at any minute and do commerce with a rival across town or across the river. Hemmed in, but hemming in too, wearing the mask of civility while fighting against any moral urge (need) to be fair because that’s what he is expected to do, and do it all for a banknote or two more or less. The hard sale. The soft coaxing. The planning and patience. The structure and discipline required to see a nine-month season through from start to finish, to frame a design and make it an actuality, to make words become music.

Juluster’s voice floats out from some unseen place inside the apartment and echoes around Seven. The same phrase shouted over and over again, climbing each time into a higher more hysterical register, making Juluster sound abandoned, marooned, cast away where nobody can reach him. (Where is Vitalis?) Seven remembers (many many years ago) how he would let Tom talk until he ran out of words. That gift for gab he had, even if much of it was gibberish. Rambling. No wrong in that. Delight in the listening. The sound would slap into Seven’s skin and once it had him, pull him into the flow — come along — and carry him off to a place where no one could reach him.

Now Seven hears Juluster wandering through rooms and halls, the sound of his feet dragging cautiously across the floor and his body bumping into walls and other solid objects, his breath repeating like a weapon. To judge by the sound of him — sighs, sucks of the teeth, grunts and moans and groans, curses, these expressions of puzzlement and frustration — he is getting more and more upset. Seven should do something. If there’s anybody who can answer his needs, direct him to what he wants, that anybody is Seven. But Seven holds his tongue and comes back to the thing he knows. Here is his body, sitting in this chair, trembling and sweating, marinating in doubt in this city he has made his own. For better or worse Juluster is all he has, the closest approximation he has come across, and he must tolerate Juluster’s petty annoyances. It happens very often that a man does something, that a man has something in him, and he does a thing again and again. So Seven must.