Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

He can back Wire into a corner, force him to help, to give money. If you can save a thief, a nameless thief … So why does he stand here, hollow, posing? Why does he force himself to turn away from the words he would like to say and hear Wire say in return? Tabbs steps out into moon-begot shadows and light and starts for home with a reserve of animation and speed built up from hours of sitting, eating, drinking.

Blind Tom don’t play no church music.

Too bad. The Almighty is the loser.

The boy would be waiting. He knew the boy would be waiting. He lacked nothing in punctuality. That’s why he was here, wasn’t it? Why he keeps coming every day, although for months the boy has been little more than a lumpen force. A few thick chords. A few loose melodies. Each sound coming out marvelously pronounced, shapely, smooth so that Tabbs feels the notes surge up his arms and enter his face and head, then sink into every nerve of his body, causing his muscles to uncoil, leaving a tingling satisfaction, a tease.

Let’s go watch the blind nigger play.

You go.

I am. I ain’t scared.

Go ahead then.

Nawl. I don’t want to. You go.

Scared.

Nawl.

He chases the kids away, but he will catch their faces peeking in, hiding under the seats, crouching behind the curtains.

Mr. Tabbs, how come you don’t like children? The little girl stared up into his face.

What would make you think a thing like that? Of course I like children. Don’t let me hear you say that again.

The mother is on her knees, her head scarf knotted at the back of her neck, her knees squarely on the wet floor and her elbows and forearms covered with a white-brown mixture of suds and dirt. She looks up and catches him full in the face. A look that goes past him, dwelling, for a moment, on the chairs upturned on the table, the sconces and portraits on the walls, and the bucket filled with water and soap.

Mr. Tabbs.

He returns the greeting with a nod of his head.

He steps into the chapel, his eye catching the shape of the piano on the small stage, knowing that he will find the boy seated there, onstage, at his piano. He clears the room of children—

He crazy.

Nawl. They took his eyes out.

— and shuts the door. Calls the boy’s name, causing the boy’s shoulders to lift, startled. Tom had not heard Tabbs enter the room. He gets up from the bench, steps down from the stage, and takes a seat in the front row.

He’s trying me, Tabbs thinks. I’m barely in the door and already he’s trying me.

Should you go up? the boy asks.

We should go up.

You said it.

The boy moves sleepily toward the stage. Tabbs aids him up the few stairs, though Tabbs can’t help feeling that the boy is helping him. The boy returning the embrace on his arm in such a way that he might have been the seeing one guiding the sightless Tabbs. Times when the boy allows Tabbs to embrace him. Parts of Tom’s body mingle well with Tabbs. Times too few.

The boy goes through his routine. Fingers a passage, a slippery group of chords and notes, then he shoots up from his stool, clapping, congratulating himself, taking bows. Sits down and fingers another passage. More accolades. And so on. Months now and Tabbs has yet to hear him play a song from start to finish. A little of this, a little of that. Never a complete song. He can’t pull those bits and pieces together. Or won’t. Some failing of memory. Timidity. The melody crawling out of its shell only to, spooked, run back for cover.

And voices (sometimes) springing up from hidden places in the room, giggling and teasing.

See, I told you. That nigger can’t play.

Wait till you hear him sing.

Then the mother will sweep onto the scene like a witch on a broom. And with the switch in her hand pointed forward like a divining rod, she will seek out the mannish boys in the room, draw the dirty intruders up from the floor like spurts of dark liquid — What yall doing in here? — and steer this black sea of orphans elsewhere. Get where you sposed to be.

Tom sits listening, but it’s quiet now, more than quiet because the music is gone. The air charged, the hum of the chords still in the room. Tabbs tries to chart the inscrutable space surrounding the boy’s body. Tries to imagine the story of this boy’s hands and feet, speculating as to the brutal geography of slavery, a life in the South under the Bethunes, vile domestic terrain.

Tom, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. Tabbs listening to the song, listening long after it’s gone. Do you wish to perform again?

I like being on top, the boy says.

Then what is it?

I want her. He stands up from his seat, aware of his own length, weight, and shape, as tall as Tabbs, but broader, thicker. The air rushes away. Tabbs wonders if the mother dresses him each morning. If she is the one who combs his hair and bathes him and keeps him clean and neat, who rubs glistening substances on his face.

You were about to tell me.

I’ll leave you in peace, Mr. Tabbs.

But you were about to tell me.

Is she here? He stands there with his head upturned, noticeably swaying from side to side.

No.

I want her now.

So it goes. I want her now, he says, and sits back down on the bench, hands buried in his lap, and Tabbs will send for the mother, and in five minutes or ten the boy will stand straight up from his stool at the sound of her footsteps. They will go away together, she takes him away, and Tabbs throws the heavy canvas cloth over the piano and hopes that tomorrow will be better. So it has been.

She’s not here, Tabbs says.

I want her now.

She had to go away.

Tom says nothing.

I’m sorry. I really am. But I’m here. I’ll stay with you until she returns.

Tom says nothing to that, his silence more absolute than ever. So quiet and still (dressed in black, his jacket, shirt, and pants glossy like rinsed fruit) he might be a shiny appendage of his piano. Looked upon. An alien and disagreeable face. The eyelids thick and firmly fastened, impossible to crack. A face that had once, before the war, moved and enchanted Tabbs. Now no face at all. Inconceivable that this boy could be Blind Tom. Black, blind, of right age but nothing else. The Bethune woman had passed off an imposter, had proved to be a liar and a cheat like all the others who took the name Bethune.

The boy smiles. A careless amusement in that smile, gaiety at Tabbs’s expense. He stands up. Sure enough, the mother is fixed in the door, watching her son with tender respect. (If that’s what it is.) Now a deep breath activates him, making it unnecessary for her to come to the stage as she usually does. He goes to her, walking at his own pace, feeling his own time. The music following them out the door. Taken away. God knows where. Perhaps they go back together to the room they share here. Yes, she takes him away, again. Months and the boy’s desire to see her has not lessened any. At first, those many months ago, Tabbs figured he would let it run its course, no need to cut it short. Go easy and let the two, mother and son, get reacquainted, come to terms with the distances of time and geography, arrive at the place of knowing each other. And still, every day, today, I want to see her.

The silence fills his chest. Forms reflected in the eye-watering hues of the piano’s surface. The entire island had come to watch the men unload the piano from the dhow, as if the piano were a sea monster that had chanced upon extinction in a fisherman’s net.

Tabbs looks at his watch to see the time on it. The open case and calibrated face (metal eye and glass eye) watching him back, reading the hour on his visage. He closes the case and time collapses, sucked in.