David (16 page)

“A British writer,” I say.

“He sounds like a minister to me.”

Because she's right, he does—sounds like the Reverend King, actually—I pick up the coffee pot and pour Loretta a refill.

“See?” she says. “Whenever you do not know what to do, you play at being bartender. It is reflex, you cannot help it.”

“I know what I have to do,” I say, stacking Loretta's plate on top of mine. “I've got to clear this table, then I'm going to fix the bathroom drain, and then I've got to take Henry for his walk.” Hearing the
w
-word, Henry trots back into the kitchen and sits in the doorway, ready to go when I am.

“Excuse me, but I am not finished, please,” she says, taking back her plate.

I don't let her slow me down, pile cup and silverware and saucer and whatever else I can grab on top of my own plate. Loretta absently butters half a roll while watching me work, like a physician observing a patient exhibiting all the telltale symptoms of an exotic disease.

“You are a strange man,” she says.

I pretend to ignore her, dump my first batch of dirty dishes into the sink, return to the table for another load.

“You work hard—you work very, very hard for many, many years, just like me—to make a life for yourself, and then, once you have made it, you choose not to live it.”

“That doesn't even make sense,” I say, not bothering to look up, wiping down the table, careful, though, to keep my rag clear of Loretta's continuing feast.

“You know what you are, David?”

I rinse my rag out at the sink, keep my back to her.

“You are spilt religion.”

I don't know what she means, but I'm enormously insulted anyway. I hang the rag over the pump, turn around. “You're having a very un-German day,” I say.

“I am sorry?”

“That's the second thing you've said in the last two minutes that's entirely illogical.”

“Oh.” She seems relieved, folds a piece of cheese in two and places it in her mouth. “No, you just do not understand.”

“Really. Enlighten me.”

She can see that I'm angry now, so smiles, knows she finally has my attention. “It is quite simple, really.”

I watch her chew, swallow.

“You are a Christian without a Christ.”

Now it's my turn to smirk, although my smile doesn't feel right on my face, feels like a new shoe you desperately want to fit but know deep down doesn't.

“And that doesn't make any sense either,” I say.

Loretta rises, wipes her mouth one last time with her napkin before letting it drop to the table for me to pick up.

“Doesn't it?” she says.

*

We met the summer I turned seventeen.

Every illicit passage I read in place of what the Reverend King assigned me to study intimated earthly enchantments I had never known. Every reprieving spring breeze reminded me I had a body as well as a soul, wasn't just a shivering spirit waiting around for celestial translation but was also a corporeal creature with dirty, idyllic desires of its own. Every time I told myself it was forbidden, was out of the question, to put it out of my mind, instead of ears waxed shut with cooling, calming silence, an obstinate echo never failed to answer back:
Why?
And:
Why?

If it was going to happen, though, there was no chance of it happening in Buxton, that much was certain. If I wanted it, if I really wanted it, I needed to go into Chatham to get it. Alone. I couldn't even risk telling George.

I told my mother I had to ride into town on Mr. Freeman's horse to pick up a parcel for him from the hardware store. I told George and his father I needed to borrow their horse to ride into town to pick up a parcel for my mother from the drugstore. Two wrongs made it right, and it was the first time I'd ever been alone in the city.

It was Saturday afternoon, and the streets being so busy with honest commerce made it easier not to imagine that every set of eyes was watching me, knew and disapproved of what I was doing. I stopped to stare in store windows and tipped my cap to elderly strangers and even purchased something so as to better resemble a real shopper, a candy apple on a stick from the same general store George and I
always used to visit when we'd accompany his father into Chatham. The hard candy coating tasted like cherry shellac, and the apple itself was mushy, nearly rotten, collapsed in my mouth on the very first bite. I threw it away and headed south along King Street.
Procrastination is the thief of time,
the Reverend King liked to remind us.

I had a plan. First, I needed to find someone who could make the transaction for me. Second, I had to ensure that, whoever he was, he didn't know I was from the Settlement, because if he did, the Reverend King would know what I'd been up to before I had time to get back to Buxton. I walked to where the majority of the Negro saloons were and lingered far enough away that no one would think I was trying to get inside, but close enough that I could spot an especially drunk patron upon leaving, just the kind of person who'd know how to get me what I wanted and who wouldn't be morally opposed to doing it. I pitched rocks up into the billowing branches of a weeping willow tree and waited. It was Saturday afternoon, workingman's payday, so I didn't have to wait very long.

A man weaved out of the saloon while attempting to light his cigarette like a newly vertical infant chasing after an elusive butterfly, until he saw the fifty-cent piece in my hand. The man stopped, carefully lit up, shook and dropped the dead match. He was skinny but had a bulge over his belt like he'd swallowed a small pumpkin, whole. His eyes were mostly red, as if he'd been up all night, and there was a scar on his right cheek that moved when he spoke.

“You're just a kid,” he said.

I didn't answer, held up the coin between my thumb and forefinger. I'd planned on this very sort of objection, was proud of myself to have been so prepared.

The man blew a smoke ring and looked me over. Although he was coloured, there was little chance he had any close
contact with anyone in Buxton, but the way he stared worried me anyway. I was contemplating running—he'd had a hard time walking, there was no way he'd ever catch me—when he said, “Go around back, and don't say nothin' to nobody unless it's me, understand?”

I nodded, and he reached for the fifty-cent piece. “Not until I get what I came for,” I said, sticking it in my pocket.

I thought he might try to take it from me—I'd allowed for that possibility too—but the man laughed instead, then coughed, then laughed and coughed at the same time.

“Just don't talk to nobody,” he said, and went back inside the saloon.

Later, back in Buxton, in bed that night, I couldn't sleep. Not because I felt guilty or was worried I'd be found out, or even because I was excited at the idea of what I'd chanced and done and gotten away with.

I couldn't sleep because I felt like someone different, as if the person who'd ridden off that morning wasn't the same person who'd ridden home that night. I got up from bed and went to my desk and lit the lamp, opened the book of ancient Greek epigrams that Mr. Rapier had bought and brought back for me from Toronto.

It was true and I knew it, and not just because I'd read it in a book, but because I knew it. And behind the big hill at Deer
Pond, underneath the heap of dead leaves and fallen branches where I'd hidden it, there was still over half a bottle of whiskey left.

I'd wanted wine, as in the epigram and in all the poems I read, but when I complained to the man in Chatham, he'd said, “Wine's for old ladies and priests. A man's drink is whiskey, boy. You're a man, aren't you?”

“Of course I am,” I said.

*

Lies, lies, lies: there
was
such a thing as heaven on earth. All it took was a pint of cheap Chatham-bought whiskey, a book of ancient Greek poetry, and an unobserved drinking and reading spot high atop the big hill overlooking Deer Pond. Add a dash of the not-insubstantial earthly pleasure of doing what you're not supposed to be doing, as well as wilfully disregarding much of what you are, and you've got yourself a can't-miss recipe for real-life rapture that bypasses Judgement Day altogether and gets right down to all the good stuff. Just shake and stir, and be prepared to shake and stir.

Watching me get drunk, however, was as far as I could persuade George to join me in breaking one of the Reverend King's most sacrosanct edicts, and even that had taken some convincing. It was a good thing I'd paid such close attention to the Reverend King's patient elucidation of the Socratic method; you never know when you're going to need to induce someone to do something they don't want to do.

“Has he ever said that it's wrong for a person to be in the presence of alcohol?” I said.

“You know he has.”

“Really? I thought that what was forbidden was to
drink
alcohol.”

“That's what I meant,” George said.

“But that's not what you implied. You implied that it's prohibited to simply be in the presence of someone who's drinking alcohol.”

We were walking through the bush in the direction of Deer Pond. George had agreed to accompany me but had made it clear he was turning right around as soon as I pulled out the pint bottle of whiskey hidden in my coat pocket. The moon was freshly risen and burning white, but we didn't need it to get where we were going. Our four feet alone had worn a path over the years that would deliver us safely there.

“It's still not right, and you know it's not right,” George said, holding a thin branch back for me until I passed. George's father had taught us to always hold down a branch in deference to the person walking behind you on the trail.

“Not right to consume alcohol in Buxton,” I said.

“That's right.”

“But we won't be in Buxton. Deer Pond lies outside the limits of the Elgin Settlement.”

George didn't reply; didn't need to. Even though all I could see was the back of his head, I knew what the other side looked like: purse-lipped and slit-eyed, angry at me for doing wrong, angry at me for making it sound right. It was a look I was becoming used to.

We let the sound of the mud slopping against the soles of our shoes do our chatting for us. By the time we were almost at the pond, “Woods' isn't in Buxton, and it's off limits,” George said.

An Englishman named Woods had recently purchased one of the first settlers' farms on the Middle Road, just beyond the Elgin boundary, and opened a grocery store there that sold whiskey. The Reverend King immediately called a meeting of all of Buxton's residents and entreated them to shun Woods's store until he ceased to sell intoxicants, reminding
them how masters in the South would encourage their slaves to drink away their few hours not spent toiling in the fields and so remain subservient because they knew how alcohol made men lazy and violent and lustful. I'd stood at the back of the crowd that had gathered on the church lawn and couldn't help but be impressed. Not by what he said—I'd never suffered under a manipulative master, I'd never known a morally degraded slave—but by the effect his saying had on every assembled listener. The entire crowd nodded their heads in unison whenever what the Reverend King said required agreement, just as they all shook their heads as if on cue when whatever he said was intended to inspire disgust. Talk about drunken subservience. And not an ounce of liquor acting inside a single one of them.

Before I had time to cleverly formulate another argument clearly illustrating how if X then Y, then therefore Z, we arrived at Deer Pond. We did the right thing—quit talking—without having to remind ourselves or each other, as sure a sign as any that you're actually doing what's right. I went and sat where we always sat and George went and stood where we always stood. The moon used the water as its mirror.

I looked at the pond from atop the small treeless hill while George stood at its edge skipping stones,
thip thip thip glug
after each new toss. The April air was cool enough that the coat I was wearing wasn't just to conceal the whiskey, but the earth was thawing, you could feel it, you didn't need a calendar to know it was spring.

A single
thip, glug
.

“I heard that,” I said.

George shrugged his shoulders. “Out of practice,” he said, looking for another rock. Since he'd graduated to full-time status at the potash factory, our visits to Deer Pond had become as rare as my secret trips into Chatham had become common.

I pulled out the bottle but didn't open it, waited to see what George would do, a jumpy hunter feeling out his jumpier prey. When he didn't motion to leave or even say anything, I slowly cracked the cap.

“Do what you want, I don't care,” he said, sidearming a new stone, an extra
thip
added to his toss.

“Nice one,” I said. I raised the pint and pulled, made an effort not to show how terrible the whiskey tasted. It didn't matter—George was looking for a good skipping stone.

I drank and George threw. I got gently drunk and George never missed. But most of all, the earth breathing easy again, new sap and fresh dew and even the sweet rot of dead leaves forcing you to feel alive. I lay face down on the hill, breathed. “Come here,” I said.

George stopped throwing but didn't move any closer. “You're drunk,” he said.

“No I'm not.” I pressed my nose deeper into the dirt, inhaled hard. The earth cleared my head of the whiskey yet made me feel drunker.

Glug
.

“I'm going home,” George said.