Sweet Song (28 page)

“The dilemma of the quiet man.”

“You sound like you’re familiar.”

“Where did you learn to read and talk all educated?”

“It seems like a long time ago. I hardly remember. But I know now that reading kept me alive and safe. It gave me a new identity.”

The two men turned around to walk back into town.

“You can keep your identity for all I care. I don’t need to know no more,” Hugh said.

“Why?”

“Told you. I’m a good judge of character. If not, my whole life would change. Look, Bob, we’re all alone in this world and we all make up what doesn’t suit us. Every story I hear has got as much untruth as truth when it comes to facts: how hard a worker one man is, how good a lover another claims to be. None of the stories are true all through. Facts bend too easily around a man’s tongue. But there’s one thing for sure and that’s that once they bend they’re real. Our stories change according to how we tell them.”

Bob knew Hugh was talking about his own story as well. They walked on. “He tell anyone else?”

“He tried, but nobody believed it or cared. He a mouthy man. Nobody listen. I didn’t except I tried it out on you.”

“So now what?”

“You ain’t changed in my eyes. I’m just sorry about some of the things I said to you, not knowing what you are.”

“What I am?”

“Didn’t mean it like that,” Hugh said. “I never enslaved no one.”

“Maybe not.”

“Everyone’s free now.”

“No one’s free unless they’re set free. There are plenty of slaves. Besides, I see how whites live. I see that blacks, most of them, don’t live the same. The Indian’s have been shoved out of the way too.”

“It takes time. It could of been the other way around. I know that don’t make it right. But there’s Negroes all over who live like white men. It can be done.”

“If people knew, how would they treat me?”

Hugh lowered his head. Some would treat you the same. Some different. Like Jacob. He’s a southern boy in his heart.”

“They’re not just Southern. What about the men who don’t want to sit with a Negro at a table, but will listen to him perform on stage?
Pone and Shorty, you know where they live? In a shed. Two grown men living in a shed. That bar’s filled every night and I’ll bet they get very little pay for their time.”

“Don’t get angry with me. I see the same thing every day. It didn’t matter when I was whole and able to work. I admit that. But now I see it clear. They look you up and down searchin’ for a reason to treat you different. To put you in a hole and then leave you there. I’m big, so I got big pay and the hardest work. Now, I’m not the same. I work next to skinny farm boys and Civil War amputees. My pay’s cut in half.” Hugh kicked the dirt in the street, turned his head, then looked Bob squarely in the face. “Them mansions still being built, but ain’t a one of us is seein’ any of
that
money. We all slaves, God dammit.”

Bob shook his head. “I’ve seen what people can do to each other. I thought being white would change that, but it doesn’t. It only changes the type of pain one man puts on another. It only changes the extent to which they do it.”

Hugh’s eyes turned up as though he were addressing someone in the sky. When he spoke, his calm voice stuttered slightly. He spoke for more than just himself. “I just want to be able to live this life out to its end. Have a good job and a place to stay.”

“I just want to be left alone.” Bob started toward the alley that led to the back of the boarding house. “I don’t like the way people treat each other. I just want to be away from them.”

“Why don’t you change it then?” Hugh stood in the street. “You’re smart. You could write for the papers. You could talk to people. Make ‘em understand it ain’t right to treat everybody bad just ‘cause you can get away with it.”

“They won’t listen.”

“Dammit, Bob, they wouldn’t listen to a little kid. They might not listen as well to an ex-slave. But you’re a man now. You’re a smart white man. You can make a difference.”

“Why are you saying this?”

Hugh held up his hand. “I want equal pay. I give my hand to this business. We gotta start treating each other better.”

“It’s for you, then.” Bob left Hugh in the street.

“It’s for all of us. You think about it.”

Bob lifted his hand and let it drop next to him, a farewell gesture. He’d heard enough. He’d said enough. Perhaps too much. He went into his room and curled up on his cot. As a boy, he’d never slept on a cot. Here, the room was half filled with transient men who came to town for a quick buck before moving on, and half filled with men too cheap or too poor to find a more hospitable place to stay. Bob fit neither category. He wondered then why he stayed there. Familiar? To help feel alienated? Assure that he wouldn’t have to get to know anyone? That he could be left alone as he had told Hugh he wanted? Was that how he wanted to live out his life?

Bob rolled into the wall. How long could he hide from himself? He clasped his hands over his ears to keep out his own questions. He consciously tried to relax and bring on sleep, but throughout the night was awakened by the groans of dreaming men or the distinct sound of someone pissing in the corner. During his interrupted sleep, Bob dreamed of a better life for himself, and by morning was thinking differently. Why couldn’t he change the way he lived? Why couldn’t he help others? He jumped from bed and got ready to go to breakfast before getting water for Jasper’s day of baking.

He was the first person in the restaurant. He could smell coffee. A stout woman he’d never seen before appeared to take his order and in less than five minutes brought it out to him. Bob ate and left money on the table. Daylight already brightened the other side of the hills, a glow hovering above the tree line and falling over the ridge. In less than a half hour, the tip of the sun would be screaming morning’s call.

Bob rushed to fill the water buckets. He readied the first batch of flour, sifting it into a giant bowl.

Jasper whistled when he came in. “Don’t think this makes up for your being late.”

“It wasn’t meant to.”

“Good. Thank you just the same.” He grabbed an apron and tied it around his waist. “You could start a fire in the oven while I’m mixin’ things up here.”

“Yes, sir.” Bob headed for the wood pile. His mind raced with thoughts and questions. He felt his options were broad and he needed to narrow them.

If he really could do anything he wished, what did he wish? Bob lifted his own hands and pulled them close to his face. There were creases cut deep into them, but the roughness had been worn away.

“Ain’t never seen you own hands afore?” Pone leaned against the shed door, a corn cob pipe glowing as he sucked air through the stem.

Bob walked toward Pone. “Tell me something.”

“Got plenty to tell. Whatcha wanna know?”

Bob’s pulse quickened. He had second thoughts about talking with Pone. But he spit out the words anyway. “Am I black or white, Italian or Irish?”

Pone pulled the pipe from his mouth. The noise from the street slipped down between the buildings. The air stood still, and the sunlight burst into the alley. He looked Bob up and down. “Turn around.”

Bob turned.

“Now walk away, then back.”

Bob did as he was told.

“Bend over then stand straight,” Pone said as he pushed his little finger into the pipe bowl and re-lit the tobacco.

Bob bent over and straightened.

“Now jump up and down,” Pone said.

Bob’s seriousness ended. He laughed and Pone laughed. “Damn you,” he said.

Pone pulled on his pipe, a wet sucking sound came with the brightening embers.

“So, what do you think?”

“Don’t know.” Pone tapped his pipe on his boot and reached into his pocket for more tobacco. “They’s so many different people in towns like this, I juss can’t tell one man from another. Unless you talk like a foreigner, I don’t know where the hell you comes from.”

“What if I told you I was Negro?”

Pone laughed. I seen you walk in the front door of Finch’s without even droppin’ you eyes for a second. I seen you grab a white man by the arm and he follow you outside. If you a Negro like I knowed Negroes to be, then you a strange and dangerous one for sure.”

Bob looked at the backs of his hands then turned them over.

“You had one bad dream lass night mister. You waked up all confused.” Pone packed tobacco with his little finger.

Bob loaded his arms with wood.

Pone sucked on his pipe.

R
egardless how much rain fell or how high the river rose, nothing could lower Bob’s positive attitude. Business for Jasper boomed. Bob took to delivering bread in the late afternoon – fresh and warm from the oven – to the mansions along Third Street. Walking the street that close to the great Susquahanna, river of dreams, he could hear her singing. Bob knew that river sound, different than the sounds of the creek, more powerful, more determined, but still the same, still water.

He imagined all the creeks feeding the Susquahanna. He remembered how they rose during the thaw and rain, how they licked at the stacked logs until they lifted them enough to dislodge one and the rest came rolling into place, rushing toward the river. And if the water took its time, the woodhicks unleashed the logs into the creeks.

But the river, strong and true, could handle the backbreaking abundance of hemlock and pine. All the logs did was push the water higher, make the river stronger.

Bob found that he could talk with the help as well as the master and lady of the houses he delivered to. He found that he could look any of them in the eye and speak as though he were their brother. Just like interviewing had been, the more often he spoke with the people he delivered to, the easier conversation rolled from his tongue.

Each night he read. There was a library in Williamsport, and he signed out one book after another. He read poetry and fiction and philosophy, science and politics. Several nights a week, he sat at
Jimmy Finch’s and nursed a beer along with Hugh, whose hand was healing slowly.

They talked about logging and books. Bob urged Hugh to read more, telling him it was the true path to freedom. He also told Hugh that reading would clean up his English, which Hugh decided wasn’t a bad idea.

“If I speak better, I could work different,” Hugh said.

Pone and Shorty had passed through and Finch was hosting three more Negro musicians. One night, while talking with Bob and Hugh at the bar, Jimmy Finch told the men, “The sound those black folk make just goes straight to a man’s soul. We’re all suffering, but not like them. They’re suffering for more reasons than I like to think. And they can sing it. Hell, we all come from somewhere else. We all miss our homes. We’ve all been touched by pain and war. But them,” he pointed to the stage, “they can bring those feelings home.”

Later that evening, walking to the boarding house, Hugh said, “What do you think about what Jimmy said tonight?”

“About the singing?”

“And about the pain?”

“He’s probably right.”

“You feel that pain again when you hear the songs?”

“Sometimes,” Bob said, staring into the dark.

“I’m sorry,” Hugh said.

“Do you feel it?”

“More than you might know.”

“I wish that it wasn’t true for you,” Bob said.

“White men treat you pretty bad?”

Bob thought for a moment. “Black or white, I’ve been treated about the same.”

After walking a short distance in silence, brushing away the occasional mosquito, Hugh said, “Jimmy Finch should know about a Negro’s pain.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He’s been part of the underground railroad all his life. I wonder what he thinks now that things have changed? I wonder if he feels relief or lost purpose?”

“How do you know about Jimmy?”

“Things like that get around. Haven’t you ever wondered why all his acts are Negroes?” Hugh said.

“They’re cheap pay for good talent,” Bob said. “And what about those two living in the shed in the alley behind the bakery? There’s no heart in that.”

“Pone and Shorty had their whole family in town and they all stayed at Jimmy’s except those two old coots. I hear they wanted some peace.”

“Well, well. I never thought. I guess I figured it brought in money and that was that.”

“Some folks won’t go there ‘cause of who he brings in and lets sleep in his home.”

“I can only imagine.” Bob glanced at Hugh. The moonlight fell into the dusty street in blotches, blocked by clouds. “Isn’t Jimmy a little young to be part of the railroad?”

“He grew up with it. His Pa and Ma worked to save slaves all the time he was growin’ up. He’s a good man.”

Bob slapped Hugh on the shoulder. It was still difficult for him to do that without feeling at least a twitch in his frame, wondering whether it wasn’t just too familiar. “Tomorrow we meet at the library.”

“You gonna make me an honest man, ain’t you?”