Song of the Shank

The Celebration of the Living Who Reflect upon the Dead (1867)

“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.

Seven needs Juluster. And everything that comes with that need. Each day is an achievement. Each day makes it harder to desist, to turn back, not that he has any intention of doing so. The greater the discouragement the keener he is to press on.

He lifts his gaze, surprised, because the air buzzes around a clean form that emerges into the day’s expectations. The clear light keeps falling on Juluster — teetering tottering he has found his way into the room — on his shut eyes and hunched neck — what saddens him now? — shawling around his shoulders. He displays a forlornness resembling Seven’s own. Still, it’s hard to feel sorry for Juluster since Seven is forever aware of his agile body beneath all those well-tailored clothes, a body forced to bend in so many ways that eventually nothing comes naturally, Juluster’s blankness offering nothing that links him with his other, Tom. He is Tom at the same time that he is too preposterous to be Tom. (Root distinction, difference: Juluster is a rare one, but he belongs. Tom never belonged. Tom never could belong. A challenge — what blind person isn’t? — Juluster is both cooperative and independent in ways that Tom never was, never could be.) He looks somewhat like Tom. A pure and simple brute, this negro with a narrow and sloped forehead, who bears in the middle section of his brain the signs of certain grossly powerful energies. The thinking faculties are poor or even null; therefore, he is possessed by his desire and also by his will, of an often terrible intensity. (What does Tom look like now? Has the richness of his darkness faded from his skin?) And physical differences between Tom and his double can be put off to aging — who will remember anyway? The public has not seen Tom for more than five years — although Juluster is Tom’s senior by a decade (more), having already reached thirty years of age. No. Even that is a lie. On his last birthday he achieved his Jesus year. But he still believes in his youthfulness. More importantly, he believes in the role that Seven has given him to play — game for the game — a role Seven mentally scripts moment by moment from memory—lait—selling the shadow to support the substance. Since Juluster is game for the game teach him his name. The body is a habit he can break. Even now his flesh quivers, every inch of it, the skin coming unhinged. He seems to be drifting out of himself, becoming other, becoming Blind Tom.

The Original Blind Tom. Seven says the name in a voice that doesn’t sound like his own but rather like the voice of a magician, a sorcerer. (Repeated practice will cause the name to come naturally. So he must remain aware of his tongue. Correct it when it errs, when he says or thinks “Juluster” instead of Tom. So, around the clock, practice saying it. Tom. The Original Blind Tom. Tom. The Original Blind Tom. Until it becomes second nature.) The Original Blind Tom. In the sounds of the name he thinks he hears a way for returning Tom back to the world, back to himself. Each word a twin of itself, telling two stories at the same time, his and Tom’s. I have become a name.

He gave his youth to Tom just as Tom gave his youth to Perry Oliver just as Seven expects Juluster and Vitalis to give their youth to him. Not quite boys, not quite men. (The flickering back and forth.) It’s not just what Seven did but what Seven did not do that haunts him. (Juluster slips back into his skin.) Tom an extension of Perry Oliver in a way Seven could not be. (Craning his neck, Juluster hears something — Vitalis back from his errands or whatever the hell he has been up to? — and stumbles off to investigate.) Is that why he is here in the city, waiting to pick up where he left off? Is it because his mind has set wax-like around the first examples of industry and companionship that he accepted? Is this all a function of his waiting for that past to be resurrected, for Tom to come alive again? Funny almost, the way Tom flies back into Seven’s mind and stays for as long as he wants. Blind Tom living in his blood. You did not choose me, Tom said. It was I who chose you.

Seven had expected some grand municipal structure manned by a hive of busying buzzing clerks. Instead he finds a shabby little affair, a single-level frame house in serious need of upkeep, set right where the road ends amid a weeded-over garden in what used to be the nigger part of town. The door is open, so he makes a point of entering first, his niggers behind him, the driver who likes to change his name every day — before they started out this morning he christened himself President Washington — followed by Juluster and Vitalis, the driver the oldest of the four, somewhere between middle age and death (visible under his broad-brimmed shadow-forming hat a patch of gray hair at each temple), and them not old, not young. The farther they go, the brighter it is, the more they can see, the interior of the house a cave full of light, illumination spilling out. A cannon shell or some other device of destruction had taken out an entire section of the house, leaving nothing behind but exposed beams and planks. Other signs of mayhem too: craters in the ceiling, walls bare and discolored in places where formerly a painting might have hung, and other walls stippled with projectile holes shaped like a cat’s paw, a cat that can walk sideways across walls. (He has heard about the city’s former troubles, about how all the niggers were either strung up and set ablaze or chased out during conscription.) In a confusion of setting each room they enter carries the pine smell of turpentine, evidence of recent cleaning.

Voices pull him to their source, two men hunched over a crude chessboard positioned between them, men who are not much older than himself but who have known war firsthand it would seem, as evidenced by the blue uniforms they wear. Then again perhaps the uniforms are castoffs, in this time of shortages — each day the newspapers’ skinny columns worded with such claims — the city using whatever is at hand to clothe its officials. After all, the war has been done for almost three years now.

For several minutes the two guards trade insults, list all the wrongs that each has done to the other. Seven waits them out, listening to the ocean in the distance, the sound of all that wide water, audible even from here. A chandelier burns brightly overhead, releasing the sweet metal smell of kerosene into the air. Seven looking (watching), hearing (listening), smelling. Something reassuring about the rhythm of their crass curses and ridiculous threats.

I will eat your eyeballs with smelling salts.

I will wipe my ass with your balls.

A sound he hardly notices as he stands there waiting with the others but will miss he knows when it stops.

One guard (the black pieces) peers up from the board — why has it taken him so long to register Seven’s presence? — giving Seven his countenance in full — his face looks almost flat, like a leaf — and finds Seven with his hard and shiny acorn-small eyes. Something alters in the air, but Seven affects to be completely unsurprised.

You have some business here? Those three can wait outside.

I am here on their behalf, Seven says. He hears his own voice beat back at him, bouncing off the ceiling and walls.

Registration?

Yes.

The soldier indicates with outstretched hand that Seven should take a seat, so Seven cramps down into the single chair placed before the long heavy table.

Then he remembers. I have some documents here — his hands are moving, searching through his many pockets. Hands that find, produce, and present a bundle of documents, with the Freedmen’s Bureau insignia stamped in the wax seal that secures the fold in place. The guard takes the bundle, scraps away the wax seal with his fingertips, unfolds the bundle, and holds the stack of documents out at arm’s length as if he is about to pronounce some decree. His head cants forward, eyes racing across paper — one, two, three — from top to bottom then he swivels his eyeballs — one, two, three — at each nigger in turn. Names?

Seven pronounces the name of each man, hearing himself slip into incoherence. The soldier repeats each name, drawling out the words in shameless confrontational mockery. Although it is English, the language Seven speaks to him still isn’t his own. No way, because he knows that years of Perry Oliver’s lessons in enunciation — he never spoke like a Southerner and expected the same of Seven — and years of traveling the known world with the Blind Tom Exhibition had permanently retooled his tongue, lathed and shaven the South out.

Listen to him, the other guard says. He does not lift his gaze from the chessboard. He sounds just like one of them contraband.

Haven’t you noticed? He even smells like one of them. Pure shit.

Seven feels a length of wind penetrate the crown of his head directly from above, feels it begin to draw down through him in a straight line — his skull, neck, thorax — making a place inside, like a hook pushed through a worm. He had expected to encounter antagonism, even affront, small practical concessions, but sitting there, his race questioned, his manhood challenged, he undergoes a curious process of invalidation. He feels reticent, almost timid.

The soldier refolds the documents then holds the bundle before the slot of a four-foot-high, six-foot-square mahogany box, where it quickly disappears — swoosh — sucked inside like a thing preyed upon. Pulls a pen out from its fountain and holds it at the end farthest away from the stylus like a walking stick, an object foreign in his hands. They got to sign right here and right here. He points to the places on the passbook where the first must subscribe his name. Vitalis steps forward, signs his name, then issues Juluster a call. Juluster gropes his way forward and Vitalis moves his hand in place over the passbook. He subscribes his new name — Thomas Greene Wiggins — his hand wandering like a sleepwalker across the book. Now it is the driver’s turn.

I don’t know no letters, the driver says.

So Seven signs for him: James Bethune. Selling the shadow to support the substance.

The soldier starts to read the many pages of the city ordinance governing the use of the passbook — that the user must carry the passbook on his or her person at all times and present it upon request, that the passbook is not transferable to any other individual, that the city reserves the right to revoke the passbook should the user commit a criminal offense, that — Seven fastens on the one word that flies his thoughts to Tom: criminal. Yes, what happened to Tom was criminal. (The freshness of the time that was ours to live).

Have you committed to an understanding of the particulars of this statute?

The driver, Juluster, and Vitalis maintain a dumbfounded silence. Understanding thus, Seven answers for them. The guard instructs them to place left hands over hearts and raise their right hands. They do and he duly swears them in. Swearing done he stamps each leather-bound passbook, piles them onto the table like a deck of cards, and turns back to his game.

And that’s all there is to it, although Seven still sits with expectations of some official closing to the interview. Closureless, he collects the passbooks and gets up from his chair to quit the office, leaving the colossal table to continue about its business.

The meeting has honed and sharpened Seven’s senses. In the months (years?) that he has lived in the city he has come to know it in a way we can know few places — eyes opened, ready to believe anything — but the soldiers have shown him something he didn’t know about how the city feels about its niggers, both the exiled repatriates (returned) and the new arrivals. Can’t say how he feels about it one way or the other. (Niggers have always been okay in his book.) As long as no one gets in his way, as long as he can keep on keeping on with his business, building Tom, bringing Tom.

Before Seven can reach the door the driver swerves into the lead, putting it upon himself to be the first to reach their carriage, his business. For the first time Seven notices that the driver has a peculiar walk, stepping softly and delicately; looking at his feet, his hands, and the bend of his head, one might imagine that he was learning to dance the first figure of a quadrille. Arms and legs not quite working the way they should. He seems to be stumbling about in the way of the dead, but here is a man who doesn’t seem capable of falling, of letting ground smack him in the face. The physical laws that govern the universe don’t apply to him. He is keeping the planet in orbit. He can keep the sky up as easily as he can keep his broad-brimmed hat balanced on his head.

Once they reach their carriage, Seven sees that the horse has taken a healthy shit into the dirt, rich grassy smell, but the driver starts right in feeding it, the long black mouth and sideways moving teeth munching hay from his palm. The driver seizes Seven by the elbow and helps hoist him grunting (the muscular effort of it) into the cab. Does the same for Juluster, but leaves Vitalis to his own devices, no choice but to climb into the cab on his own. There seated next to the driver Seven hears thick pellets of shit thumping to the earth, one after another, builders laying a wall.

Go.

The driver kisses the horse’s name fluently above the sound of the moving wheels as if speaking some pre-Babel tongue unknown to man. Seven lacks sufficient range of sight to take in the whole of Central Park. The park is so much, too much, for all of its durable beauty. The landscape changes with each intake of breath. Trees huddling, listening to their own leaves. Leaves sparkling with insects, branches glowing gray with squirrels. A black snake descending slow as molasses down the trunk of a tree. Not that the driver is moving much faster. Keeps them at a steady pace neither stroll nor trot. Nothing is hurrying him (them), just a vague threat that Seven feels hanging over him (them). Then a strange tree pops into view a number of yards ahead, the trunk rising smoothly for fifty feet or more above ground, far higher than any other in the park, before exploding outward in thick foliage-covered branches, a green cloud (leaves). The trunk as wide as a house. The tree vanishes when they turn a bend in the road but reappears after a second bend. Stands flickering, drawing him forward until he finds himself parallel to the trunk and beneath that green cloud that seems to promise access to heaven. A brown shape pokes through the branches thirty feet above. Takes Seven a minute to realize that it is a human face, viewed as clearly anything, a nigger face, a man, peering over the side of a colossal nest, a nest that is as wide and deep as a bathtub. Another brown face appears. And another. And still another. An entire family packed into the nest. Putting their heads around and between branches and twigs, their faces bursting with expressions. By what means did they come to perch in the tallest tree in the park and make it their home?

He knows that there are nigger camps all around them, niggers disenfranchised, destitute, desperate, dangerous, demanding — deeds in hand, those driven out of their homes during the draft riots want their homes back, or reparations in kind, We demand the right to return—but when he speaks to the driver or Juluster or Vitalis he tries to keep the panic out of his voice. The reports he’s heard about the camps — calculated acts of robbery and murder, revenge enacted on anybody with a white face — have widened his sense of peril, of what can happen (to him). Human nature does not deliberately choose blood, at least not Negro human nature, but the war has driven some of these niggers crazy. He can taste fear on his teeth and on his tongue. The fear of being chanced upon, found out. They will just have to play it by ear, come what may, not that he thinks himself particularly brave. Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer. (The driver’s rifle positioned horizontally across his lap, crossbeam, cross.) Surely anyone who has been in a position to achieve something large would do the same. Indeed, he is afraid, but the violence, the hurt he knows exists but he doesn’t see, can’t keep him away.

They escape the park’s green trap unmolested. Up ahead a pale rectangle, the illuminated trough of the horizon, pouring bright ocean out. He is thrown into astonishment. It makes a person hungry to travel in this light.

They are bringing the dead. More each day. Carrying bodies. Growing coffins in the camps.

These Freedmen, Wire says. Arriving in the city mostly by foot. From that broken country. Frames of breath and skin. Their flesh a foot thick with diseases and afflictions. All parts of the body ready for death.

Wire speaks slowly, telling it deliberately, but without the least bit of hesitation, concern, regret. No shakes of the head. No frowns. Plain, matter-of-fact. A job like any other. Small work for a man his size. Even seated there in his chair Wire is a towering figure, his knees rising like andirons level with Tabbs’s face, Tabbs staring into the blue cloth of Wire’s trousers, as if he were holding a conversation with twins, left knee and right.

A messy line, Wire says. Crying and complaining all. Man, woman, child. Wire seated across from Tabbs black against white walls, dark skin and dark clothes, as if he is some foreign substance the wall has expelled. Hard to tell one from the next after a while. Easy to go around in circles and waste what little time there is. Hard to say who is most deserving of your attention. Who you should see right now or an hour from now and who can safely be left for a day or two.

Tabbs cannot imagine Wire treating anybody with his big hands, how those hands can touch muscle and skin, explore mouths, necks, chests without giving pain, hands that are twice the size of his own, the knuckles high and sharp, shark fins.

Without the right measures, even the most benign injuries will consume. Best to clean the wound with kerosene to kill the lice and to keep the flies away. And you learn to treat in the way of war. Amputate first if you can keep the greater life intact. Give Death nothing else to feed on. Burn or bury what you cut off, what you saw away.

Tabbs sits there in silence, thoughts lost among the watery light and the sound of waves, experiencing the feel of liquid weight — the water, the glass in his hands, the hidden channels in his body — making no effort to hide his despair.

Wire tilts his own glass forward on his lap, aiming the rim at Tabbs, the bright wine inside threatening to spill over. Tell me, Tabbs. Tell me what it is you need to say.

Nothing, Tabbs says.

Nothing?

Nothing, he says. (The weight.) I can’t get my head around it. I mean, for them to endure so much, endure until now. And to make it this far, all the way here. He shakes his head and keeps shaking it. Speaking into the darkness of the other man’s face, not sure what sort of expression of bereavement Wire expects from him, not sure really what he is feeling just now.

Why it must play out thus?

Tabbs nods.

Why they should be cheated after having won?

Yes.

Wire swallows some of his drink. These times are no different from any other. You work around whatever these white devils give you, so as not to be led into their snares.

Yes, Tabbs says. But certainly it is not as bad as all that? I mean you can do something to contain it, to arrest the dying?

Wire stares back at him. You frighten me.

Tabbs sits across from Wire in the droning light, looking into the other man’s eyes, clear eyes, trying to figure the flow of thought. So like Wire, a big man not big on coming to the point, too loud a gesture revealing his feelings and quality of character. If Tabbs needs to explain or excuse himself he can’t. Wire is a man too often listened to, big in years — on this earth twice as long as Tabbs, fifty years or more — experience, wisdom.

Are we not one and the same? Wire asks. So you recognize that certain questions a true man of the Race will never ask.

No mistaking Wire’s disappointment. Tabbs wants to get up from his chair right now and walk out of this room, a big circular room filled with Wire’s furniture. Wire unable to relax in an ordinary chair, every chair in his home wide with long legs and a high back, throne-like. His home a dark haunting place full of stale evening light. Even the brightest rooms are dark.

It’s terribly hard. In fact, the dangers multiply. More arrivals tomorrow. By mule. By sporadic horse. But I can’t stay away. I have a certain affinity. I’m here with you now, but I’m thinking there.

Tabbs ventures to take a sip from the glass of sack he has been holding in his hands. The sea beyond the windows, outside the house, will float them through this silence. Wire seated in one monumental chair and Tabbs in another, across a table pointed with a decanter of wine. From this angle there seems little demarcation between house and sea, sea and house, as if the house is a cork bobbing in the ocean. A boat might come crashing through a window at any moment.

Every day we lose another surgeon or nurse. Why do they come at all? They work in silence. They pretend to hear and see and feel nothing. Wire’s hand moves, starting the long trek to some remote part of his body. So many who wish to abscond. Perhaps I’m destined to be the last man standing. You don’t just walk away from work like this. I will go to the camps tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, trying to pull death off these bodies. The weak have need of what is strong.

Wire brings the glass to his lips, his hair and beard barbered in a collusive manner making his beard look like a halter that has been slipped over his face. The end of the glass trembles as he drinks, his eyes wet and brilliant. He returns the glass to the hollow of his lap and takes his hand away, letting the glass rest, a shiny rising above cloth, crystal silo, liquid-drowned tower.

None of it stays with me. And none ever will. I’m used to trading in sin and rot.

He brings the glass to his mouth again, keeps it there for a time before returning it to his lap, the glass giving no evidence that it has been touched, the wine inside maintaining its previous level. The glass captures light in ways Tabbs thought not possible, glass as beautiful as water.

Doing what we do there you accept the limits of your power without thought about how much you can bear. You discover the limits of what you can feel.

Tabbs hears a donkey braying in the distance. A high congested honk followed by a low wheeze. Over and over again. He follows the sound in his mind. So many sounds he has yet to get used to here on the island of Edgemere. The call of a rooster in the morning. The shouts of fishermen. The familiar whine of the ocean. And sporadic calls, sharp and clear and far but unidentifiable.

Come see for yourself.

Tabbs eyes Wire warily, knowing not what to say, no time to lie, invent an excuse. I would welcome the chance, he says. How can he refuse? Wire’s enthusiasm has to be indulged. People come to him for guidance. Put their lives in his hands. Besides, Tabbs will need to ask Wire for a money loan before he leaves this house tonight. He swallows some of his drink, hoping he has mollified Wire somewhat with his almost-promise.

How else can I convince you?

You don’t need to convince me, Tabbs says. He knows the right words, the lie leaping from chin to chest, where it works its way back in. Does he sound convincing? He sees the look of doubt on Wire’s face.

Would it that you accompany me tomorrow. Setting out before dawn. But you must take your own decision. None of your days are idle. Would it that I cause an interruption.

Would it, Tabbs says, but you can count on my joining you.

Tabbs looks into the face of the other man, waiting for him to say something, show some indication of what Tabbs’s submission has earned him. But Wire says nothing, his face impassive. He lifts up the decanter from the table and refills his glass, pouring into the well of his lap, reaches across the table — this plane of smooth wood between them a silent road, a tongue stretched speechless — long arms forming a bridge over to Tabbs. He refills Tabbs’s glass. Let me ask you something. He returns the decanter to the table and meets Tabbs’s gaze. What compels you into your trade? You feel an obligation?

Yes, Tabbs says. Yes I do.

Concern for the greater?

Tabbs nods.

And so I ask you, what is the greater?

Tabbs hears the question.

I think I know you well enough by now and don’t doubt in the least your convictions, but can you say that what you do is more important?

Plain words, the voice hard and clear, so certain of itself.

No, you cannot. So why aren’t you there in the camps with me?

Tabbs feels his seat move back. Wire a big man and everything he does has force. A good ten feet away from him, but Tabbs feels the words catapult from Wire’s mouth, like wind-flung gravel, knocking Tabbs and his seat back. I would gladly put my services to use, he says, but I’m no surgeon.

What am I? Wire, expecting this response, leans forward, bringing his chest toward the rim of his lap-level glass, giving Tabbs the hard lines of his eyes, face, beard. Do you really believe that I am so without intelligence as to fail to recognize that you are not a surgeon?

Certainly not. If you will permit me—

What is it that you think I am?

Tabbs shapes words in his mind, tries them out, but can’t get them past his lips.

Just what? Who do you see sitting here? A fool?

No, Doctor, Tabbs says.

Take your right measure. Take it.

Tabbs is looking away so as not to see and feel Wire’s words. Wire is testing him, and Tabbs stares at Wire’s large hands, trying to manage the silence under Wire’s scrutinizing gaze, deflect the charge of moral authority. What Tabbs really wants to know, will Wire extend him the money he needs to carry on his efforts with Tom? Isn’t that after all the reason why he had accepted Wire’s invitation? Granted, Tabbs enjoys the comforts of Wire’s home. All grace and courtesy, Wire supplies his visitors in a most satisfactory style, makes them eat and drink as much as possible, has a thousand stories for anyone who cares to listen, his polished manners rising from the room’s armchair, his ease with people genuine, so too his concern, high-handed but always polite. They get along well. They hold similar opinions on many subjects. Tabbs is almost out of money and a free supper and good wine cannot easily be turned down. Who but Wire can supply him with a dose of funds? Should he ask Wire for a loan—

How much do you want?

As much as you can spare. More.

— Wire will set his crude conditions, no question of Tabbs coming to the camps the next day.

Is there any way around the camps, any way to delay his entry into those golden fields of Wire’s hopes? He must walk into this trap of his own accord, the give he needs to get—I’m obliged to come to the camps. You’re obliged to pay — an unhoped-for possibility.

Behind the scenes the Almighty is working things in our favor.

Yes, Tabbs says. Yes He is. He takes a quick breath, glad that Wire has mentioned God. Who knows, he, Tabbs, might at last say something embarrassing and true.

You must get used to the idea. Earnestly contend for the faith which was delivered unto the saints. But you don’t believe.

It’s just that I don’t know where to commit myself. I don’t know all that much about church.

Tabbs, you needn’t worry. You are not welcome in my church.

Wire sits there, smiling — confident, male.

Then I’ll stay away, Tabbs says, but only if you promise to preach my funeral. Otherwise bury me like a dog.

I would be happy to preach you and bury you. We all have thankless jobs to do.

Drowsing in the diminished light, Tabbs sits in an uncertain state, earnest, tired, something broken and floating inside his head. Despite hours of talk and drink, Wire looks surprisingly fresh, a full day of energy in his body.

So, you will tell. Are you not drawn to deep belief? Let’s clear this matter up. What are your beliefs?

It seems to Tabbs that he has already answered the question.

I have my reasons for asking. When the Almighty calls me home, I will need something to report.

Please speak to our creator on my behalf, Tabbs says, that is, if you think I am deserving of a good word.

Many good words. Should it come to that. But am I capable?

Wire takes to his feet — the decanter is empty — an ending overly prolonged. Come now, it’s time for you to go.

But through some force of inertia, Tabbs remains sitting, his mind commanding (pleading with?) his legs to perform their function. Wire standing like a black wall before him, gazing. When limbs capitulate at last, Tabbs rises to leave, a painful weariness in all of his body, a thousand fists beating him. What derives from the accumulation of many monotonous hours. Nothing said that was not to be said. Nothing remaining unsaid. He has won the right to submit, to surrender. All he has to do is ask. Ask.

Here, Wire says. From somewhere in the darkness he produces a pouch of headache powder and offers it to Tabbs. Put that on your pain.

Tabbs is obliged to accept the pouch, round light weight in his hand, admitting to himself — so it is — that Wire knows the uncertainty that floats about inside his skull, however discreet he has been.

You prefer to leave here still suffering. What have I told you? Nothing is foul for those who win.

What can Tabbs say in response? He simply thanks the doctor-preacher. Wire had taken it upon himself to see Tom back to health when Tabbs and the boy first came to the island. (It had come to pass that the Bethune woman had for days or even weeks there in her lavish apartment allowed Tom to suffer from a breath- and flesh-stealing affliction.) He had put Tom in one of the upstairs rooms rather than admit him to the hospital for what he surely knew would be a slow and difficult convalescence and had assigned one of his nurses from the camps to sit all night at the boy’s bedside, turning his head so that he would not strangle on his own vomit. Wire did not bother to set out his reasons for his generosity. I am only too happy to do you this small service. Why he had fresh clothes sent to the mother after her arrival on Edgemere. (Yes, that too.) Why he lent Tabbs the services of his driver and carriage. But Tabbs knew (felt, would learn) that it was more than just a pose. Tom for weeks reposed in a sea of white sheets like a black fish. Naked to the world. Skin dry and ashy, barely conscious, discharging rivers of urine. Tabbs and the nurse taking turns cooling down his body with water and chunks of ice. Wire would descend on the bed at set hours, pressing Tom’s eyelids with his fingers, with a raised flaming lamp check the color of his patient’s inner mouth, with palm measure the heat of Tom’s body, put ear to the hollow of the rising falling chest.

What good medicines do you have, Doctor? Tom had asked.

Try this. Wire set a bottle of holy water on the bedside table and told Tom to drink all of it.

Do this for me, Tom said.

Yes, Wire said. You’ll be happy to know that I have a piano downstairs. As soon as you are back on your feet.

You’re the one all the time up in that church.

Wire stood looking at Tom, surprise glittering in his eyes. Yes. He laughed. I am of the cloth. How did you know?

Blind Tom doesn’t play church music.

Released from Wire’s care, Tom took a room in the Home and gave no further thought to the Doctor. But Tom’s daily life remained of interest to Wire. No day went by without him dropping in to visit with the boy, entering the Home with his text- and appliance-heavy cloth satchel slung across his body, the instruments of his dual professions inside, not the least of which included hundreds of biblical verses stamped on leather and two leather-bound Bibles, the reason for the duplication unknown to Tabbs, nor clear the full purpose of their presence since Tabbs has never once seen Wire read from or even open either when giving a sermon or ministering to a patient, just weight in that bag he keeps slung across his body as he makes his rounds through the infirmary, all the happier to have Tabbs accompany him, should he wish to do so. Wire will pull a Bible from the satchel and keep it in one hand, moving from one tiny bed to the next, children weightless and inert. Wire full of knowledgeable satisfaction, perfectly comfortable in this world of dissipation, of retreating minds and withering skin, a bit fussy, scolding even, with the nurses and orderlies. As if to compensate for the failure of their hands, he brushes mentholated scent onto the sternums of his patients with the most tender strokes, especially those who are feverish — a remedy he had apparently never deemed appropriate for Tom — although nothing can hide his own smell after a day in the camps, the entire Home filled with the odor of cadaver, making it necessary to keep all the windows open for hours after he leaves.

One by one, the children will raise their faces in sensual curiosity, exploring the glassy green air. Wire can then bring it all to an end, having succeeded in putting off to the last possible moment any mention of Tom, Tom saved for last. He will enter the chapel to find Tom seated onstage at the piano. Enters quietly, without ceremony, no declaration, no announcement, but Tom removes his hands from the keys and places them in his lap, as if someone has blown a whistle, and he will resume playing only after Wire has left.

Is it so, a Chopin polonaise?

You know perfectly well.

He sits down on the bench next to Tom.

Should I remove my clothes, Doctor?

He defers to Tom, endeavors to be positive and polite.

We miss you at the house.

I don’t know a thing about it.

Well, we do.

He tries some tentative touches of the keys, even as his words fall short.

Why do your fingers such injustice when I have a fine instrument that goes unused?

I don’t want to live in a church.

You think that I live in a church?

Tom continues to refuse him. A Tom almost unknown to him.

You feel that?

What? What is it that you feel, Tom?

God just touched you.

Now he moves away, convinced perhaps that he has to do just that.

I’ll see you tomorrow, Tom.

A lot of good it’ll do you.

Wire gazes at Tabbs with a look of (he now realizes) mistrust. Still, he finds it in himself to smile at Tabbs as he prepares to leave the chapel. Says, his back to Tabbs, That boy is full of pranks. But Wire cannot not break himself of the habit, Tom an unvarying necessity. I can have it brought from the house. No? You feel that’s too much. Well, we’ll just have to have this one tuned. Seeing there’s no other way. Tabbs attaches great importance to these visits and encourages Tom to open up to the Doctor. Do him this one favor. He would be so pleased to see you. But he can do nothing to persuade the boy.

Beyond thanking the Doctor, Tabbs has shown Wire nothing in return for his concern, persistence, kindness. (How can he really?) Small gestures are enough for him. (They must be.) The fact that Tabbs will visit Wire’s church on a random Sunday or join him at his home for dinner.

Now, Wire says to him, Why go the way you came? Use some now.

Tabbs unloosens the drawstring of the pouch and rubs some headache powder on his forehead, then on his temples, a flurry of renegade particles flaking down onto his nose.

He is already on the point of passing into the foyer — things inside the room don’t seem the same as they were earlier in the evening — when he hears Wire say, They’ve been telling me about the boy. My entire congregation. The entire island. These things get around.

The words (tossed at him) point to a truth that Wire has uncovered about Tabbs and Tom (and the mother too? Ruggles even?), a truth that he has chosen to withhold until this opportune moment when it will do the most damage. Truly hard luck. Tabbs cannot ask Wire (himself) what Wire knows—What have you heard? — without risking discovery — the arrangements he does not want to expose, the uncertain ubiquity of his hopes.

Is it really sensible what you’ve been doing?

Easy to read Wire now. Tabbs feels at once humble and guilty (humiliated) in Wire’s presence. Now every vestige of control, of sense, of thought, goes out of him. How can he formulate his demand, knowing that it will seem feeble, undeserved, that anything he might say will seem suspect? He sees now that his plan has been nothing more than a misdirected outpouring of his energies. Wire had suspected (known) Tabbs’s intentions before this evening, conspired to use an invitation to his home as a prophylactic against Tabbs’s claims, thus freeing himself out of hand of any fraternal, moral, and practical obligations.

Even here at the door money lingers among Tabbs’s hopes, comes back into the field of present and immediate possibilities — so much he needs — a final pass at the Doctor’s purse will depend on a singular contingency: Tabbs will (he must) squeeze the request into the proper moral frame, an appeal on Tom’s behalf—You must do it for the boy. Only your money can save him—which Wire can then either honor or deny, which Wire can’t deny. Your money, his salvation. Tabbs sees a necessary connection between this prospective triumph and one cruel happening dating back to his (their, three) first days on Edgemere, an afternoon when he was in Wire’s company, the two strolling about the little narrow streets of the island, sidestepping pancakes of donkey dung—shit Wire calls it — looking in on various shops, stopping for a time at the old square where men gathered around the big bleem tree to smoke pipes and arm-wrestle and play cards and chess — Wire never loses, game or challenge — indulging a coalition of views, then speaking (Wire) in the full presence of a crowd of children outside his donkey sanctuary (constructed a month after his expulsion from the city; I saw the need; the first on the island), the most attentive children perched high on the fence where the donkeys were penned — twelve beasts under his care; Wire had said their names — praying for child and donkey alike before moving on to a more salubrious district, the market, island center, Wire passing on handfuls of spare coins to the perfumed mongers, which they accepted with hands they wiped clean for Wire to take and kiss, exchanging jokes, inquiring (Wire) about their husbands, offspring, and other relations. That day they would never get far without someone stopping to greet them (Wire), Wire and Tabbs partaking of the generosity they were given.

When they reached the main jetty (east to the city), they saw before them a crowd circled three people deep, man woman child, heads lifting eyes catching, Wire looming above all, his place in their lives such that they began parting into two banks of bodies, affording him (them) unobstructed passage to the circle center where they discovered four fishermen, each positioned at one of the four cardinal points, their tired faces directed toward the ground at some object of interest there, a long tube-like form, not unlike a caterpillar in appearance, only too large to be that, massive — this something at their feet powerless it would seem, fixed to the wet ground it would seem, under the collective force of these fishermen, who eyed their captive menacingly, while the captive struggled against itself, splotched with eye-like spots of blood — red seeing through the skin — the promised life inside determined to break free, a butterfly imprisoned inside its own oppressive cocoon. Three of the four took up the unfortunate creature and tossed it into the hollow of their dhow with an explosive thud, leaving behind the man (West) closest to Wire. Disconsolate, embarrassed, he sought to establish the moral validity of their actions before Wire took them to task.

They had captured a thief, a man who had been stealing from everyone on the island for months. He (West) enumerated the terrible thefts the thief had committed. (Heads nodded.) The thief would go on stealing, unless they put an end to it now. (Uh huh’s and You got that right’s.) He had stumbled into their hands less than an hour ago after time and again steering clear of their most-watchful sentinels. They had bound him and brought him here. They beat him then stuffed and sealed him up in an unneeded sack with the stolen items they’d found in his possession and were now preparing to take him out and deposit him into a deep part of the ocean.

I see, Wire said. May I have a look at the thief?

They brought the sack forth, untied it, and roughly drew it free, exposing the thief who had been confined inside, now seated upright on the wet ground, short of breath, eyes closed (swollen shut?), nude, his whole body slick as if dipped in some red fluid. Tabbs had seen the thief about, a boy really, a new arrival like himself.

Wire continued looking at the thief. He couldn’t look anywhere else for a long time. Who shall deliver me from this body of death.

Reverend. Sir. If you could—

Time’s getting on, Wire said. He directed his face toward each fisherman in turn before his worried look settled once again on the thief. Gentlemen, I shouldn’t delay you further, but I want to put your minds at ease. (Wire looking from the thief to the fishermen.) Want you to know that I fully understand what you are set on doing. You have the right to protect yourselves. Any man or beast who would rob you of your livelihood, who would snatch food from your mouth or the mouths of those you must feed, that man or beast is doing nothing less than trying to diminish your life, extinguish it little by little. Is this not murder by another name? How can such murder be tolerated? I am impressed. You’re sensitive to have given this so much thought. Not that you require my approval. Certainly not. All will be well with you.

The fishermen looked one to the other, hiding their intimidation in the silence they stood in.

For we know what the Scriptures say. Turn the other cheek and suffer violence to the face, to the flesh and blood. But where does it say we must permit a strike to the stomach? Let him violate you if he must, but hunger you? Starve you? Burn your harvest? Carry off your crops? Poison your wells? I would love nothing better than to drown such a murderer myself, should I possess the authority. So wronged, I would drown my own son, give up my own father. But there is one fact you must consider. (Hear me out.) The flesh of a sinner is the Almighty’s and He can do with it as He pleases. And that life contained within the flesh does not belong to you. Broach no claims on it. Wire raised the index fingers on both hands as if measuring some distance between them, the gesture nothing more perhaps than a strategic pause (space) that afforded him time to observe what the fishermen’s expressions told him, time to register their hesitation and dismay. Protection is the province of man, Justice the province of God. Man has no claims on Justice. Understand that. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’ve only heard Justice here today.

West started to stammer something, but the words faded in his mouth.

So how can I, a man of God, let you take from Him what is His? Who would be the greater criminal? Who would be the greater thieves? As much as I want to, I cannot.

The fishermen stood there without speaking, listening in what could only be described as attentive reverence.

This man has wronged you and wronged God. So give him his due. (What I can permit.) Let him work a thousand days to pay back what he has stolen from you. Or simply beat him, as you have. Beat him and banish him. Wire let the words stand for all to consider. And here is one more thing you might take into account. Should you decide to give him some of God’s mercy, each of you might be blessed forever.

Were the men nodding? Were they smiling?

Wire took another look at the thief. Spoke to the fishermen while looking at the captive: You have already done enough. You would agree? Yes? Perhaps you haven’t. Be certain. Beat him some more. Yes, beat him some more and be done with it.

The fishermen pummeled, punched, and kicked the thief with little energy or effort. The thief made no attempt to defend himself.

I’m glad to see that you’re such reasonable men. Would it be too much to say that I am proud? Well, I am. Wire extended his hand, summoning each fisherman to come forward, which they did in turn. He spoke each man’s name in a matter-of-fact way then proceeded to reach into his cloth satchel and pull out a scrap of leather verse, which he lifted high into the air above his head, like one feeding fish to a seal. The befuddled fishermen cupped both hands in front of them to receive (catch) the verses. Once the man before him received his verse, Wire stared into his face and recited it word for word in an unmistakably affectionate tone, all present awed by the demonstration, more awed in the repeating. On the face of it, either the performance or the blindly selected verses themselves spoke to the heart of each would-be killer, for one after the other they dropped their heads and seemed to feel real shame.

I’m sorry that I won’t be filling your bellies or your fists today, Wire said. But if you visit the shop tomorrow I will see what I can do. Bring your Scriptures.

A promise he would certainly fulfill, although unclear what these men, accustomed to operating on the sea’s moving surface, would need with any implements of stationary road travel that Wire could provide from King Jesus Carriage Parts, his shop. Unlikely that these men even owned donkeys.

Wire spoke to the thief. Take to your feet.

And the thief did in all of his nakedness. He made no effort to cover himself.

I should strike you too, Wire said. See what I’ve had to do. It’s improper for me to stand here putting questions to these gentlemen with their friends and neighbors looking on.

The thief said that he was sorry, although clearly he was in pain and had difficulty speaking. And he said it again. Pain and all, he appeared happy, a bloody grin, if that’s what it was.

You’re sorry and yet you continue to be irreverent and disrespectful, standing here when you should be on your way.

I’ll be, I wanna be, but I ain’t got a goddamn thing.

What?

Said I ain’t got a goddamn thing. Standing with his hands behind his back as if still fettered, his penis all that was free, on display, black signature of skin and bone.

Is that so? You expect me to reward you, for theft? For murder?

No, suh. Trying to draw a breath. I ain’t asking for no damn reward. I jus need to get on up away from here. Get on up from this grave.

Wire looked at the thief as though he had said something immensely stupid. You’re asking me to help you? He laughed awkwardly. Well, I see you expect me to take care of all of your complaints, a man able of body and mind.

I’d be much obliged to do something for you in return. Much.

Look at you. What can you do for me?

Taking Wire’s answer as a refusal, the thief said nothing at first, then he was in distress, great distress, and insisted he go with Wire, a separate appeal in his expression.

Wire asked him what his name was. He said that he had no name he could give. Speech and body residing in some undefined space between gratitude and grief. The surf breaking behind him, dhows tossing and bobbing, and waves crawling toward shore like an army silent in ambush.

I haven’t much patience. Wire made as though to leave.

You ain’t got to worry bout me none. I swear on a stack. Left hand on Jesus. Right hand on God.

On hearing this, Wire approached the four fishermen. By then the four had boarded their dhow and were ready to set off to sea. Wire asked that they return to shore. (The hold he had over them.) It would be these men who would ferry the thief to the mainland, to the city. Talking quietly among themselves, it took doctor and fishermen almost ten minutes to negotiate a price while the thief waited; someone gave him garments to cover his body; someone gave him a cloth to wipe his face; someone gave him a long draft of water; then he spat out blood. Relieved, he thanked Wire and thanked him again and again and went off with the men in subdued silence.

Wire and Tabbs took lunch at a café, never speaking a word about the event. (It was for Wire to speak first—That’s the way they do things here, why there are no criminals—then Tabbs could respond accordingly.) Later it occurred to Tabbs that Wire was trying to impress on him something of the true nature of his work. He had saved men from murder. He had driven other men to kill. War his to declare, his to stop.

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.

The boy curls up in his piano, in himself. Waiting. Waiting him out.

The sound reaches him before he reaches the courtyard, tearing and shredding, pellets pinging against hard surfaces, girls seated around metal tubs, shucking ears of corn, emptying fingers of beans and peas, seventy girls or more arranged in groups of ten. All those learning hands. No surprise at his entry. Unnoticed or as unremarkable as those hills of discarded green skin rising up from the floor. Or he is only partially glimpsed passing through rows of freshly laundered clothes and sheets flapping flag-like on ropes suspended from one side of the courtyard to the other. Is it her he sees just up ahead beating dust from the pillowcases? Gone before he makes it there. Moving on, courtyard and clotheslines giving way to ceilings and walls, boys young and alive in rooms, speaking at once, taking stairs headlong at a gallop, leaping over couches and chairs. And now she is with them, laying down the law, her thick gold and silver bracelets rattling as she pushes and pulls the children. She can be heard going about her labors even when the eye catches no sight of her, bracelets clattering up and down her wrists and forearms. She crosses the room jauntily with a cluster of the smallest boys about her, ready to bring the older ones to order. Motioning at this one, shouting at that one. What did I tell you? Where my switch?

I need to speak to you a moment.

She stops and turns, releasing a movement of shadow. Mr. Tabbs.

Might I have a word?

Jus let me mind these children first.

I’ll be in the church.

Set on a short walk to the church, he leaves the way he came, through the high wrought iron gate set inside the four-storied stone wall surrounding the Home, a wall ancient and crumbling but wide and strong, suitable for a castle or a fort. No clue who built it, when or why. His progress quickly stalls on a street where donkey buttocks block his passage, Tabbs caught behind a donkey train on a street so narrow you have to turn sideways to let another person or animal pass. The conductor carries a stick, beating it rhythmically against his own leg rather than against animal hide. Directs the train with a series of kissing sounds and whistles. One kiss means Go left. Another, Go right. This whistle, Straight ahead. That whistle, Step around that hole. Tabbs following along, a hoof a minute. These people and their donkeys. A man without a donkey is a donkey. Content to take life at a crawl. Why horses and carriages are rare here.

He wants answers. Something to go on. Unclear the source of the boy’s despair. If he is cross or sad. Just what exactly? The boy had expressed no desire to see anyone other than her. I want her. He has no idea what the boy and the mother do together in their time alone. What the boy does with his day. She seems to be exactly the thing the Home requires. Works without complaint for the miserly salary the Home can provide. Makes no fuss over her own person or her own sufferings. She seems to like her work, and life here on Edgemere. Doesn’t she owe this new life to him? Fact of the matter, she owes her new life to him. Edgemere. Salaried labor. Her son. Tabbs needs her to tell her son. Needs her to set the boy right, get inside his head and make him understand what they’re doing. Who else better than her?

He had offered her a generous share of future earnings. (He had it on good word that the Blind Tom Exhibition took in better than twenty-five thousand dollars a year for the Bethunes, a sum he expected to meet and increase.) For I know the plans I have for you, sayeth the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. But she neither accepted nor declined the offer, only continued to sit with her hands in her lap, looking at the washtub hollow on the floor between them.

Tell me how much, he said.

You already said it good, she said.

So you’re okay with the percentage? I can have papers drawn up.

I had enough of papers.

And that was that. Now he needs to know that Tom is still free to shaping, that all of him is within reach.

Turning the corner, the last mule in the train blinks him a big-eyed wink, proud of its balanced buttocks close enough for Tabbs to smell and touch, and thanking Tabbs for his patience, for hanging in stride after long deliberate stride, his shoes closely rhythmed with hooves, almost on beat. Passing the angular church the mule makes sure to lower its head and mumble a few respectful words.

Lord, do it

Do it for me

This is the cry of your children

Please, Sir

Do it for me

Right now

What is it that Tabbs hears? The choir (congregation) singing inside? Preaching, weeping, praying, hollering, testifying, grunting, groaning and moaning, and stomping feet. He passes under the prohibitive sign of warning above the church door. NO FISH ALLOWED. Takes all of his wondering into the church, half-expecting to find Wire there.

If you read your Bible

You heard about the blind man who could not see.

But he is alone. Must have chased minister and congregation away, leaving only echoes. Can I preach it like I feel it? He takes a seat at the rear of the church, welcoming the hard pew beneath him, the creaking bulk of it. Closes his eyes and savors the privacy, the quiet emptiness, dozens of wooden pews like docked ships. Explaining it all to himself. Thinking about everything and nothing.

You should take your time with this one, Ruggles said.

Since when are you the man of caution?

I always look first.

I’ve looked, Tabbs said.

Nawl. You couldn have.

What am I missing?

What are you seeing?

A chance, Ruggles. A chance.

Shit. You already got that.

Ruggles, just come out and say it.

I thought I was.

Ruggles.

Okay. You’re dealing with a white man.

I’ve never known anything white to scare you.

This ain’t bout being scared. Everybody scared. But this ain’t bout that.

Well, what’s it about then? I can’t change the fact that he white. Damn if I care.

You should care a little, a teeny bit. Cause his white skin ain’t the only thing you got to worry bout. You want to hear the rest?

Are you gon say it?

The rest: You ain’t half what he is.

…

He got everything to go along with that alabaster skin. Money to do his will. And men to boot. More and more of the same.

That’s the story of this country.

And it’ll be your story too.

He opens his eyes to discover her sitting on a pew at the front of the church, watching.

I ain’t mean to wake you, she says.

No. I asked for you to come.

He waves her toward him.

She tries to rise, once, twice, three times, fumbling and weak, Tabbs refusing to accept such causality—She is stalling for time—primed to disbelieve, outraged. Then he sees that she is carrying something in her face, all of what she is. He speaks to her, softly but not softly enough. She sits down on the pew directly in front of him with unconscious ease and economy, like a section of wall slipping into an allotted place. He slides along the pew to angle a view of her face. Nothing of the son in the mother, the boy all black fire, dark sheen, while she bears the evidence of Anglo-Saxon blood — studding, rape. Her features indefinable, beholden to no eye, neither ugly nor pretty. Just. And ageless. He thinks of her as an old woman although she could as easily be thirty as fifty.

As if to further confound his pondering, she lowers her face, her line of sight directed at the floor, the same way she had sat beside him on the train up from the South, head fixed, silent (can’t recall her saying a single word), never returning his gaze. He wonders now as he wondered then about her apparent timidity, to what degree actual, to what degree fabricated. Tabbs recognizes her dress as one of a handful Wire had given her, a length of fabric that in no way fits her form, but seems to stand away from her body and assume a shape of its own deciding, layers of air between material and skin. Preparing for their trip, Wire had guessed at her measurements, how what might best fit where, then had several fine dresses made for her.

I put on my speed, she says, talking at the floor. But chillen is a tribulation.

Well, you came when you could.

She says nothing to that. So he finds himself, reduced to her company once again, sitting quietly in the church, a space that he has decided to make his — should he lock the door? — for an hour or two before he sends her back to the Home. He muses about right and entitlement, about which of the two of them has claim to the church, Wire’s domain, if only for an hour or two. Should he have asked first? (Ask Wire. You should have asked him.)

How do you find it here, on Edgemere?

I ain’t never seen nothing like it.

Yes. And that’s a good thing I hope.

Everybody so kind.

They just want to help. We all want to help.

…

We all feel so honored to have him here.

You did a good thing.

I’m only doing what I promised.

…

I hope you’re finding some time for yourself. For you and your boy. He speaks into her profile, her skin smooth, her features firm, like a highly polished piece of wood.

Doin jus fine.

I can always talk to Ruggles if there’s something else you need.

Mr. Ruggles, he so kind.

Yes. That’s how we are. We all want to help, help you and Tom.

Thomas, she says.

Thomas, he says. Tongue corrected. Looking into that frozen face. You must feel special, so special because of the boy, Thomas.

I have him back.

Yes. But you know I’ve been worried. The boy has me deeply troubled. In fact, I’ve been praying, praying about the boy, Thomas.

The words turn her gaze directly into his face.

He hasn’t been himself.

Thomas? Him? He new. He jus need some time.

Do you think that’s what it is? I thought it might be something else.

He givin you some trouble.

Tabbs studies the fancy green- and-pink pattern of her silk shawl. Is it worry he hears in her voice?

Don’t you worry about him. He got his own mind. Always did.

If you just try talking to him.

I can’t see what good it would do.

We need to hurry this thing along. Isn’t that what you want? You can have all that you couldn’t before. And it will all be yours. No Bethunes to take. To steal and rob and cheat. Don’t you want that?

You ain’t got to yell, she says.

I’m not yelling, he says. Is she giving him some back talk? (What it is.) He feels like slapping her. (He has it in him. Knows this for a fact.) He could abandon the bad-tempered woman and simply walk out. But he brings himself to say, I’m sorry. I need your help.

She moves her hand and the loops of metal bangles go sliding and clanking from her wrist to her forearm then back again.

Now he has to sit here and put up with all her barbaric jewelry. Has he not been generous to her? Has he not given her back her son? A chance at a prosperous future?

I can only imagine what you two have suffered, he says. The Bethunes. For all those years. How you managed to tolerate them.

She wipes the sweat gathered at her eyebrows. I had my share of white folk. Before and since. I tolerate them jus fine.

I cannot help but sympathize with you, Mrs. Wiggins. Greene Wiggins. With an e. Through my dealings with the General I well know the nature of his character, the nature of that family, the whole line of them. If he keeps talking perhaps he can pull from her the responses he needs.

You know these woogies. They gave me misfortunes, misfortunes aplenty. They don’t know no other way to act. You can’t expect no different.

Tabbs nods.

But they did that one thing right.

What thing is that?

They gave my son a name.

He is on his way to Ruggles. Not that he has much choice in the matter, for his difficulties with the boy have persisted for almost a week (more time lost) after his useless conference with the mother. Best to see Ruggles.

Doing his best not to think of home, the city. His past lingers about him, a low humming in the ear, some memory trying to worm its way out. Many times since his return he has ferried to the city for one thing or another — interviews, appointments, arrangements — but he has never been able to summon enough will to venture to his old apartment in Black Town, afraid of what he might find there. White Pappa sitting in his chair. White baby sitting at his table eating out of his bowl and plate. White Mamma sleeping in his bed. Dreaming his history. A part of him there still, unfinished. He sees it but cannot hear it or remember its smells, tastes, and textures. No sounds or words carrying through time. His mind too full of present goals. The boy part of every thought, the boy even in his least ideas. Much is still unsettled, but he is borne in a single direction — the city, then the world.

Looking at all that water, you can’t see the city, you never see it. You must trust that it is there. Perhaps Edgemere is drifting farther and farther away from the city into some dark unknown. He has devoted a great deal of thought to leaving the island, giving him and Tom the benefit of new surroundings. But he has already invested so much here, the preparations and negotiations. (Many waters crossed.) Why lose all that? Better to stay the course and push aside whatever stands in his way. He tells himself that the mother has honored her end of the bargain. Without her he doubts the boy would have progressed the little he has. Still, he has his own comfort to seek and his own situation to improve as he can. Give the stage back to Blind Tom and give Blind Tom back to the world, an interesting and worthy undertaking, highly becoming of his skills and powers. What better for him and the boy and the mother?

Just so happens he sees her in the market — speak of the devil — holding in each hand three chickens upside down by their three-toed feet, heads only inches above the earth (fantastic white-yellow brooms), their eyes round and blank as coins, oblivious to the slaughter awaiting them. He lingers among the fishmongers until he can no longer see her. Avoiding her he has chanced upon a heated argument between two women, their voices growing increasingly high above rows of fish lined up on identical wood boards, one accusing the other of thieving her money by means of a tiny hole bored into her bucket.

Edgemere seems the perfect place for the pull of superstition, the islanders at ease in their customs and habits. No white folks, alabasters, around to check them. Tabbs purchases a red snapper from each woman, but his coins fail to quell their dispute. They continue shouting, each woman standing up in anger from her bucket stool.

Outside the church Tabbs sees scores of children converge around Wire, their bodies weirdly frenzied. Father, they call. So much they want to tell him, their voices urgent and excited, speaking all at once, Wire trying to calm them, moving his hands and pulling first one tongue from the mix then another, temporary success, one voice barely waiting for another to finish. He lowers his torso bridge-like, making it possible for each child to kiss his cross, the big silver object attached to a lengthy thumb-thick loop of iron around his wide neck. It swings back and forth in the light, the shiniest metal Tabbs has ever seen, clanking like a cowbell. You wear Jesus, Tom said.

Tabbs can’t help but notice Wire’s ease with children. They don’t fear his intimidating form but enjoy his company. They follow him into the church, a long singing chain.

Tabbs stands looking. Of course he is lost. Should he take the street on the left of the church or the one to the right?

Excuse me, sir. How do I get to Ruggles? No sooner said than corrected. People here know Ruggles by his Christian name, David, Mr. David. When he’d first returned after more than five years away, Tabbs had no clues to Ruggles’s whereabouts, if he was dead or alive or if he had moved away, moved on. But he quickly discovered that on Edgemere Mr. David was a name in every mouth and ear. During the expulsion the island had taken Ruggles in with a thousand other exiles from the city, no questions asked. They provided him with a house and made him headmaster of the orphanage, an unlikely profession for the Ruggles Tabbs knew, a hard-nosed man loaded down with banknotes, a good twenty pounds or more distributed under his fine clothes and underwear, a man whose head was full of names, dates, places, and numbers, how much borrowed, how much paid. This Ruggles took his leisure at abolitionist parties, listened patiently while the runagate at the lectern narrated his horrible tribulations — ladies fainting, men vomiting in their handkerchiefs — and pleaded for donations toward the purchase of loved ones left behind, Ruggles unmoved, holding out for the post-testimonial food and spirits.

I won’t put my hard-earned money into some slaver’s coffers, Ruggles said. Rather I murder one or two of them instead.

By birth Ruggles’s right leg was noticeably shorter than the left, every inch of his body twisted and swollen with his lopsidedness. He tried to mask (present?) his deformity as best he could beneath fine clothing and expertly stitched shoes — a big half moon of soft leather on each foot, always polished, black shine — walking with surety at his own unhurried pace. However, his vulnerable body and risky line of work brought him days filled with violence, legs and arms and pockets wracked with danger, he and Tabbs both accepting the brutal necessity of fending off some attacker or collecting a debt.

Nothing of his wealth survived the expulsion, ocean stripping him of suits shoes shirts and hats, dissolving the last of his banknotes, Edgemere restructuring the body itself, bringing about a change in dress and a change in personality (to the surface self at least), and creating in Mr. David a man decidedly different from his city counterpart, a man who finds everything in this life to his taste: the roosters, the donkeys, the narrow streets, the luring softness of sand and sea.

I was in the water. Dark. Cold. My lungs had no more life to give. I knew I would never make it across. Knew I would be carried under. I would be left to tell my last words and tales to the mud and eels. Anytime now. But I kept swimming and somehow I made it across. That’s how it all started. Can’t say if it took a week or a month. It happened so quietly and without my notice. One day I up and realized that my legs were now the same length.

These white devils had done a most wonderful thing. They had given me what God couldn’t. I could never have broken free from their world on my own. They kicked me out the door.

Tabbs crosses the low hedge-lined and tottering and slippery narrow stone footpath that brings him to Ruggles’s house, a little cradle of stone. You should have seen it. A sight for sore eyes. Most of the windows gone, part of the roof, and all of the doors. They brought paint, plaster, and wood, and in two weeks the walls were white, the doors closed the way they should, the windows had shutters, the closets could be used, the floors no longer had holes in them, the roof and ceilings had been sealed. They brought beds and furniture and carried everything in and put each item where I told them. They started a fire in the stove. Stocked the pantry. Shit, wouldn have surprised me none if they gave me a wife.

Ruggles cracks his knuckles in the doorway, looking amusedly at Tabbs, eyes steady with their assured shine, stark wonder. The unexpected sight of Ruggles standing there as if by prior arrangement causes something to break inside Tabbs. He doesn’t have the calmness of mind he thought, fearful of surrendering himself, Ruggles a master at balancing judgments, playing the devil’s advocate, off-putting, pushing around, cutting down. Tells himself that he must stick to his sense of right no matter what, that only his sense of right can decide it.

Tabbs directs the leaf-wrapped bundles of fish toward Ruggles, who accepts them with hands the color of dark soil, a good three shades darker than the rest of his body as if he is wearing gloves.

You want to fry these up?

No. They’re for you.

Back inside Ruggles gives the parcels of fish to his housekeeper. The men take seats in the parlor, a small pleasant room sparkling and grand with the eye-filling sight of red vases in the wide tall windows, vases around which nude black figures pursue each other in an endless procession. The housekeeper hurries in with a whistling teakettle and a single cup on a saucer. She sets cup-saucer on a slim table between Tabbs and Ruggles. Starts to pour. The spout releases water so slowly it takes a good minute to fill the cup, Tabbs and Ruggles waiting for filling to be done and the woman to quit the room.

What’s up, homeskillet?

You looking at it.

I’m looking at it? I know there got to be more to see.

Nothing to it. One day like any other.

Uh huh. How those women treatin you?

What women?

What women? The ones that’s pretty as pee. You know how I like mine.

I know.

You run into a dry spell? Ruggles’s smile is even coyer now. Better get you some of that pussy oil from Wire.

So we’re going to sit here talking about pussy?

Homeskillet, you the one bringing me fish first thing in the morning. Sounds like a pussy problem to me.

I wanted to catch you before you left.

You could have caught me at the Home.

Tabbs looks at the steaming cup of tea he hasn’t touched.

I don’t know how you spend your days.

What’s to know?

Lots. Starting with who you fuckin.

Dressed in a plain open-necked white shirt with black buttons and loose-fitting white pants encircled with a black leather belt, Ruggles sits with his left leg crossed over his right and his body inclined forward somewhat as if guarding his right side, a pose that seems to draw attention to his fit angles and lines while at the same time throwing his face in proud relief, a face exuding irrepressible vigor and excitement. His eyes do not smile when the mouth does, but his goatee moves with every facial expression like some adjustable ornament draped over his mouth. A lion’s mane of hair roars from his head, black intensity although he is starting to gray at the temples and his hairline is retreating from his forehead, low tide. Still no mistaking the sense of youthful accord in his features. Ruggles looks not yet fifty but long past forty with teeth that shine white when he speaks or smiles. When they first met — twenty years ago? or was it more? less? far less, yes? I was seven, give or take—at the Zoological Society Ruggles must have been roughly the same age as Tabbs is now.

I’m not the only one out early. I saw Wire down by the church.

Probably saying his good-byes.

He’s set for travel?

No, Ruggles says. He’s leaving us. Leaving Edgemere. Moving back to the city.

Tabbs cannot prevent Ruggles from seeing his puzzled look.

You didn’t know? He’s been telling everyone for weeks.

Tabbs will say nothing about supping with Wire yesterday, about the camps and the amputations and the headache powder.

I tried to talk him out of it.

You should have saved your breath.

Don’t hold it against him.

Shutters, lattices, and doors are all flung open to the rare breeze on this hot day, the room flushed with light as if the ceiling has been lifted away. Tabbs suffers a miserable feeling of inner and outer lightness. He watches Ruggles lift his teacup with those glove-dark hands, slurp it empty, and return it to the saucer.

It was getting cold, Ruggles says.

Ruggles was never one to let anything go to waste, finding use for stale bread and flat beer and wormy meat. The hard impact of his presence, his fierce determined eyes, sharp chin, flat weak nose, and scrotum-shaped head, turns Tabbs’s mind to the Pygmy inside his bell-shaped cage, Tabbs a boy of Seven or eight and the Pygmy no taller than him, a grown man withstanding with silent grim impersonality the food pelted at him. Each day Tabbs would sneak inside the Ape House and quietly make his way to the Pygmy cage. Succeed in eliciting (aggravating?) the patrons’ disgust with made-up facts and chronicles about the Pygmy. As if by unspoken agreement with Tabbs, the Pygmy would act out with brazen savagery the peculiar traits of his species, gnashing his teeth, flailing his arms, gyrating his loin-clothed pelvis, and massaging his bare chest. Heedless of the bread, candy, cookies, apples, oranges, bananas, pears, and peanuts thrown into his cage until he took the offensive, his spit and piss driving patrons away. Tabbs would eat or pocket much of what had fallen short of the cage, what the Pygmy’s short arms couldn’t reach through the bars. One afternoon like so many before, Tabbs found himself in the company of a misshapen man who it would seem had not fled with the others. The Pygmy was aware of him too. The Pygmy began the first assault of many on the man, but the man only lowered his face, taking spit on the lapels of his jacket and the crown of his stovepipe hat, and urine wherever the directed streams found their mark. In this way the man endured fluids for a good quarter hour or more. The Pygmy ceased his attack for reasons only he knew and for several moments stood there in his cage gazing out at the spit-speckled man dripping from chest to shoes with piss. Then he turned away and sat down in a back area of his cage, relishing the first of his bananas. The man who had stood his ground calmly invited Tabbs to join him at his home for a well-cooked meal. Tabbs accepted without hesitation, and sometime later that night, after the man had taken a bath and changed his clothing, after both he and Tabbs had enjoyed a long rambling dinner, both belly-full, sometime during the course of that night — most of the details now are lost in Tabbs’s memory — the man offered Tabbs employment. The following evening Tabbs went to work for Ruggles — that was the man’s name — finding customers for Ruggles’s black box, Tabbs quickly realizing an easy competence in the arts of procuring and persuading so that the line of entry to the black box on average would stretch twenty men deep. Get them in, get them out. The black box a place of pleasure but hardly a place of comfort, barely long and wide enough for one person to stretch out in, let alone two, the ceiling so low that you had to stoop at all times, and completely cut off from light. Still, men came one after the next, spilling in and out from opening to closing. Seeing how well Tabbs conducted this enterprise, Ruggles brought Tabbs along with him some years later when he went into lending.

I didn’t think you wanted the tea. Ruggles imbibes his own cup of tea.

Of course I wanted it, Tabbs says. And I want it still. It is not the smallness of his beginnings he fears. Who he is now is whom he has chosen to become.

I’ll have her bring another cup.

I was not. Now I am. Watching his own changing selves, malleable shapes lacking advantage of birth and education; resourceful and limitless and fearless. Beating the odds. Tabbs wondering whether there are any others like him and the Pygmy and Tom who have escaped the cages of their keepers and refused the roles held out to them. He sees the darkness inside his head filling with bananas and pears and apples. Hears peanuts clinking against the sides of his skull. Looks and sees a fresh steaming cup on the table. Takes it up with violent speed, sips forcefully, and returns it so loudly to the saucer he fears he has broken it.

Ruggles looks embarrassed, embarrassed for Tabbs. Ruggles has sunk back into the chair, into the softness of the cushions, his legs crossed easily in front of him. You might need still another, he says. And a fish. Smiling the words.

Hot fluid rushing inside him, Tabbs feels an ambiguous comfort. I need your influence with a certain matter.

Okay, Ruggles says. What?

It’s the mother.

Tabbs observes the friendly uncertainty scattered across Ruggles’s face. On second thought, Ruggles does not really look entirely like the Pygmy.

What about her?

I need you to send her away. Off the island. Just for a few days. Tabbs tries to say it as lightly as possible.

Ruggles continues to look at him. So now it comes out.

She commands his attention. I have to put an end to it, just long enough. I’ve tried talking to her. But how can I stop her from coming when he begs for her?

You can’t.

No.

So put an end to it, all of it, for good.

What?

You’ve milked it for all you can.

And gotten what, Ruggles? You found the boy.

And you think that’s enough? Tabbs shakes his head. Can’t believe I’m hearing you say that, Ruggles. Not you.

That’s the experience, homeskillet. I tried to warn you. Hard head, soft behind.

Hell, I’m soft all over. But that ain’t telling me much.

Dripping light, several swimmers outside seem to (semblance) climb in through the windows. Towel themselves dry with shadow.

You listening?

I’m listening.

Ruggles makes a gesture as if to say that anything he might add would be useless. He is displeased with the turn the conversation has taken and remains silent for a while staring at the floor. Tabbs hates feeling that Ruggles knows his mind, assumptions rooted in the certainties of their long history, Ruggles filling in the blanks about all that lay between Tabbs’s first efforts before the war to free the boy from General Bethune to the freeing itself that leaf-strewn day last fall when Tabbs found Mr. David at the Home shortly after he and the mother had arrived together here on Edgemere. Knows too that correlated moment several weeks later when Tabbs returned from the city carrying the weightless boy in his arms.

I can’t chance a week to see this through?

So see it through. You don’t need me. You brought her here. You brought them both.

No, Ruggles. It must come from you. She will listen to you.

Ruggles looks up from the floor into Tabbs’s face. He looks as if he wants to erase Tabbs with his gaze. Then I better leap to it, he says.

Tabbs says nothing in response. In a moment’s concentrated rush, he realizes that he has insulted Ruggles, never his intention.

Where must I send her for your week? Say it and I’ll obey.

Tabbs accepts the remark with good grace and continues to meet Ruggles’s gaze, every tendon in his body throbbing, prepared for flight. The small room feels too full with them both, with them and the swimmers and the vases. Now the difficult task of restoring the equilibrium, but no apology is likely to impose its will on Ruggles. Strong-headed. Stubborn. A reconciliation best left for another day. Tabbs looks about the room with the sensuous approval of someone who knows it well. Draws up a name—Wire—that pinches his tongue.

Of course. Throw him in this too.

Tabbs lets the comment drip away, him here, Ruggles there, the separate curves of a parenthesis, space between them. She can help Wire settle in, he says.

Ruggles takes up the tea (cold now) and gives himself time to drink it in silence, dark hand strangling the white cup. Well, homeskillet. He balances the empty cup improbably on his knee. I’m glad you came for something important.

Tabbs starts back, the beauty of day and all the bright-colored dhows tethered in the harbor growing strong in him. Each hull tilts toward its neighbor, two conjoining in a clap. He catches himself beginning again the attempts at self-persuasion, self-justification. Doesn’t relish the thought of punishing her, if that’s what it is, punishing the boy. Putting another bit of separation between them. What God join let no man tear asunder. Not his intention. Never his intention. For he must do what she can’t, restrained as she is by maternal attachments. No backing down. He never would have freed the boy from the Bethunes unless he had it inside to follow the idea wherever it took him. Remembers when the Bethune woman with a relaxed detached air took him into the stale dusty room where the boy was, a sight that raised in him a feeling of straightforward disgust. Skin and bones. Even the skin not fitting right, gone lax, like hand-me-down clothes three sizes too big. Something in him had wanted to kill the white woman, a familiar predatory self fully awakened. He pushed down the urge. Simply collected the boy as best he could and left the apartment, the glow of revenge lessening with each downward stair. He knew he had his work cut out for him, getting the boy back to health, that before all else. So much to recover, restore. But he told himself, I have the boy. Stalled, dragged back, I finally have the boy, Tom.

I want her.

I’m sorry.

Bring her to me.

I’m sorry.

And you’ll bring her.

That isn’t possible.

But I’ve asked you.

She has left you. It’s only me now.

You took her away.

I’m sorry. She has left—

The boy turns his face. You turn too and see her watching from the open door, fresh from slaughtering chickens, her hands and forearms lathered in feathers.

He feels a satisfaction that settles his mind: he is doing nothing time will not justify. What it will mean to give Blind Tom back to the world, back to the Race, and put the lie once and for all to the vicious claims for the Negro’s lack of intellect and refinement, genius and culture — the collateral and collective gains of his personal campaign against the Bethunes.

The waves are soft and almost noiseless, starting from far out and breaking in long smooth lines at the shore. (Whatever the eye wants.) A bell rings faintly behind him. The shore swells under a confused sweep of voices, Tabbs pulled into the sight of her marshaling a herd of sea-bathing children, safety and sanity, her watertight garments overspilling with the noise of gold and silver bracelets.

The boy makes a brutal series of movements from the chair to the piano then back again. Sits down on top of the black lacquered surface, face angled toward the floor six feet below, forehead greasy with sweat, legs swinging. Is the boy conscious of him? He has said nothing since Tabbs came into the auditorium an hour ago, two. Has he really sat for this long simply looking at the boy from a comfortable distance, following with glassy attentiveness an agitated body scrambling from one side of the chapel to the other?

You can say if you like.

The boy’s voice startles Tabbs. I’ve just been waiting here, waiting for you, he says.

To do it now.

Yes. Tabbs moves forward and takes a seat in the front row.

You like the bottom more?

He doesn’t understand the boy’s meaning.

Stay if you like. Wait and wait and wait.

Tabbs studies the coded mysteries, registering all the details of the boy’s clothing and grooming.

The boy places his palms against his chest, a circular expanse of fingernails budding against light-colored cloth. Why did the noise go away?

Indeed, the Home is unusually quiet. No rush of whispers, scampering feet.

Where are the children? Where did they go?

I guess they’ve finally learned to stay out of your way. That’s something.

Never enough of me.

I suppose not.

They miss me.

I’m sure they do. But don’t worry. They can have you when we’re done.

The boy begins rocking back and forth where he sits, arms rowing his torso into motion.

I thought you were about to play? The boy’s torso snaps back and forth. Tabbs can’t trust the boy’s ability to stay perched. I never told you about the first time I saw you in concert many years ago. I can still remember the fine suit you were wearing and all the people who had come to hear you. How excited they were.

The boy rocks still, upright as before. They carried trees onto the stage.

Flowers, Tabbs says.

Round trees.

So you remember those times?

I live in this body.

You remember?

They kissed my hands.

You must have enjoyed it.

The boy says nothing.

Can you show me some of what you used to do?

You need to hear?

Yes, yes, I do.

Why?

Well, for one thing I’m now your manager.

The words don’t have an impact on the boy’s face. The boy’s shoulders move once twice as if by their own accord.

How bout it? I would really like to hear you.

And you will pay.

Is it money that you want?

The boy says neither yes nor no but, Anything else?

You know there are thousands of people who will pay to hear you, Tom. Thousands.

I feel wonderful.

You should because you can have it all again, all and more, anytime you want.

One song on top of the other.

Yes.

Two niggers. Three.

Yes.

You will take me to all the places?

I will.

And bring the country.

Yes.

Tom leans forward, the piano supporting him in silence. I never had one like you.

That’s right, Tom, you haven’t. And I promise you it will be nothing like before. We’re alike, you and I. Negroes.

The boy does not speak his thoughts. Tabbs can hear his deep breath, his scent wafting down from high, filling the room. Darkness gaining, light an unneeded thing. He hasn’t asked for her. All this time and he hasn’t asked once. That much at least. Progress.

Does it hurt? Tom asks.

Does what hurt?

Does it hurt to sit on your tail?

Dr. McCune cleans his medical instruments, dipping each object in a glass of red wine diluted with several drops of water.

You’re the nigger doctor, Tom says.

Dr. McCune stops his preparations and stands over the seated Tom, considering the words. You remember me?

I remember you. Your hands smell like eyes.

Dr. McCune looks at his hands as if they belong to someone else. He holds them up and gives Tabbs a puzzled expression, but Tabbs stays where he is on the other side of the room, away from the Doctor and Tom, fearing that the Doctor expects him to sniff and offer an opinion. The Doctor requests soap and a fresh basin of water and washes his hands again, each finger receiving thorough and vigorous attention.

A nice nigger home below. I remember. Where are the others? I remember them.

Tabbs takes this as a pleasing fact, proving that Tom’s powers of memory are still in place.

It’s only me here today.

Hearing this, Tom lowers his head and remains mute long enough for Tabbs and the Doctor to lock concerned glances. You want to look down my throat. Take the nigger words out.

No, Tom, the Doctor says. I remember the nice people you lived with, Mr. and Mrs.—

I know her, Tom says.

When the examination is complete Tabbs and the Doctor retire to the smaller and more intimate anteroom. Here Tabbs feels that he can finally see the Doctor properly, comforting to let his gaze dwell on the other man’s clothing and skin, the Doctor average in height but notable in presence and build, dark with long limbs, outfitted in blue military dress, a blue that dominates the eyes, welcome contrast to the plain humble discomfiture of the room’s furnishings. A pistol on his belt, his bald head and face mounted cannon-like in his high collar, features strong, unashamed, broad nose, wide mouth, and bulky lips — Negro through and through. Gleaming mustache, gleaming skin, gleaming suit and boots — the shine of hard surface, armor. The only sign of vulnerability the black under his eyes, hanging bats.

His heart and lungs are strong, the Doctor says. Good circulation of blood. Decent musculature. A bit underweight but nothing to be concerned about. As for the condition of his eyes there’s little I can say. The eyelids are completely sealed, which might be symptomatic, an indication that disease has set in.

You can find out?

Through surgery.

Another doctor who wants to cut, Tabbs thinks. He looks into the Doctor’s face. You were his physician? He wants several questions out of the way before the Doctor leaves. The doors the Doctor’s words can open.

Long long ago. Well, not that long really. Four years. Seems longer.

He seemed happy to see you.

The Doctor secures the latches on his bag as if this is enough of a response.

An old friend might be just the thing he needs, Tabbs says. He won’t open up to me.

The Doctor cuts his eyes at Tabbs. Says, You know a hundred times what I know.

Tom is sitting on the bench with his hands extended high above the keys, as if warming them over a fire. We left the other place.

We’ll be staying here from now on, Tabbs says. Quieter. More space. No one to bother you.

God man.

He no longer has use for the house. He wants us to have it, wants you to be comfortable.

The sickroom. Tom coughs, ribs heaving, his chest exploding with a second and third cough.

You can choose any room you like.

The children.

You can visit them.

Tom lowers his hands to his lap.

You’ll like it here. Things will be much better. I promise. Tabbs sits down on the bench next to Tom. Some time before he speaks. You don’t like me, Tom?

I like you, Mr. Tabbs.

Are you sure? Have I harmed you? Have I hurt your feelings in some way?

I like you, Mr. Tabbs.

Then what can it be, Tom? What can it be?

Tom’s face brightens with some secret amusement.

What is it? Please tell me. You can tell me anything.

Three birds, Tom says.

What?

Three birds.

Tabbs turns his gaze to the window behind them, which frames a tree twenty yards away, large natural tallness, white fishing dhows docked twenty yards beyond it. Three pear-shaped birds occupy different branches of the tree, chirping singularly and collectively.

He hears Tom ask, You like the country?

Bedazzled, Tabbs looks at the boy, trying to think himself into the boy’s face, seeing in it a large number of small traits that simply cannot be real. A face with a strange distinction all its own that the mother does not share.

You were there, Tom says.

Nothing familiar, nothing Tabbs can recognize. Unknown (undescribed) the boy’s personality and his past. Nothing the Doctor could (would) tell. Had he the Bethune woman he might be able to interview her about some of the boy’s desires and habits.

On the grass.

You want to go to the country? We’ll take a trip. Just say the word. Tabbs is both drained of and filled with everything.

Tom says nothing.

I don’t understand why you want to keep yourself from the world. Doesn’t the piano give you enjoyment?

The keys are hard. Have you never touched them?

Only in folly.

If you try touching them.

Okay, so I’ll touch them now. Tabbs places his fingers lightly on the keys, ivory widening to his touch.

Understand.

But I don’t have your talent.

No. You are not Blind Tom. Tom stands up from the bench and bends over Tabbs. His mouth fits perfectly against Tabbs’s ear. Speaks what the other hears.

A woman? That’s what you want?

Take me to her.

Okay. I will take you.

Bring me her.

Do you understand? I will take you.

When can we go?

Anytime you want.

Tom lowers his head. You’d better go now, Mr. Tabbs, he says, circling the piano, in his own sphere of separation.

After all it has cost Tabbs to find the boy — the money, the miles, the years; I’ve given up everything to follow you—here the boy is, melting away, vanishing, again.

The driver slowed the horse slowed the buggy to mouth the brass-numbered address of each house lined up along one side of the tree-lined street, mumbling the way Tabbs caught himself mumbling certain tentative ideas while he was in the middle of doing something else. The unpaved bumpy road so wide — sufficient space for four wagons to comfortably pass one another — that the high canopy of poplars had no chance of providing any protective shade for any person or vehicle unfortunate enough to be caught in the road. Facing the traveler on either side a baker’s dozen of identical two-story houses with a good twenty feet of lawn separating one from the other, idyllic structures, peaceful, in all likelihood absent of human inhabitants given the wear and weathering. Barely breathing, the driver nodded his head, swung it from side to side, judiciously weighing the numbers. A single sidelong glance that he held as they advanced up the street. Tabbs leaning forward in his seat inside the black-hooded cab behind the driver, peering out from the cloth cave, mutely searching for the lawyer’s house along with the driver, but itching to take a more active part. The driver angled in his field of vision. (Tabbs sees him still.) Infected with Tabbs’s eagerness, he too was leaning forward, his upper body extended precariously over the wagon side, the shadows of horse and man blending on the road, seeing what he saw — nothing should escape his notice, nothing should happen unless he was there to capture it. But the driver seemed to grow visibly older each time he failed to identify the house. He could spell out letters, read some words, the most necessary ones, ones his profession required of him. Even though his mouth spewed out speech that didn’t quite sound like the English language to Tabbs’s ears, a world of difference between the word the driver saw and the way he vocalized it, a wide valley separating what he said and proper pronunciation, that is, the way Tabbs was accustomed to saying it and hearing it said where he came from and the many places he had traveled. With the exception of the victorious (Union) soldiers, nobody down here spoke in a way Tabbs fully understood upon first hearing. Language loose around him. Where was it heading? (He still doesn’t know, those strays with their stray speech.) Tabbs there in the shade of the cab, the driver fully out in the sun, a mile separating the two of them.

They had just driven for an hour (more) from the hotel where Tabbs was lodged. No small talk the entire way here, the driver occupied with keeping the horse at a steady gallop — perhaps he needed to concentrate on this one task, perhaps he had other needs — clicking hooves, his eyes shifting from the road to the fields to the sky, set on getting them to their destination even though he was not quite sure where it was, while Tabbs barely registered the world that existed outside the confines of the black cab, preoccupied, thinking of what to include in the story he might have to tell the lawyer. What if anything he had left out of the letter he was carrying. (What to remember. What not to.) He needed to act within a solid framework.

The driver had asked, Who you be needin? Tabbs had pretended not to hear. Later he will discover he need only have replied “Simon Coffin” and the driver would have quickly taken him there. Instead, he spoke the exact street address where he had written the lawyer two months earlier. Nothing secretive in his withholding of the name. No reason to have said more, to have acted otherwise. This driver already a relic of the past whatever the (deceptive surface) similarities between him and Tabbs. By Tabbs’s estimation he and the driver were similar in age, give or take a few years, men of the same generation and men of the same flesh — the harmony of their hair, the harmony of their skin — descendants of the same vague African fathers — would to God every person walking the earth had certain knowledge of his genealogy — and yet they came from worlds wholly apart, nothing alike. A Northern city man who had never been to the South before now, having had no good reason to do so before now.

Once they reached the end of the street, the driver tugged the reins in such a way as to have the horse spin them a half circle onto the opposite side of the street headed back in the direction whence they had come. The horse snorted in acknowledgment—All right, I can do this—and they started the slow search, the driver leaning forward, numbers in his mouth. They soon arrived at the end of the street, the very point from which they had started out. The driver drew the horse to the side of road and pulled himself erect on the platform.

We ain’t getting nowhere, the driver said. It sposed to be right in here somewheres but ain’t nan sign. Best I dig it up for you. The driver speaking in a tender voice, comically unsuited to the circumstances. He hopped down from the platform, the most natural act in the world. A scarecrow stitched up in somebody’s dark-colored hand-me-downs.

Wait, Tabbs said. Lacking the driver’s speed and agility, he spun his body 180 degrees and began to work his way down from the cab — the driver did not offer to assist him — backward like a man descending a ladder, one foot then the other. He reached the running board, pushed his weight off, and took a short hop into the dirt. Stood there in the hot rough road carefully positioning his hat on his head, low enough on the brow to block the sun but not too low to block vision. Must see what he must see. Turned to face the driver and stood looking at him. The horse was still moving, wanted to go, stamping one hoof after the next into the red dirt.

Some houses yonder over that rise there. The driver nodded his head toward the opposite side of the plateau a hundred yards off where the forest began again. Where the road don’t carry. Ain’t nowhere else it can be. He took the reins and began wrapping them around a post.

No, Tabbs said. I can go.

It’s pestering me now, the driver said. Clearly disappointed, at a loss, empty-handed, despite his best efforts. I knows where we be. Best I go.

No, Tabbs said.

The driver stood looking at Tabbs with the reins in his hands, the length of them forming a half loop from the dirt road to the horse’s long mouth. His look a reproach to Tabbs’s abruptness, possible rudeness. Tabbs stared right into the man’s irises, clear living tissue, so that all else of him disappeared. The whole of the man in one (two), round windows, maps. An easy walk up the rise, the driver said. You needin directions from there? His voice was pleasant and measured, but his tone was less than welcoming.

No, Tabbs said. I can manage. He removed a smattering of coins from his leather pouch and paid the driver, adding a generous half-dollar tip.

The driver stared sullenly at the coins circling his palm as if they were some foreign and invasive growth, boils or pox, popping up from beneath the skin or embellishing it. He closed his fingers over the coins, a fist, not happy to take them. Slowly lifted his face toward Tabbs. How long you gon be? he asked. Eyes growing tighter, clearly irritated that after having driven this passenger two miles out he now had to wait.

I can’t say. Tabbs quick to answer back, deliberately gruff even though the driver commanded respect. He started for the rise, stepping easily over the broken ground, his feet properly equipped with old sturdy water-repelling boots hardened with mud he had purchased from an alabaster native. Thirty paces out, he turned his head and looked back over his shoulder at the driver, the latter still standing in the same spot, resolutely holding the reins in one hand, the coins fisted in the other. Studying Tabbs, his gaze torn, wavering between one instinct and another. Wouldn’t surprise Tabbs a bit if he found the man gone upon his return.

He started up the rise on a narrow footpath cutting through thick forest, his lungs working. This was the South.

Sometimes he could pick out the human arrangements with quick ease; other times he had to work to see them. Caught (glimpse) a man so thin, such a featherweight, that the slightest puff of wind lifted him a full six feet above the earth, sailed him along, and settled him somewhere else yards away. Tabbs dashed along rows of trees endangered (doomed) by so many varieties of birds, headed for an Anglo-Saxon native (no mistaking him) standing a few yards off. A small man hugging a small basket at his waist. No shoes, his tattered clothing revealing patches of skin not unlike the red dirt in color and texture, a man growing up out of the soil. He snatched up his head at Tabbs’s approach, eyes bulging like two round marbles. Tabbs only went so close, leaving a strategic four feet between them.

Suh, you need one of these apples, the man said. He held out the small basket for Tabbs’s inspection. Green crab apples. They never known a worm.

Tabbs took two of them and paid the man in the smallest denomination of coin he could produce from his leather pouch.

Thanks yese kindly, suh. He dropped his head forward until his chin touched his chest.

Tabbs came right out with it. Do you know where I might find Teaberry Lane?

Old or new?

Tabbs unaware until now that he had a choice. Old, he said, guessing.

Yonder. The man pointed to the other side of the plateau where the forest began, then pocketed his money and scurried away.

Tabbs took some enjoyment in seeing the alabaster this way, face flushed from exerting in the heat. Defeated and under constant watch, the Anglo-Saxon natives were no longer masters in their own homes. In fact, they were as unsure as he was, strangers in a new land under foreign occupation. (Crab apples in his pockets.) They had numerous crimes to answer for, crimes against his people. Not a day passed when he was not struck by a desire — his own stiffening rage — to take one of the hard alabaster faces and smash it into powder. A desire that always flitted nimbly through him and evaporated, overwhelmed by the reality of the cruel necessities of war. (The planters were all dead.) The phase of fear fast replacing the state of fury.

Looked ahead into the white band of the morning and continued across the red span of the plateau, brushing his hands free of red dirt, refusing to break his stride. Trod his way carefully past sweaty Negro women carrying baskets on their heads (they were perfectly beyond his reach), moving on to the opposite side of the plateau and into forest again. Started his descent, gravity pulling him into speed. Easy now or tumble down the rise. Land leveled out — running, slowing into normalcy — and he found himself upon another road that seemed to begin and end nowhere. Worked on steadying his breathing. Heaved like something had burst in his chest. He went the way all the traffic seemed to be headed. Careful about where he placed his feet. Mounds of animal droppings like golden stones in the sunlight. Cowbells followed one another into the distances of the afternoon. The shunt and pull of animals and vehicles. (Strange how the things of this world — horses, mules, oxen, dogs, donkeys — afford flight from it.) Mule-drawn two-wheeled carts and horse-drawn four-wheeled wagons stumbling along the plateau. Hard to believe that these skeletal animals were (once) living creatures. Hard to believe they simply hadn’t upped and quit by now. All their drivers could do to navigate their vehicles through the ruddy ruts and puddles the rain had made — he recalled no rain — and maneuver around people who bothered neither to stop walking nor to move out the way. Had he found it? Was this road the elusive (Old) Teaberry Lane? Sitting very erect in their saddles, ten or twelve mounted soldiers — the victors, the conquerors — strode through on impressive stallions. Other soldiers walking behind them, meandering in loose formation, their rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders, their heavy boots sinking into the red mud.

What could he see in the spaces between the trees? Cemeteries in abundance. Fresh graves with plain wooden crosses to identify the occupants. (This country was growing the dead.) Would harvest a new generation from the old. Lesser life-forms hold little interest in the most recent of the dearly departed. Famished pigs (boars) and bearded goats grazed among the plots, while chickens flapped over the tombstones as if engaged in some athletic tournament.

Less than ten yards away, soldiers were mustering strays in a small muddy treeless break adjoining the road, grouping them into neat rows, only for the commanding officer to change his mind and mold them single file into a long crooked line extending well into the forest. The soldiers motioning and directing with their rifles, showing their irritation, their mounting disgust. The strays moving as one brown body, something large and hungry. Since his arrival in town ten days ago, no morning had passed that Tabbs had not seen them. They kept coming, a brown caravan. A brown sweaty stream, ill-smelling, off-putting to sight and nose — the strays, outfitted in rags, strips of torn cloth, feet shod in leftover leather or canvas, or no shoes at all. The little they owned — scalded pots and skillets, walking sticks, fishing poles, a coat or shawl here and there — in a jumble at their bare feet. The brutal stories he had heard fugitives tell back home on the podium or in the pub seemed so farfetched, much more so than even the most fantastic medieval romance or history. (The published narratives paled in comparison, no more unnerving or shocking than a good children’s bedtime tale.) But seeing these people he could believe they actually lived this history. One thing he could say in favor of his Race: they are a rugged people. A state of being and becoming unknown to him. (And for that reason, better than him, at least in certain respects, nobler, more courageous.) To never have quite enough, hunger growing, satisfaction that never came (comes). Futures denied. They greedily fell (fall) upon every cup of milk offered them, each loaf of bread. Yearning. (Life piled on life.) They will not — even now—settle in his mind, his thoughts. Is it for them that he was here? To build a better day? (The soon-come day without the nigger.) Assured, for mankind always sets itself only such problems as it can solve. Looking closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material and practical conditions for its solution already exist or are in the process of formation.

Aware that he stood out for any casual observer who took the time to look, knew he was a foreigner, not from here. (I was not from there, the South.) Full of the sap and sense of life, he stood out, handsome tall well-made — he had engaged in hard labor with Ruggles and others when life had required it of him — always with the clearness of health in his face and vivacity in his eyes, and always neatly dressed, neither elegant nor flashy, but suitable and dignified. (Why in the estimate of a man do we prize him wrapped and muffled up in clothes?) Barely twenty-four years into this world but already a man of independent income — that is, he worked for no man other than himself — with expectations of much more. He had to put up a bold front. (Alabasters are a fact. What can you do with them?) Until a few weeks ago, as far as he was concerned, this small Southern town — not surprisingly, the Anglo-Saxon natives fancied it a city, one of their country’s most important, the hub, the center; wrong here as they had (have) been wrong about so much else — didn’t exist, and if it did, only as a word in a newspaper or a dot on a map. But now — what difference a day — he was caught, in the grip of this thing. (Going to see the lawyer, no turning back.) Moved along a muddy winding road in a country crossed with many such roads, sunken or stamped-in paths (nothing paved, engineered, constructed) surrounded by composed and watchful trees, endless branching. (What loomed on the other side of those darkened and charred trunks?) Clear and careful — feet on the ground, head out of the clouds — he looked for omens everywhere, fearing a chance medley of possibilities and occurrences. This was (is) the land that General Bethune had built, the land that General Bethune once walked. So let him walk it. Not really his normal fluid self though. Easy to understand his cautious gait — he actually counted each step, no false or sudden moves — his hesitation. Nervously anticipating, he tried to sense and scent prey. He sidestepped passersby even before they come into eyeshot. (No matter how broad the path, an alabaster must never give a Negro the right-of-way.) A habit he had developed since arriving in town.

Hard not to worry. Terrible things could happen like this: A Negro woman stands on the hot awningless platform not far from him waiting for the train, three children of various ages seeking shade in the folds of her ankle-length dress. From her appearance, hers and theirs, she can ill afford a ticket, but there she is, there they are. Her white bonnet glows like a halo in morning light. From somewhere — Tabbs still hasn’t puzzled it complete — a white man runs up to her, lunges, and punches her in the face, reams of blood spilling red to the earth. A punch so sudden and wild that he loses his balance and almost tumbles to the ground. Solid, she doesn’t buckle, only brings both shocked hands to her mouth, loose teeth spilling out between the joints of her fingers like lumps of sugar. The children cry. Almost instantly a soldier rushes up to the man, shoves the end of his rifle barrel between the man’s eyes, and blows his brains red white and pink out the back of his head.

Tabbs recognized that he took a big chance traveling here, the soldiers, occupying army, the only force that stood between him and those who had lost the war. He had already escaped injury or death more than once: The natives yelled things at him, and the soldiers aimed their rifles and ordered them to move along. Everything he saw, has seen, bothered (bothers) him. Such squalor. Natives — men, women, and children — living in little crooked-planked cabins, ramshackle eyesores, alongside their few animals — hogs, cows, chickens, oxen, and goats, broken-down mules and horses — in unkempt filth. All the towns seemed run-down, the farmhouses had all been ruined, old windows replaced by new, or no windows at all.

Now on the plateau a soldier told him to hold up for a moment. Indeed, he had been stopped more than once his first two or three days in country, free passage since. Reasonable that they had grown accustomed to him. (He stood out. One of a kind.) He walked over to the soldier — a problem if a soldier had to walk over to you — and produced his pass, a quarter-folded sheet of paper, without hesitation. Fully three-quarters of the pass offered a poorly rendered drawing of his face — the right skin tone, the wrong features — with an official stamp in the corner, and a caption under it reading Northern Negro. He held out the pass for the soldier’s scrutiny, and the soldier moved one hand across his body to clutch the strap shouldering his rifle then bent forward to peer closer — he did not take it, touch it — and measure with successive glances back and forth Tabbs’s face against the drawing. How hard was he really looking? Barely studied it for five seconds. Satisfied, he drew back into his erect soldierly posture and emitted a short sentence in soldier’s language — perhaps he said nothing at all — indicating that Tabbs was free to continue.

Tabbs noted a measure of difference in the way the soldiers treated him and the way they treated both strays and natives. When they weren’t shouting orders or instructions they spoke like fops, barely deigning to articulate their words. But they accorded Tabbs a measure of respect usually reserved for white men of importance, a quality of treatment that he had experienced only on chance occasions. They even took the trouble to question his well-being and to warn him about places he should avoid and places he might see. That bend has the best perch you’ll ever taste. And the swimming ain’t bad if you can learn the current. He took it all in as if he was truly eager to learn and understand. Still, their facts caused him to wonder. Were they aiding him or manipulating him? Did they order him? Control him? And it was hard to say if he was obeying. He wanted to (needed to) follow his own orders (plans) so there was a good chance that at some point his will would (had to, must) collide with their wishes.

Many such thoughts flashed in him now—foolish to come here—but he did not dwell on them. Stubbornly avoided the details. Without the details everything is clear, inviolable. He had full clear hopes, as must any man who had come several hundred miles or more. General Bethune had (has) been cheated of what is rightfully his. That is why he was here. He had suffered setbacks before — what man hasn’t? — but nothing of this nature or this magnitude, for up until this point in his life he had risen much unaided. (Credit the Pygmy. Credit Ruggles.) Almost two months ago, before the war ended, he realized that the future held for him the absolute need to visit a prominent lawyer. He had written the lawyer seeking representation, and the lawyer had wired back a response for him to come. He had taken no one else into his confidence. In fact, he was sustained by the hope that that this lawyer, Simon Coffin, might be the one person in the entire country (nation?) who could aid him.

Old Teaberry Lane?

No, suh. This here ain’t it, but gon and follow it up till you see the well.

Thank you.

Much obliged. The boy continued on, the brim of his hat wider than the entire circumference of his body, his snazzy grosgrain band less adornment and more necessary tool to keep the hat squeezed on his substanceless head. Equally if not more astonishing the boy had actually called him sir. Suh. For so many years — all his life, or at least since his first awareness of slavery — Tabbs had believed these natives were monsters, so it surprised him that even monsters can be polite. So many crimes to pay for, too many to count, but now that the war was done and the monsters tamed, he was willing to let bygones be bygones, if they were willing to do the same. Willing even to extend the hand of partnership — not to be mistaken for friendship, brotherhood — break bread, and work with these creatures. (Only the best need sign up.) Whatever it took to increase, multiply. (Indeed, was that not Lincoln’s idea? No one must expect me to take any part in hanging or killing of these men, even the worst of them. We must not open the gates and frighten them out of the country. Enough lives have been sacrificed; we must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony and union.) So Tabbs thought let’s be rational and defer justice for now. (Blood should be left to cleanse itself.)

Tabbs found the well where the driver had said it would be, conveniently stationed where the road turned left and became Old Teaberry Lane. Strays raising and lowering bucket and rope to lean into and drink or lean away and wipe mouths dry. Another two dozen or more strays circling about the well or lingering within a few feet of it, many of them completely wet, as if they had just climbed up out of watery darkness to light dry surface. Like the banded boy, members of his own race addressed him as sir—Morning, suh. Yes, suh. No, suh. Evening, suh. — but never went further. Nothing more, even if he threw out some leading question or tidbit of talk. In fact, ten days running and not another member of his race had ever seemed to really notice him. Looked his way without seeing him, saw him without looking at him, as strays would later in the city. Not unlike their mode of interaction with any alabaster, whether native or foreigner.

Old Teaberry Lane turned — became another? — and Tabbs went down that way, the ground passing below him, dirt and clumps of grass giving way to his boots. The morning white from the heat, burning fierce and quick as a match. Light and heat ocean-deep. He wiped the sweat from his face, causing his hand to sting as if he had just dunked it into boiling water. Right then, he felt like giving it all up. He didn’t know what put the thought in his head. (Still doesn’t know.) He looked off into the forest. Plenty of nothing out there and plenty of everything. He thought he heard water running somewhere in the distance, the barest trickle, tried to calculate the source and how far he was from it and collided right into a black cape of flying insects, buzzing inside his nose and mouth. Head and hands worked to shake and jerk free, while tongue spat the mouth clean. He patted and checked his jacket pocket to be sure that he still had the letter he planned to present to the lawyer.

After his arrival in town he had spent a considerable part of each day at the desk in his hotel room writing a letter to Simon Coffin as he was (is) certain that he had left too much out of the first letter he had sent the lawyer almost two months ago. He wanted the new letter to be pure, no suppositions, all facts, and of the facts he separated the essentials from the nonessentials. Still, he couldn’t help squeezing in the final remnants of ideas, plans, suppositions, even suggestions for possible remedies and courses of action. How is that for contradiction? Here he was, seeking out this lawyer, because he had already exhausted all other possibilities. Who will open the doors I can’t see? Now see him on his way to the lawyer’s office with the letter securely in his jacket pocket, having finished writing it to his satisfaction less than two hours ago.

He had drained himself of all that he did not need intellectually and emotionally for the sole purpose of this sit-down meeting with the esteemed Simon Coffin. Hoping for the best — Coffin would reveal General Bethune’s whereabouts — prepared for the worst. To get the desired result, he was willing to push the lawyer — or anyone else — as far as he could.

He judged Coffin alone to be worthy of this knowledge. For thirty-five years or more (forty?) Coffin had been unquestionably among the most visible and influential men in the entire nation as an advocate for the Negro cause — no week passed without his name appearing a dozen times in the Negro journals — whether the bound or the free. A white Southerner whose circle of benevolence also extended to encompass many other scorned and abused groups — poor Anglo-Saxon natives, Catholics, German immigrants, abolitionists, and foreign visitors and travelers (including journalists). Known for both his bold pronouncements—The cruelest man living could not sit at my feast unless he sat blindfolded—and audacious tactics, this lawyer, more than any other man existing at that time, held the largest and most liberal view of the world, and was capable of devising the most practical and effective schemes in defense of these views. Coffin had even continued practicing his vocation through the course of the war without suffering arrest or any form of censorship or molestation. How explain that?

The road became what Tabbs normally would think of as a residential street. Small houses jammed together. Windows moving along as you advanced. Then the road rose (leapt) impossibly skyward where it carried him up to a section of modest three-story houses. One house was nothing like the others. How fortunate it stood where it did by itself between two oak trees on a little rise at one end of the street, trees broad and wide at the base like important men squatting before an audience of supplicants. A three-story gray structure with a sloped red-iron roof — the others were flat — the exterior rather old but pleasant, worse for wear, wood showing through the gray, streaked with longitudinal cracks, and heavy porch planks of bare wood and dust and dirt, having long given up color to a multitude of shoes and boots. The door was finely carved with a raised image of a fox and an eagle against a flat detailed field — tree, grass, pond, sunlight, wind — the eagle swooping down with beak opened threateningly, while the fox, head turned and teeth bared, leapt up to meet the challenge. Plenty of varnished wood between them, as if the animals had come to an agreement that they would only get so close. From the brass doorplate, Tabbs learned that Coffin’s office was on the top floor.

Tabbs removed his hat, pinned it between his left elbow and hip, and entered a dimly lit hall floored in elegant tile. Though he was exhausted, he started up the mahogany stairs with force and energy, the wood squishing under his feet. The stairs seemed to have suffered the worst for the humidity, soft, the wood pressing in like cake, Tabbs cautious now, unsure if the steps might not give way altogether beneath him. At the third-floor landing he saw a door left partially open at one end of the hall, and headed for it. Found a mahogany door hinged into a frame made out of cedar, with a large stained glass window depicting a coat of arms fit into the door’s upper half, and above it a brass plate engraved with the black-lettered name Simon Peter Levi Coffin IV, Esquire.

Tabbs leaned into the angle of opening and saw fifteen feet away Coffin seated bent over, gazing at some papers on his desk, pen in hand — the figure in everyday circumstances — late-morning sun entering the large room from two ample windows facing the street. Tabbs stood watching, took the time to observe, study what he could, unnoticed. This act of exclusive and privileged seeing both natural and possible because it was well-practiced, for Tabbs did (does) not view himself as one who was conditioned by — the system, the institution of — conventional intelligence. The room impressed the visitor as a place to conduct business just as it impressed the viewer as a place to exhibit a handful of choice artifacts. Scrolls hanging from the walls and a green (jade) vase mounted on a pedestal in one corner, a red (jade?) in another. Dozens of books neatly stacked near the fireplace. And papers of various sizes and description inserted in little wooden hold-alls nailed into every available space in the walls, papers that Tabbs assumed were legal files and correspondence, letters, memos, telegrams, and briefs relating to the countless cases Coffin had represented. He leaned back into the hall and tapped on the stained glass window to announce his presence.

Enter, please.

He did so unmolested. (How had he even made it this far? Reasonable to expect the lawyer to be under the protection of a personal armed guard, even his own small private band of protectors and defenders.) Face raised, the lawyer watched him enter. Stood up from his desk, smiling good-naturedly, an unmistakable man of modern height with a look of the world about him, broad shouldered and rather thickly proportioned around the waist but by no means portly or flabby (fat). He was dressed not only decently but stylishly — light (material and color) summer jacket, a linen shirt under a light-colored waistcoat, light-colored and loose-fitting trousers, and cordovan shoes from New Orleans. Tabbs saw — can see still, will never forget — in his whole impeccable figure something at once noble and ridiculous.

You must be Mr. Gross, the lawyer said with a puzzled look (so Tabbs thought).

Yes. I’m Tabbs Gross.

The lawyer leaned forward across his desk and extended his hand, and Tabbs leaned in and took it, catching the faint scent of sweet perfume.

Have a seat, Mr. Gross.

Tabbs sat down on one of two curved-back chairs positioned before the desk. Looked up and noticed a third window five feet behind and above the lawyer, lending just enough light to make visible dust drifting across the cedar panels that lined the roof.

The lawyer sat down. Well, Mr. Gross, it was good of you to come.

Sir, it was good of you to grant me an audience.

How else could we have it? Did you travel well?

Yes, sir.

I’m delighted to know that. Could I fetch you some water?

No, Tabbs said. He really wanted something to drink, his insides on fire.

Tea? Coffee? Lemon water?

I decline.

The lawyer was quiet for a few moments, maintaining his welcoming smile, a silence that gave Tabbs his first opportunity to really study the man sitting before him. With his somewhat wavy shoulder-length gray hair — waves tinged with blond streaks as if gilded, which shifted with a supple movement and brushed his shoulders when he turned or lowered or raised his head — his big-pored forehead, slanted eyelids (Mongolian fold?) that partly obscured his eyes and pupils, and heavy worm-thick lips, the lawyer looked entirely unlike himself in both the handful of well-known illustrations and caricatures — the lawyer swims the Atlantic Africa-bound with a pyramid of watermelon-eating slaves frolicking on his back — and the singular daguerreotype — that he had clearly sat for several decades earlier and that were so often reproduced in the newspapers. The way he leaned forward in his seat, his white jacket looked less like an article of clothing he wore and more like some independent object riding his back. A white impression of the kind of man he was (is), a man completely at ease here as he would be anywhere else in the known world, a tortoise-like man carrying his own white country on his back so that wherever he was he felt (and kept) quite comfortable and at home.

Tabbs (sneaky-eyed) spied the missive he had mailed two months earlier — he recognized his own handwriting — atop a pile of papers positioned exactly in line with the left desk corner edge. For some reason the desk, worn and sturdy, seemed out of order, although he couldn’t quite put his finger on the why, the source of dissent.

I’ve looked over your letter, Mr. Gross. Coffin took up the document he had been reading — his hand reddish on the outside, brownish on the inside — and placed it on top of a stack of papers, then took the letter and moved it to the cleared space before him.

If I may, sir. I’ve taken the necessary move of adjusting it. Tabbs removed the new letter from his jacket pocket and placed it directly over the old, properly flat so that the lawyer might begin reading it. Please, sir. My apologies, but this letter before you now provides a detailed description of the case and is therefore a far more accurate accounting.

The lawyer said nothing at first, but continued to sit leaning forward in his chair, studying Tabbs, his eyes aglitter, avid but cautious, weighing the possibilities. Hard for Tabbs really to look the man directly in the eye, but he somehow did. I did. Finally, the lawyer said, Then I must, Mr. Gross. He lowered his line of sight to the letter and began reading it.

Tabbs waited quietly and patiently. No point to a missive if he had to explain it, although he was (is) far the better man at speaking than at writing.

While Coffin read, Tabbs studied the many file-jammed cubicles constructed into the walls. Each box carefully labeled by month, day, and year in bright ink. These files represented a preservation of history dating back more than thirty years. On the desk Tabbs noticed a plainly bound (cloth) Bible positioned along the right desk corner spine outward so that anyone who sat in either chair before the desk could not mistake the title.

Coffin took up both letters, one on top of the other, and placed them on top of a stack of papers. Tabbs adjusted his body in his seat, trying to snap his mind clean, and hoping Coffin — the lawyer lifted his gaze to Tabbs’s face — couldn’t see any trace of his impulses and speculations. Mr. Gross, Coffin said, there is much here, much that is concrete. The words surprised Tabbs. Some note in the lawyer’s voice abiding with implication, the faint reverberation of secrets, facts withheld. Had he not spelled it all out in the new letter he had sweated over so?

I apologize for my handling of the pen, he said. Perhaps I wrote poorly. He sat awkwardly straight in the chair, like a man with his arms bound.

No, I would not say that.

You don’t understand the nature of my dispute? He had to admit, his writing hand was (is) fluid but perhaps a bit abstract. Never a word written as a commoner might say it.

Of course I understand, Coffin said. Only a fool could mistake what you have set down here. He continued to look Tabbs in the face. Why did you come here? What are your true reasons?

He knew why he was here, but how could he admit it to the lawyer? I seek your representation. That is my true reason.

You hope to win a judgment against General Bethune?

With your help.

In what jurisdiction?

Sir, I trust you with all of the legal details.

Coffin studied Tabbs, reading his face as he had read the documents. And there’s nothing else?

No, sir.

More silence. All right, so we can proceed with the case, as long as you understand what we are up against.

They set about reviewing the plain facts and the relevant dates of the case, a rough- and-ready conversion. Sure, he had written his side of it—Everything set forth in these pages is substantially true and within the truth—a twice-told tale, but perhaps his letter, one or both, differed in essential ways from the actual occurrence, from what he remembered (remembers) and what he said now. Best to acquaint Coffin with the whole of the monstrous wrong General Bethune has committed against him, from beginning to end and back again. As Tabbs spoke, the lawyer concentrated with all his might, frowning, like a dimly understanding devout listening to and pondering a sermon from the master, his hands continually moving across the desk as if he was engraving Tabbs’s words into the oak surface.

You put forth the proposal. You entered into the agreement with conscious mind.

Yes, Tabbs said, aware that Coffin was not asking but telling, reporting, in condensed fashion.

And the contract?

Tabbs produced two documents — thrice folded to form a thick rectangle of paper — from his jacket pocket and held them out to the lawyer. (He did not place them on the desk.) Coffin did not take them right away, still and reluctant, giving Tabbs a doubtful (fearful?) look as if he didn’t know what Tabbs was handing him.

As you’ll see, sir, there are actually two. The one I drew up and the one that General Bethune had drawn up in addition.

Coffin spread the two contracts side by side before him on the desk, keeping the bent pages flat with the edges of his hands. Started reading them.

I signed one then the other, and he signed one then the other, and we spoke and shook hands, as gentlemen do, regardless of race, and I handed over the first installment.

Reading done, Coffin lifted both his face and hands, allowing the documents to fold half-open half-closed on the desk like bloom-shy flowers. He gave Tabbs an eye-scrunching look as if remembering what Tabbs had just told him, as if he had been present at the meeting but couldn’t quite re-create the memory in his mind now. One thousand dollars.

Yes. With a promise of another four thousand, a promise that he never afforded me the opportunity to keep.

Five thousand dollars, Coffin said. An even better sum. More than most men could save in a lifetime or hope to save or dream of saving. His voice so resonant he seemed to be singing.

I have means.

You have a receipt?

Tabbs brought one hand to his pocket.

No, Mr. Gross. You may safeguard it for now. The hidden validity of the receipt seemed to bring about a physical change in Coffin, some ease in position, some relaxing of the shoulders. For the first time, he was leaning back in his chair, actually slouching. And after he reneged, you had no other communication?

I received — Tabbs started with that and knew he had faulted. He couldn’t tell the lawyer the rest, couldn’t tell Coffin that he had already gone to the Bethune estate. Had to and did think up something else to tell him. When I arrived here in town, he said, I received word that the Bethunes had left. It had been only a matter of speculation before. Thoughts and questions buzzing in the silent air. He could see the lawyer working to figure it out, to maneuver around the subterfuge and come face to face with the truth. So he added: The estate is completely vacant. So I was told. He realized that he had spoken incorrectly. In fact, the estate was not vacant. Far from it. Still, he saw no point in correcting himself. Enough damage done.

So you’ve actually driven out to Hundred Gates? The lawyer’s jaw rose and fell with the words.

A certain uneasy remembrance flashed in Tabbs’s mind. Hundred Gates. (The house enjoys the use of a big garden, surrounding it on all sides.) He had pushed the details out of conscious memory. (The gardens are full of flowers, none of which he can identity. What were his childhood names for startling grasses and other forms of curious or secret growth?) But he was pleased, for Coffin seemed to have set aside the idea of studying him more closely. Yes, he said, but only after I learned that it was vacant. (Not true. Anything but vacant.) He let the lawyer know that he had been out to Hundred Gates (trees like slender women) a half dozen times or more since his arrival in town more than a week ago. It never crossed my mind to impose my presence on you before our scheduled interview today. Then he paused — they were looking each other straight in the eye as custom and circumstance required (demanded) — not sure what he expected. Coffin was affected. Tabbs (years later) can still recall perfectly the rectangle of light that the sun cast through the windows, the pen leaning in the inkwell on the desk — a barren post minus its flag — and the slow way that the lawyer began to speak.

The Bethunes fled when so many others did, he said, his voice flat as he imparted the information. (He never said when. Months earlier or years?) He went on to inform Tabbs that upon his decision to meet with Tabbs — a decision he arrived at only after careful consideration — he had taken pains to investigate General Bethune’s whereabouts and learned through his most trusted sources that the Bethunes had taken up new residence at an estate called Elway in Virginia, not far from the former capital. A recent purchase, he said. Quite recent. He moved his hand toward one corner of the desk as if he was about to produce the deed itself.

Not what Tabbs wanted to hear. Some time before he could will his tongue to move. Are you certain?

Yes.

Tabbs said nothing.

So it appears that General Bethune still has financial means.

But that isn’t the end of it. (Bad news on top of bad news.) Coffin informed him that another party, one Perry Oliver — a name Tabbs recognized, yes, the former manager, Tom’s former manager—had filed suit in the state of Virginia against General Bethune for reneging on a contract. The matter had been quickly settled upon the General’s issuing this Mr. Oliver fifteen thousand dollars in cash, the sum total that the jilted manager had paid the General up front upon the original terms of their contract.

Fifteen thousand dollars?

Yes.

Tabbs said nothing.

I am sorry.

Tabbs sat quietly for some time with his disappointments, not sure what he should look at — the lawyer, the desk, the files, the tapestry, the windows.

Your case is irrecusable, Mr. Gross. Certainly the facts weigh in your favor. General Bethune willfully and negligently misled you. So the legal solution seems easy enough. A fair and impartial court, either judge or jury, should rule in your favor based on the documented evidence, the sheer logic of fact. Facts that, I might add, in this instance should amount to justice now that the war has been decided. But you understand that General Bethune remains a capable threat and can forestall a quick resolution. Coffin seemed completely immobile now, his body on pause, hold. Even as he spoke, the slanted flesh around his eyes — praying hands — remained stationary. Tabbs sensed that the light in the room had shifted, changed. For the first time he realized that Coffin’s jacket was the exact color gray as the wall behind him. Found it necessary to watch closely to separate man from background.

Tabbs found it difficult to speak, his words hanging fruit, but out of reach. I’ve been cheated, he said. I’ve done all I can.

Of course, Coffin said. Of course. So this lawyer thinks he understands, knows Tabbs’s troubles, as well as Tabbs’s longings and aspirations; and as he took it all fully into heartfelt consideration he began to smile, not a cruel smile but one of pity. Mr. Gross, I offer no guarantee, but I believe a court should order General Bethune to square accounts and return the balance of your deposit, and also allow you some substantial monies to recuperate your legal costs and to compound reasonable interest. It may be that General Bethune will—

That won’t do, Tabbs said.

Simon Coffin didn’t say anything to this. I’m beginning to understand, he said. You seek revenge? Catch your thief in order to hang him.

No, sir.

Not that?

No, sir. Nothing of the sort. Tabbs said it as straight as he could, needing Coffin to believe that he could usefully influence Tabbs.

We’re at peace now, Coffin said.

Peace? Tabbs thinks. That’s milk for the birds.

Coffin leaned forward and inclined his fleshy face toward Tabbs, this lifting of the head suggestive of an immediate change in consciousness, all that was required for him to draw up a fresh thought and give — a redirecting of muscle and skin — Tabbs a look part smile, part smirk.

What’s done is done, he went on. Nothing can change that. Keep your eyes on the prize, on the future, he said. Blind Tom once had a dazzling career, he said. Perhaps he will again.

Indeed he will, sir. (Indeed he will.)

But the boy is beyond your reach. Coffin paused, as if to let the words sink in. The General took advantage of you. You honestly believed that he would keep his word, that he would give up the boy.

Unclear if Coffin was asking or telling.

Yes.

What a funny turn of thought you have. The lawyer almost laughed. (Did he?) He shook his head, staring at Tabbs with a pitying look. Well, I foresee it possible that a mule might someday become a king.

Tabbs couldn’t find a single word. What was there to say? Still, he didn’t want a silence to develop, so he uttered a platitude. We take a respected man at his word.

And I’m sure you did just that, Mr. Gross. That makes you all the more the innocent. His eyes blinked beneath thick eyebrows that clung like gray slugs onto his face. Too much for Tabbs. Can any court or authority compel the General to produce the boy from hiding? the lawyer asked. By what means?

Tabbs stood up from his seat, walked over to one of the wide windows, and stood looking down at the street three stories below. The end of the morning presented a particular shade of color he witnessed for the first time. He turned and faced the lawyer, who was observing him with none of his former amusement.

Mr. Coffin, I am not naive. I was not weaned on babe’s milk. I am here because I know that you are a man of intelligence and means.

Yes, I am.

Many of our citizens, the best and the worst, have sacrificed almost everything to secure the rights of my people.

And why do you report me this fact, Mr. Gross? The lawyer spoke in a quiet, unhurried tone. I am well aware of the recent course of history, as I’m sure you are fully aware of the far longer course, the many years, decades, I have spent offering fair and impartial representation for your maligned people.

Of course, sir. I am not accusing you.

You most certainly are, and in the worst way. With deceit and without forthrightness.

They talked like people close to last words. Tabbs could offer nothing in his defense.

As it is, Coffin said, I already face a dilemma. These days I am conflicted, tormented between two diametrically opposed callings. On the one hand, the longing for rest. And on the other, an acute awareness of our need to oppose human crime and human misery. With such serious decisions before me, what would compel me to entertain a flimsy claim? You choose to come before me with your own private cause.

No, sir.

Yes, Mr. Gross. Yes. Coffin sat watching and waiting for Tabbs’s response — measuring his reaction? — and would not say another word until he got one.

Sir, I must respectfully inform you that you fail to understand why I am here. It is not a matter of my person. I come before you because no other man, Negro or Anglo-Saxon, stands a chance of aiding me in this cause. I stand before you at the price of a certain sacrifice of dignity, because dignity alone is the only worthy currency. There. He had said it. Now the lawyer understood (should) that this, at root and wing, was the substantive matter at hand.

He saw Coffin’s eyes darken with kindness. Mr. Gross, I’m sure you are here on a pure impulse of the heart, but you must recognize that you are in an impossible position. General Bethune will never relinquish all that he believes is rightfully his.

Indeed, sir. He won’t. I’m certain of it.

Coffin leaned back in his chair, thinking. Mr. Gross, I am often asked why I have never taken on a junior partner, an understudy to whom I might pass on all that I have studied, learned, and mastered over the years. Actually, I would very much like to do so. But I will tell you why I never will. No matter how much we attempt to speak to novices, indeed to all young people, they never take the trouble to retain what is most important.

Now, Tabbs felt that he was on his own, so utterly alone that nothing had transpired since he stepped through the door, that some other person from a very long time ago in a place very far away had seen and said and heard and felt.

I foresee a time in the future, one year from now, perhaps two or three, when you will be seated once again as you are now before another man of my profession. The lawyer turned his face and lowered his gaze to the desk. So, at your insistence, Mr. Gross, I will immediately begin considering our best course of action. I will have our complaint served on the General personally.

This was what Tabbs had journeyed here to hear. (Nothing less.) Coffin knew General Bethune’s hiding place. And Tabbs would kick in the safe house door, snatch off the roof, burrow into the General’s secret hole underground.

Without looking at Tabbs — straight ahead, through the fully open door — the lawyer laid out two documents on his desk. I have here a letter of agreement in duplicate. You must sign both. Tabbs went over and signed each document with Coffin’s pen. Signing done, he stood looking at the lawyer, who was (now) returning his gaze. And I will need a sum of two hundred dollars as a retainer for my services. I can give you a few days to acquire the money if you so need it.

Tabbs was already reaching for his wallet. (Thought twice. Should he or shouldn’t he? Now’s the time. Now isn’t the time.) Produced a sheath of notes and laid one after another upon the desk. As he had earlier upon Tabbs’s appearance, Coffin stood up from his desk and offered his hand. Tabbs took it for a brief sweaty meeting of palms.

If you will excuse me, Mr. Gross. I should begin my work.

Yes, sir. I don’t wish to impose on your time, Tabbs said, but I kindly ask that you allow me to see you again after you have further reviewed the facts. Then I will leave town and return home.

Coffin stood looking at Tabbs, saying nothing for the longest time. Mr. Gross, you must know that there is no reason for you to remain in this city. Please leave at the earliest opportunity, today even. I assure you we will be in communication. In fact, you will find a wire awaiting you upon your return home.

That is so generous of you, sir. But you understand that I have come far. It will be a most difficult matter for me to return in my present unsettled state.

Coffin lifted his chin in skepticism. Mr. Gross, I should warn you, if you are thinking about — but he said no more, as if he already knew what Tabbs was thinking and didn’t have the strength to offer any opposition. As you wish. At an hour best for you, kindly pay me a return visit on Friday.

Thank you, sir.

In the meantime, I urge caution, Mr. Gross. Coffin gave Tabbs an almost paternal look of concern. Take it upon yourself to be more circumspect.

You have my word.

I have your word.

You have my word.

He was gone too quickly. The day too hot and the road too quiet. He closed the door as much as he could — it was swollen, open as if this explained all, put motive to rest — hesitated in the hall and took his time about leaving the house — each stair a month, each landing a year — hoping the lawyer might call him back. Hard as he might try, he couldn’t quite bury his mistrust. He would never entrust his livelihood, his survival, into the hands of a white person, an alabaster. How easy to see beneath the theatrical disguises of their faces, the secrets and riddles behind their words. Perhaps Coffin was deliberately leaving him up in the air about his intentions? Even if this was the case — he never found out — he had no choice but to trust the lawyer, although he, Tabbs Gross, wished there were some way he could bring the lawyer’s true feelings to the surface. (Is it superabundance of heart or something else that makes him befriend, represent, and defend the — the great prediction, promise — last who shall someday be first?) As he slowly made his way downstairs, he realized that his reasons for being here, in this foreign land, were even remote to himself now. (A stranger.) How could he reveal to this white man, or any man for that matter, his purpose for his risky venture?

He started back for the hotel, determined not to show up in public again — I can take my meals in my room, I can have my meals delivered to my room, I need only leave my room to bathe — until Friday, two days from now. He would go about his day (that day and the next), thinking no more than usual. Understood that his decision to stay in town would involve (require, demand) two days of tense waiting. How would he manage it? (He still asks himself, How did I manage it?) His story already stretched too far. Get this thing over with.

When did he first hear the name Blind Tom? 1859? 1860? 1861? Tabbs is not entirely sure. Tom was a regular topic of conversation on the Negro grapevine.

I would never pay a penny of my hard-earned salary to hear him, the well-dressed man said. This is the way of these alabasters, to present us in a bestial light.

You’ve got it all wrong, his companion said, casual dress, casual bearing. So what if the little blind nigger whirls around onstage. He’s probably just taking him some exercise cause those candlefaces keep him cooped up all the time, under their thumbs.

Although total opposites in dress, the two men walked loose-limbed and carefree. What you got to say about it, Tabbs? Are you attending the concert?

Like other Negroes, Tabbs had thoughts about Blind Tom — was he aiding the Race or harming it?—

What are your feelings about the war, Tom?

I am not afraid of bullets. They fly so fast.

— but he couldn’t come into words; whenever the subject came to his tongue he had difficulty speaking. His mind raced ahead.

Not a damn thing. Just like I thought.

Ah, don’t be so hard on Tabbs. He’s a real race man.

The men got a good laugh out of this statement. They continued on, Tabbs straining his ears trying to follow the argument as the voices faded with distance.

Tabbs had to admit, Blind Tom as a man, as a Negro man — well, he was still a boy, only thirteen years of age — was rather disappointing—

Tom, you keep up quite a schedule of travel. It would tax any man, young or old, Anglo-Saxon or Negro. Do you not get tired?

Be passersby.

— but his way with Bach, if one could believe the journals, was something to adore.

Indeed, hearing Blind Tom in actuality proved to be all he had hoped it would be, although he can no longer pinpoint the year when he first saw Tom in concert. He either doesn’t know or doesn’t care to know. (The years don’t pass for nothing.) Only the concert itself remains firm in his memory. How would he describe it? Not unlike a body’s first entry into the ocean, smitten, salt-tasting skin hungry for more, sea secrets. Feel it:

Fifteen minutes before the scheduled start of the performance the gold and white auditorium was quiet and still virtually empty, the highest boxes and the gallery dark, almost invisible, while the best boxes, draped with long-fringed pelmets and velvet railings on the ground floor and at stage left and stage right, were only dimly visible. A few Negro attendants stood about chatting in the dress circle and the stalls, lost among the red velvet armchairs under the half light of the tiny flames of the huge dimly glowing chandelier, and the great red patch of the curtain that Tabbs hid behind was plunged in shade. He waited patiently, his anger bending to anticipation. At nine o’clock, the scheduled start, the main doors to the auditorium opened, uniformed Negro attendants bustling in with tickets in hand, directing a train of couples in front or behind, Mr. and Mrs. Candleface done up in formal ballroom dress, buoyant (floating and flying) in ballooning skirts and expansive tails, who nested down in numbered seats and began sweeping the auditorium with a leisurely gaze. (Who’s here? Who isn’t?) Only after all the alabasters were seated did the attendants allow the Negro ticket holders to enter — a crush of bodies — the gallery (Coon Heaven), way up above just beneath the rotunda ceiling with its fresco of naked women flying about in blue sky and muscular gods pitched in battle. The Negroes scrambling and fighting over the best seats, a din that caused the alabasters below to crane their necks and catapult hard glances and hot curses in their direction. Niggers! Could the alabasters actually see the Negroes they damned and cursed? The Negroes were only momentarily ill at ease, refusing to let environs spoil a good time. They expected a festive event, necessary break from their everyday chaotic and hierarchichal world. Aware nonetheless that they were in public and hence were under inspection — all eyes watching, all eyes on me—each man representing all men, each woman all women. All would suffer shame and setback should any one step out of line. So put your best self on display. Mind your p’s and q’s. Candlefaces!

He heard the manager’s voice, and carefully moved from his clandestine position behind the curtain. Took an innocent measure of the custodial closet before he stepped inside and closed the door three-quarters of the way. Confined so, he couldn’t help but smell his own body sharp and fresh in the rank empty darkness, clean light splaying through the parted door.

Listen:

Here is the piano in semidarkness, plates of light, planks of darkness, black keys and white keys. Here is the boy seated at the piano, a Negro like yourself. The boy center stage before a packed house, and you quietly wedged inside a custodian’s closet in clandestine repose — invisible, your stomach rumbles — with the door barely open, one long rectangle of vision, the boy there and you here, remote, far away — another time, another place — your eyes stinging with the effort to see over and around the broom and mop heads and handles, the buckets and pails and brushes and shovels and dustpans and hammers hanging from the walls, to look and cut through everything — one edge of the door frame, one edge of the stage curtain, the piano itself — separating you from the pianist a hundred feet away. Obscured, you think you catch a glimpse of his face behind the cantilevered slant of the raised polished lid. He brings his hands into position and begins the first selection, hands moving, casting a haze over his features, or perhaps it is the light shining down from the massive chandelier above — thousands of burning candles — that spins a web of glare that makes him so hard to see. You are skilled in fine general culture and know how to listen. Shut your eyes to skin and you are forced to admit that the performance is thoroughly in tune with the very best of European art, that the performer you are hearing is one of them, no doubt about it, a young virtuoso. He moves his body very little and has an odd way of bringing his lower lip up and letting it fall at short intervals, as a fish works its mouth while breathing. He seems to use only one foot, his right, in pedaling. And when he finishes the piece, he stands up from the stool, turns slightly toward the audience, and takes a quick bow. (Three seconds, four.) Then sits right back down on the stool and begins the next selection.

Ears pressed to air, you, Tabbs, stand for nearly an hour without words and listen, sound rushing in and piling up inside your head in copious abundance. His fingers tap the seconds into melodies, tick the chords into minutes — you stand for another hour — and you have the difficult task of maintaining your discipline, of somehow staying silent and inconspicuous. Dare not even shift your weight from one foot to the other. Aware of a certain pulsing. A tall man, you can cross the stage in five steps, erase time and distance, if you so choose. He pulls you toward him. Lightheaded, weak, you don’t care. In this nowhere, you, Tabbs, feel yourself more solidly, no longer worrying about the mundane this or that. Something to behold.

It could have ended there — in a way it did — with the end of the concert. But signs — changing times, the war going badly for the South — flooded in. General Bethune took ill, the nature of his affliction a matter of speculation. As it is, the slave owner and Confederate provocateur rarely travels, certainly never to set foot on free, Northern soil. Furthermore, he almost never traverses his own Southern climes with his shackled subjugate, young Tom, according that responsibility to the stage manager, Mr. Thomas Warhurst. Whatever his reasons for touring of late, he has apparently done so at considerable risk to his own health. Tabbs hunkering down at his table with newspaper and a glass of wine as his imagination and hopes caused the air across from him to shape into the boy’s hunched-over form, some timid insect with wings folded, lunging toward words, unable to suppress his impulse to higher efforts. Water plopped against the table, one drop, two, and another. A man setting out to war weeps.

For many years the outspoken Southerner’s name, General James Neil Bethune, had been mixed up in the controversy over severance, minority rights, and expansion, no phase in that strange life that could not have graced the leaves of a medieval history or romance. From the fiery and impetuous young lieutenant who stole as his bride the daughter of a ruler-elect of the land — the Anglo-Saxon loves a soldier — to the cool and ambitious agitator of the platform and page, the podium and the press, who took upon himself the duty to voice his nation’s cause — secession — before it was either a cause or a nation.

In Tabbs’s reading of the man, General Bethune was less a product of his country and more an aberrant self-creation, a self-directed and sovereign nation of one.

A month after the concert, Tabbs found himself seated in a sun-bleached office, all nerves. (A Negro maid had led him down a long hall and put him before a desk. Led without speaking a single word. He had stood for a good ten minutes knocking on the door, under a hard hot wind flouncing the awning. The door finally drew open to a second Negro maid, a girl in her teens, blinking him into focus and understanding. Early morning and the girl already looked tired, gazing back at him as if looking through him for a quiet place to rest.) Morning light pouring through louvers, making white walls whiter. A legal text open on the desk, broken at the spine. A (third) Negro maid crawled on hands and knees about the floor, wiping and scrubbing, suds gathering and disappearing. Her pail came up, her rag went in, the water went out, her rag waved hither and thither, lingered to rub and massage, her knees and palms creaked forward or back. Tabbs flicked eyes over the delicacy of her thin legs, small frame and hands. Caught her face revealed under rows of bruises. Then the door flapped open and still another (fourth) Negro maid appeared. A narrow woman — a life spent in tiny kitchens and tinier outhouses — the light (bone?) buttons shining on her dark smock. She waved at him — come this way — without either entering or speaking. He removed his hat from his lap, got up from his seat, and followed her down the unlit hall. He had received a wire from General Bethune’s lawyer, a Mr. Geryon, directing him to this location at this hour — no other instructions or information — but no signs so far of either the lawyer or General Bethune. Was General Bethune present? Would he actually appear? Important to make an imposing first impression, for General Bethune would know him without ever having first met him.

She stopped before an open door, pointed — in there — and he entered the room without hesitation, as if it was his right to be there. Whenever he considers it later — now — he finds it impossible to recollect what thought guided his first movement, unsure even if he had formulated any thoughts at the moment he entered the room. Remembers some force drawing him inside, not prompting but actually guiding his legs and hands and mouth. The room had no window — was it a pantry or closet? — and hence no source of natural light, but bright illumination radiated out from two tall thick candles burning on a small card table stationed in the center of the room, where General Bethune sat on the far side in a plain chair, staring blankly up at Tabbs. He gave no indication that Tabbs’s fearless entry had disturbed or upset him, that it (he) was anything out of the ordinary.

He stood up from behind the table and extended his hand in offering. A man of medium height, perhaps slightly taller, in any case far shorter than Tabbs by several inches. And he appeared, despite rumors about ill health, to be quite fit, his body worked to the rhythms of regimented exercise, impressive for a man twenty years Tabbs’s senior. A good-looking man on top of that — yes, admit it — with a full head of wavy back-combed hair, dark eyes, and nicely cut features. Tabbs stepped forward, this erasing of distance affording a closer examination that revealed that the General’s face was beginning to show signs of (early) aging, the skin cracked in the places you might expect for a man in his midfifties rather than midforties.

Tabbs took the older man’s warm hand into his own, and they shook firmly — which hand moved the other? — while General Bethune smiled in greeting. Tabbs forbade any smile to cross his lips, determined to show the other before him the coldness of profound, even deserved, respect. Their hands parted — who was the first to let go? — enough reason for Tabbs to casually take a seat in a second chair positioned before the table without General Bethune’s invitation.

The next words out of General Bethune’s mouth came in the form of a question. What has been the holdup? Excuse my asking, but why have you, sir, been so long in coming? I’ve been waiting here a good half hour or more. Completely cordial, expressing no rudeness or displeasure in his asking.

Took Tabbs a minute to respond. Sat gazing through wick-generated patterns bouncing off the table and gliding across General Bethune’s face. He said that he actually had arrived several minutes before their appointed time. Then he realized that he had not checked his watch. (Couldn’t do so now.) Nor did he know for sure how long he had actually sat waiting in the other room.

I regret to inform you, General Bethune said, that you are sadly mistaken about the hour.

Tabbs detected the scent of tobacco smoke, invisible fumes rushing into his nostrils. (Yes, someone had been smoking.) Calmly and without unnecessary words, he told as if giving a sworn deposition the circumstances leading up to their meeting today at what he knew to be the correct and agreed upon time. He wanted to be forceful and direct. Yet his words sounded cautious to his own ears.

I have listened, General Bethune said. I will henceforth consider the matter settled. You simply misunderstood. Let us leave it at that.

This caught Tabbs off guard. What should he say now? Review the facts again? Voice a complaint? Set this alabaster straight?

I understand you have a matter you need to present before me.

Yes. Tabbs wasted no time in outlining his proposition, making his intentions clear. General Bethune listened to it all with no change of expression.

You must have given this matter considerable pondering, he said.

Yes, I have.

You speak well.

Tabbs looked into the other’s confidently upturned face, under its smooth sweep of hair. For whatever reason, everything apparently sat well with him. With this realization, Tabbs’s face started to go tight. Difficult to keep his eyes open. Weighted under the fatigue of observation.

Then he saw something: General Bethune shifted slightly in his seat, an odd adjustment. And it occurred to him: something strange in General Bethune’s physical makeup, although he couldn’t say what exactly, couldn’t put his finger on it. General Bethune wasn’t (isn’t) put together quite right.

But no matter how well you speak, what would possess me to give this matter serious consideration? I see no reason why I should.

Tabbs was pleased with the question, for he took it to mean that General Bethune would actually consider doing the impossible: entering into business with the darker other. Consider it, sir, Tabbs said, for one primary reason. The war may end tomorrow or the day after, next month or next year or two years from now. We know not the hour. But one thing is certain. You will lose.

General Bethune didn’t flinch. By all indication, you are right, Mr. Gross. If I understand you correctly, you wish to rescue Tom. But Tom is already free.

No, Tabbs says, quite the contrary. This is not a moral matter, but an industrial one. I see an opportunity. More likely than not, other men will soon approach you, perhaps some already have.

Ah, General Bethune said, the early bird.

Yes.

And why shouldn’t I wait for one of the latecomers?

I will best any offer.

I already possess money. I own industry. Discretion outweighs all else.

Tabbs contemplated this some, needed to see what was back of it. You would claim to understand better than myself a person of my own blood?

General Bethune did not answer right away. Sat watching Tabbs, his face betraying no emotions. Perhaps you are right, Mr. Gross. Tom might best be served by another Negro. Even so, must that Negro be you? What I see before me is merely another boy. He had intentionally or unintentionally spoken with signs of growing dislike — the moment Tabbs had, perhaps at his deepest self, hoped for, an insult that would justify a full venting of his anger.

Your kind always knows what’s best for us, Tabbs sneered. I suppose what I require is the blood of experience on my conscience to become the equal of you.

Understand something, Mr. Gross. You are clever and strong, but you will never be the equal of me.

Tabbs idled in his seat, hot air slowly escaping from his lungs.

How could a son best a father? But your equality or lack thereof is not why you are here today. You seek Tom. I would sorely regret sitting in unfair judgment of your youth. For that reason, I need you to make clear to me what logic would justify my putting Tom in your hands. I have no intentions of insulting you, Mr. Gross, but I must express my belief that at your age you can hardly answer for your own self.

Tabbs held back hard air, fists clutched. Could he save himself? All lost in his mind. He decidedly had not wanted anything outrageous to happen, anything to go over the line, the more especially at his provocation, but it had. As I said earlier, sir. I seek opportunity. You well understand this. As a military man, you are accustomed to leading. And in your present role, retired from military service, you remain one of the leaders of your country, perhaps more now than before.

Yes, General Bethune said. I am a leader. But I am no longer a leader of men but one of thought. That is why I publish.

Indeed, Tabbs said. You would agree that thoughts are easily led?

I would. Still, Mr. Gross, you have failed to fully satisfy my conscience. Surely you have considered the possibility that his own kin should want possession of him?

Yes, sir, I have. And I will back down if they so request. But I ask careful possession of him until such request be put forth.

General Bethune was quiet for a time studying Tabbs carefully. What time frame do you have in mind?

I am willing to pay you one thousand dollars now, sir, at this very moment.

I see. And how did a youth, a man such as yourself, a Negro, come into such a sum?

Respectfully, sir, is my history of concern in this matter?

You are correct. Winged light flew across the General’s face. And what about the balance?

My investors will provide me with the balance after you sign and notarize the contract. Then we will expect immediate delivery of Tom into my charge.

General Bethune fidgeted in his seat. So you have investors?

These grimaces brought to light that Tabbs had the white man where he wanted him, that he held the black upper hand. Yes, sir. I can supply you with a list. He needed General Bethune to believe that he was not alone in this venture, as a white man neither respects nor fears a singular Negro.

Perhaps it is more pertinent at this time for you to produce a contract.

Tabbs removed the contract from his jacket pocket and smoothed it flat on the table. (Any who should read it will find it carefully worded.) From the other pocket he removed a stack of banknotes, two leather cords wrapped around either end to keep it neatly formed.

General Bethune did not move or give any indication that he noticed either the money or the document. Only continued to look at Tabbs.

The money is completely sorted, Tabbs said.

I trust that it is, General Bethune said. Still, you understand that my attorney-at-law will need to review the contract. He did not touch the document. Nor did he touch or count the money.

I would expect nothing less. You will find the money is all there.

I shall sign in receipt.

I have no such receipt for you to sign, Tabbs said.

Room flickering, General Bethune looked surprised. You elect no receipt?

No, Tabbs said. He knew full well that the money was a calculated risk, small bait for the larger catch. I know you as a man of your word, however much I might disagree with certain views you express and certain causes you champion.

So you know me. You needn’t worry. I will present this contract before my attorney-at-law today and you should expect a speedy reply. May we both wish that this contract meets with Mr. Geryon’s exacting standards.

I so wish. Tabbs could barely contain himself, remain seated. I will wire word to my partners that you have accepted the terms of our agreement and plan to subscribe yourself to the contract upon your finding it suitable.

You have my permission to do so. General Bethune extended his hand out to Tabbs. Why did the gesture surprise him? Was it because he had not expected to glide through the negotiations? And certainly not in a single day. Deals are never so easy, unless one party already feels at a disadvantage, defeated. He hooked his hand into the General’s — brown to pink — and gave it a firm tug before letting go, leaving the other to feel like the fish lucky enough to yank free of a captor’s hook whatever blood and flesh loss.

Found himself moving down the dark hall and encountering on his way to the front door one after another the three (four?) black maids. Seeing the women made him think, How did we get from there to here? Only now had history made it possible for him to give flesh to an abiding logic of thought. The world he could (can) make — you possess a thing only when you build it with your own two hands — if he accepted the challenges and risks. Chance speaking. Hands measuring and shaping.

He threw the door wide and stepped out into the street, expectant, both where he wanted and needed to be. The Tabbs who spoke to General Bethune would soon disappear, the Tabbs-to-be carrying this fact in his mind as if it had always been there, a name he could slip out of anytime he chose to. He fluttered through the city, gaze rising and dipping, catching and losing a hundred faces.

A week later, one maid let him through a door, another led him in darkness halfway down a long hall, and a third took him the rest of the way. She turned (pointed?)—in there—and she was gone, returning — to light? — down the same blind corridor whose dark length would understandably dissuade most. Everyone quiet and still and looking up at him from their respective places at the table, as if caught off guard. He managed to stumble forward into an empty chair at the table and sat down before he was invited to do so. Taking the liberty, liberties. Carrying the room. This pretense at certainty and confidence mostly for himself, caught off guard too — admit this much — forgetting for a minute what had brought him here.

Mr. Gross.

General Bethune was speaking. He sat opposite Tabbs on the other side of the table, leaning slightly to one side as if favoring a damaged limb. I’m glad that you could join us. Allow me to offer you a refreshment. What will you have? Tea? Coffee? Lemon water? General Bethune lifted one hand from the table and raised it to his side, like one about to take an oath.

Took Tabbs a second to realize that his other was prepared to summon a servant into action. For the first time he noticed a black woman standing in a far corner of the room, a good thirty feet away, as if caught in the distance of another life. She was fashionably clothed in a black dress with maline cuffs and trim, her torso wrapped in a shawl of yellow and red challis. Her face spiteful and impudent, like something trained and caged, ready to pounce upon him should she be so commanded. Then again, perhaps he was judging her appearance, reading her looks, incorrectly.

Thank you for your kind offer, Tabbs said. I respectfully decline. I am not in need.

Should we proceed then? General Bethune returned his hand to the table. Tabbs was already growing tired of seeing him, of hearing his voice. Couldn’t wait to be done with it all. Kindly allow me to introduce you to the other gentlemen you see before you. The man seated beside him he introduced — he gestured — as Dr. Hollister, a medical specialist who guarded over Tom’s health. Seated next to him — General Bethune gestured — was, at last, Mr. Geryon, General Bethune’s attorney-at-law. (That peculiar phrase.) The two men seated on Tabbs’s side of the table: Mr. Warhurst, Tom’s stage manager, a well-dressed man with black distant eyes who took the trouble to smile at Tabbs — Tabbs in midlumbering with his hat, hidden hands (beneath the table) straightening it, then moving it to his other knee, crushing it — and a curious-looking man of the cloth—our pastor, General Bethune called him — Reverend H. D. Frye. Blunt and inexpressive, he appeared to be still in his teens, possibly younger. His clothes fit him poorly, oversized, his body a small concern among the folds. All the men in the room received Tabbs nicely enough. After this initial introduction, General Bethune and Mr. Geryon dominated the talking, words upon words, Warhurst and the two men seated alongside Tabbs never a single utterance, Tabbs continually aware of the silent weight of their watching, the gaze of one (Warhurst) unreadable, that of another (Dr. Hollister) curious, and that of the last (Reverend Frye) resentful. Of course, General Bethune did not introduce the woman, presumably his servant or the servant of one of the other white men. Tabbs was prompted to ask—And who is she? or Madame, your name would be? — but he couldn’t risk making a mistake. Intent on acting in concert with what he believed might least offend.

Excuse me for asking, Mr. Gross, General Bethune said. Might you have some idea how much longer we must be detained? I assume your legal counsel will arrive shortly.

My attorney will not be joining us today, Tabbs said.

General Bethune peered into Tabbs’s eyes defiantly, a look that also seemed to hold some strange uneasiness.

Is all in order? Mr. Geryon asked. Today, we truly wish to arrive at terms agreeable to all involved if so possible.

I have already submitted the contract for your review, Tabbs said. I am perfectly capable of attending to any required modifications.

His words silenced both General Bethune and the lawyer, the men at once transparent (stunned) and impossible to entirely see through, completely still, for a time, as if unable to move. Then Mr. Geryon spoke. Even if that is the case, Mr. Gross, is there some reason why your esquire cannot be present today? In your favor, we can adjourn until a later date.

My attorney believes me perfectly and fully capable of handling any negotiation.

Mr. Gross, certainly you are aware that—

Let us proceed, General Bethune said, leaning forward on the table, hands cupped.

I have carefully reviewed your contract and weighed its fairness, the lawyer said. I have so counseled my party, General Bethune, to subscribe, pending your willingness to sign an agreement I have drawn up. The lawyer’s hand disappeared under the table, resurfaced with a leather satchel, which the lawyer promptly laid flat on the table and opened, pulling a sheaf of papers, several pages thick, from inside. The lawyer slid — how small his hands seemed bringing the words, whatever they were — the bundle toward Tabbs, until letters pushed into sight, a document titled “bill-of-sale agreement.”

Mr. Gross, the lawyer said, his voice high and tight, we see the need for two substantially similar, if not exact, versions of a contract, your contract, so that the exchange will be legally binding in both nations.

Tabbs considered this some.

Shall we review it together?

Yes, Tabbs said. Keeping the bottom edge touching the table, he took up the bundle and inclined it, propped for reading.

The lawyer took up a second copy of the contract positioned on top of his leather satchel, fit his bifocals onto his face, and with extreme readiness began to read it aloud, paraphrasing clauses where he felt the legal language was difficult, pointing to certain lines with his fingers as if to something too difficult (hidden) to see. Granted, perhaps Tabbs didn’t understand all of what was written there, a foreign language, Greek to his skin, but he made the effort, fully listening and taking in the lawyer’s abbreviations and clarifications point by point, seeking to understand it here in the moment — no time later — checking that understanding for validity, pursuing further to see if this validity served him, then persuading himself to accept it or reject it — well, in the end, he rejected nothing — before he privately arrived at a final decision to embrace the proposed terms.

So this is what we ask, Mr. Gross, the lawyer said. I hope I have been sufficiently clear.

Yes, Tabbs said.

We can give some time alone for a second reviewing.

That won’t be necessary, Tabbs said. I am prepared to sign. He feared nothing. I feared nothing. Some weeks later he would realize that he should have. I should have.

His words hummed in white silence above their heads. With all the eyes in the room turned on him—all eyes on me—he felt in himself a complete and triumphant assurance. He needed more and he would find it here, right in this room, among these men. With no hesitation, only fresh clean movement — he will inhabit the free spaces — he removed a precounted wad of crisp banknotes and counted out two thousand dollars in notes of large denomination on the table, then with one edge of his hand slid croupier-like the stack of notes across the table to General Bethune. No one moved. No one said anything. Then a sudden shift of delicate forms (skin, paper, leather, and other solids): the lawyer, moving, speaking.

Now, if you gentlemen would be good enough to sign. General Bethune, it is only right that you should subscribe yourself first. The lawyer repositioned the stack of banknotes just enough to make room for the contract and the bill of sale, then offered General Bethune a fine-bladed pen. General Bethune took the pen, signed one (Tabbs’s) and its duplicate then signed the other (his) and its duplicate. Joy caged in his throat, Tabbs could hardly believe what he saw. (He paused to breathe.) It was as he wanted it.

And now you, Mr. Gross.

Tabbs accepted the pen and signed all four documents as quickly as he could. Then he looked up. The banknotes remained on the table.

Congratulations to you both, gentlemen.

General Bethune extended his hand out to Tabbs across the table. Tabbs accepted it — a touch he would decline — with his own, and they shook, as men should, but they did not simply shake once or twice and cease. General Bethune continued to move Tabbs’s hand — a fish trying to free itself, no luck this time — with his firm fearless grip, strong bones, pressing so hard that Tabbs felt the blood drain from his fingertips. Only then did he let go, release the other.

One difficulty remains, the lawyer said. That of settling on a pattern and date for the transfer of Tom into your custody, Mr. Gross.

Allow me to put forth a schedule, General Bethune said. He spoke for ten minutes without pause, providing a thorough explanation for why he would need a full week to hand over Tom — Tom must finish out his schedule; the professionals (Warhurst, Dr. Hollister, Reverend Frye) will need time to elucidate it all to the boy; the boy should be granted a final gathering with his kin — even as Tom was only a short distance, a few minutes away, presently in town for a concert. Tabbs took this verbiage to be a measure of the General’s own seriousness. Or so he felt he must (wanted to, did) interpret it. (How else understand it?) Then too, the General’s facts appeared reasonable. Perhaps General Bethune was a better man than Tabbs thought, better than himself in many ways.

One week from today, here at my office, and shall we say at this very same hour? the lawyer asked. Mr. Gross, are you in agreement with such designation as the appointed date?

I am, Tabbs said.

We fend accord.

Should we drink a toast? General Bethune asked.

Yes.

General Bethune nodded at the servant standing in the corner, who hurried over to a small cupboard at the opposite back corner of the room, her scarf zipping behind her like a black flag. She lifted up a silver tray holding a crystal decanter and several crystal glasses, and carried the tray over to the table. With one hand steadily holding the tray, she proceeded to pour and set down before each man a glass of whiskey, working her way around the table from General Bethune to Tabbs. General Bethune raised his glass, the other men following his lead, and all drank a toast.

The liquor warmed and brightened Tabbs like a light that wouldn’t stop going through him.

I hope you are pleased, Mr. Gross.

Yes, sir.

Just like that, only the two of them, Tabbs and the General, were in the room, a bare exchange, the other men invisible even as they were physically present.

I hope I have not disappointed you, General Bethune said, a man in mourning fumbling for words. At first I suffered resentment. However, I quickly realized that I should have no reason to be upset with you, for you are only performing your perceived duty to that world which you believe in and that you believe to be true. I fully understand your motives. Why then is it I feel the lesser man in this transaction?

Tabbs knows now but did not know then the duplicitous courtesy with which General Bethune was speaking to him. In his vanity, he had lost sight of danger, the trap already set.

Sir, Tabbs said, if anyone is the lesser, it is me. Why not say it, throw the General a bone or two? Tabbs had much ahead. What more could the General ask for, require? He should count his blessings, reaping gain for all these years to the benefit of no one — it helped no one — other than himself. Tabbs powerless to correct this man’s past even if he wanted to. When he quits the room the lights will gutter out. From now on the world will remember General James Neil Bethune as a man who could have but did not and will come to know Tabbs Gross as a man of vision and will who did.

On the appointed day, he rushed out into the street, the city solid and real about him, daylight twisting in his eyes. Hurrying to meet the moment when he would board a ferry and cross waters to Tom. With Tom—Blind Tom—his story would (will) begin in earnest.

Tom, why do you play Bach?

I prefer to live by that which I know.

In only a few short hours. Hurrying to meet that moment — I will be early, count on it — because they had kept him waiting, the promised delivery deferred, pushed back until today. Two days since he had answered a caller at his door, opened it — the bolt loud, the hinges louder — to find the lawyer, Mr. Geryon, standing there leather satchel in hand. Stunned at this unexpected arrival, all he could do to exchange the most obligatory greetings and gestures. The lawyer had stepped inside after waiting patiently for Tabbs (stunned) to make the offer, removed his hat, and sat himself in the first seat he came upon, then proceeded to remove a sealed envelope from his satchel and hand it to Tabbs, who took it, confused, his frame of mind all the worse because he was still thinking about, pondering, certain facts and speculations he had just been reading about in the newspaper. Tom—across the river—had finished his extended run at the town hall. Naturally, the journal had given high marks to Tom’s closing recital at town hall — the Negro press can’t hymn his praises enough — but it also issued more reports (rumors) about a continuing and steady decline in General Bethune’s physical well-being and the vanquishing of his professional and financial holdings, the cause for the latter: every dollar earned from both the General’s press and Tom’s concerts and publications went into the Confederate war chest. Tabbs had already grown numb to such pronouncements. What truly caught his interest was the photograph accompanying the story. Tom seated on a stool at his piano with the General posed behind him, one hand in paternal rest on the boy’s shoulder. In the photograph General Bethune did not come across as a man on his last leg, a man who was suffering daily ruin and facing an early grave. He still possessed that big-eyed look of desire, hunger, and expectation that Tabbs recollected from their two meetings. When had they sat for the photograph? How recently?

Hands in flight, the lawyer took it upon himself to explain the letter, reciting it word by word, and inserting comments and clarifications and meaningful pauses as he saw fit. General Bethune seeks an additional two days and a small change of venue for the transfer. Tabbs sat gazing at the lawyer, unable to speak for a time. As much as he tried to avoid wrongful thoughts, his first inclination was to reject the request out of sheer defiance, tit for tat. Then he thought he should practice caution, the sooner to get on, two days part and parcel of his transformation, of making anew. Clearly General Bethune had his own fears. Otherwise why had he elected to conduct private business in a public space?

Despite the early start, he arrived at the meeting place thirty minutes late for reasons that he was hard put to explain, but that he now believes were a foreboding of bad things to come. The restaurant was empty as far as he could tell. He took a seat at a table offering an unobstructed view of the door, a Negro waiter motionless at his dais, looking at Tabbs but pretending not to. Tabbs felt safer in the open air of the street. Not for anything did he want to be surprised. The restaurant was a continuous row of windows on three sides, glass glinting out onto impressive views of the town, beach, and river. Easy looking out, easy looking in. A glass crib thrust into sight. Came the thought that he was positioned perfectly for a sharpshooter’s bullet.

He checked his watch. The time was all wrong. Surely his watch was malfunctioning. He returned it to his pocket. But the clock fixed to the wall behind the waiter (watching) confirmed the hour. And no sign of General Bethune. Had he come and gone?

Mr. Geryon walked in, leather satchel swinging at his side. The waiter rushed forward to greet him, but the lawyer brushed past him, walked over to the table where Tabbs sat — the waiter backed away, as if from contagion, scurried return to his dais — and, without a word, seated himself on the other side, quietly positioning his worn satchel on the immaculate white cloth covering the table, draped over the sides.

Mr. Gross, he said. You are not the man you say you are. His face down-tilted toward the satchel, avoiding Tabbs’s eyes. Speaking words into leather. You will be arrested.

What the lawyer said, no mistaking it. Tabbs could hardly keep his eyes open. The moment demanded some kind of gesture, but what could he do with his body?

No, you don’t want to go to jail. The lawyer shot Tabbs a glance, flickering his fingers irritably against the table. He opened his satchel and pulled from it a crisp stack of banknotes, held together with Tabbs’s distinctive leather ties at both ends. You have violated our trust, he said, speaking to the leather again, and in so doing have annulled all contractual claims. He placed the bound notes before Tabbs. Here is a sum total of one thousand dollars, your original deposit, plus the cost of rail passage.

Tabbs out on a limb, past words.

The balance of your monies will remain in our possession, pending calculation of penalties, investigative costs, and matters of forfeiture.

The lawyer said nothing else. Enough said. Simply closed his briefcase and departed. Some time before Tabbs could do the same. See his startled angle of retreat from the restaurant, from the hotel, earth streaming away under his feet, a thick swarm of indistinct sounds pursuing him.

Some of what Tabbs did in his life for the next few days after that meeting is lost to him now. What he sees is himself leaning back into the darkness of a hallway and patiently waiting outside a receiving room after one of Tom’s concerts, listening to the invisible chatter of voices inside the room. Emboldened, he was intent on confronting General Bethune. How had he arrived at that decision in the face of the General’s threats of arrest and imprisonment? Perhaps his presence there was the sum total of his intelligence, his shrewdness, his astuteness, his courage, a man daunted by nothing. Perhaps it was precisely the time for gallant gestures. One after another the supplicants began to leave the room. Counting, Tabbs entered the room only after the last had exited.

General Bethune looked up from the table where he was seated and saw Tabbs standing, contained in a pocket of light, his appearance now, there, no different in purpose from the previous one only days before. Went rigid with surprise, unbelief. He was trapped. What is this man, this Tabbs Gross, not capable of?

Tabbs took a seat at the table within touching distance of his adversary. The General gave him a look of mild approach, then he and the General glared at each other across the silence.

I will never cease in knowing you, General Bethune said. Your history increases each day. You have murdered men. You have pandered women. You have befouled children.

From far away the thunder of a noisy sonata reached Tabbs: Tom’s encore. Feelings are ridiculous in such moments. He must not speak. Would he really be foolish enough to report his most private feelings to a white man?

General Bethune pushed both hands into his pockets, pulled free two fistfuls of banknotes. Tossed the crumpled notes onto the table, patted his pockets for more. Annoyed, as if cornered into donating charity.

Tabbs looked at the banknotes, no intention of picking them up, cast-off leprous skin. Understanding the other’s restraint, General Bethune swept the notes off the table and right into Tabbs’s lap. Already Tabbs knew: he would never see the General again. He never has.

For weeks after he did not leave his house, welcoming no callers—Ruggles, Ruggles—in his increasing dismay, forgetful of the most ordinary matters, eating (strings of onions, loaves of bread), bathing, cleaning his teeth, washing and combing his hair, shaving, passing urine, moving his bowels, instinct equating, mind skipping off, sunk in his memories of that terrible moment, playing scenes, what he could have said, what he could have done. Signs, gifts, wonders. The trick in the hand. From dawn to rocking close of day. Thinking small, thinking big, he greeted each morning with many tongues. What must I do to be saved? Sickness when there was nothing else. Sickness that made him (feel) capable of anything. (What might strong hands do?)

So one day, once he had retrieved enough of himself, he packed his bags—Fill up your horn with oil and be on your way—put on good clothes to go out into the street, and set out — he served notice to no one, Ruggles, Ruggles—following the Blind Tom Exhibition from town to town — maps make the getting there look easy — engagement to engagement, one month, then the next through the raucous scrambled world of dark streets dark rivers dark halls. Tunnels, blackness he would (will) never come out of. Iron wheels pulling in and iron wheels pulling out. The muffled strain. The jarring chord. The running smoke and heat. The whoosh and hissing. The melting in his legs. The hot puddle between his thighs. The black ink flying at angles across paper. Advertisements. Certificates of purchase. Bills of sale. A surfeit of work. The blood-stained gate. Beat by the hammer. Beat by the fist. Prodded and pushed. Nothing had the color he would expect. Always in pursuit but sometimes falling behind schedule or, worse, losing the trail altogether until he chanced upon another lead. Knocking on a door and stepping through that door held open for him. Checking in. Checking out. Stale and alone in a country busted apart. Not another summer. Please, not another fall. Then the Union instituted a war lottery (draft) and the city exploded, fire surging like a red sea, smoke in the wide sky and hot things going up and coming down that Tabbs, trailing Tom (always, because the boy was all that mattered to him), could see in his imaginings from a thousand miles away. The planters down South driven in, underground, and Tom and Warhurst and the Bethunes dropped from public view. What now? Knew he must set out again — comfort in motion, hope — but to where, what the port of call? How would he fish up Tom out of a deep dark unknown?

For the next three years (almost), he lived with his anxious ear pushed up against the world, traveled — no end to it — from one city to another across the North tracking any mention of Blind Tom — Tabbs time and again clutching his ever-hopeful ticket of passage — some supposed sighting of him here, some supposed recital he was to give there. Rumor, all rumor. His dream deferred. Biding time until the war ended.

And so it was that the war ended, and he found himself deep in the enemy’s country, determined to unearth Tom. See him thus: exhausted and bewildered, he walked right into the hotel restaurant without taking the time to wash up first and settled on a table. Sat right down, knotted his napkin around his neck, took up utensils crafted from pure silver, and waited, the rattle of a hungry body in a room that smelled of salted cooking grease. Little astonishments going off all over the restaurant. What remarkable things these chefs could do with cowpeas, peanuts, greens, rice, cabbage, and potatoes, Tabbs partial to the food here — rib eye, roast, tenderloin — taking all of his meals here each day—You shall eat the fruits of this world—morning, noon, and night, although to sit down to a meal with the other guests was to dissemble, Tabbs dining dumbly, rolling wine in his mouth, even when the guests, all men, all alabasters, all Northerners, would sit down at his table and try to make small talk, engage him in conversation above the soft clattering of plates, the scratching of silverware on porcelain, and the clinking of glasses, trying to gain a sense of Tabbs’s feelings about the war and the reconstruction of the South, taking his hand in greeting, the hard power of their granite grips crushing his skin.

Tabbs sat thinking into the day, into the moment.

Why would he do this to me?

Because he can, Ruggles said. Because you’re a nigger.

He made up his mind to add that to the account he was determined to settle with the General, a promise that surfaced spontaneously into consciousness while he sat over his dinner engineering the fried fish (whole) on his plate with knife and fork.

Get yo grits right.

He looked up from his plate and saw Mrs. Birdoff frowning instructions, her sculpted eyebrows arched and sharp like Oriental temples, each eyelash black and hard and separate.

You got to mix em.

He shoveled his fork into the pool of grits on his plate and performed some vigorous stirring.

Mrs. Birdoff looked at him for a long time without a word, no movement in her eyes. You ain’t never ate none befo. I can see that. Her surprise uncovered a set of fine white teeth.

Just what does she want him to mix?

You know what you eatin?

Fish, he said.

Crappie, she said.

He looked at her.

You just gon and eat. Don’t worry bout how it sound.

You have to put the worm on the hook, Ruggles said. Go ahead. Hook it through. Why am I telling you twice?

It’s greasy.

Get it between your fingers.

I don’t think I can touch it good.

You want me to do it? Is that what you’re telling me? You want me to do it?

Mrs. Birdoff gave him a wide sweep of the hand, a blessing. Bless the hominy, bless the crappie, bless the greens, bless the beans, bless the sack, and bless whatever else I’ve forgotten. She left, gathering her deliberate walk about her as she went.

Several hours later, he found himself entrenched along the perimeter of General Bethune’s estate. Light flowed in a smooth reflection that outlined the shadow of the trees whose branches and leaves closed rank around him. Hid him. He could watch the house from here, so he did, watched and waited. No way he would (could) fully abide by Coffin’s restrictions. Keep to the hotel, Mr. Gross. Stay away from Hundred Gates. Let Coffin do his part. As for himself, he could submit and observe, decide and execute, all at the same time, torn away from the usual incongruous questioning, his mind free, clear, and quick. He viewed the General’s house as the empty shape of a heaven he coveted and had been promised, that he longed to enter once and for all. Nothing protecting it, only this single iron gate that opened at his touch, no fence. He walked right through the garden all the way to the porch without encountering another soul. Squinted in at the window, trying to see beyond morning glare and his own reflection shiny on the glass pane.

A Negress appeared in the doorway. You again, she said. I already told you. He ain’t here.

She frowned. Muttered under her breath. Should he stay or go?

Where is he?

We livin here now.

When did he leave?

Now she greeted him like any caller. She offered him a cup of tea — she did not say hot or cold — as if she knew that he was (is) a tea drinker. Then he understood: she was trying to trick him into revealing his true nature, man or ghost.

And you’re sure he’s not here? These planters’ mansions have all sorts of box rooms, hidden passages, and unexpected staircases. So he had heard.

Come see for yoself.

He stepped through the doorway. Looked once or twice, here and there.

I got to get back to my work. She looked at Tabbs sideways.

Where did he go?

I ain’t ask him.

It fell to Tabbs to guess. (Light suddenly more clear.) Now he was sure — uncertain before — that she had been the woman present at the meeting with General Bethune years earlier, standing quietly in the corner, wearing a black dress with maline trim. (What is she wearing today?)

He sold the house.

Don’t you see us livin here? Ain’t no coming back.

She seemed to be out of breath, hauling pots, washing dishes, wringing laundry.

He left nothing behind.

Nothing, she said.

She has turned her back on servitude. Elevated herself in the world. He could enforce his presence. Speak to her openly and honestly. She would embrace him instead of exclude, absolve instead of condemn.

What you see? she said.

A perfect translucent silence fell over the house. He felt oddly at home. (The piano in the hall.) He would like to move but couldn’t. Didn’t know whether it was his mind not speaking loudly enough to his limbs or whether these limbs had grown treacherously stiff, or something else, another foreign force making him stay put.

Did he leave anything for me? A letter? A message?

I’m sposed to give you this, she said.

What?

She shut the door in his face.

Back at the hotel, he heard music coming from somewhere on an upper floor — no, from somewhere downstairs, in the parlor, filling every room and corner with song, disembodied scales and tones quite like nothing he had heard before. Drawn in, squeezing into bodies and furniture populated with dead bottles no one had bothered to remove.

He saw a face that bore a connection to him, Dr. Hollister standing by the fireplace on the other side of the room, his head bent with listening. The blunt impact of the man. Feeling flowed in. The Doctor saw Tabbs but did not appear in the least bit surprised. Tabbs saw the Doctor’s mouth move, but the words were lost on him. The Doctor came slowly over with long sad strides — moving to the music perhaps? Tabbs couldn’t say.

He greeted Tabbs like an old acquaintance, shaking hands with him in a friendly way. So you remember me? I ain’t think you would. Turned back to the music. You ever heard anything that good?

The musicians were seated in the layered shadows of Mrs. Birdoff’s ruffles and skirts, Mrs. Birdoff standing wide behind them, above them, like a shady tree. She looked across at Tabbs and Dr. Hollister, her eyes as surprised as Tabbs’s. Looked away.

We’ll be all alone in the garden, Dr. Hollister said.

We can stay right here, Tabbs said. He didn’t look at the Doctor, acted as if he could not be thinking about anything in the world, his thoughts sliding across the strings of a violin, a banjo plucked and pulled.

So you stay. But you got to leave sometime.

The words sinking beneath the music.

Another chord. Another exchange between the instruments. But the Doctor wasn’t talking, talking that talk. Tabbs saw some of the men (listening, dancing) pull their faces from the music to watch the Doctor leave the room, nodding and smiling, all courtesy and respect. Tabbs followed. What else could he do, having resigned himself to capture, a spy in the enemy’s country, no matter who had won the war, who was in charge. Six beats behind the Doctor, he felt a renewal of everything he could suffer from ugliness and stupidity.

They struck out to the garden and followed a solitary side path speckled with blue moonlight, walking neither fast nor slow, without hurry or hesitation, space between their bodies, Tabbs put on edge.

Dr. Hollister curved his face back to hook a glance at Tabbs. You look like a man who wants to run.

Maybe I should.

That’s why I came. The General and I, we’re worried about you.

I should thank you.

My agreeable duty. We want you safe.

Tricks upon tricks, Tabbs said, speaking to the back of the Doctor’s head. He was on performance, standing on his head and hands, turning somersaults. You even look like the General.

A man can’t change what he is. He is my cognate.

The night hummed with the rasping sounds of insects. Everywhere in the garden, naked marble women glowed white from under the foliage. What was one supposed to feel here? Their eyes are upon me, and I am not.

But you know more about him than I do. So there ain’t nothing I can give you. He looked back at Tabbs, showing his strong white teeth.

Sooner quiet than say too much, Tabbs said nothing, a silence that did not reside on the surface of his lips but in the mouth. The world is always half someone else’s, never one’s own, never Tabbs’s. He wished he possessed his own private language that could represent him speak him be him.

You talkin bout how I look. I don’t see him walking here with you. Why don’t you go ask him for it? Go on out there to Hundred Gates, if you ain’t already been.

(The wrought iron gate.) (The carefully arranged grounds with fine shrubs and vines and graveled walks bordered with flowers.) (The waveless sheet of the pond.) (The marble fireplace inside the great hall.)

I’m all you got.

He continued to follow the Doctor, the sweep of hair, the hunch of shoulders, the squat wall of back, nothing of the Doctor’s legs visible in the dark, only this floating faceless torso.

Certain things a man ain’t gon give up, can’t give up, even if that thing be his owning the flesh of another man. I absolve myself of such claims. When all this mess started I set mine loose, every one of them, one hundred and twenty-four mouths that I gave food, upkeep, clothing, a roof and walls, year after year, settling their vexations and celebrations and all matters in between. They belong to themselves now. And where are they? Roaming about, confused, hungry, dead.

I just want the boy.

So does he.

What?

They went into the grass, no longer solid path beneath his feet but soft earth, his shoes pressing down with each step. Any time now, he would sink, disappear, sucked in.

You mean to tell me you ain’t figured that out by now? He ain’t got him.

Tabbs said nothing, bursts of facts illuminating the night with the fireflies. Some way off he could see Mrs. Birdoff and her help heaping crates into a cellar.

Ruggles: a long pull on a fish hooked deep. Raising the fish from water, still alive (thrashing) at the end of the hook. What about the worm?

Who did you think I was talking about? Thomas.

He wanted to stop walking but couldn’t.

Do you know where the boy is?

What I know don’t matter. Go bargain with his mother. You can bargain with her. She has a right to what’s hers.

I already spoke to her.

Speak to her again, Dr. Hollister said.

The Doctor stopped walking and turned to face Tabbs, Tabbs almost stumbling into him. He watched Tabbs for a moment, the edges of his mouth working. Maybe I got you wrong.

Bearing no grudge and hardly any sorrow, Tabbs breathed in the smell of the Doctor’s cologne. He had all he needed, a chance to undo what had (has) been done, a possibility, plan of action that could not have suited him better if he had designed it himself.

Take them in there, Tabbs said.

Master boss, President Lincoln said, we can do it right here. Right here in front of her so she can see.

President Lincoln didn’t move, lingered staring at the Bethune daughters in one long unbroken moment, his rifle at his chest, the barrel close to his nose as if he were sniffing it. (Tabbs disliked the driver’s casual handling of the rifle, but what could he say?) The Bethune daughters remained standing where they were, each girl with a distinct look of terror on her face, each girl planted in a cone-shaped dress, their slim torsos tapering off to constrictive bonnets, slim nothings, three long-stemmed flowers. And Tom’s mother with garments in kind, similar but apart, her face placid, undisturbed, riding above the driver’s words.

Just take them in the other room.

You ain’t got to worry. Only us here. Ain’t nobody gon know. President Lincoln saying what he is, what he wants.

Tabbs needed to talk, needed to penetrate the driver’s focus, keep his hands from doing the thinking. I just need to talk to her. Nothing else. He said it without panic or force, calm, trying to bring the driver back to himself.

So you gon and talk while I take care of this.

I need them.

The driver paused in his offer to look at Tabbs. You ain’t got to do it. Not nwan one. I’ll do it. I’ll do it all.

I don’t need you to do my work. Tabbs tried to sound capable, tried to create the picture that what had drawn them together was something greater than money, the dollar he had given in exchange for the driver’s services, the dollar he might give tomorrow.

But you gon stop me? Why? They ain’t nothing but woogies.

I know what they are.

Then you know. All them years, master boss. The driver looking at the daughters again, his eyes wet, moving. All the hurt these woogies put on me, years they put on me, put me through.

But I need to talk to them. How will I talk to them? The dead can’t talk.

Okay, master boss. I ain’t gon get in yo way. You go on and talk. Talk. Then just say the word.

Tabbs was relieved. Lucky him. He hadn’t the will to talk sense to the driver. The driver nodded a command, and the daughters herded into the other room, the white buttons on their shoes moving under the smooth expanse of their skirts, their hands linked like paper dolls, President Lincoln behind them, the long barrel of his rifle fisted in his right hand like a walking stick. He firmly shut the door.

Tabbs heard himself say to her, He won’t hurt them.

The woman watched him sternly.

But I need to ask you something and I need you to tell me the truth.

I know some truth.

Tabbs looked into her face for some time. Miss Bethune — Wiggins, she said. Greene Wiggins. With the e. That’s who I be. He wondered by master or marriage? The Wiggins. The e. Her words said to him, I’m other, I’m not a Bethune.

Miss Wiggins—

You looking for him, Thomas.

I’m looking for your son.

Thomas.

You are free. You both are.

Proclaimed, she said. Proclaimed.

He thought about it. The Bethunes cannot stand in the way of maternal bond. So why are you here? He has no hold on you.

He gave me the girls. I got them to tend to.

They are his daughters, not yours.

I know what’s mine. All mine gone, she said. Niggers always gon have cause to call on a woogie. Ain’t nothing come from us, and ain’t nothing gon end with us.

What have they done with your son? Where are they keeping him?

He livin up north with that Yankee woman, the one who marry Massa Sharpe. Her words rose to the ceiling, stayed put for a few breaths before they started their descent, settled on his face and shoulders. Our child you have returned to us. My child you have returned home.

All this time, Tabbs said. All this time. He shook his head. He been right there in my face. In the city. Back at home. He laughed. He shook his head some more.

She asked, How did you let yourself get mixed up with General Toon? I never known him to have no dealings with our kind. With niggers.