Song of the Shank

The sun angled high and struck the surface of the piano, day giving her her first clear view of Tom, throwing too much light on his form. The boy holding himself, clutching the sum of his life. Then his arm lifted, a long shadow cutting across the emptiness and venturing out toward her—Miss Eliza (did he actually say it, or is she only remembering?) — and she stepped back, out of reach, a body reaction. He opened his mouth and the sound escaping it was all Negroes in one mouth.

No, Tom. They’ll hear. It’s not safe.

Trying to quiet that sound twisting through her head. (What the human mouth can bring into being.) After a time, it weakened and finally gave out altogether, only a few clumps of noise that still hummed in his body. In the stairwell outside, someone was passing by, speaking in a loud voice. She couldn’t catch the words. She had to wait, too soon to try Tom again. So for a while he stayed put and she stayed, only three feet — maybe four — separating them, Tom hanging in her eyes, an intrusive speck that couldn’t be blinked out.

Miss Eliza, he said, almost as if he realized she was waiting for him to speak, give her a full report.

She tried her questions again.

That sound tolling a response. Enough with the questions for now. Is it that she sensed more than the tongue could say? Coated his mutters and groans with emotion, hearing them as her own?

The piano seemed to assume Tom’s shape, the flesh hiding underneath it, covering it. So it was, he believed that she couldn’t see him nestled inside the hard black excess of his containment. Tom (indeed) in a place far removed from the bounds of her consciousness. She felt both pity and frustration for this boy, hiding, with or without her, innocent of outcome. Could not recall a single instance of being alone with him, always a trio with her husband or the manager, a quartet with her husband and the manager. How to breach the divide? Sharpe had given Tom much patience and correct words. He spoke to Tom in a quiet voice that he made stern when he had to, and tolerated her awkwardness around the boy.

Before she knew what was happening, something wet streamed down Tom’s face, one long spill. On closer inspection she saw water puddling at the concave of his shut eyelids, a drop slowly separating from the lash and speeding to the floor. A discovery: the blind can actually cry. (How had she escaped noticing this among the blind children at the Asylum those many years ago?) Might it be that the images she needed, the unsayable truths — where is Sharpe, where is my husband? — were trapped inside the salty liquid, dripping to the floor, lost forever?

With her eyes closed, she saw Sharpe, the manager, and Tom leaving the apartment, their coats cut generously to accommodate them, three attitudes of self-assurance. Stacks of programs — under whose arm? in whose hand? — still smelling of the printer’s ink. Everything connected with their departure remarkably fresh and distinct to her.

Time wound around her. All right, then, she thought: here I am with Tom. Backed up on all fours under the piano, like some animal in hibernation. Still for hours at a time but for fevered motion that quaked through his shoulders and teeth. Now bent over, a praying Mohammedan, driving his face into the floor. Crawling on his bloody knees to one corner, and crawling back to his cave. Or twisting and turning like a troubled dreamer, the backs of his hands shining with bruises. Whole days of this, Eliza hovering in clear orbit above him, afraid to sleep, for without constant attention her floating body would be carried off to another world. Tethered directly overhead while the boy’s torso swelled and his limbs cramped, while his skin grew gray, his body giving off waves of stench, a sour orange-yellow smell, and the air in the room (she felt) thinning out little by little.

Then she heard something snag, and the boy let loose with a flood of urine. She watched, poured into a strange heaviness. Only the sound of Tom’s heart fluttering around inside the empty birdcage of his chest. Then nothing. Not a twitch or twinge. Bereft of sound, of movement, he seemed so far away. She knew he was dying.