Song of the Shank

Our Lord Jesus died for us all

Tabbs holds still, pressed against the chair. I don’t feel so blessed. He surprises himself, his willingness to speak aloud his feelings to the preacher. Less surprising the unspoken distinction he makes in his head — not blessed but deserving, deserving what’s rightfully his.

But you are.

Always one more thing to say, Tabbs thinks.

You will lay hands on a million people. Wire is soothing the boy’s shoulders.

The boy sings,

One two

Buckle my shoe

Three four

Open the floor

Yes, Tom, yes. Smiling, touching the boy’s shoulders. If the Bible is silent, we should be silent. If the Bible talks, we should shout a clarion call.

Tabbs can think of nothing to say. The ease of the preacher’s assurance almost annoys him.

You have come far, and you still have far to go. What you are willing to walk away from, leave behind, determines what the Almighty will bring to you. The abundance.

You brought her? Tom asks.

Wire takes a beat to consider the boy’s face. I’m sorry, son. She should be here, right now, with you, but she stayed behind, in the city.

Tabbs hears. The words assume a shape in him.

Yes, the city woman.

Wire presses both hands into Tom’s shoulders as if he is trying to keep the boy seated on the piano bench. We were in the camps, as regular as rain. Doing our work. Then one day, she just up and — it’s just some misunderstanding. What else could it be? Wire’s face holds some reticent knowledge that seals him off from Tabbs and Tom, some harmful (damaging) facts.

And you don’t know where?

I know. She is out there. In the city. Somewhere.

Tom’s face goes wild.

We will find her.

We can go across the water, Tom says.

That’s just what we’ll do, Tabbs says. Believe it if you want, he thinks.

Yes, we will find your mother. She wants to be with you.

Always mother, Tom says.

Wire walks about the room in his high-shine shoes, looking everywhere at once with his three heads. How have I ended up back here, again?

Wire watches the slow stirrings of the chapel come to life. Swears that he has been in this scene before, with these very men, positioned about the pews as they are. A dream. A presentiment even. (Sight is anticipatory sense.) Did he dream it last night? Is he dreaming it now? Were it not for the smell (burning trees, gunpowder, blood) he might doubt the reality of what he is seeing and hearing.

Drinkwater is speaking in a loud insistent voice, his throat wild with words, words undoing words, his mouth open so wide that Wire can see his small teeth. His body appears tense with a terrible effort of will to remain standing where he is, clutching his hat in his hand like a messenger sent on an errand. He no longer has the aura of someone exceptional, with his troubled disposition, his overexcitement, and his shoddy appearance, his skin and clothes speckled with mud and soot.

The five soldiers scattered around him in various poses of disheveled collapse chime in where they think necessary with expressions of incredible assurance—uh huh and that’s right and yeah and you know it—and constantly nod their heads, small movements of spasmodic affirmation (and shock) as if Wire, Double, and the other deacons are not impressed by Drinkwater’s account of murder and tragedy, the stark facts of the city’s offensive against them in Central Park, which has claimed the lives of all the men in their unit except those present. Double sits motionless on a pew in front of them, his manner extraordinarily composed as always, head bowed, one hand clutching his chin. Wire can feel the Deacon thinking, his mind fidgeting with the future. The Deacon has strong ideas — more than once Wire has thought about telling him so — but he is also reserve personified, never the first to speak, never a loud word, a man so at a remove listening and observing that his silence seems to cancel out his presence altogether, a man so purely inward and oriented toward the duties of his church that he enlarges the world around him by an erasure of self, occupying (filling) space but without taking space away from other things around him. Sometimes Wire will sit and think about how he wishes he knew more about the Deacon’s life.

After a long introduction containing many unusual words, Drinkwater’s second-in-command, dark and solidly built, his ears too big, picks up the story in minute detail, going beyond the bare facts — life making its extensions — narrating entire conversations, throwing himself into the attitudes of the participants, changing the expression of his face and voice like a professional actor. As Wire listens, his thoughts blow backward, the stench of donkey dung, the troughs filled with donated rations, the creaky dhows, the unkempt tents, the barefoot vendors, the half-naked children sporting in the glare of the noonday sun — all a background to thoughts and feelings not easily gauged, never completely assayed.