Song of the Shank

That’s right, Drinkwater says.

Now, don’t go too far, Wire says. In battle men see things they thought they’d kept hidden.

They do, Double says. They do.

Each day brings word of mass graves of strays sprouting up all across the city, mutilated corpses rising knee deep out of the earth with the abrupt arrival of spring, and half-fleshed corpses floating in pits filled with rainwater, fat unwholesome frogs perched atop muddy torsos and water moccasins swimming in and out of organs and skin. Stories splinter in all directions, the hurt Tabbs doesn’t see far away. Black bodies burned. Black bodies hanging from trees and telegraph poles. Africans pulled off random streetcars and mobbed to death. Bloated black bodies floating in canals, rivers, and ponds. Blood in every eye. Such stories become commonplace. Tabbs bears these facts with equanimity, nothing so barbarous that the human mind cannot accept it. He lives in a silence with noise and conversation all around him. Air thick with event. Hard to keep up with it all. Many times Tabbs will hear running footsteps, yells of fear and excitement, everybody around him trying to get to the bottom of some new tragedy, loud donkeys filling in the spaces between words. Delivered out of nothing, strays flee the city for Edgemere, the city’s African population expelled again. Ferries heavy with hundreds of the expulsed, their hulls low in the water. Uprooted. Exiled. Displaced. The land grows weary of her inhabitants. Pulled continually into their orbit, Tabbs struggles to gain a footing in the changing daily life of the island. Lives, giving his entire attention to thoughts that on the one hand grow more vague day by day and, on the other, grow more precise and unambiguous.

The strays want to forget, erase the bad old days of hunger, desire, and desperation spiriting them across the ocean to this island, dazed by their own movement, sagging, dragging. Most have no experience with money. They work hard for very little, for less than they should. And they are cheated of what they earn. The bony women with big butts always seem to be pregnant. The stunted children seem wallowed in ignorance, cunning, play, and slovenliness. Strays display their impoverishment and degradation to anyone who cares to see. Every stray he meets is named Lincoln. His life is no longer a single story but part of theirs. Tabbs Lincoln.

Tabbs wants to say to them, Tell me what it was like. (Why do you just look at me instead of telling me about your sadness?) But he rarely speaks to them — stilted and confused; downcast and dejected; their inaccurate but splendid words — content to observe them from a distance. How can he open himself to arms that will not embrace? How heal wounds that do not bleed?

Fair to say that Tabbs does not sense any changes in his own physical condition or wish for anything to be different. The world is what it is. He has to force himself to be gentle with this frailty he finds himself in the midst of.

Uncertain of clear boundaries, the exiles put up makeshift shelters in the main square, old canvas tents and burlap lean-tos flapping under the walnut trees. Their children steal from stores and grow bold enough to sneak into kitchens while their parents are out fishing or peddling firewood. And their famished dogs begin to seek out and kill chickens and goats, tearing out the throats of younger animals, and doing enough bodily harm to the larger — donkey, sheep, cow — a plug bitten out of a calf or flank, an eye lost, an ear ripped away — to make them unusable. That’s when feelings turn completely against them. Black-robed members of the Vigilance Committee shoot their dogs on sight, and tear down their ugly shelters, row after row.

Comes the day when Tabbs sees from a distance four heads set in a stationary circle around the fountain in the main square, long faces, long necks. Horses shaped out of stone. He expects water to spill from the mouths of these horses until he sees one head dip, muzzle sinking into the water. Closer, the horses prove to be strays kneeling in the grass under arrest, hands tied behind their backs at the wrist with lengths of rope. Confined to the reach of their bodies. The single deacon guarding them letting them rest some coolness back into their bodies, jabbing the air this way and that with his finger. Fountains are not for human consumption, he tells them. Each stray turns his face toward Tabbs in embarrassment, while the Deacon lifts his head and nods at Tabbs in silence.

Some get sick from tainted food and cloudy water. Die.

In this overexcited atmosphere Tabbs is content most days to let the hours in Wire’s house pass without any disruption. Other days he attends meetings with the Vigilance Committee.

Look at these poor bastards, he says.

They stretch forth their hands, Wire says. And we stretch forth ours.