Song of the Shank

The ground erupts. Planters unearthed. Up from a hidden seam in the blackness. Their garments shining clean. They spit dirt free from their mouths. Lick and restore luster to their boots. Both time and anti-time. All he can dream and then some — foot stretching into yard, yard stretching into furlong, furlong stretching into mile, mile stretching into league, a line of bodies that extends to the horizon. (Does the world really reach that far?) A future promising that it can hold far more than the past could ever hope to. A world to get lost in.

Minutes slip through his hands, and hours fail to raise his feet. Where you going to run to? Why not escape down the path that lies in the direction you were heading, south? Paths stretching in all directions, hidden inevitabilities. Yet and always yet.

He blinks words. Can’t help but hear the faint rumbling behind his eyes, some unseen whole taking shape.

And he thinks, I’ve lost him. I’ve finally lost him. No earthly way he can bear the loss, not now, not ever.

Although she had been living in a third-floor apartment at 6 Gracie Square for a decade or more, none of her neighbors knew her name or knew where she was from. No designation either family or Christian was ever put on her postal box or doorplate. And the neighbors say she never answered the bell and that her groceries were left in the basket set for that purpose outside her door. Moreover, although up to twenty families resided alongside her in this unpretentious five-story red-brick apartment building located on a quiet cobblestoned street with thick-trunked trees perfectly spaced and aligned as if on parade, the fact that a blind Negro was living in her apartment with her was known only in humor and disgust. Indeed, her neighbors considered her barbarous in electing to live with a Negro, even if they were too well bred and polite to tell her so.

Sightings of the Negro were few and far between. Last summer, several of the neighbors saw the woman lead him to a closed carriage, and the same neighbors witnessed them return in their carriage at summer’s end.

On several occasions, the superintendent was summoned to her apartment for maintenance or repairs, but he never saw the blind Negro, only heard him moving around in a far chamber. Saddled with the tools of his trade, the superintendent would go about his work, while the Negro’s mistress — thin, tall, angular — watched him openly and frankly in her plain velvet blouse and ordinary skirt, her face creased into a look of distrust. One time when he was performing some odd job, the superintendent heard the Negro throwing a tantrum somewhere in the apartment and claims that the Negro’s mistress grew ashamed and blushed.

Some claim that the woman almost never entered the Negro’s room since he detested human contact. However, whenever he let her enter, she would take the opportunity to clean what she could and wipe dust from the chair, the bureau, and the bedposts with slow quiet movements of her bare fingers. While she cleaned, he would stand silently at the window with his back turned to her and his afflicted arm stiff at his side.

The neighbors say that for the entire decade that the woman lived at 6 Gracie Square, they had become accustomed to hearing piano music coming from her apartment at all hours of the day and night. They would be in the middle of one activity or another when the music would suddenly begin, and they would listen attentively and respectfully, a disciplined and discriminating audience, even as they carried on with whatever they had been doing.