Song of the Shank

We were not planters. We had no fields to plant, no crops to harvest. In fact, we kept in minimal communication with planters and farmers, did not buy from them or barter or trade or hold or engage in any significant transactions with them that I am aware of. So, at Hundred Gates by age three or four when a servant—slave, she thought, slave—should assume the responsibility of labor, Tom should have settled into a quotidian life involving random chores about the estate or a more active assignment in town at my father’s office or his press. But when he achieved that age (four? five?) — he was less than a year old when my family acquired him, a babe of six or seven months — he still had not gained the ordinary abilities, talking and walking. (Speech, she thought.

Does that include all speech? All movement?) In fact, he showed no signs that he understood the purpose of either. He could not follow instructions. But my parents decided to keep him on rather than abandon him, having little either to lose or to gain by his presence — his absence would have devastated his family, mother, father, siblings (sisters); Ah, so he has had a family, she thought — since our commerce did not depend on free labor. He was given each day to use as he pleased. Let me tell you how he spent his time. Sharpe measured what he was saying, as if trying to remember whether anything had been left out. He passed most of each day sitting out in the open, under the sky, with his face upturned at the sun, and with his eyes fully open. He screamed, kicked, and punched if you tried to pull him away, into the shade. He crawled after the sun as its position shifted in the sky. Then in the evening, when there was no more sun to be had — the moon did not seem to interest him — he would sit before the hearth all the while passing his hand rapidly before his face.

And this is how he went blind? She could ask.

We believe it was the cause of origin. Greater damage came. He began forking his fingers into his sockets.

My God, Eliza said.

That’s not all. He began digging into the sockets with sticks and stones and anything else he could find.

That was worse, hearing it, seeing it. And nobody stopped him? she asked. (She had the right.) No one stopped him. Why did no one stop him?

I would have, had I been there. And my father would have, my mother. Would have. Anyone there. Would have. None of them. None of us. We are not cruel people, whatever their faults or our vices. But Tom largely saw after himself, as I understand it. I was not there. To stop him.

Where were you? She could ask this.

Even then I was circling the globe, pursuing stories for my father’s journal, doing my part to see that it remained a vital publication, among the best in our country — the South, he meant, his country — if not the best. She heard his explanation as best she could, her mind pushing out, exploring, formulating, but he kept speaking, speaking before she had a chance to locate her words — a few brief illuminated thoughts — without giving her an opening to surge forth in response, overtake.

You must understand, the family doctor determined all of this many days after the fact, weeks even. For quite some time the mutilation went on daily without our notice. Then one evening the boy’s mother came crying into the parlor before my father, carrying him in her arms, the boy, carrying the boy, and the boy trying to fight his way free, and the father trying to keep him still. Fresh blood covered his face, so much of it that they could not locate the source. All thought he had only then injured himself. Dr. Hollister, our doctor, was sent for. The eyes could not be saved.

She took this to mean that the sockets were empty — in fact, as she discovered several months later, the orbs were (are) very much present, intact, although useless. How it all might have gone otherwise if this Dr. Hollister possessed talent equaling Dr. McCune’s. More often than not in his examinations, Dr. McCune found that the orbs — afflicted, damaged — could be saved, and he made every effort to achieve such preservation, the question of whether or not vision could be restored in whole or part notwithstanding, for he knew — she knew too — that the presence of orbs makes all the difference to the structure of the face, rounding it out rather than flattening it, and thereby maintaining a deep inner structure, those few ounces providing (proving) by their mass and weight an addition amid the loss, a measure of hope, however false.

Dr. Hollister speculated that the boy had acted out of curiosity, a curiosity brought on by mental incapacitations, or vice versa. Whichever the first.

Eliza lifted her hand so that she could feel the breath inhaled and exhaled by her nostrils. If only she possessed the ability to breathe out of every pore.