Freeman Walker. David Allen Cates
to be grateful.
This happened often enough during the voyage that for many years afterward I confused the words grateful with nauseated.
The difficulty of this trip cannot be underestimated. It marked me forever, and even when I say or write the words ocean or ship, I think of that experience and feel again the yawning solitude that swallowed me. I didn’t want to cross the sea. I didn’t want to study—whatever that meant. And what good was freedom if I had no control?
We all suffer. My father had assumed I already knew this. But I didn’t. I was a child. I only knew that I suffered.
I arrived so ill that I remember nothing of my transport from the ship to Hodgson Academy, a half day’s carriage ride from London. I remember only waking from my fever on a comfortable bed in a small white room with a table, a chair, and a lamp. Here I was brought regular meals and a change of sheets by a woman with what I assumed must have been a great fear that if she moved her mouth to speak, or smiled, her hard white face would crack like an egg. In silence I was served, in silence my bed was changed, and in silence I was peeked at and prodded for signs of the lingering disease of my diseased country. Night followed day followed night. Had I dreamed water as far as I could see, water that touched the sky? I remembered the plantation and its grasses and trees, the cool stream where I played with my father, the taste of bare dirt outside our door and the salt on my mother’s skin, the sound of voices, dogs, cows—the smell of my mother and the cabin: these things had been separated from me by ocean and by time. How much? I didn’t know. Did it matter? Once I closed the door on the cabin, the door was closed. It happened—or did I dream that, too?
All I knew for sure was alone in that room I sometimes felt a wind race through my empty body, around and around, and I was afraid if I opened my mouth the wind would pour out and my scream would fill the world. I hated freedom, and I wanted to suffocate, to waste away with hunger.
But not quite. It has been my experience with despair that even if in our conscious mind we race to embrace it, there is something deeper inside us, and wiser, that will do anything to maintain hope.
For me it started with my body. Specifically, with the food I was being given to eat. Healthy again, I had a huge appetite—and I really liked toast with orange marmalade. I had never had either before, and I loved the smell and look of the marmalade, and I loved spreading it so thickly that the toast became simply a platform on which to hold all the marmalade. I was given a boiled egg every morning with salt. And pieces of chicken or beef or pork with my rice or boiled potatoes in the evening, with butter, and more salt, and a pot of tea, all for me, with biscuits, always with biscuits. And because there wasn’t much to do but eat, I looked forward to each meal with passion. At first I ate my meals fast, in as few bites as possible. I was afraid the woman—Miss Crinkle, I called her, for the many tiny wrinkles in her face—would take my plates away before I was finished. But after a few days, when I realized she would not come back until the next mealtime, I began eating very slowly, holding each mouthful for as long as I could before swallowing, trying in vain to draw out the meal until the next one came.
But I couldn’t, of course, so in the too quiet time between meals, I restlessly paced my room. I could walk the loop of my room with my eyes closed, counting breaths, counting steps. From one corner of the room to another. From that corner around the bed and past the night-stand to the other. And from that corner past the door to the first corner. Over and over again. I learned when to shorten or lengthen my step to avoid a creaky board, how to make the entire loop without making a sound or bumping against a table or bedpost or wall. Or where to step so that each footfall caused the floor to creak. I began to know my steps, and my breaths and the dimensions of my space, and from those truths I could invent the rest. Soon there was no difference between what I remembered and what I dreamed, between what I saw—the pale woman who brought me food and took away my waste—and Mama’s laughing face behind her, Mama standing at the door with her back turned, Mama carrying a wooden milk pail on her head. I could hear her breathe in the dark behind me, in front of me, and I could hear her laugh joyously, and often laughed with her. She was here, there, touchable like a warm meal, or visible like a ray of light under the door. Home was a warm cabin I could imagine, my sunny memories sometimes as real as the cold room I occupied. Mama was at once a dream, a memory, and someone who actually lived and breathed with me. In. Out. In. Out. My nostrils filled with the smell of her flesh. I imagined we were breathing at the same time, and even breathing the same air. In. Out. In. Out. And so like that, exhausted from a day of walking, I’d fall asleep with the feel of her fingers in my hair.
During such moments of happiness, I began to make assessments. Childish as they were, they formed the shape of my ambition. If I could conjure the past, certainly I could conjure the future. And if love had sent me here, might not love send me home again?
I SET MY SIGHTS on the only human being I knew: Miss Crinkle. Her thrice-daily food deliveries were like visits from the dead. If I said before she was silent, let me correct that. She didn’t talk, but she did make odd groans deep in her throat like a spirit, or an old dog. I tried speaking to her. I said thank you and good morning, but she didn’t even turn her head. I asked if she had grandchildren. I asked if she made the toast herself. I asked what the weather was like outside but she only clamped her wrinkled face between her two palms and let loose a moan as though she were freeing the very wind from where it had been caught in her throat.
Did I say she frightened me? Did I mention I had nightmares in which we had entire conversations where she would only make that fierce sound?
Indeed. But we all risk death by monster rather than stay home alone. Especially if beyond the walls of your room you sometimes hear other children laughing.
One night I lay in bed and determined I would sing for her in the morning. I could not sleep with anticipation. I waited all night until I saw the yellow lamplight under the door, which for me was dawn. I heard the sound of her shoes, and the key in the lock, and I leaped up to a standing position on top of my bed when the door swung open. And as the light of her lamp filled the room, I spread my arms and opened my mouth and began to sing “O Thy Joy Has Come to Me.”
She might have paused—how could she not have? The sudden volume must have startled her. But if so, I didn’t see it. I watched her carry the tray with my toast and marmalade and tea and set it on the end table, and then she turned, without looking, and walked over to the corner, where she stooped to pick up my chamber pot, and then she let herself out, closed the door, and locked it.
More miserable than ever, I spilled my tea and threw my precious toast against the wall and waited for her to come back at midday. I stood on the bed again like a little emperor, silent this time, with my arms folded, and watched her stoop to sop up the spilled tea and scrub the wall where the toast had stuck. I tried to satisfy myself with the fact that at least I had delayed her. Rather than come and go, she’d come and gone, and come back with a mop and bucket, and only after cleaning did she go for good.
So I tried the same thing with my dinner, tossing it all over the room, here and there, sticking it to the walls and ceiling. As you can imagine, this was not an easy sacrifice. I waited hungrily (and guiltily) for her to come back in the evening. When she did, I was once again up on the bed (closer to her eye level, was my reasoning) and I immediately spoke.
“I’m terrible sorry, ma’am, for the accident.”
She ignored me. She surveyed the mess to determine tactics, left, and returned with the appropriate cleaning devices. I stood on the bed and watched the back of her neck as she scrubbed. She was an old woman, and I could hear the difficulty in her breathing as she worked. No sighs, but a change of breath, at least. I asked her if she had a dog, for I could hear one barking just then, and it scared me. I asked her if she liked molasses on sweetbread, my favorite back home, and then, scratching myself and lowering my trousers sufficiently, I asked if she wanted to see my do-jiggy.
No answer. Not even a turn of the head. I watched her on her knees scrubbing, and she didn’t even pause. I moved close to the edge of the bed, struggled slightly with keeping my balance on the soft mattress, and did what comes naturally to a boy standing on the heights with his pants lowered. I