Freeman Walker. David Allen Cates
by the knowledge that without support from home (my father’s property, including my mother, had gone to his widow) I would be forced to leave school and sent to a London workhouse.
Again I would be cast out. Again I would be alone.
During my years at Hodgson, I had learned to read and write, and to add and subtract, and to feel comfortable and happy with my companions. Because we lived and studied and slept and ate together, we had become each other’s family, and there was a lot of talk about being in it together through the thick and thin, or being blood brothers—the kind of things boys say when their connection with one another is deep. But as soon as my father died, the camaraderie of fifteen hundred days of playing and wrestling and studying together—fifteen hundred days of alliance against the forces of benevolent rule imposed on us by the rector and teachers—a thousand and a half days of mutual affection engendered by our mutual loneliness, affection I had believed was enduring—ended.
Again I was cast out, again I was alone.
And again it was my fault.
Because we cannot forgive ourselves for being powerless—We are not in control—we conjure our own power even when we have very little. We find patterns in our lives, and turn antecedents into causes when it suits us. If times stay bad, we believe in our bones we might have changed things if only we’d tried harder. And if they do indeed change, we are quick to take the credit or blame.
We are free, aren’t we?
For the second time in three years I’d willed somebody dead and my circumstances had changed. If later I’d do worse, perhaps this was the start. For the time being, however, I refused to be haunted by ghosts, or madness, or a world bigger than anything I could ever conceive. So two feelings began to emerge that would serve both to keep me temporarily upright and to guide my strategies into adulthood: First, I began to fear my deepest desires. And second, I began to think of myself as a heroic figure.
On the morning of my departure, the sky was gray and the wind chilly, and crows gathered on the still green lawn amid a swirl of falling leaves. All the boys came out to wave to me—as though I were off on a splendid journey. Mr. Collins seemed the only truly sad one, and I didn’t like him for that. Because in his face I saw all my fears and sadness, too, and I didn’t want to feel those things. I wanted to leap on top of the carriage and salute, so that was what I did. Even as the team of horses lurched us into motion I kept my balance, to the delight of my classmates, and heard their cheers erupt and fade, erupt and fade. I was frightened and also strangely exhilarated. I carried the immensity of my new sense of power awesome in my breast alongside my sense of powerlessness. Oh, the mystery! I had hated my father for sending me away, and loved him, and I loved my mother and hated her for not being home when I came to say good-bye. I hated myself for closing the door to the cabin, and I hated her for loving my father and him for loving her, and I loved their love for one another, and I hated my father for dying and not rescuing me, and I hated myself for sacrificing his life to keep me well—
And yet I loved being well!
The carriage rocked beneath my feet. I felt strong. A new gust of wind sent more leaves swirling across the lawn, giving me goose bumps of glory before a wall of trees rose up on the side of the drive and Hodgson Academy disappeared forever.
Or I did.
BECAUSE I WAS CERTAINLY a more humble boy just a half a day later down a road that crossed a boggy bottom and followed the river into the heart of a London slum, when I was shoved off the carriage by the teamster’s brawny fist and watched my shiny civilized boots sink ankle deep in mud.
I stooped to grab the handle of my small trunk and drag it to the big front door of the Sunny Side Saddlery, where Mr. Collins had assured me arrangements had been made for my placement. Up and down the narrow street were more people than I had ever seen in my life, more people than I could count, a stream of movement that I could not see the end of. The air was foul with rancid grease, human and animal excrement, and coal smoke.
I gulped down my fear and knocked on the door, determined, as I watched the carriage drive off, to do as Mr. Collins had advised, and “make do.”
While I waited for the door to open, I touched my front pocket where I carried both the rolled-up copy of the Declaration of Independence that my father had given me and the envelope with my free papers. I wanted to take them out and touch them again, if only to hold something that his hands had held, but the street was crowded and I felt jostled from behind. I thought about life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, and if these were truly inalienable rights, why were they so easily taken away? Why did my father die? Why was my mother a slave? And why was I unhappy?
Because we are all going to die; we are not in control; we all suffer.
Or was it because I had sacrificed him and closed the door on her?
We are free!
Again I knocked on the door and again I felt pushed from behind. Next to me an old woman squatted on a wooden block to keep herself out of the mud, and between her feet she guarded a pot of ashes that looked cold enough but might still have given some warmth, for she dangled her gnarled fingers above it. Across the street shrieks of laugher spilled out of a gin house, and a woman with sickly yellow skin passed just in front of me. Her hair was matted and her gray eyes crazed, and two tiny, big-eyed children walked alongside hanging on to her dress, it seemed, for dear life.
I held my little trunk and knocked again and waited for the door to open. Behind me a boy lost control of his apple cart and the cart tipped and the fruit spilled across the street in a spreading pile. What happened next shocked me. It was as though the chaos of the street were suddenly organized by the opportunity to plunder. All passersby within sight of the overturned cart suddenly stopped their activity to run to fill their pockets and aprons and hats, and any other container they found handy, with apples. The boy stood shouting and waving his arms, which had only the effect of gathering even more of a crowd. In the frantic grasping for fruit, I could see a kind of grotesque mob joy—the joy that comes from unearned bounty—a perverse dance of riches. Entranced, I didn’t even notice how I was knocked down, or by whom. I only felt the old woman suddenly under my head and shoulders and her pot of ashes in front of me. I’d fallen onto her bony lap, and immediately felt her arms cradle my head. And so I was lying when I looked up and saw the door of the workhouse open slightly and the head of a man with a shiny pate and long gray beard poke out from the opening.
“Who’s there?” the man called into the din.
The old woman smelled of something horrible, yet the harder I struggled to free myself the tighter she squeezed my head in her bony arms. She said, “If this be the babe you’re looking for, I’ll let him go for a shilling.”
There followed a struggle during which I thought I would be pulled in two. The old woman held my head and the bearded man pulled my legs. Being the stronger of the two, the man pulled not only me but the old woman up off the ground—her still clinging to my head—and all the way to the threshold of the open door.
Still the tenacious old woman would not let go, and my face was contorted in her grasp, my hair pulled, until finally, I suppose, because of the fortuitous arrival of a visitor, who must have given the old woman the coin she was so diligently demanding, my head was released.
The door closed behind me and suddenly I was in a quiet, dark hallway, dangling upside down, with my feet in the bearded man’s hands and my head toward the floor.
“It’s how she lives,” I heard the other man say. His speech was both accented and slurred, and even upside down I could tell he walked with a limp.
The bearded man continued to hold me like that. Was he going to shake me down? Had he forgotten about me? I struggled to make him let go, but his hands on my ankles had the grip of iron.
“My trunk,” I finally managed to say. “It’s in the street.”
“Mon dieu,” the visitor said, and the door opened again, and the bearded man let go of my ankles. I caught myself with my hands and struggled to stand upright