Freeman Walker. David Allen Cates
to its original moving chaos: men and women and children, horses and dogs, and a pig on a leash. Everything looked the same but the specifics. The boy and his cart, for example, were gone. As were the apples, the smelly old woman and her pot of ashes—and of course my trunk with its precious books and the few pieces of clothing I owned in the world.
SUNNY SIDE SADDLERY was a private work home on the banks of the Thames where eight parentless waifs and I cut and softened and stretched and molded and sewed leather into bridles and saddles. The first months of my time there were as bleak as any in my life. My twelfth birthday came and went without notice, and then winter followed quickly and brought its perpetual darkness and cold. When we did manage to warm up with enough wood or coal to stoke the fire, hundreds of flies would emerge from the woodwork and cluster on our one grimy window. The food was bad—gruel thickened with various crawling insects—yet we worked long hours in bad light, half out of our minds with both fatigue and the strange effects of chemical fumes while Mr. Perry, the man with the bald pate and beard who’d pulled me from the street woman’s arms, paced back and forth telling and retelling the story of his life (as though this time, finally, it might make sense) to a lanky Frenchman named Le Chat, who limped the floor besides him sipping brandy from a pocket flask as though condemned to it.
Mr. Perry’s story went like this: he was been born in Newfoundland and there blossomed into manhood on grog, codfish, and a passion for poker. Running from a bad debt, he slipped away from the banks and took to the world at large. It seemed he’d been everywhere with everyone—in opium dens with thieves, in cabarets with ballet girls, on tropical islands with bare-breasted women, in jungles with crocodiles and snake charmers. He traveled the world until almost twenty years ago he found himself in the town of David, Panama, where he fell in love with an Indian girl, whom he married on sight. He adored her as the perfection of beauty, and she, in return, adored him as all that was chivalrous and fascinating, until one sad day Tragedy struck.
“Aaaahh,” he said, “happiness is but an illusion that lasts precisely until savages emerge from the wood to slay your pretty wife.”
Mad with grief for her, his sugar investments drained of profit by his gambling debts, Mr. Perry learned that a distant relative had died in England, leaving him T’is wretched business, he called it, this saddlery in London.
When I arrived, he’d been there almost a decade, still licking his wounds and still claiming to be gathering himself for a new leap.
Besides making saddles, we boys were assigned other tasks. Mine, as the youngest, was to empty the chamber pots onto the mud that lay outside our back door when the tide was out. The smell of the flat, decorated with the defecations of a thousand neighbors, the haze of flies that such a scene attracted on warm days, and the general coal-fouled air of London produced such a stark contrast to the pastoral world of my past as to cause me to doubt reality. Although I am sure that as a boy I did not think, This is not the real world!—I know I felt that way and I was forced to populate it with figments I conjured from thin air—friends from Hodgson, my parents, my own inventions. Hodgson had taught me to speak like a schoolboy, and my new colleagues derided me for it, so I stayed quiet for a long time, weeks perhaps, deepening my isolation. I invented a game where I could lift myself out of my body and look down on myself hunched over a piece of leather at the long candlelit table where I worked with the other boys. I studied the tops of our heads and wondered at the personal sorrow of each and every one of us. Invariably I would find me, of course, the top of my hatless head, the one with the Negro hair cut so short nobody knew, the one who still had a living parent, and I wondered dispassionately who I was, and who I might become. From this height, my world became scenery in the play of my life, and it gave me confidence that when this act ended another would begin. I didn’t know what would come next, but I knew something would, and in this way I avoided despair.
Then one night I lay shivering on my straw tick. The salt smell of high tide wafted in our window, threatening to make me weep with loneliness. And while I’m sure I meant to merely think the words, I heard them escape my lips in a voice identical to Mr. Perry’s.
T’is wretched business! I said.
Across the dark room I heard my colleagues giggle at my mimicry, so I continued the speech we’d all heard a hundred times. T’is wretched business is only a game I’ll be playin’ til ta woe has settled fully into me flesh, and I emerge a bright new creature, with a bright new plan!
The idea of old Mr. Perry as a bright new creature sent us into hysterics.
THE FRONT OF THE saddlery faced the street and the back was supported by pilings over a place in the estuary where the high tide eddied. While the other boys slept on straw ticks in the big room on the street side, Mr. Perry soon moved me to sleep in the closet directly over the pilings. There were two reasons for this. The first was because on Saturday nights after coming home from another losing night at cards, he liked to kneel beside me in the dark, stinking of gin, and weep while he stroked with gentle hand my face and head.
The first few times it happened I lay awake petrified, and I passed my Sundays in a fog of fatigue. The other boys speculated that I reminded Mr. Perry of his Indian wife, a thought I preferred not to think. In subsequent weeks I gained some relief by imagining my drowned father forgiving me, but the comfort of ghosts is limited, especially to a murderer. Nevertheless I had an advantage over Mr. Perry. Or at least I felt more fortunate. Because while he might have been imagining his dead wife, I soon learned that by picturing the warm face of my living mother I could begin to relax beneath his fingers and sometimes drift to sleep.
The other reason I slept in the closet above the pilings was so I would be awakened by the bump of things floating by in the rising tide. When I heard or felt a floater strike the piling below me, I was to get up and go to Mr. Perry and the two of us would use a grappling hook and line to pull it in. Sometimes it was a log we could sell for timber. Sometimes a broken boat from which planks could be scavenged. Sometimes a dead horse or cow, which we would haul up out of the water by means of a block and tackle, and if it were not too decomposed—or even if it were—we could sell the meat to the butcher for a few shillings. But not uncommonly we pulled out of the black water a bloated man or woman or child. If the body still wore clothes, we’d check the pockets for money, take whatever seemed of value, and then launch the body back out again to be taken away in the current.
We’re milkin’ ta ol’ codfish! Mr. Perry would say, jangling the coins in his hand.
He always shared the profits with me, and urged me to be grateful. I assured him I was, for you’ll remember my confusion of that word with nauseated.
Nevertheless, the money did serve as incentive for me to wake him when I felt the bump of a floating object, and to not protest my unique sleeping arrangements. As my pouch of coins grew, so did my esteem among the other boys. To stem the tide of their envy, I took to buying periodicals and books, and in the evening, especially in the summer when the light lingered late in the sky, I’d sit in the window and read aloud for their entertainment. I read serial stories and used my gift of mimicry to create different voices for the characters. (I also learned to use my one brown eye and one green, and by turning profiles to play different characters.) We took great comfort in these partial hours stolen before the light grew too dim for me to see the words. We imagined ourselves enduring long journeys in small boats, stumbling across deserts, or scaling peaks. We lifted our swords and saw our enemies flee before us like rats at daybreak. We imagined our beloved and their faces lit the darkness, and we basked in their love and light as we pulled them out of harm’s way into the safety of our strong arms.
We do not live for ourselves, my father had told me. Although he’d said I wouldn’t truly understand until I was a man, the stories gave me glimpses. Depending on the tide, we lay awake at night smelling either our own shit or the encroaching salt sea of our grief—so we needed more than ever to cry sweet tears for innocent maidens, and to shiver proudly at the brave deeds of our heroes. If our lives and the lives of our neighbors were indeed wretched, and if we often heard outside our window the wails of gin-soaked rage, if all of us were indeed only playing a game until ta woe had settled, well, we needed to be ready.
For