Song of the Shank

The conductor jams his body in the door to keep it open, wind rushing in and something inside the coach emptying out, all speech and sound snatched free into the world. Eliza actually feels her insides suck; drowning in the air. But the conductor only stands there smiling (back) at them, features distorted under the rushing wind. After a gradual easing off of speed, they pull into the iron-vaulted shed of Grand Central Depot, a structure as big as a cathedral and possessing many of the same Gothic affectations.

The entire production of leaving the train, walking through the station, and passing out of its wide portals takes only a few minutes. Panic and anger and the beginnings of elation all in an instant. The point is to hide right out in the open, put up a front of normalcy and routine. Nothing out of the ordinary here. No crossing of boundaries that should not be crossed. But suspicion permeates every syllable and glance. They think he is dead. “Blind Tom,” the eighth wonder of the world, the Negro Music Box, for her eyes only. His three-year absence from the stage having produced tenfold theories about his death. Strung up during the draft riots. Frozen in Alaska. Drowned in a Pennsylvania flood. Consumed by fire in a London hotel. Caught under the wheels of a railcar in Canada. The victim of a soldier’s bullet in Birmingham. Felled by his own heart in Paris. Felled by his own hand in Berlin.

Tom gives her hand a little tug, meaning, Let’s move a little faster, Miss Eliza. Distracted by their return to the city, she only now notices his distress. A timid destitution has closed over him, a folding in on self (collapsible flesh), which forces him to walk in a slouch, Tom conscious of being watched. Wisps of panic begin to flicker through her brain.

Eliza is already searching for a taxi among the many lined up one after another curbside, horses parked head to behind, their drivers outfitted in ragged and ill-fitting frock coats and stovepipe hats, attending to their carriages cheerfully, dancing around the wet slap of dung hitting hard ground. If only their good mood could work in her favor. The first just looks at her in a dull unresponsive way, her request left stinging in her throat. The next waggles his head from side to side. It gets worse after that — shouts and curses, faces turning away, glares that promise pain. She approaches the final driver in the queue, thinking that this may be the occasion when they will have to walk home. But why give him a chance to refuse? But the driver only smiles back at her delightedly from his perch as if he has never seen anything funnier. She calls out to Tom. Tom passes her his cane then heaves his considerable bulk into the cab next to her, leaving the porter to attend to their luggage. The taxi does just hold it all.

They ride out into the strange wonders of the city, trundling across dry bridges and wet streets rivering up out of twelve canals, a city stitched together by water. Houses and buildings pushing against each other like contentious waves. The glow and hum of the gaslights clinging silt-like to their frames. Their windows crawling with lurid light. Shadows of people moving behind them as if performing (for her). The factories and mills burning even at this hour. The shops still open for business, many hundreds of objects arranged so as to arouse desire. People tumbling out from restaurants and saloons or leaning against the crossed telegraph poles from which black bodies had hung during the draft riots. The entire city welcoming her back. How happy she is that they are safely hidden within the hooded cab. They took something away from Tom, and he’ll never get it back.

As they drive deeper into the city, it seems to her that hundreds and thousands of facts crowd into memory. The reek of feces and urine, lime and kerosene. The air stinging her skin with some invisible but definite spray. This crisscrossing of the senses too much and achingly familiar. The tiniest details recognizable. (Seeing them now?) Before long she can feel her whole body revive. Strange how altered the city seems after a summer away. Unreal. The wagon moving faster than warranted, bouncing them into the unmistakable dimensions of Broadway, a wide well-lit boulevard running like a river of whiteness from one end of the city to the other. (The boundaries stay clear.)