He put a hand on the table before George and laid out his palm, as if to gesture at the scene beneath them. And now George wasn’t sure how he could’ve missed an undercurrent so obvious. The cursory glances. The scowls of men he did not know, flitting up before returning to their empty glasses.
“You did not bring me here for company,” George said. “You had me here to warn me.”
It was only a few minutes ago that Ezra had appeared burdened by age, ground down by time. But he had not grown weak at all, George saw. In fact it was the opposite: George was the one wilting in the very manner he had inwardly attributed to Ezra.
“I had you here from a place of kindness,” Ezra said. “To let you know yours has run amok.”
“Enough,” George said. “I’m leaving now.”
He pushed his chair back and stood, then put his fingertips on the table in a moment of dizziness, feeling the punch of the drink after a sober spell.
“Was that true about your loneliness? Or was that part of your ploy?”
Ezra held his tongue for a moment, sitting before his empty plate.
“I don’t know a happy man who comes here alone,” he said.
That was it. All he needed to hear.
“Please take care of yourself, Ezra. Trust that I will do the same for me and mine. I’ll come by and see you at the office in a few days. Not out of pity, or to see that you’re well, but simply because I like you. Until then.”
George wheeled away from his friend with the sense that he had managed to avoid a trap. The floor of the bar was still so crowded he had to move sideways to slide past the bodies. He pushed his way through without a word, minding each step, hiding beneath the boom of the chatter, lost in the heat of flesh packed together. He could not tell if eyes were upon him, yet he was sweating now and he longed to reach the tavern door, to escape this place and not return.
It was not to be.
“You’re George Walker, ain’t you?”
He would have kept going had the voice not come from so nearby, close enough for it to seem as though the words themselves had reached out and grabbed him. He turned to face a young man surrounded by other compatriots his age.
“I am.”
“Ain’t that the sweetest thing. You Caleb’s daddy.”
He was caught off guard at a name he had not expected to hear.
“Do you know him?”
“I sure do. Pass a message to the feller, ha?”
The boy looked among his friends and then thrust a loaded fist at George.
“Tell him this is what traitors git around here. And you can go ahead and spread a li’l around for them niggers of yours, too. ’Cause you such kind, sharing folks up at that farm of yours, ain’t you?”
The boy raised his fist and George shrank back, retreating with his hands held over his face in surrender.
“Don’t!” he shrieked.
“Look at the fear on him!” the boy said. “I guess it runs in the family, ha?”
They were laughing. He was nothing more than a scared child. His impulse was to peer back at Ezra, though his humiliation could hardly be worse even if the old man was bearing witness to his belittlement.
The boy grabbed him by the collar and pulled him forward.
“Now take your whippings like a man,” he said, and brought his fist down.
Yet it was caught in the air by another—belonging to a man twice the width of the boy—who spun the would-be assailant around and gripped his wrist as if it were no more than a stalk of celery, something to snap in half. It was Mildred Foster’s son, though George had no idea which one, for they all looked the same.
“My mama gets on with Mrs. Walker,” he said. “I don’t think she’d be pleased to hear you’d put a hand on her friend’s husband.”
He dropped the boy’s wrist and the boy fell backward, cursing under his breath.
“I ain’t mean nothing, Charlie,” he said.
Charlie nodded at George without a hint of a smile and moved out of the way.
“Charlie,” George said. “The rest of you gentlemen. Enjoy your evening.” And he escaped out the door and into the night.
*
Even his Nantucket father had help. A child, Taffy, whom he bought for a price that George had long wished to know but had failed to locate in the pile of ledgers gathering dust in the cellar. She was a year older than the eleven-year-old George, and arrived ashen, unwilling to make eye contact.
When she came inside, his mother sniffed her across the scalp and said, in an even tone, that she didn’t warrant a bath.