Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje [42]
In the room there is the air
and there is the corner
and there is the corner
and there is the corner
and there is the corner.
If you don’t shake, don’t get no cake.
Bella Davenport married Willy Cornish in 1922.
Cornish 6′3″—297 lbs.
‘When I married him he was healthy as a pig’
Cornish had his first stroke on Rampart and
Julien while playing. Arm paralysed.
Bella questioned about those Cornish
had played with —
‘He and Buddy were just like that’
&
‘All of them mostly lost their minds’
When protests began over guard rapes, bad plumbing, labour, lack of heat, the patients organised a strike. This did nothing. They then cut their tendons. Not Bolden, who sublime took rapes from what he thought were ladies in blue pyjamas. And work as his duty to the sun. Bertram Lord walked down the hall and slid the coke bottom under each door to the patients. They took the sharpened glass, cut their tendon, and passed it back. Bolden who saw the foreign weapon enter his room left his window where he was waiting for morning, heard the whispered order on the other side of the wood, peered at it, touched it with his foot and pushed it back slowly to Lord who eventually covered 28 doors.
In the morning men were found heels bandaged in their nightshirts and naked when the doors opened. The sun fell on Bolden’s waiting face, he smiled, walked out spry and was almost alone at breakfast where he met his visitor again, this morning as a brilliant lush bar of light that lay in an oblong stretch nearly touching his plate. So bright it showed him the textures of the old fork-scarred table. He almost didn’t want to eat today. He kept putting down his spoon in the tin bowl and placing his hand over the warm yellow of his friend and his friend magically managed to put his light over Bolden’s hand simultaneously, so that it was kept warm. Later in the day he moved following his path. He washed his face in the travelling spokes of light, bathing and drying his mouth nose forehead and cheeks in the heat. All day. Blessed by the visit of his friend.
Webb in town years later, 1924, talked to Bella Davenport, Willy Cornish’s wife then, Bella Cornish then, in the corner of a loud party. Talking and eventually sliding onto the subject of Bolden. Webb said he had been an old friend of his. This was the year Tom Pickett was shot and killed on Poydras Street. The party was on Napoleon, everybody crowded into two floors and stairs and on the steps outside. Webb back here after many years, standing beside Bella Davenport and not too interested until she said she was Bella Cornish rattling her white china pearls, and Webb looking at her and recognizing they were all growing old, the lines deep and thin and dark on their faces.
So it must have been over Pickett’s death that they got onto Bolden. He and Willy were just like that, she said. Sitting with her on the bend of the stairs he said that Buddy’s death had surprised him, he’d always expected Bolden to jump out of his silence when he got bored, shit I was sure he was just hiding you know hiding from us all and that he’d put on a red shirt and come back, yeah, Nora’s letter surprised me alright, I’d been going in every few months to visit though he said nothing and then she writes not to bother anymore because Buddy died, how things get to you huh. Looking up then because the rattling of pearls had stopped and Bella Cornish was not moving. But he’s not dead, whispered. He’s still at the hospital, the state hospital, he’s still there, heaven. When did Nora write you?
Eight years ago.
He’s still there, eighteen years now. Willy saw him a year ago. He does nothing, nothing at all. Never speaks, goes around touching things. One of the doctors told Willy who had to pretend to be his brother. Willy sat in the hall