The Brothers Boswell by Philip Baruth Read Free Book Online Page A

Johnson is loudly insisting, “preaching of drunkenness as a crime, as something that debases reason—the noblest faculty of man—this sort of preaching will do nothing with the vulgar. They care not a
farthing
for reason. They will spit in your eye. The Methodists know this well. But tell the poor that they might have died dead drunk, and been roasted everlastingly for their sins, roasted until their blackened flesh fell from their bones,” he spits out a seed and thrusts a thick finger at the sky, again and again, “and
then
, sir, you will affect them as you ought. This is the key, and the only key, to the success of an English Methodist.”
    And then our boat is past, and off and away. Johnson’s voice becomes only a faint vibration at the margin of my consciousness, and then nothing at all.
    The waterman has understood by this point that he is to remain silent, and he does so, staring back toward the city we have left, pulling both sullenly and mightily, the quicker to unload his odd cargo and be off home. Once or twice, children gathered on the banks call out gaily for silver, and when they do, I pitch a bit of change into the reeds. They wade out into the shallows after it like long-limbed monkeys, racing, diving, delirious with joy at the prospect of a copper.
    But mostly there is silence, only the sound of water curling about the oars. And there is nothing left but to warm my face in the sun, huddle up in my own mind, and consider—as I am especially wont to do these last several weeks—of the promise James once made me.
    O NE N OVEMBER NIGHT when James was fifteen and I was twelve, two men visited our family flat in Edinburgh’s Parliament Close. This would be the tail end of 1755. These men had climbed the four stories to speak with my father, and when they’d stripped off their coats, he took them down the narrow hallway to the roomwhere he had always received clients before clawing his way onto the bench of the High Court the year before.
    As they passed the room James and I shared, I recognized the taller of the men to be Lord Kames, one of my father’s most powerful colleagues on the Court.
    The other man wore the upturned silk nightcap of an artist or a scholar, a particular oddity in our flat. My father had few acquaintances outside the legal universe, very much by choice. He’d once told James, who had smuggled a small book of poems to the table with him, “A gentleman does not come to the table, Jemmie, with
shite
on his boots or rhymes in his hands.”
    But this little man was no lawyer. He carried a folio under his arm, and he carried it not as though it contained watercolors or poems but as though it contained preliminary designs for the Afterlife itself. And so I guessed,
architect.
    I was right, as it turned out. After the men had been shut up in the consultation room for upwards of an hour, my father knocked on our door. “James,” he said to my older brother, and the two of them left the room without another word, according to some previous understanding. I realized once they were gone that James hadn’t changed into his robe and slippers after supper; he’d remained fully dressed in one of his best dark velvet suits, cravat tied, propped in a chair, reading his Longinus. I saw then that he’d simply been prepping his role: classical son, learning his Latin, getting his Greek.
    Another twenty minutes or so went by, and then the four of them emerged. In the hallway, the two men shook my brother’s hand, and then they and my father put on their greatcoats and hats and left the flat.
    James came back into our room, and we worked in silence for a moment, and then he cocked his head to listen. My mother was in her room with Davie, my little brother, who had a croup. There was no sound but the distant sound of singing from the street. Satisfied, James put down his text and walked over to the chair where I sat.
    “They’ve gone for gin and oysters,” he said and crooked a finger.