Since I was anathema to Scrooge, and much about him disturbed me both physically and on a deeper level, I continued to establish covert positions during his visits and was not tempted again by the sight of any darting mice when Scrooge was present.
Several months after this visit, Marley sickened and died quickly. He had been kind to me at least, and I tried to give him what comfort I could as he lay on his deathbed by curling up next to him and permitting him to stroke my fur. This I did only when no other persons were about, particularly not Scrooge. He kept a deathwatch of sorts on his partner, more out of curiosity than concern, I reckoned, but at the end he was called away on matters of his business.
I crawled back onto the bed, and Marley’s hand was upon me when he died. The fingers stiffened for a moment, then went limp, and I scurried from under the dead embrace, since there was nothing left of my former friend in the lump of dead clay that remained on the bed. Yes, I call him friend now, for I believe I was all that he had, all that he truly loved, except for the money that he and Scrooge had gathered in.
And now the time had come to deal with Scrooge. He took over his dead partner’s chambers, and used Marley’s furniture as well. I stayed out of sight during the move, but finally admitted to myself that I could not remain in these comparatively warm chambers (for that January was bone-chillingly cold) without Scrooge’s cognizance of my presence. Therefore I waited one night until he was dozing by his fire, and deposited at his slippered feet the carcasses of five mice caught earlier that day and retained for such a moment. Then I gave a brief and, I hoped, business-like cry.
Scrooge awoke, and when he saw me his body rose in his chair as if he had glimpsed a demon. But when he noticed the five dead mice at his feet his eyes narrowed. “I assume,” he said in that smooth, mellifluous voice of his (not at all “grating,” as Dickens put it for, I suppose, dramatic effect) “that you are proposing a business partnership, the same you had with my former partner.” His fingers drummed on his lower lip as he considered the deal. “Here is what I suggest,” he said at length, as seriously as if he were sitting across the table from an adversary in an office on the Royal Exchange. “I shall allow you tenancy here, nothing more. You in turn dispose of any vermin that infest or invade the premises. Expect nothing else from me, and there shall be no further familiarity on either of our parts.”
It seemed that I was out a daily saucer of milk, but at least I would be warm in winter, and the close proximity of the granary assured me a constant supply of meat. I gave a low sound in my throat that I hoped would signify acceptance, and strode to the fire, even lower than Marley’s, near which I curled up, thankful for the bit of warmth it gave off.
Thus was Ebenezer Scrooge’s dislike of cats put in abeyance for practical purposes. He and I became partners, nothing more, for seven long years. During that time he spoke not a single word to me, and after a while I became a presence as familiar and unremarkable to him as his bedposts, his hall-tree, or the Dutch tiles that paved his fireplace.
But though he ceased to observe me, I never failed to observe him, and over the years I became both astonished and dismayed by the character, or lack of the same, of the man with whom I shared my chambers. In his dealings with his fellow creatures, Scrooge was inhuman. That is to say that there was no emotion at all that connected him to his fellow men. He thought only of his own financial position and his own gain, and although it took me a long time I finally reasoned it out. I knew why Scrooge was what he was and why he acted the way he did.
There are those members of the feline race who are the same. Those unfortunate humans who suffer from felinophobia1 think that all cats evince these characteristics of exclusive self-interest, but such is not the case. Most of my race are capable of extending affection beyond themselves. Only a few are so limited as to be bound up in themselves alone, and at length I saw that Scrooge was such a cat.
When I say cat, I mean the same. I came to believe that the drunkard’s tale was partly true, that Scrooge’s mother was in part feline, and that her blood had helped to make Scrooge what he was—totally selfish, savage in his dealings with others, and concerned only with his own well-being and potentiality for self-preservation. His catlike traits, however, stopped short at the tendency toward comfort and sloth, for there the human side of Scrooge won out, and those feelings that would actually allow him to enjoy his wealth had been replaced by the constant need for acquisition.
In other words, though Scrooge thought and acted with the selfishness of the lowest form of cat, he maintained the acquisitiveness of the lowest form of man, for his mixed blood had brought out the worst qualities of both feline and human. The balance had to be shifted, for Scrooge’s own sake and the sake of those with whom he dealt.
He was not a happy man. He had merely amassed his wealth, and had never used it for good or ill, though the ill that its acquisition had created was bad enough. Scrooge had to change, and once I had determined the cause, I eventually came up with the cure.
I decided upon Christmas Eve as the night it should be done, as the human feelings that remained hidden in Scrooge were far more susceptible to suggestion at that time of the rolling year when emotion ruled reason. Charles Dickens has chronicled, in more detail than any reader might bear, the happenings of that particular night, or at least what Scrooge thought was happening. The knocker with Marley’s face was an invention of Dickens, as was much else, but the general narrative—the appearance of Marley’s ghost, the visit of the three spirits, Scrooge’s visions of himself in the past and the horrifying images of his eventual demise, unloved and forgotten, were more or less as Scrooge described them to Dickens, for I was under the chair the following summer when Scrooge told the author of his experiences.
Scrooge lured me out at the end of the lengthy interview, cuddled me, and gave me one of the many sweetmeats he now daily bestowed upon me, but when Dickens tried to hold me I resented the familiarity and scratched him lightly. Even though I scarcely drew blood, I believe to this day that is why I make no appearance in the fiction he derived from Scrooge’s tale.
And it was indeed a fiction, for the most part. Scrooge never saw Marley or the three spirits outside of his own augmented imagination, but their imaginary visitations were enough to change his character, permanently and for the better, and to such a degree that word of the transformation of this universally hated old businessman reached the ears of Dickens among many others.
The lie in Dickens is that the manifestations started upon Scrooge’s arrival at his home. The truth is that nothing whatsoever occurred until after Scrooge had eaten his gruel. I had known of the cold in his head, and that he would take his gruel upon coming home that evening. My action was based on the principle that a constant and curmudgeonly teetotaler might be transformed by the mere act of becoming drunk some night, totally unaware that anyone had added spirits to the punch until he was totally possessed by them, and was made to see the delights of the world by having his brain altered, chemically and temporarily, by the unaccustomed alcohol.
It was the same with Scrooge, for I had secreted in the coarse oats with which he prepared his gruel a goodly portion of the dried leaves of Nepeta cateria, that flowering plant more commonly known as catnip. Scrooge reacted to it, indeed overreacted. I had expected to see a playfulness possibly approaching drunkenness, but instead the herb produced in Scrooge’s human/feline blood the equivalent of an opium dream which proved not merely beneficial but utterly transformative.
The results may be seen in Dickens’s final stave, nor does he elaborate one iota the magnitude of Scrooge’s rebirth. He was indeed a changed man, and totally for the better.
He now has a multitude of friends. The family of Scrooge’s nephew and the Cratchits are frequent visitors to our new house, and I myself have learned forbearance, for my tail is frequently regarded as a toy by young Timothy.
And I have softened in other ways as well. For though I was initially Marley’s cat, I have become in
every way Scrooge’s. When guests and friends have departed after dinner, we sit by the roaring fire on winter nights, Scrooge in his comfortable chair, and I on his lap, made ever more capacious by good food and drink. I lie curled up, and he happily rubs my belly, which is always full of hearty victuals and sweet cream. In spite of myself and my independent and solitary past, I purr.
And, when no one is present but the two of us, so does Scrooge.
—For Laurie, Christmas 2006
1. The more proper “ailurophobia” was not coined until the early 20th century.
The Final Verse
Okay, this on? Yep, red light, guess I’m good to go. I carry this thing around in case I get any song ideas, never used more than the first few minutes of a tape, so this’ll be a first. What I’m gonna do now is tell how I came to get the last verse of “Mother Come Quickly,” and also what really became of Pete Waitkus. Then I’m gonna tuck this away in my safe deposit box, and maybe someday everybody’ll know the real story. So here goes.
Now you oughta know this anyway, but “Mother Come Quickly” is one of the best-known songs in popular music, a sure-fire classic. It’s traditional, and because of that everybody and his brother’s recorded it. It was around as a folk song for a good many years before it was really a hit, which was when Peter, Paul and Mary put it on their first album. It was that year’s “Tom Dooley.” Joan Baez did it on one of her first records, Bob Dylan used just the tune and put his own lyrics to it. There’s even been rock versions of it. Kurt Cobain did it on that Unplugged show, lotsa others. And country and blue-grass, hell yes. Doesn’t matter it’s really a woman’s song, a lot of guys sung it—Johnny Cash, George Jones, even ole Hank did it live, but he never recorded it. Became a bluegrass standard after Bill Monroe brought it out on Decca in the fifties. The Stanleys, Jim and Jesse, hell, even I did it back when I was doing straight country.
Course, I’m bluegrass now—then and now, since I started out as one of Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys, playing rhythm guitar and singing lead for two months way back in the early seventies till Bill realized that good as my singing was I wasn’t never gonna get that Lester Flatt lick, that bum-bumma-dooba-dooba-do that had become such a part of his sound. I could play it medium tempo, but real fast I hit it maybe two times out of five, and the other three it sounded like chickens dancing on the frets. He let me go, but not before one of them Nashville smoothies seen me and thought I had the voice and looks to make the big time.
He was right. In a few years I was just holding the damn guitar, letting the backup pickers play the tricky licks. Yeah, I had a shitload of songs on the charts back then—and I did “Mother Come Quickly” on my album, Billy Lincoln Sings Songs From the Home Place. That was around 1983, when I was starting to slip. Record sales were down, they weren’t asking me on the Grand Ole Opry anymore, concerts weren’t selling, and Columbia dropped me.
So I went back to bluegrass. Any port in a storm, and things had gotten pretty damn stormy by then. I’d spent a lot more than I’d saved, and what I had saved I’d put into dumbass investments. I played guitar with Doyle Lawson for a time, doing the festival and church circuit, and finally started my own group, Billy Lincoln and the Blue Mountaineers. We did okay, got a contract with Rounder, where a lot of the best bluegrass acts were, and sold enough CDs to hang on.
We did “Mother Come Quickly,” not like the ballad version the folkies did, but more up-tempo, driving bluegrass, the way Monroe did it. In fact, let me do it now, just so you can hear what the song was like for the first seventy or so years, before the last part…came along, so to speak. I’ll do it like a ballad, because I want the words to stick out, and because that’s how I’m gonna do it tomorrow night…
I come from a lovin’ family
That lives where the two creeks meet.
One day from the east a young man came
Who wooed me with words so sweet.
He found me in my dark holler,
Brought sunshine to my night,
Wove daisies and violets through my hair,
He was my heart’s delight.
Mother come quickly, Father come quickly,
Brother and Sister, see.
The only man I ever did love
Is hanging in front of me.
Now that’s the first verse and the chorus, so right off the bat you know something bad’s gonna happen. It goes on…
Oh, the days passed by and still he came
And he asked me to be his wife,
But my family told me I never must be
Wed any day of my life.
You are a lovin’ daughter,
My father said to me,
But before you wed I’ll see him dead
And hangin’ in front of thee.
So now you got your paternal opposition, and right away you know the kids are gonna get into this, because whatever their parents want, hell, they want the opposite too. But now weird shit starts happening…
They found a girl beside the creek,
A knife had pierced her through.
And the blade stuck fast within her breast
Belonged to my love so true.
He was not guilty of the crime,
Nor would he run away,
For the threat of hanging scared him not
And with me he would stay.
Okay, now we got a dead girl in the picture, and she’s stabbed by this gal’s lover’s knife. Only he didn’t do it. She says he was not guilty of the crime. I always thought maybe he told her he didn’t and she believed him, or maybe she knew some other way. Still, guilty or not, she wants him to get out of there, because she loves him, she doesn’t want to see him hang…
I begged him to go and save his dear life,
But alas he would not flee.
With the moon in the sky they hung him on high,
And the guilt sat hard on me.
Mother, come quickly, Father, come quickly.…
…nd blah blah blah, final chorus. Up till now. She loved this fella, her dad didn’t approve, so maybe Dad framed him with his knife and got him hung, and the girl feels guilty about it. But you notice something? The last verse only has four lines, not like the other ones that have eight.
That’s where the rumor got started that there was more to the song than what everybody knew. When it got hot with the folkies in the early sixties was when the rumor really started growing. There was this story that A. P. Carter of the Carter Family had found the whole thing but wouldn’t sing it, and some folks claimed they’d heard Mother Maybelle confirm it, but I think that’s bullshit. But Roger Waitkus—that’s the old guy who first collected it way long ago—he never said nothing. Never even said where he got it other than that it was Appalachian traditional or some such.
Waitkus was a queer duck. He was the biggest rival to John and Alan Lomax as far as collecting songs, but he didn’t go out of the country or out west and down to the Delta like the Lomaxes did. He just did the mountains—the Appalachians and the Ozarks, that whole Scotch-Irish-English tradition, looking for every variant he could find, and of course anything new that hadn’t popped up before.
He started way back in the twenties and thirties, and had his own little dynasty too—his son Carl was doing stuff around the same time as Alan Lomax, and then there’s…his grandson Peter. I met Pete when he was a little kid, and I always got along good with him. He had a bad case of hero worship for me, because, hell, there I was, little older than a kid myself, playing on stage with the father of bluegrass. I kind of took to Pete, he knew so damn much for a kid. We lost track of each other when I went country, though I got Christmas cards from him, and I’d always write him back.
It sort of meant something, getting cards from him, because to most folk he was real standoffish, like his old man and his grandpa had been. They did what they did, and published a book from some little college press every few years. I never knew a thing about Roger or Carl’s wives, though they must’ve had them. But Pet
e thought of me as a friend because we’d been friendly when we both were much younger.
When I went back to bluegrass, it was like I’d been born again to Pete. He came to a lot of my gigs and was plumb tickled when I got my own band. He’d give me songs he’d come across and thought might work for me, and I used a few, gave him a nod on the CD credits, or when we performed I’d say, “That song was give to me by a good old friend, Pete Waitkus,” and he’d like that. He was still digging in the mountains for songs the way his daddy and grandpa did—they were both dead now—and he spent a lot of time going over the old tapes and discs and wire recordings they made, seeing what might’ve been overlooked.
Anyway, he calls me last spring and says he wants to see me. He’s all excited, and he says, “Billy, I think I found a key to the Holy Grail.” Well, I’ve seen that Indiana Jones movie, and I don’t know if he’s joking or what, but I say okay, come on over. He lives in Nashville too, so he’s there pretty quick.
It’s quiet at my house since Linda’s gone. She left right after Christmas, but we’ve been keeping it mum. Bluegrass fans don’t like it if you got family troubles, and she’s still singing in the act with her mom and brothers, so we figure we’ll just play it cool before we get an actual separation or divorce.
Pete doesn’t want a beer or coffee or anything, he’s that excited. He can’t even sit down, and he’s up and walking around, and says he’s got the best clue ever about the rest of the “Mother Come Quickly” song. Hell, I figure if anybody would he would, since it’s his grandpa that found it, but I nod like this is great news. Then he starts rattling on.
“Do you know the story of how my grandpa got that song?” he asks, and I tell him I heard it was some old lady sang it for him. “That’s right,” he says, “it was Bertha Echols. She was old back then, and she told him there was more, but it wasn’t hers to sing. That’s all I knew, until…”
The Night Listener and Others Page 30