Rachel's Blue

by Zakes Mda

  But where the hell is Rachel?

  The duo’s debut should have happened three weeks ago, but the weather had other ideas. Snow and freezing rain made the roads slippery for days. For two Saturdays the farmers’ market was cancelled. But Jason continued to brave the treacherous county and township roads and worked his way from Rome Township to the Jensen Community Centre.

  Nana Moira insisted on keeping the Centre open so that seniors could come for hot soup. She told Jason there was no need for him to show up for work lest his fingers and toes fall off, and he promised he would take heed. But the next day he was there, reciting his version of Herodotus as plagiarised by the architects of the New York City General Post Office: “Ain’t no snow or rain or heat or the dark night or sleet or slush or crappy township roads gonna keep me away from you, Nana Moira.”

  “That’s a song right there,” said Rachel. “Just needs a little bit of rhyme.”

  “You see a song everywhere,” said Jason.

  “Don’t drag me into it,” said Nana Moira. “It ain’t got nothing to do with Moira Boucher. It’s all about Rachel.”

  Then she broke into her trademark laughter, spilling her coffee on the table in the process.

  Rachel’s cheeks turned rosy, which brought even greater hilarity to Nana Moira.

  “I hate it when you say such things,” said Rachel.

  She was still laughing as she wiped the spilled coffee with floor rags.

  “What if Nana Moira is right?” asked Jason.

  Thanks to the bad weather Rachel was trapped in the township. She dared not risk driving to Schuyler’s. So she just stayed at home and watched television. Or she nursed her car to the Centre to help her grandma. Because not many people ventured outside, not even for Nana Moira’s soup, Jason and Rachel spent the day rehearsing.

  The first day he came with his didgeridoo and tumbadora Nana Moira did not recognise him. Nor did Rachel when she finally came to the Centre. He was clean-shaven, exposing his angular chin, and had cut his flaxen hair to a wavy quiff. Rachel gasped, but soon got control of herself and pretended she was not impressed by the new look.

  “What have you done to your face?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Just removed all the extra hair.”

  “You look different.”

  “Only different?”

  “Are you fishing for a compliment?”

  “I did it for the music,” Jason said. “You can’t play the didj good with a beard.”

  He explained that with a beard it is not easy to form the proper seal at the mouthpiece.

  Rachel did not have staying power at the rehearsal. She soon got bored. Perhaps it was the music. She didn’t feel it. The didgeridoo sounded nothing like music to her. Just the deep bellowing sound that didn’t seem to have any direction. It went all over the place. It didn’t seem to combine well with her bluegrass guitar either. But Jason assured her it was as it should be. Sometimes he demanded that she take a detour from her rhythmic sounds and strum and pluck the strings at random. She tried this and the result horrified her.

  “It has no order, Jason, no rhyme, no reason,” she said. “It’s like jazz. I don’t play jazz, Jason. Jazz doesn’t make sense to anyone.”

  “It ain’t no jazz, Rachel. I don’t know nothing about no jazz. It’s the new sound that we’re inventing. Trust me, people gonna like it major.”

  “Well, I’m tired of practising.”

  So they took a walk in the forest. Everything was black or white. The trunks of trees were black against the whiteness of the snow. The black branches were laden with snow and ice, some bending almost to breaking point. Everything else was an impenetrable whiteness. Even those bits of the sky showing through the top branches were white. Rachel was struck by the utter silence, and the smell of freshness. Nothing of the sounds of the forest that she relished whenever she took a walk in it, which would be in the spring, summer or fall, but never in winter. It seemed that snow and ice swallowed all the sounds and rendered the forest mute. The two could not hear even the sounds of their own footsteps.

  Rachel wanted to say something, but Jason shushed her; when the forest is like this you must respect its silence. She wanted to tell him about Skye Riley. She had not seen him since she spent almost a week with him in a motel room. She would not reveal the part about the motel room. She would just tell Jason that something developed between them, but the guy never called or took the trouble to see her again. They texted each other, and all his texts were about how busy he was either working at the mine or organising the workers and the communities against corporate greed. He wrote as if that week didn’t happen between them, or if it did, it didn’t mean as much to him as to her. And then the texts also stopped. She wanted to ask Jason what to do in a case like this. He being a guy would know what went on in the heads of guys. She had come to see Jason more and more as a brother and didn’t imagine there would be anything wrong in discussing her longing for Skye Riley with him.

  His thoughts, on the other hand, were at a different place. He had a burning desire for her. If only he could hold her in his arms, right there in that icy forest, and plaster her face with kisses. He dared not do that, though. He was biding his time. She would come around. She had almost come around, until she became distant again after that damned Action Camp.

  “How old is this here cheese?”

  The customer’s question brings Jason back to Genesis’ aged cheese.

  Rachel arrives towards midday and finds Jason sulking.

  “My car wouldn’t start,” she says. “Had to wait for Nana Moira to jump start it.”

  “You should have called me, Rachel. Like, now most folks are gone. The farmers’ market will close in an hour.”

  “We can do it. There’re still some folks.”

  They repair to the lounge area and set up their busk station and start playing. He opens with the tumbadora, and then Rachel joins with the guitar. People stop and listen. Soon a small crowd has gathered around them. Jason reaches for the didgeridoo and droning sounds are echoed down the tube in relayed vibrations. Sometimes he prolongs the drone, and then suddenly shouts into the instrument, making it growl and bark like a dog. To Rachel’s surprise the audience enjoys these antics. It must be for the novelty, she concludes. Not for the music. She feels superfluous with her guitar. All eyes are on the didgeridoo, not on her.

  Blue sits in the open guitar case as if guarding the change and the few greenbacks that are beginning to accumulate. Jason did not complain when Rachel placed her there. He knows that Blue is Rachel’s mascot; she brings her luck. That’s what she told him once when she was still busking alone and selling pawpaw bread when the fruit was still in season.

  Jason is giving her the evil eye; she knows immediately that he is expecting more from her. She has been keeping to the fast but ordered tempo of her Appalachian tradition. She has to improvise. She feels silly as she flatpicks random notes and chords that don’t make any sense to her, but that animate Jason to more drones and other sounds that mimic cooing doves and quacking ducks and bleating goats and neighing horses. All the while he is performing a dance that is made even more awkward by the weight and the length of the instrument. To Rachel there is nothing musical about all these crazy sounds, but the crowd is all agape and laughing and clapping hands. Its attention continues to be solely on Jason, and this pisses her off.

  “Never seen nothing like this,” says a spectator.

  “It’s all this New Age stuff,” responds another.

  A woman pushes her way to the front, and between songs she yells: “Why do you have an Amish woman guarding filthy lucre?”

  Rachel is jolted a bit, but she summons a friendly mien.

  “This is Blue,” she says. “Blue, meet the nice lady.”

  But the nice lady has no time for pleasantries.

  “You making fun of them Amish folks, making them sit with filthy lucre listening to this devilish music?”

  Jason has no time for nice
ties. He yells back at the lady.

  “Ain’t no Amish sitting nowhere near here, ma’am. This is just a doll.”

  “You think I’m stupid?” asks the lady, and then storms away down the corridor of organic produce. Spectators wonder why an Amish doll should bug her so much. She is not even Amish herself. Another one notes that maybe she hates to see folks who bite the hands that feed her; she sells lots of home-made noodles and jams that she buys from Amish country.

  Rachel is too rattled to continue with the show. Why would anyone hate Blue? She has been busking with her ever since Nana Moira found her where she had hidden her, and no one has ever complained. Jason gives her a long tight hug, while assuring her that everything is fine, she shouldn’t worry about the crazy woman. The closeness leaves his heart beating fast and gives him an unwelcome hard-on. He wishes this could happen every day; a whole gang of Amish women could terrify her into his arms.

  An angry Genesis breaks the moment. He drove like a madman all the way from Rome Township, fourteen miles away, after he received a phone call from a neighbouring stall informing him that Jason had abandoned his cheese and was busy fooling around with a didgeridoo and a girl. And here he is, indeed, in the arms of a girl with the silly didgeridoo on the floor in front of them.

  “I’ve lost many customers because of your irresponsibility,” says Genesis, and he leads Jason back to the aged cheese table.

  The farmers and sundry traders are already packing their goods away.

  Rachel stands there for a while. Then she gathers the money and puts it in her bag. Blue is chucked into the same bag as well. Rachel packs her guitar in the case, and as she passes the cheese table she hears Genesis yell, “That Boucher girl leads you astray.”

  She knows those words were directed at her; Genesis wanted her to hear them. She stops for a while, waiting to hear if Jason has anything to say in her defence. But Jason does not defend her. He is sullenly packing the cheese away in its boxes.

  Rachel wonders why Jason lets Genesis intimidate him. She would never let Nana Moira bully her this way.

  Jason spends most of the day splitting wood for Nana Moira. He has been at it for days and the pile is enough to last the whole winter. Maybe for the next winter as well. Or even for the next two winters. When he sets out to do something he is relentless.

  “It’s enough, Jason. You don’t need to kill yourself,” Nana Moira told him this morning, as she did yesterday morning and the morning before.

  He never responds. He just keeps on swinging the maul and whistling and humming and breaking out into a song whose lyrics no one can follow. He is shirtless and his body is glistening with sweat. Nana Moira is beginning to worry about him. From time to time she picks up her walking stick and hobbles to the back of the building where the pile of wood is growing and asks him if everything is fine, and if he doesn’t want to take a breather. He just shakes his head without stopping.

  Towards midday Nana Moira goes to the back of the building again, this time determined that she would not take no for an answer.

  “Come for some soup, Jason,” she says firmly.

  “Might as well take a smoke break,” he says, leaving the maul buried in a stump.

  He takes one of the old car seats on the porch, and rolls himself a cigarette. The smell of tomato and basil soup wafts in his direction, reminding him that he has not had anything to eat today. He left home before his stepmom prepared breakfast.

  It is one of those erratic winter days when the temperatures shoot up to seventy. It is all because of global warming, the likes of Genesis who see themselves as the guardians of the environment will tell you. But to Nana Moira only ninnies would complain about a nice day like this. Give it whatever name you like, and attribute its beauty to anything you fancy, it is a day not to be wasted indoors. So she is sitting on an old car seat on the porch with two senior citizens who are regulars at the Centre.

  Rachel drives into the yard in her Ford Escort. Even as she walks from the car to join them Nana Moira stands up and bows in mock reverence.

  “Sweet Jesus, am just stumped what we did right to deserve the pleasure of Miss Rachel’s company on a nice day like this,” she says in a hoity-toity voice.

  “Sarcasm don’t make you beautiful, Nana Moira,” says Rachel.

  “Before you sit down, get Jason some soup.”

  “And some bread too,” adds Jason.

  Rachel goes to the kitchen.

  Nana Moira’s hands cannot stay idle; she is hand-stitching together pieces cut from old dresses. They will become batting for a quilt.

  Rachel returns with a cup of tomato and basil soup and two slices of bread on a side plate. She places them on the floor in front of Jason’s seat.

  “We gonna practise this afternoon; that’s why Rachel is here,” says Jason hopefully.

  “As if I need a reason to be at my grandma’s workplace,” says Rachel.

  “Ha! So Jason’s horn wins over Schuyler?” says Nana Moira.

  “That sounds rude, Nana Moira,” says one of the senior citizens. The implications of her statement dawn on her, and she breaks out cackling. The two seniors join her, and between the bouts of guffaws they exclaim how irrepressible Nana Moira is. Neither Jason nor Rachel sees anything funny. Jason wonders why his didgeridoo should be the cause of such mirth, while Rachel is quite flustered after finally catching their drift.

  “You’re all old for nothing,” she says, and walks into the building.

  But she is soon brought back by a roar that is so loud it shakes the walls. And there, entering the yard, is the scrawny figure of Skye Riley perched on a monstrous bike. On the rear fender is a tall cycle-flagpole on which flies a huge American flag. He parks next to Nana Moira’s GMC Suburban and revs the engine a few times to impress the onlookers on the porch. Jason cannot but stand in awe.

  “That’s a lot of bike,” he says.

  “’Cause he’s a lot of man,” says Rachel.

  “He don’t look nothing like a lot of man to me,” says Nana Moira. “He’s too skinny like his mama never fed him nothing when he was a baby.”

  “Like they say, Nana Moira, it’s what is inside that counts. He may be skinny to you, but he’s a lot of man inside.”

  Skye walks to the porch with a big grin and a hand outstretched in what he sees as a friendly gesture. He vigorously shakes the hands of the two senior citizens, and then of Nana Moira.

  “You must be Nana Moira,” he says. “Rachel told me so much about you.”

  “This is Skye Riley, my friend,” says Rachel.

  “Why don’t you say it like it is: boyfriend,” says Jason.

  “You’re right, my man,” says Skye as he shakes Jason’s hand. Then he grabs Rachel and kisses her. She pushes him away.

  “That’s a lot of bike you have there, buddy,” says one of the seniors.

  “Thanks. It’s a Honda Valkyrie.”

  “Skye is a mineworker,” says Rachel, as if that explains the bike, “from West Virginia.”

  “I’d rather be seen on a Harley Davidson,” says Jason, displaying as much contempt on his face as he can muster. “It’s a man’s bike, and it’s American too. What’s the point of flying an American flag on a foreign bike?”

  “Different strokes, buddy,” says Skye smiling at him patronisingly and patting him on the shoulder.

  “What’s foreign about a beautiful bike like that?” asks one of the seniors.

  “Its name. Honda. It’s made by them Chinese,” says Jason.

  “Japanese,” says Skye.

  “Same difference,” says Jason.

  “I fought at Pearl Harbour,” says the senior.

  “Nobody fought at Pearl Harbour, gramps,” says Skye. “The Japanese bombed the daylights out of us and killed thousands of our men.”

  “I don’t like your boyfriend, Rachel,” says the senior with urgency.

  “He knows too much,” adds the second senior.

  Then everyone is sullen. Except Skye a
nd Rachel. He is puzzled because he had no intention of rubbing anyone up the wrong way. She is abashed. Nana Moira decided at the very introduction, and on hearing that the scrawny man was Rachel’s boyfriend, that he was not worth her time. She is focusing on her sewing and on humming some random notes that are meant to inform Skye: “I am ignoring you, in case you didn’t notice.”

  After some brief awkwardness Skye says, “Hey Rache, you need to come over with me to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Rain found us a balladeer who’s gonna help you work on your voice till you can sing like our mountain women.”

  “Who’s Rain?”

  “My sister. She’s a balladeer too, known and loved from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the hills of Kentucky. In all the tri-state area they talk of Rain.”

  Jason cannot contain himself. He struts around and stands right in front of Skye.

  “Rachel don’t need to work on nothing with no one on the Blue Ridge Mountains. We making good money playing right here in Athens.”

  “Tell your friend to get out of my face, Rachel.”

  “Jason, please.” And then she turns to Skye and tells him she is not interested in working with anyone in West Virginia, and that Skye has a nerve to disappear for weeks on end, and then come out of the blue and think that she’s just going to leave everything and run after him.

  “You’re mad at me ’cause you don’t know what I’ve been through,” says Skye. “Let me take you for a ride and I’m gonna tell you all about it.”

  “He’s taking you for a ride all right,” says Nana Moira.

  Rachel is wary of the pillion. She remembers what happened to Schuyler. But she really wants to hear what Skye has to say. She is eager to confirm what she has been trying to convince herself all these weeks, that Skye would not just disappear like that without a good reason, not after spending the kind of a steamy week she had never spent with any man before. Also, she is getting annoyed by Nana Moira’s attitude towards her guest, and by everyone else’s. To spite them she jumps onto the pillion.