Purchase

by Christopher K. Doyle

  Stepping closer, I waved my hand in front of his face for I hadn’t run across a blind one since back in church in Bristol, after the Honorable Reverend Michael Williams took charge. When he’d set up some program that brought in all these blind boys from Stone Mountain and Shreveport and other parts I know not, but where it was told they had their own special calling and language. Something like a secret ordination that could bring the spirit right out in people and speak on divinations and meanderings, and so they were thus revered for their sageness in all things religious and prodigal. So I felt a bit scared myself knowing this one here might have been given that same gift at birth, that knowingness. And yet as I listened to him sing, and stood by his side and truly felt it at first—as all his words and feelings swirled about me as the smoke drifted before my eyes—there was really nothing else to consider. It was so pure and deep his suffering, I didn’t have to worry about anything he might have said to me, for it would be cherished, his attention, any I could get. And I was almost set to lean down and introduce myself when he spoke up first from the middle of his singing. Y’all don’t have to tend it, he said. I got it.

  Got what? I said.

  The fire, he said. I got it and you, too, and he swayed toward us as he spoke and smiled to show the black hole of his mouth, with most the teeth worn away to little ivory nubs. I keep it warm, he said. I always do, and he motioned to the flames, before dropping another hickory branch on the pile and starting up again with some other song. Some tune that let his voice rise higher and higher as if the walls of that shack had been busted open and sprawled out so that the mountain air and sunlight were pouring in now—that’s how elemental it was and profound. I had to shiver as the sound of it shook through me, rattling my chest and chin with such force I grabbed A.D.’s guitar and set down on another milk crate to start in playing to whatever he was doing. Sure. As soon as I heard it, I felt as if I’d have rode all night in the current of his undertaking just to witness such a thing as that, it was such a supernatural and righteous sound.

  Yes, he said when he first heard me riding along with him then, plotting out notes in a fury or ecstasy of arrival. Of arriving—that was what it was. His voice was an arriving as much as old Burlhead’s was a renunciation, or departing. This here voice was not diminished in the least. Not at all. And it would never be. No matter the circumstance. No matter the pain. Old Burlhead’s was devoid for sure, but I didn’t want to think about him no more. Not as Yancey (he told us his name only later, Yancey Jakes) charged on into a territory I had not felt as mine in some time. Not since coming back south so far below the Mason and Dixon to begin with. He sung of a suffering, true, but of a rising up, too, like a dove fluttering in the blueness of the ridge, absorbed almost wholly by the air and space. So that the tears started again as I heard it and knew the wings of such sweetness were for me as well as for him and anyone else who listened and who’d been downtrodden and abused. And for anyone else that had been treated as such. O it was intimate and natural his words, but also childlike, I suppose. Though they ran much deeper than what childhood runs, much deeper than any of the foolishness or trouble with adults. It was a deepness like the woods and streams and hills about us. For when he finished and swayed over to slap my shoulder since he’d liked so much my playing, he moved his long fingers out upon the fretboard and up to my chin and nose for a second to realize my face.

  You colored? he said.

  Yes, sir.

  Then you ain’t come down from old Burlhead to hear?

  No, sir.

  And you ain’t come down from his grandson neither?

  No, sir.

  Shiiiiiit, he said and let the word linger in the smoke as he placed on another branch. I thought for sure you was colored when I heard you play, but I just had to make sure in the touching. I’m real sorry about that. But I had to know for sure to tell you the word so you’d know it was true.

  O I knowed it, I said and sat transfixed before him as he swayed and sniffed turning his nose up. Maybe to the scent of the hides strung up in the smoke, ripening and drying into the flavor that would carry him on through the winter of another year. Or maybe just sniffing something else.

  And there’s another? Yancey said, because he was still sniffing. But he’d turned his otherworldly head in A.D.’s direction and as he stared at him the whites of his eyes turned up inside his skull like hard-boiled eggs. A.D. shuffled his boots once and coughed to announce himself in Yancey’s presence.

  Yes, sir. There’s another here and I liked your song very much. I’ve heard nothing like it.

  No one has, he said. That’s new and just come to me last night in the darkness as they all do when there’s nothing else to see. Nothing else but the spirit rising in shapes like they say the fire does, rising and falling across the air. Yancey had two sticks in his hands and tapped them lightly as if the rhythm inside him was too strong to contain. For he was moaning now lower in his voice, and tapping with his sticks so the refrain from his new song spun out of him as A.D. sung echoing him as the words reverberated and the guitar picked up the intonation and played itself out on its own. I swear. Even as I sat above it plucking notes and strumming as of a ghost working the strings, I couldn’t tell if I’d done a thing to bring the refrain back to its conclusion. Yes, Yancey said. Yes. That’s it. That’s it and it ain’t for Burlhead no, sir. Nor that boy of his.

  Why would it be for them? I said.

  That one’s mine, Yancey said. That one’s mine for all time.

  A.D. was leaning above the fire and pulled from his coat the whiskey bottle. Then I could see him smiling as he thought a moment longer and got a notion and blinked once before he pulled the cork so that the sweet dark scent cut through the smoke and Yancey sat up as if pulled with a pole he must a known the smell so dear and true. He turned to A.D. and held out his old soft hand and touched the bottle that A.D. passed to him.

  Yes, Yancey said as A.D. let go and the brown liquor sloshed against the sides as Yancey tipped it up and swallowed deeply twice, before releasing it as the smell wafted off his lips.

  How come Burlhead gets your songs? A.D. said. He was closer and refused the bottle that Yancey offered back. He was leaning to be closer to Yancey’s wet lips, and was lost to me in shadow then, his face. His eyes darkened and gone, and the thinking of his eyes and mind gone too, I supposed, as Yancey lifted the bottle again for another pull. How come?

  Shoot, Yancey said. You know, and he tasted again another pull before finally setting the bottle into his lap as he rocked slower, ticking like a clock from side to side as he spoke. It’s my color, sir. Y’all know about them white folks and how they takes from Yancey Jakes and gives him this last sad plot and says that’s it. That’s all there is for the sad blind nigger now and for all time. O but they don’t see me as I shuffle off through the woods like none of them ever could. Cause I listen to it and stretch my hands out into it and feel it—the dirt and air and wind—and know it’s inside me and outside me and all around me, because of that closeness and truth. Even in the darkness I don’t fret and hide for the seeing ain’t nothing more than I ever had anyways. And nothing more than I need to live and sing and see them by. O I sees them. They know it. Even that old Burlhead knows it when he sends that boy down to pick it all up from me, my sound, to take it away and play it for others as their own. I know. I always did. I know it’s mine and that it’s always mine and that’s why this one ain’t for them. Not no more. I’m done with all that to know you two. To know you now and to feel you and hear it so much better than what they could ever play. They ain’t got nothing on you two. And Yancey Jakes stood then as he said it and pulled swift and efficient three smoked trout from where they hung. We ate them just like that. Standing without any forks or plates, and they were just as light and sweet and perfect as you could think, and when we were finished he told us more of his story.

  He told us about growing up in Bristol and showed us his scars. Almost like gray slugs dripped acros
s his skin they were. The ones from the whippings along his back and legs that he must have got almost sixty-five years hence to tell it when he was no older than a child and the South was still the South. But it didn’t stop me none, he said. Not in being who I was nor what I knew I could be. And as he touched his finger to his wrinkled brow, he took us then to the swift deep stream that he fished in a ways down in a hollow, touching expertly the tautness of the strung lines and hooks before restringing some bait. I would have thought he was a young man had I seen him from a distance. Walking along the wood or scrambling along the rocks strewn about remembering and feeling everything with his mind and sniffing the cool mint fern and sharp bright pine as he led us on to his small brick hut down from the smokehouse. Till both me and A.D. were too tired to walk it wore us out so and we heard so much more from Yancey Jakes about so many other names of singers dead and gone or still living, yet lost to Yancey’s world, lost to his life. That we couldn’t begin to calculate them all and didn’t make it back to the car before midnight, and even then, A.D. hadn’t spoken in some time. He just sat there behind the wheel looking into the starry darkness and drifting clouds that hung low before being pushed off into their vastness.

  What? I said. What is it?

  A.D. just closed his eyes and tilted his head against the window to breathe the cool raw air.

  What?

  The names, he finally said, straightening up and touching his collar, before rubbing his hands along the buttons of his shirt. It was as if he was a new man. That something had been unraveled and removed inside him. That thinking up whatever he’d just thought up had changed him again. Had changed him maybe like how I’d seen Yancey changed and energized by the woods, bubbling like the stream coursing through the stony seams of the ridge as he took us around. Didn’t you hear it? he said. The names?

  The names? Well, sure, I said. I heard them. So what?

  So what? And he looked at me as if I was the most rank and ignorant nigger the world had ever known. Well, I’ll tell you so what, because right there’s the whole thing. Right there’s the names we’ve got to find.

  XIII

  A spell to him ~ The wrong end of a gun ~ He touches the dial ~ The Ballad of Clara May ~ The old Barn Dance hour ~ Some greater angel ~ His song as he called it ~ Runnymede in the storm ~ The crows ~ The last girl and her glassy skin

  THE NAMES WERE ALL, HE REPEATED THEN aloud and to himself, and were otherwise whispered to the air as of a prayer or incantation that finally become like a spell. Something that transformed him into something else than what he was, and so I worried about him and shied away, for it scared me to look upon him in his mania as we drove the next day and the day after, and into another week. Always driving farther into the ridge, into towns and places that were nothing more than way stations or crossroads maybe, and then not even that once we reached them.

  Sometimes rolling in at dusk they might have just one measly little dime store out front. Or one rusted-over filling station with a single paraffin lamp strung above a chipped up butcher’s block. Or nothing. Just dirt. Places like Whistling Pine and the Richlands, Busthead and Honaker, Grapefield and The Crows. And everywhere we went A.D. was determined to find the faces of the names Yancey Jakes had said because behind the faces were the songs he wanted to get at so much it burned him up to think they were just sitting out there waiting. Tucked inside each of those old singers’ minds wasting away into nothing where no one could ever reach them or bring them back to the light of day. O it vexed him! And so he had to ask around and spend our money freely and coax people out of their shyness, especially the ghosts of old women and men, dust-covered and disconsolate, as if in their sad gray faces, deep inside, they hadn’t seen nothing in years nor heard one word about some old nigger bluesmen, let alone anyone Yancey Jakes might have only dreamt up in his head. And most times, the people didn’t want to speak to him at all, at least not with me standing there in the shadow of the train depot or chancery or wherever else we parked. So I’d have to leave or walk around nonchalant and quiet like.

  O but the songs are there, A.D. would say, they’re real. So when we couldn’t find any in this town or the next, or in the house we’d just been directed to, he’d start in again on the names as we left, repeating them, singing them, stringing them all out like the worn beads of some forgotten necklace as we drove through the night: Old Mossfield Churchwell and Clarence Ashford. Pee Wee Woodsman and the Appalachian Mayfairs. Bill & Bella Reese and the New Carrolton Singers. Blind Uncle Vecsey and Sister Mary Patton. The Williamson Trio and Doc Ferry Sutters. Bascomb Teak Nelson and Sleepy John Sumnter. On and on it went, and some days I don’t think I got a word in edgewise to redirect him in the slightest. And yet A.D. always stopped long enough to remind me to play the song old Burlhead had given us for it was to be reworked almost immediately and trimmed up into shape.

  Shape? I said.

  Well, sure, he said and looked at me all queer like, as if I had no notion as to what we were doing, and I knew then that it was to be like that with him. He thought it’d been given fair and square to us by old Burlhead and didn’t remember nothing about being held up at the wrong end of a gun. Or hearing the screen door slam shut in his face. Instead, we were to work those lyrics over as he drove. He saw some problem in them and wanted a hook to rise out of the feeling of them. The inclination, as he called it, in the rhythm. Sure, that was a term he coined himself—the inclination—if anything could have been attributed to his process. Though I guess he’d say the songs were his, too, once he worked on them long enough and in the way he did. For there certainly wasn’t no one else to say any different, at least not me, as A.D. did most the talking anyways, but that was alright. Even more than alright, as it gave me time to ask around for my Annie and Lucy girl as I saw fit, to follow up on any leads however remote it might be to their whereabouts, to keep asking.

  Hold on hold on hold on, A.D. said and stopped in the midst of a dirt road somewhere tucked beneath the overhanging pine and larch as I finally seen the colors start to change in the leaves with autumn rolling in across the ridge. But none of that mattered for the moment, as we’d finally run out of Mr. Ralph Peer’s $50 dollars from our initial song and I was glad of it. I was glad because it meant Bristol might be finally pulled back into our sights and I might see the Honorable Reverend Michael Williams after all this time of running away to finally ask about my family. I was just about to remind A.D. of this fact when I seen him touch his finger to his lips and turn the radio all the way up as he killed the engine. Listen listen listen, he said and touched the dial keeping his hand there as the sound rose up surrounding us.

  I’d been slumped against the door a few hours by then and half-asleep for he’d finally stopped repeating the names in the darkness of the road. But now that the radio played, it was as if something had come to us born out of the darkness. Something soft at first, but knowing and able to touch us on the heads like an ordination or baptism. Something of our own making, you could say. O it was biblical and religious in its effect, and I’d never felt nothing like it before nor since, for all at once the air changed around us, too. It had become stretched out and silent, as of the stillness before a swirling storm, and as I inched closer on my seat, all the breath in me about ceased as I realized it was A.D.’s own voice singing to us over the airwaves and my own guitar plucking out the rhythm beneath it. It was our song! The Ballad of Clara May, at least that’s what the voice called it when it was done and he played it again for good measure because he said he’d gotten enough requests pouring in from everywhere since it first aired two days ago. A.D. and I had to look at each other then to realize what he meant.

  Requests? I finally said.

  Two days ago? A.D. said and let the idea linger as we listened to the song in the hushed darkness of the car. Only the glowing radio dial shone on us and it was as if a wayward star had fallen to visit us and us alone. For it tore through the center of our ribs and hearts and throats and flayed our hid
es with its light and warmth, and for all the life of me I couldn’t help but feel as if we were inside every single radio in the entire world listening in at that particular moment, to that particular station—for it was a big one out of Nashville across the other side of the Appalachians, and had just started not too long ago broadcasting like this—a station tied into the old Barn Dance hour. WSM or something was the call letters. It was a show that used to sell insurance or whatnot, but had expanded into songs like this and to programming that reached all the listeners up and down the ridge. To all the folks who’d like what we had brewing up for them with our songs that drifted away just slightly from the blues they were used to. Drifting into something more familiar and repetitive with the hook he thought up. Moving Jessico’s lyrics around a bit, chopping it up so that they could trust these words a bit more, now that they were tied a bit closer to their own lives and experience. Though of course, I had to explain all of this to A.D. as he sat there dumbstruck and awed by the significance of what we’d done, and as I did, his eyes lit up then and I seen a new direction turn in him finally. A new life.

  This radio station plays for real and most the night, I said, and A.D. had to pinch himself to hear it and to know that this was just the beginning for us, just the beginning of our lives. For the car was already rolling from under our feet, barreling down the ridge.

  He had the throttle in for sure and the strangest smirk on his lips, so that I had to stare away so as not to be touched by the spark of his madness. For as happy as I was to hear our success plainly spread out and dazzling in the very air we breathed, the blueness was fading from us the more we drove away from it, from the ridge. And as we both watched for hours or minutes (I cannot say for sure) as the light of the world raced up to meet us, and then as the burning gold rays shone down only for us, it was as if a layer of burnt skin was being peeled away from our path, and I thought: Sure. The old skin. The one we’ve just set aside. It’s gone now. The one we’ve labored under in our ignorance and wandering is gone. There’s another world we’re venturing into with our souls and sound and suffering. There’s another world entire for us to see—until Bristol appeared like a burning spot on the edge of our seeing—and we raced down towards it, singing the whole way the song old Burlhead had stole from Yancey Jakes in the fog of his magnificence.