XVI
The instrument of my music ~ In a halo of windblown leaves ~ Stitched from the same cloth ~ Just a name ~ The odd fire that burned in him ~ At Ezra Lee’s house ~ Women of the working variety ~ The entanglements of certain distinguished gentlemen ~ Pushed into all that abandonment
A SMALL PORTION OF THAT MONEY BOUGHT ME a sirloin steak that night, with fresh-baked apple pie on the side. While for dessert, I bought a bottle of the finest Scotch I could find, took it home, and drank it to its conclusion. Cursing to the rafters the reverend’s name, I slumped in a beat-up chair in the den of my broken-down house, watched a fire blaze in the chipped-up fireplace, and listened to the wind rattle the shutters and boarded up windows. That man, I said and drank until I could feel my body loosen from its wound-up rage over what the reverend could not help me with—with what he would not help me with—even after all that time.
O I sat there for what seemed an eternity and watched the deep red flames and light-blue essences collapse amidst their endless energies and diverging paths. And when I tired of that, I watched the shadows of the fire dance upon the rafters—for I had at least fixed them and most the slate shingles on the rooftop—so that when the rain and snow did come, it would not touch me here in the confines of my home. O but I wanted my Annie to touch me here. I wanted to see her again and look upon her dark brown skin and wide thick lips as she stood next to me, or over me, as we touched. That she would be there. That she was here. Yet in thinking on her so long and lost, another pain took hold inside me. Like the one I’d known in thinking of her bowing her head in her own church when the reverend and congregation shamed her after what I’d done to that man—after what that man had done to her!—when those white devils had shown up to chase me afterwards for it. So I sorted through the letters I’d written to the reverend to give to her, the letters she’d never held, never read, nor knowed I sent, and arranged them all in a row, and then placed them one by one into the fire.
O the paper caught and sent up a bright flare of light and always in the sudden illumination I would see her, standing at the sink washing and peeling potatoes into the bucket. Or swaying on her bare feet, with Lucy cradled in her arms, singing to our child. She was singing to her, and the sound of it was delicate and fleeting and never once seemed to rise into the distinction of anything that words could ever shape, and yet it was a sound that was lovelier than anything the human mouth could utter. It was beautiful and heartfelt with rhythms conjured from the depths of her. So that always in my playing, I’d sought to recreate that sweet perfect emotion, that deep rendering and divestment. Sounds that I’d only heard in my Annie’s voice, with that purity and love. Always with her love. And in all my days and years since, there’s only one sound I’d heard as perfect and true. It was Yancey Jakes’ song for sure, the one he’d sung to us in the smokehouse on the ridge. The one he said he’d never give to old Burlhead or any other, and I got the inkling then to play it, to breach its lost power, to somehow spell me from my sadness with its beauty. Groping in a haze, I reached for my guitar, but couldn’t find it, and the shape of myself seemed to bleed away then as a quake of stark panic set in upon the center of me, and I truly felt as if a shadow had descended across me entire. That it had swallowed me up.
Turning, I realized my sight was dimmed from staring into the flames, that the light from the fireplace didn’t help me none in searching for my instrument. In fact, the light was washed out and made me touch my eyes to right them, but that didn’t help neither. It was as if a milky stream of tears had begun to flow stretching before me into a dark expanse of boards and nails and planks that I could not see the end of, not entirely. Though I knew somewhere along those lengths, somewhere far away, or in another part of the world—in a space left only for them—stood my wife and baby girl. My family, and I reached out for them then. O I reached into the air, and all the thoughts and feelings that had built up inside me since I last looked on their faces came flooding back and my legs gave way and I found myself upon the floor with my ear pressed to the boards to maybe hear my Annie singing again. To hear my wife singing, or calling me back across the world. Was it possible? Could she call me back across the years and ridge and falling night? Could she release me from the pain of failing to find her again and again and again?
Isaiah?
I couldn’t move. The voice was raw and scratchy and right on the other side of the door. With the shutters creaking and clanking in each gust, I about collapsed to hear it come so close and so soon after I’d just called out to her in my heart, calling into the world. And yet, as I listened closer, and hushed my beating heart—I could hear it wasn’t her, that it couldn’t be her. My Annie. There was something short and sharp in this voice. Something that could never be for me, not with its tight jagged-edged boundary, and as I opened the door, Ms. Clara May Staunton stood there instead, in a halo of windblown leaves and dried hay, unwrapping the bright red shawl she’d bundled about her hair. O the world seemed to swirl about her for another second as she shook her auburn curls on my doorstep.
It’s you, I said, and still wasn’t sure she wasn’t just an apparition the Scotch had delivered to me in my loneliness. Stepping aside, I showed her to my fire, eager to do something—anything—to break the spell her appearance marked in me.
You’re damn right it’s me, she said. Her blue eyes shined like glints of faraway coal in the firelight, and I had to look away and set my hand again on my bottle so as not to suffer under eyes so pure and cold. Wrapping her shawl about her shoulders she said, And here I run all the way out here driving myself silly thinking on him and the shape he’s in, and all I find is you’re drunk, too. Well, it figures.
What figures, ma’am?
The two of you. You couldn’t of been more stitched from the same cloth then if you walked around in one shirt. She shook her head and stared straight at me casting a horrid pall upon me with her blazing eyes. Excuse my curtness, she said finally, you’ll find me a much nicer lady under more normal circumstances.
Circumstances? What circumstances? I had a feeling that only A.D. and his predilections could have raised such a fuss in his new love already, but after asking and getting only a mean, pleading stare from her, I asked again. What is it? What’s made you so un-normal? I knew I shouldn’t have said it as soon as I heard it, but it was out there now and wasn’t coming back. Well, almost at once her small wan face scrunched up and her strong white hand set firm on her thin narrow hip and she stared at me with a face full of righteous anger. The time between us seemed to stretch and grow more lonesome by the second. Her jaw tensed up, and her sweet pink lips turned white and nibbled at the air, for she seemed determined to stand like that till the roof caved in and maybe hell froze over, too.
He’s drunk, she finally said.
So am I, I said and hiccuped as if to put an exclamation point on it.
But what’s worse is he’s gone after some other name of his.
Name?
That’s what he said—a name—and then he took off walking like a fool with his pants on fire the minute I turned my head.
Then he’s close, I said, and closed my eyes to think of A.D. as drunk as I was and out there in the darkness, maybe with just his guitar slung over his back and nothing else. Going after nothing but a name, after something he repeated on his tongue like a prayer or destination. Something to guide him to his deepest and most pressing obsession. Even with her here now, too, he’s gone off.
For a name.
After all this time, too, after thinking on her and wishing on her and putting her up on some golden pedestal—this vision, this Ms. Clara May Staunton, this special somebody he’d made up into an impossible perfection—she was flesh and blood for him now and he’d gone off for a name anyways. And now here she was in my den, standing before my fireplace, with all hellfire burning on her tongue.
She’d been burned up by one man (most literally), and finally got hold of another (A.D.), and knew him now as only two peop
le can know each other behind closed doors, and was finally seeing the fire that burned in him, too. And damned if she wasn’t prepared to dig in with both heels to stop his smoldering, for she’d certainly toughened up from what I could tell, in never intending to let her world flare up again. Not in the slightest. Not for anything. Even drunk, I could see that, and supposed I could forgive her for her brusqueness.
I turned to the fire again, as I could do nothing to quell the shiver that shot through me from the glare of her purposefulness, and thought I’m just a man alone in the ruin of his life, and look at what I’ve been called upon to do, to help my only friend, and I must do it. Even if this woman is as alien to me as the anger in the reverend’s heart, I must do it. I hiccupped again to see my haggard face reflected in the Scotch bottle. My lips glistened from the drink and tears I’d wiped away when Ms. Clara May had arrived at my doorstep, when it was only my Annie and Lucy girl I’d yearned for. And I wondered if I was really the combustible one amongst us, if I was nothing more than dry tinder set to ignite in my desperation and despair. I shuddered again and stumbled away from the fire, just in case my body decided to catch alight right then and there. I knew that despite my pain and forlornness, I had to go get A.D., if only to keep him and Ms. Clara May from burning up on their own. ’Course I knew it was that way with love sometimes, all fiery and hot and confused, and then, sudden like, all cool and aloof, and who was I to judge between the two? All I knew was I had to bend myself to this task, to do it and be done with it, to go and bring him back so he could right whatever wrong he’d committed. So I turned to her eager now to go after our boy, ready for anything. I suppose you want me to go get him then? I said.
Good lord, she said, it took you that long to figure that out? She shook her head and smiled for the first time since I’d seen her and raised her snow white hand along the glistening skin crinkled on the back of her neck. It was like glass really, her skin, where the fire had been so direct it had changed her hairline for good, and so it would never grow long again in the back. Not after staying for a week in the hospital with them putting ointments and mustard salves on it the whole while, and that was why she kept it as short and trim as she did. To embrace how the flames marked her, to signify this fundamental change in her, and I rather liked it, her short curls. I told her so, too, later on, after the madness of this first incident was finally put behind us, when I learned to watch her neck from then on and gauge her moods by it. For it certainly gave me more information than her face did—though I don’t think A.D. ever learned that trick.
He was a curious kind, A.D., but certainly not as hard to find as she’d first thought. In fact, he was only right over the next hill. You sure he said Ezra Lee? I asked again as she drove, even though I knew I’d heard it right the first time. (I just didn’t want the silence to stretch again between us like it had in my house, with her cold blue eyes staring into the center of me and my drunkenness.) For I figured this might not be a singular occurrence, me running out to retrieve A.D., even if she didn’t know it yet, this pattern of her betrothed.
I’m as certain about it as anything in my life, she said and never once took her hands from the wheel. I’d never seen a woman drive before and it shook me to feel so helpless under her control, guiding us as she did across the darkened land, veering and accelerating with an abruptness a little too irregular for my liking. Women hardly drove back then, but I certainly didn’t want to say anything to her about it, for it looked as if she would a done whatever she wanted regardless of what any man could have said. Not least of which was to give A.D. a cold hard knock on the ear for running off from her already. So instead of watching her, I fiddled with the radio. O I worked it and tuned it until I got old WSM on the dial, that Nashville station. For wouldn’t you know it, as soon as I got it, old Runnymede was playing the same song he’d sung when Ms. Clara May and A.D. had stood beneath the gathering storm that night, when they’d found each other alive after all those weeks. And instead of turning to another station, to maybe offset the emotion already running a bit too high in the gal, I kept it there, and thought it an apt backdrop for the trouble we were heading in to, with A.D. already deep in Ezra Lee country, as the locals called it.
It was only ’bout two miles away. Ezra Lee’s house. A man known far and wide for the singular distinction of the silver mouth harp he played that had been passed down from his late great-grandfather General Robert E. Lee. Ezra was known to put that harp to his lips in-between reciting hypnotic verses to the bodies he processed for a living. Working with a meticulous artistry and pomp, he had people signing up years in advance just to receive his service— all so he could look down into their souls (as it was reported) and give them the proper showing they deserved when they passed. Sure, I’d known it was a mortuary, and Ezra Lee an undertaker, but it was something A.D.’d just heard before Ms. Clara May showed up, and I figured he’d been counting on paying ol’ Ezra Lee and his harmonica a visit. Knowing A.D. as I did, I guessed he’d grown listless after having lain with Ms. Clara May in her love nest so long, for even a day was too much for that boy to sit still.
If I hadn’t had to go on account of A.D. running off in search of his names, I would a never set foot on Ezra Lee’s property. It was a sprawling Southern-style plantation not only monumental in the old architectural way, but with the added history of keeping my kind as property in a shed row out back in years gone by. The dead bodies only added to its mystique. But it turns out the mortuary only took up the basement floor of the big central house, while it was oft told that Ezra Lee filled the upper rooms with women of the working variety, and that he ran a gambling parlor and cabaret inside the main floor that some of the best acts of Vaudeville, in its heyday, had once graced on a rotating basis. That was when Ezra was just a pup and his father Honus did the mortuarying. So I guess you could say it was a family business.
As we drew close, the air was filled with sound. The place was ablaze with lights set behind two of the tallest oaks I’d ever seen, so it looked as if the treetops were lit with new-fangled stars just come down to roost in the lower reaches of heaven, they shined and sparkled so. O I looked on them and had to blink my eyes and turn away.
And that sound! I scoured the green dial to see if that was its origin, but it was not. Listening closer, and closing my eyes, there was even a moment amidst all this commotion of movement and arrival, when an otherworldly sensation crept over me, that caused me to touch my pocket for I still had a wad of my just-returned reverend money and was worried about it. I tucked that wad further down, figuring the sound was the siren call of Ezra Lee’s women and gambling wheel, that there was devilment and temptation in the air trying to reconfigure my body, tuning it to a frequency I had not had to worry about before with my Annie at my side. Back then the oft-told tales of Ezra Lee’s place and the entanglements of certain distinguished gentlemen never concerned me in the least. But now those tales did concern me. They did indeed.
Steeling myself, I recalled everything I’d ever heard about Ezra Lee’s place, about its illicit depravity and greed. Yet I was in such a sweat to hear that eerie note persist—since it so captivated and removed me from the pressing need of reaching A.D.—that I wondered if I could still do this, if I could go into that teeming house and re-emerge unscathed. For I could see it now, as we rounded the last bend: A bright red bonfire raged outside while a daisy chain of grotesque figures danced about it, their arms raised with sticks and instruments, as the silhouette of some suckling pig or goat roasted on a spit. The front porch was crowded with over a dozen men going in and out, as periodic blasts of rambling music echoed when the door opened and the clinking sound of chips and currency seemed to craft its own underlying rhythm of barter and exchange. While from the higher windows, red-tinted shades wavered now and then, the only glimpses of tenderness and invitation the house deemed fit to offer the larger night.
I looked upon all of this as if in a stupor, held in some strange enchantment. There was laug
hter in the night. It scattered up over the yard and across the tops of the cars Ms. Clara May parked beside, and I wondered if my Annie was laughing somewhere too now in the world, laughing with my daughter? It was an image I wanted to keep in my mind, if only to save me, or keep me whole while facing the horde of depravity soon to be unleashed upon us. And I began to hum along to that clear sweet note that persisted even as Ms. Clara May turned off the engine and I watched the green radio dim and then blacken on its dial. I tapped it once to be sure, for I still heard that sweet note ringing in my head and could feel my voice intertwine with it as I gathered all my drunken courage to proceed. Even when I stepped out, it was still there, and I passed my hands across my face for the tears began to pour at its sweet persistence. There was a truth hovering in me with this sound. There was something deeper in its naming, in its formlessness and reach, and even as I stood before the blackened untruth of that house, I could feel the harmonious depths of that music buffeting me up in that moment. Buffeting me up for what I had to retrieve—a life—and A.D.’s life at that.
Isaiah? Ms. Clara May said, for she had watched me wipe my eyes twice before stopping as the sweet note ceased as she spoke. What is it? What?
I looked at her then for a long moment, far longer than when we’d stared at each other in my house. It was you, I said. You, and I touched my ear to show her I knew she’d been singing on the way here without even knowing it, harmonizing with Runnymede on the radio. For as she stepped away and scowled into the night, her face scrunched up and tense, she never once denied my suggestion nor pretended to allow it, but just swept her hand along the glassy skin beneath the edge of her hair, and so that was what I watched as she pushed her way right into the midst of all that abandonment.
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