Purchase

by Christopher K. Doyle

  The coffin was a demure cedar box with red velvet lining. The girl’s family was of a theatrical sort and imagined she’d like that touch of color, that soft fabric, Ezra explained, as he pawed and sucked and kissed his way to the end of her. And I had to shiver when I seen it, and I shiver now so far removed in retelling it.

  It was true. His thin body quivered as if an earthquake shook through each limb. Moving another step towards me, I watched silent but hopeful as he edged away from the railing, remembering the vivid scene of it all, for he must have still seen the small blue-tinged girl so close to him. He must have heard Ezra’s thin lips moving along the cold lengths of her as he sucked the death out, sucking out the sex and truth and touch from her. Sucking out everything she could use no more. So did he hear it? I said.

  Hear what? A.D. said and looked upon me as the tears pooled upon his cheeks, for he had just then been pressed and bolstered by another shock of wind.

  Her death, A.D., her death.

  He had to shake his head and close his eyes to understand my question. He did hear it, he said, for it’s her song now that haunts me. I did not get to hear the songs of the other two behind those red doors, for he had just ended singing on them when I entered, and anyways at first I was repulsed by his gruesome work. But the longer I stayed, the more I grew accustomed to it, watching his swift practiced movements, listening to his soft religious mutterings. But she remains with me to this moment. She remains.

  I touched him then, holding my hand against his arm, squeezing through his wool coat to connect to his pain in remembering her, the youth of her, and the utter waste of it all.

  She is still here with me, he said, and he touched his chest before tapping his head softly, tracing a circle on his forehead and shutting his eyes momentarily, thinking on her vision, on her shape. As Ezra finished dressing her, he started singing out her life then, singing out her soul. And it was the most plaintive and saddest tale of desiring I’d ever heard. She wanted to leave that Bristol, to move away with a young boy on a train moving south to Georgia. Just to be gone. Away away away, for as Ezra sang, I listened and had held my guitar quiet till then but swung it around as if on cue and plucked a few notes underneath it as he sang about the ghost of the girl still haunting the farmhouse where she’d died, where a fire had taken her down, like so many before. A fire her brother had set deliberate, bolting her in, jealous of her affection for another, for he’d desired her too, desired to touch her and love her as his own. And when he sung it, it was only then that I recalled seeing the welts and glassy ripples of her flesh as Ezra licked the length of her. But when I looked at her then, after he’d dressed her, after he’d done her up right, those marks were gone, and she was as powdered and beautiful and unsurpassed in her appearance as anyone. He had combed through her long brown hair and swept it up atop her head with two ivory pins. Then smeared careful and artistic his white grease paint upon her cheeks and nose, and then himself. Dabbing it on his face as if in accord to her own unspoken wishes. As he sung her story out and looked at me as he done it, I was so moved by the scene that I remembered my own fire then inside me, listening to him, the one my father burned up in with the house at home. Burned up in the night when I hid, and he knew it.

  He knew what?

  He knew about the pistol my father had fired into the roof of his mouth.

  The pistol he’d stole from the merchant in town. He knew about the opium and thick smoke perpetuating for years. The pale blue fog rising through my life, rising as mayflies around a rotten stump of meat. The buzzing of it, too, he repeated, the buzzing of the life whittling away in him, in me, in my daddy as in my mother before. He saw it all and spoke on it and there was no veil between the years or time then, Isaiah. There was no veil before his eyes, nor any lie he could not see through, so that it shook me to hear his vision. It shook me so that I stopped my guitar and knelt before him and clasped my hands for I did not want him to go on. But he pointed at the girl and said it was her. It was all her that said it—through him—and that he was just a conduit, a channel of life and death, and I believed him. I believed him even as the red doors reflected their garish rich claret in the smeared grease paint of his face, and he smiled so sinister and knowing to see me. For then the noise of the outside room had burst up to startle me, even as the walls became an indictment of my pain. I seen clear bottles of liquid and organs harvested and set afloat in formaldehyde. I seen queer instruments of silver and brass arranged and tucked in sheaths of leather. I seen old books and ledgers and packets of iris root and rush and laurel and sandarac and caraway seed all diffused and cordoned off from the harsher chemical astringents stacked in great oak buckets as he moved as a phantom must, hovering in the room. His feet barely touching down as he spoke and pointed to the girl as the live conduit of him shook uncontrolled and alive. His eyes fluttering up as moths opening and flapping their wings and burning in the world, and that was when he told me about the lights.

  The lights, I whispered in accordance to his tale, and looked into the mist and was shaken myself as the apparition of a body was upon us before we knew it. The gray wide bulk of it appeared and then dissolved as quickly along the path. The body was on a bike, for it hovered there too and the wheels and spokes of it all made such an eerie ticking sound as of an oiled and floating clock. That when it finally receded, my heart slowed back to the world of the living, and I seen at once the strange color of the mist that had lingered so long, for it was much earlier and brighter above the city. The mist and layers of fog had captured some darker strain of night. Some layer or holdover from the nether hours that had kept the stars spilled and scrawled upon the water so long, but was only now lifting, so that even the stars were retreating and being swallowed into the air. And as I watched it all, I could see A.D. also retreating and shriveling up to recall the words Ezra had spoken in the voice of the girl he’d licked the death from, licking away her soul.

  Because the lights are to be my death, he said. The end of me, of everything I mean to hope or do or be. He said it to me like that with his eyes shut and then opened them and smiled for he knew he’d laid his prophecy upon me square and cold. But even then I knew Ezra wasn’t finished, for he was touching the girl’s dress again, smoothing it down as he touched her hair and pricked his fingertip with a sharp quill he’d retrieved from his sleeve, so that he could squeeze a few drops of his own blood on each of her cheeks, rubbing it into the rouge of her, before rubbing it on her lips. This seals it, he said, and it made me shiver the more to see it and I rose from my knees for he was reaching inside her dress for something else, something hard and perfect that he found, pulling it up. A coin, he said. Gold. He held it out to me then as offering from the departed soul, for her words, and I could do nothing but take it lest I tempt the dead.

  You took it? I said. You took it! and I slapped his arm right then for I seen it, the answer for him to tear it all up, this nonsense about prophecies and such. It was right there for him to come back to me, to come down from all this madness. But wasn’t it the same coin you threw on his head? I said, remembering the impossible scene in Ezra’s house, when the coin had outlined a glistening arc before finding Ezra’s white forehead upon which to affix itself. It was hers, wasn’t it?

  And I gave it back, he said.

  Sure, you gave it back, and I nudged him with my shoulder. Don’t you see?

  That means something. Don’t you think that changes everything? Changes the power of the lights and your end here forever? He was watching me and touching his face now thinking, shuffling a bit farther from the railing to hear me. When he did, I could see he was swayed a bit by my reasoning, by what he had not been able to see in himself or his actions.

  No, he said. I thought about that for a while too. I thought that would be the end of it and that the curse, the words, had passed back into Ezra and the girl. I had hoped that much for sure. Hell, I even told Clara May about it but she didn’t want to hear nothing about curses nor lights nor n
othing ending in hardship nor death. She’d already had other aspirations entirely, of something she’d been working on for days to tell me and when she did, I finally knew the words Ezra had spoken had been turned around again somehow with the coin and given right back to me ten-fold to hear her. That was why I run out here in the first place.

  What? What did she say?

  She told me something that struck me down cold is what she said, and all I could do was say to her After. That was what I said, After. This was in Trenton at the restaurant, when I knew it was back with me for sure, the prophecy, from all the way back from Ezra and the dead girl and the coin. But still I told her After, because I didn’t want to believe it. Couldn’t hardly stand it to be true. But knew it had come down on me so sudden and hard and with me not knowing what to do nor how to act for all the world. So that’s what I said. I said, After we get there, honey. After we ride up and down this ridge and find ever last song and name to make my world new. Only then will I be able to handle it, to tackle it for what it is, and fight it off again for sure. Only After.

  But she just says no. It’s too late already for that, son. She called me son, just like that, and I looked at her in the lamplight and just knew here it comes, some other judgment on me for sure, something old Ezra had cooked up in the last fires of that dead little girl. For Clara just looked on me again, smiled, and repeated her words so I’d know for sure what she’d told me, and I couldn’t hardly believe it at first: I’m pregnant, she said. And that was it. My hand went cold and I started looking into the distance and seen all the songs and all the names and all the places I’d never find no more, and it just hit me. The lonesomeness of it all. Of not touching it any more—the music—of not making it my own, of shaping it and leaving it behind to mark me in what I’ve done and been, so much more so than what my daddy done. So I just had to go. I had to find another song in New York, to hear another name, to move.

  Your father, I said, and remembered the burnt up husk of what he’d told me, in that first fire, and what the release of it must have been, and the trauma of seeing and living through it all. After he’d been abused his whole life, suffering unnamed and unwanted.

  Sure, my daddy didn’t do nothing like this his whole life and never would. So I thought the songs would do it. I thought if anything had the power to change the curse of my life, the songs did. The songs, Isaiah, the songs. But then I seen the lights here, and he turned back to look at Manhattan, as the lights blinked off one by one in the dawn. I seen the lights and knew this was it, that it had to be, the end of me for sure. The end for all time.

  When he looked on me again, my own sadness hung inside me as a cold rain or black cloth of soot and rage. To know one so close to me would have what I’d lost. A child. A blessing. That love. Forever. And not to know it nor sense how precious it was, but to see it as a curse instead of a blessing—the one true blessing—set a fire in me, too. And for the life of me I almost threw myself over the railing to think on it and his ignorance. But I didn’t. Instead, I put a brave face on, smiled, and touched his shoulder devout like, and together we listened to the wind singing in the wires.

  XXII

  The Return of Clara May ~ All kinds of funny ~ Nothing about devils nor privies nor ditches ~ To get him down ~ The magic spell ~ Jazz ~ All shifting back and forth and hypnotic ~ Making sand into glass ~ That savage need

  THE RETURN OF CLARA MAY SOLD OUT. It was gone in days I tell you and for some reason A.D. and Ms. Clara May were okay with Benjamin Marks handling all the money that rolled in from Mr. Ralph Peer and didn’t even ask me none about it in the process. Benjamin said he had savings and checking accounts at the Mercantile and at the Farmers & Mechanics and whatnot, and if we just let it be it would grow with him for sure after he drew us all out a share from the earnings and said there’d be more where that come from as we were all on regular salary now for the remainder.

  The remainder of what? I muttered in Ms. Clara May’s apartment. But A.D. and Benjamin were counting figures, dividing wages, shuttling between the receipts of some other investments to boot and I had only to look on Ms. Clara May to know how happy she was I’d brought A.D. back to her. Even if she didn’t want to let on in her face how much she needed me.

  You heard it from him in New York, she said softly, and without lifting a finger, her porcelain-like wrists shifted on her belly where her hands rested, and I was meant to see she was talking about what was growing inside her.

  He told me.

  Well, you seemed to take it fine enough. Her sharp blue eyes sparkled as she watched me, and it was almost predatory, her look, and I wasn’t sure what else was meant behind it. I knew she was happy now, happy as maybe I’d only ever seen her when she was singing and so I couldn’t discern then the malice lingering just beneath it. The feeling I got of some shadow hidden behind her shining eyes, for I could tell she just wanted to cut me down, cut me down to pieces.

  I smiled and said yes and when he told me my own heart skipped a beat, I tell you. It did indeed, I said as soft and casual as I could for I seen A.D. and Benjamin couldn’t hear us none anyways with how they were working their numbers, swiping aside pens and pencils, writing away in their notebooks and such. I took a notion to lower my voice then dramatic-like, as if to exaggerate the confidence I thought we could share now that we were alone.

  She noticed straight aways what I implied, and leaned closer and about held her breath she seemed so still and silent there watching me, waiting. But it was funny, Ms. Clara May, I said, as I breathed deep to see the light rising then on the windowsill behind her, outlining her form in golden flossy rays. We’d been back only a few days from New York, riding down on the train after Benjamin and Ms. Clara May had driven on ahead of us that same night A.D. run off, and just by coming south again winter seemed vacated all a sudden. Almost as if it had been asked politely to leave, as how a Southern gentleman might insist, and with it, the early spring was already ebbing in the trees and grass and Blue Ridge of Virginia, and I felt fresher because of it. Maybe fresher than ever before to know we were moving again in the right direction with our music, up to the top with Runnymede for sure, and maybe even beyond him, and perhaps that was the feeling I wanted to ascertain beneath her malice. Was she happy about that, too, about our success? Or mean and downhearted at something because of it?

  What’s funny, Isaiah? What?

  O nothing, I said and looked at my worn boots a moment before looking back into the deep center of her eyes. It’s just that something’s always in the way, I guess.

  In the way of what? She blinked and I seen a little flush rise from the milky depths of her skin, douring her cheeks, before dissolving again into the smooth constrained shape of her. Just say it, she said. Go on. Anything’s funny with that fool lunkhead over there doing god-knows-what and running off to god-knows-where whenever he feels like it. When the music rises in him, like he says. Or whenever another name that he just has to track down appears, after finding it scribbled on some old newspaper or on the back of some damn grocery list. Names. Isn’t that right? and she nodded her small shrewd head at A.D., and I seen her smile disappear as she touched her belly and set straight up to sip a glass of water she then replaced on the small tabletop beside her. I should think any number of things are out there for him to fall into running off like he does, anything to make us laugh the more. Open manhole covers. Dug ditches. Septic tanks and privy wells. Anything would be funnier than seeing him run off into the black devil night of New York City again. I swear.

  But it wasn’t black, Ms. Clara May. That’s the whole thing. It was full of lights.

  O sure, I know all about those lights. The lights, the lights, that was all he said for days sitting with me, hardly reading, holding the book upside-down as much as right-side-up, thinking on it. He was so worried about running into them lights everywhere he went he finally decided going nowheres was the best solution, until you all got me singing again and mentioned Mr. Ralph Peer and Runnymede’
s success. Always with Runnymede’s success. That’s what got him. Because then I got to hear all about it and even where it come from, those lights, from that Ezra Lee joker. Though as she said his name, something seemed to ripple in the air around her, some imperceptible shift or mote of dust, a dapple in the invisible string of time, and all the sass that was building up inside her diminished. She had to cough then in her hand and aright herself, struggling to set up against the over-starched pillows stacked behind her. There’s all kinds of funny out there, Isaiah, don’t you think? So what’s your funny? She cocked her head sideways like a little bird and watched me. Well?

  I don’t know, ma’am, I said and rubbed my chin to think on her fury, the one building inside her. I guess it’s not like that at all, is what I say. It’s nothing about devils nor privies nor ditches and such. It’s just that when he told me about it on the bridge—and I nodded at her belly to signify we were back on that subject—and I heard him name the curse again, I thought it was funny for him to think like that, and talked instead about what life was set to be like with that new blessing coming his way. I talked about the growth of it, too, and the magic of its spirit, with all the anticipation of being a father and how it changes you. How it makes you feel smaller about yourself in what you’ve always been up to, but bigger in what you’ve got to do now for the little one, with what you’ve got to give. But none of that brought him in like I thought it would. None of that moved him down from his heights.