Purchase

by Christopher K. Doyle

  She was silent. Her jaw had unclenched in listening to me and I seen her small pink tongue moving against her neat row of white bottom teeth. It didn’t? she said finally, though I swear I couldn’t tell from where the words come, for her mouth was as set as cement it didn’t move an inch to even show she was breathing let alone speaking.

  I leaned in a bit more then shook my head and said none of them words seemed to help. In fact, they only seemed to make him more defiant in the face of them. He just huffed and puffed out a mouthful of cold air and rubbed his hands together contemplating that curse or that gold coin he’d flipped onto Ezra Lee’s head, and I tell you I was most lost for a moment on that bridge. I didn’t know what to do, nor if I’d ever get him back to see the side of day again, and I looked on A.D. then in the other room. I looked on him as if he were my own son, if I’d had one. He was working and scribbling with Benjamin Marks over another count and the names of some broker Benjamin knew, a cousin or uncle up in Harrisburg, but a good man he said, honest as the day is long, and it was as if me and Ms. Clara May watched them from a great distance, watching from the far end of a telescope, with all the peripherals and room wiped clean from sight. We could only focus on what they were doing, moving silently with their papers, adding and subtracting numbers, reciting a list, and as they did, I wasn’t so sure I should tell her what I’d done to get him down. Though I also knew I’d already gone too far into telling it, in giving her maybe this crucial last piece of truth to use against him someday, my A.D., and the thought made me cold.

  Maybe it was because she seemed cold to me then, removed from it all with the emotion in her washed clear out for good. For she was looking on me so expectant and tense, I thought I might burst not to tell her what it was that brought him in finally, the magic spell as it were, and shaking my head soft and slow I should have known before this I couldn’t never put nothing over on her to begin with. At least not about A.D. and his predilections, and so I just bowed my head, cleared my throat, and told her what it was that saved him. Jazz, I said and looked at her silhouetted face and seen the ends of her thin eyebrows arch up in amazement. Jazz was what it was, and it didn’t hurt none neither that all those lights finally blinked out in the sun.

  Jazz? she said, and looked on me funny, scrunching up her nose, and I wondered if her glassy neck was all rippled and agitated to have to say such a word as that.

  Jazz. And if it wasn’t for that and me seeing the Duke do it like the way he did, and then telling him about it, describing it to him, I wouldn’t have been able to bring him back in neither. I swear.

  The Duke? she said, skeptical now at my mentioning royalty to boot mixed in with all this other nonsense.

  Sure, the Duke, and I nodded my head then like she knew him, too. Like everyone knew the power of the Duke and what he did. But of course A.D. didn’t know what I meant, so I had to spell it out for him piece by piece, with how the Duke’s playing was like the purest water, with how his music was like the blood in our veins. All shifting back and forth like currents on the ocean, in long arcing patterns while at the same time scattered and shifting and loose. And in every sad, swift pass of it, in the melody, in how I wanted to cry out with words for the mood and driving sweep of it, it would all change in the next instant. It would gallop away into some other register, into some higher clime, and there weren’t no place nor solid standing for me to swim back to, nothing to hold onto. For jazz was like the city, I told him, and we—and I pointed to him and me then meaning our music and the subject of our music—we was like the ridge, with the brighter hills and mountains raised up from the blues but always tipped with them. Always stained and painted with the pain and sorrow and joy, and A.D. brightened then to hear me because he knew inside himself it was true.

  What’s true?

  That we’re not like that wide ocean, but like the country water and streams and lakes. Like even the one near Yancey Jakes, the one he took us to that night, to see the smooth swift flow of it. We’re like the river all hemmed in and neat between its banks, our sound. The ones always moving and rushing off the same way you are, for we’re always moving with you, not underneath you, nor against you. So it’s smooth like that, and aching too in its ease, in its motion. Ain’t that right?

  Outside a car horn sounded and we could hear the glazier’s door below us open as the little brass bell above the lintel tinkled and I wondered for the life of me why we were all up so early and gathered together to begin with. We’d only ridden into Roanoke last night on the train, and then went straight on through darkness into Bristol, and as soon as we knocked on the door Ms. Clara May opened it as if she’d been waiting all that time, even though it had been three full days since A.D.’d run off.

  Benjamin was there too with her. His shabby coat and dusty hat were thrown over a chair, and the silly ridiculous shape of the man looked awful comfortable and at home. He was already stacking dollar bills into piles that’d been wired in from Mr. Ralph Peer after the first rush of sales hit. And as A.D. slumped in next to him to start counting it himself, Ms. Clara May gave him such a look I didn’t think he’d ever be able to speak to her again, let alone sing nor even say hi to me in the process, it was so hard. So then here we were, waking up with Bristol and the ridge with Ms. Clara May listening to the shopkeeper below, listening to him scrape his boots off and then turn the flue in his stove before pulling the chain as the rat-a-tat-tat of the coal chute opened and filled it out. The great chalky rattle clamored up through the whole building before its echo died away in the silence of her listening and watching the world beneath us. Yet all the while I waited, I knew she still hadn’t said what she was holding in for me. Her little pink tongue couldn’t help but flicker in and out as if she was testing the air for the preponderance of her thoughts on our music.

  Smooth, she finally said, as she held her palm to the floor to feel the warmth of the furnace in the shop catch hold, with it burning anew, making sand into glass.

  Smooth like a river. Our songs is, that’s what I say.

  That’s what you say. But she didn’t turn to me when she said it. She didn’t move neither, but just kept her gaze on the windows and listened to the awakening life shuttling lonesome and slow on the streets below.

  Well, it’s what we got to keep moving with, ain’t it? It’s gonna get us where we want to go. Smooth and easy.

  Easy? she said, and turned to me with the taste of that word like gunmetal in her mouth. Easy you say? Running around the ridge like fools, barging in on old no-timers shacks and no-count niggers and such, in on folks that have never seen the half-life of a dime in years upon years. That’s what’s so easy about it? And then to take their songs from them and use them as your own?

  I was silent. I’d never heard her call no colored folk nigger before and didn’t like how it made her pretty mouth look. How it shaped it like she was biting something out in front of her, gnawing against the air. And so she wasn’t so smooth nor pretty to me after that. She had hardened into something else as quick as could be, and as her hand rested on her belly again, I knew why. O she just thrummed her hand there and seen me watching as if to amplify it too, her reasoning, the way the nature of her whole being had turned just like that, as quick as a flash. Though when I consider it now, and think on my own Annie and Lucy girl, and the family I once had, I can’t fault her none in that regards. Not in the least. If the man had to change in the coming of the child, then the woman had to change, too. And even if I couldn’t remember that savage need in Annie to keep the world safe and close to her, so that everything around her would help make her child that much better and true. Well, with Ms. Clara May, I guess I would see firsthand what it could do to everything that seemed to confront and challenge her with what she meant to have.

  Cause when this one comes, she said and smiled devilish and slow, there won’t be any more of that grand foolishness of yours—and his—and holding up her hand, as if to wave away that life, I seen for the first time the little
diamond ring she had on her finger. Like a small glint of heavendust itself. I glanced to A.D. in the kitchen and seen his ring finger wrapped with a slim gold band and knew they’d been married sometime hence, in some secret ceremony, for they hadn’t yet announced it and hadn’t seen fit to include me in the event. But I could hear it already in her voice, the new command she had of the room, of the situation, and everyone in it. Her voice was louder, as if our own confidence was through. That the trust between us had left as soon as she’d said it, naming the path A.D. would have to toe from then on.

  But you’re singing, Ms. Clara May. You sing like no other and love it, too, for I’ve seen it on your face and eyes and everything else that moves you when it comes out like a shot, your voice. So why would you deny the music to yourself?

  Well, I didn’t say I wouldn’t be singing no more, now did I? She laughed and waved her hand against the flush of heat building in waves and gusts from downstairs so I jumped and pushed up the window to let in a cool rush of air.

  You’ll still sing with us? I said and shook my head because I thought I’d just heard her say there wouldn’t be no more of that.

  I said there wouldn’t be any more of that ridge running for you two. There won’t be any more of that.

  Ma’am?

  There’s already songs, Isaiah. Hell, the whole world is just full of them. Why would you have to go out and find any more?

  She said it. I swear. She set right there and said it and nodded her head as A.D. and Benjamin stood as if they’d only just heard our voices and were concerned with the welfare of the unborn child amidst such commotion and quarrellings, even if she was just talking with me. But she took the moment to touch her belly and sigh real loud, wafting her face again for the heat before smiling at me as if none of our discourse or argument had ever happened.

  That false cold smile of hers.

  The one I would see the more of, and that made her face into a mask I shall never forget. Like the smeared white mask of Ezra Lee’s. The one that makes me shiver and recoil every time I recall it, or him, or what Ms. Clara May’s decision had me finally resort to in my dealings with A.D. from then on.

  XXIII

  The days of silence and dread ~ The blueness ~ Burning to be found ~ Five more like the first ~ The lonely magnet ~ To keep the blood true ~ Their unfathomable eyes ~ To my dark side of the room ~ As of a baptism or ordination ~ Something just audible to the attentive ear

  THOSE WERE THE DAYS OF SILENCE AND DREAD. When Ms. Clara May would be there at the shows Benjamin lined up for us—in Virginia and West Virginia and even Tennessee sometimes—but wouldn’t speak none to me nor I to her, and that was considered the best solution by all concerned. Since the tension that still stretched between us about the songs and going out to get them had gotten so heated that even A.D. didn’t know which side of the coin to come down on.

  I would be at my house most times sitting in my bedroom or walking the property, passing my hands through the tall switchgrass and weeds, watching the ridge light up in the morning with the dawning. Or, better yet, I’d watch late in the evening. As the colors of the world seemed to flow into its wan faint glow and the blueness was the last thing I could see or distinguish, before the innumerable tracks of stars seeped out one by one, and the mountains were just a far off paper cutout that seemed to sigh and persist in its resignation as of a monster nestled and sleeping in the silence of its dreaming.

  It was perfect, was what it was. The air was warm to me then, even in the early spring chill, and I would stand there as if absorbed by the sun’s golden rays and didn’t have to think none about my family then, nor about finding them, nor even about raising myself up with A.D. into some sort of prominence where my name might be broadcast to the far corners of the globe. There was just the blueness. That soft sad color, that feeling and mood, a place I could have stood in all my life just to feel it, to be part of the utter isolation of it. It seems odd, I know, but I don’t know how else to describe that feeling other than calling it the blueness, for I have not heard it named nor approached in any other way by anyone living or dead. It was a sort of perfection, I suppose, if you’d care to name it by way of mathematics or books. Though I don’t usually go in for all that scientific stuff, and considered the blueness just fine. For I was always real sad when it ended, and watched it for moments and moments even after it ended. Inside then, I’d throw another log on the fire and listen to the blueness fade into its currents and folds of time, and as I stood there and warmed myself in the heat, I couldn’t be sure if it had ever really happened, those moments, that suspension I’d just shared with the ridge, even if I looked for it and watched it each day.

  A connection, I guess is what it really was, a connection beyond just living and struggling to feel and to be something. O never to worry no more, nor be tired nor striving for anything else. Absolute and devout, as it were. And on some days I kept that aloof blue feeling with me even when I had to see Ms. Clara May or A.D. Or when Benjamin Marks leered at me from the side of whatever stage we were working that weekend, at whatever hayseed venue he’d booked. His face a scrunched up mess of raised lips and gnashed teeth and overblown anxiety that made his small little ears a ruby red, trying to attract my attention as best he could before the first few chords of our last song finally rang out. Or the encore—when I would really be in the moment—and his chance would be dashed for sure. As in Bluefield that next month, or Blacksburg a month later, when I knowed just then that my own last possibility with A.D. had finally come full circle.

  Pssst, Benjamin said and I could hear him like a slashed tire he was so loud and insistent. Anyways the crowd had just then hushed to watch A.D., for he was changing one of his broken guitar strings, and it was always otherworldly to the folks to see something like that. I have seen how this worked on them before, fascinating them to see we actually had to work these instruments. That they were just as fallible and meek as anything else, and the totality of it all would throw them into a state of perpetual wonderment. To find out at last there was a fragmentation behind the harmonious whole they’d always heard had never occurred to them, at least not in so obvious a way. And it always seemed to change them into a group of amazed and startled school children as they watched—even if they were all over twenty or even thirty years old—and so of course, Benjamin’s listing, leering voice shook the amazement right out of them. I had to play it off like my microphone was staticy and hot. Tapping it once and then twice, I followed the cord to the edge of the stage and knelt down so that I could shake it out and talk to Benjamin even without A.D. or Ms. Clara May noticing.

  You gotta stay with him after, and he nodded toward A.D., even though I knew or had a premonition before about what he meant.

  Stay with who? I said, just to set him a little more on edge, to see if he really was as anxious as he tried not to let on.

  With A.D., he hissed, who else? and he shook his sharp little head as if I was the most ignorant nigger in the whole county.

  I blinked at him once playing my part, all innocent and out of sorts like. Then looking straight at Benjamin in the flashing darkness, I seen for the first time that he held the back of a wrinkled hotel receipt and that a name was written on it in the most antique and scribbled script. I knew right away what it was—my chance—even if Ms. Clara May and even A.D. himself wouldn’t have wanted me to take it. But I knew my chance was held out to me at the end of his small sweaty hand.

  You got to keep him from it, Benjamin said, and waved the receipt before me.

  Me? I said, and blinked again, drawing out again his anxiousness, pushing that last little button in him. Why me?

  Because you know him, and he averted his eyes as he seen he was leaning a bit too far out and that his fat round belly must have been seen by the crowd for he heard quite a few giggles. Just take it, he said, and puffed on a cigar before snapping shut the broken pocket watch he rubbed furiously as if to satisfy some invisible agenda.

  I reache
d up and touched the paper a second to see the writing on it and seen Benjamin’s face too in the half-light looking into the questioning depth of me. The stern consternation of his jaw. His long handlebar moustache twitching now, before his tense little lips snapped shut as he watched me, imploring me to act, to accept it, and I believed him then. I did. I’d drawn out the real him at last and it was all frustration and anxiety and honest indignation. Even though I’d seen how close and comfortable he got when it was just him and Ms. Clara May, with A.D. out of the picture, out wandering or talking to some promoter. Or even reading or maybe working on an old song he’d set aside months ago, rearranging lyrics and such, trying to make it right. But I could see right through that fat little fellow. If he was playing tough with me, it was all an act. Even if he wanted A.D. at some point to vacate the scene entire, so he could have Ms. Clara May to himself, A.D. was still his meal ticket. And if A.D. went running off looking for some other name, then Ms. Clara May would have gotten real mad at Benjamin for letting him go, and the whole thing might collapse. So I guess he wanted me to track down the songs instead, even if he didn’t say so or hint in words to the effect. But I seen his fat red face dangling that receipt that he could have just as easily thrown into the trash or burnt up into ash.

  Would you just take it?

  There was a rustling of strings then, and as I turned, I heard A.D. strum the first few chords of The Return of Clara May as the cheering and clapping returned like thunder. Shaking out my microphone, I was still engaged in this last bit of playacting before grabbing the receipt, tucking it inside my pocket, and turning to the full force of the crowd, to the sound. For even as I watched them, I couldn’t see them no more; I couldn’t hear them neither. It all drained away. There was only A.D. now and his face before me—with his long focused stare—for he was intent on Ms. Clara May as she sang, even as I could feel the heat of the name in my pocket burning to be found.