Purchase

by Christopher K. Doyle

  To the end of what? Your memories? This land? This silly business about taking songs from those already passed on into the memory of their own depressing lives. With those niggers you rob?

  I rob no one, I said and the words of guilt and accusation shook me awake. I was fresh now with him saying it. I was opposed, too. We’re a band, I said, raising my voice and throwing it back on him like a cloak. Like you. We make something from the memories of them and bring it back out. We bring it back out to remember it.

  And to change it, he said.

  I wasn’t sure. Of course I’d thought we’d changed ’em before, but sitting there, in the brash noise of that barroom, and looking into his endless eyes, I couldn’t say anything ever changed in the whole damn world. I was still a nigger in his eyes. In so many eyes, I was. The songs we found and saved were the songs of those abused and forgotten and their voices remained even below the surface of the changing words and moods A.D. placed upon them. Had they ever really changed? Had they even moved an inch? Weren’t they still the true and forever things we held onto? That was what we were really doing, wasn’t it? Bestowing truth again upon the world. Returning it to where it had fallen away. Replacing it to where it had first strayed. Change, I finally uttered, watching him waver in the gray light. They ain’t changed none, sir, no. They ain’t nothing changed in all the world. Not one damn thing. Not even you.

  Hell, he said, and moved his lips to say something, yet no sound came. He smiled just the same and then clapped his hands when he was done and the sound shook the whole room and I wasn’t sure what any of it meant or if anyone else had heard, for the room seemed to continue on as before with people drinking and swaying to the staticy singing on the radio. Though as my own general confusion ceased, I remembered why I’d so disliked him to begin with. Then I knew truly why he sat before me either as a living and breathing adversary or as a wavering apparition, for either way he was the same strong urge seeped up out of the drink itself to deny me my strongest desire.

  Our name, I said.

  What?

  Our name, I whispered. You won’t say it, will you? and I shook my head watching him. You never have. Not even that night in this same square, in this same town, and I pointed beyond the smoky shapes reflected in the window, out past the striped awning of the Mercantile. On that very stage you stood, even as the storm raced down from the ridge and the crowd raised up even louder applauding you, but you would not say it. Even after you said every other. You would not say our name because you were afraid it was true what we sung. You were afraid we were better.

  Nonsense, he said with a smirk. You misunderstand everything. If I do not say your name then you fail to even exist. You fail to even matter. That is all, and he shook his equine head side to side as if to wash away the very suggestion of my charge. I mentioned every other act as a courtesy because they were weak and frail. But for you, and here he paused, the great man, pausing as the light inside his face flickered again before striking back true and steady, I felt something in looking at you and the boy. I’ve always felt something in looking at the boy. Ever since the Peabody when he spoke to me of Parmenides. You remember. When he said nothing had changed in the whole world just as you have now. And now here you are, and you’re just as sure he doesn’t change the songs. But I know that’s not true, and I will make you see it, too, friend, before I’m done. I will make you see it for yourself. He touched his bright white tie as he said it, straightening it out above his vanilla cream shirt. That is my pledge to you, to make the people see it, too. That they are changing. That it is for the better for them to change, to fall away, and to sing, to forget this burning away of everything, this sad burning of time and taste and love. This whole Earth is changing in every moment and the music is changing, too. This music is moving the whole world, and I thought you of any other would have at least seen that.

  I seen it, I said. I seen it, and I sure seen you, too.

  Do you? His lips were pale in the light, but shimmery, and as he licked them now with his quick sharp tongue, it was as if the blood between us was boiling up to color his flesh anew in the soft light.

  Because I seen the darkness in you, I continued. I seen it towards me and towards my kind. And I seen the fear, too.

  Ha! Again, with your bravado. It amuses me, and chuckling he leaned close enough then, ranging his wide chest over the table, so I could smell the sulfurous breath rising from inside his hideous blank depths. Even a puff of black smoke escaped his throat (I swear) as he hovered there. His lips slightly parted and red, his creamy face an endless white pudding I wanted to touch my finger to, to draw in its blank slate some sign or shape of indecency, something to mark him for what he was, and what he’d always been. You change the music and I plan to change you, he said, and grinning deeply, he added, and the boy, of course. I plan to change you two right out of my way. The world is changing and I aim to keep it changing. I don’t care about race or creed or time, because all of that falls away beneath my need. All of that can be used to my ends. He moved his hand then in the air purposefully, as if brushing the dust of us aside into a small patch of space that he shook out into infinity. So you see I aim to move aside any impediment. To ease them all out of existence.

  O you do? I said, and put my own hand into the air as if to hold up a guitar, twittering my fingers to loosen the strings of life a bit in the face of all his significance. As I did, behind us, a tray of glasses fell crashing to the floor, and Runnymede brightened to hear it, to hear the chaos and changing nature of life raised against the futility of my words.

  You are the impediment, he said in the stark silence after the crash, and his straight white teeth came together perfectly with a soft and audible chomping. The ones that want to muck up all the ugliness again. That want to do wrong when it can be made right. When it can all be washed aside like a glaze, washed over the rocks and air and hills, washing it all away. That unpleasantness and strife.

  What unpleasantness?

  Why the past, of course. If only you’d let it die, friend, you’d see a whole new world before you. Commerce, he said, and his wide white face broke into an otherworldly grin as he annunciated the word, is the new truth, and the sooner you can wrap your rusty head around it, the better. Then maybe there won’t have to be any blood in all of this. Then maybe there’ll just be you left at the end, walking away from it all, singing unto yourself, strumming for all you’re worth.

  There was a machine behind the bar working now, heating up oil and kernels and the bubbling noise seemed to diffuse the whole room with the airy scent of a circus or carnival, and I couldn’t hear him anymore and what he said for he was mouthing again some words before standing up and grabbing something from beside the candle. He then placed something in it. Something that lit up and flared as sudden as any firework to catch my attention, for I hadn’t realized it, but I was close enough to the candle flame to see the name on the slip of paper as it dispersed into smoke. The name I’d carried all that time and had to do right by. The name that had to be remembered for what it’d done, for what it had sung. But it was gone now and I knew I couldn’t show him any weakness in losing it, in feeling it drift away. Blood, I finally said. Did you just say blood?

  You know I did.

  Well, blood don’t wash away that easy, and I shook my hand out to show him. It sticks right there on the inside, and only comes out when it wants to show you what is real, and I stood before him then as he leaned back. The minty aroma of the man mixing with the scent of popcorn and roasted peanuts.

  No, I suppose the blood doesn’t ever leave, he said. It doesn’t lie either, and he was rubbing his big beautiful hands together and leering at me in the light. It’s just like the lights in that way, I suppose. It’s just like the lights all the way through.

  I was silent. The room had ceased to exist as the bubbling oil and sugary air faded into nothing. I looked into his endless black eyes, as now emblazoned in them were the lights like what Ezra Lee had prophes
ized and what A.D. had almost leapt into from the Brooklyn Bridge. The lights I had to draw him away from even as the sun helped me, brightening the world, easing away A.D.’s madness. What lights? I said, even though he knew it as sure as he’d said it, smiling and clapping his hands again so that I had to cover my ears the thunder shook the building so and a soft ash drifted down to settle over everything like a sad winter snow.

  Why the ones that will be your end, of course. What other lights could I mean? He was smiling and moving to leave. I tried to block him, but he was already behind me, and as I turned, I couldn’t see where he’d got to or where he was going, or if any other had even the faintest notion as to what kind of man walked amongst us and held such sway in what he sung and told people. It’s the lights, Isaiah, the lights. It’s always been the lights.

  The words wavered above the room as I blinked into the smoke. Then another thunderclap rang out, shaking down another rain of ash and soot and when I turned my hands over to shake them clean, all I felt was the hot burning emptiness of the name on my skin. For the letters that had stayed with me somehow, etched into my flesh, written as if by a scalding sharp pen, something eternal and true drawn with lines and drips of the deepest black ink.

  XXV

  Daisies ~ The sad burning away ~ As meager financier ~ He come to me ~ Some indecipherable pattern ~ A vision perhaps ~ The ire in his cheeks ~ The monocled man ~ Back from the edge of that window ~ The very metronome of our making ~ A prism of light and broken geometries ~ Our little Jolie

  JESUS CHRIST, ISAIAH, WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?

  There were crushed daisies beneath me when I sat up. My house was out in front from where I’d lain most the night, and as I shook my head clear, I could see from the roadway a figure struggling with the gate. What? I said and looked down at my hand as he stood there huffing from the exertion of finding me, because I still remembered the letters and wanted to see if they had remained through the night, if it had all really happened as I’d thought. But there was nothing. Only a small red circle drew its ring where before the name had been, where before I’d held it as my talisman, my charm of sorts, to ward away the sadness. I was forgetting it now even as I tried with all my might to gather it back up, to recall Runnymede and his face and the high flare of that light in the lantern, but it was no use. My head throbbed and Benjamin Marks was peering down into the broken shell of me.

  His black mustache was turned out and waxed on both ends. His red cheeks and jowls jiggled as he scoured my worn out and alcohol-soaked form from end to end. Whistling as he done it, he shook his head from side to side, muttering about the true plight of things in the world, about abstinence and temperance and all the other things I suppose he and Ms. Clara May must have preached to each other when they were alone. As he nudged me with the pointy toe of his left boot, I stretched my arms up and could hear his broken pocket watch snap shut and knew that time mattered to him now. Time always mattered to him in some way. But in his agitated movements and sweat-laden chin, I knew there was something more elemental going on here, something tense and ruddy and historic bringing him out here to roust me from my stupor.

  It’s Clara May, he said. She’s at the hospital. Been there all night.

  Hospital? And I squinted not understanding the plain arithmetic of his statement.

  It’s the baby, man. The baby’s almost here.

  NOW MY JOB WAS TO KEEP A.D. CALM, TO KEEP HIM HOME, as Ms. Clara May had requested. At least, that was what I deciphered from the endless stream of sentences issuing from Benjamin’s puckered little mouth. He was a curious man, Benjamin Marks, and I wondered if he’d ever really known love before, if he’d ever really felt a woman’s caress. (You can discount, of course, his patronage in those sultry hallways at Ezra Lee’s house of ill repute, for in those curtained and red-lit rooms, I’m certain his basest desires had been met.) Because as I watched him drive, moving the wheel back and forth in his fierce little hands, I remembered that fateful night (I’d seen him there stranded in the shadows, I swear) when Ms. Clara May had dipped her pretty little head inside the wheel of fire, when it had danced its brilliant flame of remembrance and regret above her, and I wondered if he’d felt his own regret in not stepping forth to save her, to take her in his arms? For as he drove on and talked, wandering into whatever odd tangent the man was prone to—on moneylending and the current price of tobacco and the yield of a ten-year US T-Note—I could sense the sad burning away inside him and thought he’d finally found it, his love, and it was all because of Ms. Clara May and what he wanted to make for her, in what he’d already built himself up into. Sure, men like that were always trying to outdo others, to set up airs, so to speak, to see in the illusion of themselves some greater good, some stronger hand. I’d already seen him craft himself as meager financier, as stage manager, as intrepid investor, as someone who hoped to put his finger on some wild pulse in the world—if only to break from the dull hand that life had dealt him. And in that sense, I could not begrudge his affection toward Ms. Clara May in the least, nor his worrying on her condition, with the almost doting nature he displayed during her pregnancy.

  Now I didn’t know how far his affection for her had gone (nor how far it had been reciprocated), but my plan all along had been to let it happen, to at least permit the space for it to happen. I hadn’t had the chance to get A.D. away on another trip, going after another song, though I thought this birth might just be the opportunity. Yet as we sped into town, and I watched Benjamin hem and haw over the steering wheel, I felt a certain companionship stretch out between us. The need in him to extend on all sides for some connection or kind of return wavered in the air like an ember. He was truly a wreck to know his beloved was in some sterile room somewheres pushing out another life, another extension for him to love, and he wasn’t there to see it, to help. Instead, he’d been charged with the objectionable task of coming out to pick up some drunk nigger, ironically, the same man who held his best interests in heart. The same man who watched now as he wiped another sweat rag across his face. All the nervousness and bluster that had always seemed part and parcel of the man had since faded in light of this new development, with his love, now that he was sick as a dog in worrying on his Clara May.

  Clara May said for you to watch him, and I hope you can watch him good, he said again and emphasized this last point by looking at me about as earnest and steady as I’d ever seen. Even as he pulled up on State Street, winking as he said it and eying the closed curtain of Ms. Clara May’s apartment. I was all set to appease him, and maybe to even say a nice word about Ms. Clara May, about how tough she was, hinting as I could on his feeling for her and thereby relating in some unspoken way how I was pulling for him in all this, in however it shook out. Yet as I got out of the car and turned to address him, he couldn’t have cared less. He was already looking past me to a crowd gathered in the late morning light before the Mercantile.

  Some of them were talking to each other and taking their hats from their heads and shaking them out or slapping them against their blue jeans or overalls as the bell above the Mercantile’s door continued to ring with a sharp impertinent chime each time another man came out. Then an official in a dark suit and monocle would solemnly let another man in for what I supposed was a promotion or deal with the local Freemasons or Anabaptists, or some such secretness. But all of them seemed very tense and hurried. And as I watched Benjamin take his studied read of the matter—for I knew he had more regard for the world of finance than me—the only thing he could mutter was about Ms. Clara May and the baby, before racing off, his mustache wafting in the breeze. His car skidding against the curb, leaning his pointed head out one last time to survey me and my intentions and the crowd gathering ever larger beneath the Mercantile’s striped awning.

  A.D. was a mess. He’d never heard of going to the hospital for anything let alone having a baby and set in his high-backed chair reading—or at least trying to—as he fumbled through the pages. Then in the next instant he’d g
o to the window and tug the curtain as if he wanted to open it, but then thought better of it, for the kettle on the stove was just then screeching out its steamy lament. Off he’d go like a good butler and make us two cups of coffee and then set down a spell himself on a kitchen stool and arrange in a trance the sugar and cream for us, swirling with his spoon for what seemed like ages the mixture. Before finally I had to grab his wrist to get him to calm down into any sort of common courtesy.

  I seen him, I finally said to him, as if to jolt him back into some kind of coherence, and I looked into his fluttering eyes as he stood there and swayed in the dim light. I wasn’t sure he’d heard me let alone knew the implication, his mind raced so. That I had to spell it all out some more and held up my hand as if the red circle on it would denote clearly and truly the implication of my meaning. Runnymede, I said. He come to me last night at a bar.

  What do you mean he come to you? He stepped to the window as he said it and finally took a notion to thrust aside the curtain. As he did, the light come slanting in like daggers and even from my position inside the room I could hear the general commotion at the Mercantile growing louder and louder.

  I wasn’t sure if I should tell you, I continued, but then I knew the more I thought on it, the more I wanted to get you back out there with me again to find the names of all those songs, and so I knew you’d care about it. I knew it mattered most.

  Mattered most? Mattered most? he said and looked on me with all the cruelty in his soul that I’d not seen before. O it was as if a black cloud on the ridge had covered his eyes. His long thin face had so caved in at my words, that all the meanness that he’d always only saved for others like John Hill Carter and maybe old Jessico in Annapolis and even Benjamin Marks when we’d first seen him, come forth in a bluster to confront me. Now? he said. Now is when you’re gonna have a go at me with my wife pushing out a little one somewheres in some hospital where you only ever go to die? Now’s when you’re gonna do it— after I done told you and practically begged you that I couldn’t no more—that she just wouldn’t allow it. But now is when you’re gonna try it all again? Jesus Christ, Isaiah.