No! a woman howled as the wind of the other horses passed within the slipstream of their speed, and Runnymede whispered what I heard in my soul. The speed, he said, the speed and the freedom of the dance, too. The freedom that had him wagging a long finger in my face. As you can see, the dancer is not free. He never is. The crowd hung on the rail as some even dangled over to watch the tragedy of the downed horse unfold writhing in the dirt and twisted legs of the jockey.
That is the great deception, he said. That the dance and the belief in the dance is a freedom. There are no steps that are free, friend. There is no ease. The steps are prescribed and numbered and mount always to a rhythm that forms a pattern that crafts an intention. Something that pretends to Man on the face of its ceremony. That preens and fawns and fabricates in every instance a freedom that is not there. A foundation that is not true. A form that is not whole. That merely suggests an artful ordination. A shape unbound by sides and geometries, weights and distinctions. Something that gives them hope against the knowledge of the purchase of the event that has already occurred. That occurred years and years before they could even imagine. But it’s a purchase just the same. Just as this race was. Just as this dance. Just as your word amen is your purchase on the past. And as he nodded at the track, a man with a shotgun appeared from a wagon and stood inspecting the horse and jockey. The rider had been dragged now from beneath the beast and all looked on as he winced and gasped for we could see his leg split asunder by the weight and awkwardness of the fall. Two jagged bones edged from his pants legs and were smeared with blood that he touched and leaned back from for he was in an agony that would not cease as he screamed and hit fiercely his fist into the dirt.
What will he do? I said and looked at the shotgun and the horse that did not move but watched the man with its bloodstained eyes.
What he would always do, Runnymede said. The purchase of this deed is done. It has been done for years untold. There is a darker order here. That’s always been here. An order that keeps us each the purchase of each. That elects one above the other. That offsets heights and weights and weaknesses and measures. That has placed in line the things that weren’t in line before and that were left to chance by the universal hand, as if setting sticks to float upon a river. An order that came before money and finance and markets. Before kingdoms and divisions and boundaries. That came before even metal and mineral were raised up as currency. An order that arose from a purchase of power. A purchase of talent and shape. Of substance and idea. Yes, even ideas were purchased. Do not look so obtuse, friend. History is the story of an economy, of buying and trading away lives. All to be pushed and shaped anew. To be forced inside a form ordained from time immemorial. For one purchase does not exist where there is not yet another purchase above it. And still another above it. All in line to the first purchase. The first purchase established the form that began the order that initiated the way, and all others are only subordinate to its condition. Even as this horse and man and gun cannot initiate any other response than the one that began with the first purchase that follows to this day.
He nodded smiling at me, but then as if pardoning both the animal and man who intended to shoot him, Runnymede raised his hand in a benediction, waving it back and forth, and the horse sprang up, as if raised from a pyre. Dazed, it bent gently its front legs testing them and its nostrils flared open like wet holes bored from slate to breathe the night air. I hadn’t seen anything like it. Nothing moved in Runnymede’s face as we witnessed it. But his lips, his strange opaque lips rose and fell against the smooth white masonry of his teeth, and I felt what A.D. must have at the Peabody in crying out against his logic, in dragging him asunder for his words.
But what of this purchase? I said. The one you yourself proclaimed?
Nonsense. The purchase is still intact. The purchase remains true. This horse was never meant to die this way.
Why? And I pushed closer to him, to the great wide size of him. Because we’ve all been bought and paid for? Because we’ve all been divided and apportioned our lot?
Precisely. In the first purchase. The one that initiated the pattern.
The pattern that persists?
To this day and beyond.
Then you were wrong.
Wrong? He turned to me still pristine and calm in his powder-blue suit, unspoiled or touched by the surrounding chaos.
You were wrong when you said change was the only true force upon Earth. In the library. When you said it to A.D. at the Peabody.
The great man touched his chin and sighed. Then as if the wind and light of air had quivered to align in some new way, he leaned down like a shining moon to touch my shoulder. It was a touch so slight, so faint and soft of hand, I turned with him to walk away from the track, and listened as he spoke to me so gently, so hushed and concerned, as if instructing a child in the error of his ways. You misunderstand me. The purchase is always changing, always moving from hand to hand, and shape to shape in its foreordained pattern. Anything that disrupts that pattern is the true hazard. Like your present intention.
My intention?
With your songs, of course. The songs that would unravel each purchase.
With what you find out there in the ridge and dredge back up. It’s the emotion in the songs that can release each deed. That can undo the purchase. You unfasten the knot that binds, unloosening all that’s been cast down and foretold. That’s why I’m a great collapsing to you. That’s what I do. The world is set for a great collapsing even if it doesn’t yet know it, with this radio, and this need for an electric connection. For something to hold fast the hearts of Man in their fear and longing and dread. To collapse them from the songs you find out there that are not songs at all. Those old words and ways that would send them all out again.
Out?
Into the world. You do realize you would send them out to seek their end—
or truth—as you might say. Because of those songs, and the power of those songs, the pattern and the purchase could be undone. So that it would be like before if you succeed. A world without order, when chaos licked its delicious lips. Commerce provides the pattern, even if it crashes momentarily now and again. That is why I have to make the music shinier and easier to digest. So the purchase can continue on its way. Where we know the offer and the offered. The taken and the took. Look, he said and pointed as a woman dropped a racing form as another (a servant) carried a bag and drink for her, and then bent to pick up the form before properly placing it back inside her bag. Or there, he said as a man in spectacles coughed and held out his glasses leaning above a vendor who smiled beneath his load. A thick black tray hung from his neck, and as the spectacled man touched and fingered and then released each product in turn, the vendor could see the man’s dissatisfaction with the whole lot before moving off on his endless circuit, patrolling the other vendors and products and stalls. Never satisfied. Never stopping, as each transaction was set aside and ranked. As each moment with Runnymede parted a veil to reveal a power I’d never imagined, a power always out there and hovering, braced in the ether, an invisible pattern repeated everywhere as Runnymede pointed and laughed and strummed along the strands of an everlasting web.
Stop it, stop it, I said. It was insidious and gross was what it was. I’d not felt the weave so close before nor felt so oppressed by the revelation and turned away as he placed his powder blue arm upon my shoulder, laughing as we walked.
How can I stop it? he said as the outline of the shed rows appeared, ranging back in an unerring line into the distance. As I said, it is your intention that threatens the purchase.
How can that be?
The purchase of every song is the same as the purchase of every life.
I was speechless and stood cowed as around me the energy of the night seemed drained through an icy sieve. And yet, as I looked back to the shed rows, I could hear a faint singing. Something escaping some shadowed doorway. A lilting pulse I held onto to stand apart from what he’d charged me with—slaver
y, in essence—of binding the lives of the ones who’d written the songs to the purpose of our success.
By your endeavors, he said. To reap your fame and fortune. By taking those songs and selling them to raise your name up to return—
My Annie, I whispered and shook my head. And my Lucy girl.
For as much as you want them returned to you, he said, and though you may try to change the ideal of this purchase with your intentions, you cannot change the account of its return, no matter what. For love is a purchase, too.
Even love?
Especially love, and he leveled his calm heavy head at me. Consider your own personal receipt.
Of my family? If they return?
If they return, the purchase is intact. You will have won them by your endeavor, by your unsavory peddling of ill-gotten songs. Of songs stolen. Of lives enslaved, bound to the pain of the past.
And they cannot be free? I muttered, even though I didn’t know what that meant.
You still don’t understand what I aim to do? You still don’t see me. He placed his massive hands on my shoulders and spun me around to see the white, perfect plane of his face. Leaning down toward me, he tapped his long white finger against my chest. I aim to change your arrival and your return, the whole dance of your intention. I aim to change your rising up ahead of me.
Our rising?
Into the lights, he said. Always into the lights, and as he turned, a surge of people rushed past. The bell had rung and another race was off and the air and speed were such that sandwich wrappers and errant newspapers swirled up in a vortex above the trampled grass. I had to breathe to not be caught up in the excitement of it, the commerce and change, and searched to find him but he was already gone. His shape dissolving with each word. You’re almost there, I heard him say, as he moved back toward the rail. Just keep heading toward the lights, he whispered, before disappearing altogether, ranging up somewhere behind me, moving high into the air. Always toward the lights.
XXXI
An impossible slick string ~ Our run of pure luck ~ The girls ~ His own spectral eyes ~ Just forms – Some gravitas to the circumstance ~ A fortress of pillows ~ In supplanting the usurper ~ Nashville
WHEN A.D. RETURNED THERE WAS ONLY MOONLIGHT above me. A faint airy cloud had risen where Runnymede had been and in the swollen face of the full moon my head swam to see the world a confusion of compacts and transactions, of agreements and deficits. Not just on blacks neither, as history might have told me, but on everyone else besides, and everything. Each invisible purchase was like a static charge that brought up all the hair on my neck. It was as if each man and woman were tethered to an impossible slick string that trailed off into the ledgers of a history I could never know. Into a world I could never see. Not entire.
Guitar, A.D. said and he held my shoulders and seemed inflamed by his meeting with Misericordia. Percussion, he said and grabbing an overturned milk crate, he tapped out a rhythm as we started back toward the car. If there were any chance to tell him about my ghostly meeting with Runnymede this was it, before he set up in the backseat working on that song, rearranging it as we went, working his spark of life into it. And yet, as we walked, and the night unwound into the warmer wind of a spring just settling in, and I looked back through the soughing laurel and elm to hear the crowd roar as the horses bobbed in their endless dreamy circuit, I held back. I was in this thing now forever and knew it. Just as Runnymede had said, it was included in the purchase, and as much as I wanted it to happen, to have my family returned to me, to find them, I didn’t want A.D. to want it as much now neither. I looked at him as we walked and knew I didn’t want him to purchase his life and family with the fame and fortune we sought. I didn’t want him to desire to be raised up over another as I’d had to do with that damn Hackett, miserable sonofabitch that he was. I wanted little Jolie and Ms. Clara May to be free, but the purchase of it all had sent me out, had sent everything along its endless course, setting in motion a shape I carried with me to this day.
So I drove, and he worked at that song before the memory of it should fade, and I thought I might have already been too late in extracting him from this agreement. From this purchase, as it were. I could already see the trajectory of his intentions forming as a cloud to hover above us perpetual. Something dense and scalded at the sides, with jagged bits of lightening and a rumbling in its heated core like the rumbling of the horses that had raced off from us on the track. For he’d already pointed us up north, so that Bristol— our Bristol—was but a memory to him. A point receding in the darkness of the land we drove through as he sung his demons in the backseat, and friends, I attest, it was the saddest and most plaintive sounds that ever did come from his throat.
CAMDEN, NEW JERSEY WAS ANOTHER WHIRLWIND altogether. But there was a look in Mr. Ralph Peer’s eyes after we recorded Misericordia’s song, a look I had not seen that gave me pause. So that when we were done and already on the road, I could still feel his warm handshake and his words saying, This is it, Isaiah. You’ve finally done it. As we parted, there were tears on his cheeks as the song repeated on a reel to reel behind him, as already the boys in his studio were pressing its magic into vinyl that would change all of it for us and bring Runnymede himself back into the dark trajectory of my dreaming.
O I knew we weren’t done with him yet, not by a long shot, even if we drove on in a stupor after that. After A.D. took the wheel and eased off and drove in the wrong direction for a spell spiraling out around Camden. So that we just floated over the road as the lights of the sun and stars shined done on us in turn as we repeated that song of Misericordia’s and even worked a new set of flourishes in to boot, and before we’d even made it to Maryland it was on the radio and burning up I tell you. Burning up like fire that could tear away the world it was so hot to hear and to know it was us for all time singing on the air.
You’ve got your headliner this very same night, if you want it? It was Benjamin Marks on the other end. A.D. had stopped to call Ms. Clara May from a phone booth inside the lobby of the Hotel DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware when I watched him sort of lean in closer to the receiver.
Where’s she at?
There was a long silence. Then I could hear Benjamin’s loud nasal twang as if it were right beside me, echoing up over the lobby and red vinyl booths, announcing his rank awkwardness in speaking with A.D. on the subject, even if they both knew Benjamin was with her now and A.D. wasn’t. She’s here, he said, and then there was another long silence before Ms. Clara May came on and A.D. leaned even closer as if to pull her right through the coiled Western Electric wire and frosted copper plates. Closing the wooden door, I watched him raise his hands and describe something before ceasing and slamming down the phone so hard I thought it would break it was so awful and loud that I had to look at the girl behind the counter to see if she’d heard. But she hadn’t. We were in a luncheonette attached to the hotel and as I ordered another milkshake A.D. put in another nickel and dialed again and talked again and then slammed down the phone again and that’s when I knew it—we were off.
York, he said when I asked where to, and that was it. We were onstage that same night at a theater with all the pomp and circumstance you’d expect befitting our newfound success. I don’t think I saw the light of day the next two weeks we were so busy driving after shows to accommodate our run of pure luck. It was a deluge was what it was. The money poured in and the offers built up and everyone remembered: Why yes, those were them boys that sang The Ballad of Clara May. Those were the ones I liked. But now that they had this here Misericordia Blues to consider, it pumped us up even more into an act to take hold of and run clear to the top with. So everyone and many a sundry newspaper ran our story, and I would be remiss to say I didn’t offer up my own smiling mug on occasion to anyone who’d care to listen about my long lost wife and baby girl. But it never did make the newsstand. Not with me being black, of course, and that made me drink the more to know our time spent hustling was fruitless in that regard,
even if I did get my fair share of attention, for I suppose A.D. got his fair share, too.
There were girls on the road, so many girls you wouldn’t of believed it, and I thought A.D. would of burst to touch each one of them after not seeing nor hearing from Ms. Clara May for days and days. From York to Pittsburgh, Cumberland to Pocomoke, Bethlehem to Wheeling we rode and played shows and every time he called back to Ms. Clara May, Benjamin Marks would always get on the line to tell him about the next show he’d already lined up, and the next one after that, but I don’t think A.D. ever cared about any of it, to tell the truth. Especially the attention. Especially the girls. For he saw women during that time, I assure you. He saw them and couldn’t help but be bombarded by them after a show, as they come streaming backstage or at the side doors of the theaters where we were just sneaking out. O they reared up in their calico skirts and tight cotton shirts just to catch a glimpse of the man who never once seemed to send back any of the flirtations they’d sent his way all throughout the show. Not the way most other front men would a done, I can assure you. Because if they were dancing and swaying and singing in front of his own spectral eyes, I don’t think he ever saw them for what they were. At least, not in the way they wanted him too.
They were just forms to him. Bodies drifting past in bars and taverns and on street corners and state fairs. The young and old alike. The curious and grotesque. All the ones who’d found him attractive and desirable and who might have sat rapt and intense staring at their radio all this time. Yet in the flesh and blood of day they couldn’t get a good read on him to save their skin he was so dead set on finding the next name, or the next song, or the next spark that might flare us up even higher into the stratosphere of our success. I swear; it wasn’t enough for him to know we were blowing up—but we had to blow up that much more so that Ms. Clara May might come back to him. So she’d know, as he finally told me. So she wouldn’t be able to help it, with how big we got, she’d have to love him again. Because we’ll be bigger than the whole world, he said. Bigger than a thousand Runnymedes and anyone else besides, and she’ll have to see me for real again. To remember. To feel it all over again. What we had.
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