A Lush and Seething Hell

by John Hornor Jacobs

  A door, with a single padlock on a bracket. Cromwell goes to the garage and retrieves a hammer. He rips the hasp from the wall, wondering who might’ve thought it would stop anyone.

  “Why the hell would they just put a padlock on the door?” Hattie asks. “You went through that like shit through a goose.”

  “Nice,” Cromwell says. Hattie’s exclamations are always fecund. “Yes, just a padlock wouldn’t have stopped anyone who wanted to get in there.” He shrugs. “Maybe it was to keep herself out of it.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Lock up a room just because you don’t want to go in it.” She brightened. “Maybe this place is haunted.” She pats her camera bag. “I’m gonna be rich, Crumb.”

  He does not smile. “I don’t think she wanted to keep herself out of here. I think she just wanted to make herself feel better about whatever was in here.”

  Hattie shakes her head, not understanding. He isn’t sure he understands, either.

  There’s no doorknob, and at some point in the house’s long history, the room—including the door—was painted, more than once, effectively cementing the door shut. Cromwell feels his impatience rise, full-throated. He wedges the hammer’s claw into the seam of paint at the edge of the door and applies his strength. The wood creaks, a ripping sound tears through the room, and the door opens. Stale air pours out.

  Hattie grabs a lamp from a sideboard table, drags it to its power cord’s extent—right in the doorway—and turns it on, illuminating the room beyond.

  It’s near empty, Cromwell sees. A small bedroom at one time, maybe. A nursery, never used. There are no coverings on the bare walls, nor any pictures or photos. The window has been boarded over. There is, simply, what looks like a large filing cabinet of indeterminate age, a lidded crate, and an oversized wooden turntable with an oddly shaped stylus arm, bulbous at the pivot and the end.

  “Smells like an old man’s taint in here,” Hattie says.

  “How would you know, exactly, what an old man’s taint smells like?” Cromwell says.

  “Crumb, that’s a door you do not want to open,” Hattie responds.

  It’s an unusual intimacy, but the anticipation of what’s to come has him vulnerable to innuendo. With Viv, he cannot exactly piece together all the little moments that led to what they eventually became. He cannot piece together all the little moments that led to what Maizie and William became, either. He thought of himself as happily married. When he looked at himself, in the abstract, he was a good and faithful husband who loved his wife. Their story was a story of faithfulness. Until Vivian. He can’t remember all the little pieces falling into place, and then falling into bed with her. They’d been in Boston, at a convention about using the Markov model to categorize digital sound files. Rooms on different floors. No coworkers other than just them. There’d always been flirtation. There’d always been some attraction, but nothing serious. After all, he was a happily married man. He wore a ring, and so did Vivian, and that made it okay, in ways he didn’t understand. She would not leave her husband and he would not leave his wife. It was compartmentalized and separate. She had her George, and he had Maizie. And then they had each other, before he could understand what was happening. It was so easy. Why shouldn’t I have this? he thought. It doesn’t lessen my love for my wife. But he didn’t think how the betrayal would eat at the fabric between them.

  He is at a loss when he closes his eyes or thinks on anything too long. Except for this, this door. The old, rust-colored Master Lock. Work.

  Hattie leaves, returning momentarily with another lamp taken from a bedroom. She pauses before plugging it into an outlet, saying, “Let’s hope this doesn’t burn down the house. These fixtures look midcentury at best.”

  The light blooms, casting ellipses of illumination on the wall that fold at the ceiling. Cromwell moves to examine the record player. “SoundScriber,” he says. He lifts the stylus arm from its cradle. “No needle. Look here.” He points to the back of the old device. “Vacuum tubes. And inputs.”

  Hattie moves around to see and whistles. “Shit, those are XLR jacks. Crazy we’re still using the same old-ass tech today as they did . . . whenever the fuck they locked this shit up.”

  “More important,” Cromwell says, “he recorded with this thing.”

  “Cutting discs? Vinyl?” Hattie asks.

  “No,” he says. “They were either coated aluminum or acetate.”

  Hattie opens the chest, coughing a little with the rising dust. “Here’s why we came, Crumb.” Records in white sleeves, each sleeve covered in writing. Cromwell picks up the top one and tilts it toward the lamp.

  “‘Lucius Spoon, Cummins State Farm. Arkansas. July 13, 1938.’ ‘Harlan Parker’ written at the bottom.” He squints at the faint pencil handwriting. “It says, ‘Stagolee.’ And some lyrics.”

  “What?”

  “Songs,” Cromwell says. “Songs.”

  Hattie picks up a disc, reads the writing after a moment of puzzling out the script. “‘Everybody Talking About Heaven Ain’t Going There,’” she says. “‘Vester White, Alabama.’ Different date.”

  “Careful with that,” Cromwell says. “Acetate degrades and the coating on aluminum discs does, too.”

  “Watch out yourself.” Hattie cuts him a withering look. “I’m not going to drop it, Crumb. Chill.”

  They place the records gingerly back in the crate and shut the lid. “We’ll need to get this downstairs, so we can use the hi-fi.”

  “Right, I’ll see what sort of audio outputs it has. If it’s something I can route through my mixer into the TASCAM. Failing that, we could just pick up one of those cheap turntables, or I could just mic the room and we get a field recording and then maybe a better one back in DC.”

  “No cheap turntable. I’d prefer the highest-quality recording here,” Cromwell says. “I’ll buy it if I have to, on my own dime. The Library will reimburse me.” He says this, doubts it is true, and yet really doesn’t care. With all the darkness that has come into his life, this death and bequest mean grant money, papers, a lecture circuit maybe. The Library might be the intendee, but Cromwell is the beneficiary. This could be the work of the rest of his life. A hundred, two hundred, bucks on a turntable with a good needle will be nothing in the face of that. He rubs his chin. “I’m nervous even moving this crate downstairs. I have no idea how fragile these discs are.”

  And there are still the filing cabinets. He opens the top drawer, finds it empty, save for a few brittle, brown accordion folders. One holds what looks like receipts, faded and yellowed. In the bottom drawer, there’s a ledger book, blue fabric cover, corners and spine wrapped in leather.

  Cromwell opens the ledger. Harlan Parker, Alexandria, Virginia. June 6, 1938. By commission of the Library of Congress, to make assay of the secular folk musics of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, including the Mississippi River Valley, and the Ozark Mountains. Riffling the pages, there’s a blur of the same tight, cramped hand that was on the record sleeves. “Stagolee,” or “Stackalee,” or “Stagger Lee” has a different modality for every mind and mouth that renders it, I’ve come to learn. Whatever morphology I’ve found, I can’t help but wonder if there’s not some ur-version of the song, without all the myriad variations . . .

  “I’m going to get a turntable. I don’t want to risk any loss of music.” He makes his decision. “We’ll have to record these in here.”

  6

  Cromwell: Smoot Sawyer

  By the time he returns from Best Buy with a turntable, Hattie has converted the hidden room into a passable workplace. She’s found card tables and folding chairs in a dormer storage space, and a candle from some other part of the house. For the old-man-taint smell, no doubt.

  Cromwell unpacks the turntable—he spent more than he intended, over four hundred dollars, enough that his credit card was declined and he had to call the Citibank robots and listen to menu after droning menu until he could talk with a real person and fix the issue. He promised h
imself that, afterward, he’d ship the turntable home.

  He exhumes it from the Styrofoam and plastic wrapping. The odd, unpleasant scent of polymers and chemical catalyzers trapped within the box since its construction in China fill the space, vying with the scented candle and the mold of the room. He keeps all of the packaging neat and in the box for the return trip. The card table is too unsteady for his taste, so he takes the wooden bedside table from the bedroom and places the player on top of that, instead. He lightly grips the device’s plinth and gives it a wiggle, as if trying to shake it from its seat. It remains firm. Hattie runs an XLR cable from the rear of the turntable to her mixer, and another from the mixer into her TASCAM digital recorder. She stops.

  “Crumb! I almost forgot,” she says. “Learned this when those twelve Woody Guthrie acetates turned up in a garage sale.” She roots around in her Pelican case. “Two-millimeter sapphire stylus.” She holds up a plastic container. “Use the needle you have there and you’ll risk delaminating the whole disc.” She withdraws something from the case, approaches the turntable, and detaches the current needle and attaches a new one. She returns to her TASCAM recorder. It reminds Cromwell of the old tricorders from Star Trek episodes, fitting neatly in Hattie’s palm. Hattie withdraws a Bluetooth speaker out of her Pelican case, thumbs it on, and then runs a miniplug from the auxiliary jack to the turntable’s headphone port. Her own headphones, she plugs into the mixing board and hangs around her neck.

  “Let’s play one so I can get levels first, and test the TASCAM,” she says.

  Cromwell places his seat and the turntable next to the record crate in a bit of proprietary dominance, sits down, and swivels his legs toward the crate. Hattie withdraws what looks like a tissue box, but pulls out a pair of white nitrile gloves and tosses them to Cromwell. He puts them on, his attention focused on the contents of the crate. To his eye, there are at least eighty records within, all vertically stored. He does not know how many might be deteriorated or delaminated, but despite the moldy smell of the room, he cannot see any wear or decay within the crate other than a brittleness and yellowing of the record slips. He pulls a disc from the far end and checks the date. August 25, 1938. He replaces it with a level of reverence that scientists reserve for handling sealed test tubes of contagious pathogens and withdraws a second record from the opposite end of the crate. He inspects the faint scrawl of timeworn pencil writing on the white record slip.

  “‘June 8, 1938. Smoot Sawyer, Buckhannon, West Virginia,’” Cromwell reads.

  Withdrawing the record, he feels the faint texture of grooves on one side of the disc, but on the other side, it is smooth as plastic. Unrecorded. Possibly the old acetates were recordable on only a single side. He does not know—he will ask Hattie later. He takes a moment to allow his fingers to absorb that tactile sensation of handling the acetate. Hattie watches him with her earphones on, an eyebrow cocked. He feels good, at this moment. He feels like this is what he’s supposed to be doing—he’s worked for this, all his life, he endured what he’s endured, and now he wants to remember this. Vivian is far away. Maizie and William, quiet now.

  When he was young, he listened to vinyl records—Couperin and Vivaldi, Mozart and Beethoven, Debussy and Holst. He listened to Gregorian chants and choirs like Sounds of Blackness. He listened to the Staple Singers and Dolly Parton and musical soundtracks—Gigi, The Sound of Music, Guys and Dolls, Brigadoon, The Wiz. He listened to Led Zeppelin, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder and Prince, the Fat Boys and the Gap Band. Bob Dylan and the Beatles. The Who and Peter Frampton. All on vinyl. But that was so long ago. A lifetime. Yet the one thing that remained from that jumble of near-forgotten sound was the ritual of vinyl. The hushed withdrawal of the disc, holding the shining object up to the light to examine its surface, fearful of scratches. The placement and setting of the needle. The wash of music and the perusal of liner notes as the first stirrings of sound burst through the speakers.

  Cassette tapes started the death of the ritual, and even before digital took over, compact discs had finished the job. But the ritual remains ingrained inside him. Cromwell’s hands know it well.

  He places the record on the turntable, engages the flywheel, and then carefully—hunched over so that his eyeline settles at record and needle level—lowers the tone arm to the acetate recording.

  There’s a thin crackling, and sound begins to emanate from the speakers.

  That thang takes down mah voice?

  It records sound waves and etches those waves into the coating on the disc as it revolves.

  Waves. Like the sea? Been there once, got a mouthful of the stuff and was like to die.

  Not that kind of wave, sir.

  And it hears me?

  Every bit of what we’re saying now. Any sound this [bamf] picks up—your voice, my voice, the guitar—anything loud enough to be sensed by this microphone gets translated into vibrations and etchings. I will play it for you when we are finished.

  And you want singing from ’round these parts?

  That’s the idea. Secular songs. Local music, not church music. Not religious. Songs that might be typical of this area. They will be stored in the Library of Congress.

  Seck-ular, you say? And I’ll be famous?

  That is not probable, Mister Sawyer. But it’s not out of the question, either. Let’s try a song and then we’ll see about fame and fortune.

  Well, I don’t know ’bout that, as we’re a god-fearin’ kind of folk.

  Religious music is well documented and formalized, Mister Sawyer. We would like to learn about the songs outside of the influence of the church. [Baying of dog and a woman’s voice bidding it hush]

  We’re god-fearin’.

  [Fifteen seconds of silence]

  You say you have a little tobacky? Maybe I could remember if’n I had some of that.

  [Rustling]

  That’s better.

  So, Mister Sawyer, do you think you could play “Stagger Lee”? We’d like to start off with that.

  “Stackalee”? I think I could give ’er a go, but all I got is this here guitar for ’company.

  That’s fine, Mister Sawyer, just fine.

  Cromwell looks at Hattie. She’s intent on the mixing board but notices his attention and, raising her gaze to his, gives him a thumbs-up. The audio levels are acceptable. He turns his attention back to the shimmering disc locked in rotation and then to the white record slip. Smoot Sawyer, Buckhannon, West Virginia. “Stagger Lee,” “No More Hiding in the Valley.” Parker’s handwriting is a scrawl, but it’s strangely quite legible to him.

  Faint strains of a guitar fill the room, an atonal buzz steaming from sizzling bacon grease. Smoot—Mister Sawyer, Cromwell thinks—plays with an aggressive walking bassline, answered by brisk strumming on the higher strings so that despite the remove of years, the tinniness and crackling of the recording, the song of a man who died decades before is heard once more by the living.

  Come all y’all sporty fellers,

  Come take a list’ to me.

  Got a tale here from the tellers

  Of that bad, bad man,

  Stackalee.

  A short flourish of strumming with the alternating bass notes, Cromwell hears, picked with the man’s thumb. He went to enough bluegrass performances as an undergraduate to have seen this style of older mountain picking—rough fretting alternating with rhythmic strokes. Cromwell is somewhat familiar with the song, though his familiarity is of the two dominant modalities—the Caucasian bad-man ballad made popular by Pete Seeger and Dave Van Ronk, and the joyous Negro Southern rhythm and blues song popularized by Lloyd Price and countless other sons and daughters of the South. The blues version is preeminent in modern culture, though Cromwell finds himself fascinated by Smoot Sawyer’s version of “Stagger Lee,” which musically falls in line with the Caucasian traditions but lyrically (from what he can remember from his early days studying ethnomusicology) falls somewhere in between the white and black versions of the song. In his
mind, he cobbles together an image of Smoot the man—What kind of name is Smoot? Surely his parents were not that unkind—an image that is pure fabrication: overalls over a khaki button-down shirt; a thin, clean-shaven yet haggard face; white but nut-brown from the sun on his neck and forearms; lean from the daily toil of growing corn, or mining, or any of a hundred other demanding physical labors a man named Smoot in West Virginia would be heir to.

  Sawyer begins singing once more. The old story, Stagger Lee and Billy Lyons gambling—not playing dice in this version, but playing cards in a sporting club, oblivious to the “perfumed ladies” all around them, focused on the game. Stagger Lee loses his money and his hat; Billy Lyons taunts him, wearing it. Stagger Lee goes home to get his “forty-one”—not a caliber of gun that Cromwell is aware of, though it’s within the realm of possibility, as he’s not much for firearms. Billy Lyons begs for his life, telling Stagger Lee about his wife and family and how they’re waiting at home. Stagger Lee laughs; they are in a house of prostitution, and he’s talking about his wife and children? He shoots Billy Lyons through the gut; the bullet passes through the man and shatters the glass in the barkeep’s hands. The whores scatter.

  The sheriff and his deputies come to arrest Stagger Lee, but they’re too scared and argue among themselves as to who should go into the sporting club to get him.

  The big ole Sergeant Frisbee come into the bar,

  Saying, “Stackalee, you done killed a man,

  We ain’t going to go too far.

  Come on down to the station,

  You better come along with me.”

  That bad, bad man,

  Stackalee.

  They take him to the station, and in the collapsed-time of music, by the next verse he’s before the judge. And by the verse after that, he’s to be hanged. Not too far off from how the judgments of black men happened back then, Cromwell thinks. Things haven’t changed much. We’re not far from Ferguson.