A Lush and Seething Hell

by John Hornor Jacobs

  9

  Harlan Parker: High Rank Summer

  June 11, 1938

  The people of Pineville were helpful and open about their local musicians and we recorded three men and one woman today. Jim and Mae Coats, a threadbare young white couple, more bone than meat, and newly married. Lovely harmonies, together and singly—both with the earnest, open faces of the young, though. With some regular meals, the brace of them would be very handsome and could turn some heads, but now, their complexions are sallow and they look unhealthy. Pellagra, maybe, though I saw no affliction of their skin. Neither knew any sort of verses of “Stagger Lee,” but they sang a local song called “Mabel the Mule” and went on to render “No More Hiding in the Valley,” “Buck Brush Parson,” and “Thirty Silver Dollars.” A stout fellow named Wilson Neale performed a quite lewd and bumptious song he called “Motter Fotter,” though I’m unsure on the spelling. And a colorful character named Bash Bunks sang another version of “No More Hiding in the Valley” and an interesting version of “Mockingbird” that sounded more like an incantation than a lullaby (see acetate notes). Bash also gave us the names of five musicians “that knowed enough pickin’ to be worth-a-while, I reckon.” A good day and a good find was Mister Bunks.

  It is hot, so very hot, and still early in the summer. At the five-and-dime in Burnsville, the thermometer read ninety-eight degrees. No telling how much water had already evaporated into the heavy, thick air. I’ve bought a metal five-gallon container for potable water, as we’re likely to get dehydrated due to the physical labor of moving the SoundScriber to wherever we record. The device is quite unwieldy and weighs at least two hundred pounds; the Edison batteries, each of which is a hundred pounds; the folding chairs; the microphone; the cables; the whiskey—setting it all up is a labor and in the rising temperature, sweat not only beads, it pours. Bunny and I were absolutely sodden after setting up the SoundScriber first in a back room of a general store that I think doubles as a speakeasy and then in a barn. My shirt was drenched down to my trousers and undergarments. We’ll have to stop somewhere tomorrow for laundry, unless we can camp near a creek.

  I’ve also spent more of our money on tins of sardines and cans of beans, cigarettes, matches, soap, cloth towels, rope, clothespins. The vehicle is getting tight.

  Now we’re camped in a barn for the evening, with the farmer’s permission. Bunny has walked into town; he was restless and possibly had a bit too much of the shine. I am with the Studebaker, as all of our gear is in it. Slept poorly last night, in the steaming darkness. Hopefully, I can sleep better tonight.

  And not dream.

  10

  Cromwell: Remembrances of a Hotel Room

  “Crumb,” Hattie says, looking at him. She’s wearing a slightly worried expression. He looks up from the field journal, shaking his head. “Another record. It’s getting late.”

  “This is bizarre. Parker’s all over the place,” Cromwell says, tapping the journal.

  “How so?” Hattie asks.

  “He goes from describing recordings to discussing his dreams. I knew his mother drowned when he was young, but it really did a number on him.”

  Hattie takes the journal and begins reading, her brow furrowed.

  Cromwell stands and stretches. He exits the secret room, goes to the bathroom, urinates, and then washes his hands and face. He wipes his hands on a towel and blankly wonders who will wash it now that the inhabitant of the house is dead. Should he wash it? He holds it to his nose and smells the ghosted scent of detergent and thinks about the humdrum minutiae of a living house. Laundry. Trash. Dirty sinks and toilets. Leftovers crowding a refrigerator. The detritus of a family.

  Maizie insisted on doing laundry; cooking and the management of the kitchen fell to him. “You don’t know how to fold clothes,” she said, smiling. “And you’ll burn down the house with an iron.” She took care of the bathrooms; he was tasked with the yard, the gutters, the windows. She dusted and fed the cat. He cleaned the litter box. The division of labor sorted through twelve years together, through college and after, during their young professional life, from apartment to condo to house. It was an undeniable progression, one his parents approved of. Cromwell was a man who would always do the right thing, whose life would unfold in predictable ways.

  She would do the laundry but wanted him to help make the beds. The rustle of sheets ballooning over the mattress with a pop, caught in light from the window. A white bedroom, the color of purity. They would sleep with William between them, when he was younger and sick, baby breath sweet in Cromwell’s nose, Maizie’s gaze searching his face. “How did we deserve this?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know. Who deserves anything?”

  “We do,” she said, kissing her son’s head. “We deserve this. He deserves this.”

  There are no endings, just beginnings, Parker said. That phrase sticks with Cromwell.

  In the bedroom, he notices that the sun has fallen and realizes he’s hungry. They worked through lunch. So easy to forget the demands of the body when the mind is otherwise engaged.

  “Let’s call it a day,” he says to Hattie. She raises an eyebrow but doesn’t protest. She sets down the journal and removes her earphones from her neck and places them in the Pelican case’s padded interior. She sets the TASCAM to charge in the outer bedroom.

  “It’s bizarre,” Hattie says. “These two men driving around, sleeping in their car for the government, recording folk songs. Everything’s so different now.”

  “Not that different, really,” Cromwell says. “We’re just better funded. At least this year.”

  Something bothers her, Cromwell can tell. He waits.

  “No, this dude is weird. Like, he’s got a hard-on for ‘Stagger Lee.’ And you know, Crumb, there’s some super-racist versions of that little ditty.”

  “Sure, but that’s what makes it an interesting study in ethnomusicology,” Cromwell says. “There’s always some dirty origin to most songs.” He shrugs.

  “No, that’s not what I’m talking about,” she says.

  “What are you talking about, then?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. This room, the locked door, Parker’s weird-ass dreams—something ain’t right.”

  “You’re right, I’m sure. Let’s get some dinner, and then maybe we’ll work on more of the acetates. Hopefully the journal will let us understand what exactly isn’t right.”

  Her face is tight, lips pursed, but she nods and they stand and go downstairs and out to the car.

  “How long do you think it’ll take to get all the acetates digitized?” Cromwell asks.

  “Couple more days, I’d say.” She shrugs, climbing into the Suburban. “We can take as long as you want, if you . . .” She stops to think. “Need to draw it out. Can’t be good going home to an empty—”

  “No,” Cromwell says. “Taxpayers’ money and all that.”

  He didn’t say that he was pretty sure there was no amount of time or distance that could change how he felt.

  At the hotel, after a cheap dinner at the nearby Denny’s, they agree that returning to digitize more recordings can wait until the morning and retire to their separate rooms.

  For a long while, Cromwell lies in bed, silent, thinking of the oncoming springtime chores around their Alexandria home: Pruning the lilacs, cutting back the crape myrtles, mowing the yard. Weeding. Picking up the deadfall of winter. The long heat of summer rising, the distant sounds of people working on their lawns, the soothing buzz of mowers and the smell of cut grass. But that is a long time away. Summer used to carry the promise of birthday parties and Fourth of July celebrations and then, when the heat died away, the carnival atmosphere of the fair. But not anymore. William would have been seven. They would have walked hand in hand down the fairway and laughed on the Ferris wheel. They would have eaten corn dogs and funnel cakes and breathed in the confectioner’s sugar and returned to Maizie wound up and happy and exhausted. At night, after William had gone to bed, strainin
g against each other in the dark, his mouth heavy on hers, fearful their son might wake and appear in the door, asking to sleep with them.

  He rises and paces the room. A room not too dissimilar to the last one in which Vivian and he often stayed. He thinks about her body now, how they fucked in the cheap prefabricated shower and then, falling over each other, moved to the bed to let the moisture cool on their skin. How he looked down at his cock entering her and then back to her face as if there was some great significance in that rather than simple adultery.

  How easily he transitions from thinking of Maizie to Vivian.

  Something in his stomach churns and he fumbles to the restroom, where his dinner comes up in a chest-racking, clotted mess. He does not feel better afterward. He rises from his knees and looks down on the swirling mess in the white porcelain blankness and flushes. That easy, it’s just gone.

  It’s late when a knock comes to his door. He rises from where he lies on the bed and goes to it, peeks out the peephole, which is curiously dark. For a moment he thinks it’s Hattie, messing with him, her finger over the peephole’s outer lens. She has that sort of sense of humor. So he opens the door, saying, “All right, very funny—”

  Empty hallway.

  He’s on the second floor and he looks back and forth down the length of hall, seeing no one. Flipping the bolt so his door doesn’t lock, he walks to the elevators to see if there’s any inconstancy to the digital floor numbers, revealing a moving carriage. Nothing. Numbers still on 2 and L. In the hallway’s canned air, there is the faintest hint of . . . smoke? Alcohol? Sex? He cannot tell. He has the impression that someone just passed his room and walked the corridor only moments before but now they are gone.

  He returns to his room and shuts his door and looks again through the peephole. Clear now, a fish-eyed view of patterned carpet. He thinks no more of it and returns to his bed, but he’s fully awake now.

  It’s near midnight when he leaves the room and returns to the Parker house.

  In the secret room, he places a record on the turntable and opens Harlan Parker’s field journal.

  11

  Harlan Parker: Bear Henstead, Amoira, and Gramp Hines

  June 17, 1938

  On June 12 in Mallow, we recorded Hiram Randolph Burkes, a cherubic little man with no hair on his head, playing “Stagger Lee,” almost word for word matching Smoot Sawyer’s version, though his chord progression was different—and the bass-string obbligato was a bit more jubilant and meaty. The day after, we found one of the men Smoot Sawyer had told us about, a gentleman by the name Bear Henstead. The directions were vague: “He lives down thar by the confloo of New and Greenbrier Rivers, fellers. Ask for him.” So Bunny found where the Greenbrier and New Rivers met and we drove there, backtracking some, and the first person we asked at the Bellepoint Five and Dime directed us straight to Henstead’s home, a tidy little house outside of town in a field of withered tobacco, brown leaves hanging like moth wings.

  Despite his name, he did not resemble a bear, but was a small, clean-shaven white fellow in overalls and a starched white shirt who greeted us on his porch and told us he’d been expecting us. I do not understand how knowledge moves among the hills of these mountain folk faster than the car drives, but it seems to nevertheless, without the benefit of telegram or telegraph. He indicated we should set up in his barn, among the horses, and I fancy you can hear them making noises in the background as we recorded. Henstead also required a mason jar of moonshine before he would open his banjo case.

  It began like this.

  “Mister Henstead, we like those we record to start with ‘Stagger Lee,’ if you know it. It’s a good bellwether song.”

  “Don’t rightly know what that means but I knows the ballad of that damnable Stack Lee,” he said, smiling. “Never a n—— been born blacker.”

  The word—which gives me such a loathsome feeling that I will not commit it to writing here—was said in such a nonchalant manner, it took me aback. I saw a great fury pass over Bunny, and felt it mirrored in myself. We had not fought and killed and watched our friends and companions die in a far-off country so that men such as Henstead could set themselves over others.

  Hatred constantly reinvents itself. Prejudice against one’s fellow man is rampant and omnipresent, but I had not expected to witness it without some object of animus present, apropos solely of a song.

  “All right, then, Mister Henstead,” I said, determined to move on—sparking a loathsome feeling now, this time in myself, thinking on my cowardice in not confronting the man on his bigotry. “I will signal you when to begin once the device begins cutting the record. All right?”

  He waved me off, though, and unscrewed the mason jar instead, taking a long pull. He hissed like an adder afterward. Henstead stuffed his cheek with tobacco, and only then picked out an arpeggiated chord and slapped the banjo’s sounding board, and then began singing.

  It was a version of “Stagger Lee” that closely resembled much of Smoot Sawyer’s rendition—which follows logically, since they are not divided by any gulf in geography, culture, or station in life. Between Smoot and Henstead, the latter was a far more proficient player, his right-hand picking technique adroit and fluid. His bright tenor voice sounded like a choir bell, which I found an irony, considering the baseness of its source. He ripped into “Stagger Lee,” and it was all well and good.

  But then, at the end of it, he sang this verse:

  The devil saw Stack a-comin’.

  He hollered out, “Now listen to me,

  Get ready them ropes and pitchforks.

  We gone lynch ole Stagger Lee,

  Gone lynch him for eternity.”

  After he finished, I asked him if he knew any other versions of “Stagger Lee,” other than the one he just sang. He indicated that he might, but he did not like them as much and they were more of the Negro persuasion, though—again—he did not use those particular words.

  I recorded the rest of Henstead’s songs without much enthusiasm (noted on the acetate sleeves: another version of “No More Hiding in the Valley,” which more than likely is the real find here; a rousing version of “John the Revelator,” despite my indicating the Library’s desire for secular songs, rather than spiritual; “Up Near Boochy Holler,” another unknown song; “Half a Jar of Moonshine”), using up three twelve-inch discs in total, and packed up the SoundScriber without any small talk. I had intended on follow-up interviews with musicians where I might discuss a player’s musical influences, training, favorite tunes, whatever regional themes and variations of popular music might be prevalent for a fuller understanding of their art and heritage. But the neat, starched Henstead emanated such a negative air—and his casual bigotry left me so discomposed—we left as quickly as we could to find Sawyer’s other recommended musician, a man named Gramp Hines.

  Gramp Hines was not so easy to find. Smoot had been vague about his whereabouts: “Ole Hines used to run the chautauqies way back in the old days, but now he likes to keep to himself ’round about Leatherwood. Might find him near one of them mountain lakes down there, in a big ole tent for Sunday-mornin’ congregatin’. Or Saturday-night carousin’. But he’s a strange one. He knowed fifty-two more songs than anyone else.”

  Bunny and I laughed at that recurring phrase and returned to the Studebaker and the back roads of West Virginia. We had come out of the folded land of the more mountainous regions, into the softer foothills. The woods around us canopied the road, dappling the cab of the Studebaker. With each turning of the sedan, it was as if the old forest, drowsing in the early summer sunshine now lengthening into afternoon, had its own gravity drawing us to it.

  “That old son of a bitch,” Bunny said softly, around his cigarette. “If he was on fire, I wouldn’t piss on him.” I laughed at that. We had removed our jackets and rolled up our shirtsleeves. Sweat discolored our armpits, pooled at our backs. Bunny had removed all the contents of his pockets and placed them in his hat, upturned on the seat between us: p
ocketknife, handkerchief, Zippo lighter, some silver change, Pall Malls, a flat and exhausted wallet. Beyond those items, I doubt Bunny owned much more. After returning from overseas, he’d never stayed in one place too long. He had the clothes on his back, and in his kit. A sleeping bag. And the memories. We both had those.

  At a gas station in Leatherwood, we asked the attendant about Gramp Hines.

  “Why the hell you want to find that loon?” he asked. He was a gaunt, ill-looking man, about my own height and size and coloration, though his hair was dirty blond where mine is black when it is not gray. His white Union Gas uniform was oil stained at the waist and on his trousers, around the pockets. The only clean part was his cap. I explained what our commission was and he scratched his head. “Most of the time, you don’t find Gramp Hines, he finds you. But last I heard, he had his tent up near Gooseneck Lake.”

  Bunny went to the Studebaker and returned with the map, brow furrowed. “I can’t seem to find Gooseneck Lake. Can you point it out?”

  The man went inside the Union station, rummaged around behind the cash register, and returned with a grease pencil and marked a large X on the map and handed it back. “That’s where it was last time I was there, oh, maybe in twenty-two or twenty-three.”

  Bunny chuckled. “You make it sound like it might’ve moved.”

  “Might’ve, gents. Might’ve.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Crick dries up, changes course. Water pools someplace else. Lake moves from one side of a holler to another. Disappears. How it happens ’round here.”

  We thanked the man. He finished filling the Studebaker and I paid, buying us both cigarettes and bottles of Coca-Cola from the icebox. We drank them in the fading summer day, enjoying the sweetness of the soda. The sun had lowered in the vault of sky, and Bunny squinted his eyes and said, “We better get a leg on, Harlan, if we’re gonna find this mug.” He hopped back in the car and I took up the map.