In an hour, we were hopelessly lost. We had followed an unmarked road off the highway at the point where it might’ve led to the greasy mark on the map the attendant had pointed out, but that dirt road became a switchback up a small mountain; we were halfway up the skirts before we stopped. The sun had dipped below the far rim of hills, turning the sky blue, striated with pink clouds. We turned around and went back down, retracing our route, but due to some errant turning, we found ourselves riding along a dry creek bed deeper into the hills. In the half-light of evening, the sound of insects began to rise, their fat bodies impacting like intermittent raindrops as they splattered against the windshield. The light faded, and Bunny turned on the headlights.
“I’m hungry. We could just find a clearing and camp for the evening. I still have some peanuts and a can of beans,” Bunny said. “And I could use a drink.” I had been thinking along the same lines.
“That sounds just fine,” I said.
We drove until the sky had totally darkened. By the headlights of the Studebaker, we found a camp at the side of the dry creek bed we’d been following. It was a wide grassy area, settled among oaks and horse chestnuts on springy, dry soil. Bunny was pleased, as he was—of the two of us—the one who would sleep on the ground. We set to building a fire from deadfall and soon had one burning brightly, fragrant hardwood smoke wreathing the clearing. We shared a jar of shine—a sip, a hiss, then a shaking of the head like a dog snakebit on the nose—and waited for the fire to render enough coal to set the can of beans to cooking. On a whim, Bunny suggested some music and it wasn’t too late in the night when we drunkenly set up the SoundScriber and listened to what we had already recorded.
There, in the woods, we set up the device near the fire, attached the batteries, and played Smoot Sawyer’s recording of “Stagger Lee” and then “No More Hiding in the Valley.” Then on to Bash Bunks, and the others. The sound echoed up and into the darkened foliage. The air had cooled from the heat of the day, and there was a light breeze. In my mind, I pictured a fox halting his nocturnal haunt, hushed and inactive, his ears twitching, listening to the music rising up into the night air. The insects stilled, the night creatures listened.
“Let’s hear ‘Stagger Lee’ again, boss,” Bunny said. He lay with his hands behind his head, his sleeping bag as a pillow. “I like ‘No More Hiding in the Valley’ better, but there’s more meat to ‘Stagger Lee.’”
I knew exactly what he meant. I withdrew the first disc I had recorded, placed it on the turntable, and was about to lower the tone arm when a voice said, “That’s a fine song, but I could do you fellers one better.”
Bunny was up in a flash, despite his drunkenness. A woman stood there, right at the edge of the firelight. I rose to face her.
“Ma’am,” I began. “Are you all right? We’re far away—”
“I know where I am,” she said. “Do you gents know where you are?”
When she stepped forward into the brighter firelight, I could make out her features. At first glance, I thought she was an old woman, due to her lustrous white hair, but after the first shock of it, I saw her shining, unblemished skin, and her straight posture and unbowed figure. She wore a simple, modest dress of blue, a white woolen sweater. It took a moment to register she wore no shoes. Her feet seemed wild, dirty, animal—there is no other way to put it. As if her soles had never known shoes. But her legs were well formed, as was the rest of her. An amused, expressive mouth, and intelligent eyes gazing back at me.
Bunny said, “Well, now you mention it, not exactly. We know the general area, you might say.”
“But not yet how to get out of it,” I added.
She moved near to where I stood next to the SoundScriber.
“What’s this? Quite a sight, a couple of city boys out here playing music in the dark,” she said, turning her head to examine it. “I’ve seen ole hand-cranked Victrolas before, but nothing like this thing.” This thang. Her voice had a musical quality to it, the lilting rise and fall of country folk. As she neared me, I could smell lilac and jasmine and honeysuckle—odors I’d been catching whiffs of all day with the windows down and the summer rising, but more discernible now.
“It’s for making recordings,” I said. “Of regional song.”
I hastily went into the Library’s mission. “My name is Harlan Parker,” I said, extending my hand. She took it in her warm, firm grip. She had thick calluses on her palms and fingers and a deep strength in her grip. “And my companion is Edmund Whitten.”
“Amoira Hines,” she said. “It sure is a pleasure runnin’ up on you two. How ’bout offering a lady a drink, Mister Whitten?”
“Bunny. Everyone calls me Bunny.”
“Sounds ’bout right, Bunny.” She reached out and touched his cheek as he handed her the mason jar. Strange seeing a man I’ve known as long as Bunny, and through all of it—war, women, whiskey—stalwart and unblinking, blushing.
I finished explaining what we were doing in those parts, camping in the woods, and she nodded her head as I spoke. “You should find Gramp. He could sing you a doozy or two,” she said.
“That was who we were searching for! His tent near Gooseneck Lake, but we ended up here.”
She smiled. “He’s packed up and moved on, down into Tennessee.”
“You know him well?” I asked.
She nodded. “I ought to.” She paused and looked at me with a bright eye. “He’s my husband.”
Bunny spluttered. “But, but—”
I said, “We were under the impression that Gramp Hines was—”
“Was what?”
“Older,” I said.
She laughed. “I imagine he’s ’bout a hundred and a day. But still spry.”
“But you can’t be more than—” Bunny said.
“More than what?” When he didn’t answer, she chuckled and moved to sit down beside him.
As Bunny scrambled to make room, I said, “Where did you come from? I didn’t see any houses or cabins nearby.”
“I hail from Cidersend. Hoo, I could sing you a song from back home that would have you stiffen in your britches!”
“Would you sing it for us?” I asked. “I’d like to record it.”
“Maybe in a little bit, eager boy,” she said.
“Where’s Cidersend?” Bunny asked. “Is it around here?”
“Naw, it’s back up in the Ozarks, a far piece west. Now I live up the holler,” she said. “Been there for many a year now. Can remember when this crick ran high.”
“And Gramp,” I said. “Your husband. He’s gone for good? Or—”
“He makes his rounds and then meanders back ’round autumn,” she said.
“At his age?” I asked.
She shrugged. I was under the distinct impression that age in this part of the world was purely arbitrary.
Bunny handed her the mason jar again and she took a long swallow and then hooted, casting a bright gaze about. “When I was a girl,” she said, “I’d strip naked and swim in the creek.”
Bunny took a swallow of the moonshine himself, fascinated by her and her words. It had been a while since either of us had enjoyed the company of a woman. And she was quite a handsome woman, if one discounted her ghostly white hair and her gnarled bare feet.
“Time was, I might get up to some trouble with a coupla young fellers like yourselves on a night like this, when the moon and crick were high.” She laughed. A luxurious, indolent sound.
“Do you know any songs from around here?” I asked.
She slowly turned her head to me and wetted her lips. “I figured you’d never ask.”
The woman and Bunny remained sitting close together, smoking cigarettes. Bunny making sure that Amoira drank enough shine to feel comfortable being recorded. I busied myself preparing a fresh acetate disc for cutting.
“We like to start with ‘Stagger Lee’ if we could, should you know it. It’s a good indicator of—”
“I know it, course I do,” Amoira said.
“Who don’t? It’s like my very own shadow.”
I nodded and readied everything—writing down her name on the sleeve of the acetate disc, followed by “Stagger Lee.”
“Whenever you’re ready,” I said. She nodded. I placed the cutting arm on the blank acetate disc, watching the brittle coating peel away from the virgin surface of the record. When I was sure it was recording well, I turned back to Amoira to watch her performance.
She opened her mouth.
And screamed.
12
Harlan Parker: The Morning After
When I woke, it was dawn and the campfire was dead, sending a faint ribbon of smoke skyward. I pushed myself up from the ground and felt a moment of dislocation—Bunny sleeps on the ground, not me, I thought—and looked around. Morning filtered down through the canopy, a flowering of light that flooded the dry creek bed and painted the forest in bright greens.
Bunny looked as if he’d been poleaxed. He stood and said, “What the hell happened, Harlan?” He turned around in a circle. “Where’s the woman?”
The events of the night before were muddy in my mind, indistinct. I remembered placing the cutting needle on the SoundScriber, and then Amoira opening her mouth and her face becoming hideous for a moment, racked with either pain or hatred or some other overwhelming emotion I could not fathom.
“I don’t know,” I said. Bunny, disheveled, began buttoning his shirt. “But it looks like you had a good time.” I gestured at him. There were love bites and scratches and suckling marks all across his torso.
He pulled off his shirt and looked down at his chest. “What the hell? If I’m going to roll around in the dirt with a country girl, I’d like to be able to remember it.” He looked at me, bewildered, as if seeking some sort of explanation. He stopped. “Looks like you had a fine time yourself.”
All the aches and pains of the night settled upon me then. A million little wounds surmounted by a great one: my throbbing head. I went to the Studebaker, sat in the front seat, and adjusted the rearview so I might look at myself. Haggard, unkempt, bloodshot. Near my collarbone were suckling marks, too.
I returned to Bunny, who stooped in the clearing, gathering up our things. I took the mason jar of shine—there was only two fingers left in this one—and drank half of it and handed it back to Bunny, who drank the rest.
“Where’s that raccoon?” Bunny said.
“Raccoon? What raccoon?”
“The one that shat in my mouth,” he said. He puckered and spat. “Don’t know if I signed up for this business, Harlan.”
We hastily packed up the SoundScriber and batteries, and I carefully re-sleeved the twelve-inch acetate labeled Amoira Hines—“Stagger Lee.” The rest of the disc cover was blank. As I held it, there was a pause from Bunny and we exchanged glances before I placed it carefully in the case with our other discs, those few scrawled with song and the others, unmarred.
In the light of day, it was a simple matter finding our way back out, to Leatherwood, where we visited the restroom at the same Union station, drinking our fill from the hose on the side of the building and running our heads under the stream. How many mornings, in those times away from the front, did we spend like this in France? In Belgium?
Between us, we decided to put West Virginia behind us, and head south and west into Tennessee. There was an unspoken yet great relief when we passed over the state line, the sign welcome to tenn-o-see! whipping by at seventy miles per hour. At the back of my mind was Gramp Hines and his wife—we were, in some ways, on his trail. It was something I did not linger over very long.
The land’s undulant hills and fields became greener, and I saw shotgun shacks now near parcels of land. Negro men and women working fields behind mules, sitting on porches, standing by trucks. The farther south we traveled, the heat seemed to grow more intense, the sky became hazy, and the country became flatter.
At noon we stopped for hamburgers at a roadside diner outside of Nashville. Afterward, Bunny and I felt almost normal, considering the strange events of the night before. We arrived at Ramsay Schweitzer’s home, one of the men in Tennessee on the Federal Writers’ Grant, and he welcomed us warmly, poured cold beers, and brightened our stay with conversation about the area. His wife, Anne, seemed bemused at our disheveled state and openly smiled at Bunny’s wild hair. Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Debussy filled their house with strains of music from the Victor Electrola record player, sounds very far away from those one might have heard in West Virginia.
Aware that we resembled hoboes from days and nights spent on the road, Bunny and I kept our collars buttoned and ties firmly in place, as if in an effort to convey some respectability, even when the day’s heat did not subside as night deepened. Schweitzer poured generous glasses of good bourbon for a nightcap and led us to our room—an enclosed sleeping porch, with two cots and a single black General Electric fan that oscillated back and forth between us—and we fell into dreamless sleep.
I was acutely aware of the acetate disc labeled Amoira Hines sitting nearby, unlistened to and unheard in its crate.
13
Cromwell: Amoira Hines
Cromwell closes the ledger and delicately sorts through the acetate discs until he finds the one labeled in faint pencil Amoira Hines.
He removes it from the handwritten sleeve, places it on the turntable, and lowers the tone arm. A faint crackling begins to sound. The familiar preamble of vinyl.
Then the sound of a woman’s voice.
What first sounds like a scream becomes . . .
Laughter.
It’s an indeterminate voice—not with the rough gravel and distress of the aged, but not a youthful timbre, either. Closing his eyes, Cromwell can see her white hair, her gnarled feet.
Deep feminine laughter, laughter that goes on and on, unstopping for what seems like forever. It has a manic power to it. Cromwell checks his watch. Two minutes. Three. Five. Seven.
The emotion behind it, the wellspring of the sound—the song, really, Cromwell thinks, a wordless song—isn’t joy, or mirth, or humor, but something else Cromwell cannot place. Abruptly the laughing ceases.
There’s a grunt, and some subvocal noises, another grunt, a moan, heavy breath. At first it sounds like a slap but then it occurs again, and again, picking up speed. A faint yes from a female mouth, and then it’s repeated by two male voices. Cromwell has watched enough porn to know what he’s hearing. Then, softly: Ogdru tulu handria agga rast benthu hasi tulu on aggrom nung delendu and more nonsense that the woman says over and over again until the men repeat it after her. Moans and the slapping of flesh.
The acetate ends.
Cromwell finds himself hard, clutching his cock through his trousers. He considers masturbating then, in a dead woman’s house in the small hours of morning. He rises, unzips his pants, takes his swollen member in hand, and is about to spit upon its head—comme il faut—when his iPhone begins to vibrate madly in his pocket.
He withdraws his phone to see an Alexandria number displayed and for an instant he thinks it might be Maizie calling and he fills with shame and answers it. His cock wilts in his hand, and he looks down on it in a dismayed acceptance of a personal diminution. I will diminish, and go into the west, he thinks, picturing Cate Blanchett’s smooth, androgynous face. To the gray havens, where sap does not rise in trees, cocks stay soft. Where spouses stay dead.
He places the phone to his ear. The overly cheery prerecorded voice on the other end says, Hi, I’m Allison! Please stay on the line to learn how you can refinance your home, and Cromwell responds, “Go fuck yourself, Allison,” and hangs up.
He slips the phone back in his trousers and zips his pants. He removes the acetate from the turntable and gingerly replaces it in its sleeve.
Cromwell recovers the journal and opens it once more and begins to read.
14
Harlan Parker: Tenn-O-See
July 7, 1938
I’ve lost Bunny, and the SoundScriber has been destroyed. By fire. I’m
distressed by Bunny’s departure, but I fear the destruction of the SoundScriber will be a harder obstacle to surmount.
Thankfully, none of the acetates were lost, save one, and that one I have thought on solely since its burning. I am now checked in to the Hotel Gayoso in Memphis, and as I try to sort and settle my mind, I will recount here the events leading to its destruction to the best of my memory, but I fear that is indefinite and flawed.
We found Gramp Hines in Tennessee. I do not know what to make of the experience, or of our bizarre evening with Amoira, and I am still puzzling out all that has happened. I fear that these two things are the cause of Bunny’s departure. He left me in Tennessee, abruptly, and under mysterious circumstances.
No matter the catalyst, the result is I am here for the next few days. I intend to spend that time taking down my notes of the last week, transcribing some of the more interesting—and disturbing—songs, and resting. Living on the road, sleeping in the Studebaker, has taken its toll upon me. I have broken out in a rash, either from the heat, or from the stress of travel, or from insect bites—or all of the above. The corner of my mouth bubbles. My ankles and legs are riddled with itchy, angry welts. I need days indoors with decent food for both my mental repose and my physical well-being. A few nights of uninterrupted sleep would not go amiss, either. The hotel is an extravagance, I know—but I have been exceedingly frugal thus far.
I have telegraphed Spivacke requesting more funds, a new SoundScriber, and sapphire cutting styluses for the device. I am more depressed than I care to admit about Bunny’s abrupt departure but console myself with the fact that it does mean the money will last longer.
I will continue on without Bunny, but I’m forced to head now to Arkansas, where I will at least find comfort and respite from the kind people of the Darcy Arkansas Folk Society. It will be there I shall await the new SoundScriber.
A Lush and Seething Hell Page 18