“Never been a town, you can’t rightly say. No electricity, no telegram, no highway. Was a track right through it where the wagons would come. Time was, there were orchards and children. But all that’s gone now.” His right arm was cradled over the hip of the guitar, and in his left he held the bottle. I lit a cigarette, reversed it, and offered it to him. He set down his guitar, took the cigarette, and narrowed his eyes, looking at me. “Just fifty-two songs?”
“That’s what the gentleman said,” I responded.
“Ain’t no gentlemen in West Virginia,” Hines said. “And ain’t no gentlemen in this here tent either. Is there, Mister Parker from the Library of Congress?”
“I don’t quite know what you mean. It’s simply an honorific—”
He held up a hand to quiet me and I ceased speaking. I had an uncomfortable feeling that he was well aware of whatever liberties we might have taken with his wife, though I, myself, would be hard pressed to recount them and could not explain the feeling if I had to.
“You come for a song,” he said. “That ole ‘Stacker Lee.’ But that ain’t the real song you seek. I don’t know that song.” He drank from the bottle. “I might know another shadow of that song, though. Just like the ballad of ole Stacker is a shadow of a shadow of that song.”
“What song?” I said. “What do you mean a shadow of a shadow of a song—”
Hines blew smoke and said, “Stacker got his hat, covered in blood. But it ain’t a hat the song’s about, it’s a crown.”
From his overall pocket he withdrew a tuning fork and held it up.
“You ever sat real quiet and still, Mister Parker? Maybe in the mornin’ with the sun washin’ over your bed, or in the wee hours of the night when you’re all by yourself?”
“Of course,” I said.
“In those quiet times, you ever felt the thrumming of the world?”
“I’m quite sure I don’t know what you mean,” I said.
Hines slapped the tuning fork upon the open palm of his other hand. A bright tone filled the interior of the tent, pulsing in waves. As the fork vibrated, its tines became blurry, indistinct. Hank and Martha began making slight adjustments to the tuning pegs of their instruments.
“The whole of human existence just like this here fork,” Hines said. “A-frettin’ and strivin’ and castin’ about.” He grasped the fork in his hand, snuffing out the sound. He slipped it back in his pocket. “This ain’t a song you can unhear.”
He turned his head to his daughter and said softly, “We’ll run through ‘Think on Death and Judgment,’ you hear me? Listen for the turnaround, and we’ll hang on that to a—” He made his face into the mummery of sadness. He began strumming his guitar in a circular, hypnotic rhythm that was dissimilar from most mountain music I’d heard before—a three-quarter waltz time maybe, but there was something slippery about it and I couldn’t count the beats to verify its time signature. Mountain music, and folk music in general, are simple distillations of more complex melodies and chord progressions: Much of it falls within the major scale and often, in my experience, working around the C chord. This progression lingered on minor chords, though—A minor to C, C to a strange diminished chord I could not place as guitar is not my specialty and Hines’s fretting was slurry and indistinct. He continued on, moving from majors to minor falls easily, arpeggiating the lilt and sadness in his rough manner of picking, causing a haunting effect. Soon Martha joined, strumming the dulcimer lightly. Hank kept his violin cocked and plucked intervals, pizzicato, holding down a soft rhythmic melody that might have been filled with a more basso instrument.
Hines began to sing.
Come think on death and judgment,
Your time is almost spent.
You’ve been a wretched sinner;
Time has come to send
A word of your black bargain.
Lost in the days of youth;
A soldier red in slaughter,
Both words and deeds uncouth.
For lesser men are foolish
And hide by Christian names.
Come think on death and judgment,
Come think on what he’ll claim.
He picked his guitar, keeping his eyes focused on its fretboard. Hank’s and Martha’s eyes too were fixed upon their instruments. There was a marked difference in their demeanor during the performance of this song and those they had played before. Before, Hines had focused his attention on the crowd, watching for whatever reaction or emotions his music might stir within the audience. But during this song, it was as if their eyes were lowered in deference, humility.
The music churned and swirled, Hank opened his port-stained mouth, and a low sound emanated, like a subtone from an organ or the drone of a hurdy-gurdy, and persisted, vibrating, shivering the air. Then Martha opened hers and another tone emanated from the hollow bell of her mouth, finding a harmony with her brother’s. I felt a bizarre shiver run through me, and my skin rippled in goose bumps, as if a frigid draft of air had blown through the tent, though it was still sweltering hot in the still air.
Come think on death and judgment,
Your words have all been said.
A soldier home from warring,
His hands and heart stained red.
No water flows will clean you,
No ocean wash away
The stain that now corrodes you
Until your dying day.
The wind must have shifted. The tent’s canvas walls rustled and flapped for a moment. A haze rose in the tent, stinging my eyes. The pinewood smudge fire to keep the mosquitoes away. I reached for the bottle and drank from it, rubbing my eyes. The music churned. In the shadows behind Hines and his children, I made out two figures: silver haired, feminine.
Amoira.
And her twin? They came forward, swaying with the music, long silver hair loose and wild, obscuring their faces, wearing simple white dresses. Feet gnarled, hands sharp. I would have stood, but my surprise, mingled with guilt and fear, arrested me. I could not move.
Hines and his children continued, eyes lowered.
Supposin’ you’d lie down this night,
A-thinkin’ all was well,
Your eyes would then be closed in death,
Your soul awake in Hell,
To make your case before him,
How you have sown his seeds.
Pray he’ll grant power and mercy,
Give mercy, my lord, on me.
The two swaying women—Amoira!—began a series of bizarre yet elegant genuflections and hand gestures as the music pulsed and churned. First stretching down to the ground, then rearward, toward the gathering shadows and smoke at the back of the tent. In a syncopated movement, they slipped off their white dresses and stood naked in the shifting kerosene-lantern light.
The darkness behind Hines swelled, movement within it. At first I thought what I saw was a horse, a white horse, and then the thing grew and shifted to a shoulder and haunch of an ox, leached of all color. A pale muscular animal in dim light. But the darkness shifted once more and from it came forth a man, alabaster white.
He was nude, and enormous, at least seven feet tall, bald head brushing the canvas of the tent’s roof. I tried to look toward Bunny, to see if he was joined with me in this towering spectacle, but I found I could not move; a sickening paralysis had settled upon me, and even my eyes were fixed in their sockets.
The great man stepped closer, out of the shadows. Utterly devoid of hair and bone white. A tremendous phallus swung between his legs. He seemed powdered with talcum, a great amount of it, sloughing off his body like grave mold from a revenant. The shock of his manhood alarmed me in ways I could not express. A challenge, a lasciviousness, a disease. There were bloody cankers on his member, and at his mouth, bubbling sores. Though, visually, his first impression was of whiteness, beneath the powder—the talcum caked upon him, every inch—beneath that sloughing veneer, there seemed rot, a discoloration. A sweet-sickly odor assaulted my nostrils.
> Raising his arms above his head, he began to drag a foot, and then the other, back and forth, until I realized that he danced. He danced.
Raise your eyes to heaven,
Behold this vault of ground.
Give praise and supplication,
Shuck off your fleshy gown,
And take up dev’lish raiment,
And crimson become crown’d.
As Hines’s words rang out, over and over, turning upon themselves, the alabaster man began to shift and sway in a writhing torsion. Music, a ritual with the power to transform both the singer and the listener. His hands and body traced courses in the air as if he was both in pain and mocking it, simultaneously. The music continued, with Hines singing over and over, Take up dev’lish raiment, and crimson become crown’d. Notes coursing and turning and devouring each other.
The man diminished; I cannot explain how. One moment his bald pate brushed the ceiling of the tent, the next he was as a normal man. He waned, like the moon. He shrank, a refraction. Falling away, tempo ritardando. The two Amoiras had disappeared into the smoke.
A writhing gavotte, a shivered drag. The alabaster man moved with unctuous and sliding grace. Talcum (or was it ash?) fell from him in a constant flurry. He was a small man. His penis had withered and collapsed, so that it appeared as small and puny as some Renaissance statue’s. He was the size of a boy, shrinking. And crimson become crown’d, and crimson become crown’d. A vile infant now, squirming, twitching. A wail pierced the music, the child’s cry. A writhing serpent.
A worm.
A pallid maggot.
Gone.
Smoke billowed inside the tent. The song ended, stretching into silence.
A moment’s pause and then a voice crying, Fire! Fire! The illumination shifting, growing. Heat.
The sound of glass breaking and then a wash of yellow-orange light overcame me. Heat, intense. And close. The tent was on fire.
I found I could move once more. I pushed my way up and called out for Bunny, but there was no response. The tent was shrouded in black, oily smoke, tearing at my eyes, scratching in my lungs. Behind me, at the entrance, the tent’s canvas was awash in flames; one of the support poles stood uncertainly in a pool of fire—the ruins of a kerosene lamp.
The roof shifted and lowered, flames racing along its surface. Panic rose in me. Arms above my head like some long-deceased Pompeian in a Roman mosaic, I pushed toward the back of the tent, where the two Amoiras had entered and the powdered, alabaster giant had made his way into this world. Hands grabbed me. A great cacophony of voices rang out, even though I felt as though I were alone. Hines, his progeny, their instruments. All gone.
Blind, I pushed out of the rear of the tent, where the cankerous man had entered. Reeling, stumbling into the hot darkness, my arms outstretched before me, feeling. Hands struck at me, ripped at my face. The world tilted and I felt myself toppling forward. I tumbled, ass over head, and felt myself pitch into water. There was a dislocation; I did not know which direction was up, under the surface. I felt hands again.
I lashed out at whoever gripped me. Their clutch tightened.
That shadowed form, indistinct in the warp and shifting prism of the water’s surface. Cruel hands holding me below the surface. The Mother Chautauqua.
Rage then, like I knew from old. The loss of my mother. The great pounding heat of German guns and British artillery. The stench of the dead and blood and bowels and shit, steaming in the air. A wet snarl of a man’s intestines. My hands traced the arms back to the body. I lashed out with my fists, intent on harm, the panic of self-preservation rising in me. I felt a blow connect and someone’s weight plow into me, dragging me down. My feet found the river bottom. I breached the surface, water streaming. But a frenzied blood haze rose in me and with one hand I held him and the other I thrashed and struck out viciously, violently, over and over. I caught glimpses of Amoira’s face, mouth open in ecstasy as I thrust against her; Hines’s face, singing, mouth an open bell; Bunny’s face, hands up, screaming.
A slackness. Fingers slipping to float away.
I slogged forward, my clothes tugging at me with the current, and pulled myself onto the shore on my hands and knees. I lay upon my back and took draft upon draft of air, staring at the rising smoke. I coughed. I retched. The Obion flowed beside me. Faintly, I was aware of the sound of a truck, maybe, or the roaring of some infernal engine. But my senses were playing tricks on me.
I do not know how long I lay there, in the smoking dark.
I might have passed out of thought, for a while at least, into the blessed release of oblivion.
18
Harlan Parker: The SoundScriber
The trees, the brush, the interlaced canopy of life stilled. The river called in a low murmur. I opened my eyes.
I was alone. I pushed myself up on unsteady feet. The night sounds had quieted except for my labored breathing; I stood there panting in the dark, broken only by the light of cinders from the fire. A coughing spell overwhelmed me and I stumbled away from the river, hacking heavily. Tripping, fumbling, I found myself back at the Studebaker. There were no other cars around, though plenty of tire tracks mired the semisoft ground. The fires—both the smudge pit at the front of the tent and the tent itself—smoldered in the dark.
I called for Bunny but there was no answer. Where could he have gone? I toggled on the Studebaker’s headlights. Maybe he thought I was dead and he went with the Hines clan, in their truck? I was chilled with a thought: Maybe he did not make it out of the tent. Within the narrow window of light cast by the car’s headlights, I saw a smoking shape in the sooty ash of the tent’s ruins. I ran forward. All I could taste was smoke and ash. I approached the blackened shape. The SoundScriber. There was no saving it. The fire that had torn through the tent had left it charred and unusable.
“Bunny!” I yelled, turning about, cupping my hands around my mouth. “Edmund!”
There was no answer. I searched the area, hoping against hope that I would not find any bodies, but it seemed I was the sole remainder of this particular chautauqua. However long I had been passed out, they must have lost me in the darkness. But why would they—why would Bunny—leave me? It didn’t make sense.
I checked the contents of the car. Nothing was missing, not the acetates, not my gear, not the box of whiskey or our supplies of tinned food. Nothing except Bunny’s bag. He’d gone.
How long had I been unconscious?
I drank some more whiskey, and waited, hoping they would return. They did not. With much effort, I moved the ruined SoundScriber into the car and by morning, I left.
As far as driving goes, I am not proficient at it and do not have the knack of switching gears easily. By the time I had arrived in Memphis, the Studebaker had become more familiar to me, but I fear I might have done some damage to the transmission during my acclimation period.
And now I am here, in this hotel. I would transcribe acetates—thank heavens I brought them to the car!—but I cannot until I receive a new SoundScriber. So, I must content myself with writing this, and filling out expense reports.
The Gayoso is luxurious. Normally I would be relaxed. The bed is soft and sleep should be restful. But I have terrible dreams and wonder where Bunny might have gone.
In the morning I will go to the police and report the fire. And Bunny’s disappearance.
19
Cromwell: Edmund Whitten
Cromwell pauses between recordings. The music has become a crackling drone and he is weary. It’s afternoon now and the day drags on. He’s gone back and forth, splitting his attention between the audio and Parker’s journal. And now something bothers him.
“Crumb, why don’t you go on back to the hotel,” Hattie says. “We’ve got twenty-three acetates left. I can record ten or fifteen more and then we can finish the rest in the morning.” She looks at him with a kind but stern expression. Her phrasing might be as a question, but her demeanor indicates she’s not interested in his arguing with her
.
“No, I need to be present for the recordings.”
She places her headphones on top of the Pelican case and stands. “We can call it a day. And I could use some coffee. I’ll drive you to the hotel.”
On the way back, she remains silent, but he can feel her glances. He holds Parker’s journal in his lap.
“You really need that? I can—”
“I’m just tired, Hattie,” he says, before she can start.
“Seem to be really digging into his journal,” she says, gesturing.
“It’s fascinating,” Cromwell says. “My sleep’s been off. Reading’ll put me to sleep. And there’s something I want to investigate here.”
“What?” Hattie asks.
“Edmund Whitten. Bunny, Parker’s driver and friend.” He taps the journal. “He made an abrupt ‘departure’ from the trip and I need to get back to my computer and see what I can find on him.”
“What do you think happened?”
“No idea, but there is at least the possibility that Parker might be losing his mind,” Cromwell says.
“Insert joke about working for the ell-oh-cee here,” Hattie says. “But all this stuff happened eighty years ago, so it’s not like there’s a huge rush. You need to get some sleep. I got some Benadryl in my bag, I think. Poor folks’ Ambien. You want some?”
“Sure,” Cromwell says. “It always used to knock William out when he—” He stops.
Hattie says nothing. The rest of the ride is silent. At the hotel, she ducks into her room and returns with a pink pill. He thanks her and retreats into his room.
Cromwell doesn’t take the pill, though. He puts down the journal and from a black bag removes his laptop. He opens it, uses his forefinger to clear its security. In a browser window, he logs in to the Library of Congress archives, both the outward-facing databases and those not yet (if they ever would be) made public. In the advanced search tab Cromwell enters the name Edmund Whitten, specifies the year 1938, and initiates the query.
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