A Lush and Seething Hell

by John Hornor Jacobs

  The Library of Congress servers are notoriously slow, especially from remote access, but eventually his search results populate the browser window.

  A record of Harlan Parker’s contract, where Edmund Whitten is mentioned as a subcontractor. Another mention in a telegram from H. Parker to Harold Spivacke—I have a driver, veteran of the Great War and old friend, Edmund Whitten. AKA Bunny. A missing person’s report from the Memphis Register, dated early August, filed by Harlan Parker in July 1938.

  That is all.

  Cromwell searches for Edmund Whitten, with no date range specified.

  An FBI file, declassified in the seventies and digitized in 2006, showing Whitten to be considered a Communist sympathizer, if not agent. The report is dated February 1934.

  No other mentions.

  No death certificate, no obituary. But the Library’s archives are incomplete. Whitten could’ve lived to a ripe old age and unless the appropriate newspaper had been digitized, Cromwell would never know.

  Rubbing his chin, he enters body found in Obion River, 1938.

  One hit. A paragraph in the Dyersburg Clarion, dated July 22: The Dyer County assistant sheriff issued a statement to the press, declaring that the body of a man was discovered on the shores of the Obion River, only three miles from the confluence of that river and the Mississippi, and remains unidentified due to advanced decay. His body has been interred at the Dyer County morgue and will receive a pauper’s funeral. Any information regarding his identity should be reported to Mike Hanson with the Dyer County Sherriff’s Department.

  Cromwell reaches for the phone and calls Hattie. His call goes to voicemail. He calls again, and she answers. “What? I just lay down.”

  “There’s something I need you to see.”

  “Crumb, this better not be—”

  “Goddamn it, Hattie,” he says. He thinks about Vivian, he thinks about Maizie. “I think Harlan Parker killed his driver.”

  “Really?” Hattie sounds skeptical.

  “Yes.”

  “Gimme a couple of hours, I’m gonna go to the hotel gym,” she says. “Keepin’ it tight.”

  “Right. Just whenever,” he says. “Not like he’s going to get more dead.”

  Cromwell retrieves ice from the humming machine down the hall. He feels dislocated, from either lack of sleep or the oneiric quality of Parker’s journal, he cannot tell. The impersonal, bland hallway clad in industrialized carpeting and lit by evenly spaced economy sconces seems to stretch on and on in his vision, as if he’s caught a glimpse of himself in an infinity mirror. It is not the repeated image stretching off into oblivion that is the disconcerting aspect of that particular optical effect, he knows, it’s the barren and empty focus on whoever is caught between the mirrors. He returns to the hotel room, dumps the ice in the sink, and fills it with cold water. He plunges his face below the surface, allowing the cold to prick his skin. He opens his eyes, as if in rapport with Parker, but there is nothing there, no insight, no understanding. He lifts his face from the water when his lungs swell in his chest, outraged and starving for air. He thinks about Harlan Parker, and what the man wrote of the events at the Obion chautauqua. He thinks about Parker’s mother.

  Dripping, he stands in the room, unsure for a long while of what to do, opening and closing his hands. He dresses slowly, puts on his overcoat, and goes to the door. Just a quick walk to clear his head. The long day hunched over the journal listening to acetates has taken its toll.

  He wanders out of the hotel. It’s still cold and now dark. He finds himself trudging along a thoroughfare, a wide empty highway leading away from the brightly lit Holiday Inn’s environs toward an area that has seen better days. He passes an empty strip mall, and a large square building with broken windows and a faint industrial cast—he recalls Missouri used to have a booming industry, but for the life of him he cannot think of what that might be—then continues on past a neighborhood of dark houses. Through a very quiet industrial park full of metal buildings with signs like vernor bros. upholstery, megawatt a/v rental, centerview mini-storage. Very few cars move on the roads, and the sky is overcast, so the stars are gone and the spaces between streetlights are very dark.

  As it does on many walks at night, his attention becomes focused downward, on his own feet, minding his steps, feeling the movement of his body as his heart rate rises.

  It’s a moment before he realizes he’s beyond the neighborhoods and industrial park and on either side of the road are two fields. You get this mix of urban and farmland in the Midwest, he thinks, where neighborhoods run right up and kiss these vestigial fields. What could they have planted here? Where’s the farm? He looks back over his shoulder to the last streetlight. It is a small speck burrowed in a dark tree line. Am I still in town? How did I wander so far?

  He looks out in the dark over the stubble of last summer’s furrows and stops. A dim white figure stands motionless.

  “Hello?” Cromwell says. “Hello? Are you all right?”

  A breeze ruffles the figure’s clothing. Is it a child? A woman? He cannot tell. He leaves the road and tumbles forward, a misstep in the dark. The ground is hard, and frozen, and when he stands back up, his outraged shin and scraped palms where he arrested his fall burn in the cold air. His breath comes in white plumes.

  The figure is gone.

  He feels a shrinking sensation. A tear in the cloud cover above passes overhead and a spray of stars appears above him momentarily, brilliant and casting a blue light about. He hears a laughter far off, faint, but then a dog barks in the distance, obscuring the sound.

  He looks up to the sky and feels the yawn of the tear and the stars beyond and his infinitesimal place in the world, standing at night, in an unknown field, far from everything he’s ever known or loved.

  He turns slowly. It takes him an hour to get back to the hotel.

  Entering his room, he moves to the bed and lies down, thinking of sleep, the empty, emotionless release of it. He doesn’t take the Benadryl. He used to nap—even at work he used to be able to sneak to the parking lot, kick back his seat in the Toyota, close his eyes, allow his breathing to slow, and let sleep take him for a short while. Until he was refreshed. But that was before the affair. It was then he lost that ability. In a hotel room very much like this one. The moment his prick slipped into Viv and she rolled back to give him better entry, the life behind his closed eyes had become clouded, threaded with guilt.

  He picks up the journal and begins to read once more as he waits for Hattie.

  20

  Harlan Parker: Darcy, Arkansas

  July 8, 1938

  Western Union Telegram—Harlan Parker

  Will have recorder and discs shipped to Darcy, posthaste. Transferring operating funds to Darcy Bank & Trust. Expect them within week.

  Harold Spivacke, Division of Music, Library of Congress

  It was hard passing Greenville—the emerald of the Mississippi River—to travel on to Darcy. H. L. Mencken, that onerous, brilliant man, wrote of the miasmic jungles of Arkansas, and as I drove on, the heat growing intolerable, sweat discoloring my clothing, I understood what he meant. I have spent enough time in the South and I fear he meant the unnamed jungles in the hearts of men.

  Darcy is a quaint little town on the shores of the Mississippi. It is but thirty miles from Helena, and fifteen from Rosedale, Mississippi—though on the wrong side of the river—but it seems removed, in some ways, from the rest of the world. No major highways connect it to other towns, and the dry lakes that ring it—watershed areas for the Mississippi—seem moatlike in the steaming heat of day.

  I found a ferry at Rosedale, a great diesel contraption that accepted the Studebaker without problem as two roustabouts placed chocks under its wheels. It carried a family of weary farmers in a Model T truck—held together with wire and scrap metal—and two mules hitched to a wagon. For two bits, it took me across the Mississippi. The ferryboat captain was no Charon, simply a drunken and grizzled old river boatman, pist
ol at his waist, looking for all the world like a farmer who decided late in life to become a river pirate. The ferry barge seemed tiny on the face of the great river. It was somewhere around here that Hernando de Soto’s body had been secretly dumped into the Mississippi, to not alert the native population that the great Spanish god had died. We landed on the far shore in a stand of old-growth trees, cottonwoods and oaks. Mosquitoes teemed by the trillions. A fat, black moccasin slipped into the water from the brush of the shore, and I watched it with fascination. The barge captain whistled, patted his pistol, and winked at me.

  Darcy suffered heavily from the Great Flood but there were no rills on Main Street, no water stains on stately homes lining docile streets named after trees—Oak, Poplar, Birch—many of the houses replete with Ionic columns and cast-iron lawn jockeys for horses. I felt a heaviness press on me as I passed these manicured dwellings—I was much easier in the pomp and blare of the city, or the wild, unkempt sprawl of tenements and the poor. I was ill at ease in the idylls of landed gentry. But, like some goliard in ancient days, I needed patrons, and it was here I could find them.

  The Darcys are a family of farmers who built this town from the alluvial soil of the delta, draining the brakes and sloughs for farmland, felling the giant old trees lining the Mississippi, piling earth between berm and barrow to make levees to hold back the wrath of the river—all on the backs of the Negroes that lived here in tenement shacks south of the rail line to the river port. Once I entered the town, I simply had to ask at the Chevrolet dealership the location of the Darcy home and was directed there straightaway.

  At the door, I was greeted by a black housekeeper who led me through the ornate interior of the home into a sitting room where a white man a few years my junior sat with a whiskey in hand, next to a very pregnant woman—obviously his wife—who had her face near a humming, black General Electric fan.

  “Mistuh Parker,” the housekeeper said in introduction, and was moving away before the people in the room had a chance to respond.

  “Thank you, Sophie,” the woman replied, breathless.

  The man stood up, came forward, hand out. He was dressed immaculately in a tan suit and crisp shirt and tie that had not had the opportunity to wilt in the heat yet. He was a small, compact fellow, quite handsome. We shook.

  “Jack Darcy, though everyone around here calls me Jackdaw,” he said, smiling. “Forgive Persephone for not getting up—”

  “I am hot and bothered,” Persephone said, hand at the small of her back, damp hair stuck to her neck, though the Darcy home, with its electric fans and heavy curtains, garlanded in oak and cottonwood trees and capped by crape myrtles, was as cool as any building could be at this time of year. “No, that didn’t come out right. I am hot and intemperate, and fixing to burst.”

  Jackdaw winced and then said, “We’re expecting our second child here, in the next few weeks.”

  “I would be fine if it happened today,” she said. “Fix me a drink, Jackdaw, and one for our guest. Mister Parker, come sit. Tell us all about yourself. Entertain me. Anything. I need distraction.”

  I did as she wished and sat down next to her on the couch. Jackdaw brought us scotch, with ice. Persephone lit a cigarette and looked at me brazenly as she smoked it. “So, Harlan,” she said. “Can I call you Harlan?” She went on without waiting for a response from me. “Tell me about your folklife studies. Jackdaw has given me a little information, and we have your books, though I must admit they’re a little dry for my tastes.”

  “No heaving bosoms,” Jackdaw said.

  “That is unkind, husband,” Persephone said. “Though not altogether untrue. Jackdaw says that in addition to being a scholar, you are rumored to be quite a pianist.”

  Jackdaw smiled at me, taking a seat nearby. “My uncle attended Washington and Lee around the same time as you and told me how you spent your weekends in Georgetown. At the Harrow.”

  It had been many years since I thought about my time at the Harrow Club in Washington as a performer: there, I swung like a metronome between the respectable Mahler quartets, piano adaptations of Strauss and Ravel, and then pivoting to the other extreme with Irving Berlin’s romps, performing for the rich, pampered guests of the gentlemen there. I was paid well, and treated very much like some carnival sideshow oddity, this embeggared yet brilliant fourteen-year-old stick figure with spindly fingers, more at ease in the kitchen with the Negro help than in the library at the grand piano. A child of two worlds: During the week, I lived at Washington and Lee, but on the weekends, I slept in an attic room of the Harrow Club and wore a tuxedo not my own yet tailored especially for me, spending every free moment either working on my studies or walking in the city. My grandparents, who took me in after Mother died, were sad to see me go, yet proud of my acceptance to Washington and Lee at such a young age. Their wunderkind, their prodigy. And no prodigy can remain static in this world. But university, they could not afford it. I was a young man of ability, if not means, so the Harrow welcomed me and I could leave there with my time rewarded. Possessed of a degree.

  And something more.

  During that time, I searched for a man. Insull. My mother’s lover. My mother’s killer. I was just a boy, and angry. I knew where he came from. I remembered the dime, hot in my palm, when he sent me away from her to watch the Negro minstrels.

  I remembered how I never saw her again.

  Possibly it was there I began my interest in the “rougher” musics, the songs crooned by Sibyl, the Harrow’s head cook, the call-and-response work songs belted out by roustabouts down on the wharf.

  I told Jackdaw and Persephone of my studies, and my trip so far, glossing over much of the hardships and focusing on the bright, entertaining parts. But Jackdaw expressed real dismay at my recounting the loss of the SoundScriber. “This is terrible!” he exclaimed. “Where can you purchase one? Maybe I can expedite things.”

  “My superior has already purchased one, and it will be sent here,” I said. “But until then, I am unable to record.”

  “Well, you can do some scouting, then,” he said. “I have just the man to help you.”

  “Who do you have in mind?” Persephone said, turning her face this way and that in the flow of the fan.

  “Big Tap’s Augie,” he said.

  “Oh ho,” Persephone said. “The perfect Virgil to Mister Parker’s Dante.”

  Jackdaw chuckled. “Quapaw isn’t so hellish as all that.”

  “That is very true,” Persephone said. “Hell is cold.”

  “Don’t talk like that, darling,” Jackdaw said. “It’s morbid. What will Harlan think?”

  “He’ll think that the heat is driving me mad,” Persephone said, looking at me strangely. “Do you think I’m mad, Mister Parker?”

  “Discomfort can drive anyone batty. You have ice for your scotch,” I said, taking a large swallow. “It’s very good.”

  “That’s the last of it until this afternoon. I cannot tell you how much money I spend on the stuff. More than on gasoline for the automobiles and farm equipment!” Jackdaw looked at me a little sheepishly. “It was costing me so much, I ended up buying the whole icehouse. Who knew selling water to hot people would become so profitable.”

  “I have them place hundred-pound blocks in my bedroom in a washtub and place the fan by it,” Persephone said. “Sometimes I strip down and climb in there with it. It’s quite scandalous, I assure you.”

  I imagined her belly pressing against the ice. Jackdaw said, “It’s not a scandal if you tell everyone you do it, darling.”

  Persephone sniffed. “Allow me my scandals, dear,” she said, lighting another cigarette and taking a sip of the iced scotch. “My assignations with blocks of ice are one of the few vices left me.”

  “My name’s Augustus Franklin Hughes but everyone ’round these parts just calls me Augie on account of their piss-poor memory,” Augie said in introduction. He was a tall, lean black man with gray in his beard, the white of it in sharp contrast to his skin. H
e dressed neatly in khaki pants and khaki shirt, with a pistol at his side and a proud Stetson hat, putting me in mind immediately of Stagger Lee. Jackdaw had driven me out to a town called Howard, a few miles south, and brought me to the front door of a columned plantation home. The home’s owner—a man named Tap Howard whom everyone in the county called Big Tap—was riding his fields on horseback, but his right-hand man, Augie, was happy to guide me. “They say you work for the government.”

  “Not full-time, but I am contracted with them currently,” I said. “I record folk music.”

  “That right?” he said, though the way he said it, it made me think he did not understand fully my purpose. Or, more likely, he just didn’t care.

  Augie nodded. “Well come on, let’s go. Got someone I want to introduce you to.”

  “Really?” I asked. “Who’s that?”

  “Finest musician in Quapaw County.” He laughed. “Finest musician in all Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, and maybe even Louisiana.”

  “Truly?” I said, interested.

  Augie nodded. “There’s something uncanny about the boy. Not all right upstairs,” he said, tapping his temple with a long forefinger. “But shoo-ie, can he play.”

  He led me to his work truck and we both got in. He removed his Stetson and placed it on the seat between us. “Mind the lid, Mister Parker.”

  He started the car and drove with a practiced hand, left arm hanging out the window, patting the truck’s door.

  “Is every town around here named after planters?” I said.

  “Funny, ain’t it?” he said, smiling. “The men who own the land want to put their name on it, too.” He chuckled. “Most of ’em would get down in the mud and do the old bump and grind with it if there was half a chance.” He looked away from the dirt road for a moment to gauge my reaction to what he said. “You’re different, if I might say.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Most white folks would tut-tut and act all offended. But not you.”