A Lush and Seething Hell

by John Hornor Jacobs

  I shrugged. “Spend most of your life on the outside looking in, nothing really surprises you.”

  Augie nodded and looked back to the road, his face a study in thought. “That might be true,” he said. “But a man that thinks he can’t be surprised is like to get a big one.”

  We rode in silence for a while. The summer sky had turned white with haze, and the umber fields and cotton dashed away from our vehicle, growing more indistinct in the distance. The far tree line, the levee beyond, and past that, the Mississippi flowing south in its indomitable course, past Greenville and Vicksburg, until it reached the gulf, dumping countless tons of silt and alluvial soil into the sea—all moved in slow progression.

  “Lemme ask you a question,” Augie said after a while. “The Great War, was you?”

  I indicated I was. Augie whistled in response.

  “Damn shame when men die. But I read an article that said that over six million horses died over there, and I liked to cry when I saw that.” Augie paused, thinking. “You a religious man?”

  I thought about the sodden French and Belgian countryside. The ruins of buildings, steaming craters in the mud, the bodies of both men and horses in great rotting tangles, bodies indiscriminate, mired in the wreckage of food, water, and munition wagons. War is but the throwing away of life—the lives of men, horses, animals—at the other side until one nation, one army emerges victorious. How willing are you to let men die? How much life can you pump at that bunker, that embankment, that fortification? Throw more life at it than the other side has, or is willing to expend, and the day is yours. Will you give a thousand lives? Ten?

  Horses die. Men die. Mothers, brothers, sisters. We live down in the mud and there we run the course of our lives with very little hope of an end to our pain, or a release once the pain is gone. Our lives spin out, unraveling, and we have to live them.

  “No, I’m not a religious man,” I said.

  “That’s good, because we going to di Tonti’s and I didn’t want you to get all righteous. It’s just Friday.”

  “Di Tonti’s?”

  “Indian mound. Rising up out of the Old Bottoms. French Indian family, pretty black girls all living together with a big parlor and rooms to their selves.”

  “Ah,” I said. “And in the parlor . . .”

  “A piano. Ozzie’s there, most days, or at the Whitmore. Ain’t no way Mister Darcy can take you to di Tonti’s himself, no, his reputation wouldn’t stand the storm that would blow in then. But he owns it, the land around it, and some of his walking-around money comes from di Tonti’s. Every time one of them girls opens her legs, a silver dollar pops to life in his pocket.”

  I was surprised, though nothing in my personal experience would have run contrary to the idea that Darcy might have points on a house of ill repute. It seemed that like Persephone, he had his own scandals quick to hand, though he was far less willing to speak of them than his wife.

  As he’d said, it wasn’t nearly so scandalous if you could freely talk about it.

  We continued on, entering a thick, wooded slough with old-growth oaks, easily ten feet wide at the base and towering above. The shade offered by the trees was at first welcome until Augie began cranking up his window. “You’ll be a gallon short of blood soon if you don’t watch out,” he said, indicating I should roll up my own. I reluctantly followed his instructions.

  Once, in Germany, after the war, I slept a summer night at a river’s brim, and when I awoke I was pocked with angry, swollen bug bites—the tenacity and voraciousness of Old World mosquitoes. Old World mosquitoes do not rush. They watch and wait until you are asleep. They devoured me through my clothes. But those insects, millions of generations after supping on their first human blood, had grown contemptuous. New World mosquitoes were still in love with the blood of man, still thrilled and drunk from its novelty, desperate for the taste of it and not full of the wiles of bloodlust. In the shade of the old growth, they make beelines for your waking face, your wrist, your ear. With the windows up, the truck’s cab became stuffy and hot quickly, and I began pouring with sweat. Augie, like many men who live their lives outside, seemed utterly indifferent to the heat.

  We came upon a rising mound of earth, crowned in trees, at least as high as the levee that kept the Mississippi at bay. Trees grew on the earthen flanks, and at its summit stood a house, gray in the dappled shadows, verdigrised with moss around its skirts where the rain fell and wetted the wood around the base. It had a wraparound porch with an upper floor whose tiled roof might have been clay found on a Tudor manse or a Spanish villa, it was hard to tell. An offshoot looked for all the world like a shotgun shack appended as an afterthought, with a thick brick chimney from some other, more substantial building style. It was a bizarre conglomeration of looks, and sprawling, two—maybe three—stories, occupying the whole crown of the mound.

  “Call these mounds the Quapaw Indians, like the county, and I’ve heard them named as Toltecs, but some professor came down here and said that was a made-up name. Only Indians I know about ’round here are Choctaws and Chickasaws, but I’m not really educated on Indian issues.” Augie sucked his teeth for a moment, then continued on. “You’ll have to pay your respects to Fantine di Tonti—she’s the lady of the house—and then you’ll be able to talk to Ozzie, have him play a bit, if you want some of the finest music you’re like to hear in this world or the next.”

  I nodded as we came to a graveled area where two cars were parked, and he stopped his truck and we climbed out. It was cooler in the shade, but almost immediately the mosquitoes began to whine and press in at every bit of exposed skin. We trotted up to the house, and the main doors, constructed in a French style you might find in any bar or social club in New Orleans, opened before we could knock, and we were welcomed in by two large bearded white men who obviously stood as enforcers. It was dark and cool inside: Heavy drapes trapped in the cooler air from night and there was a fountain merrily tinkling away somewhere. Fans hummed and rotated back and forth, and the house smelled of women, and tallow, and perfume, and fried food.

  One of the bruisers led us into a salon to the side of the main atrium and a woman sat at a small rolltop desk and wrote in a ledger. In the sprawl of her area there were novels, newspapers, letters, and telegrams. A Victrola stood in the corner playing Holst’s Mars with all its pomp and blare, yet turned down to a soft level. When we entered, she stopped her writing, blotted the page, and then stood and welcomed us both.

  “Augie, you’re back,” she said, a smile playing about her lips.

  “Aw, Miss Fantine, don’t you be teasing me. You know I have to check up on young Ozzie, as he’s dear.”

  “It’s good to see you,” Fantine said. Her attention shifted to me. She looked at me with wide, clear eyes. She had a light brown complexion, indicating some sort of mixed race I could not discern, and an open and unlined face. She was younger than I thought a madam might be, but there was a mottled look to the skin of her neck, dashing away into her blouse. She’d been in a fire at some point and burned badly at that. “And Mister Harlan Parker, of the Library of Congress.” She smiled openly then, at my surprised expression. “Darcy is a very small town and we now are on the telephone switch with Winslow Corner. With Cathy Downing at the switchboard, there are no secrets anymore.”

  Augie snorted and shifted his Stetson from hand to hand.

  “I brought Mister Parker to meet young Ozzie. He’s gonna record him, if that’s all right with you.”

  “I think that will be acceptable, as long as I receive a recording as well.”

  “I can arrange that,” I said. “Though I won’t have a new recorder until early next week. But I would love to meet Ozzie.”

  “Well, we won’t keep you from him, then,” Fantine di Tonti said. But she held up a hand and looked at Augie, who bowed his head and stepped out for a moment, leaving us alone. “I don’t know what you know about him, Mister Parker, but he’s an intelligent boy, and a brilliant musician. But he has
. . . difficulties.”

  “Difficulties? Of what sort?” I asked.

  “You know of the flood?”

  “Yes, the Great Flood of twenty-seven. It changed the South.”

  “More than the South,” she said, a very intense look upon her face. “There was a levee breach south of here. It was like god himself released his wrath upon us for our sins.”

  You a religious man? Augie had asked. I waited for the rest of it from di Tonti.

  “Ozzie lost both of his parents during the flood and, in doing so, gained something.”

  “Gained something? I don’t understand.”

  “More than just the levee was breached. He was transfixed across the veil.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean, I assure you.”

  “He’s ghost-haunted, Mister Parker. He sees them everywhere.”

  I thought about what she was saying. “So, he suffered a blow to the head, maybe?” For a moment, the giant white-powdered man from Hines’s chautauqua tent danced in my mind, sores at his mouth and cankers along his prick, diminishing. “Or his sanity has been tried?”

  “The boy is sane, sir, I assure you. He can see the dead,” she said simply, “his own and others’.”

  I laughed, looking about for Augie. “Surely this is a joke.”

  Di Tonti shrugged, disinterested in me then. “All right, Mister Parker. You’ve been warned. I’ll grant you some time today with Ozzie and then after your interview, possibly a recording session. But that depends.”

  “You are . . . serious?” I asked. “The boy possesses some sort of phantasmagorical sense?”

  Fantine di Tonti returned to her desk, picked up the Commercial Appeal, and opened it. It was clear my audience with her had ended. “A pleasure to meet you, Mister Parker,” she said, her voice devoid of any pleasure. “Frontenac will lead you to Ozzie.” One of the bearded bruisers appeared at the door to her salon and led me away, down a hall to where dark-wood pocket doors stood closed. The man, Frontenac, opened them, revealing a luxuriously appointed salon with multiple divans, a Victrola, a dry bar, and an upright player piano against the far wall. Low electric lights gave the room a yellow, cheery atmosphere and Augie sat near a young black man at the piano. The boy was saying, “And how’s my auntie?” A pause. “I miss her.”

  Augie said, “The reverend is a hard man, not like to forgive.” The boy bowed his head. Augie said more quietly, “But she did give me this here letter for you.” The boy took the letter and opened it, reading it closely. I remained between the doors, not wanting to interrupt their conversation. Eventually the boy sniffed and tucked the letter away in his back pocket.

  “Want to introduce you to a Mister Harlan Parker, Oz-man. He works for the government,” Augie said.

  The boy—young man, really—turned on the piano bench to look at me and his eyes widened and he cocked his head. I looked behind me and back at the boy. He was maybe sixteen or seventeen, and very thin, with long, articulate hands and an exceptionally large head, closely cropped, with protruding ears. His lanterned green eyes took me in, and the area around me, as if I were a group of men rather than an individual. He stood, approached me, and extended his hand.

  In the South, shaking hands with a white man was something reserved for other white men. Luckily, I am not a Southern man. I shook his hand happily. The boy said, “I’m Oswell Bishop Munk, but everybody calls me Ozzie or Oz-man. Easier to remember, I reckon.”

  Augie laughed and clapped him on the back. “Let you two get acquainted,” Augie said. “Mosey over to see if there’s anything happening with Miss Chloe in the kitchen.” He winked.

  I sat down at the piano and the boy sat next to me. I blocked out a chord and then another and soon I was playing Béla Bartók’s piano sonata Sostenuto e pesante, from memory, its jangling and aggressive chords, unexpected and atonal melodies. I could feel the boy become quite still as he sat beside me and I worked through the piece. In many ways, I would not be here if not for Bartók—a Hungarian, he was the first comparative musicologist and the father of ethnomusicology, interested in folklore and folk musics of the peasants of Hungary and Romany. He translated that into his work, channeling the rougher, simpler musics and making them palatable to the wider world.

  As the music went on, the boy turned to look at me, and I stopped playing. It had been a long time and I had flubbed some notes, it is true.

  “You got lots of company,” he said. “I know they told you about me, and what I see. They don’t like to talk about it, but they do, all the time.”

  I didn’t know what to make of that, so I played another bit, this time moving to one of Bartók’s sonatinas, brighter, happier. The boy stilled again and watched my hands as they moved across the keyboard. When I was done, he easily repeated the last few measures, replete with trills and scalar runs. It was quite remarkable.

  “Didn’t like that first one,” he said. “It reminded me too much of the . . . the silence.” He shook his head. “But that second one was nice. Who is it?”

  I told him about Bartók and promised to mail him some sheet music, which I was happy to learn he could read quite well. I learned, after some conversation with him regarding his playing, he had lived with other people—a reverend and his wife, where he went to school and was taught piano and musical theory—until the last year or so. “But, I needed more music than what they was willing to let me have and Miss Fantine wanted me here,” he said, shrugging. “The music, it drives off the silence and keeps the—”

  He stopped.

  “Keeps the what?” I said.

  “Not really a word for it. For them. Music keeps them away and lets me rest.”

  “You said I had lots of company,” I said. “What did that mean?”

  “The drowned lady, the soldiers, so many dead men.”

  “The drowned lady?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

  “She’s there and there’s a mighty sadness on her and she watches you.”

  I looked at the boy closely. I am no expert on the wiles of mankind, but there was no subterfuge or deceit in his voice. “And the soldiers?”

  He swallowed and looked at me. “Men you done killed, ain’t they?” His accent had slid back to a simpler tone, rustic. “They hate you and would see you dead.” His face became puzzled. “There’s a gray man, with his hair burnt away and water pouring out his mouth.” He patted my knee. “But look! Right here.” He placed his hands upon the keys and began to play a rollicking, bouncy song that sounded like something I had known all my life, yet I’d never heard it before. It was both simple and complex, sad and exultant all at once, with blocked chords and fast runs between them. It had the musical density of a piece of Mozart, yet rendered with bonhomie and down-home charm. The room seemed to lighten.

  “That was wonderful,” I said. “What was that song called?”

  “Noodlin’.”

  “The song was called ‘Noodling’?”

  “Nah, that was just what I was doing. Noodlin’.”

  “Will you play something else for me? Do you sing? Can you play ‘Stagger Lee’?” I asked.

  “Nah, I don’t like ‘Stagger Lee’ much, never cared for the words. But I do like some Scott Joplin!” He worked through a flawless “The Entertainer” and “Maple Leaf Rag” and then said, “Wrote some that were like his, but not his, if you know what I mean,” and then played some pieces of his own that sounded like Joplin yet weren’t. Compositions of his own that people in Washington and New York would flock to in droves. He could play in Carnegie Hall if he was of a mind. Part of me wanted to drop everything, abandon this contract, and take this young man somewhere his talents could be realized. The Lomaxes had taken Lead Belly under their wing, led him to notoriety and what fame a black man might find through “sinful” Negro songs. But something held me back. The memory of Hines’s abject gaze as he sang, the doubled Amoiras, the dancing giant diminishing to nothing. The delirium of sickness that passed over me, lying bedridden in N
ew Orleans once, echoed here, now, in the vaults and chambers of my body. The way of all flesh.

  A gray man with water pouring out of his mouth. The drowned lady. There’s a mighty sadness on her and she watches you.

  I sat and listened to the boy work through his pieces. Once he stopped, and we’d discussed Joplin and jazz, I asked him if he’d ever been to Memphis or New Orleans and he allowed that he had been to Greenville once, but not to play, to get hot tamales for a church picnic.

  “Do you know the song ‘Crowned in Scarlet’?” I asked him, as it occurred to me. I began to tell him about recording “Stagger Lee” in northern Alabama, and the man named Lucius Honeyboy in the Cummins State Farm, but the boy stood up and backed away from me, horror filling his face.

  Puzzling. To explain I sang a line, hoping that he’d catch the lyrics and melody: Come think on death and judgment, your time is almost spent. And: Give praise and supplication, shuck off your fleshy gown, and take up dev’lish raiment, and crimson become crown’d.

  The boy’s back hit the wall and his eyes opened wide as if taking in some vast presence that had filled the room.

  “No, no, no,” Ozzie Munk said. “Music should’ve driven you away. And what’s that with you—” His eyes rolled back in his head and he began to thrash, saying, “Ain’t opening that door. Ain’t gonna open that door for nobody. No no no no no no. Not for nobody.”

  He slumped to the floor and closed his eyes tight and covered his ears with his hands and remained that way until a voice behind me said:

  “Mister Parker, I’m afraid I must ask you to leave. Now.”

  Fantine’s face blazed with outrage and anger and even some fear, I think, now I’ve had some time to reflect on it. She called for Augie and he rushed in, hat in hand, as Fantine went to the boy. Augie looked discomposed and hustled me out of the building and back into his truck. The afternoon was getting on, and the shadows under the thick trees had shifted, and summer cloud cover had darkened the sky—the air felt dank and heavy with moisture.