I crept forward. There were a thousand things in my mind running around like foals in spring or puppies or a mess of snakes. My imagination sparked, I guess you could say, and I could see in my mind’s eye a dead body down in that hole, a woman maybe, all in white like she had died at her wedding. I don’t know. But as god is my witness, I heard a creak like a door opening and in my mind it was the woman’s black mouth and a wind came up and blew into the world a cold, cold breeze.
“Ask,” the wind said. “Ask.”
“I would hear ‘Crowned in Scarlet,’” Mister Parker said.
The wind howled and moaned. Don’t know any other way to explain it. The mist was thicker than milk now, and I crept forward so I could get where I could see and hear better.
The wind laughed at Mister Parker, and it was a bitter sound. From where I crouched, I could see his back and shoulders, he was hunched over whoever was in the grave with him and for a moment I thought he was the voice of the wind.
“Baby,” the wind said. “My baby. It’s been so long.”
“Momma?” Mister Parker said. “Momma, I’ve missed you so much. I’ve done—”
“Ssssshhhhh,” the wind said, its voice coming from so far away. It sounded like two tin cans connected with string. It sounded like someone speaking softly in a big house in a different room from where you are sleeping late at night when everything is quiet and still. “Don’t think on all that now,” the wind said.
“He killed you. I couldn’t rest, I couldn’t sleep until I found him. And I did,” Parker said. His back hitched when he said it, and I realized he was crying. “I killed him,” he said.
“What are you saying, my son?” the wind asked.
“It was in Washington and I saw him. Insull. Matthew Insull. On the street. I followed him home and watched him. And then, one day, I went to his house and wrung the breath out of him.”
“What what what what what,” the wind said.
“My hands found his throat and I did to him what he did to you, Momma.” Mister Parker’s voice sounded like car wheels over gravel. There was so much pain and misery there I liked to cry. But I didn’t.
“No no no no no no no no,” the wind said. There was something rising in that sound as well. Terror, yes, and agitation. In my mind the white woman writhed in the grave. “You lie. You lie. You lie. If not to me, then to yourself,” the wind said. “Bunny is here. Bunny is with me, at your hand.”
“Bunny? I would never have hurt him,” Parker cried. “I would never have hurt you.”
“My son. My son. My son. Insull did not drown me. I was drunk and foolish. I stripped naked to swim, having drunk so so much, and slipped. The world flashed and flipped and went white. My head struck the dock, my body struck the water, and my lungs filled. And then I found myself here. Matthew was a good man,” the wind said.
“Why did he flee?” Parker asked.
“He’s a man, just like you, and scared and small, like all men.”
“I killed him,” Parker said back. “And then to hide, I went to war. And killed again.”
“No no no. Please no, I do not have much time. It is coming,” the wind said.
“Momma, I’m sorry, I thought—”
“I cannot help you now. There is no succor for murderers. It is coming,” the wind said.
“What’s coming, Momma?”
“The crowned man, the scarlet king. The black wall,” the wind said. And then: “Goodbye.”
Then there was a sound, and I don’t like to think about it too much. You can hear it yourself on the recordings. There was a sound. I cannot say whether Mister Parker made it, or the wind, or something in the ground. But it rose up and shattered my ears and I ran away into the dark and got lost in the woods. Behind me I could hear Parker or the wind singing words over and over again and they became huge, taller than the trees, taller than the sky. I glanced back once, and there it was, a black wall of night and a tall man standing in front of it and beyond it nothing.
Daddy came to find me in the morning. He was scared, I could tell, and very frightened by my hair. It’s all white now.
I don’t mind it, really, and I think it looks like a queen’s hair—“royal” is the word they use in advertisements—especially when I string together red mountain flowers in a daisy chain and wear them as a crown. I feel beautiful then, and any boy or man would find me that way too.
But I can still shoot out the eye of a sparrow on the wing with my slingshot.
My daddy found Mister Parker still in the grave, gibbering. He said Mister Parker had lost his mind, and from what I could see on the way back, he surely looked to be cat and tonic, just like the doctor said about Grandmam before she passed.
Daddy put the SoundScriber in the house we made camp in, and we put Mister Parker on Bess, and went back down Hell Creek to the White River where the bargeman waited. He couldn’t stop looking at my hair, nor Parker in his mute and dumb state. He drooled, Parker did.
I never saw him do or say anything else. Except once.
Daddy had someone contact the government. Daddy, who was worried about the government and their lawyers, went back upriver and collected Mister Parker’s SoundScriber and all the records that went with it. He did not keep the Studebaker, but held it in waiting for the government men. But the government men did not come. Eventually, they sent a telegram saying Mister Parker’s sister would collect him, and his belongings. It was a long while, waiting for her to come, and in the meantime, we had to take care of Mister Parker. He could eat, and he could sleep—it seemed like all he did was sleep and sit out on the porch in the sun, staring into the cornfields, drooling. Sometimes, Daddy would roll a cigarette and light it and put it in Mister Parker’s lips and he’d smoke it, never using his hands. But if you didn’t watch it, it would burn down to a nub and blister the poor man’s lips. I never had to wipe his backside with a corncob, but Daddy surely did, and did not enjoy that one bit. Daddy hated that part so much, he said we weren’t to feed Mister Parker but once a day, and then only a little bit. So that’s what we did.
My brother Michael came home with a cigar box, coronations de luxe it said on the wooden lid, and with a bit of wood and some of Daddy’s tools, he made a three-string guitar for himself. He always wanted a fiddle but Daddy said they cost too much, so he made himself something he could pick a tune with. When he brought it in our house’s main room down from the attic where he kept his workshop, and struck a few notes, Mister Parker appeared in the main door from the porch, a wild look in his eye. He moved to Michael like a wolf and snatched up the cigar box in one hand and began fingering it madly, producing a weird, disjointed melody. His hands moved like spiders across the strings. Michael and Daddy just stood there, poleaxed.
Mister Parker began mouthing words, whispering at first and then growing louder, “Ain’t I king here, well well well, Ain’t I a good man, well well well, Ain’t I lord and where’s my crown, well well well, Ain’t I belong here, well well well, I’m a bad man, I’m a bad man . . .” Over and over and then he opened his mouth like a bell and a sound came out so black that I stretched out and my hand reached into my pocket as if it had its own mind and found the rock I had there for my slingshot and I threw it as hard as I could and hit Mister Parker between the eyes. He fell backward and the cigar-box guitar went a-clattering across the floor.
Mister Parker never spoke again.
His sister came a couple of days later and collected him.
My name is Millicent Olive Dethero and that is my story. I swear every word of it is true.
If you doubt me, come touch my hair and listen to Mister Parker’s acetates. And then maybe you’ll believe.
He was wrong, though. Some endings are final.
32
Cromwell: He Cannot Sleep
Cromwell closes the field journal. It is morning now and he’s read through the night. He rises, showers, brushes his teeth. When he opens the blackout curtain, a woman with shocking white hair stares up a
t his window from the parking lot. She’s dressed in her shift and the wind tears at her clothing. Dementia, maybe, he thinks, grief is like dementia, and barrels down to the lobby and out into the parking lot to help her but she’s nowhere to be found. The hard, cold asphalt of the lot hurts his bare feet and he realizes he’s standing beneath the clotted sky in his nightclothes. He returns to his room slowly, rubbing his face. He sits at the glowing screen of his Mac, vacant, and pecks at the keyboard. He answers emails, he looks at his direct messages on social media accounts. The Realtor, the estate sale planner, the lawyer, the inspector, his bureau chief. A high school friend expressing belated condolences. A woman who has heard he is newly single. Viv has not contacted him. She won’t, he knows. He must be the one to reach out to her and that will never happen.
Hattie texts him and they meet in the lobby to check out. They eat prepackaged Danishes and powdered eggs with hot sauce from the continental breakfast as Hattie asks which continent as a joke and it takes Cromwell a full ten minutes to catch it.
“You all right?” she asks, by rote now. Purely habit. His work wife, as if there ever can be such a thing without work sex. He thinks of Vivian. Her remarkably strong hands insistent at his body. He thinks about Maizie, the curl of her stomach against his son, breathless, the house still. The carbon monoxide detectors had beeped in the night—he doesn’t remember which night—indicating the batteries were low, and he’d pulled the nine-volt to stop the beeping and shuffled off back to bed and did not think of them again, ever. And now he’s here, in Springfield. Did I want them to die? Did I? So I could be with Vivian? Am I that sort of man? A monster? I cannot remember.
I cannot remember who I am, he thinks. Who I am supposed to be.
“I’ve arranged the flights.”
“I look forward to getting back. Hotel life sucks, man,” Hattie says, observing him. “You?”
“Yes. The recordings will be my work for a long while,” he says.
“You gonna follow up on the Bunny angle?” Hattie asks.
“Maybe,” he says. “I don’t know yet. Let’s just get the acetates in the system and then I can move on to the next part.”
She seems dissatisfied. “So that’s it?”
“If I did write something, I don’t think I could do it without you working with me.”
She’s still for a long while, and her gaze searches his face for what, he cannot tell. Honesty, maybe. She shakes her head.
“No, man,” Hattie says. “You can’t write that book.”
“Why not?”
“I think you know. You’ve got other business to attend to.”
He says nothing.
“And right now, you’re a fucking hot mess, Crumb,” she says. Her face is hard as she says it. He meets her gaze. In some ways, it’s a rejection that hurts more than anything he can think of. He needed her acceptance and not getting it makes him bitter. Angry. That grubby spark of ambition burning in his chest. “But ask me again, later.”
He nods. It’s like a lifeline. Possibilities indicate a future, a road that can be followed.
“I’ll probably still say no,” she says. “Writing isn’t really my bag. But you never know. I’m probably as good at it as you are. Can always give it a shot.” She stops, thinking for a moment. “What was that phrase that Parker kept saying?”
“There are no endings,” Cromwell says.
At the Parker house, Hattie cues up the TASCAM and they work through the remaining acetates, slowly. Hattie decides to go get some Starbucks, and takes Cromwell’s order, and he wanders down through the house, to the front lawn. It’s sunny today, with a bright, moistureless winter sky. The Realtor has placed a sign on the front lawn. He finds himself returning to the backyard, and the room in the back of the garage. The deteriorating instruments within.
Here they would place Parker, with the banjo, the guitar, the dulcimer, and lock the door. They’d flee, he knows, out of earshot. Whatever music Parker played, he played solely for himself.
They finish by noon. But Cromwell, for reasons he cannot wholly explain, takes the last acetate, the one marked Cidersend, and files it in the middle of the records without presenting it to Hattie to digitize. It’s a subterfuge that will most likely be found out, but not today, and not by Hattie. All he can think when he does this is I am not ready, I am not ready. Hattie smiles in relief when he tells her they are through. Carefully, working as a team, they load the acetates and the SoundScriber into the back of their rented SUV and bring the items to a USPS, where other government employees take the cases and equipment and pack it under Hattie’s supervision. By evening they are home.
33
Cromwell: Mollie in Mountain View
Winter: The house is cold and remains so. In the mornings, Cromwell rises silently, dresses somberly, and returns to work. He does not listen to music on his new turntable. He does not cook. His commute has changed. He does not drive to DC, but goes west to Culpeper, in the shadow of Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge Mountains, passing fields and markers for Civil War battlegrounds and farmhouses and new real estate developments. What sort of songs do those hills contain? A song is a thought the heart gives expression. He does not miss the office in Washington, with its political struggles and jockeying for position. He does not miss wearing the suits and ties.
In Culpeper, there is a hole in the ground, and in that hole the American government stores all of the audiovisual records of the country’s history. The climate is controlled; it’s a tomb, a sepulcher for the nation’s film, its acetates, its microfiche and wax tables and deliquescing paper history. Through its halls walk technicians, curators. They’re young people, bright faces downturned to glowing device screens. It is there where Harlan Parker’s recordings have gone to live, deathless. The National Audio-Visual Conservation Center campus looks to Cromwell like the site of a Roman amphitheater, covered in ivy and decay. Surely the architect must’ve intended this, he thinks, each time he enters. It’s the ruins and remnants of a dead culture. Why do this?
His days are spent indexing the recordings. Listening to the voices of Smoot Sawyer and Lucius Spoon and Gramp Hines and all the rest. He works on papers and writes, as he listens, taking notes. Notating key, tempo, structure. He transcribes each acetate. He’s accompanied by a young technician who wears forensic latex gloves and who does not let him touch the acetates. She is young, and blond, and plump, and smells good, and Cromwell cannot stop himself but he often thinks about what it might be like if she opened herself up to him, thick legs spread. When these thoughts occur, the hurt feels like a palpable thing in his chest, his stomach. I’m a bad man, Stackerlee. It becomes a litany. In time, Stagger Lee has ceased to be the villain and is now Cromwell’s confessor. Her name is Bethany March and she has a gaudy and large diamond wedding ring that distends the latex gloves and a vapid laugh he does not like but still he thinks about her spreading herself. But he cannot come, even at his own hand. He thinks of Parker, near the end, when no food could sate him. Liquor and smoke did nothing. At night Cromwell will thumb through the worst sorts of porn the Internet has to offer, his hot prick in hand, and cannot reach completion. That part of him has been walled away.
One day, after winter has passed into late May, they listen to the Amoira Hines acetate together. He watches the technician as it becomes obvious what is occurring in the recording, the sex, the demented laughter, arcane and unknown words, the slapping of flesh together. With her gloved hand she touches her neck, brushes an errant bit of hair from her face. Eventually she rises and leaves the climate-controlled listening room. The next day, she offers Cromwell instruction on the care and handling of acetates and does not remain with him again during his work.
He requests the acetate labeled Cidersend.
It is as Mollie Dethero described it, though it is not clear whether it was Parker, in his dementia, speaking for himself and the “wind” or if it was Mollie who was speaking. A jape, a trick she pulled on a poor sick man. A snake in the b
edsheets, poison ivy in the clothes. Surely it was not the wind. Not a voice from the grave. The sound at the end is like a tempest in a tin can, full of words and jarring melodies, full of sound and fury. You know the rest. It’s a small sound, full of the crackle of recording and seemingly very far away. There is no intimation of the black wall.
On a whim, Cromwell turns to his computer, opens a browser, and keys into a search bar Millicent Olive Dethero, Arkansas. A single hit. Her name became Millicent Dethero Tackett at marriage. He is glad it is not an obituary. An article regarding gardening, dated 2002, in the Stone County Register. In her byline, it mentions her husband, Richard “Buddy” Tackett, and a search reveals his death in 2009 at the age of ninety. He is survived by his wife and two sons, George and Lester Tackett. It takes two phone calls to contact her oldest son, George, and discover whether she lives and where she is.
He’s on an early-morning flight the next day to Little Rock, Arkansas. By late afternoon, he’s in the parking lot of the Stone County Retirement Home and Assisted Living Complex, a drab, run-down affair. This is where people come to die, he thinks, those too tenacious to let go on their own. There’s always pleasure to be found somewhere. In a television show or vanilla pudding. In an OxyContin or a foot rub. Isn’t there? The world still contains pleasure, does it not? The voice of Mollie that lives in Cromwell’s mind is thousands of miles, and eighty years, away from this poor place.
He gets out of his rental. Already, he can feel the summer. There’ll be a long procession of days like these, hot and bright and golden. It’s Arkansas, and the heat is rising in the hills and the air is full of moisture and the sky teems with columns of clouds.
The nurse will not let him see Mollie Dethero, so he leaves a note asking permission to speak with her, indicating he’ll return tomorrow. He takes a room at a motel and has an urge to have a drink, to have many drinks, to see if something still churns in his depths, but Stone County is dry. A pocket of prohibition that has hung on to life since Mollie Dethero was a girl.
A Lush and Seething Hell Page 31