We’re in town now, riding down Queen Street, with all the people on their way home from church waving to Mother as if she is, by herself, a parade. Pauline Burke yells howdy to our open windows; her psoriasis has worn so far in the harsh winter, her face looks like something hanging from a deli window, but the warmth of her smile breaks the ravaging of her cheeks. Junebug, still tall and fine, but with a rangier walk and a certain increase of want in the way he holds his shoulders, doesn’t really wave at us. He’s more honest than anyone else: he waves at the car.
“Go on in here now,” Mother says, pulling the 210 alongside the Tin Cup, “and get your ma some Early Times.” She pushes a five-dollar bill into my hand, propelling me out of the car with the passion in her fingertips. Take care of your mama, Mr. Barbour said, but once I’m standing outside in the bright sun and graying slush, I can’t be certain what that entails. Junebug catches up to where I’m standing on the sidewalk and passes me, but his head stays swiveled in my direction. He’s dressed in a regular workshirt and suspenders; he hasn’t been to church. I think maybe, like Mother and Mr. Barbour, he has his reasons. He touches the brim of his cap in respect, and someone standing across the street might mistake him for having a newfound appreciation of me, but I’m standing close enough to see his eyes. He’s staring at the cerulean fins atop the trunk of Mr. Barbour’s car.
“Nice to see you too, Junebug.”
“You really do look like a citygirl,” he says, halting his stride. “Hear tell you had a record on the radio, but I ain’t never got to hear it for myself.”
“It wasn’t my record,” I say. “I just wrote the song. I bet you have heard it.”
He doesn’t ask which song, because he doesn’t care. He wiggles his cap right and then back left on his head. “Think you’ll ever come back to Kentucky?”
I shrug, and he snaps his head back around to shuffle on down the street. Through the white cinder-block walls of the Tin Cup comes laughter, the shouted end of a joke, more laughter. I breathe deeply of the winter around me, then step in the bar’s front door.
“Them Cats is doing all right this year. No thanks to Coach Rupp—”
“Aww naw, you pour lye down the drain it’s gonna eat them pipes right up—”
“Gotta grease up the sow ’fore you reach up her nethers for that piglet—”
“Then she took my boots and threw ’em out in the snow while I was sleep—”
The little radio atop the ice chest carries on with its Nat King Cole chorus, and at last the men of the bar fall silent. They build me a wall of stares. The Tin Cup is always so stuffed with men, I thought they could smell it when a new woman walked through the door, but they’re just now noticing me.
“That the little Martin girl?”
“The one what went off to New York?”
“I believe it is.”
“Heard tell she was on the radio.”
“Well, little bit, you done growed right up,” says the Tin Cup’s owner, who’s standing behind the bar, crushing ice in a grinder. He’s let his conk grow out, and even under the crown of his natural, his polished gold-cuffed links and black leather vest whisper a proprietary slickness, a sophistication that will own Queen Street even if it will never transcend it.
“Thank you,” I tell him. “But it’s probably just my new coat.”
Still the men stare, some of them at my shoes, others at my hair, still others at shapes they visualize beneath my wool coat. The WLEX announcer breaks the music with news: Eight days after launching the seven-ton Sputnik V, the Soviets have used the orbiting satellite as a launch platform for the interplanetary probe Venera I, which is aimed at the planet Venus. The United States launched Pioneer V toward Venus in March, but the signal was lost a month later.
“What you need?” the owner asks. “You’re a little short in the tooth yet to be liquored up on a Sunday, smart girl like you. And I ain’t seen your mama here in a good long while.”
“I’d just like some—” I begin. I’ve arrived at a minute I’ve come to a thousand times before, in a hundred different lifetimes, and this time the hard, blue crystals that have tied me down are snapping loose. Take care of your mama, Mr. Barbour said.
“Peanuts. I came for peanuts.”
“Peanuts? Well, all right, if that’s what you want.”
“This some kind of New York thing?” somebody yells from the bar, and all the other men laugh.
I try to hand the owner Mother’s five dollars and he shakes his head. “Your mama’s gonna be all right,” he says, as he pours half a bag of shelled peanuts into a paper sack. I breathe deeply of the Tin Cup, of my mountain people and their gorgeous, ruinous ways, of something that’s no longer my mother’s.
When I slide back into the car, I watch Mother watch me. The bun she’s so carefully coiled this morning has slid down to a loosening bump on the back of her neck, and she doesn’t seem like my mother at all—she’s just a sad, nervous widow too old to have a two-year-old baby and too young to have a daughter who’s gone and gotten married without so much as a how do or a go-to-hell. Mother leans into me and puts her hand out for the sack. “What’s in here?” she asks, peering in. “Peanuts? Peanuts!” But she’s smiling, and then she starts to laugh.
Ice on the road has turned to slush and then to water, and trees on the way out of town stand naked, relieved of their icy sleeves. Spray hisses under Mr. Barbour’s tires and dirties the sides of his car, and I imagine him outside later, washing it with his bucket of soapy water, drying it with his chamois. I hope it’ll stay warm for him. He loves my mother. To teach her to drive, he’s had to sit in his own passenger seat and look over at her and see a woman more bold than afraid, a woman defaulting on the sadness she owes her past. I’ve finished eighteen, and I’m on my way to twenty. Five fours, a nice rounded-off number. Between Mother and me now is an end, a beginning. She turns on Mr. Barbour’s radio, and I sink back into the vinyl seat. I can’t know the time exactly, but in less than twenty-five hours I’ll go from being some of my mother’s daughter to being all of August’s wife. And for that, for my hurry, I’m already sorry.
FAMOUS ONES
When Grandpap sees me coming up his sidewalk with August, he stands up from his new porch swing and shakes his head. Not so much at us, I gather, as at himself—after sixty-eight years in the world, he can no longer always be certain of what he sees. Age has carried his body a far piece in the year I’ve been away, or perhaps it’s just that I never noticed the pinching of his mouth and the blossoming of hair in his ears when I had daily watch of them. He says my name with tears in his blueing eyes. I’m his lone pigeon returned to roost, and he holds his embrace of me for such a length of time that I’m able to count a score of shy heartbeats traveling up his chest. I’ll leave it to August to tell him we’re only visiting.
“Granddaddy, this is my husband.”
He shakes August’s hand as gently and easily as if I’ve offered him a sandwich. “Right pleased to meet you,” he says, but he hikes up his pantlegs and sits back down without offering August a place in the swing. He doesn’t invite us into the house, though the sun is just starting to dip behind the mountain and our arms are chilled underneath our coats. “How old is this feller?” Grandpap asks me, without taking his eyes off August’s.
“Thirty,” August answers.
“I asked my granddaughter.”
“Thirty,” I say. “Says so on his birth certificate.”
“Thirty. That means he ain’t in high school. Which means he must do something for a living.” Grandpap keeps August locked in his sights. “Now I am talking to you,” he says, and sets himself to rocking.
“I’m a bassist. Sir.”
“A musician?”
“Yes, sir. I make a comfortable enough living out of it, sir.”
“Well, that’s good. Ain’t too many of ’em what does.”
Grandpap manages to lower his bushy eyebrows and make himself look satisfied, but it comes out that he i
sn’t. Over a dinner of breakfast—hotcakes he’s smothered in butter, and sausage with hot pepperseeds he’s ground tiny as dustflakes—Grandpap rakes questions over August. How long has he played for money? Eight years. Who has he played with? Jaki Byard and Elvin Jones. Anybody we would of heard of? McCoy Tyner? Naw. Pharoah Sanders? Maybe. Where all has he played? Café Society. Connie’s Inn. The Five Spot. You get booed off the stage? That how you met my Audrey? It was a regular gig we had together. Sir. Had? What happened?
I’ve got seventeen hours left to find Caroline, and answering all Grandpap’s doubts will take a lifetime. “Granddaddy,” I say. “Let the man eat his supper.”
“Your daddy’s dead, so I’m the man has a right to know.”
“They threw out my contract. Sir.”
“Well, then. People don’t generally throw things out midstream lessun the things is causing them trouble.” Grandpap sets his fork and knife down on either side of his plate so that they stand like soldiers waiting for orders. August looks glumly at his island of hotcakes. He bites into a piece of sausage, and spice waters his eyes.
“They threw out his contract,” I say, “because he was living on his feet.”
Grandpap’s eyebrows ruch upward again and he retakes his silver, pushing his knife through the tines of his fork to saw out a piece of sausage. “Man oughta make sure he can feed his wife before he goes standing on his feet,” he says, but he doesn’t sound like he means it. He chews and swallows, making a couple of minutes during which neither August nor I dare breathe. “So,” he asks, “if you can play bass, that means you might can fiddle, too.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, it just so happens I got one in the backroom.”
“Granddaddy,” I say, but he’s already up and tapping himself to the back of the house.
“Hey, Lolita,” August whispers. “What’s old Grandpa really going back there for? His jar of arsenic?” He rolls his eyes, and I giggle. Grandpap returns with a blank expression that confirms he’s heard nothing.
“Well, all right, son,” he says, handing over his fiddle. He thrusts his splintered bow forward, grazing August’s forehead with its frog, but he won’t acknowledge having hit him. He won’t apologize, either, for interrupting the man’s dinner. August takes up his bow and sews together a child not quite ragtime and not quite bluegrass, a movement so undeniably precious and rare as to make me and Grandpap feel that this is the afternoon for which we’ve lived eighty-four collective years. He heads into 5/2 time, shuts himself into the pentatonic scale, resolves back into bluegrass, and Grandpap dips his head with the shame of having to wipe away a tear. If August knows then that our ears are melting, his face reveals nothing: he’s simply saving the day with his hands. He plants the fiddle deeper in the crook of his neck and frowns, transects Grandpap’s fiddle with the camber at every possible angle; and the thing he hatches takes me and Grandpap back past the telegram from South Korea, back past the time either of us ever saw the word COLORED atop a water fountain, past that day in childhood when we first discovered our fingers wouldn’t reach the sky no matter how high we stretched. August plays, and my grandfather and I are reborn.
“Best damn fiddler I ever heard,” Grandpap says, when he’s finished. The curtains are still parted, and I can see the moonlight as a faint smear across the tops of the trees; snow will be back in Mt. Sterling by morning. Grandpap invites us to stay the night, the weekend. “But don’t y’all dare think a living here,” he says, as August hands him back his fiddle and bow. “Ain’t a body south of the Mason-Dixon line knows how to treat a black man got that kind a talent. Y’all need to move on over to Paris. France. That’s where all the famous ones goes.”
For the night, we do stay. In our sharp, black, New York clothes, we spoon up and sleep together in fits on Granddaddy’s narrow sofa, August’s pants against my nylons, the soft part of my nose sunk into his starched collar. I remember how, if you’re a young person, it’s a virtue to be out on a Friday night in Mt. Sterling, and I wonder at how old I’ve grown already, that the thought of doing so repulses me. I wake at midnight. And at three in the morning. And again at four thirty, having dreamed that I fell asleep and had a dream. I’m exhausted the next morning, but it feels wise: I have only five and three-quarter hours to find Caroline, and from Mr. Barbour’s house, it would have taken me all morning to catch a ride.
I’m not at all certain what meeting her will make me have to say, whether I owe her apology for not coming on New Year’s Eve or excuse for coming so soon thereafter, or the neutrality of being—like her—not so special after all. Just a girl who tried. By the middle of January in this new decade, neither August nor I were able to find gigs anywhere. Joe Glaser, it seems, was powerful enough to have both my and August’s cabaret cards revoked. What’s worse, we didn’t find out until we went looking for gigs. Where we’d been friends, we’d become poison. At Clark Monroe’s Uptown House, the stage manager shook his head and said his hands were tied. At Dan Wall’s Chili Shack, the owner just chuckled to himself and walked away, as though he were already looking at two ghosts. John Hammond hadn’t been touched, it seemed, and August played a session on the eleventh, but we both knew it wouldn’t be enough money. Through a friend, we got on with the Theater Owners’ Booking Association. Everyone knows it as T.O.B.A., though August calls it Tough On Black Asses, because the Southern audiences want blood, sweat, and tears at every show. They’re interested in showmanship, not musicianship, and in 70-degree winter weather, it’s too hot, in any case, to play art. It feels odious to lay on a note for two measures; it feels like we ought constantly to be playing Dixieland. August, in reaction, wants to solo constantly. He’s forgotten that the bassman is the foundation. It’s like someone’s thrown us a medicine ball. In the long run, it might be that holding the ball isn’t the hard part, but catching it has been something awful.
When I see her, I won’t tell Caroline about that. I’ll tell her, instead, the story of us in New York, of nights spent jostling beautiful, sensitive crowds, and subway platforms full of girls with their own spending money. I’ll tell her how I’d forgotten about my mother’s black dress because each night, the costume girl wheeled out a whole rack of show gowns. I’ll tell her she should have come; she should have been there. I’ll tell her about the Negro girl on Riverside Drive who etched the faces of famous people in pink chalk.
August is drooling a spot on the flowered couch pillow, and when I roll to standing on the cold wood floor, he rouses and turns over so his face is in the couch. Still, he sleeps. Grandpap’s bedroom door is filled with his heavy snoring, and it’s easy, if I miss the louder floorboards, to steal his winter boots from inside the door. At the back of the house, in the old keeping room, I take three pairs of wool socks from his drying rack to snug the boots against my feet. If I take August with me to see Caroline, August with his crisp black shirt and his quotations from Mao’s Little Red Book, it will be like speaking Portuguese. It won’t do to wake him, then, and when I leave through Grandpap’s front door, I hold the spring so it won’t creak, letting its coils slink along my fingers.
At seven on a winter’s morning, the frontier beyond Grandpap’s porch stands empty of life, without humans or animals or visible foliage. The sun has sunk itself and not returned, and the heavy winds have rolled overland in the night and refrozen the earth. From every chimney on Queen Street, smoke recycles itself into the gray sky, and the singed air stings my nose and leaves a sooty film on my tongue. It means mothers are cooking breakfasts, and fathers are warming their feet at fires; older sisters are pressing their hair and warming babies’ bottles. It doesn’t mean that anyone on Queen Street cares that I’m here, or is waiting for me to be anywhere save the inside of their radios or the hard places they reserve in their hearts for folks run off and grown strange. Off the porch, then, I stumble, down the sidewalk and into the frozen mud of the street. Grandpap’s boots rub hard enough to blister, but the layers of sock protect my feet. Enough t
ime passes that the early morning wind stops and gives way to silence, and though its song stays in my mind, I know it’s just an echo deep in my soul. When an engine finally breaks the quiet, I trudge the exact middle of the road, daring the car to run me down, which I myself can’t believe. Any monster could be driving, waiting for a young, stupid, frozen girl to misjudge her place in the scheme of things.
Mrs. Wofford comes into view behind the wheel of her station wagon—pink and wrinkled, with cruel eyes and blazing orange hair. She leans across her seat and rolls down her window in jerks. “Where you headed?” she asks, in the loud voice of the slightly deaf, and I can’t believe how much two years have ravaged her. Her roots, at the hairline, show half an inch of gray. “Where you headed?” she asks again, when she sees I’m just gawking at her, and I lift my hand in something not even dismissal.
“Are you listening to me, gal?” she yells, as I start to walk. Another motor crawls along in the distance and then comes to pass her. A tired-looking couple in a dented sedan, the letters D-O-D-G-E pressed against the muzzle of its grille. Mrs. Wofford inches along the street beside me. “Well, it’s right cold out here, and you with not even no hat. You’re liable to get frostbite on them ears, you don’t get inside right quick.”
She rolls up her window as she says it, and drives off with no further advice, spoiling the virgin air with exhaust as she rocks through the ruts. I watch until her car disappears, then I take up walking again in the direction of the White grocery and the carousel. I’m traveling. Just like everyone else on the planet.
Atop No. 211 stands a man hammering a shingle onto the roof. It’s remarkable, but my thoughts are only of escaping the cold, and I think nothing of him until he shouts out: “Audrey? That you?”
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