by Alan Rodgers
“What’s that, Blind Willie?” Robert Johnson asked. “I never heard that song.”
Blind Willie grinned.
“It’s a mystery,” he said. “Will you give me your secrets if I tell you the tune?” He wasn’t serious, and they both knew it.
Robert Johnson scowled. “Get on with you,” he said. “Where did you get that song?”
Blind Willie laughed.
“You ought to get yourself a hymnal, Robert Johnson,” he said. He was still picking out the melody, strumming quietly on his guitar. “It’s called ‘The Ode to Joy.’”
Robert Johnson snorted. “Ain’t nothing in no hymnal sounds like that,” he said, pulling his guitar off the strap where it hung on his back; moving his hands across the strings; picking up the refrain.
He was right, of course. Blind Willie had reworked “The Ode to Joy” considerably — he’d syncopated the beat, rearranged the phrases, rebuilt the structure until it grew bluesy. It was strange, powerful music; it made the world around them irresistibly beautiful. They say God whispered in Beethoven’s ear as he wrote “The Ode to Joy”; everyone who ever heard Blind Willie play his version of the ode said he heard the word from God.
And maybe those people did hear. Certainly Robert Johnson heard. The sound was nearly dear enough to call him back to Heaven.
It might’ve called him, too, if Blind Willie hadn’t let go his guitar and reached up to take hold of Robert Johnson’s arm.
“Don’t let it carry you away,” he said. “This ain’t the time for that.”
Robert Johnson laughed derisively, like to say what makes you think such a foolish thing?, but he really didn’t carry it off. Blind Willie knew all sorts of things — some of them because he had the sight and could see for himself; some because he’d heard the word about a lot of things to come. He patted Robert Johnson on the back and told him not to be afraid.
Johnson hardly even heard him. How could he hear Blind Willie when his mind’s eye was showing him the Pearly Gates of Heaven?
No way at all, plain and simple.
“I got lost in your woods, Blind Willie,” Robert Johnson said. “How do I get out of here?”
“If you need to know the way,” Blind Willie said, “that’s what I’ll show you.”
Robert Johnson snorted. “I bet you will,” he said.
“I never gamble,” Blind Willie said, standing in the doorway, looking Robert Johnson blindly in the eye. “You want to follow me or not?”
He stood and started toward the door.
Robert Johnson let out a breath; the sound wasn’t a sigh, exactly, and it wasn’t a gasp, either. Defeated, or tired, or exasperated — it was something like that. He followed Blind Willie out of the shack, into the swept yard beneath the pines.
Three paths led away from the shack. None of them led directly back toward Memphis.
“If you need to come this way again,” Blind Willie said, “remember that the best way is the hard way. Some of the other paths work if you know how to follow them, but it’s easy to get lost when you go those ways.” As he spoke he gestured, first at the rocky path that led up toward the crest of the ridge, then at the other two trails, one of which led down toward the river, the other straight north along the side of the ridge.
“I went that way,” said Robert Johnson. “It didn’t take me anywhere I want to go.”
Blind Willie smiled. “Sometimes it seems that way, don’t it?”
Robert Johnson swore. “Talk sense,” he said.
Blind Willie didn’t say another word. He started up the rocky path, and walked it quickly, like a sighted man; he didn’t slow until they reached the north edge of the forest and the trail that led down the ridge toward Memphis.
All that time Robert Johnson kept expecting Blind Willie to ask a price for his guidance, the way he’d hinted he would when Robert Johnson first told him he was lost. But if there was a price to pay, Blind Willie never asked it.
That made Robert Johnson especially suspicious, because no man ever puts such a debt on you as the man who helps you without mentioning his price.
“You asked me for the Mysteries,” Robert Johnson said. “Is that the price I owe you for your help?”
Blind Willie laughed.
“You pay me what you want,” he said. “You don’t have to pay me anything at all.”
“I bet I don’t,” Robert Johnson said. “What you mean, old man?”
“I mean exactly what I said, and not another word. You pay me what you like,” Blind Willie said. “Or pay me nothing at all, if that’s what pleases you. If I wanted to put a geas on you, I would have asked you for it long ago.”
Robert Johnson knew he was stepping into a trap, and he wanted to step away from it. But his heart was stingy, and it wanted to get by paying his debt as cheaply as he could.
So he gave Blind Willie just one more mystery, and he tried to let it go at that.
“The blood that goes in the ground,” he said, “is the Devil’s sacramental wine.”
Blind Willie frowned, and he looked away. There was an expression on his face like he’d heard a thing so vile that he could not bear to listen to it.
“Even Satan lives to serve the Lord,” Blind Willie answered. “God bless you, Robert Johnson.”
And so, even though Robert Johnson had cheated him — giving him the wisdom he’d seen as the Devil cast him out of Hell instead of the transcendent whisper-word from Heaven — even though Robert Johnson cheated him Blind Willie set him free from the debt.
But that never works the way it should. Because a geas isn’t a thing that a body puts on another nor one he could remove: a geas is a thing that grows in your own heart when someone does you a turn that makes you grateful. The geas that Robert Johnson felt was a thing he’d put upon himself, and there was no way he could remove it with a frugal generosity.
Robert Johnson wasn’t stupid; it didn’t take him long to realize the mistake he’d made. But not too long was plenty long enough: by the time he’d come to understand the burden he’d put on himself he was halfway down the ridge to Memphis, and Blind Willie was unfindably deep inside his haunted forest.
And there was not a solitary thing he could do to change the fate he’d already set in motion.
Robert Johnson took a name for himself when he reached Memphis, and the name he took was Hinky Tom. He was a deadman and he didn’t dare to play for money, but all the same he picked a little now and then, down to the corner, setting out a cup before him; and when he picked the power of the songs he did not play enraptured every passerby, till none of them who heard him could help but drop ten coins into his cup.
That was how Robert Johnson made his way those months in Memphis as he waited for his fate to come to him: for the first time since his death he made his coin with his guitar, and with the coin the world bestowed on him he cleaned himself and dressed himself, took himself a room in a boardinghouse and made a life as though he’d never died.
And waited for his destiny.
But the destiny he felt awaiting him never came, no matter how he waited. Because that life in Memphis under the name of Hinky Tom was his destiny. It made him, molded him, and shaped him in ways he never intended and surely did not understand. He moved through the city and the world, following the song he heard in his heart — and mostly that song was a thing that came from deep within him, a thing that he was born to because of who he was and what he was, but partly too it was the great King’s song, whispering in his dreams across the miles and the years.
But Robert Johnson didn’t know that. He only thought that he was waiting, day by day all through the fall and into winter for a Destiny to come a calling; and it never did, no matter how he waited. After a while he began to wonder why Saint Peter said the world still needed him, and there were days he picked �
��The Ode to Joy” softly in his room all by himself, hoping he could learn to play it just the way Blind Willie did to let them see the Pearly Gates of Heaven.
But no matter how he tried, his music would not transubstantiate, and now day by day he found himself growing hungry and eager, felt himself yearn for things he hadn’t yearned in all the years since the wet pneumonia took his life.
And the day came when he woke as if from a deep sleep, and he looked himself in the mirror and saw that he needed a shave.
That was when he knew that the lust and the hunger and the yearning were real, and he like to cry when he realized that. Because they meant he was no deadman but alive, and no matter how he wanted otherwise Robert Johnson had to face the world as all men do, to struggle and survive, to thrive or die beneath the sun.
And he cried and cried, but not because of any sadness: Robert Johnson cried to be alive because the joy had overwhelmed him and it like to break his heart.
That night Robert Johnson took himself to church and got himself a baptism. When the baptism was over he stood beside the choir, and sang with them, singing hallelujah loud among the choir as the preacher screamed and shook so fine, and though his song made magic in the air, it caused no necromancy — it only called the clear pure transcendent Spirit of the Lord.
And that was good.
But the goodness didn’t last for long. It never does, does it? Two hours after Robert Johnson got religion he was wandering back to his boardinghouse in the docklands with his heart all full of joy and celebration, and a voice spoke to him from the shadows of an alley.
“Robert Johnson,” the voice said, calling him by his born name where everyone in his new life knew him by the name of Hinky Tom.
“Call me Hinky Tom,” said Robert Johnson. “That’s what they call me now.”
The voice ignored him. “I’d like a word with you, Robert Johnson.”
Robert Johnson recognized that voice. It was a beautiful voice — a ragged, gnarled, bluesy voice, a voice the giftie made unlike all others — and Robert Johnson would have known it in a maelstrom.
“Is that so?” he asked, peering into the shadows, trying to see if it could really be the one whose voice he knew, wondering why that man would come a-looking for him in the dark.
Then he saw that cursed bluesman walking toward him in the uncertain light of the rising moon, and he said, “Leadbelly, why are you here?”
But Leadbelly didn’t answer.
Leadbelly was still alive in those days, though the days that remained to him were numbered. He didn’t always answer with the truth.
“It’s good to see you, man,” Robert Johnson said. He lowered his guard — not all the way down, but just about. He’d known Leadbelly almost as long as he’d breathed, and he held him in high regard. Back when Robert Johnson was alive, he and Leadbelly were two of a kind, because both of them had felt the touch divine and still went with the Devil.
Robert Johnson didn’t think about the things that separated them, now that he’d died and come alive, born again; now that he’d redeemed himself and stood before the Pearly Gates, and returned to the world only because Saint Peter told him that the world still needed him. He didn’t see an enemy who lived to serve the Devil, but rather saw a friend, a companion, and man he loved the way great bluesmen love the rivals they respect.
When Robert Johnson looked at Leadbelly, he saw a friend. He would have welcomed him whether he was alive or dead or if he’d been returned from Hell, because there’s that kind of brotherhood among those who learn their craft together — but he would have been a fool to do it.
That was Robert Johnson: he was nothing if he wasn’t a fool.
And where Robert Johnson was a fool, Leadbelly was a scoundrel.
“I heard you was around,” Leadbelly said. “Thought I’d see for myself.”
Robert Johnson could hear Leadbelly was lying — the lie was clearer to him than any lie had ever been, partly because the repentance and salvation in his heart made the truth more clear to him. And partly because the Devil was about that man more distinctly than Robert Johnson had ever seen before. The Devil leaves a special mark on those he wraps his arms around, and because the Devil is the Prince of Lies his falsehood colors the words of everyone who serves him.
“Tell me the truth,” Robert Johnson said. “Why are you here?”
Leadbelly smiled unaffectedly, like it didn’t bother him to get caught in a lie. “What the hell you think?” he asked. “You afraid I come to kiss you for the Devil?” and then he laughed uproariously, as if that were the most outrageous humor.
Robert Johnson wanted to say, I wouldn’t put it past you, but held his tongue. He was still new to his repentance, and averse to giving deliberate offense — even where more seasoned righteous people call folks as they see them. “I don’t know what to think,” Robert Johnson said. “Why don’t you tell me what I need to know?”
Leadbelly smiled all bright and wide, and Robert Johnson knew he was in trouble.
“I just want to see how you been doing,” Leadbelly said. “I heard a story you was dead, and then I heard somebody saw you alive in Memphis. Of course I had to see.”
“Just a story,” Robert Johnson said. “I don’t look dead to you, do I?”
What he meant to say by that was, Look at me. Do I look like a deadman Hoodoo Doctor walking on the earth? and of course the answer to that was no. Robert Johnson wasn’t a Hoodoo Doctor and he wasn’t dead, either. But he wasn’t entirely innocent of those things, either. Robert Johnson was dissembling — deliberately clouding the truth by answering at right angles to it.
That was his second mistake. Because even if it isn’t a lie when a man dissembles, it breeds a lie, and a lie is a lie, any way you get to it.
Ain’t no way no man can win, lying to the Devil’s henchmen. The Devil is the Prince of Lies, and commands all of those who lie to him; a man who answers him truthfully will almost always face him down, and those who hold their tongues beat him almost as often.
But when a man lies, the Devil laughs, and he knows he’ll have his way. He had his way with Robert Johnson that night, that’s for sure.
“You look like Robert Johnson, that’s a fact,” Leadbelly said. Leadbelly’s born name was Huddie Ledbetter, but everyone knew him as Leadbelly. There were people who knew why to call him that, and there were those who called him Leadbelly without knowing why. But there were very few who knew the story of his name and called him by it too. “But you ain’t the man I know.”
Robert Johnson cocked an eyebrow. “Is that so?”
“You know it is.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m the man I was born, and the man I’ll die. You got me confused with someone else, that’s none of my concern.”
Leadbelly raised his face to look toward the sky, rolled his eyes toward the heavens. As he did his neck rode up above the scarf he wore around it, and Robert Johnson saw the wide white line of scar that cut across his throat. Johnson knew about that scar; everybody knew about it. He knew about the night in the bar down in Tupelo, and the awful fight that’d left Leadbelly bloody and broken on the floor where the barman slit his throat. And they knew how the barman had left him there when he closed the place, thinking that the rats would eat his rotting corpse. But Leadbelly was Leadbelly, and he wasn’t a man you could trust to die just because you’d slit his throat. When the bar was empty Leadbelly climbed out of his pooling blood, wrapped his shirt around his oozing throat, and stumbled out across the cotton fields toward home.
Even when he was alive, Leadbelly was hard to kill. Lots of men tried lots of ways to kill him, but no one ever hurt him.
“I just mean you changed,” Leadbelly said. “That’s all.”
“I guess I have,” Robert Johnson said.
They were walking, now — toward Robert Johnso
n’s boardinghouse, the way it happened, but they could have been walking anywhere, any place there ever was.
“Tell me more,” Leadbelly said. “I need to know.”
When Leadbelly said that Robert Johnson heard, I need to hear the good word of the Lord. And what could he do? No good man who’s ever been a sinner can deny a request like that — especially when the person asking is one who needs redemption as dearly as Leadbelly did.
So Robert Johnson said, “I heard the Word,” and gave him the news for all mankind. Leadbelly took it all in like he was the dry land and Robert Johnson’s testimony was the blessed rain. But he didn’t take it the way Robert Johnson meant it — not for a moment. He listened at the corners of every word that Robert Johnson told him, picking out the details of Johnson’s history and salvation, just as the Devil instructed him.
Before that night the Devil knew just three things about Robert Johnson: the avaricious life that had killed him and sent him to Hell; the vanity so great that even the Devil himself despised it, and cast him out of Hell; and the moments after his Redemption, when Scratch saw the Eye of the World watching him intently.
The Eye of the World still watched Robert Johnson, albeit more discreetly. The Devil didn’t know that, and Leadbelly couldn’t learn it for him — because Robert Johnson didn’t even know it himself.
But Leadbelly heard every one of Robert Johnson’s secrets that he thought to ask for. He heard about the years Robert Johnson spent wandering the country, looking for a thing he didn’t know and couldn’t name and could not bear to lose; he heard about the music and the magic, and what you hear when you pick two and seven and listen as you sit before a bonfire between the Left and Right Hands of the Lord. He heard about the Pearly Gates, Saint Peter, and the Mysteries, but neither Leadbelly nor the Devil could make a lick of sense from them. (Is it any wonder? All those things, and the Mysteries especially, depend upon a State of Grace not available to the unrepentant — a state that’s often just beyond the reach of the Lord’s most righteous children.)