Bone Music

by Alan Rodgers

  And then it finally came: a great flash of lightning so bright like the sun suddenly come to earth beside him — that close, so close that thunder burst right with it. No delay, not even a beat. Like it hit a block away, maybe closer.

  He rolled over onto his side. Pulled the blanket tight.

  And heard the scratching tapping at his window pane.

  Someone was out there in the thunder and the rain. Someone who wanted his attention.

  Who the hell. . . ?

  But he didn’t want to know who it was. He was scared out of his mind, and if he’d had the nerve he would have pushed away the blankets and run for his life — but he didn’t have the nerve, didn’t have any nerve at all too scared to move to speak to look who the hell in the storm it was thundering out there.

  Too damned scared to move, let alone run.

  Too scared to look, too, but his eyes opened in spite of themselves.

  And that was how he first saw her: watching him through the glass.

  Our Lady of Sorrows, Santa Barbara.

  It didn’t matter that he’d never seen her before. He’d known her all his life. Seen her shrines and grottoes outside dozens of houses back home in Union City; smelled the potion that bore her name hot summer afternoons when his mother came from the botanica; shivered when he saw the painting of her in the bar where wrinkled superstitious Cuban grandfathers smoked fat cigars as they sipped at their cervezas.

  Santa Barbara: the virgin with the burning sword, blood-hungry and terrible.

  Dan Alvarez sat on the edge of his bed, shivering with fear. He wanted to run. Wanted to look away from the Santa. And if he couldn’t run or look away he wanted to ask her why she’d come for him. She meant to kill him — he knew that. Couldn’t help knowing! Look at her, so beautiful and angry in the flickering chiaroscuro light from her burning sword — look at her! Blood-red eyes, long soft coils of black hair piled high and cascading from her head; skin white as ash. Whiter than any living thing ever ought to be. Dan saw her and knew she was all terror of the dark distilled and made tangible; knew she was the wrath of the Lord set out upon the world to do his bidding — or worse!

  She wants me to let her in.

  But he knew he didn’t dare.

  I’ve got to open the window.

  Because she was his fate, come to him. Come for him. There was no way he could avoid or delay what she had for him — only deny it, and denying the inevitable wasn’t a thing Dan ever managed to do.

  When he finally stood and crossed the room, it was as involuntary, as unconscious as when he’d opened his eyes.

  Just like a fate, he thought.

  “Santa,” he said when the window was open. “I live to serve you.” He felt stupid to say those words — like some guajiro hick in a story of his grandfather’s. And he wasn’t any damned hick! He was American, an honest to God rock ‘n’ roll American boy with talent nobody ever bothered to abuse, and the day was going to come really soon when they’d all regret they’d missed their opportunity!

  They were, Dan swore they were.

  The Santa smiled. When she spoke her voice was a whisper through the open window, throaty and hungry as desire. “I hear,” she said. “I have come.”

  “Why are you here for me, Virgin?” Dan Alvarez tried to keep the fear out of his voice, but it wasn’t any use. “I know I am unworthy.”

  The Santa ignored his question. She reached through the window to touch his face, and for a moment it was a tender gesture that cast a warm light on Dan’s life — fulfilled him, made him whole enough to die happy and content. And then the touch changed. Not so dramatically that anybody watching would have noticed, but Dan felt it, and there was no way she could have touched him like that without meaning to. Her fingers pressed hard against him, hard as though she were trying to probe the bone of his skull right through his skin. Maybe that was the point, he thought; maybe she pressed him the way a butcher probes a sow he means to buy to slaughter.

  Maybe.

  Dan tried to protest. “Santa —” he said, but she waved to silence him before he could say another word.

  “Do you accept me?” she asked.

  He didn’t understand, but he knew in his heart that he didn’t dare say anything but yes.

  “I do, Santa.”

  And all hell of thunder broke loose above him — lightning struck the roof, shattering the building’s wood frame. Sundering the roof and walls; setting the sundered bits afire.

  Among the Saint Francois Mountains Of Southeastern Missouri

  Easter 1949

  The snow was dry and powdery out on the Mountain, the same way it always is on winter afternoons; as Robert Johnson walked through it as he climbed the Mountain the stuff puffed and billowed like airy dust all around his boots. It was cold snow, he knew. It had to be cold. But it was so dry he hardly felt the coldness.

  “The Mountain is beautiful,” he told Peetie Wheatstraw when they’d been hiking for an hour. “I wish I never had to leave.”

  Peetie Wheatstraw smiled.

  “Then stay,” he said. “The Hoodoo Doctors will surely make you welcome.”

  Robert Johnson frowned. “I know they will,” he said. And he wanted to say, But I can’t stay with them, but even though he knew in his heart that he couldn’t stay, he wasn’t sure yet why that was.

  “Don’t put your mind at worry,” Peetie Wheatstraw said. “There’s plenty of time before you leave. And if you leave you’re always welcome to return.”

  Peetie Wheatstraw wasn’t telling any lie, but Robert Johnson knew that he was wrong. He dreaded to learn why.

  “I’m serious, Robert Johnson. There’s a place for you here. It’s yours when you want it.”

  Robert Johnson frowned. “I know there is,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

  Neither one of them said much after that. Maybe because the Mountain was steep and tall and they needed to save their breath for the climb — and maybe because there was nothing left that either one of them wanted to say out loud.

  Either way, it made their climb go faster. A few minutes before three o’clock they rounded the last bend before the hollow, and they could see the village with its thatch and wood and bake-mud houses, its swept yards and its two great common houses.

  Ma Rainey met them at the edge of that village.

  Now Ma Rainey wasn’t just any Hoodoo Doctor; she was one of the Seven Kings (though at that date there still weren’t yet seven), no matter how she was a Queen and not a King. She was secondest of all the Kings, and she answered to no one, not even John Henry his own self. In some respects she was his master, and some folks said she was his mistress. But they didn’t live together. John Henry lived in his mansion high on the summit of the Mountain; Ma Rainey kept a humble swept-yard shack in the village of the Doctors, and she didn’t live no way that anyone could criticize.

  Ma Rainey smiled and she opened her arms to Robert Johnson. “Give me your hands,” she said, and she smiled as warm as sunshine in the spring. “I’ve wanted to know you for a long time, Robert Johnson. I’ve heard the most amazing things about you.”

  Ma Rainey, she was so intense — Robert Johnson got bashful as a schoolboy when she looked at him that way.

  “I can imagine what you’ve heard,” Robert Johnson said. “And I imagine it ain’t altogether good.”

  Ma Rainey laughed, and her laugh was the sound of new leaves fluttering in the May breeze.

  “And not altogether bad, neither, young man.” She looked into his eyes and she smiled again, and Robert Johnson knew she saw him all the way deep down into his core, and loved him faults and all. It made him feel so naked, the way she looked at him! Naked and exposed and touched, too, like something intimate had passed between them and he didn’t even realize as it happened.

  Robert
Johnson felt his cheeks flush, and not for the first time he found himself glad that his skin was so dark it didn’t show how red he felt.

  “You’re a gracious lady, Ma Rainey. I’m pleased I have the chance to know you.”

  Ma Rainey seemed to glow. “Why, thank you, Robert Johnson.” She let go of one of his hands and turned to lead him into the village. “You’re just in time for dinner,” she said. “Let me show you to the common house.”

  Dinner was beans and greens and barbecue pig meat like you ain’t never had, no sir, nobody off the Mountain ever eats like that.

  On the Road in Eastern Tennessee

  The Present

  Some people say a kazoo ain’t nothing but a toy for children. Some ways they’re right, of course. Kazoo ain’t got much for range, and when you compare it with a real horn that old kazoo is kind of sad.

  But it’s wrong, too. Music is what you make of it, however you go about it; and there aren’t many places where you’d use harmonica that a kazoo can’t serve you adequately well.

  And even more than that, the kazoo is so simple and straightforward that it ain’t like other instruments. Most kinds of music measure craft as well as talent, but the toy kazoo is so simple that it measures talent plainly.

  Lisa played and played that toy kazoo all the way her mama drove from Johnson City west and south to Greenville. As she played her natural talent bloomed, and by and by the strangest consequences happened on the roads around them.

  Among the Saint Francois Mountains Of Southeastern Missouri - again

  Easter 1949

  For Robert Johnson, the strangest thing about dinner in the common house of the village on the Mountain was meeting up with Sonny Boy Williamson again. He hadn’t seen Sonny Boy since that awful awful morning on the bluff over Greenville, but the time they’d spent together before that morning had left a mark on Robert Johnson, and he thought of Sonny Boy most kindly and quite often. When he saw him as a deadman Hoodoo Doctor (and at an age so young!) he mourned a little. But the striking thing about Sonny Boy wasn’t his metamorphosis past death, nor even the frightful tale he told when he described the night a robber murdered him in Chicago.

  The most frightful thing was the look in Sonny Boy’s eyes.

  He looked haunted — burned and tortured to his core, as though he’d spent a thousand lives of torment in the cruelest parts of Hell.

  “Sonny Boy,” Robert Johnson asked, “what the hell has happened to you?”

  Sonny Boy pretended like he didn’t understand that question; he just retold the story of his murder, and how his partner Big Joe Williams gave up music after Sonny died.

  “I heard that,” Peetie Wheatstraw said, and he sounded very sad.

  Big Joe Williams was in the car with Peetie Wheatstraw when Peetie died in that car wreck, and because there were no next of kin Big Joe inherited Peetie’s guitar. He took it north with him when he went to Chicago.

  Chicago was where Big Joe got hooked up with Sonny Boy Williamson. Big Joe played Peetie Wheatstraw’s guitar and Sonny Boy played the harmonica he’d took to when his guitar began to give him fits, and together they played the clubs and juke-joints. Three times they recorded, but none of those recordings ever saw the light of day.

  God willing, no one alive will ever hear a record pressed from those recordings.

  Because strange things happened in those sessions, and the happenings left their record on the tape. The folks who’ve heard the master say the music itself is haunted — they say hoodoo comes afire when that record plays aloud, just as it burned when Big Joe and Sonny Boy played live in those last years of Sonny’s life.

  But where the live sessions were fantastically haunted, eerie and seductive, the haunting on the tape is a horror that torments all who hear it.

  “Big Joe going to be okay, Peetie,” Sonny Boy Williamson said. “I know he is.”

  Peetie Wheatstraw nodded. “I hope you’re right.”

  Robert Johnson cleared his throat. “You still haven’t told me, Sonny,” he said. “How come you look so — haunted?”

  For the longest time the whole damn table went so quiet you could hear the sound of snowflakes on the wind — and then finally Sonny Boy broke the silence.

  “That’s right,” he said. “And I ain’t going to tell you, either.”

  Ma Rainey — who sat at the far end of the table — cleared her throat. “I hear you’ve retaken to performing, Robert Johnson,” she said.

  Robert Johnson pushed his plate away. “I play now and then,” he said. “It hasn’t caused me any problem.”

  “I heard him,” Peetie Wheatstraw said. “His gift has grown in the years since he was alive.”

  “Is that so?” Ma Rainey asked.

  Robert Johnson shrugged. “You’re very kind,” he said to Peetie Wheatstraw. “I try to get along.”

  Ma Rainey smiled. “I heard a tale from Furry Lewis,” she said, “himself a talent of no small measure. You know he sweeps the streets of Memphis? He’s heard you many times, Robert Johnson. He recognized you the day you reached that town.”

  “I know a street sweeper,” Robert Johnson said, “and I noticed he had a gift about him. But I never heard him play.”

  “Someday you will, I think. His gift is very fine.”

  “If you say it, Ma Rainey, then it surely must be so.”

  Ma Rainey laughed, and her laugh was a song that Robert Johnson wanted to hear forever. “Robert Johnson!” she said. “I hope your faith in me won’t turn out to be mistaken.”

  “I know it’s not.”

  She laughed again, and Robert Johnson realized that he’d begun to fall in love with her. He wondered if that was wise, or even appropriate.

  “I want to hear you play, Robert Johnson. Peetie Wheatstraw and Furry Lewis have spoke of you so highly! I have to hear you for myself.”

  “I’ll do that, if you like,” Robert Johnson said.

  “It would please me,” Ma Rainey said.

  When dinner was over and the table was clear Ma Rainey built a great fire in the potbelly stove at the center of the common house, and half a dozen Hoodoo Doctors brought out their guitars. But they didn’t play themselves. Instead they waited for Robert Johnson.

  Robert Johnson didn’t hurry. He spent a long time tuning his guitar, and then he just held the guitar for the longest time, warming his hands to the strings. When he finally played he played good God-fearing tunes, and that surely made three Hoodoo Men discomfortable. He played “When the Saints Come Marching In,” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” fast like blues, not gospel-slow the way most people play it. When those were done he thought a long time before he played “Let Your Light Shine on Me,” which most people know rewritten and abused as “Midnight Special,” even though it’s really a hymn about the light from God’s lighthouse. Robert Johnson didn’t play it exactly the way Blind Willie played it on the back side of the same record that had “God Don’t Never Change,” but he played a lot more like Blind Willie than he’d played when he was alive.

  When he was halfway through “Let Your Light Shine on Me,” Sonny Boy Williamson took up his harmonica and began to accompany him; when he got to the next chorus three of the hoodoo men jumped in to play backup with their guitars.

  “Shine on,” Robert Johnson sang, “shine on! Let the light / from the lighthouse / shine on me!”

  And then the room went quiet, and Robert Johnson realized that the place was all-but-glowing; the air around them was dense and warm, pure and Godly with the presence of the Lord.

  The silence lasted for the longest while. It was Sonny Boy Williamson who finally broke it. “You’ve grown, Robert Johnson,” he said. “You’ve grown in ways I can’t begin to measure.”

  Someone said yeah, and someone else said, it’s true, it’s true. “I thought the gifti
e was going to speak to us,” Ma Rainey said, and Robert Johnson blushed again, and he felt very shy.

  Robert Johnson and Peetie Wheatstraw spent that night in guest rooms at the common house. Up until the small hours of the morning Robert Johnson slept as well as he ever did in all his days. Of course he slept that well! That Mountain was a special place, and the village was a special place upon it. The common house was more special still, for it held the warmth and good will that all common houses hold. If there is a place in all the world where a body can sleep secure and well-assured, it is that house upon that Mountain.

  But three hours after midnight someone screamed, shattering the silent night, transforming the dreamy village of the doctors into a nightmarish place.

  “What is it?” Robert Johnson shouted as the sound of the scream woke him. He threw off his covers, found his boots beside the nightstand, and pushed them on.

  No one answered his question, and for a long moment he began to think he’d dreamed the sound. But then he heard another scream. This scream was nothing like the first — nothing at all like the first. Robert Johnson recognized it, even though he’d hardly spent a day in Hell: it was a demon’s scream, shrill and piercing, inhuman and bizarre.

  It ain’t fit for no living man to go challenging a devil, but Robert Johnson didn’t think far enough ahead to be scared. Even if he had thought he probably would have done the same thing he did that night — throw on his coat, hurry out the door of the common house, into the village square.

  When he got to the square he saw fiery lights burning in Sonny Boy Williamson’s shack, and went to investigate them. He could have guessed what he’d find, and maybe a part of him did guess — he’d never heard about the devils who’d tormented Sonny since that morning over Greenville, but it was of such a cloth with Robert Johnson’s life that the knowledge was very near a part of him.

  The door to the shack was open when Robert Johnson got to it, and there were half a dozen people standing by the entrance. Inside there was a hellfire burning all around Sonny’s bed, and Sonny his own self was on fire. Three devils danced in and all around that fire, tormenting Sonny like he’d chose his lot to be eternal pain among the damned.