The Museum at the End of the World

by John Metcalf

  When Jenny had first met Tim—dinners out in Bristol, away from the pen, as Tim put it, the three of them, films together—she’d said of him that she thought he was ‘very public school’ though saved from being entirely that by Basil Seal tendencies; ‘very elegant’ she’d said “ruthless,” “world-weary,” and “wonderfully snotty.” She’d wondered if he might be… just a thought…

  “Indefatigable,” Rob had said, “in the opposite direction.”

  The public school he’d attended was a minor one with a number of scholarships endowed specifically for the sons of RAF pilots. Tim’s father had died in a Spitfire over Kent in 1940. His mother lived in Surrey with a succession of “pals,” imbibed gin, smoked cigarettes in a cigarette-holder, and emulated, in style, film stars of the thirties and forties, studio portraits, eyes soulfully uplifted to the left top corner, black and white, pearls.

  Tim did not talk about her much but Rob did remember his saying, “She lives in a world she prefers to imagine exists.”

  Tim’s imagination revolved around arranging life about him to command money and power. On their arrival in Montreal, he had promptly enrolled at McGill to study for an MA in matters Educational while Rob had failed to pass a teacher-certification exam because he could not, would not, bear the tedium of reading the prescribed handbook, the mindless detail of register-keeping, the number of seats permissible in a classroom.

  “The obvious move,” Tim had said, “is out of teaching and into administration.”

  “But I quite like teaching.”

  Tim had shrugged.

  “Goodbye,” he had said, “Mr. Chips.”

  His larger vision was the acquiring of a PhD and then working to supplant, suppress, subjugate, all the Guidance Counsellors under the Board’s jurisdiction—

  riff-raff, dear boy, pathetic, qualified by virtue of summer camp experience, by St. John’s Ambulance Certificates in First Aid and Water Safety and in a few appalling cases by Ordination in the lower reaches of evangelical Protestantism—and becoming the Board’s Consultant,

  the obeah Top Hat man of Psychology

  …answerable to no one, the fons et origo.

  “I shall come down upon them,” he had said, “like the wolf on the fold.”

  Then, credentials established, translation to the States to some warm land-grant college languorous with faculty wives desirous of fulfillment, and perky with pom-pom girls in little white skirts.

  West Virginia gave way to Kentucky.

  The road seemed endless.

  Kentucky gave way to Tennessee.

  They wandered about in Knoxville for a while but it struck them as a leftover, washed-up place, a place time had left high and dry.

  In Nashville, described in the free tourist brochure as The Athens of the South, they went to look at the full-scale replica of the Parthenon. It amazed them. In a liquor store, they were also amazed to see Scotch from the UK in gallon jugs. They wondered who drank such prodigious Scotch, wondered who had dreamed up the idea of building a full-scale Parthenon in poured concrete. The brochure informed them that the Parthenon now functioned as the Nashville Art Gallery permanently exhibiting its entire holdings, the sixty-three paintings donated by James M. Cowan.

  Memphis seemed more promising. On Beale Street, Rob wanted to look round a famous record store. The recording studio of the Sun Record Company was also on Beale or Main, the company defunct but the studio apparently much visited by Elvis Presley devotees. The label’s founder, Sam Phillips, had discovered and promoted Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and suchlike rockabilly tosh but, of much greater interest, had recorded the beginnings of B.B. King, Sonny Boy Williamson, Sleepy John Estes, Little Walter, and Howlin’ Wolf.

  They started to wander along Beale Street looking for the record shop called Home of the Blues. The area was seedy, automotive workshops, LOANS, clang-clang of trams.

  Rob stopped to read a handbill in the window of a delicatessen. Crady’s Bar and Grill. A blurry photograph and, beneath, the call letters of what Rob guessed were radio stations, WMSL, WREC. Advertising that week the dynamic blues artist Frog Legs Henry.

  A crawling police car behind them.

  “Is it us?” said Rob.

  “Don’t look round like that,” said Tim.

  The car surged ahead of them, slewed in, a nightmare policeman emerging, dark glasses, paunch, gun, and baton. He stood leaning against his car as they came abreast. He pointed down at the sidewalk in front of him.

  “What you boys lookin’ fo’?”

  “A record shop,” said Tim.

  Eyebrows rose above the gilt rims of the dark glasses.

  “What you in fact lookin’ fo’?”

  The dark glasses looking them up and down.

  The jaws chewed.

  “A record store,” said Rob.

  “Huntin’ cooze?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Ah know a cooze-hound when ah see one,” said the policeman.

  They stared at him.

  “Y’all chasin’ black pussy?”

  Tim, his tone getting frosty, said, “We are ‘chasin’ a record shop called Home of the Blues.”

  Hurriedly, Rob said, “In search of a…”

  Further chewing and cogitation and mirrored examination.

  “In search of, huh?”

  The policeman gave this further thought and then heaved his bulk off the car and pointed back the way they had come.

  In the store, Rob bought a record by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. It had on it the track Charlie Denton had raved about, “That’s All Right.”

  They climbed the loud, wooden stairs to Crady’s Bar and Grill, Tim fuming still… cartoon sociopath, morbidly obese animal, Brownshirt, Thing from the Swamp…

  At the top of the stairs, a pair of swing doors. Inside, conversation and shouts, the background sound of a radio. Rob followed Tim through the swing door.

  The room was smoky, loud with the hubbub, separate round tables and chairs, bar facing them along the far wall. As people noticed them, the conversations died down, men turning around to stare. As people deeper into the room became aware of something happening, What? turning, staring, Say? the silence deepening. The radio seemed very loud.

  Every face was black.

  Rob touched Tim’s arm.

  The bat-doors thunk-thunk, the gunslinger walking to the bar, spurs jink-jink, but he and Tim weren’t slinging, the thought flashed, but rather, about to be slung.

  “Tim…”

  But Rob followed him through the room to the bar.

  “I can hep you with somethin’?”

  “Two beers, please,” said Tim. “Make it, oh, I don’t know, not that it matters much… let us say, Millers.”

  The bartender stared at them.

  “I cain’t serve you.”

  “Pardon?”

  A man wearing a white shirt and black bow tie and crimson arm bands who’d been leaning against the bar in conversation—Tim nodded to him—picked up his shot and beer and edged down the length of the bar stopping at a bowl of peanuts.

  “I got to be about my work,” said the bartender.

  He half-turned and busied himself with a cloth and glass.

  Tim cleared his throat.

  “Millers” he said.

  The bartender made head-down mumble.

  “Pardon?”

  “You not welcome here.”

  “Nonsense, my good man!”

  The bartender set down the shining glass.

  Chair-scraping noises. Rob could sense people behind him.

  The bartender said,

  “Where you from!”

  Rob understood this as neither question nor geographic enquiry. Tim, however, said, “Not that I see it as germane, but we are presently
resident in Quebec, Canada, though essentially we are from England. Surely you would not be—?”

  What he sayin’?

  I ain’t real sure.

  “—so churlish as to turn from your door…”

  “England?” said the bow-tie man.

  He bore back his shot and beer.

  “Aubrey. Timothy Aubrey.”

  “Jordan. Isaiah Jordan.”

  Gesturing, he said,

  “Pay no mind to these low-rents.”

  A cheerful afternoon ensued. Isaiah Jordan turned out to be a concierge at the Metropolitan Hotel. Rob was given lessons on how to pronounce New Orleans. His “New” didn’t even figure. Noo Orleens caused cackles. Noowawlins secured sort-of approval. And “French Quarter” seemed to be pronounced something like Quotah.

  A New Orleans beer called Dixie was commended by those who had travelled.

  No one had heard of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. Rob’s record was examined. The “Crudup” amused some. “Big Boy” provoked considerable prurient and bawdy back-and-forth, much of which Rob was unable to follow.

  Tim was asked to say more things in English.

  It was confirmed that London was blanketed in fog.

  Frog Legs Henry would not be appearing as, earlier in the week, he had been taken to Tennessee State Prison for some jackanapery with a pistol.

  Tim and Rob were taught to say:

  Gimme a double Beam and a back of Dixie.

  Tennessee gave way to Mississippi.

  In Mississippi, the countryside changing, Rob saw statuette egrets for the first time, a blaze of whiteness against green and swamp.

  In Decatur, they saw a blind blues singer being led about by a boy, the old man’s outstretched hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  Near Vicksburg, they saw a chain gang cleaning roadside ditches, the line of them not actually in chains, but overseen by a gunbull on a stallion, pearl Stetson, boots gleaming, the butt of a double-barrel twelve-gauge resting on his thigh.

  This was the South Rob had been waiting for, the South he’d read about, imagined.

  Take this hammer

  Carry to the Captain

  Tell him I’m gone

  You can tell him I’m gone…

  Somewhere south of Vicksburg—they’d stopped to look around, besieged in 1863 by the Union forces under General Grant, the last Confederate holdout on the Mississippi—they decided to stop and sleep. Dusk was fast deepening into night and they started looking for a place to park for the night where the car would not draw the attention of the police. Where they were driving seemed to be along the edge of a park of some sort.

  Tim saw an opening off the road and drove very slowly into a bare-earth area behind the roadside trees and dense bush, a sort of lay-by. After Tim turned of the ignition, silence began to fill the car like rising water. They wound down the windows and that silence filled quickly with an unending drone of sound, insects, frogs, tree-frogs and bull-frogs. Sudden piercing night cries. It was like a movie soundtrack, on patrol in hostile jungle.

  Another car sat some distance away.

  Moon behind cloud glinted occasionally off the windshield.

  A black car.

  Their eyes were adjusting to the darkness.

  A dark figure was crouched beside the car’s rear wheel.

  “What’s that bloke doing?” said Rob.

  “Changing a wheel, looks like,” said Tim.

  The car’s trunk lid stood up.

  “Why don’t we put our headlights on where he’s working?”

  Tim turned the car and crawled across the potholes towards the black car.

  He called out of his window, “I’ll put the lights on so you can see what you’re doing.”

  The crouched figure called, “No, no.”

  Put his palm up flat, pink, as if to ward them off.

  “It’s no trouble,” called Tim.

  Their headlights sprang on like floods filling a movie set. The hubcap upside down, inside it three nuts, the crouched man, his forearm raised above his eyes, the whites of his eyes, white in the blackness of his face, a tire iron on the ground, the grip end of it painted red.

  He shifted himself around.

  Was forcing down on a wrench.

  Behind the dazzle on the windshield, they could make out a woman holding a baby.

  The noise that had fallen in volume when they’d switched on the lights was rising again, the croaking, urge, urge, urge, a throb as steady as blood pulsing, blood felt under a pressure-cuff.

  The man was wrestling off the wheel.

  Skinned his knuckles, licked the rawness.

  Rob felt captured in this scene, bound, as if all the world had contracted to this plot of bare earth, the man’s back, the streaming asylum light as from a film projector, a spray of leaves caught in the light’s fringe, glint of steel, frogs pulsing, a scene intense, incandescent, searing on and on and on.

  And then, suddenly, the scene released him, the film resumed running through the sprockets at what seemed silent-film speed, out of the trunk, lifting the spare, trundling round, bending, pushing, wrench, clank of the jack collapsing, hubcap snapping into clamps.

  He was wearing a long, brown overcoat.

  How strange in such heat.

  “All O.K?” called Tim.

  The man turned towards them and lifted his forearm above his eyes again. He might have nodded. The fingers of his raised hand spread in what might have been a farewell gesture.

  Tim tucked their car tight in against the brush so it wouldn’t be readily visible from the road.

  “Humph,” said Tim, “rather rude, wouldn’t you think.”

  “I think,” said Rob, “that he was terrified.”

  “What?” said Tim. “Us?”

  “I think,” said Rob, as if he were discovering what he was saying as he spoke, “I think he thought we were going to kill him.”

  *

  Rob and Tim sat under the awning of the Café du Monde, looking out over Jackson Square onto the Cathedral Garden in front of St. Louis Cathedral. The early-morning sprinklers were shpritzing into the Garden, regular and soothing as the spray climbed, sounding up the low fence.

  Breakfast was something they’d read about, beignets and coffee, the coffee heavy and black and blended with chicory.

  “Essentially,” said Tim, “doughnuts.”

  They both felt slack and luxurious, restored yet weakened by showers and by sleeping in beds.

  The sound of mules clip-clopping, drawing carriages of tourists.

  They gestured for more coffee.

  Rob didn’t much like the look of the Cathedral, its monotonously severe and rigid lines, ruler and thick lead pencil, looking like the creation of a literal child.

  Rob imagined—the magical street names, Burgundy, Bourbon, Canal, Perdido, South Rampart Street—the parades and funeral processions there once had been when men traditionally belonged to one or more fraternal clubs, mainly clubs like the Odd Fellows, the Masons, and the Knights of Pythias, but also to clubs that grew out of the mutual-aid societies that mushroomed with the influx of immigrants from the plantations, the Zulu Aid and Pleasure Club, the Tammany Social Aid and Pleasure Club, the Jolly Boys, the Original Swells, the Autocrats, the Charcoal Schooners. Even the pimps had a club.

  Membership dues were as low as fifteen cents a month. Club members took the afternoon off to march in the processions for their departed brethren; fines were levied for non-attendance. The best bands then for the societies to hire had been the Tuxedo, the Onward, and the Eureka.

  The funeral procession gathers at the Club Hall or meeting place and the club members fall in behind the band that starts to play slow renditions of Sing On, Just a Closer Walk with Thee, Just a Little While to Stay Here. The colourful buttons the me
mbers wear on their coats are reversed to show the side that’s flatly black. The Grand Marshall with his baton, mace, or furled umbrella has also turned his wide silk sash of office that crosses his chest and hangs at his side nearly to the ground to its flat black side, hiding its flamboyance.

  The Second Line has been gathering—friends, neighbourhood women, children, following the band on the sidewalk. When the procession reaches the house or church where the body is resting, the Club members go in to pay their respects. If there is a church service, the band disperses into nearby saloons; a child is sent to fetch them when the service is over.

  The child, Rob imagines, a boy of nine or ten, could have been Louis Armstrong, still, at that age, wild on the streets before his incarceration in The Home for Colored Waifs.

  The coffin is carried out and placed in a horse-drawn hearse sheeted in black shrouds. Bass drum and snare drum start playing. As the parade assembles, the band is playing Free as a Bird.

  Voices in the Second Line are singing.

  Two women, holding up decorative umbrellas, are breaking into slow dance steps and drinking Jax from bottles.

  The Grand Marshal blows a whistle and hoists his furled umbrella to signal the start to the cemetery. The hymn is Nearer My God to Thee. When the band rests, the snare drummer continues a stark beat, the drum muffled by a handkerchief between the skin and the wires of the snare to mimic the military sound of a kettle drum. The pace is ritually slow. Crowds stand along the sidewalks in silence. Men doff their hats and hold them to their hearts.

  At the cemetery, the band slows the pace even more and begins to play a dirge, usually What a Friend We Have in Jesus. The cornet is playing the lead melody straight with little embellishment while the clarinet weaves an obbligato counterpoint high and sweet.

  The preacher pronounces the words and he or the widow throws a symbolic handful of earth onto the coffin, a final gesture, Armstrong once said, that turns the body loose.

  After a respectful pause—

  ashes to ashes

  —the Grand Marshal flips his wide silk sash over from its black side to its blazing yellow and the club members do the same with their buttons. The snare drummer removes the muffling handkerchief and, razz restored, with a loud roll, calls the band into position.