Delta Blues

by Carolyn Haines

  Last night—what a disaster. She said she wanted hot food and to get away from there, so he took her for spaghetti at the Rest Haven, but she just picked at it. Then they went around Clarksdale on the Harley and found there was a band at Ground Zero, but when they got there she didn’t want to go in, said she needed fresh air. They parked outside and stood around listening to the thrum. He talked to a couple of guys about bikes, one with an Indian Scout from 1941, restored, magnificent. Meantime she wandered around reading the writing on the walls. The place was completely inscribed; started inside with autographs of blues guys, but then everybody else added a name, a date, even outside on the chippy paint. She’d pointed out where it said, high on a window, “If the world didn’t suck, we’d fall off.” All the more reason to have fun while you can, but she’d wanted none of him last night.

  Professor Martin’s Isuzu pickup full of tools pulls up, and Harris strolls down to greet him. The others never seem to get it, but he is ambitious.

  “NOW HERE’S SOMETHING,” Celia says. “In with every greeting card she ever got.”

  Mallory glances over and sees the mottled cover of a composition book.

  “Looks like Mother started to write down some history. Names: Cecil Scott Bishop married Lila Barber, Bee Branch, Arkansas. Then C.S. Junior, that’s Daddy, married Mother, Mary Earl Powell, of Chattanooga, daughter of Robert and Evelyn Powell. My mother felt the Powells were better than the Bishops because they came from Virginia originally. Whatever originally means. Then here’s Scott, Cecil S. the third, and I’m Celia Savannah. But then it goes off into things she’s copied, recipes and ways to get out stains.” Celia flips ahead. “Okay, here’s some of the black tenants but she doesn’t tell you who was where. Family named Easterday, that’s before my time. Here’s Wince and Luzie Cole, whose real name was Louisiana, she notes. That seems to be the point, odd names. ‘Her daughter is Venice and the son is Roosevelt.’ My mother thought all this was hilarious, I’m ashamed to say. She liked to laugh at people naming a kid Moonpie.”

  “Venice is a pretty name,” says Mallory.

  “I remember her. I was a little tomboy running around and she was probably fifteen and full-grown and graceful. I remember her striding along. I think I had my first crush on her.”

  Mallory looks at Celia in sudden speculation, and Celia grins. “Come on, you’re not shocked.”

  Mallory, thinking how little that goes on in the Back House must get by Celia, shrugs.

  “I learned early enough I didn’t belong here. Neither did a girl like—now, see, I remember, they didn’t pronounce it Venice, they shifted it to southern, Veneece. I have the impression she was bright, and what education was she going to get here in the 50s? They moved away. My mother has here: ‘Mother of Luzie, Venus, question, Slave?’ Luzie’s mother could have been born in slavery, certainly. Next page, pink applesauce. Well, I’ll put this book aside.” She is back in the closet.

  Mallory says, “It’s very kind of you to let us excavate on your land.”

  “I always thought it should be looked at. The pity is that there were other mounds out here, but they were leveled. It’s just because structures were built on this one that it remains. My grandfather kept relics that would come up when they plowed, but bones, nobody cared. The land was too valuable, that famous fertile soil of the Delta. My father used to joke that Choctaw bone meal was part of the secret.” Celia sighs. “When I was a little girl I adored my father. He was tall and certain and he smelled of cigarettes. You never get over that.”

  Mallory thinks about her father, who took her to a thousand soccer practices, standing anxiously on the sidelines, trying his best to make her a strong girl. And she should be strong, show some drive. She asks, “Are there any very old textiles in the house? That’s what interests me most. I’m not really a bones type, I’m finding out. After I get my master’s, I want to get on a research grant for excavation of a plantation up north, study how they grew flax, spun, wove.”

  “Up north of here?”

  “No, in the north. They’ve discovered there were huge plantations with slaves in Massachusetts, New York in the 1700s. They were called manor houses, landed estates, but they were plantations. I grew up not far from where one was in Connecticut, eight thousand acres.

  Celia says, “Well, I don’t know that there’s any really old cloth here. I remember a coverlet, but I think Scott’s wife went off with it when they split up.”

  “Scott, that’s your brother?”

  “Big brother. I always thought he’d leave. He talked about it, into college, but he wound up coming back, working, staying on even when he’d leased the fields out. I can’t say we were close growing up: he was five years older and in tenth grade he got shipped off to military school in Tennessee. He and my father fought. I remember Daddy busted up some records Scott had. He called it ‘jungle music.’“

  “Rock and roll?”

  “I think it would have been rhythm and blues. There’s a good-size collection of blues records in the house, now. The ones Daddy smashed would probably be of value.”

  “I’m not sure how much I like the blues,” Mallory says. “All those guys lamenting.”

  Celia says, “I always think it’s about survival. Look what I got through. And the women’s blues is a whole different thing. The women were the first stars. Bessie Smith. Ida Cox. You know her ‘Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues’? ‘You never get nothing by being an angel child, you better change your ways and get real wild.’“ She sounds surprisingly raunchy. And then she laughs at Mallory’s expression. “You need to listen to some Big Mama Thornton and Memphis Minnie.”

  She sets down her mug and rummages through another box, humming “Wild Women.” “Everybody’s counting on the blues to revive tourism in the Delta, but once people come, there’s other history to be known. I’m thinking this could become some kind of archaeology study center later on. I might want to spend part of the year on the Gulf Coast somewhere, and maybe there could be some kind of exhibit here if it were all arranged right.”

  “That would be fantastic. I’m sure there’s some way to set that up with the University. You should talk to Professor Martin.”

  “Can’t do it yet, of course. There’s my brother.”

  “I’m sorry?” Mallory says. “I thought he’d passed away.”

  “Oh no, he’s in a nursing care facility. I visit a couple times a week. He’s got heart trouble and other things. When he got in bad shape, I thought why keep fighting out the Scopes trial all over again with these students who have been raised to deny evidence as an article of faith? And my partner, Ellen, died two years back, of breast cancer. I had my time in so I took retirement and came home.”

  Celia carries her mug over to the sink and rinses it, looking out the window. “I don’t think those dogs are getting anything. Well,” she says, “I’m keeping you from your work. I’ll just carry these cookbooks into the house.” She hoists her carton and goes out.

  Mallory saves her work, moves her laundry to the dryer, then decides she’s hungry and should really get some food.

  THE DOGS, PEARL AND LEVI, went for the dirt where the box was found, but when the men dug it out deeper, under Professor Martin’s watchful eye, there was nothing of significance below. And the dogs sniffed around but weren’t much interested in anyplace else. The team packs up cheerfully. Elimination of a possibility is as much a fact as finding anything, and being out with Pearl and Levi on a fine October day is a pleasure.

  Martin discusses the possibility of training cadaver dogs to find thousand year old bones. The sheriff’s investigator says the paper’s going to have a picture of the box, in case anybody might know anything, although that box is pretty much typical. People just threw them together, put on the hardware. After calling into the office, he says, “It’ll be possible to go back to excavation tomorrow, if it doesn’t rain, which it might. Of course, if you turn up anything else, we’ll want to know.”

  Luis sees
Mallory’s car scoot away. Harris is sucking up to Martin, showing him the Cage and spouting his theory that it was for animals or captives. Town strikes Luis as a good idea.

  OVER IN JACKSON, the bones are laid out, pieces of a puzzle, photographed and noted. The bones of the upper right extremity are all there, and an inch of the radius and ulna, to where they were chopped. The upper left extremity was severed across the wrist. Part of the proximal row, scaphoid and lunate, are present, but the triquetrum and pisiform are missing.

  Lab tech Josslyn Pulliam slices off a quarter gram of bone. It will be crushed, the DNA extracted and copied. She will isolate the mtDNA, the matrilineal ring around the nucleus. With fluorescent dyes to pick up the repetitions of G, C, A, and T, she’ll look for the identifying pattern of the mitochondria, a line she’ll find goes back to Africa.

  IN CLARKSDALE, Mallory orders a cookie and a double espresso at Miss Del’s General Store, and while she’s waiting the older gentleman who lives in the little front house at the Bishop place comes in to buy some seed for mustard greens, curly top. The guy behind the counter measures it into a little paper bag and they talk about how it’s going to rain tomorrow and that’s the time for throwing down seed, good soaking rain.

  Mallory takes her espresso outside to drink while looking at the plants for sale, thinking maybe she should buy something to brighten up the Back House. Luis comes by—he was over at the library using the wireless to check email—and they stroll down to Cathead where she buys four CDs of women singing the blues, and he asks the owner about harmonicas, and they look at all the folk art, which is this strange combination of creepy and hilarious, not unlike the Mexican Day of the Dead stuff, as Luis points out. Then Luis takes her for Southern tamales and while they eat them in his truck he tells her about how the recipe passed in the cotton fields from Mexican workers to blacks—though it’s definitely Mississippian to serve tamales with crackers and Tabasco. He says these have way more cayenne than any his mother would make, but they’re good. Mallory finds hers delicious, beef tamales, aching with spice.

  HARRIS IS STUCK in Miss Celia’s living room with her and Professor Martin, the two of them chatting away, nibbling cheese straws and spiced toasted pecans, drinking white wine. She calls him Greg, he calls her Celia. Harris gathers that she got a letter he’d written her brother asking about excavation and invited him out, last summer. Harris asks if he might have something else and Miss Celia tells him to help himself at the liquor cabinet, an old oak icebox with a lot of hardware that needs polishing. She says she doesn’t know what-all her brother kept in there. Well, plenty. Harris puts a few fingers of Old Granddad in a highball glass and asks her does she know there’s a couple Mason jars of homemade whiskey in there?

  “My brother’s,” she says. “I’m sure it was family tradition to have a supplier. You know Muddy Waters sold moonshine in the area, in my grandfather’s day.”

  Shelves on either side of the fireplace are filled with books and artifacts. Greg Martin picks up and admires a frog effigy bowl. “Did this come from out back?” he says.

  “I assume so,” she says. “It’s been here as long as I can remember.”

  Harris wanders back towards the liquor cabinet. He notices a speaker above it, up near the ceiling, and turns in a circle til he’s spotted four of them, and the stereo set-up, which is on shelves by the piano, in the front corner of the room. Above the piano hangs a portrait of a boy already gangly at nine or ten, and a bright-eyed little girl in a red dress, his arm around her protectively, her face alight. Harris crouches and pours himself more bourbon.

  Martin has another piece in his hands, a teapot with an up-thrust spout. “You know they thought these were imitations of French teapots made after the French came through here, but carbon dating shows they’re older. Some think they were fertility symbols.”

  Celia snorts with laughter. Maybe she’s had too much wine. “Sorry, it just seems basically female, a teapot.”

  Harris counts the Mason jars in the cupboard. Lots of vodka in here too: several bottles started and not finished, trendy stuff.

  Where are Mallory and Luis, that’s what Harris wants to know.

  THEY’RE AT OLD RIVER—Luis drove, and they walked over the levee and down by the water. “I’d like to take a canoe out there,” he says. “Do you know the Arkansas state line is out in the middle? Once they established it, they left it, even when the river abandoned this water.”

  She sits back on her elbows. “It’s peaceful.”

  He pulls out the harmonica. “I’m supposed to practice,” he says. He breathes out his chord and breathes it back in.

  “That sounds awful,” she says.

  “That’s right,” he says, “but it helps me. Mallory, when I asked you out this summer, I liked you, but I didn’t know you.”

  “You still don’t know me,” she says.

  “True,” he says, “but I like you more.”

  “Why do you guys always make things so complicated?” She leans over to kiss him, and laughs. “I’m getting lessons in being wild,” she says.

  “Mallory,” he says, “I don’t think you need any lessons in being wild.”

  “Yes, I do,” she says. “Hey, did you know Celia’s gay?”

  “No.” He is touching her knee with his.

  “She had a crush on a black girl named Venice, just for starters.”

  The moon is coming up behind a lot of rippled clouds, and bugs are dancing around her hair. He waves them off and says, “We have to go back to town to get your car anyway. Let’s go hear some music and dance.” Then, as he opens the door of his truck, “Did you say Venice?”

  JAM NIGHT AT GROUND ZERO. Bill McKie wears a maroon hat, pink shirt, red tie, dusty pink pants, two-tone shoes. He’s got three harmonicas stuck in his belt and he’s blowing away on a fourth.

  Mallory and Luis see him, and wave. They have some beer and proceed to dance it off, sweating. When they go outside for some air, she shows Luis the line about the world sucking,

  “It doesn’t suck,” he says. “Just pulls you close.”

  WHAT HE NEEDS TO DO, Harris decides, is show Mallory how messed up he is without her and then get her to help him to reform. He sits by the steps to the Back House in one of the metal chairs. He has the jar he took from the liquor cabinet: fine aged mash. Miss Celia is never going to miss it. He has offered himself up to be reformed before. It’s one of his best lines. And maybe she can really do it. Fix me, that’s what he’ll say. Hell, you liked me til yesterday. Fix me.

  CELIA SITS IN THE LIVING ROOM reading her mother’s notes, a catalog of the mundane. So many ways to prepare yams. The address for the headmaster of the school they sent Scott to. A list of presents she got for her aunts at Christmas 1959. A recipe for a pudding that uses shoe peg corn. Garden tips. She pages forward. She can find nothing about the times when things got really dark here, about 1964, the summer when her mother took her away because things were burning and she was afraid out here in the country. Scott was home from Ole Miss, working for Daddy, who asked him repeatedly if he’d seen James Meredith there, which Scott denied. She and her mother visited relatives in Chattanooga, then went up to Asheville, and Hot Springs, following the mountains.

  When they got back, Celia was busy understanding who she was and trying to keep it hidden at the same time, planning her escape to boarding school, her father willing to send her because he feared integration. She’d seen daylight and she ran for it. Scott did so poorly at Ole Miss that year, they decided he should come home and work. Celia looks up at the portrait: she and Scott smile away, full of the confidence of 1953. Her grandmother made that red dress with the hand smocking. Scott wears a white shirt with a dark blue tie, his crew cut carefully rendered. “What am I to do?” she says. But there’s no answer, just the artifacts of a lost world.

  “FISH ME,” Harris says, as Mallory crosses the lawn.

  “Oh my God,” she says to Luis, who is walking behind her a step or two. He has
decided not to push it, to take it easy, they’ve had so much fun, although if she wants to be wild, so be it.

  “What are you doing with her? You bastard.” Harris lurches up from his chair, focuses on Luis, and takes a swing, easily ducked.

  Oh, how much Luis wants to hit him. He grabs him by the arms and tries to turn him away, but Harris is taller and off balance, and the two of them fall hard.

  Mallory is saying, “Get out of here, Harris,” but Luis, sprawled on top of him, doesn’t feel him breathing. Luis pushes himself up, frightened. Then Harris groans and pukes on the steps.

  Celia is there suddenly, in her robe. She turns Harris so he’s throwing up into the grass. “Get me some water,” she says. Luis goes inside the Back House kitchen, finds a galvanized pail under the sink, and fills it nearly full. When he runs out, Celia’s got Harris over where there are some bushes, and she’s holding his head. Mallory stands a few yards away, looking up into the pecan branches shaking in the wind, casting down nuts. A front is coming through.

  “Fish me,” Harris moans.

  Celia says, mopping his face, “Those were perfectly good cheese straws, but they’re not enough if you’re going to do really heavy drinking.”

  Luis takes the bucket and dumps half over Harris’ head and chest, then sluices off the steps.

  Bill McKie comes up still in his music togs, hat and all. “Got a problem here?”

  “A little youthful overindulgence,” says Celia.

  “You going to be okay?” Luis asks. Harris just looks at him.