Mockingbird Songs

by R.J. Ellory

  The pregnancy was endured. It was not easy, not at all. William spent all the hours God gave him in the fields. He hired extra hands, coloreds and Mexicans, worked them hard, paid them a decent wage in comparison to his neighbors. Riggs earned a reputation as a fair-minded and pragmatic man, even somewhat empathetic. To his wife he became a distant memory of something that might have been. He was never abusive or violent, far from it, but there seemed to emerge a cruel streak in him, a coldness perhaps. Whatever tenderness may have once been there seemed hardened and resolute, as if blame was being apportioned and he’d assigned her the lion’s share. Perhaps he believed that his authority had been undermined. He’d said no to children, at least for a while, and yet here was a child on the way, like a letter in the mail that could not be delayed. Perhaps, as some men do, he took this as a sign that he was not master of all he surveyed, that there were other forces at work that could defy and derail his intentions. Whichever way it came, he had decided it was a bad thing.

  The child came in January of 1920. Same day the federal government saw fit to prohibit alcohol.

  William Riggs held his firstborn in his arms, a son, and when the child opened its eyes and looked at its father, the father felt little of anything at all. Riggs had sense and humanity enough to understand that this absence of feeling was wrong, but he could not force himself to feel something he did not. That the mother loved the child was evident in all she said and did around him, but Riggs did not connect with the boy. They called him Carson, and he was a strong boy, a fighter. He never sickened, he slept soundly, he ate enough for two, and he grew like a tree. But Riggs watched that boy as if he were the fruit of some other man’s loins, and though he knew that such a thing was impossible, it still sat like a shadow among his thoughts. It repeated on him again and again, like sour milk on the palate. He desperately wanted to love the boy, but he could not. Grace saw this turmoil, this inner conflict, and she grieved in her own quiet way. The atmosphere was one of melancholy, akin to a wake, but she could not fathom what William believed he had lost.

  When Grace told him she was again pregnant in the latter part of June, 1923, William stood in the kitchen and looked at her, a glass in his hand, a mustache of milk on his upper lip, and he said, “Seems like we’re destined to have a family,” which wasn’t what he wanted to say, but some type of distant cousin.

  The second child, once again a boy, arrived with a good deal less fanfare and drama in March of 1924.

  Whatever internal knots were tied with Carson’s birth seemed untied once more in the moment that William held Evan in his arms. The newborn gurgled and blinked, his tiny hands reaching toward his father, and the obdurate stone that had temporarily replaced William Riggs’s heart gave up its tenancy without a fight. The man cried. Never would have admitted such a thing, but he cried. He carried that babe out to the veranda and stood silently while his exhausted wife slept. Carson, now four years old, was elsewhere, perhaps taking this opportunity to secrete further comestibles about his person as if continually allaying the risk of starvation. His dungaree pockets were a mess of crumbs and crusts, his fingers forever finding ways into Weck and Mason jars, his face a smear of chocolate or preserve. There was something simple, even base about the boy, William believed, as if his intent in life would never be anything greater than taking as much of everything as he could and yet giving as little as possible.

  To him, even in those first moments, Evan was different. Never a man for poetic and elegant words, William was inspired to find terms such as lightness and presence. The child, even in those first few days of its life, brought something to the party. Carson, it seemed, was a taker. Evan was a giver. That was the only way William saw fit to define it. And though his temperament and love for Carson would never match that which he felt for Evan, nevertheless he believed that Evan had rehabilitated something he had lost. Evan showed his father what there was to love about his eldest son, for within those first few weeks of life, the newborn expressed an affection and affinity for his sibling that prompted comment from both parents.

  Grace could not have been happier, for she recognized in her husband the man she had married, not the man she feared he had become.

  William and Grace Riggs attended the small church in Calvary; she made preserves and cookies for the school bake sale; William brewed a potent fortified wine from blueberries and the like, and once a month he and a half dozen local farmers gathered for cards and cigars and ribald anecdotes. The Riggs were a well-liked and much-respected family, and within that environ the boys grew side by side, the slower Carson ever vigilant for the swifter-witted Evan, their similarities few, their mutual affection unquestioned.

  And so it seemed that life would progress ever forward from good days to better days, and in the handful of years before the Great Depression, there was little for which William or Grace could have asked.

  But then it seemed the devil came to Calvary. Wearing a hat and a coat and a crooked smile, blown in by some ill wind from beyond the Stockton Plateau and the Pecos River, a dark kind of trouble walked its way into the lives of William and Grace Riggs.

  For so many inexplicable reasons, life would never be the same again, and it all began on Evan’s fifth birthday in March of 1929.

  FOUR

  On the sidewalk outside an Eldorado gas station, a three-legged dog sat statue-still and watched as Henry Quinn rolled a cigarette and lit it with a match. Henry wondered about the leg, how it was lost, where it wound up, and how a dog like that would think about such a thing. Whether a dog like that would think at all.

  A bus had stopped to refuel, disgorging its passengers, giving them time to use the restroom, stretch their legs, buy chilled bottles of root beer and sacks of potato chips before their own journey resumed. He had driven fifty-odd miles south on 277, would head east out of Eldorado, would perhaps make another brief stop in Ozona, and then cover the last handful of miles to Calvary.

  The passengers gathered on the forecourt as they waited for the driver to fill the bus and fetch coffee, and Henry listened to the vignettes of conversation that snuck their way between the sound of the wheels against the highway and the passage of cars.

  How am I doing? Spending money I don’t have, drinking myself into an early grave. The usual, you know?

  …three gross of Nibco 633 copper pipe unions …

  …tell you now, ideas is like assholes. Everyone’s got one, and they’re usually full of shit …

  To Henry they seemed like people of another race. In his mind he was still cell-bound. Would take a while to come out of it. Evan had spoken of such a thing.

  Man’s as likely to get someplace and ask for the smallest room he can get. Can’t take too much space, you see? We don’t care much for the unfamiliar, and when you’ve been buckled up in an eight by ten for years on end, you don’t feel so good unless you’ve got four walls arm’s breadth apart and a door you can shut tight. People get over it, but it takes a while. Some of them never get over it, and they do something to get ’emselves brought right on back. You can feel their sigh of relief when someone locks ’em up again.

  Henry knew whereof Evan spoke. There was a comfort in claustrophobia. There was a comfort in routine. There was a comfort in never having to think about anything save the book you were reading or the conversation you were having. In jail you did not need to find the rent. In jail you did not miss a meal. There were a great deal of things you did miss, but even they seemed to fade from reality after a time. In a way it reminded you of being a child. You ate when you were told; you slept when you were told. Step out of line and there was always someone mighty keen to show you right where that line was and put you behind it once more.

  But now it was all done. Now he was out and free, and though he could not leave the state for another year without telling someone, he was his own man.

  Except for his promise to Evan and whatever was happening with his ma, he could do pretty much as he pleased.

  The reunion
had not gone well. She was still right there in the house where it all happened. The O’Briens, Henry was relieved to discover, were gone. Sally O’Brien had not lost the faculty of speech. A blessing, no doubt about it. Should Henry keep a weather eye out for Danny O’Brien? Maybe. Maybe not. Henry didn’t know the man from Adam, thus could not determine his temper or taste for retribution. Seemed to Henry that when it came down to basics, there were two kinds of people: those who blamed everyone else for their situation and those who blamed themselves. Would take a broad perspective to accept that accidents and coincidences were of your own making, but given a choice between yay and nay, Henry would fall on the yay side. Even if such things weren’t of your own design and decision, the mere fact of taking responsibility for them got you of a mind to do something about it, rather than just bitching like a cuckold.

  Anyhow, all such philosophical ramblings aside, his mother was his mother, and she was slipping out through the gap between what was and what wasn’t. The drinking didn’t help none. Drinking, in Henry’s experience, merely served to exaggerate what was already inside of you. Like money. Like power. Give those things to a man and he just becomes more of what he inherently is.

  Reeves County Farm Prison transport drove Henry as far as Odessa. The driver said little, save that he wanted to stop at a roadside diner to get a cup of coffee and a bear claw. Henry waited on the bus. Driver never asked if he wanted anything and brought nothing back for him. Just sat and ate his bear claw, drank his coffee, lit a smoke, and then started out again.

  By the time they arrived, it was nightfall. Henry slept at a shabby motel in a room that smelled of mold and bad feet. Didn’t undress, for he doubted the sheets had been changed in a month. Even the water in the bathroom seemed uncertain of its own ability to clean anything. Wash your hands in it and they needed to be washed again elsewhere. It was not a good welcome back to the free world.

  Henry took a walk around Odessa on the morning of the twelfth. Little things caught his attention. Colors seemed brighter, hair was longer, cars louder than he recalled. What had he expected, that time would wait for him unchanged and unmoved while he served his three years, three months, and four days? That it would be like dreamtime—a day in a second, a week in an hour—and yet upon waking the dreamer discovers that everything is the same? No, everything had changed. He could sense it. He could feel it. He did not like it, for it was a constant reminder that the time he’d spent in Reeves was as good as time lost forever. The only upside had been Evan Riggs, the fact that the man understood the need for music, that he’d shared some wisdoms and words that would count for something on the road to wherever Henry was ultimately headed. Where that was, well, Henry would find out in due course. Like Hemingway said, It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

  And so he walked, and he thought of how best to talk to his mother, to explain to her that he was not staying in San Angelo, that there was a road he was going to walk and its first wide part was somewhere called Calvary. Once that was done, the pledge honored, then where? He didn’t know, and he didn’t need to know. After a thousand or more days of regulations, he figured he could do without them for a while. Would she understand? There was no way of knowing until he got there and told her.

  It was bad, but not as bad as it might have been.

  A man had been staying in the house. That much Henry could determine from the shaving accoutrements in the bathroom, the shoes on the porch. Who he was and what his business was, his ma didn’t say, and Henry didn’t ask.

  “You’re leaving?” she asked. “I haven’t seen you for a year and you’re leaving?”

  That first line he could have written before he left Reeves.

  “I am,” he told her.

  “But why?” She stood in the kitchen doorway, her hand on her hip, something in her body language that said he was going nowhere until she received some satisfactory answers. Her appearance was further confirmation that more than three years had passed. Her hair was close to silver, her eyes reconciled to the sight of an unappealing future. She did not look well.

  “Have to deal with something, Ma,” Henry said.

  “But you need to spend some time here, spend some time with me, settle down, get a job. You need to get a job, Henry. A job should be your first order of business.”

  “It isn’t, Ma. I don’t expect you to understand, but there is something I have to do. I made a promise, and I gotta keep it.”

  “What about your promise to me?”

  “What promise would that be, then?”

  She changed the subject, went for the bourbon, took a slug that would have put Henry on his back after three years of no liquor. She started off on a detour concerning something or other that Henry did not understand, and in truth had no mind to. Seemed like she was working up enough courage for a fight, and that was the last thing Henry wanted.

  “Look, Ma,” he finally said, interrupting her midflow on some wild anecdote about a raccoon as big as a dog in the garbage, “I just have to do something. I’ll be gone a little while. A few days, a week, a month maybe. As far as the rest of my life is concerned, I have to figure that out, sure, but that’s not my priority right now.”

  “I am not happy, Henry,” Nancy Quinn said.

  “Is anyone?” Henry replied.

  Nancy Quinn looked at her son like he was a stranger.

  Henry smiled at her like she was the only mother in the world.

  Compromising, Henry agreed to stay one night. His mother’s gentleman friend arrived for supper. His name was Howard Ulysses Morgan.

  “Hell of a story behind the Ulysses, if you’re interested,” which Henry was not, but Howard proceeded to tell the story anyway.

  The story was no big deal, but politeness won over and Henry smiled at the end.

  “And that, young man, is how I came to be Howard Ulysses,” Howard concluded, pleased with himself perhaps, as if the oddity of his middle name somehow compensated for an absence of charm and personality.

  Whichever way you painted the sign, Howard was a drunk. His was the bourbon, and he had no shame in keeping it to himself. Only once did he offer some to Henry. Henry declined. Nancy took a second man-sized jolt, then switched to her own brand of poison, and the pair of them slid into semi-coherence, seemingly untroubled by the fact that Henry had just been released from prison and might have had an ache for company.

  After an hour, he left them to their own devices. He went out back to check on his pickup, an Apache Red 1962 Studebaker Champ. Pride and joy, no question. Front driver’s-side tire was down some and would need a breath of air; rust around the wheel arches was accelerated but not fatal. It had been tarpaulined, and the tarp had at least prevented animal or insect infestation and sun-bleaching. She kicked over on the first try.

  “Y-you goin’ s-someplace?” Howard slurred at him from the back door.

  “No, sir,” Henry said. “Not just yet. Just checkin’ she’s still runnin’.”

  Howard looked at Henry as if he’d forgotten the question he himself had asked, and then he raised his glass, smiled cheerily, and headed back indoors.

  Henry heard Howard and his ma laughing about something, and then there was silence.

  Maybe folks like Howard got through the day by convincing themselves it was still Christmas or New Year’s or some such.

  Half an hour later Henry was in his room. Evan Riggs’s letter was there on the nightstand. It had one word clearly and carefully printed on the front. Sarah. Henry’s guitar case sat on the floor at his feet. It had been underneath the bed all this time. The Princeton amp was still working. No reason for it not to have been, but when he switched it on and the transformer came to life, he was almost surprised.

  Why there was a sense of trepidation as he leaned forward to open that case, he did not know. It was there, and he could not deny it.

  Before Reeves, music had been his life, his being, his raison d’être. Glancing no
w toward the wall, seeing the stacks of vinyls that rested there—everything from Lead Belly and Sonny Terry to Gene Vincent and Johnny Burnette, British imported records like Five Live Yardbirds and Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the West Coast sounds of Surrealistic Pillow and Easter Everywhere from right here in Austin, Texas—Henry could see himself seated right where he was now more than three years earlier.

  A moment. That’s all it took. A moment of dumbass stupidity.

  He was drunk. Four, five, six cans of beer, he couldn’t even remember. He was in the funk. The black dog. He was pissed about something he couldn’t learn, something that frustrated him. Nothing so simple as girl trouble; it had been soul trouble. Maybe something only musicians could understand, but there was a point where the body defied the mind. Maybe it was the same for athletes, as if you knew something could be achieved, but there was no clear way to achieve it. Regardless of reason or rationale, Henry had been down. He’d drunk most of a six-pack and then took the .38 into the yard and let off a few rounds. One degree up or down, one degree left or right, and that slug would never have ricocheted as it did, would never have made it across the yard and through the fence, would never have reached Sally O’Brien.

  And he would not be here three years later with a void in his mind.

  The weight of the guitar surprised him. Ten pounds, give or take, but it seemed so much heavier. The shape and feel was unmistakable, and the chords were still there, though changing was slow and clumsy. That would come back in no time at all. It was the riffs and lead lines that were gone, and where muscle memory had once put his fingers exactly where they needed to be, there was little of anything left.

  Henry played the guitar for a handful of minutes, and then he laid it back in its case and just stared at it for a while. Finally, he kicked the lid closed with the toe of his boot.

  He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his head in his hands like a man taking delivery of heartbreaking news.