The Devil and Preston Black (Murder Ballads and Whiskey)

by Jason Jack Miller

  "Preston Black couldn't sleep the whole night through, Preston Black couldn't sleep the whole night through." He stopped and crossed his arms. "He'd lay in bed 'til the morning came, but the devil'd visit him just the same. Preston Black couldn't sleep the whole night through."

  Right now I wished it was last Friday instead of this Friday and Pauly and me were good and I'd never found the record. And I wished it wasn't so cold.

  The night sky looked bigger than I'd ever seen it. Stars practically dripped down onto the old wool in my hat. No wind blew, and the whoosh of the Blackwater River reminded me that even though the distance was less than a hundred miles, home was still very far away tonight.

  My phone's blue LCD screen killed the bright starlight, ruining any wish I would've made. When I scrolled through my missed calls and saw I wasn't alone, some of my fear shrank. At the prompt I entered my PIN, waited for my voicemails and turned my back on the stars.

  The metallic female voice said First unheard message received today at 9:47am.

  "Preston," Pauly yelled into the phone, "you fucking bastard. You got a lot of fucking nerve sneaking around the apartment. You're being a real pussy, you know that? How long 'til you grow the fuck up, huh? I ought to change the locks and rent out your fucking room. Call me."

  Message deleted. Next unheard message received today at 11:32am.

  "God damn it, man. You're really going all in this time. Whatever. I'm on the road for a few days, so you can have the apartment all to yourself. Maybe when I get back we can sit down and talk about all this. Later."

  Message deleted. Next unheard message received today at 4:42pm.

  "Hello, Preston?" Dani's voice sounded so warm, like an April breeze that blows just before rain comes. Hearing it reminded me that winter would be over soon. "I miss you. I had a good time last night. I couldn't remember if we were supposed to do something tonight, so call me."

  "Shit," I flipped my phone shut. Jamie and Katy chatted with Earl as he loaded himself into his van. Looked like they were waiting for me.

  I made my way over to Jamie's old Subaru. Katy opened the back door.

  "Take the front," I said.

  "It's okay. I'm getting out first." She wore a hat with bright knit flowers on it and a scarf to match. Her brown hair framed her pink cheeks.

  "Well, let me help you then."

  She handed me her fiddle, a case so dainty compared to my guitar. She scooted in then reached for her instrument.

  "Thank you," she said, smiling. Her pupils looked quite large in the dim glow of the dome light, making them seem like they were smiling too.

  After I got in Katy poked her head between the front seats and held her mittens up, as if collecting phantom heat from vents that had yet to produce any. She smelled like ginger and vanilla. "So James, what's the deal with Earl and all that?" She reached up to the dashboard and turned the stereo down until only the footprint of a song remained.

  "Katy," Jamie cleared his throat, almost a tsk-tsk. "Maybe we can talk tomorrow."

  "I'm heading back tomorrow. I won't see you... Maybe 'til spring break." She sniffled into a tissue.

  Jamie squirmed, more nerved up than a rabbit at a dog show. He ran his fingers along his jaw a few times. I knew he'd never find a way to put it delicately. He jammed the car into gear and drifted through a break in a snowdrift on the berm.

  I tried to help him out. "A few days ago I found a record at Isaac's."

  Katy interrupted, "On Pleasant Street? I'm in there all the time."

  "Really? I work at Mick's. You need to stop in some time. You a student?"

  "Grad school. PhD. Mick always has to special order my stuff and always gives me a hard time about it. Anyway..." she said, like it was my fault the story wasn't progressing.

  I said, "So I find this record with my name on the back. As one of the song titles. At the time it made a lot more sense, but I thought the guy might've been my dad or something. Like maybe the song was about me. Sounds stupid when I say it out loud."

  "Preston," Jamie said, "it was a good hunch. And now you know. You don't have to wonder anymore."

  "But eliminating Earl as a candidate means my dad is still out there somewhere." After a moment to think, I said, "Is it just me or was Earl holding something back?"

  "I don't know. I'll take a look at my tapes and see what I can come up with. Either way, it's more than you had this morning."

  We bounced onto a gravel side road. A light snow fell through the headlights, joining the old snow rotting along the edge. The dark blue night swallowed everything but the road just ahead of the Subaru, and scrubby bushes and low stone walls beside us. Around a sharp bend in the road we passed a pair of homes flanking a barn. From an old foursquare with a big porch, blue television images flickered into the yard, and I could see a single person sitting on a couch watching.

  Up ahead on the right sat another house, spotlights from the front porch shined into the old field between the house and the road. A pair of deer spotted Jamie's Subaru and froze.

  Katy said, "You guys going to play any more tonight?"

  "I suppose we could. You don't have to go home?" Jamie slowed to a crawl at the top of the long gravel driveway.

  "Did Aunt Izzy cook?"

  "She said she made a few lasagnas."

  "I'll just have my mom run over and pick me up a little later then. If that's all right."

  Jamie sputtered, a typical Jamie move, I discovered. He glanced at me, then looked back in the rear view mirror before I could meet his gaze. "I suppose."

  Katy chirped until we got to Jamie's. For five minutes she went on like one long Facebook status update, right until Jamie rolled to a stop in front of a long, wide porch. She didn't stop until I interrupted. "If it's okay I'm going to make a real quick phone call."

  Katy retreated into the back seat like a kitten from a vacuum cleaner.

  "You might be able to get a signal out here," Jamie said like he really, really hoped it'd be different than every other day of his entire life, when a snowball had a chance in hell of getting coverage.

  "Really? So, sometimes you can get coverage here?"

  Katy jumped in gleefully, "Jamie was just being polite. You won't get a signal out here."

  I shut my phone off, waited, then turned it back on.

  Searching for signal.

  Searching for signal.

  "You can use the house phone."

  But once we got into the house and I saw the phone hanging on the wall in the kitchen, I declined. Jamie said nobody'd mind, but I couldn't see myself trying to flow to Dani while Jamie and his wife and Katy ate lasagna.

  After dinner we retted up, then Jamie led Katy and me into the basement. Instead of the busted Craftsmen circular saws and old croquet sets we had at home, Jamie had shelves of sheet music and old cloth-bound books about theory and artists. He had shelves of CDs, cassettes and old reel-to-reels resting above a row of vertically stacked LPs, with small tags sticking out like hitchhikers' thumbs to keep them in order. In the corner to my right Jamie had a 24-Track digital recorder and mixing board. Neatly arranged booms, some crowned with condenser mics, some with vintage mics, all waited patiently for the music to start.

  The biggest wall held a curtain of musical instruments—more than a few fiddles, a half-dozen banjos, a quartet of mandolins, an upright bass, an autoharp, a bouzouki...

  And guitars. Man, the guitars. I walked right up to a pair of Gibsons. In a floor stand Jamie had another Martin, this one much smaller than the D-28 I'd used all day long. The varnish had faded to the point where it had all but disappeared, perhaps it had simply been played away. This was Jamie's tool shop. These were his hammers and screwdrivers.

  Jamie ran his finger along the rows of cassette tapes, pulled a few here and there, then did the same thing with the row of reel-to-reels. He saw me looking at the guitars and said, "Help yourself."

  I picked up the little Martin. The wood felt soft, like parchment or an onion skin.
I ran my fingers across the strings. The wood looked light and sweet, like butter pecan.

  Katy watched. I hoped she wasn't waiting for me to impress her, because I learned a long time ago the challenge of trying to impress a girl this way. After a few bars she pulled a violin off of the wall, put her ear close to the strings to check the tuning, then began to play a Celtic-sounding melody. She tapped her foot to the time I'd kept, but seemed to want to rush the beat.

  "James, you going to jump in?" She dropped the violin to her belly as I kept playing.

  "Go on. I'm going to put some of these tracks on a disc for Preston." He licked his fingers and flipped through the pages of an old moleskin journal. He took a pencil from behind his ear and made a few notes. Then he stood up, without really looking up from his notes, and went back to the shelf. "Why don't you show Preston the 'Wildwood Flower'?"

  Katy got right into it without putting up any fuss. She blew her hair away from her eyes and began playing a melody as sweet and syrupy as berry pie.

  "C," Jamie said.

  I quickly fretted the cord and finger picked along. When the chord changed I pretty much knew what came next and slid into a G.

  "G7," Jamie corrected. "Is your record upstairs?" he asked, then jogged up the steps without waiting for me to tell him it was.

  The second time around I thumbed the bass notes like I'd learned at the fire hall. Jamie returned and sat down, put the LP on the turntable. A long-forgotten sound, the low hiss of a vinyl, rose from the speakers. He plugged in a set of headphones and held them up to his ear. After a minutes or two he dropped the headphones into his lap, spun in his chair, and began to sing along with me and Katy.

  "Oh, I'll twine with my mingles and waving black hair..." He pronounced 'hair' like it rhymed with 'fur'. Katy cracked up. When she laughed her hair fell back over her face.

  With that, Jamie put his headphones on and spun back toward the desk. I put the little Martin back in its rack and took the iced tea-colored Gibson off of the wall. It sounded louder than the little Martin, maybe even louder than the D-28. But it didn't come alive in my hands the way the 28 did.

  "Sing something," Katy said.

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know. Something good. Something to wow me." I couldn't figure whether or not she was being sarcastic.

  I couldn't think of something that'd sound particularly good acoustic. My fingers slid into a Cadd9, and I inhaled. I strummed the chord, but before I could begin to sing Jamie dropped his headphones on the desk and spun his chair.

  "Bingo. I have it."

  "What?" Katy asked, her interest in my song thinner than a Chili Cheese Frito.

  "The record. Even though his picture isn't on the front I recognized Jesse Currence's fiddle. He's not even listed on the inside. That lead me to a version of the song I recorded in 1984 up in Pocahontas County. When I thought Earl wrote the song I decided not to look at my notes. But the record—it's all on here."

  "Really?" I asked, unsure if I wanted to hear more. What I'd already heard sounded bleak enough.

  "It's a good news, bad news situation." Jamie looked at his notes like they'd done him wrong.

  "Bad news first," I said, hanging the Gibson back on the wall.

  "I only have the same four verses Earl sang at the fire hall. The tape just cuts out. There's more to the song, but I either forgot to flip the tape, or... I don't know what happened. My notes say it's four minutes long, but there are only two and a half here." He looked like he genuinely felt bad about it.

  "There's good news?"

  "Yes, there is good news." Jamie's eyes widened. I'd only known him a short time, but never imagined he could get so animated. "The good news is we have provenance. Get ready for a road trip."

  "Where to?" I said.

  Jamie flipped his notebook shut, leaned back in his chair and folded his arms behind his head. "We know where Earl got the song from. And if we know the source, hopefully we can get the remaining verses. We're going to Pocahontas County to get the rest of the song."

  He stood up and grabbed a fiddle off of the wall. Just before he slung his bow across the strings, he said, "We're going back in time."

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I didn't sleep well, but at least I didn't dream. Instead of eating breakfast I had a few cups of tea. Jamie told me he had some things for me to take home, and led me downstairs. Last night, after I'd gone to bed, he put together a few more CDs. He said the songs were on there chronologically, and I should listen to the CDs in that order to hear the progression.

  He set the discs next to a small stack of books, two or three years' worth of reading for me.

  "Look here," he said, "some people think that a tree is the best way to illustrate evolution, in this case, of a song. But it's really more like a flower bed. The roots are all intertwined, and a song that springs up in Braxton will sound different when it springs up in Lewisburg, and different still when it springs up in Virginia or Kentucky. The same seed stock begat each song, but different growing conditions change the final product. So a flower closer to the downspout gets more water, and maybe gets a little fuller and taller."

  "And that's what these are?" I pointed to the discs.

  "Uh, yeah. And then some that you just have to get to know. I couldn't stop myself." He grinned.

  He put them off to the side, and then set the books on his lap. "Now these... I've noted important passages with note cards." He held the books up to let me see. "What you'll find interesting—at least I did—is the way the song is seeded."

  Jamie got kind of quiet, kind of serious in a way that made me perk up my ears. He leaned in and lowered his voice so much that I had to meet him halfway if I wanted to hear what he said. "Instead of coming from one seed, it comes from many. Like maybe it's been bastardized quite a few times. At least a lot more than most of the stuff I recorded. One version goes back to 1229. Came from the Codex Gigas?"

  He waited for me to acknowledge, but I just shook my head.

  "It's a famous book from Bohemia. Supposedly written in one night by a monk who'd made a deal with Lucifer to avoid being walled up alive."

  I nodded while he explained. To show I was paying attention, I asked, "Bohemia?"

  "Czech Republic," Jamie said, then told me we'd know more about the song later in the week. The song really didn't mean that much to me, especially since I started out just looking for my dad. Maybe Jamie's enthusiasm kept me caring.

  When I heard Katy at the door I stood up and stretched and shook Jamie's hand. "Thanks for everything. I really mean it. And, you know, it's okay if this doesn't really end up being fruitful. You know, the search?"

  Jamie handed me the bag of books and recordings, then slid his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. "We're pretty close. I suspect by this time next week we'll have everything we need to put this to bed."

  "Yeah, I understand. But I'm just saying I think I got more than I expected. And maybe... I don't know." I didn't want to say that maybe I realized who I was without a song or my father. "Like, maybe if I started to focus on music instead of thinking the universe has it in for me, maybe then things would start to happen."

  I stood on the bottom step with a hand on the banister. Katy was already at the top putting her shoes back on.

  Jamie said, "I understand. Would you prefer that I didn't set anything up for this weekend?"

  "No. Let's see where this goes. You've done a lot for me, and I owe it to both of us to see what we can see."

  Jamie agreed. He made small talk while I got my shit together. My books and discs. My Tele, which—compared to Jamie's acoustic—seemed lifeless without an amp and a cord. Jamie and Isabelle each gave Katy a big hug and a kiss on the cheek and a big care package to get her through another rough week in the big city. Jamie shook my hand.

  "Thank you for everything," I said.

  "And I'll give you a call as soon as I find anything out. I'll be in town this week, so we'll try to leave from there. I'll bring the Ma
rtin for you." Jamie held the door while we made our way onto the porch.

  "Thanks, but I'm going to take a look at what Mick has again. I'm going to try to get something on my own."

  "Nice. Let me know how that goes. If you want advice, just give me a yell, although I'm sure Mick'll have plenty of advice." Jamie waved again, then shut his front door.

  Katy slid into the driver's seat of her little Honda. I couldn't tell if it was silver or champagne from the salt crusted to the paint. On the back window she had a few stickers—WVU, of course, and Mountaineer Girl. There was a Black Bear Burritos sticker and one that said YMSB. I slid my stuff into the back seat next to her laundry baskets and groceries.

  She backed the little car out of the driveway with all the grace of a tugboat pushing a barge through the lock. I tucked my hands beneath my armpits. My breath frosted to the inside of the windshield. "Sorry." I tried to wipe it away with my elbow. We chit-chatted as we passed through Davis and then Thomas. After a few more miles of polite small talk I asked, "Would it be rude if I checked my messages?"

  She shrugged. "It's fine."

  Her tone implied she minded. "I can wait."

  "No, really, it's fine."

  I flipped my phone open, waited for a sign from her to see that she'd meant it, then dialed up voicemail.

  First unheard message sent today at 9:03am.

  Dani.

  "Hello, Preston? I'm thinking about brunch. Call me if you are interested. Good bye." She sounded sleepy. I struggled to recall her face and the way she looked at me.

  Shit.

  Next unheard message sent today at 12:15pm.

  "Maybe you didn't get my first call? I don't know. I have to go up to the library. Call me, or maybe we can meet this week. Good bye."

  Shit. I snapped my phone shut with a bit more force than I'd meant to.

  "Everything all right?" Katy said it like she'd take a little pleasure in hearing that it wasn't all right.