Danny said, “They all love him. Maybe even better than we do.”
For the next two years, all their families got were postcards. Gaudy souvenir cards from tourists spots all over the South—places Danny and Dixie never visited because instead of seeing the sights, they were doing the roadhouse circuit, playing one-nighters. Mostly the new stuff called Rockabilly, but also bluegrass standards, and gospel hymns when the audience was open to that, which was almost never.
Making petty cash but it was more than Dixie’s dad had paid them for working the cornfields, which was nothing because they were supposed to be content with room and board. Top of that, they were doing what they loved and getting paid for it. Meeting people, all kinds of people, having all kinds of eye-opening experiences that no way would’ve happened back in Newport.
Christmas, they sent store-bought toys to Baker, along with sweet notes in Dixie’s hand. The baby became a quiet, determined toddler, unlikely to give up whatever he was working at, unless forced to.
When he was three, his parents showed up at the corn farm, wearing fancy clothes and driving a five-year-old Ford van full of instruments and music and costume changes and talking about meeting Carl Perkins and Ralph Stanley, all those other famous people in “our world.” Talking about colored singers doing that rhythm and blues, sometimes you could be safe in those colored clubs and it was worth listening.
Dixie’s father scowling at that. Spooning his soup and saying, “I won’t hold it against you, running off like that, and leaving your problem with us.” Meaning the little boy, sitting right there. Talking about him like he didn’t understand. “Be up tomorrow at five to atone. We got a whole edge of the north field to do by hand.”
Danny fingered his leather string tie with the piece of quartz up near the collar, then smiled and stood and laid down a fat wad of bills on the table.
“What’s that?” said his father-in-law.
“Payment.”
“For what?”
“Babysitting, back rent, whatever.” Winking at his wife.
She hesitated, avoided her family’s eyes. Then quaking so hard she thought she’d fall apart, she scooped up Baker and followed her husband out to the van.
As the Ford drove off, Dixie’s mother said, “Figures. They never took their gear out the back.”
Baker Southerby grew up on the roadhouse circuit, learning to read and write and do arithmetic from his mother. He picked things up quickly, making her job easy. She hugged and kissed him a lot and he seemed to like that. No one ever talked about the time that she and Danny had gone and left him.
She told him to call her Dixie because everyone did and, “Sweetie, you and me both know I’m your mama.”
Years later, Baker figured it out. She’d been all of seventeen, wanted to see herself as that pretty girl with the lightning fingers up on stage, not some housewife.
When he was five, he asked to play her Gibson F-5 mandolin.
“Honey, that’s a real precious thing.”
“I’ll be careful.”
Dixie hesitated. Baker stared at her, with those serious eyes.
She ran her hand over his blond crew cut. He kept staring.
“All right, then, but I’m sitting right next to you. Want me to show you some chords?”
Grave nod.
An hour after he started, he was playing C, G and F. By the end of the day, he was coaxing forth a respectable version of “Blackberry Blossom.” Not at full speed, but his tone was clear, his right hand nice and smooth.
“Dan, come listen to this.” Listening to him, watching how careful he was, Dixie was comfortable letting him play the mandolin without her hovering.
Danny came in from the porch of the motel, where he’d been smoking and strumming and writing songs.
“What?”
“Just listen—go ahead, sweetie-pie little man.”
Baker played.
“Huh…,” Danny said. Then: “I got an idea.”
They bought him his own mandolin. Nothing high-priced, a forties A-50 they picked up in a Savannah pawnshop, but it had decent tone. By age six, Baker had a trunk full of stage-duds and a thirties F-4 almost as shiny as Dixie’s F-5 and he was a full-time headliner. The new act was officially The Southerby Family Band: Danny, Dixie and Little Baker the Amazing Smoky Mountain Kid.
Mostly there wasn’t room for all that on any marquee so it was just The Southerbys.
Baker’s chord repertoire ran all the way down the fretboard, encompassed the majors, minors, sevenths, sixths, ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths, along with diminished, augmented, and a whole bunch of interesting extensions he came upon himself that could be called jazz, even though the closest they got to jazz was a few Texas swing songs that always ended up sounding bluegrassy.
By the time he was nine, he played cleaner and faster than his mother and to her credit, she reacted with nothing but pride.
Homeschooling—though that concept hadn’t been invented—continued and Baker was smart enough to get a year ahead of his age group. At least according to the intelligence test Dixie had clipped out of Parents magazine.
Baker grew up on fast food, tobacco smoke and applause. Nothing seemed to alter his quiet personality. When he was twelve, a smooth-talking man who’d heard them play at a honky-tonk outside of Natchez told Danny he’d give all three of them a recording contract, make them the new Carter Family.
They went into the studio, laid down five old standards, never heard back from the guy, tried calling a few times, then gave up and went back on the road.
When Baker was twelve, he announced that he wanted to go to a real school.
Danny said, “Just like that? You give it all up?”
Baker didn’t answer.
“Wish you’d talk more, son. Kind of hard to know what’s going on behind those eyes.”
“I just told you.”
“Giving it all up.”
Silence.
Dixie said, “That’s what he wants, maybe it’s not such a bad idea.”
Danny looked over her. “Yeah, I been feeling that’s coming.”
“What has?”
“Itching to settle down.”
“Could’ve done it years ago,” said Dixie. “I was waiting.”
“For what?”
She shrugged. “Something.”
They moved to Nashville, because it was in Tennessee and, theoretically, not a big deal to visit their families. The real reason was: Music City.
Danny was still a young man, though sometimes he felt like he’d lived three lifetimes. The mirror told him he looked sharp, and his pipes were good; guys a lot less talented than he were making it big-time, why not give it a shot?
He used some of the cash he’d saved from years on the road and bought a little frame house in The Nations. Nice white neighborhood, full of hardworking people. Dixie wanted to play house that was fine; he’d be over on Sixteenth Street.
Baker went to junior high and met other kids. He stayed quiet but managed to make a few friends and, except for math where he needed some catch-up, classes were pretty easy.
Dixie stayed home and played her mandolin and sang “Just for the sake of it, Baker, which is music at the purest, right?”
Sometimes she asked Baker to jam with her. Mostly, he did.
Danny was out most of the time, trying to scare up a career on Music Row. He got a few gigs playing rhythm guitar at the Ryman when regulars were sick, did some club dates, paid his own money to cut demos that never went anywhere.
When the money ran low, he took a job teaching choir at a Baptist church.
After a year and a half of that, over dinner he announced it was time to hit the road again.
Baker said, “Not me.”
Danny said, “I didn’t mean you.” Glancing at his wife. She screwed up her mouth. “I put on weight, nothing’s gonna fit.”
“That’s why God invented tailors,” said her husband. “Or do it yourself, you used to know how to sew.”
“There you go. We’re leaving on Monday.”
Today was Thursday.
Dixie said, “Leaving for where?”
“Atlanta. I got us a gig opening for the Culpeppers at a new bluegrass club. Nothing fancy, all they want is S.O.S.”
Family talk for the Same Old Shit.
Meaning the standards. Danny, seeing himself as a modern man, had come to despise them.
“Just like that,” said Dixie. “You made all the plans.”
“Don’t I always? You might want to get some new strings for your plink-box. I overheard you yesterday. The G and D are dead.”
“What about Baker?”
“He can take care of himself, right, son?”
“He’s not even fourteen.”
“How old were you when you had him?”
Talking about him as if he wasn’t there.
Baker wiped his mouth, carried his plate to the sink, and began washing it.
“So?” said Danny.
Dixie sighed. “I’ll try to sew it myself.”
From then on, they were gone more than they were home. Doing a month on the road, returning for a week or ten days, during which Dixie doted on Baker with obvious guilt and Danny sat by himself and smoked and wrote songs no one else would ever hear.
The summer of Baker’s fifteenth birthday, Danny announced they were sending him to Bible camp in Memphis for six weeks. “Time to get some faith and spirituality, son.”
By sheer coincidence, Danny and Dixie had been booked for a six-week gig exactly during that period. Aboard a cruise boat leaving from Biloxi.
“Hard to get phone contact from there,” said Dixie. “This way we know you’ll be safe.”
During the last week of camp, Baker ate something off and came down with horrible food poisoning. Three days later, the bug was gone but he’d lost seven pounds and was listless. The camp doctor had left early on a family emergency and the Reverend Hartshorne, the camp director, didn’t want to risk any legal liability; just last summer some rich girl’s family had sued because she’d gotten a bladder infection that developed into sepsis. Luckily that kid had survived, probably her fault in the first place, she had a reputation for fooling with the boys but tell that to those fancy-pants lawyers…
Hartshorne found Baker in his bunk room and drew him outside. “Call your parents, son, so they can pick you up. Then start packing.”
“Can’t,” said a wan, weak Baker. “They’re on a ship, no phone contact.”
“When were they figuring on picking you up?”
“I’m taking the bus.”
“All the way to Nashville?”
“I’m okay.”
Lord, thought Hartshorne. These new families.
“Well, son, can’t have you being here, all sick. Got a key to your house?”
“Sure.”
“I don’t mind Nashville. I’ll drive you in.”
They started out in Hartshorne’s white Sedan Deville at three PM, made a single stop for lunch, and pulled into Nashville at nine fifteen.
Lights out in the little frame house.
“You okay going in by yourself?”
Baker was eager to get away from Hartshorne’s Bible speeches and the odors the reverend gave off: bubble gum and body odor and for some reason, an overlay of Wheatena cereal.
“Sure.”
“Okay, then. Walk with the Lord, son.”
“Yessir.”
Baker got his duffel and his pillow from the back and fished out his door key. The Cadillac was gone before he reached the door.
He walked into the empty house.
Heard something.
Not empty—a burglar?
Laying his duffel and pillow on the floor, he tiptoed into the kitchen, snuck all the way back to the laundry room where Danny kept his pistol.
Ancient Colt, Danny called it protection for the road though the only time he’d had to use it was when some Klan-type guys loitering near their motel in Pulaski made remarks about seeing them going into a nigger juke-joint.
One flash of the Colt and the idiots dispersed.
Remembering that now—recalling the power that came from a couple pounds of honed steel—Baker hefted the pistol and advanced toward the noise in the back.
His parents’ bedroom. Some kind of commotion behind the closed door.
No, not completely closed; the thin paneled slab was cracked an inch.
Baker nudged it with his finger, got a couple more inches of view space and aimed the pistol through the opening.
Dim light. One lamp on a nightstand, his mother’s nightstand giving off a pinkish light.
Because of some silky material that had been tossed over the shade.
His mother on the bed, naked, astride his father.
No, not his father, his father was off to the side on a chair and another woman, blond and skinny, was astride him.
The man under his mother, heavier in the legs than his father. Hairier, too.
Two couples, panting, heaving, bucking.
His gun arm froze.
He forced himself to lower it.
Backed away.
Took his duffel and left his pillow and walked out of the house. Made his way to a bus stop and rode downtown and got himself a room at a motel on Fourth.
Found the marine recruitment office the next morning, lied about his age, and enlisted. Two days later, he was on a bus to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
It took another week for a panicky Dixie Southerby to locate him.
The marines told him to come back in two years and sent him home.
Dixie said, “What’d you do that for?”
Baker said, “I got restless. Can I go to military school?”
“You don’t want to live at home?”
“I’m big enough to go away.”
Danny said, “That’s a mature decision, son. It’s time for your mother and me to hit the road, anyway.”
Military academies turned out to be too expensive but Fall River Bible School and Seminary in Arlington, Virginia was flexible about tuition for “students with spiritual leanings.”
Baker settled in, met some nice people, and was starting to think he might even fit in somewhere. A month into the first semester, Mrs. Calloway, the head counselor, called him into her office, with tears in her eyes.
When he got here, she hugged him. Not customary for Mrs. Calloway. Not much touching went on at Fall River, period.
“Oh, you poor boy, you poor lamb.”
Baker said, “What?”
It took a long time for her to tell him and when she did, she looked scared, as if she’d be punished for doing it.
The van had been hit head-on, by a drunk on I-40.
Danny and Dixie returning to Nashville from a gig in Columbia. Grand opening of a car dealership, two-hundred-dollar fee, not bad when you figured it was only a one-hour drive.
All those years on the road without a mishap. Fifteen minutes out of town, the van was turned into scrap.
Both of them dead on impact, their stage clothes strewn all over the interstate.
Danny’s guitar had sustained irreparable damage, sliding around the rear of the van, its soundboard crushed, its neck severed and splintered.
Dixie’s mandolin, its hard-shell case covered by a newer Mark Leaf space-age plastic supplementary case and swathed in three packing blankets, the way she always wrapped it, came out unharmed.
Baker went and retrieved the instrument from the closet, same way he’d done so many times before.
Stared at it, touched the taut strings, the ebony bridge, the mother-of-pearl tuners with their gold-plated gears.
Not too many F-5s were gold-plated or triple-bound. This one was and everyone who’d seen it opined that even though it was dated 1924, not ’23, it was from the same batch as Bill Monroe’s. Monroe’s had gotten damaged years ago; the story that circulated was some jealous husband had caugh
t the bluegrass king in bed with his wife and taken out his anger on the instrument.
Stupid, thought Baker. It was people who deserved punishment, not things.
Staring at the F-5 and realizing what he’d just told himself.
Maybe he should smash this thing. What did music bring other than sin and misery?
That poor girl.
That rich boy, was he any better off?
Maybe he’d call that shrink, Delaware, ask if he had any ideas about helping Tristan.
Nah, the guy was long gone back to LA, by now. And what the hell was it his business if the boy had emotional issues, that mother of his…
He’d done his job.
So why was it gnawing at him?
Like the girl, like the boy, like everyone else in this goddamn world, they were just people. With their talents and their weaknesses and their heartbreaks and their egos.
People. If there was a God, he had one hell of a sense of humor.
Or maybe there was wisdom behind it.
People, able to change. Able to better themselves, even though so many failed.
The people he and Lamar met day after day…
Maybe there was more…
Hands—must’ve been his, but it felt like they were someone else’s—lifted the mandolin out of its case. The back all shiny, those silky, sculptural contours where some Michigan craftsman had carved and tapped and carved some more under the watchful eye of the chief acoustical engineer, a genius named Lloyd Loar.
Loar had signed the instrument on March 21, 1924. Anything with his name on it was worth a bundle to collectors.
Baker’s fingers grazed the strings. EADG. Perfect tune, after all these years.
He knew because he had perfect pitch.
His left hand formed a G chord. He told his right hand not to move but it did.
A resonant, sweet sound rang out, bounced against cold walls devoid of art or family mementos, ricocheted against discount-outlet furniture and linoleum floors. Ended its flight and burrowed into Baker’s skull.
His head hurt.
His hands moved some more and that helped a bit.
An hour later, he was still at it.
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Capital Crimes Page 30
