Bone Music

by Alan Rodgers

  Then the coffin was clear, and they lifted it gently to set it on the grass beside the open grave.

  Wheatstraw himself hammered out the nails that held the lid secure. When they were gone he pried it free to expose Blind Willie’s carcass to the light of day.

  Peetie Wheatstraw stooped over the open coffin, peering at the corpse. After a moment he murmured derisively. “Get up,” Peetie Wheatstraw commanded the corpse. “Ain’t no sense you lying there, Blind Willie. It ain’t the time for you to go to no reward.”

  The gravediggers sidled away from Wheatstraw; one of them mumbled something about a burial he needed to attend to.

  The corpse lay silent, still as stone.

  “Get on with you, Blind Willie! Ain’t no use you try to lie there. The angel Death already come for you, took you home, and brought you back. She left you here on earth where you belong.”

  Blind Willie didn’t answer.

  One of the gravediggers cleared his throat. “He’s dead, Mister. Can’t you see?”

  Peetie Wheatstraw looked up. “You think I don’t know? I know a dead man when I see one.” He shook his head. “Jesus Christ Almighty, what do you think I am?”

  The grave digger gave no more answer than the carcass had.

  “You got to understand,” Peetie Wheatstraw said. “This isn’t any ordinary body. Blind Willie — he’s a Hoodoo Doctor. Being dead ain’t no problem for a hoodoo man.”

  And suddenly the corpse sat bolt upright in its casket.

  “Damn you!” Blind Willie shouted. “Damn your hide to Hell, Peetie Wheatstraw!”

  Peetie Wheatstraw laughed so hard he like to fall into the open grave. Two of the gravediggers turned and ran for their lives; the third would’ve run with them if he hadn’t been too scared to move.

  Blind Willie scowled; he mumbled curses so quiet that only the Devil heard them — but those curses were so foul that the Devil took delight to hear Blind Willie speak them.

  “Your time has come and gone, Blind Willie. But the world still needs you, and you’re here. You better get used to the idea.”

  Blind Willie wouldn’t hear it. “Go away,” he said. “You want to talk to me, I’ll see you at the rapture.”

  That got Peetie Wheatstraw started laughing all over again.

  “It ain’t a going to work, Blind Willie. The blues have got you, and they’ve made you to a Doctor.”

  “I never sang no blues,” Blind Willie said. “I sang to serve the Lord.”

  Peetie Wheatstraw rolled his eyes. “We all serve the Lord,” he said. “God makes us who we are.”

  “You’re wrong,” Blind Willie said. “I seen the light, and I seen the darkness. I seen the halls of hell and I seen what folks who dwell there. God never made a place like that for anyone He loves.”

  Now suddenly Wheatstraw grew serious and sober, and when he spoke he spoke so quietly that even Blind Willie — dead and alive with the hoodoo that consumed him despite every good intention — so quietly that Blind Willie hardly heard him. “God loves us all so dear He makes us free to grow as great as we can dare.”

  “Free to be wrong, you mean. Free to sin!”

  “Damn right.”

  “You better get yourself religion, boy,” Blind Willie said. “You better learn to serve the Lord.”

  Wheatstraw didn’t answer right away, and when he did answer he answered at right angles to the point. “Get up, Blind Willie. That grave no longer can contain you.”

  Blind Willie didn’t answer that at all. He sat perched still as stone in his coffin, staring at the horizon for the longest time.

  And then he began to pray.

  On toward late afternoon a cold wind came down off the plains, and now the boneyard took a chill as deep as death. After a while Peetie Wheatstraw put his arm around the gravedigger who was still too terrified to move, and led him back to town.

  Spanish Harlem

  The Present

  Everything should’ve been great after Lisa came back. It should have been fine and wonderful and true; it should have been a renewal that gave them life where life had slipped away. But it didn’t work that way, because life never works that way: Lisa woke to her new life as angry as a jaybird frightening a pigeon.

  It was hard to see at first, because she was still in her heart a good little girl who spoke politely and minded what her mother told her — but underneath the goodness and the deference the girl had a temper.

  A bad, bad temper.

  Emma first saw it the morning after Lisa’s resurrection. She’d put her coffee on to brew and gone to Lisa’s room to tell her breakfast was ready, and found Lisa awake in bed, playing with a mouse. God only knew how the girl had caught the thing, and damn the exterminator who’d promised to rid the building of mice two months ago, but there it was, acting like some child’s darling pet, crawling back and forth across Lisa’s papery hands. Such a darling little dear, Emma thought, maybe they ought to buy a cage and keep this one mouse as a pet — and then the creature stumbled, hissed, and bit deep into Lisa’s left thumb.

  Emma swore and rushed to her daughter’s side to nurse the wound.

  As Lisa screeched.

  Grabbed the mouse with her free hand.

  Closed her hand around it and crushed it to a pulp.

  “Lisa!”

  Lisa glanced over her shoulder, still angry; she looked surprised to see her mother.

  “It bit me, Mama,” Lisa said. And then she glanced back at the red wet goo that sopped down from her hand into the bedclothes. She sobbed. “It never should have bit me.”

  She sounded like she wanted to cry, but she sounded angry, too.

  Emma bit her lip, tried to make her stomach be still. “The mouse is dead, Lisa,” she said. Emma wasn’t sure why she chose those words, but they were the only ones she could find. “You need to wash yourself, child.”

  Lisa looked from her mother to the dead mass in her hand and back again.

  “Yes, Mama,” Lisa said. She sounded like she wanted to say something else, too, but whatever it was she kept it to herself.

  Emma led her to the bathroom, where she flushed the bloody mass down the toilet and washed Lisa’s hands in the sink.

  “I don’t know what’s got into you, child,” Emma said. “I never seen you hurt a fly before.”

  Lisa frowned.

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” she said, rinsing and rinsing her hands in the water. And then her face seemed to crumble, and suddenly she was sobbing, sobbing and crying like a baby lost alone. “I miss my friend,” she said. “I want him back.”

  “The mouse is dead, Lisa.”

  “He never should have bit me,” Lisa said. And then she cried some more.

  The mouse bite oozed pus for three long days, and when it stopped oozing Lisa’s whole thumb hardened stiff as wood.

  It was like — like she was still dead. She didn’t eat except when Emma told her to, and every time she did the food came back up a few hours later, smelling like death. Lisa smelled like that, too, sometimes — like meat left to sit in the sun for days. And her breath! So sulfury and strange, like brimstone burning closer than you want to think.

  One night Emma dreamed that the stinking rotten thing in her daughter’s bedroom wasn’t Lisa at all — it was some dead thing, a zombie, just like Mama Estrella said. It was a monster inhabited by demons, and the only peace she’d ever know was if she burned it in a bonfire.

  But there was courage in her heart, and she knew the difference between her convictions and her fears.

  And she knew Lisa was her daughter, her precious little girl who’d suffered a terrible miracle, and she knew that if she kept the courage of her faith the Lord would see her through.

  There are some — like Mama Estrella — who would say Emma was
a foolish woman, and that she should have put her daughter down to rest before she died forever. And there’s reason in those words, no question. But there are times when courage and faith are better guides than reason, and this was one of those.

  Emma’s heart told her this was just that time. But Mama Estrella told her different. She called on the telephone over and over, trying to frighten Emma, trying to persuade her.

  “Your baby’s going to die, Emma,” Mama Estrella would say as Emma lifted the receiver. “She’s going to die forever, girl.”

  But Emma didn’t frighten easy.

  “You’re wrong,” she said. And she hung up the phone.

  What did worry Emma was Lisa’s temper. There were times it seemed unnaturally inspired, and other times it seemed natural but out of all proportion.

  The night she had that awful dream Emma wandered into the kitchen for a glass of water and found Lisa by the sink, killing roaches and painting pictures with their innards around the edges of the drain.

  “Lisa!” Emma had shouted, all bleary and confused, “What are you doing, child?”

  When Lisa saw her mother she looked ashamed.

  “Just killing bugs, Mama, that’s all,” she said, and her voice sounded guilty and repentant even if her words tried to make out like it wasn’t something heinous and disgusting she’d been doing.

  “Why would you do such a thing, child?”

  And Lisa had looked up at her mother like she was about to cry. “I just get so mad, is all,” she’d said. “Sometimes I get so angry I don’t know what to do.”

  And all that night after Emma went back to bed she lay awake wondering which was real, the demoniac thing that drew her daughter to hurt those bugs, or the little girl who did such things even though they shamed her.

  She never knew for certain.

  The next day Mama Estrella and her sisters came looking for Lisa while Emma was away at work. She knocked three times, demanding to be let into the apartment, and when there was no answer she used her master key to open the door.

  Lisa heard her, and she hid in the back corner of the closet, terrified of the chanting women and their incense. They looked and looked all through the apartment, but Lisa lay still as stone down in the dirty laundry, and they never found her.

  When Emma came home she found Lisa still hiding terrified in her closet. Emma asked the girl what she was doing hiding there, and when Lisa told her Emma hit the roof.

  She got on the phone and gave that Santeria Lady a piece of her mind.

  But Mama Estrella didn’t hear a word of it.

  “Emma,” Mama Estrella said, “your baby could die forever.”

  Emma took the phone into the living room and closed the door as much as she could without damaging the cord. When she responded her voice was even angrier than she meant it to be. “You stay away from Lisa, Mama Estrella Perez. My Lisa’s just fine, she’s going to be okay, and I don’t want you going near her. Do you understand me?”

  Mama sighed. “When you make a zombie,” she said, “when you make a real one from someone dead, I mean, you can make it move. You can even make it understand enough to do what you say. But still the body rots away. It doesn’t matter usually. When a zombie is gone it’s gone. What’s the harm? But your Lisa is inside that zombie. When the flesh rots away she’ll be trapped in the bones. And we won’t ever get her out.”

  Emma felt all cold inside. She’d seen the rot; she knew what was happening to her little girl. But there was a truth in her heart, a knowledge and certainty that rose above all argument and justification. She reached into her heart and trusted what she found, and when she answered the Santeria Lady her voice was a crucible of rage. “Don’t you say things like that about my Lisa, Mama Estrella,” she said. “My Lisa’s alive, and I won’t have you speaking evil of her.” She opened the door and slammed the phone into its cradle before Mama Estrella could say another word.

  Marlin, Texas

  November 1948

  Blind Willie finally left his open grave an hour after midnight. For a few moments he considered heading to the northern outskirts of town, to find his mourning wife and comfort her, but when he thought on that long enough he knew that she could never take him in her arms again, because the death that separated them was a final thing no matter how he came back to the earth.

  Later he reconsidered this, and went home to look for her, but he never should have done it. It happened just the way he’d known it would as he’d stumbled from his grave: she wouldn’t hear of him now that he was gone. And when he stood before her she took him for a ghost, no matter how he tried to reassure her.

  When he thought about that for a while he decided she was right, and went back to the ridge over Memphis where he’d built the home that was his new existence.

  But that was later — much later. That night when he left his grave he wandered into Beaumont, into the worst parts of town. He found a saloon there he never frequented, and it was doing a brisk business in bad liquor and painted women. He didn’t like that place at all, but he knew he had to go there. Because he knew what he would find there, and he knew he had to face it.

  And he did face it. He only hesitated a moment outside the barroom door, and then he pushed in, past the drunkards and the devil-music and the party women with their wide smiles and their hearts and eyes so full of self-contempt; through the pool-hall on the far side of the bar, into the back room where the real money was.

  He found Peetie Wheatstraw there, sitting at a table with five other gentlemen, playing cards for stakes even deadmen can’t afford.

  The gamblers glared at Blind Willie as he burst into their room. One of them made to draw his pistol, but Blind Willie waved that threat away with a gesture of his hand.

  “You woke me, William Bunch. Tell me what you want so I can return to my rest.”

  Peetie Wheatstraw threw his cards down on the table and pushed his stake into the pot. “It took you long enough, Blind Willie,” he said. “You’re a stubborn kind of man.”

  “You’re ignoring my request, William Bunch. I mean to get this done.”

  Peetie Wheatstraw took Blind Willie by the arm and led him through the back-room door, into the bar. “There’s something you don’t understand,” he whispered.

  Blind Willie didn’t answer that; instead he glared at Peetie Wheatstraw, waiting for him to go on.

  “I can’t tell you here,” he said. “We need to go where we can talk.”

  He led Blind Willie out of the bar, into the night; through the empty streets of Beaumont to the boneyard Blind Willie had walked away from not an hour earlier.

  As they went the deadman who sometimes called himself the Devil’s Son-in-Law hummed a little tune, and though it was no melody Blind Willie could name, he recognized the tune.

  Because it was the shadow of the music of the world, and Blind Willie was a part of it, same as you and me. But his part was a large one, very clear; it sang him like a refrain, some ways, because Blind Willie was a crucial bit of everything to happen.

  Before they reached his grave Blind Willie knew what lay ahead of him, and he knew why he had woken. He knew Peetie Wheatstraw hadn’t been the one to wake him at all, but only a deadman come to greet him; he knew that he was damned to life on Hell and earth, no matter how piously he’d tried to live his life.

  And he accepted all of that, because he had the Grace and Faith to accept the fate he never meant to find.

  “Tell the King he knows where he can find me,” Blind Willie said. And then he walked away to find the wreck of his subsistence on the surface of the world.

  Spanish Harlem

  The Present

  As the summer wore on it grew hotter and hotter in the tenement — hotter than any Harlem summer Emma ever lived.

  The heat went bad on Lisa.

 
Her skin drew chalky, greasy; her hair fell away in clots. Her eyes shriveled in their bony sockets until they hung free, trembling as she moved. The ichorous mound that once had been the cancer in her belly swelled and bloated till Lisa’s tiny desiccated form became a caricature of a pregnant corpse.

  When the rot had all but consumed her, Lisa had a dream. In the morning, she told her mother about it.

  “The Lady came to me last night, Mama,” Lisa said.

  Emma Henderson frowned. “What lady is that, Lisa?”

  “The Lady from my dream, Mama.”

  Emma didn’t like it, not one bit. “What did she say, Lisa?”

  “She told me not to be afraid, Mama.” She looked out the window. “I’m going to die again, aren’t I, Mama?”

  Emma pursed her lips, set her teeth. When she spoke she spoke carefully, trying not to show how scared she was. “I’m not going to let you die, child,” she said. “Don’t you worry about that.”

  Lisa took that in, but she didn’t look like she believed it.

  “The Lady took me through a city,” Lisa said. “She held my hand and showed me all the stuff along the River. Factories and dockyards, old houses with the rot. One place there was a well covered up with stones, and she said it went so deep they drink from it in Hell.”

  Emma rubbed her temples. She didn’t want to think about dreams like that. She didn’t want to know about them.

  Not that she had a choice.

  “By the well there was a man with a guitar,” Lisa said. “He played music so beautiful it made me want to cry.”

  “Tell me,” Emma said. “Tell me what he sang.” She didn’t want to know the song, no more than she wanted to think about the dream. But she knew she had to hear.

  “He sang about Damnation,” Lisa said, “and all about the Eye of the World. But before he told it all he stopped, and the Lady said his song was Judgment Day.”