Bone Music

by Alan Rodgers

  Robert Johnson smiled reassuringly. “No one here will ever hurt you,” he said. “Remember this place and you’ll always have a sanctuary.”

  “I will,” Lisa said. But how could she ever remember? The Lady led her here through the darkness, and Lisa didn’t know the way.

  “You can always find it in your heart, Lisa, if you know to look for it.”

  “I knew that,” she said. Which was another lie, but Robert Johnson knew and didn’t care.

  “Come on,” he said. “Take my hand, I’ll show you something.”

  Lisa didn’t want to go anywhere. She liked the place with the bonfire, and if she could have stayed there for a lifetime, listening to the music and watching Charlie Patton strangle his guitar, she would have done that.

  But she couldn’t, of course. And she knew that if there was a thing Robert Johnson thought she’d need to see, she’d better go with him and see it.

  So she took his hand and followed him away from the fire, out into the darkness and forever and on; it felt like they walked halfway cross the country before they were halfway done.

  And now there were trees around them in the darkness, and they were climbing a mountain in the hills of Tennessee.

  High above them stood three men with guitars.

  “Who are they?” Lisa asked.

  Robert Johnson hushed her. “These are the Blind Lords of the Piedmont,” he said. “They rule these hills and everything surrounding.”

  “Blind? — I don’t understand.”

  “Hush.”

  She tried to make out the words to their song, and then realized there were no words at all — the blind men were humming to one another as clearly as you or I might speak.

  When they were close enough to touch the blind men, Robert Johnson knelt to whisper into Lisa’s ear. “You need to kneel before them,” he whispered, “and ask them for their blessing.”

  Lisa thought, I won’t!, but she was wrong. She didn’t mean to be, but that was how it happened — something deep inside her knew a more important truth, and when she stood before the Blind Lords it pushed her to her knees and raised her right hand to them, palm down.

  “I live to serve you,” Lisa said, and she never meant to say that, no more than she meant to kneel.

  The black Lord smiled; his white companions folded their arms. “We take your service, child,” the black Lord said.

  “We take your service, Lisa Henderson,” one of his companions repeated. “Bless you, child. Bless your sojourn, and everything that you endeavor.”

  And then the Blind Lords were gone, and Lisa and Robert Johnson stood alone atop the mountain.

  “I never heard a white man who knew about real music,” Lisa said, and they both knew she didn’t mean just music, but blues music, real blues like the kind that’s always got some magic in it, even when the least ones play it.

  “You never known nobody from the Piedmont, girl,” Robert Johnson said. “Things are different in the mountains.”

  “What was the song?” Lisa asked. “I know that song. It’s like Judgment Day, but different.”

  Robert Johnson looked surprise that she had recognized it. He nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “It’s called The Eye of the World, and the Blind Lords will sing it loud and true from their mountaintops after the Kings sing Judgment Day.”

  Lisa bit her lip. “I knew that,” she said. “How did I know?”

  “It’s in the music, Lisa. If you know the music in your heart, you know its deepest secrets.”

  Far away in the western distance, Lisa could see the great river, and above the river there was a light. “I’m just a girl,” Lisa said. “I don’t know about things like that.”

  Robert Johnson laughed.

  “You know all sorts of things, child. They’re written in your heart. All you have to do is admit them and they’re yours.”

  Now the light above the river grew larger and larger, till it was four times the circumference of the moon, and Lisa could see it was a great wide eye.

  The Eye of the World.

  “It’s beautiful,” Lisa said, and it was beautiful, clear and deep and luminescent in a way that made clear everything that shone beneath it.

  “Of course it is,” Robert Johnson said. “If the world has a soul,” he said, “you can see it through the Eye.”

  And Lisa thought she could see the world’s soul, deep inside that Eye; not directly, but reflected, the way you see the heart of a woman when you look her in the eye.

  “Is it true, Robert Johnson? — Is it true what I heard about you and the Eye of the World?”

  Robert Johnson went all slack beside her; he made a sound like the breath of a sigh but defeated, the noise you hear when a vacant body lets go a man’s last breath.

  “Every word of it is true, Lisa Henderson.”

  And Lisa could see it was, because now that she thought to look for them she could see the cracks in the Eye’s lens; and in her dream she imagined those cracks grew wider and wider till finally the Eye of the World fell open like the petals of a desiccated rose.

  “Every word of it is true.”

  Lisa woke crying quietly in the dark. She didn’t mean to cry. She didn’t want to cry. She hated crying like she did, she really hated it. But it wasn’t like she could stop — she knew that because she tried and it didn’t do a bit of good.

  “Tell me about your dream, Lisa,” said a voice in the darkness, and Lisa knew who it was. Of course she did! It was Mama Estrella, poking around in the privatest secretest things that Lisa ever knew.

  “I won’t,” Lisa said.

  “You need to tell,” said Mama Estrella. “You know you do.”

  Lisa said, “You’re wrong,” but she knew the Santeria lady was right. And Mama Estrella did, too; and because she knew she didn’t press. She sat in the darkness at the foot of Lisa’s bed, waiting and listening, for a time that felt like hours but maybe it was only moments.

  And after a while Lisa knew that it was right, and she began to tell. She told Mama Estrella everything, there in the darkness. Told her about the dream with Robert Johnson and the Blind Lords of the Piedmont; about the reflecting pool outside the gates of Heaven and Hell; about the night she died, when Our Lady of Sorrows appeared to her in the twilight fading of her hospital room.

  Mama Estrella took it all in. After a while Lisa began to suspect she’d known parts of it all along.

  “Shungó has expectations for you,” Mama Estrella said, when Lisa had said everything she knew to say.

  “I’m just a girl,” Lisa said. “I don’t want any expectations.”

  “I know that, Lisa. That’s why I’m trying to help you.”

  Lisa knew when she heard the word help that there was terrible trouble caught up around it, but she didn’t say anything. What could she say, after all? Let me alone, Mama Estrella, the Lady knows what’s best for me? Lisa could have said that, maybe, but she was too scared. She loved the Lady and she knew the Lady loved her, but she frightened Lisa all the same, and the dearest part of Lisa’s heart just wanted to go back to being an ordinary little girl in ordinary Harlem with her ordinary mama and her everyday school, and she knew that was impossible so long as she went with the Lady.

  So she let Mama Estrella wash her and dress her that morning, and when the sun came up Mama Estrella and Mama and Lisa all went down through Mama Estrella’s store, into the grotto in the back yard.

  And Mama Estrella made a candle from three kinds of sacred oil and a water that made the flame sputter pungent smoke, and she made Lisa kneel before the Lady’s statue in the grotto.

  And she said a prayer in a language Lisa didn’t know, but three times she recognized the name Shungó, and twice she heard Barbara.

  When Mama Estrella finished her prayer,
the statue at the center of the grotto began to move. It moved as easily as a Lady made of flesh and blood, but it still looked like stone.

  “Santa,” said Mama Estrella. “Santa, we beseech you —”

  — as now the statue’s sword caught fire as the Lady raised it high above her head, to strike —

  “— beseech you to set our daughter free.”

  As the sword swung hard and fast and bright to cut the Santeria lady in two.

  They got Mama Estrella to the hospital in time for the doctors to reattach her arm, but only barely. She spent seven hours in surgery, and all that while she was half awake and murmuring, no matter how they drugged her.

  She woke the moment they wheeled her into the recovery room, and demanded to speak to Emma Henderson. The nurses tried to reassure her back to sleep, but she refused to let them, and persisted in her demand until they relented.

  “You need to find the Seventh King,” Mama Estrella said when they brought Emma to her. She was sickly-looking — sweaty and wide-eyed from the drugs, pale and shriveled from the trauma of her wound. “Take my car. Go to Greenville — Greenville, Mississippi. Take Highway 82 through town. Three miles south of Greenville you’ll see three tall pines that cross themselves. There’s a dirt road between two of those trees. It leads through a pinewoods toward a bluff.

  “Follow the road until you know you should stop, and look south — you’ll see a shack. The last of the Seven Kings lives there. Knock on his door and he’ll find you, even if he isn’t there.”

  Hell - John Henry

  Timeless

  There are a thousand stories about John Henry, and a thousand thousand variations on those tales. Some of the stories are literally true; some of them are figuratively true; some of them are wrong. That’s the nature of stories, isn’t it? They show us all the highlights of the world, but they never leave us certain we can trust the things we know. We listen because they delight us, and mind them as much as they illuminate our hearts; but no one with a lick of sense ever trusts a tale he can’t verify himself.

  There’s no way at all to be certain where John Henry is concerned. All the tales about him are echoes of one another; and perhaps John Henry himself was only an echo of them all. Who’s to say whether we should believe the stories about his songs, his deeds, his sermons? Even the events recounted in ballad that describes his competition with the engine are uncertain, and those events are so well known most people take them for the gospel truth.

  But there is no gospel truth where John Henry is concerned. His birth, his death, his marriage and his sons — all of them are mysteries clouded by a history of uncertain times.

  One story says he was born in Africa in the 1830s to a great songster and his beautiful frail wife. His mother died the day she named him (but no story ever tells the name she gave him), and his father died when he was ten. When both his folks were gone his drunkard uncle sold him for a slave.

  The slavers took him north and west, smuggling him into Georgia, where they sold him to the cruelest masters they could find. Those masters — avaricious planters — beat the boy, abused him, and battered him to break his spirit. They would have succeeded, too, if they’d never given him the Good Word of the Lord.

  The moment that that child heard of God he knew Him and he loved Him, and he took the hymns the planters taught him and twisted them around the music in his heart until he made a song greater than any hymn the planters ever knew.

  The planters never heard him sing his song, but they heard it all the same: he made a song that every black man sang to Praise the Lord, and when the white folks heard it they sang too, even if they only kept the music in their hearts.

  John Henry’s faith and his song and the nature of his song all grew mighty and most fine, and his faith was a treasure more valuable than gold. It guided him as he learned to sing and work and struggle, and it taught him how work and perseverance make us strong even when they serve our oppressors. When the war killed his masters and the soldiers in blue uniforms wrecked their plantation, John Henry took up arms and fought alongside the best of them.

  When the war was over he traveled far and wide, working his way from one end of the country to the other and back again. As he grew old his music grew deep and rich and wise, and in his time he passed away and died.

  No one knows exactly where he’s buried, but there are those who will tell you his grave is on the side of a great mountain high above the Mississippi, where the great man looks down upon the river and the land and the nation that he loved. His ghost watches all of us, they say, loving us and guiding us as no other spirit could.

  Near St. Marys, Missouri - Peetie Wheatstraw

  Easter 1949

  Robert Johnson and Peetie Wheatstraw got off the train at St. Marys early in the morning Easter Sunday. They tried to find a hire car to take them to the Mountain, but because of the holiday there were none to be had. That left them with no option but to make the trip on foot.

  In some ways that was for the best. The people of St. Marys knew about the Mountain in those years, and they suspected it mightily; lots of busy minds would have taken note if two unearthly men like Peetie Wheatstraw and Robert Johnson had hired a car to take them to the Mountain.

  Whether it was for the best or not, it wasn’t an easy walk. The countryside gets rough and uneven along the river north of St. Marys, and the weather was terrible. Terrible! Easter came early in 1949, and the winter that year was a rough one besides. Even in a mild year the mountainous parts of Missouri get real winters, and on Easter 1949 the winter was very real indeed. It snowed on and off all day that Easter, and when it wasn’t snowing the temperature went just high enough to thaw a little of the thick snow already on the ground and turn it into slush. That bitter melting cold burned Robert Johnson as it never could have burned him when he was still truly a deadman.

  Or maybe not. By the time they’d walked the fifteen miles from St. Marys station to the foot of the Mountain, even dead Peetie Wheatstraw had took himself a chill.

  “I don’t like this cold,” he said, pausing for a moment to look at the trail that led from the riverside up to the summit of the mountain. “It aches me grievously.”

  Robert Johnson had started shivering two miles back, but he didn’t let that intimidate him. “What’s the matter,” he said. “Can’t you take a little cold?” And then he laughed bravely till he realized that laughing let the cold run down deep into his lungs.

  “Don’t give me that,” Peetie Wheatstraw said. “You going to catch yourself another pneumonia if we don’t get you to a fire.”

  Robert Johnson shrugged. “I ain’t scared of no pneumonia,” he said, even though the whole idea of pneumonia scared him something terrible. “They got a pill they call penicillin, now. Pneumonia don’t kill nobody who finds themself a doctor.”

  Peetie Wheatstraw looked at him like he was out of his mind. Which maybe he was, or maybe they both were, or maybe every soul upon that Mountain was out of his mind. “You watch out for those city doctors,” he said. “They kill a lot more than they save. Always have, always will.” He gestured at the trail. “C’mon, Robert Johnson. Get a move on. Charlie Patton has a shack half a mile up the Mountain; he always keeps a fire there.”

  The trail up was easier going than the trip from St. Marys had been, because life is always milder on the Mountain than it is in the world outside. If the world is cold then the cold upon the Mountain is less bitter; if it snows upon that Mountain then the snow is light and airy, too soft and dry to seep through a hiker’s boots. When the thaw comes it comes all at once, in one warm afternoon, and the runoff flows into the springs and streams without ever muddying a trail.

  But the mildness wasn’t much help for Robert Johnson. He’d already took his chill, and there wasn’t a fire in the world that could warm it quickly out of him.

  When they reached
the shack Peetie Wheatstraw put his hand on Robert Johnson’s arm. “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll have to tell Charlie Patton that I’ve brought you.”

  Robert Johnson nodded to show he understood, but Peetie Wheatstraw didn’t see. He was already opening the door of the shack, greeting Charlie Patton, speaking to him too quietly for Robert Johnson to hear. After a while — a long while, longer than Robert Johnson expected — Peetie Wheatstraw leaned out the door of the shack and told him to come in.

  He didn’t look happy when he said it. He looked — worried. Which is a very strange expression to see on the face of a man who calls himself the Devil’s Son-in-Law.

  It only took Robert Johnson a moment after he got in the shack to realize why Peetie Wheatstraw looked that way: the reason was Charlie Patton.

  Charlie Patton was angry — spitting angry, and angrier still when Robert Johnson held out his hand to introduce himself.

  “You keep that to yourself,” Charlie Patton said. “You’re a stranger to me, Robert Johnson, and I’d just as soon see it stayed that way.”

  Now there were deep connections between Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton. Patton, after all, was the man who taught Son House blues, and Son House was Robert Johnson’s teacher. The two men weren’t even strangers; Charlie Patton had worked the plantation where Robert Johnson grew up, and lots of nights when he was a boy Robert Johnson sat at the fireside with the other children, listening to Charlie Patton play.

  Back when he was alive the first time, Robert Johnson would have took exception to talk like that from a man who might as well have been his kin, but in his new life he was a God-fearing man, and he loved God, too, and because he feared and loved the Lord he turned the other cheek when he was able. When Charlie Patton refused to shake his hand Robert Johnson took the insult with good humor and a measure of grace; he said “All right, then,” and clasped his hands before him to show he didn’t plan to take offense.

  “Show a little courtesy, Charlie Patton,” Peetie Wheatstraw said. “This man is our guest. He isn’t here to ask a favor from the Mountain King; he’s here because John Henry sent for him.”