Bone Music

by Alan Rodgers

  Charlie Patton spat into the fire.

  “I saw him sing, twelve years ago. I know who Robert Johnson is.”

  Robert Johnson winced. He stared at his shoes.

  “You don’t know nothing, Charlie Patton. I’ve been watching this man for months. I know him like I knew my brother. He ain’t the person who he was.”

  Charlie Patton scowled. “I saw him,” he said. “I saw the Eye.”

  “I know you did.”

  “There are things for which a man can never be forgiven,” Charlie Patton said. “There are gifts so fine that vain men don’t deserve them.”

  Peetie Wheatstraw didn’t answer that right away. Instead he spent a long moment looking at the fire through the open door of the shack’s woodstove, looking like he was weighing his words and trying to decide how much he ought to say.

  “I want to show you something, Charlie Patton,” he said at last. “You say you saw the Eye, twelve years ago? I’ve seen the Eye — four, five dozen times these last few months. It hangs above the river watching him for hours on end.”

  “It doesn’t hate him, Charlie Patton. Just the opposite, in fact — I’d swear I see it watch him full of adoration.” He stepped to the door of the shack, and opened it. A cold wind gusted through the aperture. “See it for yourself,” he said. “It’s watching now, just as I thought it would be.”

  And sure enough, the Eye hung above the river, staring at them.

  Staring at Robert Johnson. Watching him, lovingly.

  Then suddenly the wind reversed itself, and the door slammed shut with a terrible bang.

  “I don’t believe you,” Charlie Patton murmured, but that just wasn’t true. He turned away from Peetie Wheatstraw and Robert Johnson and began tidying his shack. After a moment he went to the cookstove to stir the beans simmering atop it. “Sit down,” he said. “Be comfortable.”

  Later when they all were warm Charlie Patton served them beans and rice, and after that he found his guitar. “I haven’t played in a long time,” he said. “I don’t play much these days.”

  Everyone who knew the Mountain knew that was true. There was a reason Charlie Patton lived so low on the Mountain, instead of near the summit with the other Kings.

  “I didn’t play for a long time,” Robert Johnson said. “But these days I play more than I used to.”

  Charlie Patton eyed him carefully, measuring the man. “Is that a fact?” he asked.

  “It is.”

  Charlie Patton nodded. “I know a song,” he said. “I bet you never heard it.”

  Peetie Wheatstraw raised an eyebrow. “And what song would that be?”

  They all knew what he was asking about.

  “Nothing that ought to make you fret, Bill Bunch.” Bill Bunch — William Bunch, more rightly — was Peetie Wheatstraw’s born name, but he never used it when he no longer was alive. “Just a little song I know. You ought to hear it, too.” Charlie Patton gripped the guitar strangely — one hand around its neck, the other all but covering the guitar’s open mouth. And as his hands moved, the guitar seemed to speak. “Lord have mercy,” the guitar said. “Lord, Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy — pray, brother, pray, save poor me.”

  Robert Johnson laughed. “John Henry can make his hammer ring like a bell,” he said. “But you got yours talking like a lady.”

  Even Peetie Wheatstraw had to laugh at that. “I never met that lady,” he said. “Maybe Charlie Patton ought to introduce me.”

  And they laughed.

  When the laughter died, Charlie Patton said, “This here is a song about a man who lived and died and lived again, and instead of him going on to his damnation — or reward! — he found himself back on earth being somebody he never ought to be, something nobody ever ought to be — something dead and alive at the same time, a body not alive enough to feel and not dead enough to go still and decay. I know a man who’s like this song, and there are days I feel for him, I tell you.”

  And then he sang.

  His song was a four-four ballad with loose, uneven rhymes; it was long and sad and sometimes beautiful; but it was also a little on the maudlin side, and there were places where it dripped with self-pity. It was the story of Charlie Patton’s reawakening as his music charmed him out the gates of Hell. It told how he’d traveled three weeks on his own after he came back from Hell, curing the sick and straightening the lame, enlightening the ignorant and teaching miserable people to rejoice. When those three weeks were over he came to a crossroads, and there at the crossroads was John Henry, singing.

  John Henry made his hammer ring like a bell.

  Charlie Patton played along with him — played his guitar for the first time since he’d come back to the world of man and woman. As they played, the magic in their music transported them, and when their song was done the two deadmen stood upon the great Mountain above the great river.

  Charlie Patton never meant to climb that Mountain, but his music took him to it anyway. When the song was over and they stood together on the Mountain, John Henry told Charlie Patton who he was and why he was and what his role was in the scheme of things, but Charlie Patton didn’t like that. Not at all.

  So he came down from the mountain and went back to his vocation among the people, whispering songs that cured the sick and straightened the lame. He could have done that for a lifetime, because he loved the work. But it isn’t in human nature to take a gift and let it go at that, and the day came when a rich farmer demanded Charlie Patton raise his dead daughter from the ground.

  Charlie Patton didn’t have it in him to raise nobody from the dead. Sure, he’d walked out of Hell himself, but that didn’t mean he could walk out of Hell for a little girl who’d already spent three years moldering in her grave.

  Charlie Patton told that farmer there was nothing he could do. But the farmer wouldn’t take that for an answer. He put his shotgun to Charlie Patton’s head and told him he was going to sing. Then he built a bonfire beside the little girl’s grave, exhumed her, and called people from thirty miles ‘round to witness his daughter’s resurrection.

  Charlie Patton did as he was told. What else could he do, with a shotgun to his head? But no matter what he did, he couldn’t raise the dead. He sang to the child’s bones, and did everything he could to tease them back to life. But all he managed to do was make the dry bones dance.

  They danced to his song for as long as he could sing it, and when the song was over they collapsed. The farmer cocked his gun and told Charlie Patton “Boy, you going to sing, I warn you,” and Charlie Patton sang, of course, and by and by the bones began to dance again. But no man can sing forever, not even a hoodoo man, not even a King who ruled by moral right as Charlie Patton did. Somewhere after midnight his voice gave way and his guitar strings snapped and Charlie Patton collapsed in an exhausted heap.

  The bones collapsed beside him.

  And the farmer, good to his word, blasted Charlie Patton’s skull with both barrels of his shotgun.

  Now, you can’t kill a deadman, and the lead that tore the top off Charlie Patton’s skull didn’t send him back to Hell. But the blast most surely startled him, and it scared him, too. When he saw he was still a living deadman he shrieked in fear, grabbed his guitar and three big pieces of his broken skull, and ran.

  It must’ve been a funny thing to see, old Charlie Patton running like his life depended on it (which, of course, it couldn’t), carrying his guitar in one hand and most of his head in the other.

  Or maybe it wasn’t. Surely the townsfolk didn’t take it in good humor; but then Charlie Patton’s egress took him directly through the center of the crowd. He ran into and over half a dozen of them, and what is a mob like that supposed to do when some bloody gruesome monster deadman barrels into them?

  They did the only thing they could do, of course.

 
They tore Charlie Patton to pieces.

  When the song was over they were all quiet for the longest time — Charlie Patton quiet because he’d said his piece and played his blues, and he thought that said it all; Peetie Wheatstraw quiet because he’d heard it all before; Robert Johnson quiet because there are some things you just can’t tell a man, no matter how clear you see them.

  It was Robert Johnson who finally broke the silence.

  “How the hell did you ever get yourself back together?”

  Charlie Patton shrugged. “Deadman’s body got a draw to itself. Like a magnet, but different. One day I woke upon the Mountain, and I knew this life was meant for me.”

  The way he said it there was no mistaking that he wasn’t any too happy about the life that was meant for him. And deeper under that there was something else — like he was scared, or something. Robert Johnson thought maybe he was scared to face the world again after the terror that ripped him limb from limb, and maybe that was the reason he didn’t go back out into the world or up onto the mountain with the other hoodoo men, but there’s no way to know a thing like that — a secret that a man keeps in his heart — for sure.

  An hour after noon Robert Johnson finally had got rid of his chill, and by then the woodstove had dried their boots. Peetie Wheatstraw said, “The day ain’t getting no younger,” and the other men both allowed as it was so.

  “I’m ready,” Robert Johnson said. He held out his hand to Charlie Patton once again, and this time the King took it.

  “I’m glad I know you, Robert Johnson,” he said. “God bless you, and see you on your way.”

  “I know He will,” Robert Johnson told him as he put on his coat. “His hand guides us all.”

  Charlie Patton nodded. He patted Robert Johnson on the back as he saw him to the door.

  Outside the door was the Eye of the World, still hanging in the sky above the river, watching Robert Johnson.

  Hell

  Timeless - The King

  When he was young the King who was a slave took God from his masters and came to know Him as no slaver ever could, and he Loved Him and worshiped Him so well that the white man took a lesson. (Anyone who cares to know just what that lesson was should compare the practice of worship in the rural South with the ministries back in England. The men who came from Africa taught their masters powerful lessons, and in the end their wisdom flourishes everywhere it reaches.)

  Later, the story says, he grew as crude and rough as any man. In those years he was just a man — a man like men everywhere, who lived his life and cursed his lot and made the best of a hard life of toil and frustration. Some say he repented just before he died in 1912, but others say he was too proud to repent. These people say he went to Hell, but Hell could not contain him — they say he stood before the inviolable door that leads out to the world, and he sang.

  Sang so true and powerful and intense that the door could not deny him, and opened up to set him free.

  Others say he survived the contest with the engine, and lived three more years before dying at a party on Juneteenth — they say he sang that night as he sat dying before the Juneteenth bonfire, and he sang so true and powerful and intense that he never even noticed that he died, and the Devil could not touch him. By the time the night was over, they say, Hell had forgot it owned him.

  But there’s no disagreement about the blues. The great king went to Hell after he died, and when he’d seen the Devil he walked up out of Hell into the world, and as he came he brought the blues back with him.

  He brought hoodoo with him, too, but wary people don’t tell that part out loud.

  Near Johnson City, Tennessee

  The Present

  Lisa and her mama got to Tennessee three and a half days after they left New York. It hadn’t been an eventful trip to that point — not really. The only weird part of all of it from the time they left Mama Estrella’s bedside at the hospital to the time they got to Johnson City was the hitchhiker. And even if she looked weird with her big watery eyes and funny ears, she didn’t do anything weird. Just hitched a ride in Pennsylvania, got out the car at the first rest stop.

  Mama got all tired-looking after the hitchhiker left. She said, “I need coffee.” Ten minutes later she pulled off the highway on the outskirts of Johnson City.

  Half a mile later they were pulling into the parking lot of the place with the big Krispy Kreme Donuts sign.

  “Donuts, Mama!” Lisa said. “Can I have donuts?”

  “I’m just stopping for coffee, Lisa. It’s too early for donuts, don’t you think?”

  “Mama! I want donuts, mama!”

  Mama sighed. “All right, Lisa. All right. Just one.”

  “I want lots of donuts, Mama.”

  “We’ll see. Come along.”

  There were three blind men in the donut shop. Lisa hardly noticed them at first. Of course she hardly noticed them! Mama was buying donuts at the counter, and then they were sitting at their table, eating those airy-cremey donuts unlike anything Lisa’d ever had in all her years in Spanish Harlem. And how could a girl like Lisa notice three old men sitting around a table when there were donuts to be eaten?

  Well, there was no way, of course. No way at all.

  But then the donuts were gone, and time went on forever as Mama sipped from her great tumbler of coffee. And Lisa got so bored.

  Wouldn’t anybody?

  She watched the cars go by out on the road until she got so sick of seeing them. She watched the donut ladies tidying the store front, wiping the counters and bringing out new donuts; she counted strip-mall stores along the road through Johnson City; she looked at the round and woody Appalachian mountains that hung above the city.

  And then she saw the old men.

  They were dirty old men, wrinkly smelly vagabonds dressed in worn-out clothes and black taped-together glasses. They were blind men, she realized, and two of them were white and one of them was black, and there were guitar cases resting at their feet.

  I know those men! Lisa thought, and she remembered the blind men in her dream, and she felt she knew their names but she couldn’t remember.

  She pushed out of her seat and crossed the room to look at them more closely. Mama didn’t even notice — she was too busy with her coffee.

  “I know you,” Lisa said.

  And of course she did: everybody who’s ever heard the song knows these men when she sees them. For they are the Blind Lords of the Piedmont, and their nature is implicit in the contour of the land.

  The black man turned and smiled at her. He seemed to recognize her, but of course he couldn’t see.

  “And we know you, Lisa Henderson,” he said. He reached out to her, and for a moment Lisa thought he would take her in his filthy vagabond arms, but he didn’t. He didn’t touch her at all, in fact.

  Instead he gave her a gift.

  “What is it?” Lisa asked, taking the gift from the vagabond’s palm. It looked like a whistle — but different. Lisa had never seen a whistle anything like it.

  “It’s an instrument,” the black vagabond said. “A kazoo — the simplest instrument there is. You hum in it. It makes a sound you’ll want to hear.”

  “I don’t understand,” Lisa said. “Why are you giving this to me?”

  “You’ll need it,” the vagabond said. “God speed you on your way.”

  “Lisa. . . ? Where are you, child?”

  Lisa looked over her shoulder to see her mother. “Right here, Mama. Talking to the men.”

  “There you are! What men? What’re you talking about, girl?”

  “Right here, Mama,” Lisa said, and she gestured at the three blind vagabonds —

  But they were gone.

  There were no vagabonds.

  There was no one in the store at all, in fact — no one
but Lisa and her mama and two donut ladies scurrying back and forth behind the counter.

  “No one, Mama,” Lisa said. “I’m just playing a game, that’s all.”

  For the longest time Lisa really thought that was so — she thought she’d imagined the blind men like a daydream that picked up where the dream three nights ago left off.

  And then in the car as Mama drove the car back onto the highway, Lisa looked down into her hand.

  And saw the kazoo, waiting to teach her secrets that she did not want to know.

  Los Angeles, California - Dan Alvarez

  The Present

  Dan Alvarez heard her before he saw her, but he knew that she was there for a long time before she made a sound. She had that kind of presence — thick and palpable, electric as a thunderstorm about to break. It was late July, and Dan Alvarez lay in his bed awake and uneasy, as unable to sleep as he’d been every night for months.

  Three big gusts of wind pressed against the window across the room, rattling the panes, the edges of the frame. It would rain soon, Dan thought — that was why he felt the storm about to happen. That was all it was.

  Dan Alvarez almost managed to believe it, too.

  His life was always like that, he thought: he was a storm waiting to happen, never breaking loose. Any day now, any damn day real soon one or another of the half-dozen bands he played with would take off, and he’d have a career, a real honest-to-God rock ‘n’ roll legend career and tell the bar gigs and the temp agencies to put it where none of them would ever see it again.

  Of course he felt the tension in the air — he was a tension waiting to happen, a legend waiting to be told.

  Like hell.

  Even in his worst moments Dan knew better — no matter how he wanted to believe, he knew too damn well that it just wasn’t so. He wasn’t going anywhere, and every day that went by he had a little less heart for bashing his head against the walls that surrounded him.