Bone Music

by Alan Rodgers

  Lisa mumbled belligerently — Emma couldn’t quite make out the words, but she knew she wouldn’t have liked them if she’d heard them.

  “Are you coming?” Emma asked as she got out of the car. Lisa didn’t answer, but she climbed out of her car seat and followed Emma out the driver’s side door. She followed Emma along the last few yards of the path, stood beside her as Emma knocked on the rickety wood door.

  A soft familiar voice told them to come in. It was very familiar — intimately familiar, though for the life of her Emma couldn’t think how it was she knew it.

  “Hello. . . ?”

  Emma pressed on the door, and it swung open as easily as the door to a pantry.

  “Hello, Emma Henderson. Good afternoon, Lisa.”

  Inside the shack it was dark as dusk, and Emma could scarcely see a thing. There were shadows that looked like furniture, and she could see the silhouette of a man on the far side of the room, but all the details were opaque. Emma took her daughter’s hand and stepped carefully through the threshold, uncertain of her footsteps.

  “I know you,” Emma said. “Where do I know you from?”

  The silhouette laughed. “I’ve known you all your life, woman. But we only met this afternoon.”

  The man from the store, Emma thought. And as she realized him the room brightened to reveal the details she remembered — the short, snow-white hair; the dark, leathery-creased skin; the scarf he wore around his neck despite the fact that it was high summer in Mississippi.

  His name was Leadbelly, or maybe it was Huddie Ledbetter, depending whether a born name or a taken name is the true measure of a man, and he was neither dead nor alive. He was seventh of the Seven Kings, the only King surviving, and in his way he was like her daughter Lisa.

  He was a rogue and a scoundrel, but he was gifted like no other; he was the man who’d tried to kill Robert Johnson, after that man’s rebirth and redemption; he was a murderer so cruel that twice the judges put him away for life, and so gifted that twice he’d sung his way to freedom, for his songs so charmed the men who imprisoned him that they could not help but set him free.

  He wore his scarf to hide the scar that marked him: somewhere late in life he lost a barroom brawl, and when his rival finished with him he slit Leadbelly’s throat and left him for a corpse. But Huddie Ledbetter didn’t die — he walked away and healed without ever going to a doctor. All his life and all his death he wore red scarves around his throat to hide the bright white slash that marked him for who he was. But he could not hide his nature, and the scar was just the most obvious bit of that.

  “You can call me Huddie Ledbetter, if you like,” he said.

  Emma’s eyes went wide. “I know who you are,” she said. “You died before I was born.”

  Leadbelly laughed, and his laugh was the music of the world. “I’ve heard that said,” he told her. “Do I look dead to you?”

  Emma laughed at the question, because he’d asked it so good-natured there was no way to answer it.

  That was when Lisa let go of her mother’s hand and stepped toward the deadman. “You can’t fool me,” the child said. “I know who you are. I can see it!”

  Leadbelly laughed again. “Is that so?”

  “It is,” Lisa said. “You’ve been to Hell, I know. The devil-mark is all over you.”

  Leadbelly went quiet for a moment. And he looked so old! Older than he’d looked back at the store, and sadder, too. He knelt to look Lisa in the eye; held her head in his hands. When he kissed her forehead Lisa tried to squirm away from him, but she couldn’t.

  “You can see the marks, can’t you, child?” he asked. “I should have known you would.” He eased away, watching Lisa as carefully as a necromancer reads his offal. “Don’t let those marks concern you, child. I don’t mean you any harm, and I don’t mean to lead you toward temptation.”

  There was something in his voice when he talked about the marks — Emma thought it sounded like regret, but she wasn’t any surer of that than she was of anything else.

  “Something’s wrong with my little girl, Mr. Ledbetter,” Emma said. “She’s been through things — I can’t begin to tell you.”

  The old man looked at Emma quizzically. “Tell me what you please,” he said. “I’ll listen if you like.”

  “Two days ago she almost killed a little boy,” Emma said. “There’s something terrible got into her.”

  The old man looked — alarmed. Unsettled, too. “What happened?” he asked.

  Emma told what she’d learned from the nursery attendants — how Lisa had beaten the boy to within an inch of his life and then disappeared from the school; about the water that covered Lisa when Emma found her — water that had bleached everything it touched without burning the way ordinary bleach would. She even told him about Mama Estrella and the ritual in the garden, and how the shrine had come to life and nearly murdered Mama.

  “Down here we call her the Lady,” he said when she told him about the horror in the shrine. “But you know that, don’t you?” He stared away into the darkness, looking worried.

  Emma nodded.

  Leadbelly got to his feet, crossed the room, and began to search among the shadows; when he finally stepped out of the darkness he held a beautiful old guitar.

  Emma knew that instrument the moment she set eyes on it — it was Leadbelly’s battered twelve-string guitar. When she looked at it she was certain she could feel the hoodoo seeping from it. “Follow me,” Leadbelly said. He stood by the door of the shack, waiting for Emma.

  Emma put her arms around her daughter, holding the girl protectively. “I won’t let you hurt my baby.”

  Leadbelly scowled. “I wouldn’t ever harm her,” he said.

  Lisa put her hand on Emma’s arm and pressed just hard enough to get her mother’s attention. “I’m not afraid, Mama,” she said. “The old King doesn’t mean me any harm.”

  Emma wanted to say, Child, what’re you talking about, what do you mean, “old King,” but the girl pushed Emma’s arms away before her mother could say a word.

  “Lisa. . . ?”

  “It’s all right, Mama,” Lisa said. She was crossing the room, heading toward the door, and now she met him in the doorway, took his hand, and followed him into the pinewoods.

  Emma wanted to shout at her — What do you think you’re doing, child? — but it was too late, because they were gone into the woods and the girl wasn’t going to pay any attention anyway. So she swore under her breath and threw up her hands and sighed.

  And followed her daughter and the hoodoo man into the west, through the woods and the tall grass and the palmettos, up the gentle rise until they stood on the bluff that overlooked the Mississippi River.

  Right around dusk Leadbelly led them to a ring of big rocks up on the bluff; in the center of the ring there was a black scar of char and ashes from an old bonfire. “Help me find some wood,” he said, and Emma looked around to see that there were fallen branches all around them, lying in the grass and among the palmettos.

  Emma stooped, pulled a branch half the size of a sapling out of a palmetto thicket. “Looks like a hurricane came through here,” she said.

  Leadbelly shrugged. “I don’t know about any hurricane,” he said. “But there was a big storm three weeks ago.”

  He took the branch from Emma, hefted it, and broke it cleanly over his knee. Folded the two halves together and broke them as a pair.

  “You need more?” Emma asked.

  The old man shrugged. “Small stuff,” he said. “Get me kindling — there, see that branch of twigs?”

  Emma grabbed the branch he pointed at, shook away the pinestraw that still clung to it, and handed it to him.

  Leadbelly broke the twigs up into kindling, arranged it around the big wood, and lit the fire with an old Zippo lighter.


  Lisa lifted Leadbelly’s guitar out of the grass. “I like your guitar,” she said. She let it rest on her knees as she ran her finger up and down the strings. “It’s very beautiful.”

  The old man turned around, swearing as he did. “You put that down,” he said. “I never told you you could touch my hammer.”

  For half a moment Lisa almost looked afraid. “You never said I couldn’t,” she said. And then she set the guitar gently on the grass beside the old man.

  “Lisa!” Emma said. “Don’t you be fresh!”

  The old man shrugged. “Let her say anything she pleases,” he said. “It don’t bother me.”

  He took the guitar by the neck and lifted it off the ground. Carried it to the far side of the fire and began to play.

  As he played he sang. He sang a song with no words at all, but he didn’t need words, because he wasn’t singing to Emma or Lisa. He was singing to the fire, and as he sang the fire roared to life.

  So beautiful, that fire. It had a very special beauty, because it was enchanted, and not just enchanted but revealed — for as Leadbelly sang the fire grew not only greater but truer, and by and by its truth grew ultimately revealing. Truer and clearer and more beautiful, and now the light it cast showed things not shadowy as firelight but true as sunshine.

  “I saw a fire like this lots of times,” Lisa said at last, but she wouldn’t say no more than that, no matter how her mother prompted her.

  “Is that so, child?” the old man asked.

  But Lisa wouldn’t answer him, either.

  Now the fire grew so true that its light began to suffuse them. For a moment Leadbelly looked transparent as a ghost — Emma could see the river through his heart, and she knew the magic in the music had consumed them all; consumed them all as it grew truer and truer, so true that now it showed the deepest secret truth about each of them.

  Emma could even see the ghost of her own truth, surrounding her: it was the specter of courage, for she was a woman with backbone who would never flinch from any terror if it meant the welfare of her child.

  The true light showed Leadbelly for the angry mean-tempered scoundrel that he was — but it showed the splendor of his gift, too, and it showed he knew something true and important about the nature of the world. Listening to him in that light Emma knew that he sang songs that God whispered in his ear.

  And then she looked at Lisa.

  Lisa looked dreadful in the true light from the fire: her skin was venous, mottled, and leathery as the surface of the cancer that bore her. And the look in her eye was so bloodthirsty! — And standing behind her with a hand on Lisa’s shoulder was Santa Barbara with her burning sword.

  On a Railway in the Southwest - The Present

  Somewhere in the night it came to Dan Alvarez that he had to go to New Orleans, but he never learned why. He had an intuition, and it went like this — he dreamed that he was made of music, and as the music sounded it rang out of the Mississippi Delta, just like the blues when men first sang it. Blues grew so beautiful as it flowered from the misery of the Delta, because hardship, poverty, and oppression are gifts in their own awful way.

  They’re gifts because they bring the greatness out of all of us, no matter how they grieve us.

  I want to be a hobo bluesman, Dan thought in his dream. I want to move from town to town like a no-account bum, and I want to play those songs so laced with magic that they change everything that hears them.

  Dan had heard lots of songs like that on scratchy old records — old recordings full of mystery and magic, and something higher and more beautiful, something — something magic in those blues. Dan loved those blues. It was the ghost of their beauty that drove him into rock ‘n’ roll, but he never found the ghost in rock, no matter how he looked for it.

  And maybe that’s the nature of the beast. Maybe that’s what it is — magic. Maybe, Dan thought, the blues aren’t just music.

  Maybe they’re magic.

  Then he was dreaming again, and he dreamed an awful weirdling dream where cruel gods walked the earth —

  No, not gods, these weren’t gods but something less, they were petty godlets that run and hide when they see the shadow of the One True Lord —

  And now in his dream it was 1952, and Dan stood among a crowd of great musicians on a high bluff outside Nashville, Tennessee, and all the bluesmen all the true bluesmen and women sang. . . !

  Among the Saint Francois Mountains - Of Southeastern Missouri

  Easter 1949

  When the demons were gone everybody wandered back toward their rooms and bed, but Robert Johnson wasn’t tired anymore.

  Not tired at all. How could he be tired, as frightened as he was? He wandered back toward the common house, and into its kitchen. He found the kettle and the tea, and he put a pot on to brew, and sat looking out the window at the night and the river and high among the stars the watchful Eye of the World.

  Ma Rainey found him there a little while after he poured the tea. She took a seat not far from him and asked him what was the matter. It wasn’t a real question — just a way to start a conversation. Ma Rainey knew how he would answer long before she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Robert Johnson told her. It wasn’t a lie, exactly, but it could have been more true. “Just unsettled, I guess.” He sighed, gestured at the teapot. “Pour you a cup?”

  “Please,” Ma Rainey said.

  Robert Johnson poured the tea. Leaned back in his chair to stare out the window at the Eye.

  “It’s breaking again,” she said. “Did they tell you that?”

  Robert Johnson felt a chill despite the warmth of the room.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “But I knew it in my heart.”

  And that was true, too: he could feel the fissures in the lens of the Eye of the World as though they were flaws in his own heart separating from one another. He’d been able to feel them for longer than he could remember. Since the night Leadbelly tried to murder him? From the night he stood before the Pearly Gates, when he first knew redemption? Maybe he’d been able to feel the Eye in his heart from the day he first sang Judgment Day — it could have been that long, growing in him like a passion for the nature of the world.

  “If you look closely at the Eye, you can see the cracks. Look, look Robert Johnson — they look like tears, don’t they?”

  Robert Johnson looked, and he saw, and he told Ma Rainey that he did.

  “You know,” Ma Rainey said, “that’s only one side of the Eye that watches over the river. The inside of the Eye is a portal that watches the world from Hell.”

  Robert Johnson had heard that story when he was a boy. He said that to Ma Rainey.

  “If you look directly at the lens and as closely as you can,” Ma Rainey said, “you can see Lucifer’s great throne room in the Mansion called Defiance. Every night ten thousand devils come to that room to batter on the Eye. One night will come, and they’ll break it through.”

  “‘And Hell will rain upon the Mississippi River, as the walls come tumbling down,’” Robert Johnson said, quoting a phrase from the secret Book of the River (whose words are written on the heart of each and every bluesman who ever lived to die and sing again).

  Ma Rainey smiled. She reached across the kitchen table to rest her hand on Robert Johnson’s hand. “We need you here, Robert Johnson,” she said.

  Robert Johnson didn’t know what he could say. What he thought was, You know I can’t, but he didn’t understand why he thought those words, and how could he say such a thing when he didn’t understand the reason why?

  “You don’t need me here,” Robert Johnson said. “John Henry lives up on this Mountain.”

  Ma Rainey looked so sad.

  “I wish that you were right,” she said. “But awful times are on us.”

  Robert Johnson sho
ok his head. “John Henry sang down the walls of damnation,” he said. “A man like that don’t need no help from me.”

  Ma Rainey set her tea cup on the table, then turned to stare into the darkness. She was quiet for a long while; Robert Johnson knew she was weighing her words, measuring out what she could say to him.

  “Last fall,” she said, “two beggars found their way onto the Mountain. They were dressed in humble clothes, and looked for all the world to be the kind of vagabond thieves you find skulking in the rail yards. But Charlie Patton saw them as they climbed past his shack, and he knew them when he saw them. Of course he knew them! Any deadman gonna know those two when he see them, because they were Dismas and Gestas, and those two were the thieves who died on crosses to the Right and Left Hands of the Lord.

  “Charlie Patton saw them, and he called to them, but Dismas and Gestas ignored him. They do those things, you know — they wander about the world in strange and mysterious ways, doing the Lord’s own work. For as they died the Right and Left Hands of the Lord so they continue: they are His Hands from Kingdom Come, and they serve Him without hesitation.

  “Charlie Patton did the only thing he could think to do: he sang a song he knew the King would hear, and in that song he told John Henry who was on the Mountain.

  “John Henry sent me down to meet Dismas and Gestas. For all the good it did! They very near ignored me! I opened my arms to greet them, and they took my hands — and led me back up the Mountain to John Henry.

  “They carried me up the steep side of the Mountain, past the village without a pause. When they got to John Henry’s mansion the doors opened spontaneously. All the doors in that place opened before them, and nothing anyone could do would cause a moment’s hesitation. Peetie and Blind Lemon tried to bar the door to John Henry’s sanctum, but the bars all fell away as quickly as anyone could lay them in place.

  “Dismas and Gestas carried me into John Henry’s den, where the King sat in his great leather chair before his roaring fire, and when he looked up at them with his wide startled eyes Dismas held up a hand to silence him.