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Bone Music

Page 19

by Alan Rodgers


  “‘Tonight we stood before the Pearly Gates,’ Dismas (who is also known as the Right Hand) said. ‘As we watched Robert Johnson’s transubstantiation.’

  “‘That great sinner’s heart redeemed him,’ the Left Hand said. ‘He saw his error and repented, and his redemption carried him to the bosom of the Lord.’”

  Ma Rainey just stopped there, as though she’d told the whole story and Robert Johnson was supposed to understand. But he didn’t understand at all. He was more confused, in fact, than he’d been before she started.

  When he told Ma Rainey that he was confused, she sighed long and slow, as if she were disappointed in him. “I don’t understand,” Robert Johnson said. “Why would they tell you, tell you — ?” He tried and tried to finish that sentence, but he couldn’t because his moment at the Pearly Gate was a dear and secret thing to him, and it made him ache to try to speak of it out loud.

  “Robert Johnson,” Ma Rainey said, “in all creation there were only six times where a soul has come back to this world from redemption. When Saint Peter persuaded you to return, he did it for a mighty purpose.”

  Robert Johnson couldn’t argue with that — not least because he didn’t understand what Saint Peter did, or why, and he didn’t know what this world meant for him. “I guess,” he said.

  “John Henry needs you, Robert Johnson. That’s what the Right Hand of the Lord told him: ‘This man has seven Mysteries,’ he said, ‘he has a gift unlike all others, and he has his redemption. The time will come when you will need him, and his nature is so changed you may not find him. You must call him now or you will never find him.’

  “John Henry climbed out of his great leather chair, and he knelt before the Hands of the Lord. He thanked them for their guidance and begged them to enjoy his hospitality — but before he could finish they were gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  Ma Rainey shrugged. “Disappeared,” she said. “Vanished as suddenly as they’d first appeared below Charlie Patton’s shack.” She reached into her bag and brought out a pack of Kool Filter cigarettes; took one from the pack, lit it, and drew from it so hard the ember tip glowed bright with fire.

  She let the smoke sift away from her in a long and billowy sigh.

  “That smells so good,” Robert Johnson said.

  Ma Rainey smiled.

  “Share it with me, Robert Johnson,” she said.

  Somewhere out on the Mountain the mockingbirds began to sing.

  Greenville, Mississippi - 3

  The Present

  Emma screamed when she saw the Santa standing behind her little girl, and she screamed even louder when she looked down at Lisa and saw the dreadful apparition of the girl herself. Leadbelly dropped his guitar and kicked sand into the fire — kicked and kicked until the fire subsided and the darkness of the bluff enfolded them.

  “Be very still,” Leadbelly said. “Don’t let them know if you’re afraid.”

  Emma forced herself to stop screaming, and she tried to be still. But she was terrified — so frightened that she couldn’t stop trembling entirely.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Leadbelly said. “I’ve got a light. I’m about to turn it on.”

  “Please,” Emma said. “Please please.”

  She heard a click, and now fluorescent light flickered from the tube of Leadbelly’s pocket lantern, on and off and on and steady now as the pinewoods filled with that pale blue fluorescent glow. . . .

  “It’s all right,” Leadbelly said with a voice as soothing as good brown mash. “Ain’t no call to be afraid.”

  As Emma looked around and around the woods, at the sky, at the river, at the shadowy pines, at the smoldering dead fire.

  At Leadbelly.

  And then she turned to look her daughter in the eye —

  But her daughter was gone.

  “Lisa!”

  Gone, gone, gone, gone beyond the dark side of the moon. And no matter how they looked for her she stayed gone, too.

  On a Railway in the Southwest - The Present

  In Dan Alvarez’s dream it was September 1952 on a ridge above Nashville, Tennessee. Half a thousand men and women stood on that ridge beneath the moon and thunderheads. Some of them had guitars, some of them played harmonicas. Some of them played other instruments — some of them just sang.

  A cloud roiled up to cover the moon, and now in the darkness the greatest of them all began to sing.

  Oh how he sang! He sang a song they all knew in their hearts, a song Dan Alvarez knew in his heart, but no matter how they knew it not a one of them could have lined out a solitary verse.

  Until they heard him sing.

  Now the choir joined the King in song, and the ridge shuddered to hear them all.

  As they sang the sky folded, roiled, and thundered, stormed and raged against the night. When the storm had shaken itself to dissipation Dan Alvarez could see the Eye of the World high in the clouds above the ridge, and when he stared into the Eye he saw Hell and the demon loa press against the lens from deep inside.

  Dan Alvarez knew that tune. He thought, That’s Judgment Day, even though he’d never heard the name of that tune, because no matter what he didn’t know the song was in his heart just like it’s in the heart of every man woman and child who ever sang the blues.

  But the song wasn’t Judgment Day. Dan knew that in his heart almost the moment he thought the words Judgment Day. It was a song as great and as deep and as powerful as that apocalyptic strain, but where Judgment Day is fire and brimstone calling up the end, this song was joy and redemption and the divine promise of a better world to come.

  And then finally Dan recognized the song he heard in his dream.

  “The Ode to Joy”! he thought, and he was exactly right. It was “The Ode to Joy” he heard, rebroken, syncopated, twisted, and remade into blues, but it was still Beethoven’s melody, beautiful as it was the morning that the master wrote it.

  Now in Dan’s dream the moon rose high, and the sky began to close — and suddenly there came a great explosion, a powerful shattering of the night that sent electric fire in every direction.

  When it was clear the sky had closed again, and the great ones lay scattered and broken across the bluff.

  Just before Dan woke he saw a white boy come wandering through the carnage, and he recognized that boy. The boy’s name was Elvis Presley, and even if he had just a mediocre gift he was a figure charged with destiny.

  Young Elvis Presley wandered among the strange unearthly fires still flickering on the ridge until he reached the centermost summit where the great King once had stood.

  And there among those terrible unholy embers Elvis Aron Presley found the hammer that once rang like a bell.

  He grabbed it and he ran — stealing a heritage that was neither his by right nor by legitimate assumption.

  And then he ran for his life.

  As well he might.

  Among the Saint Francois Mountains Of Southeastern Missouri

  Easter 1949

  That next day it was springtime on the Mountain, and Robert Johnson drew it in as deeply as he could. It was spring, and there were new buds on the trees, and as Robert Johnson climbed the final bends of the trail that led to John Henry’s mansion at the summit, he thought the Mountain could be any mountain anywhere in the south, any mountain anywhere at all. Just a beautiful green mountain covered with trees and brambles and wildflowers blooming in the spring. But it was special, too — Robert Johnson could feel how special it was. There was something extraordinary about that place, something tremendous and triumphant. As he climbed the last steps up the Mountain he felt as though he were ascending the steps of the mansion in the sky, up beyond the Pearly Gates.

  When he reached the mansion gates they opened to admit him of their own accord, just as they’d opened for the
Hands of God in the tale Ma Rainey told. Robert Johnson walked into the mansion’s great hall, and his feet carried him inward as though they had minds of their own. In through the hall as it grew deep and dark, down inside the Mountain; past the pillars of damnation; through three stations and their attendant chapels; into the bowels of the Mountain.

  To the doors of John Henry’s sanctum, where the great King sat before a roaring fire in his deep leather chair.

  John Henry was a great dark mountain of a man — taller, broader, and more gentle-eyed than Robert Johnson ever expected to find him.

  He wore a crystal talisman on a leather thong around his neck — a great jewel cut in the shape and image of the Eye of the World. Some say that pendant was no jewel but a tiny mirror always fixed upon the Eye, and when the Eye was shut, the pendant was shut too, and when the Eye gaped open it did too.

  The Lady gave his pendant to him, everyone knows that. Some say the Lady is his consort, and that may be true.

  “Huddie Ledbetter tried to kill me last fall,” Robert Johnson told the great King. “That’s something I think you ought to know.”

  John Henry frowned. The expression was a frightful thing on his broad dark face; it gave Robert Johnson a chill as bad as any he’d felt in his new life. “That man worries me,” he said. He didn’t say another word about the subject, but Robert Johnson hadn’t expected him to.

  “He worries me, too,” Robert Johnson said. Of course he worried Robert Johnson! He’d drugged Robert Johnson with spirit liquor, slit his throat, and left him for dead, bleeding into the river. If the river and the Eye hadn’t held him in their hearts, Robert Johnson would have died for certain.

  “I didn’t call you here to talk about no Huddie Ledbetter,” John Henry said with his voice as deep and sonorous as a hot wind from the mountains. “I called you here to see you — and to show you something.”

  The great King lifted his amulet off his chest, pulling the heavy leather thong that held it over his head. Held the amulet out to show Robert Johnson —

  And as he looked at it Robert Johnson knew that he was looking into the Eye of the World, honest and true, and no matter how it was just a jewel John Henry wore around his neck, no matter how the Eye of the World still and always hung in the sky above the river, watching the land; no matter what else was real and true this was still the Eye. Robert Johnson looked deep into it and he saw that mighty lens, cracked and patched and battered once again. He saw through the lens into Lucifer’s great chamber in the Mansion called Defiance, where ten thousand demons pressed and beat the cracks unceasingly.

  “It’s breaking, Robert Johnson,” John Henry said. “But you can see that, can’t you?”

  Robert Johnson nodded. “I see the devils down in Hell,” he said. “They’re going to smash it through.”

  John Henry said, “You see it all, then.”

  He set the Eye on the table that he kept beside his leather chair and turned away from Robert Johnson. For the longest while he stood facing the fire, looking into the flames as though he expected to find the same sort of revelation there that Robert Johnson saw when he looked into the Eye.

  John Henry said, “Every day those devils get that much closer. Last month they made it onto the Mountain where the Mountain stands between Hell and the world. Now every night they come for Sonny Boy Williamson.”

  “I saw them last night,” Robert Johnson said. “I don’t think those devils will be back.”

  John Henry laughed, deep and melodious. “That’s what I heard,” he said. “More power to you.”

  Robert Johnson shrugged. “I was there,” he said. “I do what I can.”

  The great King wheeled around to face him, turning away from the fire. “There’s an awful confrontation coming,” John Henry said. He sounded — terrified. More frightened than Robert Johnson ever imagined any King could be. “We’re going to need you, Robert Johnson.”

  Robert Johnson nodded. “Call me,” he said. “Call me and I’m yours.”

  The King nodded. “You know I will,” he said. He lifted the Eye off the table, pulled its thong over his head, and let the jewel fall back to its place beneath his throat. “I want you here,” he said. “Stay here on the Mountain. Stay here in my mansion if you like.”

  Robert Johnson wanted to take the hospitality the great King offered. He truly did. But before he even took a moment to think about the question, his heart told him that he never could. Robert Johnson spoke the words his heart told him to because he knew he had to; it was only later that he understood what they meant and why he had to say them.

  “You know I can’t,” Robert Johnson said. “The Mountain ain’t no place for a man alive.”

  John Henry nodded and allowed as it was so.

  “And there’s something back in Memphis — something that I’ve got to do. I don’t know what it is, but I can feel it in my heart.”

  The King blinked; for half a moment he looked surprised. Then he nodded sadly. “If that’s what you hear, you need to listen to it, Robert Johnson. You’d be a comfort to me here — but that’s not as urgent as the music in your heart.” He sighed. “Be ready for me,” he said. “I know I’ll need you soon.”

  Robert Johnson left the Mountain two hours before sundown without stopping to tell anyone goodbye. Maybe that was for the best.

  For when he reached the foot of the Mountain, half an hour after moonrise, he looked back at the summit and saw a great fire on the Mountain.

  And he knew that fire was no place for the living.

  He hiked back to St. Marys, and in the morning he caught the southbound train to ride it back to Memphis and his life as Hinky Tom.

  And waited for the King to call him to his service.

  It was a long wait — much longer than he ever would have guessed as he stood in the King’s sanctum talking before the roaring fire. Six months went by, and then a year; and now Robert Johnson found himself in love. Such a crazy thing, to fall in love when he was no ordinary man, when he didn’t dare make any commitment for fear the King would call him to a fate so grave it frightened a man with shoulders broad enough to shield the world.

  But it wasn’t like he had a choice. Robert Johnson met Virginia Henderson, and the moment that he knew her he loved her against all common sense; and because his heart commanded him beyond the possibility of denial, he married her, and they made a cozy home not far from the river.

  Six months later Huddie Ledbetter died, and Robert Johnson felt it when he rose back from Hell to be seventh of the Seven Kings.

  A few weeks after that Robert Johnson’s wife turned up pregnant with their daughter. When she was born Robert and Virginia named their daughter Emma.

  Robert Johnson loved his daughter Emma more dearly than anything else he’d ever known in the world; in Hell; he loved her more dearly than he loved the Pearly Gates of Salvation.

  But he hardly had the chance to know her.

  Because the King called him three days after Emma’s birth. Robert Johnson answered the call, just as he’d promised he would. And though he returned from it, that return was only for a moment before he was lost forever to the ones he loved.

  Greenville, Mississippi - 4

  The Present

  Emma and Leadbelly spent hours searching the woods by the pale blue light of Leadbelly’s fluorescent lantern. That light was bright enough to let them see for miles in thin pinewoods on the bluff, but even so it did them little good. No matter how they looked, no matter which way they shone the light, there was no sign of anyone — no sign of anything alive. Nor were there any tracks: Leadbelly searched and searched the ground for spoor, but he found none.

  When the sun was high and bright Leadbelly said “Enough of this. Follow me. We need to try something different.” And he led her to his musty cottage in the deep deep woods. He made coffee and
served it with sectioned oranges, and sat with Emma near the dark hearth still dusty with ashes from last winter’s fires.

  And began to play his melodious twelve-string guitar. Softly, softly, picking and strumming no recognizable tune but an endless half-melody — a melody from a jam session, but how could anyone call something so quiet and gentle a jam?

  After a while he seemed to doze, but he played on and on. Till now the music drifted away, and Emma faded asleep still sitting in the wide-armed chair beside the hearth.

  The last thing she heard was Leadbelly, snoring.

  Los Angeles, California - The Present

  Dan Alvarez woke panting, gasping for air. It was pitch night in the boxcar, he was as alone as alone gets, and now the train rounded a bend and moonlight flooded in through the open boxcar door.

  And in the moonlight he saw that terrible thing that followed him out of his dream, beautiful and ominous and powerful as it was the day John Henry carved it from the wood: the great guitar that Elvis Presley stole..

  Memphis, Tennessee - Again

  September 1952

  Robert Johnson climbed the Memphis ridge to search for Blind Willie one final time before he answered John Henry’s call. This time he found the hardest path, and he followed it against the grain until it led him to Blind Willie’s shack.

  When he reached the door he found Blind Willie waiting for him, as though the gospel songster who became a King had known that he was coming.

  And perhaps he did.

  “I owe you something dear, Blind Willie,” Robert Johnson said.

  Blind Willie tried to say there was no debt between them, but Robert Johnson cut him off before he could finish speaking.

  “It doesn’t matter if you hold me to account,” Robert Johnson said. “I hold myself accountable.”

  And then he gave Blind Willie the seven Mysteries he’d kept hidden in his heart for years.

 

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