by Alan Rodgers
He called them by name (they have the names of angels, and maybe they’ve taken them or maybe they were born with them) and they smiled like they’d met a brother at reunion, and as they did some great rift in the nation’s heart began to heal as it never could before.
“I love you,” Furry Lewis said. “You are my brothers and I love you.”
The Blind Lords didn’t answer, and long as the four Kings of the Delta waited they never answered, but their silence neither embraced nor denied the love the King proclaimed.
Two of them were white, now, and one was black. These things change from time to time, depending on the circumstance and the context. They aren’t nearly so important as they seem.
Because we are the nation that the crossroads built, and after that what else matters?
“You’ve come at a fine moment,” Furry Lewis said. “You come to help?”
The Blind Lords didn’t answer. No one who saw them could be exactly sure what that meant.
“We aren’t here,” the darkest of the Blind Lords said, “but only seem to be.”
That was true, of course. The Blind Lords of the Piedmont may neither tread in Hell nor upon the Mississippi Delta; it’s a consequence of their nature, just as they are a consequence of ours.
“I don’t get it,” Vaughan said. “If you aren’t here to help, what are you doing?”
And the Blind Lords smiled. And the first of them (or was he the third?) struck an unmasterable chord as his companions touched the fallen tower —
Which exploded in a palisade of light and sound like an explosion, but musical and fundamental manifest: and when the light went dim every solitary fact about their circumstance had changed.
Where a moment previous the broken citadel had towered, now there stood a gleaming structure as glorious as it had been the day the angels erected it, and where grey ashes had sifted in the wind now there was a mist as beautiful and pure as the cloudy wisps that decorate the heavens, and where the cacophony of battle had permeated the air now there was a music like the ringing of the spheres.
“Lord, Lord,” said Washboard Sam.
As Red fell to his knees and began to pray.
A moment later Furry Lewis joined him. Vaughan and Sam just a moment later still.
When their prayer was done Vaughan looked around him and saw a crowd was gathering.
“Where are they?” he asked. Furry Lewis cocked an eyebrow to ask him what he meant. “The blind men, the Lords, where are they?”
Furry Lewis shrugged.
“Gone,” he said. “As if they never were.”
“But we need them!”
Furry Lewis shook his head. “No,” he said. “They’ve done everything they can.”
Leadbelly’s directions only ended up getting them more lost. When they’d driven ten minutes through the chiaroscuro of the dark and burning city Emma realized that they were back where they’d started, on Loyola, not far from the French Quarter.
And then she saw it, gleaming glorious as an icon through the Hellish dark and burning: the Tower.
So beautiful, that Tower. Beautiful and Godly in the midst of the awfulness of that night where the world had turned to Hell, and the moment that she saw it she knew it was their salvation.
She pulled the car over, got out of it, and walked toward the Tower. Leadbelly called after her. “What the Hell you think you’re doing, woman? Where do you think you are?” But Emma ignored him. Which was just as well; half a moment after he asked those questions he got out of the car, slammed his door, and ran to catch up with her.
And followed Emma to the edge of the Revival.
Vaughan stood on the steps, looking out at the crowd. He tried to pick out faces, pick out people, sort the living from the dead — but it wasn’t easy. Some of them damned, come up from Hell, and some were the living breathing people of New Orleans. None of them repentant, but none of the damned among them were damned beyond all hope of salvation — no one who was damned through and through could abide the sight of the Tower as it stood in Heaven, he thought. When they saw the light it drew them, and that attraction marked the decency inside them.
Then someone whispered, It’s the Jubilee, and a murmur went back and forth through the crowd, and Vaughan felt it begin to happen all around him. . . .
There is a thing some people call the Carnival and some people call Mardi Gras, and other people call the Jubilee; some of them celebrate it at the Easter season and other people observe it in high summer. Evangelicals call it a revival, and that’s as true a name as anyone could give it. They call it any time it comes to them, and it came to them that night when Hell became New Orleans.
Washboard Sam, still wearing his uniform of authority, knew it in his heart. Because he knew it he directed it. He stood on what were once the steps of City Hall — they faced south from the Tower — and sent Furry Lewis south before him. He sent Tampa Red east and Stevie Ray Vaughan west.
“Sing it out,” he said. “Sing it to the people of the city — let them hear the Good Word of the Lord.”
“Sing what?” Stevie Ray Vaughan asked. “I don’t understand, what do you want me to sing? And why?”
Washboard Sam smiled, and he said, “There’s a song inside your heart, Stevie Ray Vaughan. Find it and sing it, and that song will show the way.”
And then he began to sing himself.
Inside the four points of that compass, there before the steps that led toward the gleaming Tower, their song made a place where no wholly evil thing could walk, a place that drew men and women with the shadow of Salvation in their hearts as surely as a light will draw the firefly, and when they came they stood mystified before the gleaming Tower that once was the Blessed Jewel of Heaven.
When Emma and Leadbelly got to the corner of Loyola and Perdido they found a throng of people crowding around the Tower, so many of them pressed so thick that there was hardly room to pass. Leadbelly stopped at the back edge of the crowd to peer at the Tower, at the crowd, at the bluesman singing endlessly hypnotic jam somewhere just out of sight — and when he got a good look he started to back away.
“What’s the matter?” Emma asked him. “Don’t just stand there — we’ve got to go inside.”
Leadbelly scowled. “No, woman,” he said. “Woman that ain’t the place for men like me.”
Emma looked at him crossways. “You’re wrong,” she said. “I know you are.”
“I’m not,” Leadbelly told her, but Emma wasn’t having none of that. She grabbed his wrist and pulled him half off-balance into the crowd, and when he resisted they both stumbled and ended up falling forward as the crowd gave way —
— gave way —
Gave way to reveal the singing deadman, and that was Furry Lewis.
Now Leadbelly and Furry Lewis had some history between them, and it wasn’t pleasant stuff. But there was no way Emma could know that. When Emma saw that man her knees like to collapse beneath her, because she knew he was a man who’d heard the Lord’s voice whisper in his ear, and that voice carried through his song as truly as a night gives way to day, and day to night thereafter.
But Leadbelly didn’t see him till he got up from his stumble and found himself face to face with the man who was first among the Kings.
“Come on,” Emma said, pulling Leadbelly past the bluesman. But her pulling was no use, because there was a barrier where Furry Lewis sang, and that barrier was hard as steel so far as Leadbelly was concerned, no matter how nobody there could see it.
“I can’t, Emma Henderson. Like I said, that place is not for me.”
He turned away from Furry Lewis. And where he might in some other circumstance have pulled a knife on the deadman, or threatened him, or sneered at him and walked away, in that moment in that place on that night Huddie Ledbetter, known most commonly as L
eadbelly — Huddie Ledbetter felt himself ashamed.
And in his moment of shame Emma pulled his wrist again, and now he fell through the barrier as surely as though it had never stood before him in the first place.
It took the Santa and her party most of an hour and a half to cut their way through the demon horde. Dan sang until his throat grew hoarse, and he kept singing, because he knew that the moment that his song should fail the horde would be upon them, tearing them limb from limb. . . .
They all sang, even dead Elvis — all of them but the Santa. Maybe she had no song inside her heart, or maybe there was no room for song inside her as she cut the path before them with her great fiery sword that flared and sputtered each time it drew the ichor of a demon, and the fire and the chary bits of demon-hide were everywhere, filling the air like an unholy rain, spattering their clothes, their skin. Caustic on Dan’s skin, acrid where he breathed the vapors from it, and now as Dan looked at the grue that covered him he wanted to scream — scream and turn and run for his life and his sanity.
Run for the hills! he thought, but there are no hills around New Orleans, and anyway he’d be torn to ribbons the moment that his song should end. Despair tried again and again to consume him, but he didn’t stop singing. Not even for the time it would take to breathe. He didn’t dare, and he knew it; his fear was greater than any despair could ever be.
And then they came around a corner onto Loyola, and there in the distance was the Tower.
So beautiful, that Tower! From where Dan stood it seemed to be made of pure white light, and it spoke to his heart of hope and the promise of Redemption. Filled his song with hope and joy, and now as they heard the sound of machine-gun fire the Santa‘s sword cut hard and fast through the horde, and the horde opened up before them to reveal a battlefield.
Someone in the distance shouted, “Don’t shoot! They’re on our side!” and Dan couldn’t begin to imagine how they knew such a thing, but he was glad they did.
As the Santa raised her sword before them to light the way, and now they passed unchallenged through the lines of the Louisiana National Guard.
Come midnight the crowd inside the songsters’ compass huddled close before the Tower, and the revival started of its own accord. Washboard Sam, standing on the steps that once led to New Orleans City Hall, let his song drift away, and he addressed the crowd before him as though he were a revivalist and the stair-steps were his platform.
“My friends,” Washboard Sam the revivalist said, “my friends, I have called you here tonight so that we may all behold the testimony of three sinners!”
And the crowd roared in response, repeating his refrain: “Testimony of the sinners!”
“Three people whose acts and deeds in the course of their mortal lives and their damnation have condemned them to tarnation, and given them the cruelest fate a body may endure. But all of these sinners have heard the Glory of the Word of the Lord, and that word is God! Yes, yes, my friends, yes it is!”
And the crowd roared, “Yes it is!”
The revivalist stepped out onto the front edge of his platform, and he picked out one of the damned residents of New Orleans, seemingly at random. But there was nothing random in his choice — nothing at all.
For the woman he chose was the worst of sinners. Her name was Rebecca, and she was the owner-lady of the Greenville bar — the woman who’d spent a week in a state of assignation with Robert Johnson as her jealous husband looked on; the same woman who’d given him the succor and the strength to shatter the Eye of the World.
The woman stood when the revivalist pointed to her, and started toward the platform. She trembled as she walked toward it, and trembled worse as she climbed onto it.
“Before you stands Rebecca Carter,” the revivalist said. “In her day she was a good woman and a bad woman, too; she fell into temptation, and in the end that sin consumed her.
“But there’s more to Rebecca Carter than the sin. There’s the light inside her, too, the light in every one of us who’s heard the Good Word of the Lord —
“Good Word of the Lord!” the crowd roared.
“— and it shines through her sin as gloriously as it shines inside that Tower!”
The owner-lady wept as the revivalist described her.
“My name is Rebecca Carter,” the owner-lady said, “and I have sinned.”
“Sinned!”
As she spoke, as the crowd roared, a torch-bearing procession made its way through the crowd, and the torch its captain held was no torch but a burning sword. Somewhere in the crowd Emma Henderson saw the procession and the people in it and shouted, “That’s my baby! My baby Lisa!” and she tried to run to embrace her child. But the sinister man beside her took her arm and held her back, and he said, “No, Emma, you can’t — she’s got a special place this evening,” and after a moment the frantic mother relented.
As the procession passed through the crowd, climbed the platform, and continued past it, into the glorious Tower made of light.
“My first sin was adultery,” Rebecca Carter said. “I loved my husband, but I saw another and I took him as though he were my own.”
A murmur passed through the crowd. Someone repeated the last line of her confession, as though it were a refrain: “As though he were your own.”
“He wasn’t mine, and I knew it. And even worse I took him in the plain sight of my husband. And that drove his heart insane.” She paused, as though she expected a response, but there was none. “My husband tried to kill my lover, and he beat me half to death. When the beating was over, I tried to save my lover, and I very nearly did it. But he died — partly because his death was foregone, partly because his vanity consumed him in a hail of fire and brimstone.”
“His vanity consumed him,” the crowd responded, but softly, softly, as though the words consumed them, too.
“I didn’t return to my husband when my lover was gone, but took up in a boardinghouse, and kept to myself while my heart recovered from my loss and my body recovered from the beating he gave me.
“And then one night, three months to the day after the beating, I put a pistol in my purse to ensure my self-protection, and I went to my husband’s new tavern, intending to give that awful man a piece of my mind.
“I found him in a dark corner of the tavern, writhing in a barmaid’s arms. And there and then a thing came over me that I never imagined I could know: I felt a jealous rage consume me!”
“A jealous rage consumed her!”
“I saw him, that man I reviled and the wanton girl, and where a moment before I’d despised that man now I knew I owned him, and could not bear to see him with another. In that moment I forgot myself. I took that pistol from my purse and shot them both, and then I shot again and again, for the rage in my heart demanded I make certain they were dead. And then I ran from that place, and my life, and all my worldly goods, into a life of poverty and misery and terror of the law.
“But from that day to this, no matter what the misery that found me, I never regretted. Not for a moment. That rage consumed me until this evening, when I saw the Tower and the light. And now as I look upon it I know the error of my ways, as light dispels the darkness of the heart!”
Now Rebecca Carter wailed, and her cry was a sound of torment as like to anguish the damned. Her face became a mask of grief and regret, and as her wail trailed off she began to sob piteously.
“I was wrong,” she shouted. “He was a dirty bastard, but he was mine, and I loved him, and he’s gone. And I killed him, Lord Lord, Lord, I killed him.”
“Lord, Lord, Lord.”
Lisa didn’t stop playing her kazoo until the Lady led them into the Tower made of light. And even then she kept it in her hand where she could get it in a moment if the darkness pressed on them again — but it didn’t press. There was no dark inside that Tower, no dark and no poss
ibility of darkness. It was the only homely place Lisa had been since, since, since so long she couldn’t remember anymore.
So beautiful. So wonderful. So safe. Lisa felt as though someone had taken an enormous weight off of her back.
As the Lady led them through the base of the Tower, onto a winding stair that seemed to rise endlessly into the sky. They climbed that stair forever before they finally reached the top of it — where a great wood-and-iron door opened into the most amazing room Lisa had ever seen.
Inside that room there was a forge — like the blacksmith’s forge in a movie Lisa saw when she was six, but cleaner and brighter and more beautiful.
The Lady piled seven logs into the forge’s hearth, drew her sword, and set them afire. In a moment the fire was roaring, and the Lady took a bellows from the wall to stoke the flames hotter, brighter — and now the whole room glowed with the fire’s heat.
All that while Robert Johnson, dead Elvis Presley, and the man and the woman who’d come with him stood watching the Lady intently, as though the fate of the world hinged on the fire she was building.
And maybe it did — Lisa could feel something great and important weighing on them, and every moment the weight grew more intense, till suddenly Lisa’s shoulders could no longer support it. Then she felt so tired, and she thought, What if I crawl away into the corner of the room and drift off to sleep. . . ?
That was such a crazy idea, Lisa thought. But the lethargy consumed her, and she knew that if she didn’t give in to it she’d stumble off her feet and collapse to the floor. Besides, no one would notice. They didn’t really need her, did they?
But she knew they did, because the Lady told her so.
She kept thinking that as she sat in the corner, trying not to drift away: They need me need me need me need me how can I sleep when the world has broken open? — And then her dream began, and Lisa knew why sleep had overtaken her.
