The Axeman’s Jazz

by Ray Celestin

  Luca opened the grating with a dusty, warped poker, and threw the paper bag into the fire within, watching it for a moment as the pages curled and writhed, the heat drying out his eyes.

  He returned to the lobby, saw the concierge off, settled himself behind the counter and smoked a cigarette while he waited. He browsed through the guest-book and saw that, as far as he could tell, he was the hotel’s only current guest. Behind the counter was a corkboard to which the concierge had pinned photographs – gray images of family and friends, baby pictures, a snapshot of an ocean liner, and a postcard printed with a photograph taken from the hills outside Naples. Luca pulled the postcard from the corkboard and stared at it – it showed the city from above, stretching out to meet the wide curve of the bay. Tiny boats clustered around the wharves like schools of feeding fish, and in the far distance, sloping gracefully into the sky, the pale shadow of Vesuvius. All he could really see of the city itself was the rooftops of the buildings, tiny squares of red tiles mosaicking haphazardly, sliced by streets and pinned with a hundred campaniles.

  Luca had once spent a day in Naples, years before, when he and his parents had caught the ship that brought him to America. It was the first time he’d been in a city; he remembered being bewildered by the narrow streets, the tall buildings one on top of the other, the noisy market squares, the beggars, the drunks lying in the gutters. He remembered staring at his father as they wandered through the docks, searching for their connecting ship with a faint, tourists’ disquiet, realizing that the city was as perturbing for his father as it was for him.

  The memories didn’t make Luca nostalgic, didn’t make him yearn to return, like they had when he thought about his childhood in Monreale during the nights he spent lying awake in Angola. The city in the postcard looked alien and unsettlingly real. The buildings looked too small, the volcano in the background like a foreign god he didn’t know how to worship. The land in the picture meant as much to him as St Petersburg, Manila or Athens and he realized with a flush of anxiety that even if he did go back to Italy, he’d still be in exile, a man with no home, because a home wasn’t just somewhere you lived, it was somewhere you were happy to die.

  He put the postcard back on the corkboard, pinning it carefully into position like a butterfly, and smoked another cigarette while he waited. The concierge returned a few minutes later, shaking water from his umbrella with a smile. He nodded at Luca to signal his mission had been accomplished.

  Luca left the hotel directly. He strode down the wet streets, shoulders hunched, staring out at the world from under the brim of his hat, walking with no end destination in mind. He had realized with a stab of panic that he was starting to have doubts about moving back to Monreale. He wondered if the idea was just the foolish dream of an old man lying in a prison bunk, and he thought of Carlo’s laugh when he had told him his plans. Luca stalked the banquettes and brooded, running things over in his mind. Every now and again he’d look over his shoulder to see the two policemen following him, red-faced, annoyed that he was forcing them to travel through the rain.

  After pacing about for a quarter of an hour he realized he was in the Tango Belt. On the banquettes, the paperboys were hollering ‘Axeman Night Special!’ and the boards and posters outside the cabarets, restaurants and saloons were proclaiming the names of the jazz bands they had secured for the night:

  THE OASIS CABARET PRESENTS ITS

  AXEMAN SPECIAL:

  The Onward Brass Band here tonight!

  No Axe killings or your money back!

  THE TUXEDO BRASS BAND!

  TONIGHT AT THE HAYMARKET!

  Playing Jazz all night long!

  Leave your axes at home, now!

  The morbid humor of the signs and the excitement in the streets only increased his restlessness. He realized he hadn’t eaten yet, so he decided to make his way to the Grocery, an Italian-owned eatery on Decatur Street.

  He walked with his head down and his hands shoved firmly into his pockets, no closer to finding an angle through the thoughts in his head. When he arrived he found the place almost empty. He ordered a muffuletta and a coffee and took a seat at an empty table.

  He lit a cigarette and scanned the interior while he waited, and it was only then that he noticed the altar in the corner and remembered that it was St Joseph’s day. People all over the city set up altars dedicated to the saint, laden with braided loaves, cakes, fruits, pastries and bottles of wine, all scattered among flickering red vigil lights and overseen by statues of the holy family. The altars overflowed as each individual, household, business and church tried to outdo the next.

  Bartolomeo, the owner of the Grocery, brought him over his coffee and muffuletta – a flatbread sandwich of mortadella, chopped olives and provolone. As he ate, Luca looked at the altar, at the food and the candles and statuettes of St Joseph and he wondered if the Axeman had planned his night deliberately to coincide with the saint’s day. He overheard the other customers talking to the staff about their plans for the evening, which cabaret they had booked tickets to, and the merits or not of ‘jazzing it up’.

  He listened to them and ate and as the food seared through his stomach he made his own plans. For Luca, St Joseph’s Day normally meant going to the church parades around the French Quarter, watching the faithful carry the statue of the saint on their shoulders, and then going back to Carlo’s house for a banquet, all the members of the extended family eating and drinking together. Carlo would consider it a snub if Luca didn’t make an appearance, and yet he didn’t feel he could go. The false sincerity and warmth of the men there, sharing jokes with each other as intrigues were plotted – he would much rather spend the day in someone else’s company. He could maybe use the case as an excuse for not turning up, but now the letter was sent he had nothing to do but wait. He decided to visit Simone, realizing she was the anchor keeping him in New Orleans, and he wondered if there was any point trying to shake off the two policemen who would undoubtedly follow him there.

  He finished his drink and sauntered over to the counter with his ticket. At the counter, Bartolomeo was showing off his shotgun to two women in fine coats, with moneyed, pale faces. Bartolomeo was boasting about how the Grocery would be open all night, and he wouldn’t be playing no coon music, Axeman or not. The customers laughed at the funny old Italian, gloved hands in front of their mouths.

  Luca handed over his ticket and paid, then stepped out into the street. He lit a cigarette with his hands cupped against the rain, and began the long walk to Simone’s.

  A few hours later he was sitting on her porch and watching the rain beat down on the surface of the bayou. The two plainclothesmen had followed him all the way there and had hidden behind a shack on the opposite side of the path. They had stayed for at least the first hour, occasionally peeking around the corner, rain-drenched, cold and annoyed. But he guessed they must have shirked off their duties and headed back to the precinct, or more likely to the closest bar.

  The door behind him squeaked and Luca turned around to see two Cajuns exit the cabin. The husband had his hand over his gut, and he smiled at Luca warmly and said something in French that Luca didn’t catch. The wife followed him out, adjusted a shawl so that it covered her head, and the couple stepped out into the rain.

  They had arrived an hour before, when Luca was in the shack with Simone and he was trying to explain to her why the policemen were following him. The Cajuns had knocked and greeted Simone with familiarity. The man was tall and broad-shouldered with wispy black hair and a bushy mustache. He wore a white shirt and a hat with a wide brim and Luca recognized him instantly as a Cajun fisherman. The wife was equally tall and dark-haired, but for someone who worked in the sun she was surprisingly pale to Luca’s eye. Simone had asked Luca to step outside while she consulted with them, so Luca had sat on the porch, smoking cigarettes and watching the rain, feeling like both an intruder and an exile.

  He eyed the couple as they walked along the path, heading back to whatever corn
er of the local backwaters they had come from. Then he stood, flicked his cigarette into the yard and re-entered the cabin. Simone was busying herself by the stove, setting some kind of broth to cook. He could tell from the way she concerned herself with the cooking that she wasn’t in the mood to talk. He sat at the table and watched her as she chopped vegetables on a board and threw them into the pot.

  ‘Are those two idiots still outside?’ she said without looking up.

  ‘The Cajuns?’

  ‘No, the police,’ she replied curtly, unwilling to acknowledge the joke.

  ‘I didn’t see them,’ he said. ‘I think they’ve gone home.’

  She nodded and continued her work. She had been distant since he had arrived, so much so that when the Cajuns came knocking, he was glad of the distraction.

  ‘How did it go with the patients?’ he asked, settling on a neutral topic.

  ‘Stomach ulcer. Same as what you’ve got,’ she answered curtly. ‘I gave him some herbs.’

  She picked up a pan from the stove absentmindedly, without first wrapping a cloth around the handle. She shrieked and the pan clanged to the floor. Luca jumped up and ran over to her.

  ‘Merde,’ she hissed, holding her hand in pain.

  ‘You OK?’

  She nodded, shrugged him off, and dipped her hand in the pail of cold water at the foot of the stove.

  Luca grabbed a rag and cleaned up the contents of the pan from the floor – some kind of sticky brown goo that reminded him of the fig jam his grandmother used to make every September back in Sicily. Simone watched him as she knelt, her hand plunged in the cold water, something angry in her eye, as if she blamed him for her accident.

  She stood, dried her hand and walked over to the rows of jars. She opened one, took out some papery yellow arnica leaves and pressed them against the burn mark on her palm, wrapping a bandage loosely around it. She returned to the stove and held her hand out to Luca, who took it and tied the bandages tight.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  He smiled, finished off the bandage with a bow-knot and stood. They peered at each other, their faces close for the first time since he arrived. He leaned forwards and kissed her, and to his surprise she kissed him back. Then she turned, picked up a cloth and stooped to finish off wiping the mess from the floorboards.

  Luca sat at the table again and watched her work. He noticed that his nose was running a little, and guessed he was coming down with something after walking through the rain all morning.

  ‘You got anything in there for a cold,’ he said, motioning towards the shelves.

  ‘Lots of ’em are good for colds. Pimento tea, pepper-grass, cirier-batard leaves, honeysuckle. I’ll make you a tisane after I clear this up.’

  ‘A tisane?’ asked Luca.

  ‘Medicine tea.’

  A half-hour later they were sitting on the porch drinking the tisane, a yellow tea of ironwort that tasted faintly of chamomile. They sat without speaking and watched the rain as it danced in the mud track, drumming a cacophony against the sheet-metal roofs of the shacks opposite. Simone seemed calmer now, less annoyed.

  ‘And the windows of heaven were opened,’ she said. ‘And the rain was upon the earth for forty days and forty nights.’

  Luca frowned and turned to stare at her.

  ‘Two weeks of solid rain,’ she said. ‘Haven’t seen anything like it since the hurricane in 1915. Remember?’

  Luca shook his head. ‘I was in Angola that year,’ he replied, matter-of-fact. Simone peered at him and nodded, then turned back to stare at the downpour sheeting onto the lake.

  ‘It rained for a week before the storm came, and when it did . . .’ She made a waving gesture with her hand, to indicate that whatever was being described was too great for words. ‘I remember the noise when the dams broke – like thunder. And then the next day all the bodies floating down the street. People, cows, dogs, all of ’em dead and white and bloated and rolling on the water, floating down the street.’

  She shook her head and gazed at the cup of tea in her hand before taking a sip.

  ‘You think it’s brewing for another hurricane?’ asked Luca.

  ‘Two weeks of rain,’ she said flatly, as if that explained it all.

  ‘A hurricane in May?’ he said.

  She shrugged. ‘It’s happened before.’

  She stared out across the track, looking with concern at the bayou in the distance and the tender gray storm clouds gathering above it.

  They continued to stare out over the desolate view – the rickety shacks, the swaying trees, the lake, the rain smashing itself stupidly into the earth. Luca should have recoiled from the scene, it had an oppressive bleakness to it. It was the kind of view only afforded to people on the very edge of things, one step away from the chaos beyond. But he found some kind of beauty in it, an unexplainable reassurance, a sense that, despite the bayou’s forsaken form, this half-world was where life began.

  At some point, the neighbor with the mandolin struck up a tune, this time joined by someone else on a fiddle, the duet broken by the rain into a jaunty staccato. Luca wondered if the performance was prompted by the Axeman’s letter, if the two musicians were trying to buy their safety with the tune. The music was less mournful than the previous time Luca had heard the neighbor play, as if now that the mandolin had found its partner, its song was less lonely.

  He looked over to Simone and she smiled at him warmly, her bad mood from earlier completely gone. He held out his hand and she took it in hers and they watched the storm. The anxiety that had been in Luca’s heart all day slowly dissolved, became so meaningless as to lose all threat, something he could forget ever existed. When it grew dark they would light a fire and eat a stew of vegetables and chicken, and then they would spend the night wrapped around each other, as the music played and the fire flicked an orange glow around the room, and neither of them would care anymore about the storm circling over the cabin’s tin roof.

  43

  Lewis had never seen anything like it. The city was awash with jazz. From the honky-tonks in Back o’ Town to the night-spots in the Tango Belt to the normally quiet houses and cafes, a thousand and one songs were spilling out onto the streets. It seemed to Lewis, as he made his way from Mayann’s to the cabaret, that every possible means of creating music had been pressed into service – in places where there wasn’t a band, Victrolas, phonographs and inner-player pianos supplied the songs, while elsewhere hobbyist musicians had dusted down long-idle instruments and banded together with anyone that could strum a few drunken notes. It was as if a spirit had seized control of all the instruments in the city and spellbound they had burst into song. The sound came together in the streets, where despite the fact that it was still early in the evening, Lewis had to dodge past crowds already drunk and stumbling between bars and clubs.

  When he got to the cabaret he noticed an electric, expectant mood. The place had been decked out in a tropical theme for the night, with spools of crêpe paper strung from the ceiling, and multicolored lanterns casting rainbow lights, and the bar and stage decorated with palm leaves, coconuts, and fake Hawaiian reeds. He overheard the owners arguing about whether to set extra tables on the dance floor, or to make the dance floor bigger by moving tables out.

  The band rehearsed the new song a few times, and then the doors were flung open and within half an hour the place was jammed, and everyone was dancing, stamping the boards and clapping their hands in a sweaty, liquor-fuelled frenzy. Strings of pearls broke, shirtsleeves ripped, suits and gowns were drenched in champagne and perspiration. Even the big-timers who normally sat at the back and never looked excited were dancing away with everyone else. The crowd become so fevered the band veered from their standard Tango Belt repertoire and started playing the bluesy, growling songs that were never normally heard outside of Back o’ Town – ‘Kiss My Funky Ass’ and ‘Brown Skin Who You For?’.

  Lewis remembered his grandmother telling him about the days before emancipation
, when the slaves in New Orleans spoke French and they would gather every Sunday afternoon in Place Congo to dance the Bamboula or the Conjaie to African music rattled out of drums and slides and cow-horns and bells – anything people could get ahold of to make a noise. She had told him about the fervor with which the people there danced, and for the first time in his life, Lewis thought he was witnessing a scene that resembled those of his grandmother’s stories.

  They were a couple of minutes into ‘Tiger Rag’ when Lewis heard a cue from Baby as they came to the end of a chorus, a half-bar drum fill, a double hit on the snare. He closed his eyes and launched into a solo, but not one of his usual solos because none of those felt quite right. Tonight he made it up as he went along, feeding off the crowd and their frenzy. His mind drifted as he played, away from the music, and he thought about the day when he was a child by the river, about the blues he heard the wild-man play on his old dented Kress horn. Lewis had never been able to recapture that sound, it was always just at the back of his mind. But now he managed to remember it clearly, and used it in his solo, picking out tones he would never normally pick, letting the memory guide him in his choice of notes.

  Other memories flooded into his head – the sound of church when he was a child; singing for dimes with his street-corner quartet; sneaking out at night with his friends to peek through the cracks at Pete Lala’s and the Funky Butt Hall so they could watch their heroes on stage, Buddy Bolden, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton. He remembered Joe Oliver showing him how to use a mute and performing in parades with the Waifs’ Home brass band, even playing the blues for whores at four in the morning in long-gone bordellos. The memories found their way into the music he was making now, all of them aligning. And a beautiful peace passed over him that seemed to last an eternity.