by Tim Bryant
"It would have been better if the damaged riverboat had never been returned to J.T. Conray's desk. I guess little boys don't think that way. J.T. Conray might not have noticed its absence for a long while, but he sure noticed it sitting there in such a pitiful shape, with its upper deck sliced off and the paddle wheel gone. J.T. called Jed to him and demanded an explanation.
"Boy, can you tell me what happened to my Kate?
"I can just imagine Jed's little lip stuck out and quivering.
"It fell from your desk?
"Off my desk and into the river, Mister Conray said.
"And so, in order to save his own hide, Jed Conray accused me, who had never once set foot in the big house, of instigating the whole affair. Next day, I was called up to the house where I was shown the remnants of the little boat and asked to explain. In hind sight, I probably could have come up with a better response.
"Wash and me told Jed that it wasn't gonna float.
"I was beaten within an inch of my life with Jed standing not ten feet away from me, watching in silence. Beat me so bad I forgot all about the whipping I took for Blue Dick. Wash gained some satisfaction from watching Jed take a slighter but similar beating just moments later. I didn't get to hang around for that. I suppose old J.T. thought he was teaching his son some kind of lesson. Whatever the reason, it gave me no pleasure at all.
"Years later, when the Conrays picked up and moved away, we continued to live in our little house back in the quarter and never did move into the big house, even though it sat empty. Victor and momma never went inside, except to get some kind of supplies every once in a while. I asked momma one time, not too long after the Conrays picked up and left.
"I said, momma, why don't we move into the big house now?
"'Cause it ain't ours to move into, she said.
"That's all she had to say, far as I was concerned. Suited me fine. I never wanted to go back in that damned place anyway, and I never did. I don't rightly know whatever happened to the little Kate or the big one either, for that matter."
Art took a break, handing his banjo to the drummer and disappearing into the dark. At first, I thought he had slipped away from me again. I walked up to the bass player, who was laid his bass down and was lighting a cigarette.
"Art gone for the night?"
He shook the match out and reached out to shake my hand.
"I sure hope not," he said.
I started to tell him how he had disappeared during his previous engagement at The Pepper Pot, then thought better of it.
"I think he just went to water the grass," the drummer said.
People had been sending jars of moonshine up to the band for the past hour, so there was now a circle of mostly empty jars that stretched across the ground in front of them. The drummer, who I learned was named Willie T, contemplated returning them to their owners, thinking, with any luck, they'd be refilled, but the bass player, Biscuit, thought they looked like stage lights.
"What in the hell good are stage lights that don't have lights in them?" said Willie, and then he looked at me. "Am I not right?"
I shrugged. Biscuit said he still liked them right where they were.
In a minute Art came walking out of the shadows, and Willie T took his place. I noticed almost immediately how much bigger Art looked when he was standing up. He had a presence about him that set him apart. Like there was something different about him, he knew it, and you'd better get to knowing it.
All the same, there weren't many people standing in the band's vicinity. Most were taking the break in music to say hello to someone they hadn't spoken to in a while or to continue conversations started earlier in the evening. I didn't want to miss my opportunity.
"I've never heard anybody play the way you do," I said.
Art sent Biscuit to get more drinks, saying he would watch all of the instruments until he got back.
"No two people play the same way," he said, "because no two people feel it the same."
"Yeah, but we all get the blues," I said. I wanted him to know I wasn't just listening. I was thinking about what I was hearing.
"You right about that," he said. "But we all bring our own thing to it."
He reached over and picked up his banjo. Maybe it felt easier to talk holding it.
"You hear me talk about building a boat, taking off down river, what comes up in your mind?"
I had to think about that for a minute.
"I guess just getting away from the pressure of life. Being my own man," I said. If I had had more time to think, I could have expounded, but I was fairly happy with my answer.
Art sat down on the seat that Willie T had been using.
"You know what it puts in my mind?"
I didn't want to make any assumptions. I shook my head.
"I think about fixing up that beautiful boat, the Lady Camargo, and taking off from Pattonia, headed for the world."
Willie T had returned and was listening in.
"In other words," Art said, "you get the heat, but I got the fire."
"You get enough heat, you're bound to bust out into flames too," said Willie T.
Biscuit came back with full jars and an invitation for art to spend the night with one of the spinster ladies that lived between Persimmon Grove and Lufkin. Art told him to tell her thanks but no thanks.
"I might've said yes, once upon a time," he said.
"Shit, Art," Willie T said, "you ain't telling me you're too old."
"I ain't too old," Art said, "but I've done told you. I've been transfigurated. I ain't that guy no more."
Although I hadn't seen anything to indicate that Art was a religious man, it seemed to me like something a preacher would say. That gave me the seed of an idea.
"I got a cousin named Eulalie Glover," I said. "She has a one hour radio show every Sunday morning in Nacogdoches. You ought to come up and play this week. She's always looking for good music."
"What kind of show does she do?" Art said. He looked interested.
"It's called the Glover Family Gospel Hour with Eulalie Glover," I said, "but it's more than just gospel. She talks to people in the community and other things too."
Biscuit laughed nervously.
"I don't know," he said. "We don't really do gospel shit."
I said I thought the music they played was as true as any hymn I had ever heard.
"And ain't that what gospel is all about?"
I wrote down the information on the back of a 1956 Standard Oil map that Willie T produced and let them get ready for one last set of tunes. If I hadn't had one and a half jars of drink in me, I probably never would have had the nerve to make such an offer to them. And if I hadn't kept on drinking, I might have realized my mistake a little sooner.
"That fire looks like it's starting to die out. You build a fire, seems like there's always something working against it. The wind. Rain. Mother time. It's a fight to keep it alive. Well, we're here to hand down a whole other kind of fire. It ain't some new kind of fire I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is an old kind. A fire that's still burning on generation after generation.
"We've been playing our music and telling stories, bringing the fire, all the way across the south. I pretty much been all around the world, and I come back home because I knew it was time to bring it back. I sailed into Charleston, South Carolina about a year, a year and a half ago, I guess. And you know, people, it dawned on me that I was sailing in just like my people must have come sailing in two, three hundred years ago. But I come back and did it, I was a free man. And that gave me a weight. That freedom come with a burden. And here's what I knew I had to do. I had to pass it on. Not the burden, I had to pass on that freedom.
"Now we played our way home. Statesboro. Swainsboro, Macon. We met up with other folks. Folks like The 5 Royales. Lowman Pauling. Man alive, that boy's got the fire inside. I couldn't even get close to him. I'm not lying to you. Not even close. We played with him in Tuskegee, Montgomery, Mobile, Hattiesburg. Said goo
dbye in New Orleans, where this old music stick was born a long time ago. Full circle. And now, we're back here."
The crowd applauded at this point, and I was surprised how many were still there, off in the darkness but still awake and listening. Art and his band played a song called "Say It," and it went so well, they did it over again. (Later, I was to discover that this was a 5 Royales tune; were they as good as Art claimed? Almost.) They followed that with a harrowing version of Texas Alexander's "Polo Blues," the song Mister Alexander wrote about murdering his wife. Before he murdered his wife.
The fellows in the shadows were getting more juiced up with every song, their reactions more and more boisterous. By this point, they were no longer watching the same show I was. One of them stepped out of the cover, looking like a lost cowboy against the fire.
"I don't give a good goddamn about all this rain in Spain and South Carolina shit," he said. "I just wanna know, are we gonna hear what happened with that damn riverboat you was talking about."
If not, he was ready to pony up and ride away.
"And I ain't talking about no goddamn toy neither," he added.
Art never missed a beat, although Willie T looked like he was thrown off just a little.
"Don't you worry, my friend, " Art said, "I'm not finished singing 'til you're finished listening."
"We got the Lady Camargo, with its new name emblazoned along the side, into the water. It wasn't easy. I ended up pulling the engine out and taking both wheels off to do it. Back in the river, it was easy enough to roll the two repainted wheels into the water, then bolt them back into place. Each wheel had twelve paddles, not big as paddlewheels go, but plenty to churn up a little action. I even took the time to reinforce that part of the boat with wood from the carriage house, just to be safe. Putting the engine back in proved to be more time consuming, if not more difficult, just because I had to clean it up and reassemble it before I could put it back in place.
"I had been a carpenter for years, though, having learned from an old man over on Burgess Hill, in that area. We built just about every building standing in the Burgess Hill area, and I'll bet every one of 'em is still there today.
"So we got the boat safely into the water, and she appeared to be holding up. No leaks, no problems. I sent Harmon up to the house. Said get Zeus, get that big old carriage out from under the carriage house and start loading it up. Just get it and start loading it up.
"Harmon said, what you want me to put in it, Art?
"I said, anything that ain't nailed down. If this is gonna be home, we're gonna need beds, we're gonna need tables. Whatever George don't have no more need for, we do.
"He took off for the house, but then he stopped and said, books? Because George and Missus Carrie had themselves a whole heap of books. Books on business, on law, books full of stories from all over the place.
"All the books you can load up, I said.
"Harmon made three whole trips back and forth while I was getting the boat ready to set sail. The boat was as big as George's house, and it would hold as much of it as we could get onto it. Harmon come with the big bed. He come with Lovey's bad. He brung that long son of a bitch kitchen table, hanging off out the back of the carriage and him running along behind it, keeping everything stable.
"When I got through with my work, I would start on the furniture. Putting the beds back together. Finding places for everything. Harmon even took the curtains down and brought them, and I was putting them back up on the other end. Nailing in curtain hangers.
"Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me that we needed to test out the calliope up on the upper deck. I didn't have no idea in the world how to go about that, so I waited for Harmon. Him being the musical type and all. Back then, I didn't know how to tell a musical note from a bank note. Can you believe it?
"Well, we got to pushing and pulling on that calliope. Harmon called it a steam trumpet. We knew it was tied into the steam engine. That much we could see. And when Harmon would work the keys— which looked like any old organ, far as I could see— a big puff of steam would come out of it. But no music.
"Harmon said, maybe we need to prime it
"I was thinking, it wasn't no pump, but he said, yes, it was a pump organ, so maybe we need to prime it. So we primed it, run a little oil and then some water down in it. It blowed the oil right back out like you were pouring castor oil down a baby's throat. The steam trumpet was done for.
Harmon seemed to take the news personal. Got all down in the mouth. That's when I got the notion to bring that big ass organ down from the house, set it up on the boat. It might not be as loud as the steam organ, but I said I bet it could be heard.
"You know how goddamn heavy that thing's gonna be? he said.
"So I told him I'd go back up there and help him drag it to the boat. And that's what I did. It just about killed both us, just getting it out the back and onto the carriage. I tell you what. I don't know how in the world they ever got that damn organ in that house. Must have been, they just built the house up around it. We busted out the back door frame, which pissed off the bank people to no end.
"The bank people had shown up by then, nosing around and taking photographs with a great big camera. Asking questions they had no business asking. What was we gonna do with all that stuff. What did we need with a kitchen table like that. Did we really figure on playing that organ?
"All that stuff was mine. Given to me by Mister George Delafield.
"I would have killed my fool self getting that organ out of there and away from those men. And I like to have done it. But we got that organ on the Lady Camargo, and I put together a lift that raised her right up on top of that upper deck. Built a foundation that nestled her right up against the rail. She looked miles better up there than sitting in that dark bedroom, about to go through the floor.
"We were getting real close to pulling up anchor. We needed to go back and make one more pass through the house, make sure there wasn't anything else that might come in handy. I also had the final task of leaving Zeus where he could be taken care of properly. I wasn't looking forward to saying goodbye to that old mule, but I knew a steamboat wasn't any place for a mule.
"I remembered how Blue Dick had been taken out back and shot when we moved off the Conray farm, all those years ago. I didn't want Zeus to come to any such end. He might have been getting on up in years, but we couldn't have asked for more from that mule. He had pulled a whole houseful of stuff down to the boat, and he wasn't even getting to come aboard.
"However many years he had in him, I wanted to be sure he would live them in happiness. That's all I wanted for myself. How could I want less for him?
"We want to be sure you're not trying to get away with anything improper.
That's what I was told by one of several men from the bank who were walking around the house when I got back. One was inside, another was sniffing around the carriage house. One might have been down in the shithouse, because a third one appeared out of nowhere a few minutes later. I didn't know what to make of it.
"I have the legal ownership of everything in this house and on this property, with the exception of the buildings, I said. You don't see any buildings missing, do you?
"He brought me over to the man who had shown up. A man who introduced himself as a probate attorney from Longview. I had no clue what probate meant, and I wasn't too sure about attorney either. I didn't ask.
"He said, It seems to me that there is some question pertaining to the boat.
"I said, I was told by my lawyer— see I wasn't too dumb to learn a thing or two; no sir, I was learning— Lester Massey told me that I was the legal owner of anything and everything on the Delafield property, not including the buildings. That means I'm the owner of the steamboat.
"The lawyer didn't seem to like the sound of that.
"Exactly what do you intend to do with the boat, if I may ask?
"I knew for a fact that banking son of a bitch, who I didn't see anywhere on the propert
y at that moment, had gone running to this probate man and told him that I had come after him with a hack saw. I flat out knew it.
"I intend to take it as far from here I can, I said.
"He whispered something to one of the bankers. I had half a mind to whisper something to Harmon, just to show I was in the game.
"If you have plans to sleep on the boat, it then becomes a place of residence, the banker said. You are not allowed to take any place of residence on the property.
"I tried not to look as ticked off as I was.
"What if I only go fishing?
"The probate man shook his head.
"If you go fishing, are you sure you need two beds onboard the boat?
"Okay, I thought. This was reminding me of the word games me and George would play, time to time, when conversation got scarce at the seed store. Long as I didn't let myself get overheated, I felt like I could match wits and maybe even come out ahead. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was later to find out, that was part and parcel of being a probate man.
"Is the carriage mine to have?
"They both seemed eager to let me have that much.
"Say, what would happen if, somewhere down the road, I was to get sleepy and take a nap in it?
"Mister Patton, that's an entirely different matter, the probate man said. You and I both know it. For one, there's the matter of the bed set up on the steamboat.
"So, long as I don't make me a bed in the carriage, I can do whatever I want to do.
"It was the kind of smarty thing I used to say to Momma Jodora just to drive her crazy.
"I told him I wasn't one hundred percent sure Mister Massey would split the differences the same way, and that I would like for his input in the conversation before I said anything else.
