Rudford came from a place called Agersburg, Tennessee. He said it was about an hour's drive from Memphis. It sounded to me like a pretty little town. For one thing, it had a street called Miss Packer's Street. Not just Packer Street or Packer's street, but Miss Packer's street. Miss Packer had been an Agersburg schoolteacher who, during the Civil War, had taken a few pot shots at some passing Union troops, from the window of the principal's office. None of this flag-waving, Barbara Fritchie stuff for Miss Packer. She had just taken aim and let go, knocking off five boys of in blue before anybody could get to her with an axe. She was then nineteen.
Rudford's father originally had been a Bostonian, a salesman for a Boston typewriter company. On a business trip to Agersburg, just before the first World War, he had met--and within two weeks married--a well-heeled local girl. He never returned either to the home office or to Boston, apparently X-ing both out of his life without a jot of regret. He was quite a number altogether. Less than an hour after his wife died giving birth to Rudford, he got on a trolley going to the outskirts of Agersburg and bought out a rocky, but reputable, publishing house. Six months later he published a book he had written himself, entitled, Civics for Americans. It was followed, over a period of a few years, be a highly successful series of highly unreadable textbooks known--only too widely, even today--as The Intelligence Series for Progressive High- School Students of America. I certainly know for a fact that his Science for Americans paid the pubic high schools of Philadelphia a visit around 1932. The book was rich with baffling little diagrams of simple little fulcrums.
The boy Rudford's early home life was unique. His father evidently detested people who just read his books. He grilled and quizzed the boy even at the height of marble season. He held them up on the suitcase for a definition of a chromosome. He passed him the lima beans on condition that the planets were named--in order of size. He gave the boy his ten-cent weekly allowance in return for the date of some historical personage's birth or death or defeat. To be brief, at the age of eleven Rudford knew just about as much, academically, as the average high- school freshman. And in an extracurricular sense, more. The average high-school freshman doesn't know how to sleep on a cellar floor without using a pillow and blankets.
There were, however, two important footnotes in Rudford's boyhood. They weren't in his father's books, but they were close enough to make a little quick sense in an emergency. One of them was a man named Black Charles, and the other was a little girl named Peggy Moore.
Peggy was in Rudford's class at school. For more than a year, though, he had taken little notice of her beyond the fact that she was usually the first one eliminated in a spelling bee. He didn't begin to assess Peggy's true value until one day he saw her, across the aisle from him, insert her chewing gum into the hollow of her neck. It struck Rudford as a very attractive thing for anybody to do--even a girl. Doubling up under his desk, pretending to pick up something from the floor, he whispered to Peggy, "Hey! That where you put your gum?"
Turning, her lips ajar, the young lady with the gum in her neck nodded. She was flattered. It was the first time Rudford had spoken to her out of the line of duty.
Rudford felt around the floor for a nonexistent ink eraser. "Listen. You wanna meet a friend of mine after school?"
Peggy put a hand over her mouth and pretended to cough. "Who?" she asked.
"Black Charles."
"Who's he?"
"He's a fella. Plays the piano on Willard Street. He's a friend of mine."
"I'm not allowed on Willard Street."
"Oh!"
"When are you going?"
"Right after she lets us out. She's not gonna keep us in today. She's too bored....Okay?"
"Okay"
That afternoon the two children went down to Willard Street, and Peggy met Black Charles and Black Charles met Peggy.
Black Charles's cafe was a hole-in-the-wall hamburger joint, a major eyesore on a street that was regularly torn down, on paper, whenever Civic Council convened. It was, perhaps, the paragon of all restaurants classified by parents--usually through the side window of the family car--as unsanitary-looking. It was a swell place to go, in short. Moreover, it is very doubtful if any of Black Charles's young patrons had ever got sick from any of the delicious, greasy hamburgers he served. Anyway, almost nobody went to Black Charles's to eat. You ate after you got there, naturally, but that wasn't why you went.
You went there because Black Charles played the piano like somebody from Memphis-- maybe even better. He played hot or straight and he was always there when you had to go home. But not only that. (After all, it stood to reason that Black Charles, being a wonderful piano player, would be wonderfully indefatigable.) He was something else--something few white piano players are. He was kind and interested when young people came up to the piano to ask him to play something, or just to talk to him. He looked at you. He listened.
Until Rudford started bringing Peggy with him he was probably the youngest habitue of Black Charles's cafe. For over two years he had been going there alone two or three afternoons a week; never at night, for the very good reason that he wasn't allowed out at night. He missed out on the noise and smoke and jump indigenous to Black Charles's place after dark, but he got something, afternoons, equally or more desirable. He had the privilege or hearing Charles play all the best numbers without interruption. All he had to do to get in on this deal was to wake the artist up. That was the catch. Black Charles slept in the afternoon, and he slept like a dead man.
Going down to Willard Street to hear Black Charles play was even better with Peggy along, Rudford found out. She was not only somebody good to sit on the floor with; she was somebody good to listen with. Rudford liked the way she drew up her racy, usually bruised legs and locked her fingers around her ankles. He liked the way she set her mouth hard against her knees, leaving teeth marks, while Charles was playing. And the way she walked home afterwards; not talking, just now and then kicking a stone or a tin can, or reflectively cutting a cigar butt in two with her heal. She was just right, though, of course, Rudford didn't tell her so. She had an alarming tendency to get lovey-dovey, with or without provocation.
You had to hand it to her, though. She even learned how to wake Black Charles up.
One three-thirtyish afternoon, just after the two children had let themselves in, Peggy said, "Can I wake him up this time? Huh, Rudford?"
"Sure. Go ahead. If you can."
Black Charles slept, fully dressed except for his shoes, on a bumpy, ratty-looking settee, a few stacked tables away from his beloved piano.
Peggy circled the problem academically.
"Well, go ahead and do it," Rudford said.
"I'm fixin' to; I'm fixin' to. Go away."
Rudford watched her a trifle smugly. "Naa. You can't just shove him around and get anywhere. You've seen me," he said. "You gotta really haul off. Get him right under the kidneys. You've seen me."
"Here?" said Peggy. She had her finger on the little island of nerves set off by the dorsal fork of Charles's lavender suspenders.
"Go ahead."
Peggy wound up and delivered.
Black Charles stirred slightly, but slept on without even seriously changing his position. "You missed. You gotta hit him harder than that anyway."
The aspirant tried to make a more formidable weapon of her right hand. She sandwiched her thumb between her fist and second fingers, held it away from her and looked at it admiringly.
"You'll break your thumb that way. Get your thumb out of--"
"Oh, be quiet," said Peggy, and let go with a haymaker.
It worked. Black Charles let out an awful yell, and went all of two feet up in the stale, cafe air. As he came down, Peggy put in a request: "Charles, will you play Lady,Lady for me, please?
Charles scratched his head, swung his immense, stockinged feet to the cigarette-butt- specked floor, and squinted. "That you, Margar-reet?"
"Yes. We just got here. The whole class was kept in,"
she explained. "Would you please play Lady,Lady Charles?"
"Summer vacation starts Monday," Rudford enthusiastically put in. "We can come around every afternoon."
"My, my! Ain't that fine!" Charles said--and meant it. He got to his feet, a gentle giant of a man, towing a hook-and-ladder gin hangover. He began to move in the general direction of his piano.
"We'll come earlier, too," Peggy promised.
"Ain't that fine!" Charles responded.
"This way, Charles," Rudford said. "You're going right into the ladies room."
"He's still sort of asleep. Hit him just once, Rudford...."
I guess it was a good summer--the days full of Charles's piano--but I can't say for sure. Rudford told me a story; he didn't give me his autobiography.
He told me next about a day in November. It was still a Coolidge year, but which one I don't know, exactly. I don't think those Coolidge years come apart anyway.
It was afternoon. A half-hour after the pupils of the Agersburg Elementary School had pushed and shoved and punched their way out of the exit doors. Rudford and Peggy were sitting high in the rafters of the new house that was being built on Miss Packer's Street. There wasn't a carpenter in sight. The highest, narrowest, weakest beam in the house was theirs to straddle without annoying interference.
Sitting on a beauty, a story above the ground, they talked about the things that counted: the smell of gasoline, Robert Hermanson's ear, Alice Caldwell's teeth, rocks that were all right to throw at somebody, Milton Sills, how to make cigarette smoke come out your nose, men and ladies who had bad breath, the best size knife to kill somebody with.
They exchanged ambitions. Peggy decided that when she grew up she would be a war nurse. Also a movie actress. Also a piano player. Also a crook--one that swiped a lot of diamonds and stuff, but gave some of it to poor people; very poor people. Rudford racer--he already had a pretty good pair of goggles.
A spitting contest followed, at a heated moment of which the losing side dropped a valuable, mirrorless powder compact out of her cardigan pocket. She started to climb a horrible thud on the new, white pine floor.
"You okay?" her companion inquired, not budging from the rafters.
"My head. Rudford, I'm dyin'!"
"Naa, you're not."
"I am, too. Feel."
"I'm not comin' all the way down just to feel."
"Please," the lady entreated.
Muttering cynical little observations about people who don't watch where they're even going, Rudford climbed down.
He pushed back a hank or two of the patient's lovely black-Irish hair. "Where's it hurt?" he demanded.
"All over..."
"Well, I don't see anything. There isn't any abrasion at all."
"Isn't any what?"
"Abrasion. Blood or anything. There isn't even any swelling." The examiner drew back suspiciously. "I don't even think you fell on your head."
"Well, I did. Keep looking...There. Right where your hand--"
"I don't see a thing. I'm going back up."
"Wait!" said Peggy. "Kiss it first. Here. Right here."
"I'm not gonna kiss your old head. Wuddaya think I am?"
"Please! Just right here." Peggy pointed to her cheek.
Bored and enormously philanthropic, Rudford got it over with.
A rather sneaky announcement followed: "Now we're engaged."
"Like fun we are!...I'm leaving. I'm going down to old Charles's."
"You can't. He said not to come today. He said he was gonna have a guest today."
"He won't care. Anyway, I'm not gonna stay here with you. You can't spit. You can't even sit still. And when I feel sorry for you or something, you try to get lovey-dovey."
"I don't get lovey-dovey much."
"So long," Rudford said.
"I'll go with you!"
They left the sweet smelling empty house and moped along the four o'clock autumn streets toward Black Charles's. On Spruce Street they stopped for fifteen minutes to watch two irate firemen trying to get a young cat out of a tree. A woman wearing a Japanese kimono directed the operations, in an unpleasant, importunate voice. The two children listened to her, watched the firemen, and silently pulled for the cat. She didn't let them down. Suddenly she leaped from the high branch, landing on the hat of one of the firemen, and springboarded instantly into an adjacent tree. Rudford and Peggy moved on, reflective and permanently changed. The afternoon now contained forever, however suspensory, one red and gold tree, one fireman's hat and one cat that really knew how to jump.
"We'll ring the bell when we get there. We won't just walk right in," Rudford said.
When Rudford had rung the bell, Black Charles himself, not only awake but shaven, answered the door. Peggy immediately reported to him, "You said for us not to come today, but Rudford wanted to."
"Y'all come on in," Black Charles invited cordially. He wasn't sore at them.
Rudford and Peggy followed him self-consciously, looking for the guest.
"I got my sister's chile here," Black Charles said. "Her and her mammy just come up from 'gator country."
"She play the piano?" Rudford asked.
"She's a singer, boy. She a singer."
"Why are the shades down?" Peggy asked. "Why don't you have the shades up, Charles?"
"I was cookin' in the kitchen. You chillern can he'p me pull 'em up," Black Charles said, and went out into the kitchen.
The two children each took a side of the room and began to let daylight in. They both felt more relaxed. The Guest discomfort was over. If there were somebody strange, some non- member, hovering about Black Charles's place, it was only his sister's child--practically nobody.
But Rudford, over on the piano side of the cafe, suddenly took in his breath. Somebody was sitting on the piano, watching him. He let go the blind string in his hand, and the blind snapped to the top; it slattered noisily for a moment, then came to a stop.
''And the Lord said, Let there be light," said a grown-up girl as black as Charles, sitting in Charles's place at the piano. "Yeah man," she added moderately. She was wearing a yellow dress and a yellow ribbon in her hair. The sunshine that Rudford had let in fell across her left hand; with it she was tapping out something slow and personal on the wood of Charles's piano. In her hand, between long, elegant fingers, she bad a burning stub of a cigarette. She wasn't a pretty girl.
"I was just pulling up the shades," Rudford said finally.
"I see that," said the girl. Her foot was tapping, too, Rudford noticed.
"We come here a lot," Peggy said. "We're Charles's best friends."
"Well, ain't that glad news!" said the girl, winking at Rudford.
Black Charles came in from the kitchen, drying his huge, slender hands on a towel.
"Lida Louise," he said, "these here's my friends, Mr. Rudford and Miss Margar-reet." He turned to the children. "This here's my sister's chile, Miss Lida Louise Jones."
"We met," said his niece. "We all met at Lord Pluchbottom's last fortnight." She pointed at Rudford. "Him and me was playin' mahjong out on the piazza."
"How 'bout you singin' somethin' for these here children?" Black Charles suggested.
Lida Louise passed over it. She was looking at Peggy. "You and him sweeties?" she asked her.
Rudford said quickly, "No."
"Yes," said Peggy.
"Why you like this little ole boy like you do?" Lida Louise asked Peggy.
"I don't know," Peggy said. "I like the way he stands at the blackboard."
Rudford considered the remark disgusting, but Lida Louise's thenodic eyes picked it up and looked away with it. She said to Black Charles, "Uncle, you hear what this little ole Margareet say?"
"No. What she say?" said Black Charles. He had the cover of his piano raised and was looking for something in the strings--a cigarette butt, perhaps, or the top of a catsup bottle.
"She say she like this ole boy on accounta the say he stands at the blackboard."
"Th
at right?" said Black Charles, taking his head out of the piano. "You sing somethin' for these here chillern Lida Louise," he said.
"Okay. What song they like?...Who stole my cigarettes? I had 'em right here by my side."
"You smoke too much. You a too-much gal. Sing," said her uncle. He sat down at his piano. "Sing Nobody Good Around."
"That ain't no song for kiddies."
"These here kiddies like that kinda song real good."
"Okay," said Lida Louise. She stood up, in close to the piano. She was a very tall girl. Rudford and Peggy, already sitting on the floor, had to look way up at her.
"What key you want it?"
Lida Louise shrugged. "A, B, C, D, E, F," she said winking at the children. "Who cares? Gimme a green one. Gotta match my shoes."
Black Charles struck a chord, and his niece's voice slipped into it. She sang Nobody Good Around. When she was finished, Rudford had gooseflesh from his neck to his waist. Peggy's fist was in his coat pocket. He hadn't felt it go in, and he didn't make her take it out.
Now, years later, Rudford was making a great point of explaining to me that Lida Louise's voice can't be described, until I told him that I happened to own most of her records and knew what he meant. Actually, though, a fair attempt to describe Lida Louise's voice can be made. She had a powerful, soft voice. Every note she sang was detonated individually. She blasted you tenderly to pieces. In saying her voice can't be described, Rudford probably meant that it can't be classified. And that's true.
Finished with Nobody Good Around. Lida Louise stooped over and picked up her cigarettes from under her uncle's bench. "Where have you been?" she asked them, and lit one. The two children didn't take their eyes off her.
Black Charles stood up. "I got spareribs," he announced. "Who want some?"
During Christmas week Lida Louise began singing nights at her Uncle Charles's. Rudford and Peggy both got permission, on her opening night, to attend a hygiene lecture at school. So they were there. Black Charles gave them the table nearest the piano and put two bottles of sarsaparilla on it, but they were both too excited to drink. Peggy nervously tapped the mouth of her bottle against her front teeth; Rudford didn't even pick his bottle up. Some of the high school and college crowd thought the children were cute. They were dealt with. Around nine o'clock, when the place was packed, Black Charles suddenly stood up from his piano and raised a hand. The gesture, however, had no effect on the noisy, home-for-Christmas crowd, so Peggy turned around in her seat and, never a lady, yelled at them, "Y'all be quiet!" and finally the room quieted down. Charles's announcement was to the point. "I got my sister's chile, Lida Louise, here t'night and she gonna sing for you." Then he sat down and Lida Louise came out, in her yellow dress, and walked up to her uncle's piano. The crowd applauded politely, but clearly expected nothing special. Lida Louise bent over Rudford and Peggy's table, snapped her finger against Rudford's ear, and asked, "Nobody Good Around?" They both answered, "Yes!"
22 Out-of-print J. D. Salinger Stories Page 27
