These Bones

by Kayla Chenault

  He moved his fingers across the guitar’s neck as though caressing an old love; he picked at each string as though listening for its story. He played with a cigar stuck between his teeth that seemed bigger than his head. Bobwhite tells a good story with his body. When he finished playing the song, he walked off the stage to a little stool and drank a Seagram’s 7 on ice.

  He propped up the guitar on the bar top, and I could see him shaking as sweat poured over his thick-lensed glasses. I walked over and introduced myself. I told him that I used to listen to his singles until the grooves went bleary. The bartender handed him a plate of catfish. He sort of shrugged his shoulders. “I get tips, fish, shit else these days,” he said.

  “Where’d you first learn how to play like that?” I asked.

  Bobwhite smiled in such a sad, crooked way that I didn’t understand the belly laugh that followed.

  “At Tempess’s place,” he said.

  “Tempess Place? What did the name mean?”

  “Place didn’t have a name. Didn’t need one.”

  “So then who was Tempess?”

  “Tempess was tall and dark. Swayed into the room like cattails on a breeze. She wore pants and riding boots and a tie. She smelled like pine tar; when she kissed you, you would close your eyes and find yourself in the embrace of the undergrowth. When I think of Tempess, I think of laughter sprinting out of her big red lips. And the stark white girl who trailed her skirt.”

  He placed the ice-cold glass against his forehead and let the condensation roll down his face for a moment. The folds and wrinkles in his face said, “I miss the high of something sweeter now.” He threw himself back into his chair and threw back the rest of the Seagram’s.

  “Shit, girl, you must be a long way from home! Where you from again?”

  What can you say to a legend like Bobwhite Teller? Do I say Brooklyn or that I studied at Vassar? Do I tell him about the shtetl my great-grandmother grew up in or about the summer place up in the Catskills? Or do I tell him about the room with the record player, in the brownstone, where my father would pull vinyls down from a shelf so high up I couldn’t see it and say, “Ah, now this one, Clio, this is a classic”? Then the needle would touch the grooves and the hum and crackle would begin as he crumpled into the rocking chair.

  But Bobwhite Teller moved on.

  “I’d bike down to her place with my fiddle. Cross the bridge from the Bramble Patch. There’d be the river folk on the other side. And a shanty made of tin and cardboard on a dirt patch. It’d be me and my best friend. He was the piana and I was the fiddle. We’d hightail it in there, because we was always late. Between schoolwork and church and chorin’ and seein’ the Barghest’s girlie show, couldn’t make it on time. But Tempess, she didn’t care. She was usually a little drunk, go up to everybody and give ’em a hug. Even our late asses.

  “Once we start playin’, the place was shakin’ with dancin’. That’s when Tempess start dancin’ and kissin’ on folk: men, women, it never mattered. She had her little girl with her. White like spider silk, we called her Moonchild. I got to askin’ once where Tempess got a white baby from. She just laugh. All she ever did is laugh at anything: joy, sorrow, pain, hate. A white lover, she said, from Jericho. She laugh again, and said, ‘I seen him and something came tumblin’ down, and it weren’t a wall.’”

  “What happened to it? Tempess’s Place?”

  “Prohibition took the booze away. The Depression turn the songs to sorrows. Then a flood swallowed up the shack and Tempess, too. You can’t know what the river hides and not expect to tempt fate.”

  “A lot of things collapsed after the Depression.”

  “Not the Barghest. The old pimp stayed moneyed.”

  “Well, the oldest profession and all that,” I noted.

  He looked up at me with squinting concern. He muttered something about his damn cigarettes. As he clawed into his pocket, I couldn’t help but think about my dad holding up the Bobwhite Teller 45s wrapped in fading paper. My dad, leaning over me, smiling with a cigarette in his mouth. I was really young—my mother had died not too long before, and my aunt was finishing Shabbat dinner. Ash fell from my dad’s mouth as he said, “This right here! It’s like a diamond, Clio, a diamond in an effing coal mine.” I handed Bobwhite one of the cigarettes from my pack. He smiled and continued.

  “Me and my best friend, we’d play anythin’ we could think of: spirituals, marches, hillbilly music, songs we heard old-timers sing. But always in a ragtime style-like. My favorite was this old, old song, ‘Darlin’ Cora.’”

  His voice warbles and warps but finds the right tune as he sings.

  Child, dig a hole in the meadow

  Dig a hole in the cold, cold ground

  Child, dig a hole in the meadow

  Gotta lay my sweet Cora down

  I smiled a bit. For the record, based on things he told me, there is no chance in hell he was singing that song in 1921. The earliest known appearances of the song were in 1919. But he is nearing seventy, and years of hard heroin use haunt his fingers.

  “Was this in your hometown?”

  “Bramble Patch?” he asked as he lit the cigarette. “Bramble folk didn’t think of the river folk as belonging to us.”

  “Bramble folk?” I asked. For some reason, I felt uneasy.

  “From the Bramble Patch,” he explained. “It’s been gone a long while. That’s my home. D’you ever—” He looks at me dead in my eyes as tears start to form in his. “You ever see the sulfurous smoke of hell, Miss Cook? How it rises up in black billows and consumes everything? I have.

  “That pimp had a crooked evil smile and blew black smoke from his nose. He come to Tempess’s place once. She was getting better business than him. He come down there to scream at her. He told her, ‘How you gonna take my customers when you ain’t but river folk?’ And she called him a bitch. She said, ‘Ain’t you a little bitch!’ He raise his hand to slap her, but she spoke and the wind thundered in the pines. Her voice moved the river; the waves crashed against the Barghest. We stopped the music. Silence. The wave scattered into his face. His suspender slashed in the wake of her curse. Yes, the Barghest was made ugly and bullish. Where that little bitch belong. His bones shuddered in anger. We heard ’em rattle. Tempess said, ‘Get the f— out my place.’”

  I was ordering a second round for myself by this point. He’s gotta be pulling my leg. Our eyes met and I searched for the wink in their shine. But there was no wink. There was no shine. Only quiet. Which was only broken after the catfish was gone and the tumbler was empty, when the great Bobwhite Teller was picking at the remnants of cornbread.

  “The pimp stared me down, I swear. Me and my best friend. The smoke and sludge of hell, he took with him back across the river. Fire belched from his footsteps. Him, fire; and her, the water. Nothing could stop either of them. So they moved through our world, and we let them. But they made us. They sustained us. Until they didn’t. Then they swallowed us whole.”

  “What happened?” I asked. We were leaned in so far.

  “Come on, Miss Cook, you’re smart! There’s always water and fire. Soul and bone. My best friend and me. The holy and the wicked. The Bramble Patch and Napoleonville.” He put his hand over mine, and his voice dropped to susurrus timbre. “There is skin and sinew. There is this second and the next. And between those, there is a long stretch of breath and stillness and potential. So to answer your first question, that’s where I learned to play music.”

  I laughed and let go of his hands. He hollered for another side of greens as he drummed against the bar top. My stomach felt uneasy. I stood up to leave, but his calloused hand grabbed mine again. He looked past me into the neon glow of the sign outside. “All of that is a memory these days. The wisp of smoke at the death of the flame. Tempess spoke and the waters parted. She belonged to the river. She and hers belonged to the river. And the river took her.
The thing that she was consumed her. I think about that a lot these days.”

  He was about to play his second set of the night, so I went over to the payphone to check in with my baby sister, Markie, before it got too late back in Brooklyn. The hesitancy in her voice told me something was wrong.

  “Your damn ex keeps calling,” she said.

  I groaned. “He’s got some nerve calling you.”

  “Well, he told me to tell you to call him at home once you get back to your hotel.”

  “I’m staying at a motor lodge,” I huffed.

  She groaned. “Doesn’t matter, Clio. He said it was urgent.”

  I groaned again. “Fine. I’ll call him back. Oh, and Markie? Tell Dad I got to talk to Tommy Teller tonight.”

  We exchanged a short goodbye and the homey twang of the Dobro started again. “All right, had my fill of catfish now,” Teller said. “I’m gonna start with an old song I loved called ‘Darling Cora.’” He looked at me and smiled.

  But I, for one, felt a wave of dread hit me. So as he picked away at the guitar, I silently slunk out the door with my recorder and my notes, just like the black magic woman slipped into the flood waters of a river she was made of.

  Home

  When He separated the waters, God said, “Let there be sky and river, and let us gather the gully from the river and make them different, too, and let us scatter the coal-black seeds ’til they find deep, good soil.” God tossed them down the river, and they lined the far bank and rooted themselves into the islands and marshes and all the way to where the river was dammed up. And Bertha’s kin sprang forth. They were older than the earth—grown from the formless waters that God spake into—and shooting up from the mud like cattails in the river islands.

  Bertha was infolded and calloused from crown to sole. She’d been a slave in the time before, had come up from a place no one knew the name of. She said, “Was the mouth of hell.” She never spoke of it again. Folks used to think her kin was from the Carolinas. But it was a “might be” tale.

  There was a lot of “might be” tales about Bertha’s kin. Folks said you only go down to Bertha’s kin during the sad hours. When the grass turns blue under a hazy moon and your own sorrow, when you’ve had to drink corn likker to forget and there’s not a single girl at the Barghest’s that can satisfy you. You go to Bertha’s kin when your man’s been creeping at midnight. Folks said the little dwarf man knew voodoo from down in the tropics. You go down to him—Bertha’s grandson-in-law or nephew or something—and he will brew up something with chicken blood and a lock of your lover’s hair. And make you drink it. Then your man will come back shaky and all-overish with glassy eyes, love-locked to you and cursed. Some nights, there was a panicked holler that came out from the reeds across the river. Folks said, “Isn’t that the sound that comes from skinning a cat?” Folks in the Bramble Patch said she and hers did the devil’s work. But what folks didn’t know is that Bertha was the patron saint of lost things.

  No one noticed shadows or the swirls on lost mother-of-pearl buttons, or the mottled skin of bent sewing needles, or the little brown girl lingering in the reeds. Not her bright scarlet dress or her braids born of battle between scalp and comb. But the gray eyes of Bertha took in all of these small lost things. She smiled toothlessly at Bit. The weathered hands reached out among the foliage and pulled up the little girl in her scarlet dress. “You lost, little girl?”

  Wanhope shook her head, her lips plastered over in fear.

  “You sure?” the old woman asked.

  The little girl wasn’t sure. She was willing herself to become one with the reeds and the cattails and the water and the amphibious skin which clung to her little brown legs as she stood barefoot in the water. She was not far from her house; she could make out the dusty remnants of her own footsteps leading back. But she felt in her guts a wave of uncertainty that clawed at the rugae of her stomach. Her words were small then, but when her words got bigger and they put an MD behind her name, she would know about the chasms of her body into which that pang was nestled. She wasn’t far from her house, she knew that very well. But she found that she was lost from home.

  Bertha took the girl out of the water. “You don’t belong to the river, girl. You belong to something else entirely.”

  “My mama told me what the river hides.”

  Bertha plopped Wanhope in the mud and snarled. That level of foolish talk smacked of something sinister, smacked of her granddaughter’s arrogance. But this child wasn’t their kin. Maybe it had been Rhea’s open maw that put such ideas in the heads of the Bramble folk. Lord knows how Rhea could—

  Then Bertha looked into the child’s eyes. “Oh,” she said with a quiet nod.

  Long ago, Bertha had asked the river for life, but life got to repay life. She had run to the river; the river hid her from the white men. But nothing could hide her from the river. So she gave the river what it wanted, if only in necessity. To give the river something out of cruelty was to tempt fate. This little girl wasn’t for the river.

  It had been a strange summer. The seeds of the cottonwood cloaked the ground like snow. This little girl belonged to something in between the Bramble Patch and the river folk and Napoleonville.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Wanhope, but most folks call me Bit.”

  Bertha walked with the little girl along the banks of the river. And the world was just those two, like broken glass in shattered spangles. The lost things headed somewhere familiar.

  Tempess’s Place

  The Bramble folks called me Moon-child. Nowadays, I go by Ma’am or Selene. My milky white skin hides me in sunlight.

  My man’s hands trembled when I told him. He couldn’t tell, of course. I’d be surprised if he noticed. White folks never know what to look for. And I’ve done my best to disappear and be reborn as one of them. But I’m from here, too—the side of town he dreamed of as a boy. My folks’ side of town.

  He smiled and kissed my hands and said, “I guess you always belonged here.”

  How could you think I belong to Napoleonville? The white folks in town were always cruel to me and my kin. Home is where the stones grew like moss over the ground and the river belly-laughed as the icy waters danced.

  I slept during the days, letting my scalp sweat kinks into my auburn hair. Mama didn’t send me to town for schooling. All the reading I needed was a menu. All the arithmetic I needed was keeping Mama’s books. Night would approach and, like a wedding procession, they would don their best. Not their best clothes, mind you. So few of us had good clothes back then. But their best crowns of joy sat crooked upon thick, coarse braids as they chasséd down the dirt path. I’d press my nose against glass to stare at them. In the halo of dusk and the fog of my breath, they were iridescent. Azures and scarlets and blushes and plums and honeys waltzed down the road, effortlessly royal. I did my own pigtails and put on an old cotton dress, nearly gossamer with age, and I’d go down to greet them and take their entrance fee.

  You knew you were close to Mama’s place when you saw the oak tree that grew crooked at the fork of the dirt path. It was over the hill from there. And once you were over the hill, it was pretty easy to spot. The gutters shook with the hoots and hollers and stomps. The windows pulsated with shadows. The ground trembled when the door split open, breathing light into the darkness.

  The smell hit you first. You could buy a bag of fresh donuts for a dime, covered in wild honey. They were still warm and greasy in the paper bag. No one made hot donuts like Miss Phoebe, who was short and always wore a mourning dress since her husband died. She would fry up bacon sandwiches, too, for fifteen cents. If we were lucky and could get the Poles from the city to come down our way, Phoebe would serve kielbasa and mustard on rolls.

  Peanut shells carpeted the floor. Mudcats swam against the current just to hear the songs inside. Most of the time it was the Teller boy and the Lyons boy
playing tunes. But sometimes, if we were lucky, it was that Jug Band from east of here. The washboard and jug start shouting at the guitar and banjo, and the banjo and guitar would answer back. The night became hurly-burly on our side of the river. Gaslight and piano, laughter and hooch poured out of the windows and doors.

  I just laughed behind my lips, not wanting to be heard or seen. Mama sat above it all and moved through the throng the way some folks say the Holy Spirit moves through a body. ’Til you’re dizzy from sacred electricity glowing in your skull. She walked through the room and breathed air into everything. My mother dispersed into a million atoms of stardust and would glitter over the crowd. And I was scared that if I laughed too loud or spoke up, the spell would break and this court would disperse back to brambles and dust on their own side of the river.

  There was no shame, no need to hide. I needed no mirrors of glass; I could see my own joy in the smiles of everyone around me. I could gather my skirt and feel the bones of the world creaking under my feet as we danced. And we danced every night ’til those beautiful black and brown faces melted from sweat and ecstasy and the sun hovered lilac at the horizon. One by one the procession of everyone disappeared behind the trees. The waters stilled in the morning. The mudcats hushed. And I would achingly crawl back into bed as the sun stood rosy above everyone.

  You knew where you were when you got there.

  You were home.

  Sweet and Sour

  The Teller house sat at the bottom of a hill that graded down in a lovely swoop. In those days, that house was whitewashed, and the curtains billowed and swam on the breeze from the open windows. The Tellers were one of those families: the ones that lived on Asher or Lincoln Street and wore spats and satin ribbons.