When he was at home last night, he had practiced Moonlight Sonata for his family, which was large and always growing. His eldest sister had four kids now, herself. They were good kids and sat still the whole time he played the piano. He noticed his little adopted sister sitting in the old rat traps, staring at a tintype. Then he played something more lively to cheer her up. Swanhilda’s Waltz. She didn’t look up. She was about to play her game. Wanhope’s second-favorite game was sitting among the rat traps listening to Laz play the piano and looking at the tintype. The piano stank of the white man’s house, a smell that every domestic in the Bramble Patch knew. One that irritated the nose. A smell that clung to most all of the women and girls in the Lyons house. Her mother hadn’t had that smell. That much she remembered: an earthy smell that was silken against the nose. Her mother’s photograph with eyes too bright and focused, “half-nekked” as Dinah would say, and happy. Wanhope remembered that she held tender sadness in those eyes. She would then begin the game: go up to Daddy King and say, “Daddy King, who’s this?” The picture was the beginning of her favorite semiological discourse. She asked not because she did not know, but because the conversation would always conclude with her mother. One of the few things in the world that was hers only.
Verity clutched Wanhope’s elbow and dug her claws into her brown flesh. “Stop.”
Wanhope looked up from Ovid. Her throat burned with a mix of kerosene lamps and overtalking.
“The children are away?”
Wanhope nodded.
“And my husband telephoned and ’s’not coming home for supper.” She rose and touched Wanhope with the red stump where a hand had been. She rubbed her cheek delicately and Wanhope leaned into the touch, knowing that she would go home that night reeking of a white man’s house. “Take me to the bath, then.”
Nocturne
This is what the people said: “The Barghest’s spent. His place. It’s old-fashioned. No grind, no bump. No sex, you know. Where you going to slow drag and hully-gully? Shit, he got two dead whores now. Go into the marshes at Tempess’s place. She has a good ear for music and good taste in liquor. Go listen to Lazarus play the piano. He’s the best of us all.”
The benefactor’s older daughter, Marie-Anne, the one from the door, burst into the parlor with her plain white ballet dress and bare feet, which smacked against the floor. Lazarus hated that noise. She, too, was brunette, but unlike her sister, she was nearly diaphanous. She took a bow.
For the first time, girls her age were wearing painted lips and eyes lined in kohl. That was in the cities. That was where she would be a barnstormer in her dreams as she listened to the Hungarian Rhapsody. She danced upon the wood of her floor, standing in first position and second and third, doing a pirouette to the sounds of a Negro playing piano in her parlor. What her father didn’t know was that these moments were as sacred as the last shafts of moonlight dancing up on the rooftop and more sacred than the tongues and utterances that she had heard her Pentecostal mother pray in. Her neck arched into an elegant bow, and she lifted her ears up through a line from the small of her back. A boy named Lazarus played the piano. And he was very good at it for somebody whose father picked peaches and grapes for a living.
Her little sister, Aimee, was almost deaf and watched the scene with ears pressed against the floorboards, following the rhythm that Lazarus tapped out with his feet. The little deaf girl looked at Marie-Anne and smiled so broadly that her cheeks threatened to rip in bloody gashes. Aimee could feel the music buried deep in her rib cage and rattling her bones, ready to spill them out in a game of craps. Since Lazarus, her father was letting her dance in the parlor or sit with company, when before she had to sit in the kitchen. Since Lazarus, her own world burst with drawings of amaryllis done in pastel chalk, made from the music he made with the piano. She would say to Lazarus, play something for Marie-Anne to dance to. And he would answer her back and play the music. He would not stare coldly at her lips as she spoke, nor wrinkle his nose, but would actually listen to her.
Lazarus played his way through the overture of Coppelia, almost dreaming that he sat in front of an orchestra and watched a prima perform soubresauts to the ballet of his fingers. In the dream, he wears a white tailcoat which he removes in a swoop, because the stage is his stage. In the dream, he hunches over the keys and begins a waltz. But then he switches mid-waltz to his favorite blues, and the people scream for him. Up in the balcony, Ma Lyons is smiling in a fine fox fur, the kind Mrs. Dorothée had in the closet. Dinah’s in a silk dress instead of cotton so old that sweat has turned the collar to rags. Daddy King is telling the white man next to him that he’s Laz’s daddy. Bessie is holding his baby in the front row, bouncing him to the rhythm. The prima is doing a grand jeté. Bessie’s brother Tommy is playing fiddle right next to him, because that’s what they do when they play the hully-gully.
But it seemed that Esther wasn’t in this half-dream. She was at the river, pulling up the mud and rocks and flogging herself bloody with them. She was in the sulfur plains, where music could soothe no longer.
Three things that happened back in 1915 catalyzed 1920: Lazarus asked his friend Tommy from down the road if he could fiddle with him at Tempess’s place, and they learned a version of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” that swept up everyone in fervor; soon, the Barghest noticed people weren’t showing up to his place no more. The second was what happened to Dr. Peter Ailey’s first daughter, Geraldine, just over the age of one. Verity was holding her tightly in the crook of her bad arm, and the child dropped and fell swiftly toward the ground. Luckily, Verity’s own mother was there helping her and cradled the little girl before she could smash her head upon the teakwood. Verity begged her mother not to tell her husband. But Peter knew even before he got home what had occurred. He raged against his wife’s stump arm, beating his belt into the air where a hand had been. “Of course you thought you could carry that child. What if Geraldine had broken her skull? What would you have done then?” (He was in medical school at the time and loved using his knowledge of anatomy to shame her.) The last thing was that D. W. Griffith made a horror film of real nightmares that set Mrs. Dorothèe Keith’s teeth on edge. Her littlest, Aimee, was a toddler yet, small and bright and going deaf, and her husband had invited a Negro boy into the home. She watched Lillian Gish fall down to the craggy surface below and screamed in the theater. A few women did. The New York Globe called it “the greatest picture ever made and the greatest drama ever filmed.” Dorothèe felt that in her stomach. Like a sucker punch.
Five years later, thinking back on when she watched Birth of a Nation, Dorothèe sneered at Lazarus. “Boy. My husband wants to know what you want for supper,” she said.
“I’ll eat anything, Mrs. Dorothèe. Is Mr. Richard going to be home soon? I don’t want to bother you with my practice.”
“Don’t you mind me with your practicing. My husband and me have investment on you doing well. So you keep practicing. All day if you have to.” She hissed at her oldest daughter to come help her in the kitchen. She watched the boy and thought of that movie.
Down the road, Geraldine Ailey’s shrill cry was echoing through the whole house. Verity grabbed her arm to stop her from running but Geraldine, now six, wrenched away, her blonde halo of hair flying behind her. Her younger sister Sally, aged three, was swinging a porcelain doll by the roots of its hair. The baby doll’s head cracked against the highboy. Sally was stark naked and joyously jumping.
“Damn Black girl. Ain’t here to help me!”
Wanhope was dreaming in the barn loft up with the barn kittens. Her jaw dropped and crude oil spilled from her mouth, dripping from her sanguine tongue. She felt the color build behind her eyes lavender and gold and navy. Oil pooled onto the straw. Her toenails dug into the wool of her stockings. The kittens scattered, save the gray tabby boy. Then she exploded—her body flew in all directions, a rainbow of crude oils spilled from her severed self. By the time Wanho
pe put her body back together, the sun had dipped behind the Aileys’ oak tree. She scooped up her kitten and placed him in her apron pocket. She ran into the Aileys’ house, coated in sweat and the smell of dinner.
“I gave you permission to get some dinner. Not to leave forever. I need you!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Will you give the babies some of my headache powder to cool them down? Send them to bed without eating.” The little one began licking the side of a sliver of porcelain. “Help me curl my hair for tonight. I want it in ringlets. Fifty-four of them. Do you understand?”
Wanhope grabbed the littlest one from her spot where she was stroking shards of doll face.
“Elizabeth.”
Wanhope jumped at the sound of her middle name.
“Thank you for helping me with Sally and Deenie today. When I leave for the concert, you may go home for the night.”
Mr. Richard was smashing potatoes between his teeth the way apes did, with particular attention to the fibrous skins between each grind of his jaw. The way Mr. Richard could masticate and talk so eloquently was proof to Lazarus that whiteness was so much different than Blackness. He was able to construct a world in which he would be so rich and elegant that the thought of eating and talking at once would not disgust him. His hands ached at the red band that was his knuckles. He heard Mr. Richard say something about playing “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” which was Mr. Richard’s favorite song. He often requested it. Sometimes, he would even allow Lazarus to bring his friend Tommy to fiddle with him. Not tonight. There was a local white violinist, Mr. Richard had noted, that would be playing with him. “Good man. One of the Croswells.”
Lazarus tried to lift his fork and found himself all-overish. The tremor started in his legs and raced up to his right hand. Mrs. Dorothée looked at him, eyes brimmed with tears. The fork clattered onto the china, chipping a little piece away from the Delftware blue. “It’s just nerves,” he said. “I just can’t eat too well.” Mr. Richard nodded. Marie-Anne giggled. Mrs. Dorothée clenched her fork tighter.
Sometimes Lazarus wondered if it might be all right for him to tell Mr. Richard more about himself. Laz hadn’t told his own father that his girlfriend was pregnant, but she was. And sometimes Laz imagined that he could sit with Mr. Richard on the nice couch in the nice parlor and talk about it. Mr. Richard would hand him a cigar and offer him a glass of red wine. Mr. Richard would place his hand on his shoulder, and Laz would ask: “What’s it even mean to be a father, Mr. Richard? Daddy King’s always too busy with working for Mr. Duncan and with all them damn children, sorry for the language, but they are damned.” They were eight in total; some born to his parents and some not, and that didn’t include the kids that Dinah had. And that didn’t include the town that looked up to Daddy King. He had a lot of children that way too. Mr. Richard gave his daughters a small forehead kiss good night, every night. No one was more loved in the world than they.
Lazarus dug his fork into the roast beef; the hair on the back of his neck prickled. He could barely lift his hand to his mouth.
Mr. Richard was talking too much about the white folk in Napoleonville and the money and the Negro College and how Lazarus would get out of the Bramble Patch. As if the Bramble Patch was something you could tangle your way out of. As if Mercy City didn’t run in your veins, or you could wean yourself from Tempess’s liquor. As if you were not scarred in the legs from getting switched by the white sheriff while going back home. As if you could ever take off your jacket in a white man’s house. Or as if the knot in your stomach—the one sloshing the bile around like your little brother sloshes a bucket of pig slop—was not every warning bell that you knew from the trains that passed through. As if you could ever leave the Bramble Patch. As if you could even try.
Compline
The Barghest had watched the world for over sixty years. He felt the pickling in his stomach turning him inside out. He remembered the Brick-man and Jessup, and ’Livia when she still had the O. His ribs threatened to lacerate his skin for their own pleasure. He liked pleasure, and silk and habanera dances and girly shows and the fresh blood of men. Shit, he loved it all. Where Mercer Street began, a little ways off from Freedom Road, he had slithered his way into the last crooked building on the wooden sidewalk. That was 1890. Now it was 1920. He had seen wars of a sort sprinkle the land with fresh droplets of blood and virility. He watched white men of note sneak into his shows; the preacher and his son made him laugh because they never saw each other, only the same woman. He had seen the last rag bands start to dwindle and had seen them begin. He knew bump. He knew grind. He missed both. Tempess had a good piano man who was young and had quick hands. She had no dead whore on her back, hunching her shoulders. She had no taste for flesh. She was not starving.
But had he waited a little longer, Tempess would’ve been without a piano man and soon without a fiddler, so she’d have dried up. The making of liquor would have dried her up, too, when the sheriff caught wind of it. Had he waited, a Depression would have socked her in the mouth straight, blunt force-like, and she would have hemorrhaged money until she drowned, and the river would surge up and down everywhere her and her family, Bertha’s people, lived, and would swallow up everything she owned.
The Barghest turned his nose up the hill to where the white folk lived. He smelled something…alone. Something unfettered to life, a pure piece of flesh, so sad. So very, very sad. Hollowed-soul, soured-soul blood. That was his favorite kind of blood. And so the Barghest stepped out of the what-if and followed the sugary delight of blood bathed in the pallor of the nearly new moon.
Could you picture him? Lazarus, coming forth onto the stage of a school auditorium, at the shoreline of an unending sea of faces so unlike his own they seem to be masks? Faces he recognizes but does not give names to other than sir or ma’am? Ready to tear down the black and white keys with scampering fingers, blessed hands arched and hovering, his shoulders in a hunch?
Lazarus felt the blood leave his hands. He was cold. The air sucked from his lungs. He looked at the notes on the page, looked at his violinist but could not put a name to his face.
Or could you picture him the way he has been engrained into little Aimee’s mind as she sits on her mother’s lap? Vertebrae jutting out into menacing little humps, fingers snapping the spine of his song book to a page where the inky darkness of the notes cavorts into the rests, small eyes against the blackest skin she would ever know darting to pick each of them apart? Her mother vibrated in pain. She would remember it, the tremor that ran across her hippocampus, seventeen years later, when she would return to Napoleonville, camera at her side, to capture justice. She would say to her sister Marie-Anne and to Deena, who grew up down the street, that she remembered her mother had been afraid of Lazarus. They would barely understand her.
“Who was Alexander to have a ragtime band?” Tommy Teller would one day say in an interview with Alan Lomax. “He wasn’t nobody for which the music could be named. Irving Berlin, he’s Russian Jew. He didn’t make that music. But folk think he did. ’Specially where I’m from. I hate that song. It soured my soul.”
The Croswell with the violin tapped his feet to lead in the music. For a moment, the black and white keys blurred into an image of gray from which the chromatic scale might appear in brilliant shades of the blues. Any minute now. Any minute now. The Croswell with the violin tapped his feet again, but Lazarus, he was stuck where his knucklebones had frozen in searing pain. Mr. Richard’s eyes grew huge—tall, like Wanhope would say. His mouth opened and his whiskers drooped.
“I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen. If you would be patient, I—” Lazarus stopped short as he heard his own voice. He what? Felt ill suddenly? Couldn’t play the piano anymore? Had a child on the way? Wanted to go to college so he and Bessie could get married and get out of the Bramble Patch? Believed that there was a place beyond the Bramble Patch for him to go in the first place?
He bolted from the piano bench.
Lazarus leaned against the outside wall breathing in shuddering heaves. He watched his hands shake and redden. He bit into his thumb, hoping to wrench it back awake, but he only drew blood.
“What are you doing?”
Mr. Richard gripped Laz’s collar by the front so his neck bulged over the fabric and he started to choke a little. “Mr. Richard, sir, please.”
The grip loosened a little. Laz opened his mouth and said his hands were run ragged and he needed a break for a week. He wouldn’t play at Tempess’s or anything, he just needed to pause. A few days. He was feeling ill in his stomach and his head and his hands and his mind. His hands were the worst of all. Hand-sick is what he called it. He was hand-sick. Mr. Richard would understand. Mr. Richard would know, because he was a good father, that Lazarus needed rest. Mr. Richard would—
These Bones Page 7
