Bone Music (17 page)

Easter 1949

The snow was dry and powdery out on the Mountain, the same way it always is on winter afternoons; as Robert Johnson walked through it as he climbed the Mountain the stuff puffed and billowed like airy dust all around his boots. It was cold snow, he knew. It had to be cold. But it was so dry he hardly felt the coldness.

“The Mountain is beautiful,” he told Peetie Wheatstraw when they’d been hiking for an hour. “I wish I never had to leave.”

Peetie Wheatstraw smiled.

“Then stay,” he said. “The Hoodoo Doctors will surely make you welcome.”

Robert Johnson frowned. “I know they will,” he said. And he wanted to say, But I can’t stay with them, but even though he knew in his heart that he couldn’t stay, he wasn’t sure yet why that was.

“Don’t put your mind at worry,” Peetie Wheatstraw said. “There’s plenty of time before you leave. And if you leave you’re always welcome to return.”

Peetie Wheatstraw wasn’t telling any lie, but Robert Johnson knew that he was wrong. He dreaded to learn why.

“I’m serious, Robert Johnson. There’s a place for you here. It’s yours when you want it.”

Robert Johnson frowned. “I know there is,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

Neither one of them said much after that. Maybe because the Mountain was steep and tall and they needed to save their breath for the climb — and maybe because there was nothing left that either one of them wanted to say out loud.

Either way, it made their climb go faster. A few minutes before three o’clock they rounded the last bend before the hollow, and they could see the village with its thatch and wood and bake-mud houses, its swept yards and its two great common houses.

Ma Rainey met them at the edge of that village.

Now Ma Rainey wasn’t just any Hoodoo Doctor; she was one of the Seven Kings (though at that date there still weren’t yet seven), no matter how she was a Queen and not a King. She was secondest of all the Kings, and she answered to no one, not even John Henry his own self. In some respects she was his master, and some folks said she was his mistress. But they didn’t live together. John Henry lived in his mansion high on the summit of the Mountain; Ma Rainey kept a humble swept-yard shack in the village of the Doctors, and she didn’t live no way that anyone could criticize.

Ma Rainey smiled and she opened her arms to Robert Johnson. “Give me your hands,” she said, and she smiled as warm as sunshine in the spring. “I’ve wanted to know you for a long time, Robert Johnson. I’ve heard the most amazing things about you.”

Ma Rainey, she was so intense — Robert Johnson got bashful as a schoolboy when she looked at him that way.

“I can imagine what you’ve heard,” Robert Johnson said. “And I imagine it ain’t altogether good.”

Ma Rainey laughed, and her laugh was the sound of new leaves fluttering in the May breeze.

“And not altogether bad, neither, young man.” She looked into his eyes and she smiled again, and Robert Johnson knew she saw him all the way deep down into his core, and loved him faults and all. It made him feel so naked, the way she looked at him! Naked and exposed and touched, too, like something intimate had passed between them and he didn’t even realize as it happened.

Robert Johnson felt his cheeks flush, and not for the first time he found himself glad that his skin was so dark it didn’t show how red he felt.

“You’re a gracious lady, Ma Rainey. I’m pleased I have the chance to know you.”

Ma Rainey seemed to glow. “Why, thank you, Robert Johnson.” She let go of one of his hands and turned to lead him into the village. “You’re just in time for dinner,” she said. “Let me show you to the common house.”

Dinner was beans and greens and barbecue pig meat like you ain’t never had, no sir, nobody off the Mountain ever eats like that.

The Present

Some people say a kazoo ain’t nothing but a toy for children. Some ways they’re right, of course. Kazoo ain’t got much for range, and when you compare it with a real horn that old kazoo is kind of sad.

But it’s wrong, too. Music is what you make of it, however you go about it; and there aren’t many places where you’d use harmonica that a kazoo can’t serve you adequately well.

And even more than that, the kazoo is so simple and straightforward that it ain’t like other instruments. Most kinds of music measure craft as well as talent, but the toy kazoo is so simple that it measures talent plainly.

Lisa played and played that toy kazoo all the way her mama drove from Johnson City west and south to Greenville. As she played her natural talent bloomed, and by and by the strangest consequences happened on the roads around them.

Easter 1949

For Robert Johnson, the strangest thing about dinner in the common house of the village on the Mountain was meeting up with Sonny Boy Williamson again. He hadn’t seen Sonny Boy since that awful awful morning on the bluff over Greenville, but the time they’d spent together before that morning had left a mark on Robert Johnson, and he thought of Sonny Boy most kindly and quite often. When he saw him as a deadman Hoodoo Doctor (and at an age so young!) he mourned a little. But the striking thing about Sonny Boy wasn’t his metamorphosis past death, nor even the frightful tale he told when he described the night a robber murdered him in Chicago.

The most frightful thing was the look in Sonny Boy’s eyes.

He looked haunted — burned and tortured to his core, as though he’d spent a thousand lives of torment in the cruelest parts of Hell.

“Sonny Boy,” Robert Johnson asked, “what the hell has happened to you?”

Sonny Boy pretended like he didn’t understand that question; he just retold the story of his murder, and how his partner Big Joe Williams gave up music after Sonny died.

“I heard that,” Peetie Wheatstraw said, and he sounded very sad.

Big Joe Williams was in the car with Peetie Wheatstraw when Peetie died in that car wreck, and because there were no next of kin Big Joe inherited Peetie’s guitar. He took it north with him when he went to Chicago.

Chicago was where Big Joe got hooked up with Sonny Boy Williamson. Big Joe played Peetie Wheatstraw’s guitar and Sonny Boy played the harmonica he’d took to when his guitar began to give him fits, and together they played the clubs and juke-joints. Three times they recorded, but none of those recordings ever saw the light of day.

God willing, no one alive will ever hear a record pressed from those recordings.

Because strange things happened in those sessions, and the happenings left their record on the tape. The folks who’ve heard the master say the music itself is haunted — they say hoodoo comes afire when that record plays aloud, just as it burned when Big Joe and Sonny Boy played live in those last years of Sonny’s life.

But where the live sessions were fantastically haunted, eerie and seductive, the haunting on the tape is a horror that torments all who hear it.

“Big Joe going to be okay, Peetie,” Sonny Boy Williamson said. “I know he is.”

Peetie Wheatstraw nodded. “I hope you’re right.”

Robert Johnson cleared his throat. “You still haven’t told me, Sonny,” he said. “How come you look so — haunted?”

For the longest time the whole damn table went so quiet you could hear the sound of snowflakes on the wind — and then finally Sonny Boy broke the silence.

“That’s right,” he said. “And I ain’t going to tell you, either.”

Ma Rainey — who sat at the far end of the table — cleared her throat. “I hear you’ve retaken to performing, Robert Johnson,” she said.

Robert Johnson pushed his plate away. “I play now and then,” he said. “It hasn’t caused me any problem.”

“I heard him,” Peetie Wheatstraw said. “His gift has grown in the years since he was alive.”

“Is that so?” Ma Rainey asked.

Robert Johnson shrugged. “You’re very kind,” he said to Peetie Wheatstraw. “I try to get along.”

Ma Rainey smiled. “I heard a tale from Furry Lewis,” she said, “himself a talent of no small measure. You know he sweeps the streets of Memphis? He’s heard you many times, Robert Johnson. He recognized you the day you reached that town.”

“I know a street sweeper,” Robert Johnson said, “and I noticed he had a gift about him. But I never heard him play.”

“Someday you will, I think. His gift is very fine.”

“If you say it, Ma Rainey, then it surely must be so.”

Ma Rainey laughed, and her laugh was a song that Robert Johnson wanted to hear forever. “Robert Johnson!” she said. “I hope your faith in me won’t turn out to be mistaken.”

“I know it’s not.”

She laughed again, and Robert Johnson realized that he’d begun to fall in love with her. He wondered if that was wise, or even appropriate.

“I want to hear you play, Robert Johnson. Peetie Wheatstraw and Furry Lewis have spoke of you so highly! I have to hear you for myself.”

“I’ll do that, if you like,” Robert Johnson said.

“It would please me,” Ma Rainey said.

When dinner was over and the table was clear Ma Rainey built a great fire in the potbelly stove at the center of the common house, and half a dozen Hoodoo Doctors brought out their guitars. But they didn’t play themselves. Instead they waited for Robert Johnson.

Robert Johnson didn’t hurry. He spent a long time tuning his guitar, and then he just held the guitar for the longest time, warming his hands to the strings. When he finally played he played good God-fearing tunes, and that surely made three Hoodoo Men discomfortable. He played “When the Saints Come Marching In,” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” fast like blues, not gospel-slow the way most people play it. When those were done he thought a long time before he played “Let Your Light Shine on Me,” which most people know rewritten and abused as “Midnight Special,” even though it’s really a hymn about the light from God’s lighthouse. Robert Johnson didn’t play it exactly the way Blind Willie played it on the back side of the same record that had “God Don’t Never Change,” but he played a lot more like Blind Willie than he’d played when he was alive.

When he was halfway through “Let Your Light Shine on Me,” Sonny Boy Williamson took up his harmonica and began to accompany him; when he got to the next chorus three of the hoodoo men jumped in to play backup with their guitars.

“Shine on,” Robert Johnson sang, “shine on! Let the light / from the lighthouse / shine on me!”

And then the room went quiet, and Robert Johnson realized that the place was all-but-glowing; the air around them was dense and warm, pure and Godly with the presence of the Lord.

The silence lasted for the longest while. It was Sonny Boy Williamson who finally broke it. “You’ve grown, Robert Johnson,” he said. “You’ve grown in ways I can’t begin to measure.”

Someone said yeah, and someone else said, it’s true, it’s true. “I thought the giftie was going to speak to us,” Ma Rainey said, and Robert Johnson blushed again, and he felt very shy.

Robert Johnson and Peetie Wheatstraw spent that night in guest rooms at the common house. Up until the small hours of the morning Robert Johnson slept as well as he ever did in all his days. Of course he slept that well! That Mountain was a special place, and the village was a special place upon it. The common house was more special still, for it held the warmth and good will that all common houses hold. If there is a place in all the world where a body can sleep secure and well-assured, it is that house upon that Mountain.

But three hours after midnight someone screamed, shattering the silent night, transforming the dreamy village of the doctors into a nightmarish place.

“What is it?” Robert Johnson shouted as the sound of the scream woke him. He threw off his covers, found his boots beside the nightstand, and pushed them on.

No one answered his question, and for a long moment he began to think he’d dreamed the sound. But then he heard another scream. This scream was nothing like the first — nothing at all like the first. Robert Johnson recognized it, even though he’d hardly spent a day in Hell: it was a demon’s scream, shrill and piercing, inhuman and bizarre.

It ain’t fit for no living man to go challenging a devil, but Robert Johnson didn’t think far enough ahead to be scared. Even if he had thought he probably would have done the same thing he did that night — throw on his coat, hurry out the door of the common house, into the village square.

When he got to the square he saw fiery lights burning in Sonny Boy Williamson’s shack, and went to investigate them. He could have guessed what he’d find, and maybe a part of him did guess — he’d never heard about the devils who’d tormented Sonny since that morning over Greenville, but it was of such a cloth with Robert Johnson’s life that the knowledge was very near a part of him.

The door to the shack was open when Robert Johnson got to it, and there were half a dozen people standing by the entrance. Inside there was a hellfire burning all around Sonny’s bed, and Sonny his own self was on fire. Three devils danced in and all around that fire, tormenting Sonny like he’d chose his lot to be eternal pain among the damned.

“They shouldn’t be here,” Robert Johnson said. “Devils can’t go walking in the world of men.”

The hoodoo lady who stood beside him scowled. “You cracked the Eye of the World, Robert Johnson. The Lady pressed the pieces back together, but every day the devils try to cut the bonds she tied around it.”

“He broke the Eye of the World?”

“No, he hasn’t broke it, yet. But the cracks are wide enough to let demons slip onto the Mountain.”

Robert Johnson pushed his way through the crowd by the door, walked across the shack to stand beside the burning bed.

“Get on with you,” he said to the devils. “You’ve got no business in this world.”

The devils jeered; one of them spat grey crud into Robert Johnson’s eye.

“Damn you,” Robert Johnson shouted. “Damn you to Hell.” He grabbed the spitting demon by the throat, planning to lift it off its feet and throttle it —

And the most amazing thing happened.

Where Robert Johnson touched the devil its foul flesh seared — boiled and broiled and burned away like putrid fat when you drop it in a vat of acid.

Those devils should have known to run the moment that they saw Robert Johnson. No devil can ever stand against a man who’s found salvation, and they all cower before the ones who’ve been redeemed. Robert Johnson had stood before the Pearly Gates of Heaven, and he’d touched them with his good right arm.

But devils lose their sense in the heat of the moment, and those creatures were no exceptions. Three of them tormented Sonny Boy as the fourth, burning in Robert Johnson’s grip, thrashed and screamed. Robert Johnson lifted it into the air, and the creature tried to plead for mercy, but the words burned away before anyone could hear them.

“I said, ‘Get on with you,’ devil. And I meant it.” Robert Johnson hefted back and threw the awful creature with all the force he could muster; the devil went sailing across the shack. It would have hit the south wall if it hadn’t vanished in midair.

The three tormenting Sonny vanished only a moment after the first.

When they were gone the only sound in the shack was Sonny Boy gasping for air, still trying to find his breath — deadmen don’t need air, but the reflex to breathe persists in many of them, and commands them in some moments of extremis.

And then a woman said, “I told you he could exorcise them,” and Robert Johnson looked up to see it was Ma Rainey speaking about him. She smiled when she saw he had his eye, and something in her smile made Robert Johnson feel as silly as a schoolboy.