Bone Music (7 page)

November 1948

Blind Willie finally left his open grave an hour after midnight. For a few moments he considered heading to the northern outskirts of town, to find his mourning wife and comfort her, but when he thought on that long enough he knew that she could never take him in her arms again, because the death that separated them was a final thing no matter how he came back to the earth.

Later he reconsidered this, and went home to look for her, but he never should have done it. It happened just the way he’d known it would as he’d stumbled from his grave: she wouldn’t hear of him now that he was gone. And when he stood before her she took him for a ghost, no matter how he tried to reassure her.

When he thought about that for a while he decided she was right, and went back to the ridge over Memphis where he’d built the home that was his new existence.

But that was later — much later. That night when he left his grave he wandered into Beaumont, into the worst parts of town. He found a saloon there he never frequented, and it was doing a brisk business in bad liquor and painted women. He didn’t like that place at all, but he knew he had to go there. Because he knew what he would find there, and he knew he had to face it.

And he did face it. He only hesitated a moment outside the barroom door, and then he pushed in, past the drunkards and the devil-music and the party women with their wide smiles and their hearts and eyes so full of self-contempt; through the pool-hall on the far side of the bar, into the back room where the real money was.

He found Peetie Wheatstraw there, sitting at a table with five other gentlemen, playing cards for stakes even deadmen can’t afford.

The gamblers glared at Blind Willie as he burst into their room. One of them made to draw his pistol, but Blind Willie waved that threat away with a gesture of his hand.

“You woke me, William Bunch. Tell me what you want so I can return to my rest.”

Peetie Wheatstraw threw his cards down on the table and pushed his stake into the pot. “It took you long enough, Blind Willie,” he said. “You’re a stubborn kind of man.”

“You’re ignoring my request, William Bunch. I mean to get this done.”

Peetie Wheatstraw took Blind Willie by the arm and led him through the back-room door, into the bar. “There’s something you don’t understand,” he whispered.

Blind Willie didn’t answer that; instead he glared at Peetie Wheatstraw, waiting for him to go on.

“I can’t tell you here,” he said. “We need to go where we can talk.”

He led Blind Willie out of the bar, into the night; through the empty streets of Beaumont to the boneyard Blind Willie had walked away from not an hour earlier.

As they went the deadman who sometimes called himself the Devil’s Son-in-Law hummed a little tune, and though it was no melody Blind Willie could name, he recognized the tune.

Because it was the shadow of the music of the world, and Blind Willie was a part of it, same as you and me. But his part was a large one, very clear; it sang him like a refrain, some ways, because Blind Willie was a crucial bit of everything to happen.

Before they reached his grave Blind Willie knew what lay ahead of him, and he knew why he had woken. He knew Peetie Wheatstraw hadn’t been the one to wake him at all, but only a deadman come to greet him; he knew that he was damned to life on Hell and earth, no matter how piously he’d tried to live his life.

And he accepted all of that, because he had the Grace and Faith to accept the fate he never meant to find.

“Tell the King he knows where he can find me,” Blind Willie said. And then he walked away to find the wreck of his subsistence on the surface of the world.

The Present

As the summer wore on it grew hotter and hotter in the tenement — hotter than any Harlem summer Emma ever lived.

The heat went bad on Lisa.

Her skin drew chalky, greasy; her hair fell away in clots. Her eyes shriveled in their bony sockets until they hung free, trembling as she moved. The ichorous mound that once had been the cancer in her belly swelled and bloated till Lisa’s tiny desiccated form became a caricature of a pregnant corpse.

When the rot had all but consumed her, Lisa had a dream. In the morning, she told her mother about it.

“The Lady came to me last night, Mama,” Lisa said.

Emma Henderson frowned. “What lady is that, Lisa?”

“The Lady from my dream, Mama.”

Emma didn’t like it, not one bit. “What did she say, Lisa?”

“She told me not to be afraid, Mama.” She looked out the window. “I’m going to die again, aren’t I, Mama?”

Emma pursed her lips, set her teeth. When she spoke she spoke carefully, trying not to show how scared she was. “I’m not going to let you die, child,” she said. “Don’t you worry about that.”

Lisa took that in, but she didn’t look like she believed it.

“The Lady took me through a city,” Lisa said. “She held my hand and showed me all the stuff along the River. Factories and dockyards, old houses with the rot. One place there was a well covered up with stones, and she said it went so deep they drink from it in Hell.”

Emma rubbed her temples. She didn’t want to think about dreams like that. She didn’t want to know about them.

Not that she had a choice.

“By the well there was a man with a guitar,” Lisa said. “He played music so beautiful it made me want to cry.”

“Tell me,” Emma said. “Tell me what he sang.” She didn’t want to know the song, no more than she wanted to think about the dream. But she knew she had to hear.

“He sang about Damnation,” Lisa said, “and all about the Eye of the World. But before he told it all he stopped, and the Lady said his song was Judgment Day.”

She said that like her mother ought to know just what that meant, and Emma did know, of course, because everybody down home in the Delta knew there was a song called Judgment Day. But Lisa hadn’t ever gone down home, and Emma couldn’t figure where she could have heard of such a thing.

“Don’t you ever sing that song, child,” Emma told her daughter. “I don’t care why you think you need to. I don’t want you dreaming about it, neither.”

As if there was any way the girl could stop a dream.

“Yes, Mama,” Lisa said, obedient as ever, no matter how her mother asked a thing no child could deliver.

“It isn’t right, you growing up like this,” Emma said. “We’ve got to set this house in order.” And that wasn’t right, because the house was tidy as could be, no matter how the stink of Lisa rotting overwhelmed the air. “You need a normal life, child. School and play, Girl Scouts in the afternoon. You need to go to church on Sundays, and get right with the Lord.”

Lisa laughed when her mother said those words, get right with the Lord.

“I’m serious!” Emma said. “If we were home I’d take you to a revival tent!”

Lisa laughed and laughed, and after a while Emma started trying to think about the churches here in Harlem, and wondering if there was any of them that weren’t full of politics and welfare, and maybe it really was time to find religion.

But then Emma realized how wonderful it was to hear her daughter laughing, to see the girl’s dead-eyed face alive with sunshine and delight, and the thought of church got lost in the beauty of the afternoon.

By the time Emma found it again it was too late for any preacher in the world to help them.

Because everything went to hell early the next morning, and by the time the dust had settled nothing was the same. It started when Emma gave her girl a kiss on the cheek, early in the morning. It never really ended.

“I love you, darling,” Emma said, and she stooped and braced herself to give her putrefying girl a kiss. And she did it, too — but when she did it went all wrong. Big oozy flakes of the girl’s cheek came away on Emma’s lips, and before she could make herself be still Emma screamed and screamed again. It was too much, too damn much, and the faith that’d given her the courage to tell Mama Estrella to go away the day before evaporated in a binding moment made from terror —

And Lisa looked so hurt.

So hurt.

Then Emma got a grip on her heart, and she made herself be silent as she wiped the liquefying flesh away from her lips.

“We need to do something, baby girl,” Emma said.

“I know, Mama.”

Emma bit her lip and tried to think, but all she could think was how they had to clean her daughter up. The moment she had that thought she knew it was trouble, that it was the worst thing she could do. It ran against common sense, cleaning up a girl who’d begun to fall apart!

Emma shook her head and went back to the kitchen for more coffee.

Lisa followed her.

“I’m scared, Mama,” Lisa said.

Emma bit her lip. She wanted to wail, or shout, or — something. She wanted to find God and ring his ears for letting her daughter fall into such a state.

She really did.

And as she thought that blasphemy, the last bits of her faith slipped away from her so quietly she didn’t even notice.

She bit her lower lip.

“I’m frightened too, child,” she said. She kept trying to think. Rot was about germs, wasn’t it? And germs hate heat, and they hate disinfectants.

That was no help at all. What was she going to do, boil her daughter? Pickle her in rum?

And that was when it came to her, the terrible idea that she never should have thought.

Alcohol.

There was rubbing alcohol in the cabinet, wasn’t there? Emma stepped into the bathroom, opened the cabinet, and found a half-empty bottle of rubbing alcohol.

Not enough. Half a bottle of alcohol wasn’t enough to wash a girl falling apart with the rot. They needed more — a whole tub full of the stuff. “You wait here in the closet, baby,” Emma said. “I’ve got to go to the grocery.” She stooped, kissed Lisa’s forehead — and felt more tiny fragments of Lisa’s skin flake away on her lips.

They tasted like cured meat.

Emma tried not to think about the flavor, because the more she thought about it the more she wanted to get sick, but whether she thought about it or not the taste of preserved meat followed her all the way to the store.

And home again to Lisa, huddled and crumbling in her closet. Lisa was asleep there when Emma got back.

“Lisa?” Emma said. She pulled the clothes aside and looked into the closet. Lisa was curled up in the corner of the closet with her head tucked into her chest and her hands folded over her stomach. “Lisa, are you awake, honey?”

Lisa looked up and nodded. The whites of her too-small eyes were dull yellow. “Mama,” she said, “I’m scared.” She looked afraid, too. She looked terrified.

Emma bit into her lower lip. “I’m scared too, baby. Come on.” She put up her hand to help Lisa up, but Lisa didn’t take it. She stood up on her own, and when Emma moved aside she walked out of the closet.

“What’re you going to do, Mama?”

“I’m going to give you a bath, baby. With something that’ll stop what’s happening to your body.” Emma said. “You get yourself undressed and get in the bathtub, and I’ll get everything ready.”

Lisa looked like she didn’t really believe what Emma was saying, but she did as her mother asked all the same. When Emma got to the bathroom with the shopping bag Lisa had her nightgown up over her head. She finished taking it off and stepped into the tub without even turning around.

“Put the stopper in the tub for me, baby,” Emma said. She took a bottle of alcohol from the bag, carried it to Lisa.

And something down in her heart started shouting at her, telling her she was about to make a terrible mistake.

A terrible, terrible mistake.

But that was silly, wasn’t it? Silly. Lisa was sick and she was falling apart and Emma had to do something, didn’t she? Something, anything to save her?

The voice in her heart said it was better to do nothing, but that had to be wrong, didn’t it?

Had to be.

And so despite the best counsel of her heart Emma doused her daughter in spirit liquor.

Spirit liquor.

The old word, the real word, for the alcohol in liquor is spirit. The reason we use that word is lost so far back in time and drunkenness that very few recall it, but it’s no mistake — there’s magic deep in alcohol, and not just intoxication.

Lisa was a dead girl made live by necromantic sacrilege, as magical as anyone who’s ever walked the earth. When Emma washed her in that spirit liquor she made a mistake she never stopped regretting.

“This may sting a little,” Emma said. “Hold out your hand and let me make sure it doesn’t hurt too much.”

Lisa extended her hand, and Emma poured the spirit on her.

“What does that feel like?”

“It doesn’t feel like anything at all, Mama. I don’t feel anything anymore.”

“Not anywhere?”

“No, Mama.”

Emma shook her head, gently, almost as though she hoped Lisa wouldn’t see it. Not feeling anything? That was dangerous. The whole idea frightened Emma.

“Close your eyes, baby. This won’t be good for them even if it doesn’t hurt.” She held the bottle over Lisa’s head and tilted it. Clear fluid streamed out of the bottle and into the girl’s hair. After a moment it began to run down her shoulders in little rivulets. One of them snaked its way into the big open wound of Lisa’s belly and pooled in an indentation on the top of the cancer. For a moment Emma thought something horrible would happen, but nothing did.

Emma poured all ten bottles of spirit liquor onto Lisa. When she was done the girl sat in an inch-deep pool of the stuff, soaked with it. Emma — who still didn’t realize the awful thing she’d done — thought the girl needed to soak awhile, so she left Lisa in the tub and went to the kitchen to make another pot of coffee.

Poured a cup, sat in a chair at the kitchen table, and opened a magazine she’d bought three months ago and never got the chance to read.

Took a cigarette from the pack she kept on the shelf above the kitchen table, lit it, smoked. It’d been two months since she’d had a cigarette, and the pack was very stale, but Emma didn’t care. She needed a cigarette, and stale cigarettes were better than none.

After twenty minutes Lisa screamed. In the middle of her scream she abruptly went silent. Emma bolted out of her seat, rushed to the bathroom —

“Mama,” Lisa said. Her voice was so still and quiet . . . it gave Emma a chill. “I’m melting.”

She held out her right hand, and Emma saw Lisa’s too-thin fingers — they looked like wet clay soaked in water. Milky fluid dripped from them.

Lisa stood up in the tub, and slime drizzled down her butt and thighs. She glared up at Emma, and her shrunken little eyes turned hard and mean and angry, and she screamed again.

Where before she’d screamed in terror, now her scream was murderous rage, and Emma was certain the girl was going to kill her.

“Mama,” she shouted, and she launched herself at Emma. “Stupid, stupid, stupid Mama!” She raised her fist up over her head and hit Emma square on the breast, and hard. Harder than Lisa’s father’d ever hit her, back when he was still around. Lisa brought her other fist down, just as hard, then pulled them back and hit her again, and again, and again.

Emma couldn’t even move herself out of Lisa’s way. She didn’t have the spirit for it.

For a moment it didn’t even look like Lisa beating on her. It looked like some sort of a monster, a dead zombie-thing that any moment would reach into her chest, right through her flesh, and rip out her heart. And it would eat her bloody-dripping heart while it was still alive and beating, and Emma’s eyes would close, and she’d die.

“All your stupid fault, Mama! All your stupid, stupid fault!” She grabbed Emma by the belt of her uniform skirt and shook her and shook her. Then she screamed and pushed Emma away, threw her against the wall. Emma’s head and back hit too hard against the rock-thick plaster wall, and she fell to the floor. She lay on her side all slack and beaten, staring at her daughter, watching to see what she’d do next.

Lisa stared right back at her, her shriveled eyes and cracking lips contorted in a mask of rage. For a moment Emma thought the girl would kill her —

And then something happened on Lisa’s face.

Her expression shifted — crumbled, almost. Suddenly she looked all slack and beaten, and her legs dropped out from under her, and she fell to the floor.

She started to cry. Sob, sob, sob, big gasping tortured bleats, broken and pathetic and so sad it like to break Emma’s battered heart. The sound of it melted Emma’s terror, and after a moment turned it to tenderness.

And what could she do?