Jezebel's Blues (22 page)

She didn’t know the exact logic that had led him to leave it for her, but she could guess. He’d lost his hands, his ability to play this beautiful instrument, and with that loss, he’d lost himself.

It was the most precious thing he owned, this guitar. Celia picked it up and held it against her and it seemed almost an extension of him, as if he’d left her his heart.

Holding the cold weight against her, Celia cursed her father. For Jacob Moon had written this story. Now it was ending. After finding love he could not accept, the hero would wander far and wide and die a bitter death, while the heroine pined away, alone forever.

“Oh, Daddy!” Celia cried aloud, her heart shattering. “Couldn’t you have written just one happy ending?”

E
ric made it as far as New Orleans before his exhaustion caught up with him. It was an almost instantaneous process. One minute he was driving mindlessly, without thought of his destination; the next he was nearly cross-eyed.

At the first exit off the highway, he found a motel, one of a friendly, family chain. In the faceless room, he collapsed without even removing his clothes—just fell onto his belly on the bed and passed out.

When he awakened it was late afternoon of the following day. His hands were stiff with the driving and the lack of movement afterward. They ached. He was dizzy, too, and he remembered he hadn’t eaten in a long, long time, save for a couple of oranges purchased at a roadside stand.

He needed food and a shower. He got to his feet and groaned at an ache in his lower back. The room was still and sticky and he flipped on the air conditioner.

His thoughts were frozen—his bodily needs came first. That was what the road did for him, he thought grimly, turning on the shower, kept him so physically miserable he didn’t have time to think about anything else.

As he tugged his shirt off, a waft of scent was released from the fabric, a scent of patchouli and roses.

Celia.

He was about to throw it into the corner, but at the last minute, lifted it to his nose. He buried his face in the soft flannel, inhaling deeply, feeling the press of her mouth upon his own, the give of her pliant body, the sound of her laughing…

Instead of throwing the shirt aside, he folded it and wrapped the plastic shower cap around it to preserve the precious scent.

The shower and a solid meal eased most of his physical discomfort although his back still ached vaguely. Long road trips, because he’d made so many of them, had begun to make his back ache—one of the reasons the Volvo with its heated seats had been so appealing.

Outside the restaurant where he’d eaten, he paused. It was summer. It was night. It was New Orleans. Somewhere, somebody was playing the blues.

He found them in a close little bar near the levee—a quartet playing Delta style. Eric knew the guitarist from a long way back when both had been perfecting their licks for just enough money to buy their beer for the night and a little breakfast the next day. On a break, Eric bought him a drink, and they hunched together over the whiskey, laughing about old times.

“So where you been, man?” Davis asked. “I heard about that accident, but you plain dropped outta sight.”

Eric lifted a shoulder. “Just been putting things back together.”

“You written anything new lately?”

“A little,” Eric replied, thinking of the song for his sister and the harmonica pieces that had been flitting through his mind.

“Come on up and share ’em,” Davis said.

For the first time in two years, Eric was tempted. He looked around the dark, softly smoky room, feeling the old longing to share the blues with a room full of people.

Davis waited, and Eric suddenly felt a swell of rightness—this old friend would know where to fill in with his guitar while Eric sang or played his harp. The music would not be exactly what he thought it was now; the crowd and Davis and even Eric’s mood would influence it. It was time. Giving Davis a nod, Eric said, “Yeah. I’d like that.”

And so it was that he found himself on stage for the first time since the night Retta died. For a moment, as the band assembled around him, Eric felt a little awkward without the ever-present shield of his guitar. Then he tugged his harmonica from his pocket and settled on a stool, and the stage fright passed.

They started with one of the pieces Eric had written a long time ago, the same song Willie had sung at the club in Gideon: “Jezebel’s Blues.” Hearing the words now, Eric had to smile at the memory of the homesick boy who’d written them. It was odd to hear someone else play the slow guitar he’d always played, but there was satisfaction in meshing the harmonica with that guitar, in weaving together the old with the new.

After a time, Davis nodded at him and Eric leaned into the microphone to sing. At the sound of his voice, a whoop sailed out from the floor and he stopped, grinning, then started again and kept going in spite of the whistles and catcalls from the crowd. He fell into the singing, into the songs, old songs and new ones, songs he had written and songs he hadn’t. Behind him and with him, Davis played guitar and sang harmony. Even Eric could hear how good they sounded together, and he wondered how it was they’d never blended their voices before this.

They played until they were sweaty with the humid air and exertion, sang until Eric was hoarse. And when they would have quit, the crowd whooped and hollered for one more. Just one more.

Davis nudged him. “Do your new one,” he said. “I’ll follow you.”

Eric pawed, then settled on the stool and lifted the harmonica to his lips, bending into it. He coaxed a slow, mournful pull of notes, hearing the nights he’d sat on Laura’s porch, wondering if she were alive or dead. It wasn’t what he’d meant to play, but years of living by intuition told him to go with it. He played the notes he’d composed in Gideon, first in Celia’s attic, then on Laura’s porch and finally on the banks of Jezebel that last morning.

There was loss and grief and despair, the long, long story of his life, the story of things never ending right, but always, always going foul. There was the ache of a motherless child and the pain of never settling. Davis’s guitar picked out a melancholy key and his slide whined over the strings in the old Delta style.

When Eric was sure the guitar had found the pattern he needed for background, he let the harp take him in another direction. Through the sorrow now wove moonlight, silver and soft—the sound of a fey slender woman, the sound of her laughing into Eric’s melancholy and breaking it up.

When it was over, Eric leaned into the mike. “That was for Celia,” he said, and climbed down from the stool.

The crowd let the band break. Someone dropped coins into the jukebox, and Eric blotted his face with a handkerchief. “Thanks, man,” he said to Davis. “It’s been too damned long.”

Davis chuckled and drank deeply of a glass of water. “You keep up on that harp, you’ll be another Sonny Terry one of these days.”

Eric made a dismissive grimace. “Listen, I was back home for a while, and there’s a boy named James who's going to be somebody on guitar. Another year, he’ll be ready to try his wings. I’d like to get him out here before the summer’s through to play a night or two and get his feet wet.”

Davis smiled. “Tell you what—I’ll make you a deal. You write some words to that piece you just played and let me work out something to get it recorded, and I’ll see your boy gets what he needs.”

“You got it.”

“I want you on harmonica,” Davis added as Eric headed off stage.

He lifted a hand. “I’ll be around.”

* * *

The satisfaction of his playing and singing, the pleasure of letting the blues flow through him lasted until Eric opened the door of his faceless motel room in the middle of the night.

He went in and closed the door quietly so as not to awaken the vacationing families all around him.

It was so quiet. No birds signing, no cats fighting, no river rushing by in a soothing song. Faintly over the hum of the air conditioner came the sounds of trucks on the freeway. A lonely sound. He tugged off his boots and socks and flipped on the television and set it to a cable station playing movies through the night. But it didn’t provide the kind of noise he was looking for and he flipped it off again.

There was no smell here, either. No scent of pine or frying bacon; no fishy odor hanging like a ghost in reminder of a good meal; no coppery scent of water or rich earth. Only a faint trace of some astringent cleaner and freshly washed linen—pleasant enough, but without character.

He dug in his backpack for another orange, some Oreos and his old standby, the rubber-banded paperback copy of Jacob Moon’s
Song of Mourning
. It had helped him pass more than one lonely night.

After a trip to the soda-pop machine for a can of cola, he sprawled on the bed and began to read. It was a little tougher this time to settle in. There were intrusions now. His life had shifted dramatically since the last time he’d tried his homesick cure. Tonight instead of getting lost in the story, he kept thinking of reading the original manuscript. He remembered the tiny changes that had been made in the publishing process’ shifts that aligned each word with every other word.

Celia’s face kept appearing as he read over the words: Celia laughing at him as he told his sad story; Celia weeping because she missed her father; Celia tossing her head with a wicked smile as she pinned him against the mattress with her lithe, lovely body.

But he’d spent more years than he could count trying to forget things that gave him pain. He concentrated. By the third chapter, he was firmly anchored in the Gideon of his childhood, and he immersed himself in the old magic.

It was a story about a boy from the wrong side of the tracks who fought like hell to be somebody, only to die a tragic, early death believing the worst everyone had ever said about him. It was a simple and familiar tale, and he read it less for the story than for the mood of home that ran through it like a song. Like the blues.

But tonight, as he read, Eric felt an embarrassed little shock over his identification with the main character. It seemed uncomfortably melodramatic.

Celia’s words wafted through his mind:
No wonder you like my daddy’s books. They’re written about your life, aren’t they?

In a way, the book was the story of his life, and particularly since this last trip home, it rang true. But as he read, he grew uncomfortable.

For every time the young man had a chance, he sabotaged himself. Eric had always known that, known that half the reason the character died tragically was his own fault. This time he felt a distinct annoyance at the hero, particularly when there was a woman in his corner, a woman who honestly loved him, who could have healed him if he’d given her a chance.

Whenever you get over feeling sorry for yourself, you know where I am.

With a sigh, he put the book down, pursing his lips as a new angle of the novel settled in, obvious as the nose on his face if he’d just come out of his brooding long enough to see it.
Song of Mourning
was a morality tale. It had a lesson to teach. Because Moon had been the writer he was, a member of the school of obscure lessons, it was a fable.

Eric chuckled, amazed he’d been so stupid all these years. The moral was simple. Believe. That’s all. Believe in yourself.

Jacob Moon had known a bit about the cruelty of small towns, Southern or not. He’d known about the fierce, biting gossip that occupied the minds of little people in a fishbowl where almost nobody had any money to spend, where the long bitterness of endless poverty lashed out at anyone who dared to be happy.

Moon had also exiled himself from the one place he loved. It made Eric sad to realize that, to realize that Jacob had been buried unimaginable miles from the soil in which his roots had been planted. Away from Gideon, Jacob had been lost, so lost that he’d killed himself rather than go on when faced with the loss of his wife.

Self-destruction.

Eric felt suddenly dizzy. He didn’t know—guessed that he probably never would know—why Jacob Moon had left Gideon forever. He could only see the end result.

Self-destruction.

That terrible night when Eric had stomped his foot hard on the accelerator, thus ending the only life he’d ever known and killing someone else was forever etched upon his heart.

He flashed back to that night, to the jeers of Retta from the audience, to the biting comments she had made in the car before the accident. He had seen so much of himself in her. In those moments before he’d stomped his foot down on the accelerator, he’d been thinking both of their lives were a joke. In fury and bleak despair, he had committed his own act of self-destruction.

He would pay the price for the rest of his life. He would always regret that he had been unable to save Retta, that indirectly, he had killed her.

But the clock, no matter how much he wished, could not ever be turned back. It moved only forward.

With a sense of extraordinary clarity, he picked up the book. Firmly, he wrapped the rubber band around it and settled it among his clothes in his backpack.

He was homesick as hell. He was always homesick when he left Gideon. He’d only left to begin with because his love of the blues had required him to leave its safe arms to seek his fortune. Over the years, to ease that ache, he’d convinced himself he hated it.

There were things he hated. The small-mindedness of some of its people, surely. The poverty that was undeniably part of the little town, that too. But he’d seen small minds in his travels. And poverty in the country was a far sight better than poverty in the city. At least there was clean air to breathe and the sounds of birds in the trees. Poor in the country meant there was still some dignity, some fresh food that didn’t come from the government. No machine guns in the country, either.

He’d sought his fortune. And he’d found it.

His sins and losses, when laid out side by side, balanced out pretty clean. He’d lost his hands and the guitar that had saved him. But he still had the blues in his voice, in his harp and in his soul, where the blues lived anyway.