Searching for Caleb (36 page)

   From four a.m. till five he slept, dreaming first of a cobbled street down which he ran, more agile than he had been in years; then of fields of black-eyed Susans; then of grim machinery grinding and crumpling his hands. He awoke massaging his fingers. The ache was always worse in the early morning hours. He lay watching the darkness lift, the ceiling whiten, the sky outside the one gigantic window grow opaque. The tossing forms around him stilled, signifying wakefulness, although none of them spoke. This was the hour when old men gave in to insomnia, which had been tracking them down all night. They would rather not admit their defeat.

   They lay gritting their gums together, tensed as if on guard, betraying themselves only by a dry cough or the occasional sound of one foot rubbing against the other.

   Caleb was stillest of all, but now "Stone Pony Blues" was spinning between his ears.

   At six o'clock the matron came to snap on a switch. Long after she had gone, fluorescent tubes were fluttering and pausing and collecting themselves to fill the room with glare. The sky appeared to darken again.

   Morning came later now; it was fall. In December he would have been here seven years and he knew every shadow and slant of light, all the sounds of night and morning and mealtimes, which he tabulated with a sense of contentment.

   Those who could manage for themselves began to struggle out of bed and into their bathrobes. Caleb's bathrobe was a rubberized raincoat, whose belt he tied clumsily without moving his fingers. He had asked Roy's wife Luray for a real bathrobe this coming Christmas and he was fairly certain she would bring him one. He slipped his feet into paper scuffs and went off across the hall to the toilets. Already a line had formed. While he waited he hummed. The old men went on discussing their constipation, indigestion, leg cramps, and backaches. They were used to his humming.

   For breakfast there were grits, shredded wheat biscuits, and coffee. The men sat on long wooden benches, eating from tin plates with compartments.

   The women sat on the other side of the dining hall. They could have mingled with the men if they wished but they didn't, perhaps preferring not to be seen in their flowered dusters, with their veiny white legs poking out and their scalps showing through the thin strands of hair.

   Caleb, however, bowed and smiled in their direction before taking his place on a bench.

   After breakfast they went to the social room. Some watched television, most just stared into space. Those who were crippled were wheeled in and parked like grocery carts. A gin rummy game started up in one corner but lapsed, with the players merely holding their cards and sitting vacantly as if frozen. A man with a cane told another man how his son had done him out of a house and five acres. Caleb himself did not have anyone to talk to at the moment. His only friend had died in August. Jesse Dole, a horn player who had been recorded several times in the days when you blew into a large black morning glory and it came out of another morning glory in someone's parlor. They used to sit in this very spot between the radiator and the Formica coffee table, arguing the fine points of their different styles of music. Then one night Jesse died and they collected him in his bedsheet and swung him onto a stretcher, leaving Caleb to spend his days all alone with the vinyl chair beside him empty. The others thought he was a little odd. They didn't have much to do with him. But Caleb was accustomed to making friends with anyone, and he knew that sooner or later he would find somebody or somebody would find him, maybe some new man coming in with new stories to tell. Till then, Caleb sat tranquilly in the social room with his knotty hands resting on his knees and his eyes fixed upon the green linoleum floor. For lack of anything else he had begun thinking back on his memories, which wasn't like him.

   He had never been a man to dwell on the past. Leaving places, he forgot them, always looking ahead to the next; but he had supposed that someday he would have the time to sit down and take a look at where he had been and this must be it.

   New Orleans in the early part of the century: jitney dances at the Okeh Pavilion and the faint strains of quadrilles, schottisches, and polkas, and musical beggars one to a block playing anything that made a fine noise. White-Eye Ramford bowling along the sidewalk with his buckle-kneed gait, plucking notes like little golden fruits and singing and stumbling so you thought he was drunk, till you saw his flickering black paper eyelids and the blind, seeking roll of his head. He had lost his sight at twelve or maybe twenty, his stories differed; and by the time he reached middle age he should have learned how to navigate but he hadn't. He was hopeless. A plump, clumsy, hopeless man with a mild face, wincing when he stumbled and then moving on, resigned, plucking more notes from his cracked guitar. He wore a ragged white carnation in his buttonhole, and a derby on his head. It was the fall of 1914. Caleb was on his way home from the sugar refinery and he stopped and stared. Then he followed behind. Till the blind man called, "Who that?" and Caleb melted into a doorway. The next day, the same street, Caleb brought along his fiddle.

   When he heard the guitar he started playing. High haunting notes wailed and rose, commenting on the tune, climbing behind it. He had known immediately what this sort of music required. The guitar readjusted, making way for the fiddle, and the two of them continued down the street.

   Someone dropped a coin into a lard bucket hanging from the guitarist's belt. "Thank you," said Caleb, always well mannered. The guitarist spun around. "White man?" he cried. Caleb was so pleased at his surprise that he hardly noticed he was left standing foolishly alone. He was certain (because he wanted it so much) that the two of them would meet again, and that he would go on playing his fiddle behind the cracked guitar until he was accepted. Or tolerated, at least. Or recognized to be unavoidable.

   In 1912 or 1913 you could run into Caleb Peck in just about any sporting house or dance hall in the city, always propped against the piano or the edge of the bandstand, puzzled and wistful, worn down from his menial daytime job, hoping to be allowed to fill in for some musician, though no one was that eager to have him. After all he did not play any brass, and most had no use for a fiddle. As for piano, he was a musical Rip Van Winkle. He had learned from a man who left New Orleans in the nineteenth century, when jazz was still spelled with two s's. So in 1912 and 1913

   Caleb merely hung around the edges of places, with a thin, strained face from so much listening, from absorbing so much, from trying to understand. But in 1914 he discovered the blues, which he understood instantly without the slightest effort, and for the next twenty years you could find him in the same small area of the Vieux Carre, linked to a blind man by a length of twine and playing a fiddle above a slippery song.

   While he stared now at the streaks of detergent on the green linoleum, he could hear White-Eye's loopy thin voice and the twang he made sliding a bottleneck down the strings of his guitar. He sang "Careless Love" and

   "Mr. Crump." He sang what Caleb made up- "Shut House" and "Whisky Alley" and "Cane Sugar Blues." Then "The Stringtail Blues," which some people credited to Caleb too but it was plainly White-Eye's, telling how a blind man felt leaning on other people. Caleb's fiddle shimmered and lilted, the guitar notes thrummed beneath it. Caleb had turned shabby, and not quite clean. It took money to be clean. He was surprised sometimes when he caught sight of himself in a window: that lanky man in a grimy frayed suit. Often he bore welts from the bedbugs in his rooming house, where he continued to live alone, unmarried, year after year. He had a great many friends but they were mostly transients, disappearing unexpectedly and resurfacing sometimes months later and sometimes never. Only White-Eye was permanent. Yet you could not say that they were friends, at least not in any visible way. They hardly talked at all. They never discussed their personal affairs. But some people noticed how their two stringed instruments spoke together continuously like old relations recollecting and nodding and agreeing, and how when Caleb and White-Eye parted for the night they stood silent a moment, as if wishing for something more to say, before turning and shambling off in their separate directions. At night White-Eye went to a wife he never named and an unknown number of descendants. Caleb went to work as watchman in a coffee warehouse; otherwise he would have starved. (He took no more than a deceptive jingle of coins from the lard bucket.) For twenty years he existed on four hours of sleep a night. He did it for the sake of a single body of music: those peculiarly prideful songs celebrating depression, a state he had once known very well. He could no longer imagine any other kind of life. If you asked where he came from, or who his family was, he would answer readily but without real thought. He never pictured the city he named or the people. His mind veered away from them, somehow. He preferred the present. He was happy where he was.

   The other street musicians dwindled to a handful, and Storyville was closed and the jazz players went off to Chicago or the excursion boats or the artificial bands hired by debutantes' mothers. But White-Eye and the Stringtail Man continued, supporting themselves more or less even through the Crash in 1929. They had become a fixture.

   Though not famous, they were familiar; and the poorest people were willing to give up a coin in order to keep the world from changing any more than it already had.

   In 1934, on a Monday morning very early in the year, Caleb set out searching as he always did for the first faint sound of White-Eye's guitar. (Their meetings were never prearranged. You would never suppose, at the close of a day, that they were planning to see each other tomorrow.) But he had not gone two blocks when a brown woman wearing a shawl came up and touched the scroll of his fiddle, and told him White-Eye was dead. She was his widow. On the very morning of the wake she had taken the trouble to locate Caleb and break the news and invite him to the funeral-a fact that he appreciated, though all he did was nod. Then he went home and sat for a long time on his bed. He wouldn't answer when his landlady called him. But he did attend the funeral the following afternoon and even accompanied the family to the cemetery, a remote little field outside the city. He stood at the edge of the swampy grave between two tea-colored girls who stared at him and giggled. Throughout the ceremony he kept brushing his hair off his forehead with the back of his hand. He was, by then, nearly fifty years old. It was the first time he had stopped to realize that. , Now Caleb traveled the streets alone. Since he had never been a singer he merely fiddled. (No one guessed that White-Eye's voice still rang inside his head.) The solitary strains of his music had a curious trick of blending with street sounds-with the voices of black women passing by or the hum of trolley lines or a huckster's call. First you heard nothing; then you wondered; then the music separated itself and soared away and you stood stock still with your mouth open. But when people offered him a coin, moved by what they thought they might have heard, they found no tin cup to drop it in. They tucked it into his pockets instead. At night Caleb would find all his pockets lumpy and heavy and sometimes even a crumpled paper bill stuck into his belt. He could not always remember where it had come from. He merely piled it on top of his bureau. But as the months passed the dazed feeling left him, and one noon when he was sitting in a cafe eating red beans and rice he looked up at the waitress pouring coffee and realized that life was still going on.

   He stayed in New Orleans two more years, and might have stayed forever if he had not fallen in with a pair of cornetists who talked him into taking a trip to Peacham. Peacham was a small, pretty town just to the north, still suffering like anyplace else from hard times and unemployment. But the mayor had hit upon a solution: he planned to make it a resort.

   (Nobody thought to ask him who would have the money to go there.) He published a three-color brochure claiming that Peacham had all the advantages of New Orleans with none of the crowds or city soot: fine food, lively bars, two full-sized nightclubs rocking with jazz, and musicians on every street corner. Then he set to work importing busloads of chefs, waitresses, and bartenders, as well as players of every known musical instrument. (In all the native population there were only three pianists-classical-and the minister's daughter, who played the harp.) References were unnecessary. So were auditions. In a creaky wooden hotel on the wrong side of town musicians were stacked on top of one another like crated chickens, venturing out each morning to look picturesque on designated corners. But there was no one to drop money in their cups. The only visitors to Peacham were the same as always-aging citizens' grown sons and daughters, come to spend a duty week in their parents' homes. One by one the new employees lost hope and left, claiming they had never thought it would work anyhow. Only Caleb stayed. He had landed there more or less by accident, reluctant to leave New Orleans, but as it turned out he happened to like Peacham just fine.

   He figured he could enjoy himself there as well as anyplace else.

   Now he worked days as janitor for an elementary school, and in the evenings he played his fiddle on the corner he had been assigned. He ate his meals at Sam's Cafe, where a large red kind-faced waitress gave him double helpings of everything because she thought he was too skinny. This woman's name was Bess. She lived just behind the cafe with her two-year-old boy. It was her opinion that Caleb's hotel charged too much for his room, and bit by bit she persuaded him to move in with her instead. It wasn't hard. (He was so agreeable.) Before he knew it he found himself settled in her kerosene-lit shack, in her brown metal bed, beneath her thin puckered quilt, which smelled faintly of bacon grease. If she was, perhaps, not the one he would have chosen out of all the women in the world, at least she was cheerful and easygoing. Sometimes he even considered marrying her, in order to give her son Roy a last name, but they were already so comfortable together that he never got around to it.