The Lost Songs (20 page)

Lutie opened Miss Veola’s little gate with unnecessary force and shut it loudly behind her. “Good evening,” she said, like a
trumpet. “Why, Professor Durham. And Mr. Gregg.” She used her Chalk voice:
Whaaah, Professah Door-Ham. Ayund Mistah Grayyg
.

Doria and Kelvin regarded her thoughtfully.

“Miss Lutie,” acknowledged the professor. “I was just about to ask Miss Doria about her own music.”

“Sir?” said Doria, grasping at last the value of Southern styles of address. So courteous and yet so distant.

“Mr. Gregg showed me one of your compositions, Doria. A person of your scope belongs in the High School of Performing Arts. Your talents are wasted at Court Hill High.”

I am lonely at Court Hill High, thought Doria. But I am not wasted. Musically I have moved a long way in a short time. And musically, Mistah Door-Ham, I am ahead of you. I own some of the Laundry List myself.

“Right now, on the organ,” said Doria, amazed to hear a Southern drawl in her own voice, “I’m doin’ some Buxtehude, a little Mendelssohn and of course Bach.”

Kelvin butted in. “You know, Doria, you want real music, you should come to Miss Veola’s church one Sunday. I’ll take you. Lutie, she can shout down that aisle.”

Kelvin would take her? Doria almost leaped on top of him so they could piggyback over to the church right now. “I can’t. I have a church job of my own.”

“Don’t sound so sad about it,” said Miss Veola. “You’re doing the Lord’s work.”

“For you, it’s probably the Lord’s work. But I’m just showing up. I love to play the organ and I love an audience. I’m not sure I love God. In fact, I usually forget he’s there, I’m so busy with the notes.”

This was very distressing. The ladies climbed right on board. A soul was at risk. They dug deep.

Professor Durham and Mr. Gregg gave up and left.

Lutie said suspiciously, “Doria? You offer up a little godlessness just to change the subject?”

Miss Veola said, “Shame on you, Doria Bell.”

“Way to go, Dore,” said Kelvin.

Kelvin enjoyed the scenery of the two girls. It tickled him that Lutie was associated with something called a laundry list. Lutie seemed more of a candidate for a Treasures of the Nile list or a Jaguar list. A Star in the Sky list. A How Many Guys Can Have a Crush on the Same Girl at One Time list.

In the long shadows of early evening, the two girls seemed to change colors. The white one went black and the black one went gold.

How beautiful the world is, thought Kelvin, utterly satisfied with life.

He turned to leave and saw Train, alone in the road, swaying like a cobra.

T
he sun had set.

The guests were gone.

Lutie turned on her pastor. “You had no right to talk to that musicologist.”

“Rights!” shouted Miss Veola. “You have rights to that music? What rights? You got a will, maybe? A last testament? A deathbed video?”

Miss Veola never yelled. Lutie was stunned. “No, ma’am. But it’s my music, isn’t it?”

Miss Veola lowered herself into a lawn chair. In the faint light of dusk, the pastor looked a hundred years old. “Lutie, Professor Durham is different. The other researchers were just wandering by. Your MeeMaw just stood there and looked ignorant until they were gone. This man will dig to China if that’s what it takes. But it won’t. He knows he’s on the right track. He’ll go from house to house. He’ll offer money or TV interviews or just a bottle of liquor. One by one, he’ll collect your songs. And then, Lutie, the Laundry List will be his.”

Lutie did not want to hear this.

“He’ll call them folk songs. Mabel Painter probably sang
them, he’ll say, but anybody could have composed them. All the women in Chalk did laundry, he’ll remind us. These pieces were probably composed jointly. Besides, he’ll add, Mabel Painter lived in the nineteenth century. This is the twenty-first. The songs are public domain.”

Lutie was filled with dread, as if she’d been walking through the woods and looked up to see a snake draped overhead.

“And then he’ll point out that he’s the only one who bothered to collect them. If the young Painter woman had cared about those precious songs, she would have done it herself.”

“Did he say that?”

“It’s the way of things. Music collectors have always scoured the countryside for folk music. Hungarian. Appalachian. When some old Eastern European peasant woman sang her lullaby or some old shepherd on a Scottish moor sang his ballad, you think the researcher took names? Wrote checks? No. He went home and presented the songs as folk music, meaning they belong to anybody and everybody. The copyright will go to the researcher. The way things are shaping up, Lutie, you’re going to be informed that the Laundry List was given to the community of Chalk over the years and now Chalk is giving it back. Perhaps its new curator will make mention of Mabel Painter, or Eunice, or you, and perhaps not.”

“That’s theft!”

“You won’t be able to prove theft,” said Miss Veola, “because you never established ownership.”

The word “ownership” was stiff and formal. Lutie hardly knew what to make of it.

Mabel Painter had owned so little.

Snatches of melody and words thrust themselves at Lutie. Some were notes she had forgotten. Some felt unsung, as if she possessed melodies she hadn’t heard yet.

Lutie saw Mabel Painter standing in the meadow, telling God that she did not want more scars.

Give me my star! cried Mabel Painter.

Give me my star! cried Mr. Gregg.

Give me my star! cried Professor Durham.

We all want stars, thought Lutie. Except maybe Train. Train might actually want the scars instead, like the scar DeRade has in the palm of his hand, proof forever that he blinded Nate.

“How can the Laundry List make him a star?” she protested. “The songs don’t have million-seller potential. They won’t work on some huge stage with a backup band and pyrotechnics. All they are is one woman’s hymn to her God.”

“So is every hymn and carol in the world. But the world sings ‘Silent Night’ a million times every Christmas,” said Miss Veola. “Lutie, I know you’re sick of me by now. But if you perform the Laundry List, it would fill our church. It would bring our people together. It would help the lost find God. It would bring joy and yes, it would bring money. But most of all, it would establish you as the source of the songs.” Miss Veola paused. Then she said softly, “You know what your grandmother wanted. For you to use your wood for something good.”

Miss Veola was referring to the saddest of the songs. The song where Mabel Painter admitted that a Negro laundry-woman wasn’t a real person with real feelings and real hopes. She wasn’t any different from a stick of kindling to heat the water. She was a laundry tool.

Lutie was always shaken by the presence of Jesus in the song. If Jesus was so gentle and if he was also the Lord God Almighty, how come Mabel Painter was just a stick of wood? Why didn’t he intervene?

Lutie could hardly see past all those notes. “There’s a song I half know,” she said slowly. “I can’t quite pull it back. It started playing inside me a few days ago. Do you remember one that starts with the words ‘Be you still alive’?”

Miss Veola took a long slow drink from her glass. By now, it must be all melted ice, and no tea. “I think we’ve probably lost a number of songs, Lutie. One I half remember is about six more days. It was a countdown song. The only day Mabel Painter could be off her feet was Sunday, the seventh day. So each day of the week was one fewer to wait for Sunday. But I don’t know the words anymore, or the melody.”

“What church did Mabel go to? The churches around here don’t seem old enough.”

“I don’t think they had a building, only an arbor. Vines on a trellis. I feel as if somebody told me the vines were wisteria. Would have been violet and mauve. Probably had birds nesting. I think they’d have sat on something, because they were laborers. It really was their day of rest. But there wouldn’t have been pews.” Miss Veola struggled to her feet. “I’ll give you a ride home, honey.”

Miss Veola had kept her Cadillac washed and polished and running for a quarter of a century. When she came out of her house with her purse and had locked the door behind her, they climbed in. Miss Veola gave her leather upholstery a little pat.

Lutie had a sudden vivid memory of MeeMaw sitting here in the front seat, and the two old friends giggling like seventh graders. “Be you still alive?” she asked again. “I have a few notes of it.” She hummed, but her memory did not locate the rest of the melody.

“You staying with Mika or Grace tonight?”

“It doesn’t sound like a hymn,” said Lutie. “And I feel as if you have to cry when you sing it. I think it’s a weeping song.”

“Which way am I driving, Miss Lutie?” said the pastor. “Tamika’s or Grace’s?”

“Aunt Tamika’s.”

They left Chalk. Miss Veola took a long slow turn and a long slow time.

“Maybe Aunt Tamika will remember ‘Be You Still Alive?’,” said Lutie.

A mile later, Miss Veola said, “I don’t want you to bother your aunt. Yes, it was a weeping song. No, it isn’t part of the Laundry List. Your MeeMaw songed that up.”

“MeeMaw wrote songs too?” Lutie was amazed and excited.

“No. She sobbed on the porch for years after Saravette left for good. And one day, the pain found notes.” Miss Veola turned into Aunt Tamika’s driveway and let the car idle. “You were a baby. Saravette was doing drugs and selling them, selling herself too, doing everything bad there was to do, and she and her mama had a terrible fight. Saravette stormed away and never came back. Never called. Never wrote. Never sent a message. Knowing how Saravette chose to live, and what she was doing to her body and soul, your poor MeeMaw didn’t even know if her baby girl was still alive. Eunice hid her sorrow
in her heart because it wouldn’t be good for her baby Lutie to be raised in all that grief. But it came out in song.”

In her youth, Miss Veola had been a singer, but youth was decades ago. She struggled for breath.