Bone Music (19 page)

Somewhere in the night it came to Dan Alvarez that he had to go to New Orleans, but he never learned why. He had an intuition, and it went like this — he dreamed that he was made of music, and as the music sounded it rang out of the Mississippi Delta, just like the blues when men first sang it. Blues grew so beautiful as it flowered from the misery of the Delta, because hardship, poverty, and oppression are gifts in their own awful way.

They’re gifts because they bring the greatness out of all of us, no matter how they grieve us.

I want to be a hobo bluesman, Dan thought in his dream. I want to move from town to town like a no-account bum, and I want to play those songs so laced with magic that they change everything that hears them.

Dan had heard lots of songs like that on scratchy old records — old recordings full of mystery and magic, and something higher and more beautiful, something — something magic in those blues. Dan loved those blues. It was the ghost of their beauty that drove him into rock ‘n’ roll, but he never found the ghost in rock, no matter how he looked for it.

And maybe that’s the nature of the beast. Maybe that’s what it is — magic. Maybe, Dan thought, the blues aren’t just music.

Maybe they’re magic.

Then he was dreaming again, and he dreamed an awful weirdling dream where cruel gods walked the earth —

No, not gods, these weren’t gods but something less, they were petty godlets that run and hide when they see the shadow of the One True Lord —

And now in his dream it was 1952, and Dan stood among a crowd of great musicians on a high bluff outside Nashville, Tennessee, and all the bluesmen all the true bluesmen and women sang. . . !

Easter 1949

When the demons were gone everybody wandered back toward their rooms and bed, but Robert Johnson wasn’t tired anymore.

Not tired at all. How could he be tired, as frightened as he was? He wandered back toward the common house, and into its kitchen. He found the kettle and the tea, and he put a pot on to brew, and sat looking out the window at the night and the river and high among the stars the watchful Eye of the World.

Ma Rainey found him there a little while after he poured the tea. She took a seat not far from him and asked him what was the matter. It wasn’t a real question — just a way to start a conversation. Ma Rainey knew how he would answer long before she asked.

“I don’t know,” Robert Johnson told her. It wasn’t a lie, exactly, but it could have been more true. “Just unsettled, I guess.” He sighed, gestured at the teapot. “Pour you a cup?”

“Please,” Ma Rainey said.

Robert Johnson poured the tea. Leaned back in his chair to stare out the window at the Eye.

“It’s breaking again,” she said. “Did they tell you that?”

Robert Johnson felt a chill despite the warmth of the room.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “But I knew it in my heart.”

And that was true, too: he could feel the fissures in the lens of the Eye of the World as though they were flaws in his own heart separating from one another. He’d been able to feel them for longer than he could remember. Since the night Leadbelly tried to murder him? From the night he stood before the Pearly Gates, when he first knew redemption? Maybe he’d been able to feel the Eye in his heart from the day he first sang Judgment Day — it could have been that long, growing in him like a passion for the nature of the world.

“If you look closely at the Eye, you can see the cracks. Look, look Robert Johnson — they look like tears, don’t they?”

Robert Johnson looked, and he saw, and he told Ma Rainey that he did.

“You know,” Ma Rainey said, “that’s only one side of the Eye that watches over the river. The inside of the Eye is a portal that watches the world from Hell.”

Robert Johnson had heard that story when he was a boy. He said that to Ma Rainey.

“If you look directly at the lens and as closely as you can,” Ma Rainey said, “you can see Lucifer’s great throne room in the Mansion called Defiance. Every night ten thousand devils come to that room to batter on the Eye. One night will come, and they’ll break it through.”

“‘
And Hell will rain upon the Mississippi River, as the walls come tumbling down
,’” Robert Johnson said, quoting a phrase from the secret Book of the River (whose words are written on the heart of each and every bluesman who ever lived to die and sing again).

Ma Rainey smiled. She reached across the kitchen table to rest her hand on Robert Johnson’s hand. “We need you here, Robert Johnson,” she said.

Robert Johnson didn’t know what he could say. What he thought was, You know I can’t, but he didn’t understand why he thought those words, and how could he say such a thing when he didn’t understand the reason why?

“You don’t need me here,” Robert Johnson said. “John Henry lives up on this Mountain.”

Ma Rainey looked so sad.

“I wish that you were right,” she said. “But awful times are on us.”

Robert Johnson shook his head. “John Henry sang down the walls of damnation,” he said. “A man like that don’t need no help from me.”

Ma Rainey set her tea cup on the table, then turned to stare into the darkness. She was quiet for a long while; Robert Johnson knew she was weighing her words, measuring out what she could say to him.

“Last fall,” she said, “two beggars found their way onto the Mountain. They were dressed in humble clothes, and looked for all the world to be the kind of vagabond thieves you find skulking in the rail yards. But Charlie Patton saw them as they climbed past his shack, and he knew them when he saw them. Of course he knew them! Any deadman gonna know those two when he see them, because they were Dismas and Gestas, and those two were the thieves who died on crosses to the Right and Left Hands of the Lord.

“Charlie Patton saw them, and he called to them, but Dismas and Gestas ignored him. They do those things, you know — they wander about the world in strange and mysterious ways, doing the Lord’s own work. For as they died the Right and Left Hands of the Lord so they continue: they are His Hands from Kingdom Come, and they serve Him without hesitation.

“Charlie Patton did the only thing he could think to do: he sang a song he knew the King would hear, and in that song he told John Henry who was on the Mountain.

“John Henry sent me down to meet Dismas and Gestas. For all the good it did! They very near ignored me! I opened my arms to greet them, and they took my hands — and led me back up the Mountain to John Henry.

“They carried me up the steep side of the Mountain, past the village without a pause. When they got to John Henry’s mansion the doors opened spontaneously. All the doors in that place opened before them, and nothing anyone could do would cause a moment’s hesitation. Peetie and Blind Lemon tried to bar the door to John Henry’s sanctum, but the bars all fell away as quickly as anyone could lay them in place.

“Dismas and Gestas carried me into John Henry’s den, where the King sat in his great leather chair before his roaring fire, and when he looked up at them with his wide startled eyes Dismas held up a hand to silence him.

“‘
Tonight we stood before the Pearly Gates,
’ Dismas (who is also known as the Right Hand) said. ‘
As we watched Robert Johnson’s transubstantiation
.’

“‘
That great sinner’s heart redeemed him
,’ the Left Hand said. ‘
He saw his error and repented, and his redemption carried him to the bosom of the Lord.
’”

Ma Rainey just stopped there, as though she’d told the whole story and Robert Johnson was supposed to understand. But he didn’t understand at all. He was more confused, in fact, than he’d been before she started.

When he told Ma Rainey that he was confused, she sighed long and slow, as if she were disappointed in him. “I don’t understand,” Robert Johnson said. “Why would they tell you, tell you — ?” He tried and tried to finish that sentence, but he couldn’t because his moment at the Pearly Gate was a dear and secret thing to him, and it made him ache to try to speak of it out loud.

“Robert Johnson,” Ma Rainey said, “in all creation there were only six times where a soul has come back to this world from redemption. When Saint Peter persuaded you to return, he did it for a mighty purpose.”

Robert Johnson couldn’t argue with that — not least because he didn’t understand what Saint Peter did, or why, and he didn’t know what this world meant for him. “I guess,” he said.

“John Henry needs you, Robert Johnson. That’s what the Right Hand of the Lord told him: ‘This man has seven Mysteries,’ he said, ‘he has a gift unlike all others, and he has his redemption. The time will come when you will need him, and his nature is so changed you may not find him. You must call him now or you will never find him.’

“John Henry climbed out of his great leather chair, and he knelt before the Hands of the Lord. He thanked them for their guidance and begged them to enjoy his hospitality — but before he could finish they were gone.”

“Gone where?”

Ma Rainey shrugged. “Disappeared,” she said. “Vanished as suddenly as they’d first appeared below Charlie Patton’s shack.” She reached into her bag and brought out a pack of Kool Filter cigarettes; took one from the pack, lit it, and drew from it so hard the ember tip glowed bright with fire.

She let the smoke sift away from her in a long and billowy sigh.

“That smells so good,” Robert Johnson said.

Ma Rainey smiled.

“Share it with me, Robert Johnson,” she said.

Somewhere out on the Mountain the mockingbirds began to sing.

The Present

Emma screamed when she saw the Santa standing behind her little girl, and she screamed even louder when she looked down at Lisa and saw the dreadful apparition of the girl herself. Leadbelly dropped his guitar and kicked sand into the fire — kicked and kicked until the fire subsided and the darkness of the bluff enfolded them.

“Be very still,” Leadbelly said. “Don’t let them know if you’re afraid.”

Emma forced herself to stop screaming, and she tried to be still. But she was terrified — so frightened that she couldn’t stop trembling entirely.

“Don’t be afraid,” Leadbelly said. “I’ve got a light. I’m about to turn it on.”

“Please,” Emma said. “Please please.”

She heard a click, and now fluorescent light flickered from the tube of Leadbelly’s pocket lantern, on and off and on and steady now as the pinewoods filled with that pale blue fluorescent glow. . . .

“It’s all right,” Leadbelly said with a voice as soothing as good brown mash. “Ain’t no call to be afraid.”

As Emma looked around and around the woods, at the sky, at the river, at the shadowy pines, at the smoldering dead fire.

At Leadbelly.

And then she turned to look her daughter in the eye —

But her daughter was gone.

“Lisa!”

Gone, gone, gone, gone beyond the dark side of the moon. And no matter how they looked for her she stayed gone, too.

In Dan Alvarez’s dream it was September 1952 on a ridge above Nashville, Tennessee. Half a thousand men and women stood on that ridge beneath the moon and thunderheads. Some of them had guitars, some of them played harmonicas. Some of them played other instruments — some of them just sang.

A cloud roiled up to cover the moon, and now in the darkness the greatest of them all began to sing.

Oh how he sang! He sang a song they all knew in their hearts, a song Dan Alvarez knew in his heart, but no matter how they knew it not a one of them could have lined out a solitary verse.

Until they heard him sing.

Now the choir joined the King in song, and the ridge shuddered to hear them all.

As they sang the sky folded, roiled, and thundered, stormed and raged against the night. When the storm had shaken itself to dissipation Dan Alvarez could see the Eye of the World high in the clouds above the ridge, and when he stared into the Eye he saw Hell and the demon loa press against the lens from deep inside.

Dan Alvarez knew that tune. He thought, That’s Judgment Day, even though he’d never heard the name of that tune, because no matter what he didn’t know the song was in his heart just like it’s in the heart of every man woman and child who ever sang the blues.

But the song wasn’t Judgment Day. Dan knew that in his heart almost the moment he thought the words Judgment Day. It was a song as great and as deep and as powerful as that apocalyptic strain, but where Judgment Day is fire and brimstone calling up the end, this song was joy and redemption and the divine promise of a better world to come.

And then finally Dan recognized the song he heard in his dream.

“The Ode to Joy”! he thought, and he was exactly right. It was “The Ode to Joy” he heard, rebroken, syncopated, twisted, and remade into blues, but it was still Beethoven’s melody, beautiful as it was the morning that the master wrote it.

Now in Dan’s dream the moon rose high, and the sky began to close — and suddenly there came a great explosion, a powerful shattering of the night that sent electric fire in every direction.

When it was clear the sky had closed again, and the great ones lay scattered and broken across the bluff.

Just before Dan woke he saw a white boy come wandering through the carnage, and he recognized that boy. The boy’s name was Elvis Presley, and even if he had just a mediocre gift he was a figure charged with destiny.

Young Elvis Presley wandered among the strange unearthly fires still flickering on the ridge until he reached the centermost summit where the great King once had stood.

And there among those terrible unholy embers Elvis Aron Presley found the hammer that once rang like a bell.

He grabbed it and he ran — stealing a heritage that was neither his by right nor by legitimate assumption.

And then he ran for his life.

As well he might.