Nighthawk Blues (16 page)

“Your husband is a very sick man, Mrs. Jefferson,” said the doctor in clipped precise tones.

Mattie fell back on her chair as if she had been struck. “Is he going to be all right, Dr. Bontemps?” she said.

“Well, I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that. He really ought to be in the hospital, where he could be looked after properly. He’s had a number of incidents now, and, while he’s comfortable enough at this stage, it’s hard to judge the extent of neurological damage. Until we can get him in the hospital and run some tests—”

Mattie was wringing her hands. “You think we ought to get him in the hospital then, Doctor?” Jerry said, just to fill the silence.

The doctor looked through him blankly. “Well, from what you say his antipathy toward hospitalization—a trait which, I might add, is not uncharacteristic of his
’generation—
would not seem conducive to the establishment of good medical routine.
Certainly
he should be in the hospital, but it seems as if he would be fighting us every step of the way, and what he needs right now more than anything else is peace of mind. That plus the determination to follow certain prescribed medical routines with-out which all the hospital tests in the world aren’t going to do him any good. Do you understand what I’m saying, Mrs. Jefferson?” Mattie nodded automatically and looked at Jerry. “He must be put on a diet which will have to be strictly adhered to. No alcohol. No fried foods. Vastly lower the intake of salt. He must exercise regularly and take off, oh, I would say, about forty pounds. If he doesn’t follow the prescribed routine, he will simply keep having these attacks, no matter what the tests say, and the next one, or the one after that, could very well be the one that does the trick, that is, kills him.”

Mattie gasped. Jerry glared at the doctor. He thought he was laying it on a little thick. Evidently the doctor must have thought so, too. “The reason that I say all this to you is to stress how very important it is to make Mr. Jefferson understand the absolute necessity to follow without deviation doctor’s orders.”

Mattie was shaking her head, still not crying. “He ain’t gonna follow nobody’s orders. He ain’t never followed anybody’s orders yet, and I just know he ain’t gonna start now.”

“Well, you’re just going to have to help him then, Mattie,” said the doctor, patting her hand. “You’re just going to have to do the best you can.”

They sat there, the three of them, staring off blankly into space, until at last the doctor cleared his throat and stood up. “Well, I’ve got to be going. I’m afraid there’s no other course for him for the present. Have him get plenty of rest, don’t let the kids disturb him, no whiskey, Mattie—you pour it down the drain before you let him have a drink of that rotgut. I’ve given him something to help him sleep, and I’ll be back to check on him first thing in the morning. But if anything comes up in the meantime, you give me a call, hear?” He touched Mattie’s shoulder. “Now don’t you worry. I’m sure he’ll be all right.”

Mattie pulled her head up from the table. Her eyes were red. “It easy for you to talk,” she said. “What am I gonna do without Hawk?”

Outside Jerry tried to pay the doctor. “I will send my bill at the end of the month.”

“Well, send it to me,” Jerry said, handing him his card. “I want to take care of it. What do you think his chances are?”

The doctor hesitated, one foot in his gleaming yellow Ca-maro, sitting incongruously on the muddy, tire-rutted lane. “Do you want my frank opinion?”

Jerry nodded.

“I’m afraid Mr. Jefferson’s chances are slim. There’s a pattern to this type of illness. Mr. Jefferson is in an advanced state of hypertension, he would seem to have a good number of other things wrong with him, he’s obviously suffered incidents like this before, and my guess is that he won’t follow one bit of the advice I gave to his wife.”

Jerry nodded bleakly at the familiarity of it all. It was amazing, the fraternity of the medical profession—white or black, rich or poor, urban or rural, they all considered themselves somehow better than their patients, they all expressed an apparent contempt for those weak enough to become ill. “I remember when I was a boy,” the doctor interjected into Jerry’s thoughts, “hearing Mr. Jefferson sing. They used to call him the Screeching Night-hawk, I believe. My parents always warned us to stay away from him because he was from across the creek, he was always in some kind of trouble or other, and they said he always reeked of whiskey. My father was pastor of the New Bethel Church of the Morning Star, you see. But we children would sneak down sometimes to see him when he was playing at one of these big suppers out here in the country or at Barbour’s Big House, you know it was an old plantation hall, bare dirt floors, kerosene lamps, Lord it must have burned down twenty years ago, but I can still remember the good times the people had, barefooted and raggedy as they were—we used to boost each other up and take turns peeking through the open window or pile up old Coke cartons and listen until someone caught us. He used to be a very
stirring
singer, you know.”

“He still is,” said Jerry, more fiercely than he really meant.

The doctor lifted his eyebrows. “Oh, I’m sure he is. I didn’t mean—it’s just that I haven’t heard him—oh, it must be at least fifteen or twenty years ago, when I went away to college, and when I came back, you know, the dance hall had burned down and things were different.”

Jerry watched him back out on to the paved road and waved weakly.

Inside Hawk lay in the darkened room. He could hear the sounds outside, children playing, a car driving off, the muffled sound of voices, Mattie’s tears.

DAMN DOCTOR
turn out the light. Don’t that boy understand nothing? I told him, leave the damn light on, I want to see exactly what is going on. Don’t understand all this damn foolishness. Why don’t they send in the boy, like I asked? They know I wants to see the boy, let him show me what he done on that box of his. Shucks, don’t seem so long since I was his age, just playing my diddley-bow upside the wall, trying to get all the little girls to listen. Didn’t have no git-tar then. Sneak off every chance I get with my uncle’s git-tar, he made it himself, him and Mose. Man, they used to make the damnedest git-tars back in those days. Made one out of a phonograph one time, took the wood off an old record player, frets made out of baling wire—shoot, where is that boy? Wants me to hear him do that little song we was gone work up together. That boy all right, he gonna be all right, make suthin of himself, not like his daddy. He gonna have some of the advantages, but he still all right. The other boy all right, too. Course he can’t play no music. He just a promoter, make money off other people’s music. Which is all right, too. Don’t matter how you get by, so long as they’s some-one’ll buy what you’re selling. Now he ain’t nothing like that slick, the first one come to bring me up to Chicago for the Paramount Record Company. I remember Barbour promised to make me a star, said he was gonna call Chicago and get this man to come down. Course we all thought he was just woofing, but that man come down all right. Show up at the old Majestic The-ater, where they have the Saturday-morning talent contests. Come in from playing all night at a barbecue or a fish fry or some juke way out in the country, go right to the Alamo without even going to sleep or anything. Of all the acts that went on that day, I was the only one Barbour come through for. Later on the others all told me Barbour promised them the exact same thing, but I was the only one passed the audition. That man really was smooth; I call him a jitterbug, but that too good for him. He bring me up to Chicago all right, and when we all done he give me twenty-five dollars and a train ticket. Go home, boy, he say. I let you know when I need you. Before I seed that twenty-five dollars, I ain’t seen nothing or heard talk of nothing either. Slept under the El at night, rode the buses all day long, just trying to pick up a little spare change by playing my box. Couldn’t get no other work, because old Big Bill and all them other old jealous-hearted blues singers had the town sewed up tighter’n a twelve-year-old’s snatch. Would’ve been all right if I’d had my boy with me, either one of them, just someone to look out after my own interests. But I was young then, kind of wild, I didn’t think nothing about tomorrow, far as I was concerned the sun done rose for the last time this morning, and I’s going to have a natural ball. And I did. I did. Just a country boy trying to act slick, them jitterbugs had my twenty-five dollars
and
my train ticket before I even got down to the station. So coming back I had to ride the rods with nothing in my pockets, just like always. …

IV

HIGH JOHN THE CONQUEROO

L
ORI SHOWED
UP that same afternoon without announcement. She got out of the old sway-backed taxi she had ridden all the way from Jackson. Her long blond hair streamed out behind her, she wore a short-sleeve knitted shirt and a pair of dirty white slacks. Jerry hurried out to meet her, feeling that old familiar ache. What she had been doing, whom she had been seeing, why she had been off the road so long, he deliberately declined to know. She gave him a kiss on the cheek and looked him in the eye with that same clear, frank look that always brought him back to the fact that nothing had changed, no matter how much he might have liked it to. Not about his own feelings. Not about her. He wished he could have dismissed her as just another talented kook. Maybe that was all she was, with her constant flirtation with risk and vulnerability, her seeming contempt for her own success. If that was all, though, he could never see it that way. “How’s Hawk?” she said.

Jerry shook his head helplessly and tried to tell her. Up till now he had been in control the whole time, but in Lori’s presence he almost broke down once or twice and there were long charitably overlooked pauses in his speech.

“But isn’t there something we can do?” Lori said at last. “Surely there must be specialists—”

Jerry shrugged. “What are you going to do? Strap him down and fly him to Boston? Hawk’d just turn around when we got to the hospital and say, ’That boy there is kidnapping me. Ain’t never seen him befo’ in my life. Whuffo you white folks want with me?’ “ Lori laughed. “The doctor says if he’ll just follow instructions he’ll probably do okay. He left an anticoagulant that’s supposed to do for a start. He ought to be in the hospital probably, but what good’s that gonna do if it just gets him all agitated? Besides, who knows what kind of a hospital they’ve got down here? I don’t know if I’m worried so much about the way they’d treat him as the way he’d act toward them. I think I’d rather see him take his chances at home.”

“Let me talk to him?”

“Sure. Of course. He’s out right now. I don’t know how good shape he’s in to talk. He wasn’t able to—”

“No, I mean, he’s always listened to me. You know he has.”

Jerry nodded. She was right. He always had.

Inside she immediately made herself useful. She first embraced Mattie, who for her part seemed genuinely glad to see her. “Don’t know how long it’s been since we seed you and Mr. Jerry together. Did you see how the children growed?” Then she took Lori out behind the house to see the children and the pig they were raising for slaughter and the chicken pen that Martin had built. Then she and Lori rolled up their sleeves and went to work, busying themselves with a seemingly endless assortment of domestic procedures, rearranging sleeping quarters, dusting and mopping, and cooking what looked like enough food, Jerry thought, for a two-week siege. He sat at the kitchen table listening to the hum of the old refrigerator, glancing at a week-old paper that had been used to wrap up some fish, watching the two women, warm, animated, unselfconscious, at ease with themselves, as if he were no longer in their presence.

The first concert they had played was at Harvard, and right there Jerry should have known there was something wrong, something irretrievably anomalous about the whole situation. They played at Eliot House Commons, a basement room with a stately grand piano and ornate, ponderous furniture that looked as if it had come with the king’s grant. All of this had been moved to one end of the long room, and folding chairs and a makeshift stage had been set up by nervous members of the Folklore Society who had arranged for the concert. It was late November, and Hawk hadn’t thought to bring an overcoat. He wore a somber black suit and tie loosely knotted at the neck. The top of his shirt was missing two buttons, and his seamed black face was expressionless and calm.

The room was packed. Although they had not had a chance to advertise the concert, news of it had spread through the classrooms and houses, and a few posters around the Square had announced that the Screamin’ Nighthawk, a blues legend previously thought to be dead for many years, was actually alive, well, and performing at Eliot House.

The audience was hushed and anticipatory as Jerry nervously clumped up to the stage, nearly tripping on the small step and feeling uncomfortably that every eye was on him. He went on too long—overly flowery and overly technical—trying to place Hawk in a historical context, trying to make these kids understand, he thought at the time, just who Hawk was, who he had been. They were remarkably polite, gratifyingly attentive, as was Hawk, who sat patiendy through it all with seats empty on either side of him, his leg jiggling ever so slightly. Then at last Jerry emerged from the thicket of credits (to Mose, to Hard and Thayer, to Hawk and the concert organizers), and Hawk heavily mounted the stage, cradling his battered guitar. He sat down, fumbled in his pocket, fiddled with the cord, and then leaned over and plugged in the little Sears, Roebuck amplifier which had been sitting unobtrusively on the stage unnoticed by all or, if it was noted, discounted as a useless prop (or thought to be left over from some rock ’n’ roll rehearsal perhaps). As he plugged in, the buzz from the amplifier was nothing compared to the murmur of shock and disbelief from the crowd. Hawk fiddled with the dials for a couple of minutes, and both hums only grew louder.

“Oh, dammit,” said the boy beside Jerry, “we’re too late.”