Bone Music (10 page)

Before that night the Devil knew just three things about Robert Johnson: the avaricious life that had killed him and sent him to Hell; the vanity so great that even the Devil himself despised it, and cast him out of Hell; and the moments after his Redemption, when Scratch saw the Eye of the World watching him intently.

The Eye of the World still watched Robert Johnson, albeit more discreetly. The Devil didn’t know that, and Leadbelly couldn’t learn it for him — because Robert Johnson didn’t even know it himself.

But Leadbelly heard every one of Robert Johnson’s secrets that he thought to ask for. He heard about the years Robert Johnson spent wandering the country, looking for a thing he didn’t know and couldn’t name and could not bear to lose; he heard about the music and the magic, and what you hear when you pick two and seven and listen as you sit before a bonfire between the Left and Right Hands of the Lord. He heard about the Pearly Gates, Saint Peter, and the Mysteries, but neither Leadbelly nor the Devil could make a lick of sense from them. (Is it any wonder? All those things, and the Mysteries especially, depend upon a State of Grace not available to the unrepentant — a state that’s often just beyond the reach of the Lord’s most righteous children.)

When they’d talked for hours Leadbelly took a flask from the pocket of his coat and offered Robert Johnson spirit liquor.

Now Robert Johnson hadn’t touched the demon rum since the night he brought the vengeance of a cuckold husband down upon himself. Mostly he’d avoided the stuff because he was dead, and everybody knows the terrible things that happen when deadmen touch that awful stuff.

But Robert Johnson wasn’t dead anymore. He was alive, and the truth was that even if he’d repented the folly of his sinful ways, he still had a taste for good brown mash. And is that such a crime? Lots of righteous gentlemen imbibe a measure now and then; it doesn’t turn them into demons when they drink in moderation.

Robert Johnson thought, What could it hurt?, and then he made a terrible mistake.

He said, “Sure, sure, I’ll take a lick,” and he took the cask of spirit liquor from Huddie Ledbetter.

And drank that poison down.

Robert Johnson woke on a dock above the Mississippi in the small hours of the morning. He couldn’t remember nothing after the drink he took from Leadbelly’s flask of mash, but he remembered that drink so clearly: it was the savor of every sip of whiskey he’d ever drank, distilled into a moment richer than the warmth of morning sunshine on a deadman’s cold dewey-slick skin; it was half the sight of Heaven half-obscured in the clouds that surround the Pearly Gates; it was greater than the doomed damned majesty of Lucifer’s throne in the Mansion called Defiance along the shore of the Lake of Fire where it reaches down to Hell.

Spirit liquor was a lover he’d always known but never thought to cherish. When he woke on the dock, bloody and aching like to die, he knew he loved that liquor so dearly that he never dare to touch the stuff again.

“Lordie Lordie Lord,” he said, and as he spoke he heard his words rasp and burble in and out his throat, and it began to sink through to him how dire were his circumstances, “dear God please forgive me.”

And he reached up so carefully to touch the wound he could feel cut across his throat.

And felt with the tips of his fingers the same terror he heard burbling around his words:

He felt his throat cut open wide where Leadbelly had slit him open to the bright light of the moon.

And left him on the dock where his blood gathered in a pool that drizzled slowly into the river, draining toward New Orleans and the sea.

Robert Johnson should have died the moment Leadbelly cut him. If he lived even a moment after he never should have had the strength to wake and see the horror that became of him. But he did wake, aching bloody terrified and alone, and he saw the river; saw the blood and the bright moon high above him; and he saw the Eye of the World.

It hung in the sky brilliant as a red second moon — no, brighter, infinitely brighter than the first — and it watched Robert Johnson through its shattered lens.

Robert Johnson saw the deep bright cracks in the lens of the Eye of the World, and all he could think was I did that, I broke the Eye of the World, I was so full of myself and now I’m so ashamed. When he saw the Eye he saw his own hubris, and it shamed him. You can’t say a thing about a man that marks the change in him as clearly as that marked Robert Johnson. The man he’d been the day he died would have seen the Eye and wondered what it meant to him, and meant about him. But that night as he lay on the dock clasping his throat, trying to stop his blood spurting and leaking into the river, it didn’t even occur to him to wonder why the Eye watched him. He didn’t think to wonder why he was alive, or why Leadbelly drugged him, or even why the river whispered his name so softly as it lapped the shore.

“I’m sorry, Lord,” Robert Johnson said, still looking at the Eye, still mourning the consequences of the song he’d sung a lifetime ago. “Lordie Lordie please forgive me.”

As he wrapped his shirt around his open throat and stumbled away from the river, away from the dockyards, toward the hospital in Memphis where seven doctors gasped in fear and wonder when they saw him.

They rushed him to their operating room and sewed his throat together. When they were done an orderly wheeled him into a hallway and left him there where the doctors could watch him until they were ready to put him in a room.

But Robert Johnson wasn’t having any of that. The moment their eyes were off him he pushed himself up off the stretcher, got to his feet, and staggered down the hall. He followed the hall through seven heavy doors until he found the hospital’s bright wide entrance. That led him onto the streets of Memphis, where the sun was rising and the birds were calling and the day was wide and full of possibility.

Robert Johnson shambled through the morning streets of Memphis until they led him home. When he reached his room he fell into his bed; in a moment he was sleeping.

It was days before he woke again.

The Ballad of John Henry

When John Henry was a little baby boy

Sitting on his mother’s knee

He pointed straight at a piece of steel

Said that steel’s gonna be the death of me

Yes, yes

That bridge and tunnel, that bright wide steel

Are gonna be the death of me

Yes, yes

They’re gonna be the death of me

Some people say John Henry was born in Texas,

Some say he was born in Maine,

But he really came from the hills of Carolina

That’s the last place that he went to ‘fore he died

Yes, yes

That’s the last place that he went to ‘fore he died.

John Henry told his Captain one day

Says, A man ain’t nothing but a man

Before I be beat by your steel-driving gang

I’m going to die with this hammer in my hand.

That’s what he said,

I’m going to die with this hammer in my hand

Well, the paymaster loved to see John Henry,

Water boy loved to hear him sing,

Most of all what the paymaster loved

Was to hear John Henry’s hammer ring.

Made his hammer ring like it was a bell

And it rang so clear, rang yes baby

And it rang

John Henry knew a woman

Her name was Polly Ann

When he got so sick that he lay abed

You know Polly she drove steel just like a man.

Polly she drove steel just like a man.

One day John Henry got a notion

And he had to climb the hills

His Captain said, John Henry, those hills are sinking in!

He said shut up, Cap’n, you don’t know what you saw

It wasn’t nothing but my hammer sucking wind

Lord yes,

That wasn’t nothing but my hammer sucking wind.

That day John Henry told his shaker

I declare you a better pray

If I miss this steel with this ten-pound maul

Tomorrow is going to be your burying day

Yes, yes

Tomorrow’s going to be your burying day

Lord knows.

John Henry looked at the sun one day

And the sun had done turned red,

And he looked over his shoulder Lord

And he seen his partner falling dead dead

Then John Henry went to the Mansion

Tell the head of his hundred-car fire

Crying, George just pick ‘em up and let ‘em down again!

We’re going to work until we die

Yes, yes

We’re going to work this line until we die.

John Henry worked until he died.

When he fell they carried Johnny up the Mountain

Up on the Mountain so high

The last words he said to the water boy

Was, Give me a cool drink of water ‘fore I die.

Lord yes,

Give me a cool drink of water ‘fore I die.

When the woman in the west

Learned of John Henry’s death

She came awake in her bed

She was dressed in white

She was dressed in red

She wailed for old John Henry

He was dead dead dead

John Henry

Just give me one cool drink of water before I die.

When the world was whole and the Wizard Kings still ruled the Delta, there was a King who stood foremost among them. He was first because he’d come before them, and also because he was the wisest, truest, and greatest of them all.

His name was John Henry, and he could make his hammer ring like a bell.

In his time he talked to God and he talked to the Devil; he got religion and gave it back; and then learned the error of his ways.

Some people say he was a scoundrel bloodthirstier than Leadbelly. Others say he was a saint as holy as Sister O.M. Terrell. The truth is probably somewhere in between — for though hoodoo men always serve the Lord (just like the blues that breeds them) they serve Him most often at cross-purposes, perversely.

His history is a mystery made of legends that everybody knows and everyone denies. His story is the glory of the nation and the wonder of the world: everyone who knows John Henry celebrates him, and no one does him wrong.

Three times in those months he spent in Memphis, among redemption and salvation but before he had the chance to go astray, Robert Johnson went hiking up on the bluff above the city, searching the woods for Blind Willie’s shack. But he never found it, maybe because he never took the hardest way.

On Fat Tuesday, Peetie Wheatstraw came looking for Robert Johnson.

He found him in a cheap café not far from the riverfront — the kind of two-bit place where dockhands go for breakfast and no one orders anything but eggs, potatoes, coffee, toast, and grits. It wasn’t a fancy place, nor even an especially good one, but it was a place where a man can drink his coffee slow enough to read a paper and no one really minds. Robert Johnson went there a lot in the months when he lived in Memphis under the name of Hinky Tom, and the waitresses knew him for a regular.

Robert Johnson knew Peetie Wheatstraw, too — the moment he set eyes on the Doctor he recognized him for a deadman. Robert Johnson had that kind of sight, and he didn’t lose it just because he came alive.

“What you want?” Robert Johnson asked, as if he didn’t know. “I been waiting for you.”

“I bet you have,” the Hoodoo Doctor said.

“Waiting for a long time.”

“Good, then,” Peetie Wheatstraw said. “That makes it simple.”

Peetie Wheatstraw was the youngest of the Kings (who weren’t yet seven, but five). Because he was youngest he was their arms and legs, and spoke for them just as Blind Lemon had spoken for the kings through the 30s. When he was alive and singing he called himself “Peetie Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-Law,” but William Bunch was his born name. He was born in the low country of Alabama, which is a province of the Delta Kingdom, but he spent most of his life up north. He knew the Lords of the Piedmont (who govern the high country in the east as the Seven Kings ruled the Delta, but differently), and paid them the respect they were due.

William Bunch who was Peetie Wheatstraw died in a car wreck in 1941, four years after the accident that killed Bessie Smith.

After he died he was always Peetie Wheatstraw, and William Bunch was dead and gone forever.

“What do you want from me?” Robert Johnson asked.

Peetie Wheatstraw grinned wide and wicked as the Angel Death. “I only want to help you, Hinky Tom,” he said, and he laughed perfidiously.

“The hell you say,” said Robert Johnson. “You want to help me like a buzzard wants to help a sojourner.”

Peetie Wheatstraw pushed himself away from the table. He looked offended.

“You got me wrong, Hinky Tom,” he said. “I come to seek you for the King.”

Robert Johnson eyed him uncertainly. He knew (as all bluesmen know) who the Kings were, and he respected them. But he also knew they serve their own ends, and when his preacher railed against them during the Sunday service, Robert Johnson took his words to heart. “I got religion now, Peetie Wheatstraw. When I play I sing to serve the Lord.”

“So?”

“So I got no business with the Devil’s Son-in-Law.”

Peetie Wheatstraw swore.

“You got me wrong,” he said. “And you’re doing worse by the King. John Henry is an upright man.”

Robert Johnson thought about Leadbelly and the music and the Good Word of the Lord, and he wanted to help because he thought he could. But the Lord don’t want nobody acting like a fool, and that’s a simple truth. “When he died he got religion, that’s what they say,” he said. “You can’t prove it by me either way.”

“I never said I could,” Peetie Wheatstraw said.

“What do you want from me?”

Peetie Wheatstraw didn’t answer straight away. He just sat there, staring at Robert Johnson so young and healthy and alive sitting across the table from him, and maybe the Devil’s Son-in-Law envied him his life and his health, and maybe he only wondered how a man could die such a colossal fool and still find redemption and the miracle of life. Whatever it was that went on in his head, he shrugged it away. And sighed, and leaned close across the table to whisper at Robert Johnson.

Robert Johnson smelled his breath before he heard his words. It was deadman’s breath, cool and stale, and somewhere hidden in the staleness there were hints of brimstone and decay.

“John Henry wants to see you,” Peetie Wheatstraw said. “He sent me here to bring you back.”

I’ll go, he thought, even though he was half afraid it was a terrible mistake. Because there was something in his heart that told him that he had to — maybe it was the song that is the music of the world, or maybe it was the song the great King whispered in his ear across the years and miles. But his heart told him to trust it, and it wasn’t wrong.

“Where is he?” Robert Johnson asked Peetie Wheatstraw.

“He lives up on the Mountain,” Peetie Wheatstraw said. “Everybody knows that — I don’t know why you got to ask.”

Robert Johnson shrugged. “Just uneasy,” he said. “I got to say a reason?”

The Devil’s Son-in-Law smiled. “Don’t got to say nothing you don’t want,” he said, getting up from his seat. “We best get started — it’ll take us a few days to get there.”

“All right,” Robert Johnson said.

They went to West Memphis — in Arkansas, on the far side of the river — three hours later, and took the afternoon train bound north toward Chicago