Bone Music (3 page)

That was bad.

Bad bad.

Because the wick, still burning, found its way to a bale of straw someone had brought in the night before to use as wallflower seating. In a moment the hay caught fire, and now the fire found the spilled kerosene soaking in the floorboards.

Now the whole bar was on fire.

Sonny Boy Williamson lifted Robert Johnson from the fiery floor where he lay dying, and carried him to safety.

And watched over the man, as best he could, as he lay sweaty and convulsing all night in the dewy Mississippi grass.

Not long before morning the owner-lady found them. She was bruised and bloody, and the moment Sonny Boy Williamson saw her he knew that that small and angry husband of hers had beat her half to death. She looked hateful and vengeful, like she meant to do her husband something even worse than he’d done her.

“You follow me,” she said, and Williamson lifted half-dead Robert Johnson up onto his shoulder and carried him into the hills. “I got a shack up here,” the owner-lady said. “It come to me through my mamma. That man don’t even know it.”

She led them to a tiny weather-beaten place that looked down on Greenville from the ridge above the town. Inside, the shack was spare but tidy — there wasn’t any furniture, wasn’t anything at all but a sooty lantern and a worn straw mattress. But there was a gift in that place, and Williamson could feel it — the kind of gift that a mother passes to her daughter, and to her daughter, and to her daughter unto her, and he knew just what that place was. He couldn’t see it the way he could see the fire still flickering to consume Robert Johnson, but he could feel it, and he knew that it was there.

“He’s going to be okay,” the owner-lady said as Williamson set Robert Johnson to rest on the mattress. She stopped to whisper in the sick man’s ear. “You’re going to be fine, Robert Johnson, I know you are,” she said. That sounded like a lie, but it wasn’t a lie Williamson was going to argue with. “I’m going to call a gospel man. He’ll make you right with God,” she said. “He’s a man who knows how to stop a hoodoo.”

Williamson shook his head. “This man needs a Doctor,” he said. They both knew he wasn’t talking about any physician from the white doctor school.

“The gospel man knows Doctoring,” she said. “He knows it best of all.”

“He ain’t going to do no good,” Williamson said. “There’s a graveyard by the crossroads. Go there tonight. Clap the bones three times and tell them Robert Johnson needs him a Doctor.”

“I already called the gospel man from Beaumont,” she said. “That’s all I’m going to say.”

“I don’t care who you got coming,” Williamson said. “He needs the man you call from the boneyard. If you can’t call for him I’ll have to call myself.”

The owner-lady left, just as she promised, without saying another word. But that night she traveled to the crossroads, and rolled the bones beneath the moon, where only dead eyes see
.

Toward midmorning Robert Johnson began to recover. Bit by bit he sweated out the poison, and the flames Sonny Boy Williamson saw burning his heart began to flicker and go still. A little while after noon the carrion flies lost interest in him.

He woke around three in the afternoon, asking for water. His voice was weak and uncertain, but it was stronger than it’d been last night as he’d murmured in his dreams. He drank the water Williamson held to his lips, and came away gasping for air.

“I told you that poison couldn’t hurt me,” Johnson said, still trying to find his breath. It was a brave front, but it didn’t fool either one of them. No matter what Robert Johnson said, they both knew he was scared out of his mind.

He was right to be scared, too. Because it didn’t matter if his gift could damp the hoodoo poison; he was still just a man. The poison had laid him low seventeen hours, and in those hours an infection had found him.

If there’d been a city doctor around, he would have told Robert Johnson he’d caught bacterial pneumonia, but he wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it. In those days before penicillin, bacteria were the masters of men, and once a body fell to them there wasn’t much to do but die.

Deep in his heart Robert Johnson probably knew what was happening to him. He had his gift, after all, and he had the sight, and now he had the first measure of humility he needed to use them. But knowing didn’t do him a damn bit of good. Because there was nothing he could do by then — nothing but hang tough and die proud.

But even if Robert Johnson had learned the humility that comes to men who swallow poison, he didn’t have the grace to die without a tantrum. (He learned it later, when the door to Hell had slammed shut in his face — but that was years and years away.)

Three hours after dark the owner-lady came back with hot stew and blankets and Robert Johnson’s guitar. She didn’t say much and she didn’t stay long. Sonny Boy Williamson could feel in his gut how she had a plan she was pursuing, and he tried to figure what it was, but he couldn’t figure. It was a long time before he did — ten years, maybe more. And when he did it was a realization from hindsight, and in hindsight he had to wonder how he ever missed it.

When she was gone Williamson could hear the faintest sound like singing, and he heard a chord he knew but never dared to sing. He looked back and forth, trying to find the source of the music — and what he saw was Robert Johnson breathing hard and wheezy, and that was the music, wasn’t it? The music was the sound of wet pneumonia singing down in Robert Johnson’s lungs.

Williamson tried not to react as he realized what he heard. Because he knew what it meant — seven times in his life he heard that wheezy music as a chest began to fill with fluid. And of all those times there was only once where he’d seen the lady get well and walk away from the disease that ailed her. Six other times what started as a mild illness — a cold, really, just a cold gone down to the chest — six other times what started as a mild illness turned into a death watch.

“What is it?” Robert Johnson asked, demanding. “She told you something, didn’t she? — I know she did. I can see it in your eye.”

Williamson shook his head. “She didn’t tell me anything,” he said. “You’re the one she whispered to.”

Johnson scowled. “Mind your business,” he said. “Ain’t no concern of yours.”

Williamson shrugged. Took his stew plate to the window that looked down on Greenville, and watched the landscape as he ate.

Johnson was still brave the next morning, but by then even he could hear the wheezing. He woke smiling uncertainly. He didn’t look Williamson in the eye. “See, Sonny Boy,” he said, “that poison couldn’t hurt me.” He sounded scared out of his mind. They both could hear it.

Williamson didn’t say a word.

“I just got a cold, that’s all,” Johnson said. He coughed raggedly, reached into the pocket of his jacket, found a cigarette, lit it. “I’ve got a cold but it’ll clear out soon enough. I’m going to be fine.”

Williamson nodded, patted Johnson on the back. “You going to be fine,” he said — but the lie was so plain there was no mistaking it.

“Yeah.”

“Need to get you a Doctor,” Williamson said. “Got to get you right with the world.”

Johnson laughed. “
Get right with God,
” he said.

“
He will show you how
,” Williamson responded. He didn’t laugh because it wasn’t any joke.

“Get on with you,” Robert Johnson said. He coughed, and the cough became a hacking snarling fit that wouldn’t end. When he finally cleared his throat he looked Williamson in the eye uneasily. “It ain’t like that at all. I’m going to be fine,” he said, like he hadn’t just coughed himself half to death.

Williamson didn’t reply right away, and when he did he didn’t really respond. “Yeah,” he said. “I got to take a walk, okay? I got some business.”

The business he meant to see to was to repeat the exhortation the owner-lady had made in the graveyard at the crossroads outside Greenville.

But he never did attend to it.

Because there was a blind man waiting at the door when Sonny Boy Williamson opened it. A blind man who cleared his throat and brushed past him just like he was sighted, and maybe he was sighted, this way or another. For the man at the door was the gospel man lately from Beaumont.

Robert Johnson’s bluster crumbled the moment he set eyes on the blind man.

“Blind Willie,” he said, sobbing.

The blind man crossed the room toward him — steadily, purposely, with a sureness that said he knew every step he meant to take.

There are those who say Blind Willie Johnson was a bluesman, and those who say he was too righteous to sing music as feral and ungodly as the blues. He would’ve told you that his own self, if you’d cared to ask him. He called himself a gospel songster, and maybe that’s the best way to describe him. Bluesmen sing the songs that please them, and sometimes they sing wicked songs — but Blind Willie never sang a song that could please the Devil. He sang fire and brimstone, and sometimes stories from the Bible — but he sang with the driving power of a master bluesman. Does it really matter, in the end? Whether he called it hoodoo or the blessing of the Lord, Blind Willie had the gift. He had the gift like no other man alive, including Robert Johnson.

The gift was so strong in him, in fact, that like Robert Johnson he had the presence of a Hoodoo Doctor even when he was still alive. But he wasn’t Robert Johnson, and he didn’t pretend to get gifts or gets he didn’t have. He didn’t act like a Hoodoo Doctor, and he didn’t ask to be treated like one; he used his gift for the ends of the Lord, shedding light into the hearts of the faithful and onto the sins of the profane. Anyone who talked to him about hoodoo was likely to be beaten with his cane.

“You’ve got to help me, Blind Willie,” Robert Johnson said. “I got the cough, and it’s trying to consume me.”

Blind Willie didn’t answer right away. Instead he knelt at Robert Johnson’s bedside, and laid his hands upon him. He held Robert Johnson for the longest time.

Blind Willie Johnson — no relation to Robert Johnson, or if there was a relation it’s lost in the fog of Texas abolition — was a legend among songsters, and among all of those who listened in the markets and in the churches of the Mississippi lowlands. He sang fire-and-brimstone gospel with a driving thunder like it was the blues, and he sang with a voice that sounded like the end of the world whispering on the wind. He was a blind man, but Blind Willie had the sight — partly the sight that comes from the gift, the sight that lets those who have it see things no eyes could ever tell them. But he also had the sight because he was born sighted, and for the seven years that he could see he’d watched the world carefully, almost as though he was born knowing what would happen in his seventh year.

If he did know, he must’ve damned the knowledge. Because what happened to him his seventh year should never happen to anyone, least of all a child: that year his mother died, and his father took a second wife. One day while his father was in the field his stepmother was with another man. Blind Willie’s father came in from the field early that day, and found his woman with the other man. In his rage he beat them both, and stormed away from the house.

The lover skulked away when Willie’s father was gone. And then Willie was alone with his stepmother wailing indignity and pain and rage. He tried to hide from her, but it wasn’t any use: she found him hiding in the woodshed, and vented her rage on the boy — beating him with a switch, and then with her bare hands. When she was done she was still trembling, wailing with rage. She grabbed the boy by the wrists, dragged him to her kitchen, and poured scalding lye into his eyes.

His father came back in time to save his life, but too late to save his sight.

I’m scared to die, Blind Willie,” Robert Johnson said. “You’re going to save me, aren’t you?”

Blind Willie frowned. Shook his head. Stooped and stared at Johnson through his blind eyes cloudy-clear with scar.

He scowled and swore.

“You got to save me. I’m not ready yet, I know that now. I’m not ready and I’m afraid.”

“You ought to be,” Blind Willie said.

“I am, Blind Willie. I am! Save me!”

Blind Willie shook his head. “It ain’t no curse that ails you, Robert Johnson. You got the cough, and you got to get rid of it for yourself — there’s nothing I can do for you.”

He stood, rubbed his hands against one another. Turned and started toward the door, like he was about to leave.

Robert Johnson called after him, terrified and enraged, but Blind Willie didn’t listen. He would have walked out of the shack and got himself home to Beaumont if there hadn’t come a knock on the door before he could reach it.

When he heard the knock Blind Willie swore again — profanely this time. Somewhere down in Hell the Devil had a laugh at his expense.

“Lemon!” he said, a moment before Sonny Boy could open the door. He was right, of course — it was Blind Lemon Jefferson standing in the doorway, no matter how he was supposed to be nine years dead in his casket in the Texas soil. “Go back to your grave, Blind Lemon. You don’t belong among the living.”

The Hoodoo Doctor ignored him. “You called me,” he said to Williamson.

Sonny Boy nodded toward Robert Johnson in his sickbed, and saw Johnson trembling. Did the mojo scare him that badly? Did he see his own illness reflected in the Doctor’s eyes? Williamson wasn’t sure.

“Someone put a bad hoodoo on him,” Williamson said. “Poison. Like to kill him.”

The Doctor nodded. He seemed to watch Robert Johnson through his dark blind-man glasses; when he crossed the room toward Johnson’s bedside he moved even more purposely than Blind Willie had. When he reached the bedside, he knelt beside it, just as Blind Willie had.

“It’s my chest, Doctor,” Robert Johnson said. “I feel like the river tried to flood inside me.”

Blind Lemon chuckled. “I bet it do,” he said. “Listen to it — your lungs are singing to you.”

They both had a laugh at that, but it was a bad laugh — because it started Robert Johnson’s cough all over again. The man coughed and coughed and coughed, till now he folded over himself heaving and gasping like a drunk who’d lost his stomach, only it was his lungs clutching not his stomach, and the man was breathless like to die, sucking for air, choking and gasping and all he could draw was his own watery phlegm.

The hoodoo man slapped him on the back, whispering words of comfort. But that comfort was a lie — for as he whispered he looked up at Blind Willie and shook his head.

They both knew what he wasn’t saying. They both knew Blind Lemon had seen into Robert Johnson’s fate, just as Blind Willie had, and there was no hope for him: the man was touched by destiny, and his destiny was death. He was going to die tomorrow. There wasn’t any hope for him, just comfort.

“You need to find your faith, Robert Johnson,” Blind Willie the Gospel Man said. “Your faith will make you strong.”

Robert Johnson looked up terrified from his gasping. He tried to plead for his life, but he couldn’t find the wind to say a word.

“You need to put you right with God.”

Blind Lemon scowled. “There’s always hope,” he said. “You got to keep your hope alive.”

Robert Johnson reached up to take Blind Lemon’s hand. “You got to help me, Doctor,” he said. “Doctor, I don’t want to die.”

Blind Lemon was nine years dead, and he could have told Robert Johnson that Hell ain’t no place to scare a bluesman, but he didn’t do anything like that. Maybe he took pity on Robert Johnson, or maybe he thought the man was as damned as he was doomed. Whatever the reason, he did a thing that made Blind Willie’s cloudy eyes go wide with shock and indignation: he reached into the pocket of his suit coat and brought forth a packet of rare earth.

It was terrible, terrible dirt — soil from the Bright Spring boneyard in Arkansas, which is no boneyard at all but the ruin of a death-pit where the skeletons of children poke through the thin Ozark soil into the light of day like necrotic daisies reaching for the sun. Some say that a pervert killer spent a lifetime killing children, and always threw their bodies in that pit. Others say some demon monster of a white man went killing every Negro child he could find in the days before Juneteenth — they say he killed ten thousand children and their mothers, killed their grandmothers and grandfathers, too, and when he’d murdered them he heaved their bones into an open pit high up in the mountains. Worms and buzzards ate them all summer long, till winter covered them with snow, and the spring wash covered them with dirt.

No one knows for certain. But to this day those three mountains, southmost of the Ozarks, are a frightful place. The angry ghosts of children crowd those hills, and haunt them in the summer.

The soil that covers their bones is magical stuff, potent and ungodly.

But no matter how magical that soil was, it wasn’t enough to save Robert Johnson. It never could be, not after the bacteria had found him. Bacteria don’t care about hoodoo or music or magic or the rhythm of the blues: they only live to thrive, and no charm ever could dissuade them.

“Take this dirt,” Blind Lemon said, “and make you a tea. Drink it when the sun goes down, and then again when the moon is rising. If the cicada sings past midnight drink it then again.”

Blind Willie tried to protest — so far as he was concerned the hoodoo man was talking mumbo jumbo, plain and simple, and the gospel man couldn’t abide a lie that deliberate. But Blind Lemon had slipped a hoodoo on him while he wasn’t looking, and that year was before Blind Willie gained the strength to break a hoodoo set on him by a dead man. (Later it was different — but everything was different then.)

Robert Johnson took Blind Lemon’s cold dry hand and kissed his ring. “I owe you, Doctor,” he said. “I love you like my life.”

Blind Lemon nodded. “You take better care of yourself, Robert Johnson,” he said. “You’re a man too young to die.”

“I will, Doctor,” Robert Johnson said. “I swear I always will.”

Blind Lemon smiled. “See that you do,” he said. And with that he took Blind Willie by the arm and led him down through the cotton fields to Greenville.

Blind Willie tried to protest, but it didn’t do him any good — not till they were halfway back to Greenville.

“What in the name of the Lord do you think you’re doing, Blind Lemon Jefferson? That man’s going to die tomorrow, sure as I can say my name. He needs to get religion! He needs to save his soul! — and here you got him thinking he can save himself by drinking dirty tea.”

Blind Lemon scowled again. “It never hurt a man to give him hope,” he said.

“It never did no one no good to let ‘em live a lie,” Blind Willie told him. “
The truth will set you free
.”

The hoodoo man scowled, hooted derisively. “Shit,” he said.

And for the longest moment he tried to go on — but that was all the answer he could find.