Bone Music (8 page)

What could she do?

She crawled to Lisa’s side and put her arms around her.

And held her for the longest time.

“It’s okay, baby,” Emma said. “Mama loves you.” One of her hands brushed across the open cancer in Lisa’s belly, and Emma felt an ominous electric throb. She wanted to screech, to flinch away, but she knew that if she did that it’d be like pushing Lisa away, so she clenched her teeth and made herself be still. Lisa’s little body heaved with her sobs; her back pressed painfully against Emma’s bruised breasts. “Mama loves you.”

Emma looked at Lisa’s hands, and saw that the flesh had all crumbled away from them. They were nothing but bones, like the skeleton one of the doctors at the hospital kept in his office.

“I want to die, Mama,” Lisa said. Her voice was all quiet again.

Emma squeezed her, and held her a little tighter. I want to die, Mama.

And Emma thought, She’s right, she’s right, my baby needs to die, and because her faith had left her she couldn’t see how false that was. Mama Estrella is right. It’s wrong for a little girl to be alive after she was dead.

“Baby, baby, baby, baby, I love my baby,” Emma cooed. Lisa was crying even harder now, and she’d begun to tremble in a way that wasn’t natural at all.

“You wait here, baby. I got to call Mama Estrella.” Emma lifted herself up off the floor, which made everything hurt all at once.

Emma went to the kitchen, lifted the telephone receiver, and dialed Mama Estrella’s number. As the phone began to ring Emma wandered back toward the bathroom, watching Lisa, trying to save her memory forever.

The girl lay on the bathroom floor, shaking. The tremor had gotten worse, much worse, in just the time it’d taken Emma to dial the phone. As Emma watched it grew more and more intense, till finally Emma thought the girl would shake herself to pieces.

As Mama Estrella finally answered the phone.

“Hello?”

“Mama Estrella?” Emma said, “I think maybe you better come up here.”

Mama Estrella didn’t say anything at all; the line was completely silent. The silence felt bitter and mean.

“I think maybe you were right, Mama. Right about Lisa, I mean.” Emma looked down at the floor and squeezed her eyes shut. She leaned back against the wall and tried to clear her head. “I think . . . maybe you better hurry. Something’s wrong. I don’t understand.”

Lisa made a little sound halfway between a gasp and a scream, and something went thunk on the floor. Emma didn’t have the heart to look up to see what had happened, but she started back toward the kitchen to hang up the phone.

“Mama Estrella, I got to go. Come here now, please?”

“Emma . . .” Mama Estrella started to say, but Emma didn’t hear her; she’d already hung up, and she was running back to the bathroom, where Lisa was.

Lisa was shivering and writhing on the bathroom floor. Her left arm, from the elbow down, lay on the floor not far from her.

Emma took Lisa in her arms and lifted her up off the floor.

“You’ve got to be still, honey,” she said. “You’re going to tremble yourself to death.”

Lisa nodded and gritted her teeth and for a moment she was pretty still. But it wasn’t anything she could control, not for long. Emma carried Lisa to her bedroom, and by the time she got there the girl was shaking just as bad as she had been.

There was a knock on the front door, but Emma didn’t pay any attention. If it was Mama Estrella she had her own key, and she’d use it. Emma sat down on the bed beside Lisa and stroked her hair.

After a moment Mama Estrella showed up in the bedroom doorway, carrying some kind of a woody-looking thing that burned with a low flame and smoked something awful.

Mama Estrella went to the window and closed it, then drew down the shade.

“Water,” she said. “Bring me a kettle of hot water.”

“You want me to boil water?” There was smoke everywhere already; it was harsh and acrid and when a wisp of it caught in Emma’s eye it burned like poison. Lisa wheezed and coughed as the smoke drifted toward her, coughed and coughed and coughed no matter how she hadn’t drawn a breath she didn’t need to speak since she’d died.

“No, there isn’t time. Just bring a kettle of hot water from the tap.”

Then Mama Estrella bent down to look at Lisa, and suddenly it was too late for hot water and magic and putting little girls to rest.

The thick smoke from the burning thing settled onto Lisa’s face, Lisa began to gag. She took in a long wheezing-hacking breath, and for three long moments she choked on it, or maybe on the corruption of her own lungs. Then she began to cough, deep, throbbing, hacking coughs that shook her hard against the bed.

Mama Estrella pulled away from the bed. She looked shocked and frightened and unsure.

“Lisa, be still!” Emma shouted, and Lisa sat up, trying to control herself. But it only made things worse — the next cough sent her flying face-first onto the floor. She made an awful smacking sound when she hit; when she rolled over Emma saw that she’d broken her nose.

Lisa wheezed, sucking in air.

She’s breathing, Emma thought. Please, God, she’s breathing now and she’s going to be fine. Please.

But even as Emma thought it she knew that it wasn’t going to be so. The girl managed four wheezing breaths, and then she was coughing again, and much worse — Emma saw bits of the meat of her daughter’s lungs spatter on the hardwood floor.

She bent down and hugged Lisa, hugged her tight to make her still. “Be still, baby. Hold your breath for a moment and be still. Mama Estrella loves you, Lisa.” But Lisa didn’t stop, she couldn’t stop, and the force of her wracking was so mean that her shoulders dug new bruises in Emma’s breast. When Lisa finally managed to still herself for a moment she looked up at Emma, her eyes full of desperation, and she said, “Mama . . .”

And then she coughed again, so hard that her tiny body pounded into Emma’s breast, and her small, hard-boned chin slammed down onto Emma’s shoulder.

Slammed down so hard that the force of it tore free the flesh of Lisa’s neck.

And Lisa’s head tumbled down Emma’s back, and rolled across the floor.

Her head rolled over and over until it came to a stop against the leg of a chair. Lisa’s eyes blinked three times and then they closed forever.

Her body shook and clutched against Emma’s chest for a few more seconds, the way a chicken does when you axe it. When the spasming got to be too much to bear Emma let go, and watched her daughter’s corpse shake itself to shreds on the bedroom floor. After a while the tumor-thing fell out of it, and everything was still.

Everything but the cancer. It quivered like grey, moldy-rotten pudding that you touched on a back shelf in the refrigerator because you’d forgotten it was there.

“Oh my God,” Mama Estrella said.

Emma felt scared and confused, and empty, too, like something important had torn out of her and there was nothing left inside but dead air.

But even if Emma was hollow inside, she couldn’t force her eye away from the cancer. Maybe it was morbid fascination, and maybe it was something else completely, but she knelt down and looked at it, watched it from so close she could almost taste it. There was something about it, something wrong. Even more wrong than it had been before.

“She’s dead, Emma. She’s dead forever.”

Emma shuddered, but still she couldn’t force herself away. The tumor began to still, but one of its ropy grey veins still pulsed. She reached down and touched it, and the whole grey mass began to throb again.

“What is it, Mama Estrella? Is it alive?”

“I don’t know, Emma. I don’t know what it is, but it’s dead.”

Then the spongy grey tissue at the tumor’s crest began to swell and bulge, to bulge so far that it stretched thin and finally split.

“Like an egg, Mama Estrella,” Emma said. “It almost looks like an egg when a chick is hatching. I’ve seen that on the television, and it looks just like this.”

Emma reached over toward the split, carefully, carefully, imagining some horrible monster would reach up out of the thing and tear her hand from her wrist. But there was no monster, only hard, leathery hide. She set the fingers of her other hand against the far lip of the opening and pried the split wide so that she could peek into it. But her head blocked what little light she could let in.

Small gurgling sounds came out of the darkness.

Emma crossed herself and mumbled a prayer too quiet for anyone else to hear.

And reached down, into her daughter’s cancer.

Before her hand was halfway in, she felt the touch of a tiny hand. It startled her so badly that she almost screamed. To hold it back she bit into her lip so hard that she tasted her own blood.

A baby’s hand.

Then a baby girl was crawling up out of the leathery grey shell, and Mama Estrella was praying out loud, and Emma felt herself crying with joy.

“I love you, Mama,” the baby said. Its voice was Lisa’s voice, just as it’d been before her sickness.

Emma wanted to cry and cry and cry, but instead she lifted her baby Lisa out of the cancer that’d borne her, and she held her to her breast and loved her so hard that the moment felt like forever and ever.

August 1938

The great King played his Hammer as the fire roared inside the iron stove there in his study, and as he played a vision flowered in the fire. It was like the vision that the Lady saw when she looked into the Eye of the World, but it was different, too, because the great King’s song touched it, and changed it.

That was the nature of the great King’s song: it twisted in upon the music that is the world, and subtly bent the beat into the melody until it grew in ways no other songster could imagine: he made his song into the music of the world until he made that song his own.

His song found the meekest people at the periphery of the world, and whispered to them in their dreams until they woke to stand tall, casting ominous shadows on the destiny of the world. It found poor doomed damned Robert Johnson, cast from Hell to spite his hubris, and helped him find the light; it found a boy in Los Angeles with half a gift too small for the ambition he could never grow to fill, and it whispered greatness to him; it found a woman who’d loved the King more dearly than her own life, and guided her through Hell.

It found the hapless boy who would inherit from the great King, and tried to make him strong enough to bear the load that fell to him — but it hardly could attempt to make the boy that strong.

It found the great King’s rivals, the Blind Lords of the Piedmont, and whispered to them pleadingly, begging for succor; but they could hardly give it.

It found a tiny girl across two generations, and twisted her heart into a bitter, angry thing, filled with rage and spite. It turned her into an awful thing that was three parts child and one part demon, but it made her strong, too, and made her tough and brave enough to face the awful lot that fell to her.

It spoke to the Hands and the Lady, and it persuaded them that there was hope inside damnation, no matter what it cost.

When the song was done, the Lady knew that there was hope, but still she grieved. Because the only hope would cost her and the world everything she loved, and even then it was only half a possibility, fainter than the shadow of salvation where it falls upon the Damned in Hell.

But no matter how she grieved, no matter what she lost, the Lady stood true, and made her world as best she could. And in the end that’s all there is, isn’t it? Is there anything more that any one of us can do?

July 1948

When Robert Johnson died he went to Hell — everyone who dies unrepentant goes to Hell, and there was no aspect of Robert Johnson’s hubris that could except him from damnation.

Robert Johnson went to Hell, and the Devil looked into his heart to see the hubris that had near destroyed the world, and he cast Robert Johnson out from the pit.

Robert Johnson tried to get back in — more than once. Of course he did! Hell ain’t Heaven, but it’s a better place for sinners than wandering the world. But no matter how Robert Johnson tried, no matter how he sang nor what the song, no matter the greatness of his craft nor the truth inside his blues, he could not charm the Hell-door open.

Later — years later — he grew great enough to walk back and forth across the threshold of damnation as you and I step through ordinary doors. But that was years away.

Because he could not go to Hell, Robert Johnson wandered the world with no purpose plan or destination.

Like a ghost, but more real.

Sometimes he played his guitar, and other times he didn’t; music is like that for deadmen. They like the sound, the music and the magic, but only when it pleases them — they have no passion for performance. That’s just as well, the way it happens: things happen when deadmen sing. Hoodoo things. Robert Johnson wasn’t any Hoodoo Doctor, but he was deader than the best of them, and his music had a magic all its own.

As the years wore on his purposeless meandering reduced him to a derelict — but that reduction taught him, too, in the way that indignity can show a man the error of his ways, and bit by bit Robert Johnson came to see the falseness of his pride.

One night he found himself in a trainyard long after midnight, sitting around a bonfire with two vagabond thieves who’d followed him halfway across a continent.

He looked at the bums, the fire, the half-open can of beans warming in the embers, and he shut his eyes. Pulled his guitar over his shoulder onto his lap, and just sat there for the longest time, listening to the music of the world.

After a while he plucked two and seven on his guitar, and he heard the blues metamorphosing into a waltz.

As he heard that metamorphic sound he heard the echo of his wasted life.

Hearing, he looked back on his life and his wandering past death in a way his vanity had never let him see before that moment.

And he said, I’m a fool.

And then he thought, I was wrong.

And the moment the words whispered on the inside of his head he knew how true they were, and he felt ashamed and small and broken and afraid.

I could have torn the world in two, he thought, but that was only the half of it. Lordie Lordie please forgive me, he thought, and then he sang those words.

Now, when the damned repent they can move on to their reward, and because they can the Devil takes the act quite personal. He pays repentant sinners special mind.

Every demon down in Hell pays mind, in fact.

The Devil had scarcely thought of Robert Johnson since he’d cast him out of Hell, but he thought of him that day. Worse, he went to earth to watch him (as the Devil always can, because in the truest way there is the Devil is always at our backs). And the Devil saw Robert Johnson sing “Lordie Lordie please forgive me.”

The Devil hates that song most of all.

As Robert Johnson sang the vagabond thieves who’d been his companions for so many months transformed miraculously into their true selves, and Robert Johnson saw they were repented sinners too, and their names were Dismas and Gestas, and they were the thieves who died on crosses at the Right and Left Hands of the Lord.

On the far side of the fire the Pearly Gates of Heaven opened out before him, and Robert Johnson saw he was redeemed.

He lurched to his feet and stumbled toward the Gates of Heaven, not even noticing when he stepped into the bonfire. He was too intent on the Majesty of Heaven, the splendor he could almost see through the pearly haze so thick around the gate, and anyway the fire didn’t burn him because he’d found a state of Grace few of us will ever know.

As he approached the open gate Saint Peter stepped out to welcome Robert Johnson with open arms.

Robert Johnson cried for joy.

When his tears dried Saint Peter took his hand and told him seven Mysteries. Robert Johnson listened because he’d learned the humility to listen when the blessed voices speak, but he hardly understood.

And is that any wonder? Few can think of Mysteries when the sight of Heaven lies waiting just a hazy fog beyond their vision.

When the Mysteries were spoken Saint Peter looked Robert Johnson in the eye, and he told him what he couldn’t bear to hear.

“You can go to your reward,” Saint Peter said, “if that’s what you really want.”

There was something in the saint’s voice that told him that he shouldn’t. Robert Johnson asked him what he meant.

“The world isn’t done with you,” Saint Peter said. “It needs you now in ways it never could before.”

Robert Johnson couldn’t figure what he meant. “I don’t understand,” he said. “What am I supposed to do?”

The saint frowned and shook his head. “I can’t tell you that,” he said, “because it isn’t certain yet. But the world will need your gifts.”

Robert Johnson heard Saint Peter, and the words hurt him worse than he could say, but he took them to heart all the same. He nodded and he turned around and walked back into our world, through the fire and into a clear cold day in 1948.

When the last of the fire was behind him Robert Johnson stood five hundred miles from the trainyard, on a fateful ridge above Memphis, Tennessee.

When he looked into the sky over Memphis he could see the ghost of the Eye of the World, just as he’d seen it the day he cracked its lens and died.

When he saw the Eye he heard a scream behind him — a terrible, terrible scream, the most terrible sound he’d ever heard, alive or dead or in between, no matter that he’d walked to corridors of Hell before the Devil cast him out.

And he turned around to look behind him, and saw the Devil who’d watched him all this time.

As the Devil screamed in terror to see the bright face of the Eye of the World — he can only bear to look upon the nether Eye, which hung that year above the mantel of his great room in the Mansion called Defiance down in Hell. When he saw the good face of the Eye, the Devil lunged into the sky to steal it, but before he could it vanished like a dream.

And then the Devil vanished, too.

When the Devil and the Eye were gone, Robert Johnson wandered down along the ridge toward Memphis. When he was halfway down, he met Blind Willie.

Blind Willie was a deadman, a Hoodoo Doctor, and Robert Johnson knew that the moment he set eyes on him. And Robert Johnson thought that was so funny, to see the gospel man transubstantiated by the Devil’s music and made into a hoodoo man. He laughed as he saw Blind Willie. Blind Willie frowned at him in turn.

“You wouldn’t help me, Blind Willie,” Robert Johnson said. “I needed you.”

Blind Willie shook his head; he tried to smile, but it didn’t really come off — partly because he wasn’t pleased, partly because a smile isn’t a pleasant expression when it’s forced onto the face of a deadman. “No,” Blind Willie said, “you’re wrong. I wouldn’t lie to you, Robert Johnson. You wouldn’t help yourself.”

Robert Johnson scowled. He said, “Shit.” But he knew the gospel man was right.

Blind Willie ignored the swear word. “Follow me, Robert Johnson,” he said, and he led him off the Memphis trail, into the pine forest that grew on the ridge slope. After a while they were deep in a woods so dense and dark that it was hard to see the river or the sky. Now here before them was a hobo shack, and Blind Willie opened the door and showed Robert Johnson in.

Robert Johnson could’ve mistook Blind Willie for a sighted man if it weren’t for the empty sockets of his eyes half-visible through his dark blind man’s glasses.

“Have a seat,” Blind Willie said, “and I’ll put on the coffee.”

Robert Johnson wasn’t sure why the gospel man had led him to this place, and by and by now he began to grow uneasy.

“Why have you taken me here?” Robert Johnson asked. “What is this place?”

“Just my home, that’s all,” Blind Willie said. “You like your coffee black?”

“I like cream,” Robert Johnson said. “Why are we here?”

Blind Willie crossed the room as graceful as a dancer, coffepot and cream pitcher in one hand, two empty mugs in the other.

“The Lady came to me last night,” he said. “She came to me in a dream, and she told me things.”

Robert Johnson snorted. “She tell you where to find me?”

Blind Willie smiled deadly.

“As a matter of fact, she did.”

“What else she tell you?”

A dead little laugh, now, hollow and echoey but full of good humor.

“She told me. . . .” Blind Willie said, and then he hesitated. “She told me that you’d know seven Mysteries, but you wouldn’t know what to do with them.”

Robert Johnson went all stiff and tense, frightened-like, and you’d be surprised how natural and easy that posture looks when a deadman does it.

“She said that, huh?”

“She didn’t say those words.”

“I hope she didn’t.”

Blind Willie set the cups and coffee on the kitchen table, sat down in one of the chairs, poured two cups of coffee. “Go ahead,” he said, “have some coffee. Set a spell.”

Robert Johnson hesitated before he took a chair, but only for a moment. He sat, took the coffee, and waited for Blind Willie to ask him for the Mysteries.

But Blind Willie never did.

After a while Robert Johnson got tired of waiting. He went ahead and said the first of them without waiting to be asked.

“A bone is a thing that binds a body to the soil,” Robert Johnson said.

Of course that made no sense, but Blind Willie understood it anyway. Oh how he understood!

“Of course,” Blind Willie said. He smiled ruefully. “I always knew that in my heart.”

“You lie,” Robert Johnson told him.

But that just wasn’t so. Blind Willie never lied; there wasn’t a solitary falsehood in his heart. “I wouldn’t lie about the truth,” he said. “Nobody could do that.”

Robert Johnson scowled. “Shit,” he said, two syllables, just like a boy responding to a tall tale.

“Go on,” Blind Willie said. “What else?”

Robert Johnson eyed him coldly. “Music is a song you hear but never play.”

Blind Willie looked at him uncertainly. “Are you sure about that?” he asked. “You got that wrong, I think. It sure ain’t right.”

Robert Johnson swore; he looked surprised. “The song you hear,” he said, “is the music in your heart. The chords it plays are the music of the world.”

Blind Willie rolled his eyes. “I know that one. Everybody does! I want the mysteries from heaven, Robert Johnson. It’s important. Ain’t right for you to lead me wrong.”

“If I tell you,” Robert Johnson said, “you got to tell me what it means.”

Blind Willie didn’t answer right away. When he finally did answer he didn’t look happy at all.

“I tried to do that once,” he said. “But nobody ever heard. You know what I mean? It’s like, if you understand, you understand it in your heart, soon as you hear. And if you don’t you ain’t yet meant to hear, and no one could ever tell you.”

Robert Johnson stood up suddenly, violently. His chair went flying away from him. “I’m leaving here, old man,” he said. “I ain’t never coming back.”

Blind Willie looked very, very sad.

“Suit yourself,” he said. “God speed you on your way.”

Robert Johnson lied, of course. He came back banging on Blind Willie’s door before an hour had elapsed. Blind Willie didn’t notice right away, that was how deep he was thinking of the one mystery Robert Johnson had told him, so deep in contemplation that the ridge could have dropped down into the river and he wouldn’t even notice.

“Robert Johnson!” Blind Willie said as he finally heard the door. “Come in, come in.”

“I need your help, Blind Willie,” Robert Johnson said. “I got lost in this damned woods of yours.”

Blind Willie was still in his chair at the kitchen table. He had his guitar on his lap, and he was picking a song Robert Johnson knew in his heart but couldn’t remember no matter how he tried. He thought, That’s Judgment Day, it has to be, it has to be a snatch from Judgment Day to do that to my heart. But it wasn’t Judgment Day at all, and Robert Johnson knew that better than anyone else.

“What’s that, Blind Willie?” Robert Johnson asked. “I never heard that song.”

Blind Willie grinned.

“It’s a mystery,” he said. “Will you give me your secrets if I tell you the tune?” He wasn’t serious, and they both knew it.

Robert Johnson scowled. “Get on with you,” he said. “Where did you get that song?”

Blind Willie laughed.

“You ought to get yourself a hymnal, Robert Johnson,” he said. He was still picking out the melody, strumming quietly on his guitar. “It’s called ‘The Ode to Joy.’”

Robert Johnson snorted. “Ain’t nothing in no hymnal sounds like that,” he said, pulling his guitar off the strap where it hung on his back; moving his hands across the strings; picking up the refrain.

He was right, of course. Blind Willie had reworked “The Ode to Joy” considerably — he’d syncopated the beat, rearranged the phrases, rebuilt the structure until it grew bluesy. It was strange, powerful music; it made the world around them irresistibly beautiful. They say God whispered in Beethoven’s ear as he wrote “The Ode to Joy”; everyone who ever heard Blind Willie play his version of the ode said he heard the word from God.

And maybe those people did hear. Certainly Robert Johnson heard. The sound was nearly dear enough to call him back to Heaven.

It might’ve called him, too, if Blind Willie hadn’t let go his guitar and reached up to take hold of Robert Johnson’s arm.

“Don’t let it carry you away,” he said. “This ain’t the time for that.”

Robert Johnson laughed derisively, like to say what makes you think such a foolish thing?, but he really didn’t carry it off. Blind Willie knew all sorts of things — some of them because he had the sight and could see for himself; some because he’d heard the word about a lot of things to come. He patted Robert Johnson on the back and told him not to be afraid.