Delta Blues Read online

  They embraced in the parking lot. “I never knew,” Clista said. “How could I not know?”

  “But didn’t you, really? Come on, didn’t you? Way down deep? In your guts?”

  Clista opened her purse and withdrew the compact and tube of coral lipstick. “I guess that’s a thing to consider.” She reapplied her signature color, pulled out a Kleenex and blotted a kiss onto it. She folded the Kleenex and handed it to Savannah. “If you’re ever really low, give yourself a kiss from me.”

  “Oh, I’ve already been plenty low. I’m aiming for up now. But, just in case, thanks.”

  “You’ll be okay here?” Clista glanced around the parking lot. It was not the best neighborhood, judging by the buildings in various stages of disrepair, and day had fallen into dusk.

  “Oh, hell yeah. Dakota won’t be too long.”

  “But it’s getting dark and you’re unfamiliar with the area.” There was a pharmacy across the street that was well-lit. “You should go to the bench by that drug store.”

  Savannah giggled. “Are you kidding? Nothing’s going to happen to me. You should know this about me by now. No point in letting worry rule your world, huh?”

  “I guess.”

  “So have you decided what you’re going to do?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “And it feels right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  The champagne-colored Cadillac was warm from the sunlight trapped inside just a short time ago—invisible but there, the traces of a star. Clista rolled down the windows and waved as she waited to pull out of the parking lot. She looked back for a few seconds longer to see Savannah arrange her possessions and plop down on her duffel bag next to the front of the rib joint, a snapshot of a reality Clista had enjoyed for a day. She wasn’t sure if the woman—no, the girl—was a chance that fell out of the sky or a providential event sent by some spiritual presence in an effort to set things right. Maybe the girl really would fade from existence once Clista turned away, so she hesitated for a moment, not wanting that vibrancy to dissipate, like the rays of the sun were.

  “Just go!” Savannah shouted, waving her off, laughing.

  Clista giggled, a genuine sound, pressed the gas, and pulled away. She started to roll up the windows but caught herself, even told herself “No,” right out loud. Then, at a glimpse of her eyes in the rearview mirror, she even whispered, “You crazy fucker.”

  And she left the windows down into the evening, rolling south through the farm country, past the scrubby towns and lives of folks left behind. The push of air blew a rhythm of comfort into her soul, disengaging strands of platinum blonde that whipped about her face, growing into a small hurricane of color-treated hair spiraling around the eye of coral lips. She would drive well into the night, until she made it all the way home, consuming every millisecond with the fierce energy of thinking, thinking hard, thinking him back alive.

  2 Love in Vain

  David Sheffield

  TO PUT IT REAL DELICATE, Miss Odessa Hervey was a woman of what you would call very ample girth, and so it was with some considerable difficulty that I rolled her over to complete the process of washing her down with germicidal solution. I had such fond memories of Miss Hervey from when she taught us fifth grade at Nichols Colored Elementary. Sadly, she had succumbed to the sugar diabetes, which no doubt contributed to her largeness.

  I placed a modesty cloth over her privates before I called in Elnora to help me set the features. Sure enough, she was still acting all sulky with me.

  All I said was, “Please go easy on the lip rouge this time.”

  “Why you want to criticize me and I haven’t even started?” Elnora said with her eyes all snappy.

  “All I’m saying is Miss Hervey was a Christian lady and I’m pretty sure her family wouldn’t like to see her done up too strumpish.”

  “You just set her jaw and let me worry about the life picture,” Elnora said.

  We went on about our separate business without saying a word, me bending and flexing Miss Hervey’s flabby arms to ease the rigor mortis while Elnora began the process of setting the poor lady’s hair in pin curls.

  About that time a call come in from the Leflore County Coroner, Mister Ernest Hemplewhite, saying there was a colored man for pickup at an address in Baptist Town.

  Maurice and me headed over there in the older hearse, the ‘34 Buick. We have a new ‘38 Packard-Henney at the Pruitt Funeral Home, but Maurice said it was in the shop to get the name painted on it. It’s always something with Maurice. He took to picking on me before we was even out of the drive, asking why was Elnora so touchy lately and cutting his eyes real sly.

  “Me and Miss Elnora are colleagues,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “I hear she colleagues with Lonnie Earl now,” Maurice said, checking me out to see how I would react.

  This cut me but I decided to let it slide, looking out the window while Maurice drove down Fulton Street toward Baptist Town. It was one of those miserable days in August, so hot the tar was popping up out of the pavement in little bubbles that crunched under the tires of the hearse.

  When we arrived at the location, a big old rambly yellow house at 109 Young Street, Mister Hemplewhite was waiting outside in the yard with a clipboard in his hand, acting all fidgety like he ready to get this over with. I been knowing him since he was elected coroner last November and I get the feeling he don’t much care about colored people. I’m not saying he hates. I’m just saying he regards people of color as some kind of bother to him.

  We had to climb up some narrow outside stairs to get to the room where the body was at, and it was sweaty work hauling the gurney up there.

  The room was dark and close where he was laying, with all the curtains shut and no electric light. It was two women in there, an older lady that owned the house, and her daughter, a very plain girl, no more than eighteen or nineteen, holding the hand of the deceased, waving a cardboard fan over his face like she was tranced. When we told her it was time to go, the girl commence to wail and moan from deep inside her chest with such a sound of grief and misery that it give me chills. The girl’s mama, the landlady, almost had to carry her out, with the girl still clutching that fan and wailing so hard her body shook. Then I heard some more women from another room take up the wail in that old Africa way they have that don’t hold nothing back.

  Mister Hemplewhite carry out his examination of the decedent, checking for a pulse, palpating the chest and so forth. It was a tall, thin, fine-featured young colored man laying there, wearing his underwear shirt and just the pants of a pinstripe suit. His skin was chalky and his lips was parched but you could see he was what the ladies call a pretty boy. The thing I remember most was his hands, his uncommon long and slender fingers, froze like they was reaching for something.

  The landlady come back in and Mister Hemplewhite asked her what did she know about the dead man.

  “Some peoples calls him R.J. and some calls him Bobby,” she said. “His last name could be Spencer but he go by Johnson. I know for sure his mama married a Dodds from down around Robinsonville.”

  Mister Hemplewhite was writing all this down. “Age?” he asked.

  “I believe twenty-seven.”

  “This his regular address?”

  “No, sir. He stay here with my daughter while he play music at the juke in Three Forks.”

  “What’d he die of?”

  “He come in the other evening with a terrible colic which he had for the last three days.” The landlady stop and give a shiver. “Right up to he died he was trembling and struggling for every breath he took.”

  “Prob’bly pneumonia,” Hemplewhite said. “Y’all should a called a doctor.”

  “Yes, sir, I know,” she said, “but ain’t nobody have the money.”

  Under “Cause of Death” on the coroner’s report, Mister Hemplewhite wrote down, “No doctor.”

  Just about then we heard somebody thumping up the stairs and
in come a young colored man in a rumply suit, all out of breath, looking a little crazy eyed, like a man that hasn’t had no sleep.

  “My name is Honeyboy Edwards,” he said. “If y’all fixing to signify how my friend R.J. died, then I’m here to tell you—the boy was poisoned.”

  Honeyboy asked the landlady could he have a glass of water and when she left the room, he lower his voice and say, “It’s like this. R.J. always had two kinds of womens. Plain girls to stay with and hot tamales to fool around with. This time, he picked the wrong honey for sure, because it turns out she go with the very motherfucker that own the juke at Three Forks.”

  “We don’t need that kind of talk,” Mister Hemplewhite said. “Let’s have some respect for the dead.” But Honeyboy didn’t pay no mind, just catch his breath and go right on.

  “They give R.J. a bottle of whiskey that had strychnine in it,” he said. “Sonny Boy Williamson was playing mouth harp with him, and when the first bottle come, he knocked it out of R.J.’s hand and said, ‘Don’t ever drank from a bottle that’s already open.’ R.J. said, ‘And don’t you ever knock a bottle out my hand again.’ Pretty soon they come back with another bottle and R.J. drank it down. He seem like he all right for a while, but about two thirty in the morning he have to put his guitar down and go outside to vomit. He got worse and worse so we brung him back here. It was strychnine killed him, sure as I’m standing here.”

  “If you knew it was strychnine, why didn’t you call the law?” asked Hemplewhite.

  Honeyboy didn’t have no answer for that.

  “When are you people going to learn? When you got a problem, call the law,” Hemplewhite said. “I can’t go changing the cause of death. I done wrote it down.” Then he signed his name to the report and passed it over for me to do likewise.

  Honeyboy stepped up to me with his voice all trembly and said, “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Vernon Pruitt, Junior,” I said. “Associate Director of the Pruitt Funeral Home.”

  “Look here, Pruitt,” he said. “If you sign that, you letting the man from Three Forks off the hook. He killed him. He killed my man R.J.”

  “He don’t have no say in it,” Hemplewhite said. “I’m the coroner and I done wrote it down.”

  We carried the body down to the hearse and since this was an indigent case for the county, we took charge of the personal possessions for the time being—a guitar, a valise, and an old coach trunk full of something so heavy it took me and Maurice both to lug it down the steps.

  By the time we got ready to go it was a number of people crowding around in the yard, most of them women crying and carrying on. The girl come down from the house and hung onto the hearse to where we couldn’t leave til her mama pull her off.

  As we was leaving, Maurice looked back in the rearview mirror with that nasty smile of his and said, “Reckon if I played and sang the womens would cry for me too?”

  “I doubt it,” I said.

  Back at the funeral home, Maurice asked could he leave early because he have to take his mother to get her feet scraped or otherwise she wouldn’t be able to stand up in the choir on Sunday. It’s just like Maurice to claim some kind of mercy doings he knows I can’t dispute.

  The county won’t pay for embalming on an indigent case, just a pine box and a hole in the ground. Still, I try to carry out these preparations with as much dignity as I can and so I looked through the boy’s things til I found him a clean shirt and tie. Unfortunately the jacket to the pinstripe suit was wadded up with stains all over it, so I took it in the back to sponge it clean and go over it the best I could with the steam iron.

  When I come back in with the clothes, Elnora was standing over the boy’s body with her head bowed, moving her lips so soft I couldn’t make out what she was praying. When she finish and turn around I could see her eyes was all puffy.

  “You going to have to do this one by yourself,” she said. “It hurt too bad to see him this way.”

  “Where you know him from?” I asked.

  “Three Forks,” she said. “Me and some friends of mine went down there to hear him sing.”

  “Is that where you go with Lonnie Earl?”

  “Why can’t you leave me alone?”

  “He’s never going to treat you right. A man like Lonnie Earl don’t give a damn about nobody but hisself.”

  “That’s for me to worry about,” she said. “Listen, Vernon. I can’t work here no more with you disapproving me all the time.”

  “You don’t have to go,” I said. “I’ll stop.”

  “No, you won’t,” she said. “You can’t help yourself. Please tell your daddy I’m sorry but I have to go.”

  Elnora gathered up her things and then she was gone, leaving me to casket the boy by myself. The coach trunk caught my eye. I opened it out of curiosity and it was full of records. I picked one out and took it to the chapel where we have an electric phonograph.

  Sitting in a pew by myself, I listened to his music. How could one man squeeze so much sound out of nothing but a plain guitar? Raw and driving on the bottom, sweet and tinkly on the top. When he sang, his voice was rough as a field hand and soft as a seraphim—

  When the train rolled up to the station

  I looked her in the eye

  When the train rolled up to the station

  and I looked her in the eye

  Well, I was lonesome, I felt so lonesome

  and I could not help but cry

  All my love in vain

  When the song was over, I sat a long time, listening to the needle scratch and pop. Then I got up, turned off the phonograph, and went back in to finish the preparations.

  It took some doing to get the suit on him, being that his back was so stiff and arched up from struggling to breathe. Maybe Honeyboy was right. If he did get a dose of strychnine it could of wore him down til he caught the pneumonia later. People think the poison kills a man’s brain but what it really does is rob him of his breath.

  I knotted his tie, smoothed out his lapels and fluffed up the handkerchief in his breast pocket.

  “Why you? Why do all the women love a man like you? What is it they see in bad men, dangerous men like you and Lonnie Earl? Why you? Why you and not me?”

  I flexed and worked his hands, stretching out those long elegant fingers, smooth as a girl’s except for the calluses on his fingertips from where he fretted the guitar. I folded those hands, then leaned down close and whispered—”A lot of good it done you, pretty boy. Look at you now.”

  As soon as it passed my lips, a wave of sorrow come over me. I closed the pine lid and nailed it shut, driving each nail straight so as not to split the wood, the bang of the hammer pounding in my head. When I finally stopped and let go, I wasn’t sure if I was crying for the dead boy, or for my own sorry self.

  3 Nine Below Zero

  Ace Atkins

  THE DEPUTIES HAD COME AND GONE, trying to track a couple of meth-heads boosting anhydrous ammonia from a holding tank down the road. The sheriff had his boys in four-wheelers out in the snow zipping up and down the Sunflower River and along Highway 49, but we paid the whole thing little mind, turning back to cold Budweiser, warm Jack, and endless cigarettes. This was as cold as the Delta had been in fifty years, and it seemed even colder inside the cavernous space of the old Hopson Commissary.

  The only illumination shone from a strand of Christmas lights snaked through dusty booze bottles and the heavy fire glow pulsing from a pot-bellied stove trying its best to heat a room as large as an airplane hanger. A stereo played some vintage Muddy Waters.

  “So,’’ said the man at my elbow. “You just took up and left New Orleans? Just like that? Nothing but your truck and that old trailer?’

  “I didn’t have the trailer then,’’ I said. “I found that Airstream over in Pocahontas.”

  “What about all your things? Personal items and such.”

  “I took what survived the storm, a couple books and a Stones album. Most of my clothes had b
een looted.’’

  “What was it?”

  “What was what?”

  “The album?”

  “Exile.” “Si. Si.’’

  I nodded. Ice had formed hard and stiff in the corner of a small window glowing red with a Budweiser sign. My thick jacket felt as if it were made of paper.

  “You sound a little angry.”

  “It is what it is.’’

  “That whole thing was a mess, my friend. You think it will ever be the same?’’

  “Nope,’’ I said, and toasted the fella with half a Budweiser, feeling confident in a nice steady buzz.

  The commissary had been part of the plantation back in the day and had since been turned into a local juke joint and gathering place for town misfits and out-of-town travelers. The owner, a fella by the name of James Butler, had kept the place about as original as he could, leaving the old post office toward the front of the building and even keeping the odd hay bale near the main stage where bluesmen like Pinetop Perkins and Big Jack Johnson sometimes played. Old farm equipment and rusted Delta relics hung from the wall. Muddy kept on singing.

  “And you’ve been right here?”

  “I went to France for a while.’’

  “What was in France?”

  “A girl.’’

  “I knew a girl from France once,’’ he said, staring into nothing. “Big blue eyes and fantastic ta-tas.’’

  “How big?”

  “Big enough.’’

  The back door opened, and in walked a shirtless man, slathered in mud, with red eyes and blue lips. His thin chest looked as light as a bird’s and just as bony, and he stood and shivered, seeking the heat of the old stove. He stood there for several moments, trying but failing to hold onto a cigarette, and I watched him as he planted his feet, dead-eyed, and tried to revive his blue skin.

  I looked back to my drink and signaled to James for another round for me and my drinking partner. It was about a quarter til midnight. Muddy kept on. One More Mile. One More Mile.