CHAPTER 15

And I named him Bliss, Hickman thought, shaking his head. Resting back in his chair now, his hands shading his eyes from the light, he stared sadly at the man on the bed. Lord, he thought, here he is at last, stretched out on his bed of pain. Maybe his dying bed. After flying so far and climbing so high and now here. Just look at him, Lord. Why does this have to be? I know it’s supposed to be this way because in spite of all our prayers it is; still, why does it have to be? I’m tired; for the first time I feel old-tired, and that’s the truth. And this is what’s become of our Bliss. He wasn’t always ours and yet he first was mine. It wasn’t easy either; far from easy. My hardest trial …

Hickman, maybe she was as Christian as she thought she was, maybe she was doing just what she had to do.… Then it seemed like Wickham said the Jews used to put it out there in K.C.: like killing your mother and father and then asking the court for mercy because you’re an orphan.… Maybe she was driven, like those gamblers who couldn’t stand to win. But just think about it—coming there wrapped in a black shawl through the rutted alley over all that broken glass shining in the starlight … past all those outhouses, yard-dogs, and chicken coops, long after dark had come down. Coming into that house at a time like that. Having the nerve, the ignorant, arrogant nerve to come in there after all that had happened. Hickman, do you know that that was something? Talking about Eliza crossing the ice!—Ha! But her—having the arrogance to come there after all that had happened.

Maybe she was innocent, Hickman.

Innocent?

I can’t understand what people mean when they call somebody like her innocent. A man murders sixteen people on a city street at high noon he’d never seen before in his life, and they call him innocent? Maybe she had innocence in her but she was not of it. You couldn’t believe it, could you?

The first, yes; all that about Mamma and Bob, I could. Because that terrible story has happened to so many that it’s new only when it happens to you and to yours. You get to live with it like the springtime storms. So that it gets to be part of your sense of what life is. You learn to live with it like a man learns to live with only one arm and still get his work done—but not the Bliss part, that was the snapper, the stinger on the whip!

There you were, sitting again in the lamp-lit room feeling the weight of the rifle across your knees and a shotgun and two pistols on the table beside you; sitting dressed in your working tuxedo and your last white, iron-starched shirt, there staring into the blank wall at the end of time. Yes, and with death weighing down your mind. They’d already told you to get out of town, because you reminded them of what they’d done and you’d refused to go; yes, and maybe they recognized what it would cost some one or two of them at the least to force you, so after all those months you were still there. And instead of the end it was the beginning. Maybe it would help him to know. Yes, but in his condition it might kill him to know; the truth can humiliate those who refuse to meet it halfway. And I couldn’t believe it myself when it was happening. You’d heard the expected knock on the door and said Come in with the rifle ready, taking a glance at the shotgun and the pistols on Mamma’s table and at her Bible open to where you’d written the record, hers and Bob’s; and with your own all written down to the month, feeling that this was to be the month, and just waiting for some unknown hand to write in the date. It’s still waiting, after all these years, thank you, Master—my best-loved Bible to this day … I never thought of it before, but maybe it all began with my writing my death in the Book of Life, who knows? Yes, and with me sitting just like I’m sitting now … It’s like I’ve never gotten up or recognized her presence in all these elapsed years. Ha! Sitting there in death’s dry kingdom preparing myself for seven months to take a few of them along with me. Yes, ready to write your name in blood and to go to hell to pay for it. Hickman, you were too big and black for anybody to ever have called callow, but, man, you were young! Waiting for more liquored-up, ganged-up violence to come get you—and then seeing her standing there. There, Lord, after the double funeral and all, you thought you were seeing an evil vision, didn’t you, Hickman? Yes, indeed, or at least that I had dozed. I shot bolt upright in the chair. Yes, you sure did. Standing there, looking at me out of those hollow eyes; not saying a word. I thought, If I take a deep breath it’ll go away, then she stretched out her hand and kind of fluttered her fingers and tried to speak and I knew she was real. Shot up with a pistol in my hand, no longer surprised as Bob must have been, just dead sure her being there meant more deathblood to flow, and dead set to drown her in it along with me. A church organist, come to think of it. I never thought about that before, but, Hickman, look at the pattern it makes.… Tall and wrapped in a black shawl like those Mexican women in mourning, shaking her head at my pistol like I was some child she’d come upon in the woods about to go after a bear with an air rifle, saying,

No, no, it won’t help us, Alonzo Hickman; you and I, we’re beyond help; I had to come. Have you a woman here, a wife? You’d better call her because there isn’t much time.

Just like that. And I felt the pistol throbbing beneath my hand like a hungry hound that’s sighted game. So she wants me too, it’s not simply the men who want me. She got Mamma and Robert and now she wants me. I’m supposed to be next. Less than seven months to pickle me in my pain and now she wants me. All right, if that’s the deal, then all right. But she goes too. This time she’ll lead the way.

There’s not much time, she said.

All right.

Standing there, leaning—Lord, I can see her after all this time—leaning a little to one side with her fingers just touching the back of the chair as though she knew it was Mamma’s, and so to her a rocking accusation, and me looking across the room at those black-smudged eyes in that chalk-white face, not even a tint of rouge to give it the color even a corpse would have nowadays … Me, looking at her and all dedicated to one last act and trying to hold on to my life and trying to live my life fully in those few seconds I felt I had left to live … Oh, Hickman, you’d been a rover and a rounder, but man, you were young. Young? Wasn’t even born! No, and you couldn’t see the side of a church house: There the lamp on the table was telling you to look at the facts of life staring you dead in the face and you seeing only the white paperish mask above that black lace shawl; standing there with that heavy Colt .45 so light in your hand that it seemed to be part of your own body; then her coming toward me casting the shadow across the floor and the opposite wall and then across me, and that was the first time I noticed that she was moving like a woman pushing a basket of clothes in a wheelbarrow—that slow, heavy-laden walk, yet swift in the mind’s eye tightened with my feelings. Moving the omen or sign I couldn’t read. Yes, coming like a sick woman carrying a Christmas gift under her coat to hide its shape from the children’s eyes; seeing it floating before her as I raised my hand towards her and still could not accept what my eyes screamed to me was there and which my brain refused to deal with because it didn’t want to give up its simple-minded interpretation of the scene as through a glass darkly. Like my eyes had jumped clean out of my head and flown up there beside Papa’s picture on the wall and were just sticking there watching and recording and saving till later what I was trying to see through my fingers or my skin. Yes, my brain refusing to accept the bold-faced evidence because knowing that Bob hadn’t been anywhere around and wasn’t the type. So it doubly wasn’t him, and so making her big-bellied ripeness a fact as meaningless to me as a mole on her shoulder blade beneath the shawl, or an offending tonsil that had been removed and dropped in a jar of alcohol when she was twelve years old.

And then we were joined together. Me without realizing it, sailing past the table with the lamp and the Bible and jamming the pistol barrel there where I knew the pain would wind slow and live and give birth to death long after I was beyond the revenge of screams  … Rest, Bliss—Wonder why they don’t give him something to really ease him?…

Brother Bob, the only brother I had left; the good, true and dutiful son to Mamma while I the preacher’s hellion son rambled and gambled out there in the Territory, in Joplin, St. Joe, and K.C. You, Hickman, that was you. Yes indeed. I had prayed for the end of her and all like her, and for revenge, and here, I thought, was the answer. How many have shriveled with that pain? It was for me to round out the order, to bring it to a halt, dead-end—But all the time saying not a word to her, just thinking in snatches and hearing breathing sounds, hers and mine. Standing there gripping her neck in my hand like it was a bass fiddle’s and with the sight of the barrel pressing into the curving of her belly. Still refusing to recognize what it all meant. Just trying to feel it all as I saw it, so that I could say it all, so she could suffer it all and feel it keen in one red burst like an abscessed tooth at midnight on a highballing train. No relief. No red lights. No one to flag it down. So that she’d know what it meant to let loose all that old viciousness out of the pit to strike down some innocent man in his defenselessness; so that I could throw her upon the same old disgusting sacrificial altar on all the ignored blood still screaming there for justice. Ay, so that in my anger the high and mighty young priestess would for once sprawl where her victim fell.… But those must have been the terms that came afterwards, sitting in the chair; not then. Then was more blind feeling and thinking. I was swept backwards into deeper and older depths of living, down where the life had gone out of the air and only animals could breathe. Just why I didn’t slap her backhanded across the room and kick her into a corner like a bouncer or a dance-hall floor-manager would have done any overbearing whore who’d interrupted a dance just to win herself some cheap notoriety at the expense of his good nature, I’ll never know. Such I had learned to watch without flinching back there in those places where the music was more important than any violation of a woman’s womanliness by a man’s male strength. I was sure a big heathen, back there. You sure were, although Lord knows you were taught better. Yes, but it’s a fact that those women knew that the consequences of fooling around like that was either a black eye, a lumped head or a bruised behind. As Rush used to sing it, Women all screaming murder. I never raised my hand…. But that would have been too personal, I was beyond just that, I was as a thousand in my ache for vengeance. So I must have been changing.… Old clock used to work by weights passing one another, up and down. Maybe the shock of their death had to change me if I was to live even a second after I heard the news. Maybe the shock was so great that I knew even in my tongue-tied condition of wickedness that there was a moment when all heaven and hell had come together to purge men with the pill of eternal judgment, emptying us just like those old Greek folks were emptied after they committed some of their God-cursing crimes. And, in fact, the same kind of crime it was and just as holy-horrible even though we ignore it and let it happen year after year after year and no punishment or hope for justice. Thy must regulate thyself or take the pill. Ha, yes! But one day soon now it’ll come back to us from strange places, seeking us out with sword and fire in a strange sunburned hand, saying, Here, you folks without recollection or feeling for the humiliation and the wasted blood, take some of old Dr. Time’s Compound Cathartic.… Thou shalt not bear false witness—No, but that don’t even begin to describe it, not what she did … they do. Maybe something like that went on under the old skin of my brain back there. Ah, Bliss, would knowing the story have helped you?… With her breathing between my hands and me recognizing that here was more than we actually saw when we sat up there on the bandstand playing while they danced, or when we passed on the street and thought: That there now is a woman who flows with the moon and who squats in the morning like other women but who by law and custom can spread herself or smile only for those she knows as her own kind. She there is a woman who wills herself to believe that she’s different from my women and better than my women simply by being born and not because of anything she can do that’s more womanly or wifely or motherly, but who can prove she is what she’s supposed to be when the chips are down only by letting hell yell rape from the pit between her thighs and then pointing her lying finger at me. Talking about having the power of life and death! Maybe the shock of Bob’s death—poor Mamma was old and sick and wore out with trouble, so I had faced up to her leaving us before long, I had only hoped to see her once more before—But Bob, Lord, their doing that to him was such a shock that even in my lost condition I understood that even if she, there in the palm of my hand and curved hard against the pistol barrel, even if she were the finest of the fine, a lady fair and gentle-wayed was now become a pus pot slopping over with man’s old calcified evil and corruption. What kind of love and respect is that—raised up like a golden cow just to plunge then in the raising lower than those poor whores performing daisy-chain circuses in dope-fiend cathouses and West Coast opium dens. Lower! Those poor lost souls couldn’t touch the downright obscenity of one of these. Not even the ones who perverted themselves with dogs and goats before flyspecked spotlights for money and then moved from table to table lifting their tips from dirty, liquor-ringed tabletops with the shaved, raw, puffed, dry, slack-mouthed lips of their corrupted and outraged businesses. Those shameless whores with their guts fish-mouthing for filthy old limp and wrinkled dollar bills that they had to straddle the corners of the tables and grind down to in order to retrieve—No, Hickman, not even these—And back there you had seen life raw. You had seen the bottom of the bucket and the hole in the bottom of the bucket and the cruel jagged edges of the hole. Yes, and seen the bitter lees lying on the bottom, the very dregs and under the gritty bottom level of the dregs those poor lost souls. But none so lost and bound for perdition on Perdido Street could touch those who had been armed with the power to kill with that lying cry….

Lord, Hickman, I wonder what you’d done if she had been a man? You know what you would’ve done; that’s why women could do so much good if they would, they’re meant to make us men put on brakes, meant to break our headlong pace. Ay! but anyone seeing us that night would have been justified in calling for the straitjackets! This here is insanity, I told myself. This here is the instant before you foam at the mouth and bite off your tongue; the split second when you see the man pull the trigger just five feet away and when you realize still without pain that you have been hit because you can’t hear the gun go off and then he’s turning cartwheels with the gun still pointing straight at you.… In Tulsa, that was, and lucky I threw my trombone and the bullet went through my shoulder.… Oh yes, indeed. That was me back there—wild and reckless. Who used to hit the poolroom’s swinging doors yelling,

Both of us must have risen up about three feet off the floor and been standing there in the air by now, because no floor in Alabama could support such goings-on. No, and no one could live through it without some modification of his deepest soul. So I was already changing, I suppose. Hearing her saying like someone in a trance:

If you’ve got to do it, go ahead; only hurry. But it won’t help either of us, Alonzo Hickman, it wouldn’t help a bit and I’m not worth what it’ll cost you….

And me repeating, He didn’t do it; Robert didn’t do it and you know dam’ well he didn’t do it….

That’s right, I lied. You don’t have to say it again because I acknowledge it.

Just breathing, nervous between my hands like a scared convert standing chest-deep in the baptismal water. Then that word lied started banging around in my head. Like when you put a coin in one of those jukes, yes, and it takes a while before the machinery goes into action, then all of a sudden—wham! the red and blue lights go on and the sound comes blaring out:

Woman, is all you can say is that you lied? What’s that word got to do with it? If you’re going to use these last minutes to talk, then say something.

Say you burned up all the cotton and polluted the waterworks. Say that you dried up all the cows; that you spread the hoof-and-mouth disease throughout the state and gave all the doctors the bleeding piles. Even that you brought everybody down with the galloping consumption and the sugar diabetes—But don’t come here telling me that you lied. Everybody, including the littlest children, know that you lied—what’s all this death got to do with the truth?

What? What?

Tell me that you’re responsible for the Johnstown flood.

What?

 … That you can stir up cyclones just by waving your naked heels in the air. Tell me that you breathe fire and brimstone from your belly every time the moon comes full—but don’t come talking about you lied! Don’t you realize what you did?

Yes—shaking her head. Yes, can’t you see that I’m here? I’m not a loose woman.… I’m from a good family.… I’m a Christian!

You’re a what?

Yes, a Christian. I lied. Yes. I bore false witness and caused death. Yes, and I’m a murderess. Can’t you see that I understand? How could I help but know? I’m here. Can’t you see, I’m here….

And Lord knows, she was….

You couldn’t deal with that about her being a Christian, could you A.Z. Ho, ho! No, she could just as well said she was the head chief Rabbi of Warsaw, or the Queen of Sheba … or Madame Siseretta Jones. So I ignored that one.

I said: Why Bob? You’ve been knowing me from when we were children, but you didn’t know him from Adam’s off ox….

But it wasn’t him. I didn’t wish to hurt him. Nor anyone. Can’t you understand that, Alonzo Hickman? You have to try. He just didn’t exist for me. He was just a name; just a name which by saying I could protect someone more precious to me than myself or mother or father, or anything he and I might have together. But I wanted only to protect my own. Not to destroy anybody. It was fate. Please, is there a woman here? There’s very little time….

A woman? Won’t I be enough for you this time? Do you have to have another woman as well as another man? Don’t you know that what you did has killed the only woman of this house, my mother?

Yes, I heard. You don’t have to remind me. I’m here. I’ve put myself in your hands but it’s still beyond the two of us. Still I tell you, if you don’t hurry and shoot you’d better hurry and get a woman because you’re going to have too much on your hands for any man….

And even in the hard cold center of my anger I was confounded. I simply couldn’t link all that death back to life. No, I couldn’t fit the links into a chain. Said:

Another woman for what? To lay out our bodies? You want a woman for that? Don’t worry about it, because I’m putting a hot bullet through that oil lamp sitting right there on the table; we won’t need her. Besides, we’ll both be in hell watching the confusion long before she could even get here.

Oh, I was already feasting on revenge and sacrifice, telling myself: Those eyes for Bob’s eyes; that skin for Bob’s flayed skin; those teeth for Bob’s knocked-out teeth; those fingers for his dismembered hands. And remembering what they had done with their knives I asked myself, But what can I take that can replace his wasted seed and all that’s now a barbaric souvenir floating in a fruit jar of alcohol and being shown off in their barbershops and lodge halls and in the judge’s chambers down at the courthouse? And then beginning to really see, my own eyes betraying my aim and my understanding growing and making me say,

Bob’s; you know dam’ well it can’t be Bob’s.

I tell you I didn’t know him, she said. Can’t you get a woman?

I said, Whose is it then?

All I can tell you is that it wasn’t your brother. It’s cost too much my trying not to tell to tell it now. But not his … He had nothing to do with it….

Just like that. So Hickman, maybe that’s when you started to change. It was like seeing all of a sudden the air falling apart so that you could recognize the separate gases and molecules that made up its substance and which you’d have to see gather quick and mix together again if you meant to continue breathing. She had been protecting her secret and her man. That’s all it was for her. All of that destruction just to deny that little growing bit of truth. Gone and set fire to the whole house just to hide where she’d spilled a little grease on the rug. Talk about all those lives ground up to build the Pyramids, she’d have destroyed the nation just to protect her pride and reputation in that little old town. Slop the juice and cause a flood. Fire is more like it. So naturally she couldn’t go to a doctor for help and in confidence. Not after screaming Robert’s name, because then everybody would have yelled Bliss’s question even before he could draw his first living breath. Just as surely as Mary had a baby, King Herod had him a daughter; thousands of ’em.

Where could she go? So not to her doctor, or to her pastor; both those ministering roles were scratched from the book and denied. Neither to her mother, nor to her father; nor to her sister or to any friends or kinfolks. Neither could she go to any maidservant, to no black cook or washerwoman, nor to any of our preachers, teachers, or doctors. The blind man could stand on the corner and cry, and folks would drop money in his cup so they could ignore his pain, but she bred and spread muteness and blindness and deafness. That poor girl had cut herself loose from both sides. She must have thought about each and every grown person in the whole town, like someone turning over each and every pebble on a mile-square stretch of seashore, hoping to find just one that would give her relief from that terrible loneliness. Misery doesn’t just love company, it reaches out for its own through all the man-erected walls and then claims its own.

So I had to be the one. Me, the least likely, the anyone-else-but: She finally sifted the grains down to me. Oh, she could be willful and blot Bob out without ever bothering to think that there was a body attached to his name and life in that body, she could do it and be beyond the consequences—but now her own belly said, Let the disgusting, foul-aired truth come clean, and it turned her wrong-side out. Or maybe right-side, because she must have had to have more than simple arrogant nerve to come there that night.

But to who else could she go, Hickman? Who but to the one who had suffered deep down to the bottom of the hole, down where there’s nothing to do but come floating up lifting you in his own arms into the air, or die? Oh, John the Baptist was a diver into those lonely depths, I do believe. I do believe.… In all that frenzied agitated searching she must have been like a man being chased West so hard and fast that he stumbles and falls into the ocean and has either got to swim or sink. Don’t tell me a human don’t live by instinct when he reaches bottom, because when he’s just about to go to pieces his instinct tries to guide him to where he can save himself. That’s when God shows you His face. That’s when in a split second you’re about to be nothing and you have a flash of a chance to be something. She must have been sore desperate, like backed into the corner of a red-hot oven. Hickman, that was when your heart stopped beating like a run-down clock. Oh, yes; and that’s when you got your first peep through the crack in the wall of life and saw hell laughing like a gang of drunk farmers watching a dogfight on a country road. All at once you were standing there smelling her sour, feverish white woman’s breath mixed up with that sweet soap they used to use and you were hearing the hellish yelling and tearing around and about of a million or so crazy folks. Ha, yes! That’s when the alphabet in your poor brain was so shaken up that the letters started to fall out and spell “hope,” “faith,” and “charity”—it would take time for them to fall all the way into place, so you could recognize it, but it was beginning to happen. Yes, it was happening even while you were saying:

So now you come to me. Out of all the rest you come to me. I guess you think that old lady who died doesn’t mean anything to me because she was only a black man’s old worn-out mother who was soon to die anyway. I guess I’m supposed to forget about her. So now here you come to me after all that to demand that I get you aid to perpetuate all that you have done without even thinking. So I’m to stand here on the spot and switch over from the animal you consider me to be to the human you’ve decided I could never be, so that I can be understanding and forgiving—Woman, do you think I’m Jesus Christ? Do you think a man like me is even interested in the idea of trying to be Christ-like? Hell, my papa was a preacher while I’m a horn-blowing gambler. Do you think that after being the son of a black preacher in this swamp of a country I’d let you put me in the position of trying to act like Christ? Make it easy for you to destroy mine and me without even the need to remember, and humiliate mine and me, and, dam’ you, expect me to understand and forgive you and then minister to your needs? Destroy me and mine so that you can cast me down into corruption and the grave and then dig me up next week so that I can serve you. Tell me, what kind of endless, bottomless, blind store of forgiveness and understanding am I supposed to have? Just tell me where I’m suppose to carry it. What kind of meat and bread am I suppose to eat in order to nourish it?

Hickman, you didn’t know it at the time but when you started talking she had shifted out of your hands and put you into hers. She really had you then. You were talking so fast you were foaming at the mouth, but that instinct and life inside her had reached out and tagged you and you were It. A pair of purple smears sagging shuteyed in my hands and me standing there holding her and unable to let her fall.… If we ever learn to feel real revulsion of the flesh—any flesh—that’s when hell will truly erupt down here and the whole unhappy history become an insane waste; if we ever learn to hate the mere rind in the same way we ignore the spirit and the heart and the hopeful possibility underneath.… And there I stood—me, cursing her for using a woman’s weakness as a club to kill me there and to deny me anger and hate because I was my mother’s boy child and my father’s son whom they had brought up on the ideas and standards that made any human beings bearable one to the other.… That woman, coming there using my very black manhood to deny me grief and to deny me love and to deny me thirst and hunger and weakness and hope and joy—denying me even denial and rejection and contempt and vindictiveness against any claim her kind had upon mine … denying me even the need for anger or life. There she’d been feeding two for all those months and now sagging in my hands like the shadow of some little ole frightened bird about to take off and fly.

And then it really started, and me still cursing but helpless before the rhythm of those pains that started pulsing from him to her to me, as though some coked-up drummer was beating his snares inside her belly and I was being forced against my will to play or dance, and dance or play, even if I had nothing left but bleeding stumps for arms and legs. Me, a full-grown man crying, “Mamma, Mamma,” with tears running down my face, while I was getting her to bed. Me, crying helpless at a time like that, as though my body had somehow to register a protest against what I was being forced to do, and getting her into Mamma’s bed and starting to uncover all that that Bob had died for not even thinking about uncovering: white and blue-veined and bulging like that boa constrictor I saw back there during my days with the circus band after it had swallowed a lamb. Yes, and went about dressing her just the same in one of Mamma’s gowns. Then going on to tear Mamma’s sheets, and pouring the water I’d heated for my own last bath in case the men had come.… Yes, almost convinced that I was in a dream. Too mad and outraged now to be afraid that she had been followed and still determined to make small-town history in blood. Determined, after letting out the life that bulged her belly, to let out the life that had drained me dry of love.

Oh, ashamed too; shamed and too outraged with myself to call a woman to come do the midwife’s work. Asking myself, Man, where’s your dignity, where’s your pride? Where, at what point is my hate spilling out between my hands and my determination? What do you call this situation? Who’s doing this to me? Who’s got me hypnotized? And all the while doing the whole thing myself in spite of myself: Holding the damp cloth to her brow and placing the pillow beneath her quivering backside to ease and aid the flesh in its quaking and quickening, and holding firm to her weaving hands while she gave birth to that bawling, boiled-red and glistening baby flesh. Watching my own big black hands going in and out of those forbidden places, ha! into the rushing fluids, and despising it all. No mercy in my heart, Lord, no! Only the choking strangulation of some cord of kinship stronger and deeper than blood, hate or heartbreak. And stopped from killing the two of us only by the third that was coming screaming in all his innocent-evil bewilderment into that death house.… Ho! if anyone passing in the night had heard him cry.… They had me battling against myself, but I went all the way, I suppose by then to prove to myself, even to the Lord, that I was mean enough to play the cards that life had dealt me and still stick to my will. They say a doctor is a butcher underneath, it’s a wonder I didn’t try to use those pistol barrels for forceps—No, but I took Papa’s old straight-edged razor and boiled the blade to sterilize it and divided the fruit from the tree. Yes, and tied up his navel cord with Mamma’s embroidery thread, fixed his first belly band. Him, Bliss. Wiped his unseeing eyes and anointed his body with oil. You, Bliss. I wrapped you in the sheet around and placed you in the crook of her sleeping arm and saw her try after all of that to smile. Her face all beaded over with sweat and I wiped that too away; then sat way back in Mamma’s rocking chair, just looking at them, dazed and defiant.

I was too tired to sleep or rest and my mind wouldn’t stop. There she was, relieved of her burden and sleeping like a peaceful child, and him beside her with his little fists already balled up for the fight of life. I couldn’t look at him too steady either. There was that one bright drop of blood on the white sheet and I watched it growing dark, thinking: Now there’s two, one to accuse me and the other to hang me; one to point the finger and the other to rise up and shoot me down, or pull the rope to break my neck. Yes, and because of these there is no one of my own to come cut me down. There they are in Mamma’s own bed, outraged and outrageous. I started thinking about those old Hebrew soldiers who use to leave their prisoners castrated on the battlefield—but for what Jehovah could I even play Abraham to that little Isaac? Lord, my eyes must’ve been bloodshot with my thoughts and frustrations. And there Bliss was, puckered up and so new he looked like if you were to drop him he would bounce like a rubber ball….

How long did I sit there? Nobody would come to mark the passage of time and I had long ago drawn the shades and let the clock run down and she’d made me a pariah even to my own. Pariah and midwife too, and raped me of my will and my manhood. Dehumanized my human needs. Told myself, it won’t stop here. When she gets her strength she’ll scream again. Yes, but now the life is out of there and she’d beat me with a little child.… Hickman, you were crazy. Yes, but I was sane too; because what I thought there was true, though it took time to learn it in. She had torn me out of my heathen freedom so she could save herself, that was the truth. And all with that baby. With just that little seven-pound rabbit. Not even a few minutes of pleasure or relief either. Which was the last thing I would have thought about. She wasn’t even good-looking, with that thin nose and high forehead; with just that ugly-sounding way of talking through her lips and nostrils. I knew her before her skirts went down, gangle-legging along the street like a newborn foal, trying to walk with class. And him not even brown so that I could have made some sensible meaning out of her coming here to me; just nothing definite, just baby-mouse-red and wrinkled up like a monkey with a strawberry rash. And me such a slave to what a human is supposed to be that I couldn’t refuse to help him into the world. Helped him when I should, according to the way I felt then, have left him stranded and choking with the cord wrapped around his neck when her mammy-waters burst.

Now she’s sleeping, I thought. Now she’s in her woman’s exhaustion, resting out of time like a stranger to both good and evil—while here I am, tired and feeling with no relief or rest inside me or outside me. She, resting up so she can scream again and they’ll hear it all the way to the State House. Yes, but now the life is out I’m going to put us all to sleep. I mean to clear the earth of just this one bit of corruption. Which is all one can do, just clean up his own mess or that which is dumped on top of him when he has the chance.… Just look at them sleeping there, fruit of all this old cancerous wrong. Why isn’t he brown or black or kinky, so that I could see some logic in her coming here? At least allow me to see the logic of a mare neighing help from a groom who happened to be passing her stall during her foaling time. Oh no, but coming here to me … Easy, Hickman, don’t fight old battles. Maybe it was the way the sacred decided to show Himself. Would you at this age still criticize God?

Lord, O Lord, you must have been preparing me all those twenty-six years for that ordeal; giving me this great tub of guts and muscle and deep, windy lungs and this big keg-sized head and all that animal strength I used to have and which I thought was simply meant for holding all the food and drink I loved so well and to contain all the wind necessary to blow my horn and to sing all night long, sure; and for the enjoyment of women and the pleasures of sin.… Ah, but right then and there I learned that you had really given me all that simply so I could contain and survive all I was to feel sitting there through those awful hours.

Just sitting there and hating. Just sitting there looking at the two generations of them in the ease of their sleeping, and thinking back three generations more of my people’s tribulations and trying to solve the puzzle of that long-drawn-out continuation of abuse. That and why the three of us were thrown together in my house of shame and sorrow. It was a brain-breaker and a caustic in the naked eye all right, and the longer I sat there the stranger it seemed. I guess it couldn’t have been stranger than if one of Job’s boils had started addressing him, saying, “Look here now, Job; this here is your head-chief boil speaking to you. You just tell me my name and I’ll jump off your neck and take all the rest of the boils along with me.” Yes, and ole Job too used to trouble and straitjacketed in misery by then to even be surprised to learn that a boil could talk—even one of his boils—only wondering why his kin or hair or toenails or something didn’t speak up and tell the boil to be silent in the presence of the Lord. Because, Master, you must have been there with me at the time, and probably with a sad smile on your face. Even after Mamma and Robert it was like waking up on mornings in some Territory town like Guthrie in the old days and discovering that my trombone mouthpiece had grown to my lips and my good right arm changed into a slide, but with no bell anywhere to let out the sound.… Hickman, you were in a fix. You and those two strangers in the most unlikely place in the world and you the strangest of all.

Yes, with the baby mewling and raising the dickens and me having to put him to that thin, white, blue-veined tit to suck. Yes, having to guide his red little gums to that blighted raspberry of a nipple so I wouldn’t have to listen to him crying for a while. And my having to be gentle, not like a nursemaid who loves a child enough to give it a good hard pinch in the side when it vexes her too much, but just because of the murder in my heart having to be gentlest of the gentle. Just because he was a baby and me a man full of hate; and gentle with her because aside from everything else, she was a mother lying in the bed where my own mother had once lain. It was like the Lord had said, “Hickman, I’m starting you out right here—with the flesh and with Eden and Christmas squeezed together. Never mind the spirit and justice and right and wrong—or time—just now you’re outside all that because this is a beginning. So, starting right here, what will you do about the flesh? That’s what you have to wrestle with.” He had called me and I had nothing in the hole and was in too far to pass and still couldn’t take the trick by using the baby’s life as my ace, no matter whether he were dealt in spades or in hearts.

So now I had to cook for her. Go out and get that little boy, Raymond, to go bring me milk and bread and meat from the store, pretending it was for his mamma, and me picking the vegetables that Robert had planted for Mamma’s needs and then stand over the stove and prepare the meal and then feed it to her spoon by spoon. Yeah, and remembering … A little bit of poison helped her along, that old slave-time line, and coming as close to breaking out of my despair and grinning as I ever did for a long, long time. But still granting nothing to the facts. So all right, I told myself, you’re just fattening her for the time she can understand what she did and pay for it. You just be patient, just count the rest until your solo comes up. This rhythm won’t stop until you take your break; just keep counting the one-two-three-fours, the two-two-three-fours, the three-two-three-fours….

So I didn’t eat, only took water and a few sips of whiskey, never leaving the house, knocking on the windowpane in the afternoons to get little Raymond to go to the store, or to stand out on the back porch in the dark to get some fresh air. And with all that feeding and clumsy, grudging ministering to them I wouldn’t let myself think a second about life and living, only about dying. About how to kill and the way our bodies would look when they found us. And the quickest way to get it over with, how the flames would announce the news in the night. Whether to just let them find us or to have little Raymond take a note to Mamma’s pastor to tell the folks to keep off the streets …

Everything, but never whether I could save myself because that would have meant to run and I didn’t believe I had anything left to run for.

Ah, but Hickman, you were caught deaf and blind. With eyes that saw not, and ears that heard nothing but the drums of revenge. And there was that baby growing more human every second nudging his way into your awareness and making his claim upon you, and her crying all the time—in fact more than the baby did. You had fallen into the great hole and they’d dropped the shuck in on you. There was simply too much building up inside of you for clear vision. I guess if I could have played I might have found some relief, but I couldn’t play, even if I hadn’t left my horn in Dallas when I got the word. And I couldn’t sing and if I had after all she’d done to me I’d probably sung falsetto. Then came the day …

Poor Bliss, the terrible thing is that even if I told you all this, I still couldn’t tell who your daddy was, or even if you have any of our blood in your veins.… Like when I was a boy and guessed the number of all those beans in that jar they had in that grocery window and they wouldn’t give me the prize because one wasn’t a bean, they said, but a rock! What a bunch of rascals. Ha! Ha! So outrageous that I just grinned and they had to laugh at their own bogusness. Gave me a candy bar … No, I’d still have to tell him as I told myself in the days that were to come: that who the man was was made beside the point by all that happened. Bliss started right there in that pain-filled room—or back when the fish grew lungs and left the sea. You don’t reject Jesus because somebody calls Joseph a confidence man or Mary a whore; the spears and the cross and the crime were real and so was the pain.… So then came the day when I started in from the kitchen to find her sitting on the side of the bed, her bare bony feet on the bare boards of the floor as she sat there all heavy-breasted in Mamma’s flannel nightgown; her hair swinging over her shoulder in one big braid and with eyes all pale in her sallow skin; and all weak-voiced, saying—

Listen, Alonzo Hickman, the time has come for me to leave.

Leave, I said, who told you you were ever going to leave here?

Yes, I know, but he’s growing to me too fast. So if I’m ever to leave I must do it now….

What makes you think …

No, let me tell you why I came here….

Yes, I said. As though I don’t know already; you tell me. Just why, other than the fact that you had no damn where else to turn?

Don’t you be so sure, Alonzo Hickman. And don’t quarrel with me after helping me. There’s more to it than you think….

So why? I’m listening.

I came to give you back your brother, do you understand?

You what!

Yes, it’s true. I never knew your brother and I meant him no special harm. It was just that I am what I am and I was in trouble and so desperate that I couldn’t feel beyond my heart. You must understand, because it’s true and it’s a truth that’s cost us both all this.—No, let me finish. So now you must take the baby …

WHO?

 … take him and keep him and bring him up as your own, looking at her feet, that braid swinging across her breast …

WHO? I said. WHO?

It’s the only way, Alonzo Hickman. And don’t just stand there in that doorway saying “Who” like that. Who else can save us both? I mean you. It’s the only way. After what I’ve done you’ll need to have him as much as I need to give him up. Take him, let him share your Negro life and whatever it is that allowed you to help us all these days. Let him learn to share the forgiveness your life has taught you to squeeze from it. No, listen: I’ve learned something; you won’t believe me, but I have. You’ll see. And you’ll need him to help prevent you from destroying yourself with bitterness. With me he’ll only be the cause of more trouble and shame and later it’ll hurt him….

And you expect me …

Yes, and you can. You have the strength and the breadth of spirit. I didn’t know it when I came here, I was just desperate. But I’ve seen you hold him, I’ve caught the look in your eyes. Yes, you can do it. Few could but you can. So I want you to have him—and don’t think I don’t love him already at least as much as I love my own mother, or that I don’t love his father. I do, only his father doesn’t know about him; he’s far away, and unless I do something to undo a little of what I’ve done there’ll never be a chance for us. I could go to him—Oh, Alonzo Hickman, nothing ever stops; it divides and multiplies, and I guess sometimes it gets ground down to superfine, but it doesn’t just blow away. Certainly none of the things between us shall. So you must take him. Later there’ll be money and I’ll get it to you. I’ll help you bring him up and pay for his education. Somewhere in the North, maybe. He’ll be intelligent like his father and he deserves a chance … and I’ll see that you’re taken care of….

And I thought, So now I’ve got to be a pimp too. First animal, then nursemaid and now pimp, seeing her shake her head again:

No, please don’t speak yet. I must do this for both of us….

And you think that that child there can do all that?

No, but he’s all I have—unless you still want my life. And if you take that, somebody will still have to take him. You don’t just help a child to be born and then leave it alone. So very well, if you mean to kill me, all right, but could you destroy something as weak as that, as helpless as that?

I have killed snakes.

A snake? Can you even with death in your eyes call him a snake? Can you? Can you, Alonzo Hickman?

Ha! Hickman, and you couldn’t. No, but if your heart had been weak I would have died right there of the sheer, downright nerve of it. Here I had been pushed even in Alabama. Well, God never fixed the dice against anybody, we have to believe that. His way may be mysterious but he’s got no grudge against the infants, not even the misbegotten. It’s a wonder I didn’t split right down the middle and step out of my old skin right then and there; because even after all these years I don’t see how I stood there in that doorway and took it all without exploding. And yet, there we were, talking calm and low like two folks who arrived late at the services and were waiting in the vestibule of the church. She sitting on the edge of the bed, kinda leaning forward, with arms spread out to the side and gripping the bedclothes to support herself. Still weak but with her crazy woman’s mind all set. And me telling myself that I was waiting to learn just how far she intended to follow the trail of talk she’d blazed before I would set the house afire; saying:

So supposing I say all right—what are you going to call him?

You mean what shall we name him?

Yes.

It’s not for me to do, he’s yours now. But why not Robert Hickman?

No!

Then just Robert, and you give him a last name. But I name him Robert as he should be …

Just like that. She couldn’t face life with him, wanted to give him to me but wanted me to always remember all the circumstances that brought him to me. So there it was. Like a payday, when all the sweating and aching labor that went into a dirty job is reduced to some pieces of dirty paper and silver and coppers, which the hateful bossman handed to you in a little white envelope. As though that was the end of it and Monday would never come to start you out all over again. It was too much for me. I just listened to her and then backed out of the doorway and went and lay down and tried to think it clear. Ha! Hickman, you had wanted a life for a life and the relief of drowning your humiliation and grief in blood, and now this flawed-hearted woman was offering you two lives—your own, and his young life to train. Here was a chance to prove that there was something in this world stronger than all their ignorant superstition about blood and ghosts—as though half a town was a stud farm and the other half a jungle. Maybe the baby could redeem her and me my failure of revenge and my softness of heart, and help us all (was it here, Hickman, that you began to dream?). Either that or lead him along the trail where I had been and watch him grow into the wickedness his folks had mapped out for him. I thought, I’ll call him Bliss, because they say that’s what ignorance is. Yes, and little did I realize that it was the name of the old heathen life I had already lost.

So she got her way. She asked the impossible of a bitter man and it worked; I let her walk out of that house and disappear. Let her stay around and nurse the baby until dark, four or five hours more, and still let her leave. Let her come in crying and put him in my arms then walk out of the back door and gone. Oh, thank the Lord, I let her. Ah, but who but those who know life would believe that out of that came this? That out of that bed came this bed; that out of that sitting and a-rocking came this remembering, and this gold cross on my old watch chain?

That was the end of the old life for me, though I didn’t know it at the time. But what does a man ever know about what’s happening to him? She came in there heavy and when she went out I had his weight on my hands. What on earth was I going to do with a baby? I wasn’t done with rambling, the boys were waiting for me out in Dallas. I hadn’t ever met a woman I thought I’d want to marry, and later when I did she wouldn’t have me because she insisted I had been laying around with a white gal because she thought I was traveling with a half-white baby. So not only had the woman placed a child on my hands, she made me a bachelor. And maybe after that night, after seeing what a woman could be, after that revelation of their boundless nerve and infinite will to turn a man’s feelings into mush and rubber, I had lost the true will to join with one forever in matrimony. I was still young and full of strength but after that I could only come so close and no closer. I had been hit but I hadn’t discovered how bad was the damage. Master, did you smile? Did you say, “Where’s your pride now, young man? Did you say, “How now, Hickman, can you hear my lambs a-crying? You’ve got to do something, son; you can’t stand on the air much longer. How now, Hickman?”

And didn’t I try to get away! I must have sat there for hours, numbed. Then when the realization struck me I got up and put him in the bed with a bottle and went to Beulah’s and ordered a pitcher of corn, broke in the door because she didn’t want me in there and all the others leaving when they saw who I was. And I drank it and couldn’t feel it so I left there. And walking down the railroad tracks, between the two shining rails not caring if a manifest struck me down or if I could get to Atlanta in one piece, stumbling between the gleaming rails like a man in a trance. Then finding myself at Jack’s place and beginning to shoot craps with those farmhands and winning all the money and having to break that one-eyed boy’s arm when he came at me with his blade after my winning with their own dice. Then stumbling out of there into another dive and then another, drinking and brawling, but always seeing that baby reaching out for me with his little hands that were growing stronger and stronger the farther I moved away from him. Till I could feel him snatching me back to the room as a dog leaping the length of his chain is snatched back to the stake driven in the ground.

That little ole baby, that li’l ole Bliss. So I had to go back and get him. Made up my mind. Slept all day and left the next night with him in a satchel. That was the beginning. Took him to Mobile where we stayed in a shack on the river. And him getting sick there, almost dying and getting him a doctor and pulling him through with the help of God; still mixed up over why I was trying to save him but needing to bad enough to learn to pray. The Master must have really smiled then, but I was still trying to leap my chain. Running out of money in Dallas because the boys were afraid to play with me because they had heard about Robert and Mamma and then I show up with the baby and they didn’t know who would come looking for me and I wouldn’t explain a thing. Pride, that’s what it was, but I said that if they couldn’t take me back for my way with a horn then they didn’t need to know anything else about me. So I shined shoes and I swept the floors and cleaned the spittoons in that barbershop and paid for our room and his milk and my whiskey. Then Felix came and told me about Reverend McDuffie being in town and needing a musician for his tent meetings and I began playing my music for the Lord. That was Bliss then. He couldn’t remember any of that even if he hadn’t willed himself to forget us; now it was too far back. I lied that he was my dead sister’s child and the ladies were kind and looked after him while I played and we were always traveling and that made it easier for me. Then a year old and never from my side, me still mixed up in my emotions about him but always having him with me.… Had to leave Memphis on a freight train once and just managed to grab a bottle of milk to feed him and them right behind me for kidnapping, running over those cinders with him under my arm like a bear cutting out with a squealing pig. Lord, but I could really pick ’em up and put ’em down in those days, kicking up dust for a fare-thee-well and making that last boxcar just in time. Poor little fellow, he didn’t know what it was all about. Stripped the paper from the boxcar walls to make him a bed then setting there with the car bumping under me wondering why I hadn’t let them have him and be free.… But what could I have told them, when any part of the truth meant trouble? Master, did you grin? So we went rolling through the land over the rhythm of those wheels clicking along the tracks and when he started to cry, me lullabying him “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor” till we were long gone to Waycross.

Then gradually beginning to find my way, finding the path in the fog, getting my feet on the earth and my head in the sky. Yes, my heathen freedom gone, I followed the only thing I really knew about, my music. Followed it, right into the pulpit at last. Had found a sanctuary where all babies could grow without too much questioning as to where they came from. After all, I testified to my sins before a crowd and sat down at the welcome table and learned to open up my heart—and I was heard.

They took us in and they loved him. That was Bliss then. All the love we gave him. Now no trust for me; none of us, even though we kept the faith through all those watchful and graveling years. We held steady, stood firm in face of everything; even after he ran away and we picked up his trail. I had been claimed by then and they loved him. Foolish to do but all those from the old evangelizing days felt the same need I felt to watch him travel and to hope for him and to learn. Yes, I guess we’ve been like a bunch of decrepit detectives trailing out of love. We didn’t even have to think about it or talk it over, we all just missed him and keep talking about him and seeking for him here and there. Lord, but we missed little Bliss. We missed his promise, I guess, and we were full of sorrow over his leaving us that way, just up and gone without a word. So we kept looking for him and telling all those who had heard him when he was traveling with me throughout the country to keep a lookout. Some thought he had been kidnapped and some that he was dead, and others that his people had come and taken him away—though they didn’t know who his people were and were too respectful to ask me about him.

So we started looking and asking questions, all the chauffeurs and Pullman porters and waiters, anybody who traveled in their work—till finally we picked up his trail again and I knew that it wouldn’t do any good to go to him and say, Come home, we miss you, Bliss; and we need you. Oh no, he was on another track by then and it was up to him to miss us in his heart and need us. So we just watched and waited.

Someone was always near him to watch him; maids and butlers, dining-car waiters, cooks—anybody who traveled, anybody who could keep him in our sights. Even a few of the younger ones were recruited; a few every year or so given hints that he was one of us, telling them just enough so that they could feel the mystery and start to watching him and reporting back. And all of it building up our amazement. Even when what he did left our hopes pretty weak. I guess we hoped for the Prodigal’s return. But in a country like this, where prodigal boys have so much that they can do and get that they can never waste it all which makes it easier for them to forget where home is and that made our hoping and waiting a true test of our faith or at least our love. There he lies, worth about three million dollars, I understand, and ran away with five saved dollars and a leatherbound Bible. Lord, I could laugh at the “laugh-cry” of it and I could cry sure enough right now. I was pretty bad when that child started shooting, pretty hysterical. But Lord forgive me for violating my manliness, because it was little Bliss I saw going down. Instead of this one lying here I saw a little boy with the white Bible as in a waking vision. I’m getting old, but how is a man who’s had to do with children but only had one child suppose to act when he sees such as we were witness to? Yes, and who’ll be a witness for my grief, my awful burden? Who, when nobody knows the full story? Still the old-timers were with me and they prayed that he’d find his way back home! Bliss. All the old ones and some of the young and some of the old ones committed so long ago, many forgot just why, but still. We came when we sensed the circle was closing in upon him. Poor Bliss, he had wrapped up his heart in steel, stainless steel, and I guess he’d put his memory down there in Fort Knox with all that gold. He wouldn’t see us and he only had to remember us as we were and as he was to know that we didn’t come here to rebuke him, his own heart would do enough of that, considering the line he’s been taking against our people all these years. Still, that too is the way of man, so he couldn’t trust even me, even though I told him way back when he seemed bent on leaving us that I would live a long time and that I would arrive in his presence when he was in sore need. And I tried. We arrived and he didn’t trust me enough to see me. So why’d we come, why’d we hold on so hard to hope? What about this, Master? Is this one more test of faith put to us in our old days, or just our own foolishness, just some knotted strings of slavery-time weakness still clinging to us?

Well, that is what the baby boy became and there’s no denying. Poor fellow, poor Bliss lost. He’s lying there twitching and groaning and I can only talk and sit and wait. We’re with you, Bliss. We arrived just as we said we would, way back there when you put us down. I don’t know, Hickman, maybe the real one, the true Bliss got lost and this is somebody else. Because during all that time we could never ask if he really were the true son even though we knew in our hearts he ought to be. Maybe we’ve been following the wrong man all this time. Naw, Hickman, you’re tired, this was Bliss. There’s no doubt about that. It’s him and there lies the nation on its groaning bed. Those Georgia politicians knew it twenty years or so ago, when they tried to make me admit our ties. Sure, and I lied and denied so he could climb higher into the hills of power hoping that he’d find security and in his security and power he’d find his memory and with memory use his power for the good of everyone. Oh yes, he’s the one, Hickman, you won’t get out of it that easy. You can’t stop now by calling it all foolishness. Those politicians didn’t threaten you for being foolish, they were playing for keeps. That’s why they threatened to run you out of town. Well, I had been run out of better towns by then, sometimes with little Bliss with me, and always my sanctuary was the Word. Anyway there was nothing to lose as there’s nothing to lose now and the sheer amazement of God’s way is a wonder and well worth it. Let me laugh, I see the links in the chain. Bliss had to bribe and deny and deny and bribe somebody to get in the position he’s in. They know it and I know it, only they don’t know all I know. Just like I know that I had nothing to lose when they threatened me and that they probably made a deal back there, because Bliss did turn into this, there. Rest, boy. Lord, I wish I could reach him. That doctor ought to be coming in to look at him pretty soon. Janey. After all those long years, Janey writing me that something was brewing:

Dear Brother Alonzo, a young man I know about is come hereabouts from far away and after a long time. You will know who I mean. So I think you ought to know that he’s stirring up old ashes and turning over old stones and he is taking down true names and asking questions. I know you will want to know about this because I am too old now to put him off for much longer. I mean he’s pressing me too hard. I have dreaded it but it had to come. I always knowed it would. Brother Alonzo I’m not strong like I used to be and I have trouble keeping quiet. I betrayed him once a long time past and now I think my time is closing down. So I hope everything is all right with you and I know you will do what you can. May the good Lord be with you and all our old friends. May he rest you and keep you and them in faith. Tell them that I’m still praying on my bended knees. Tell them I’m remembering them all in my prayers. Your sister in Christ, Janey Mason …

I had to think about that one. I remember Janey from way back there in my heathen days, before Bliss came. Riding out of the bottoms during the springtime flood on a dripping horse with five little children rowed behind her and holding on to her nightgown and to each other while she swam that horse out of the swift water and her bare heels against his belly barrel till he came on up to higher ground. Talking comfort to those children with weeds in her hair. Saved all of ’em too. Walnut Grove. That was a woman. Oh yes. She roused me then too, up there looking, standing on the bank of mud and silt. Oh yes, in that wet nightgown she roused me. It wasn’t long before Bliss either, though I didn’t know it. I was on the verge of change—oh how odd of God to choose—yet playing Cotch and Georgia-skin or Tonk every night I wasn’t gigging or playing dances in that hall overlooking the railroad tracks, blowing out my strength and passion against those east- and west-bound trains.

No little Bliss then, but a lot of easy living in that frontier town. This I could tell him, since he wandered there years later. A lot of half-Indian Negroes, those “Natives,” they called them, and a bunch of hustlers and good-time gals. What times; what hard, young wasteful living. Used to put a number-two washtub full of corn on the table and drink your fill for a dime a dipperful. And there was Ferguson’s barbecued ribs with that good hot sauce, yes; and Pulhams. “Gimme a breast of Guinea hen,” I’d say, “and make the hot sauce sizzling.” All that old foolishness. Ha! Me a strapping young horn-blowing fool with an appetite like a bear and trying to blow all life through the bell of a brass trombone. Belly-rubbing, dancing and a-stomping off the numbers and everybody trying to give the music a drive like those express trains. Shaking the bandstand with my big feet, and the boys romping by midnight and jelly-jelly-jelly in the crowd until the whole house rocked. I should tell him about those times; maybe it was the self-denial that turned him away. Maybe he should have known all the wildness we had to bring to heel. Surely the Lord makes an allowance for all that, when you’re in the heat of youth. He gave it to me, didn’t He, and it was the new country which He gave us, the Indian Nation and the Territory then, and everything wide open and hopeful. You have to scream once maybe so you can know what it means to forbear screaming. That Chock beer, how I exulted in that; rich and fruity mellow. A communion there, back there in that life. Its own communion and fellowship. That Texas white boy who was always hanging around till he was like one of us, he knew it. Tex, why you always out here hanging around with us all the time? You could be President, you know.

Yeah, but what’s the White House got that’s better than what’s right here?

Maybe Bliss could tell him. Old Tex. Heard he struck oil in his daddy’s cotton patch but I hope he’s still a witness for the good times we had. Forget the name of that State Negro with the Indian face … a schoolteacher, tall man, always smoking Granger Rough Cut in his pipe and talking politics and the Constitution? From Tennessee, walked all the way from Gallatin leading a whole party of relatives and friends and no preacher either. That scar on my skull to this day from going to the polls with ax handles and pistols, some whites and Indians with us, and battling for the right. Long back, now Oklahoma’s just a song, but they don’t sing about that. Naw, and why not, since that’s what they want to forget. Run up a skyscraper and forget about the foundation, just hope there’s oil waiting to get into the water pipes. Yeah, but we got it all in the music. They listen but hear not; they feel its call, but they act not. Drink of the Waters of Life, He said. And I drank until He sent the child and I realized that I had to change. Then I drank again of the true water. I had to change so the sound of life, the life I felt in me and in the others could become words and it’s still too complicated for definition. But like the Lord Himself, I loved those sinners and I’ll not deny even one. They had the juice of deep life in them, and I learned to praise it to the transcending heat. Who knows? His ways are strange ways, Hickman. Maybe it was all His plan, and you had to be what you were then in order to lead His flock. It took all of that to come to this and little Bliss was the father to the man and the man was also me….