Jordan County (5 page)

Duff looked down at the horn in his lap. He seemed not to have thought of it before. “I dont know,” he said. “In my thoat, I reckon.”

When he came home to Bristol in the early fall, nearly two years after the trainride with the deputy, there were chocolate bands on houses and trees from the great flood of 1927. In some of the cabins in Lick Skillet, which was in a sort of shallow
natural basin, there was powdery soft yellow silt on the rafters, left when the water went down. An abandoned skiff bleached in the adjoining yard, derelict, its painter still tied to an upright. Two children sat in it, a boy and a girl, their faces grave with pretense, playing Steamboat. It was late afternoon, the sun three-quarters down the southwest sky. Waiting for Nora to come home, Duff sat on the steps with a paper-wrapped parcel in his lap. When he lay back on the porch floor the children’s voices faded, as if the skiff were indeed bearing them away. Then they passed completely out of hearing, and when he opened his eyes the sun was gone and bull-bats were flying. He was looking up into his mother’s face.

“Hello, mamma,” he said. “I fell to sleep waiting here on you.”

“Get up, boy, before you catch your death of cold.” She watched him quietly; he had not written to let her know he was coming home. “You had your supper?”

“Noam. I aint eat since I left Moorhead this morning.”

He rose, carrying the parcel, and as he limped across the porch toward the door Nora saw that the fronts had been cut out of his shoes. “Whats the matter with your feet?”

“Corns,” he said. “I got them plowing.”

“Plowing. Well.” She followed, watching him walk gingerly through the front room. “Maybe that place done you some good after all.”

“Yessum.”

“Leastways you aint apt to go breaking into people’s houses again real soon, are you?” Duff said nothing. She said, “Are you?”

“Noam,” he said.

He sat at the kitchen table, the parcel again in his lap. Nora went to the cupboard and began putting biscuits and cold sidemeat on a plate. Over her shoulder she asked, “What you got in the package?”

“My horn,” he said. “The warden give it to me.”

“Horn? What kind of horn?”

“A
horn
, mamma, that you blow in to make music. A cornet, they call it. Like in a band.”

Nora halted, the plate in her hand. Then she came forward and put the food on the table in front of him. “I’ll shake up the stove and perc you some coffee,” she said.

He was fifteen that spring, five feet eight inches tall and weighing a hundred and thirty pounds—within half an inch and five pounds of all the height and weight he would ever have, though in later years the wedged shoes and padded suits would raise and broaden him and the perfumed grease would straighten the kinky hair which now fitted his head like a wooly skullcap. His eyes were black, the whites somewhat yellowed as if by jaundice, and his mouth was broad, with regular, white teeth and bluish lips and gums. Though his arms and legs were thin and gangling, his hands and feet were small. His voice was habitually low and he spoke so softly that people often had to ask him to repeat what he had said.

When he went out that evening after supper he took the horn with him, still in its newspaper wrapping. Nora watched him go. Again there was that impulse to restrain him, then to follow and bring him home. But she resisted it now; he was too big. Instead she waited, counting the hours by the courthouse clock, and at midnight when he still had not returned she went to bed. Finally she even went to sleep. At four in the morning — the clock was striking — she heard footsteps on the porch and then a hand fumbling at the door. Rising on one elbow out of sleep she reached automatically for the bureau drawer where she kept her pistol. Then the door came open; it was Duff. She lay and watched him, and as he passed her bed on the way to his cot in the kitchen, she saw that he still carried the horn. Unwrapped, it glinted silver where light struck it from a street lamp down the block.

“You act like that thing was part of you,” she said suddenly out of the darkness. Duff turned in the kitchen doorway. “Where you been, boy, till all hours of the night?”

“I got me a job, mamma.”

“What doing?”

“Playing this.” He did not raise the cornet or glance down at it or indicate it in any way; he did not need to, for he knew she would know what he meant and he also knew how she felt about it. “At the Mansion House, seven nights a week,” he said. “They give me a dollar a night.”

This time the contest had been brief, was over, indeed, before she had time to plan; he had outgeneraled her so quickly that before she even became aware that an engagement was in progress it had ended in her defeat. The fourth stroke of the courthouse clock vibrated in the room; it was that darkest final hour before dawn. Nora lay back and pulled the covers over her face. Presently, as he stood waiting, she spoke from under the quilt, her voice muffled. “Go on to bed,” she told him.

So now at last it was Duff who was on the inside, screened by whirling dancers and curtained by swirling smoke, making the wild Mansion House music while other boys, his age and younger, crouched outside under the windows where he had crouched two years before, to hear the music they were too young to approach. It was a new world to him, with a new population. Blind Bailey was there every night, but the other musicians were transients. Guitar or clarinet, saxophone or banjo, they seldom stayed longer than a week and there were never two of them together. Like Boola Durfee they traveled alone and they never stayed anywhere long; they were independent-minded men, troubadors who thought as highly of their freedom as they did of their music; they played for money and then spent it and moved on, and none of them had the least thought for tomorrow.

Usually Duff and the enormous old pianist were alone, a study in contrast. Blind Bailey was gray-haired and wore blue-lensed
spectacles and a boxback blue serge coat, double-breasted but always left ajar; he said it gave him “room to move around in.” He affected a high celluloid collar and a narrow tie like a preacher, but he kept a flat pint of corn whiskey on the upright. Weighing just under three hundred pounds, with skin so black it glistened with purple highlights, he sat straight-backed, punching the keyboard with big hands whose fingers were dark and apparently boneless. He was said to be older than God. Duff, by contrast, was years younger than anyone else in the house. He wore denim trousers, an open neck shirt, and shoes with the fronts cut away to accommodate his corns. Sitting with his legs crossed and his body hunched over the silver horn, he kept his eyes tightly closed against the hard yellow glare of the lightbulb suspended on a cord from the ceiling. His manner was mild and gentle, incongruous with what came out of the horn, which was wild and blary and would almost deafen anyone who nudged up too close to the bandstand.

When the whiskey was good and the music went to suit him, Blind Bailey would sing. Then the dancers would stop and watch, for it was well worth seeing. Except by suggestion the songs were meaningless, without connected thought and sometimes even without words. He would begin bouncing on the oversized bench which had been especially constructed for his weight, cross-braced with two-by-fours and baling wire, then throw back his head and holler from down deep in his throat:

and then go off into a language all his own, composed mostly of shouts and moans, punctuated with growls and hisses, like an enraged sea lion — which, indeed, he managed to resemble at such a time. Duff learned to conform to these voice improvisations,
obbligato, and they were the basis for much of the spectacular art of his later years.

He played at the Mansion House for nearly three years, by the end of which time he had learned all it had to offer him. He was not restless; he was never restless about his work; but he knew that it was nearing the time for him to be moving on. Then one cold February morning, a little after two oclock, a group of young Negroes, bandsmen off an excursion steamer that had stopped at the Bristol wharf for a moonlight dance, came in wearing unseasonal white flannel trousers, blue and white striped blazers with big pearl buttons, and two-tone shoes. The steamer was lying over until morning because of ice and debris on the river, and the musicians had come ashore to make the rounds on Bantam Street. They danced with the girls and listened to the music for an hour — both with an air of conscious superiority, bringing as they did into the dance room a cosmopolitan atmosphere of the wide outside world — then moved on, taking half a dozen of the best girls with them. They had been gone about twenty minutes when Blind Bailey began to strum the Farewell Blues, winding up with a few fast bars of Home Sweet Home; that was how he finished off each evening. Duff held the spit valve open and blew out the cornet, and Blind Bailey rapped with the piano lid to waken the boy who slept in the corner behind the upright every night until time to take the old man by the coat sleeve and guide him home to the Chinaman’s store, Joe Toy’s, where he had a room in the back.

The moon had risen late. As Duff came down the Mansion House steps he saw it shining bright and cold on the bell-bottom flannel trousers and gaudy jacket of one of the steamer bandsmen. “How do,” the stranger said. He stood on the sidewalk, holding out his hand. “Ive been waiting to catch you, see you. I’d have seen you inside there but I make it a practice never to talk business with regards to hiring a musician while he is actually engaged in performing for someone else, for pay I mean. Excuse my glove.”

“How do,” Duff said. He had never heard such a speech before; it was like hearing a foreign language, one that required no breathing pauses. He felt soft, cold suede against his palm. Suddenly it was withdrawn.

“The name is Jefferson,” the bandsman said. “Pearly, they call me in the trade.” He paused.

“Glad to meet you,” Duff said, like a prompted actor.

“Likewise. Would you join me in a drink somewhere where we can talk?”

“I generally get me a cup of coffee at the All Nite Café. It’s just up the street a piece.”

“That will be congenial,” Jefferson said.

Over the coffee, and employing the same highflown garrulity with which he had performed the greeting outside the Mansion House, he explained that his orchestra — he was the leader — had lost a horn man on Beale, two nights ago in Memphis. “A woman,” he said sadly. He paused; he shook his head. Then suddenly he returned to the business at hand. “I like your tone,” he said. “With a little polish I think youll fit right in.”

There were barely two hours before the steamer would take in her stageplank. When Duff woke Nora and told her he was leaving, she sat up clutching the edge of the quilt under her chin.

“I declare, boy,
I
cant make you out.” She shook her head. “How come you want to be running off with strangers? Last time you got mixed up with a stranger you wound up in reform school for two years. Is that what you want, some more of that? Because this time itll be Parchman and lots longer.”

Duff kept his eyes down, hearing her through. “I want to make something out of myself, mamma.”

“Hump. You want to make that wild scandalous music: thats all you want. Why cant you stay here and play it? I aint stopping you.”

“They going to pay me twenty dollars a week, mamma.”

“A week?”

“Yessum.”

This was impressive; Nora paused. But having paused she hurried on. “And whats the good in that?” she said. “Youll just spend it on riotous living — canned peaches, cigars, sardines, and suchlike.”

“I got to go.”

“You aint got to nothing.”

“Yessum I have; I got to.”

She waited perhaps five seconds, watching him. It seemed long, and she knew she was defeated again. Then she said quietly, “All right. If you got to, you got to. I aint holding you. When did I ever, once you took a notion?”

The stageplank was taken in on schedule. The paddle blades thrashed water, backing the steamer away from the wharf; the whistle screamed and rumbled, precipitating steam, and the paddles reversed, driving the boat ahead on the forward slope of a churning wave. From the rail Duff watched Bristol shrink and fade in the pale light of the winter dawn. When he was a mile downriver the sun rose big and scarlet, and as the steamboat rounded the lower bend he looked back and saw the town gleam blood-red for an instant, house roofs and church spires, smoke stacks and water towers burgeoning in flame. Then, apparitionlike, as the trees along the Arkansas bank swept a curtain of green across it, it was gone.

That night they played Vicksburg. In the course of another week they played Natchez and Baton Rouge, and within a third week they were in New Orleans. Duff made two trips on the excursion steamer, to and from Saint Louis and fifty river towns along the way. He was learning, playing and listening in all those different places flanking the river where this kind of music was born. What was more, Jefferson — who, Duff soon discovered, had a good deal more genuine friendliness than the garrulous façade had indicated — taught him to read musical notation and featured him on a share of the songs.