Phantom Banjo (19 page)

All the time Faron Randolph spoke Willie's
jaw was untightening and his teeth were unclenching and his eyes
were getting more and more un-squinty till they were wide and
friendly looking. For a while Willie nodded judiciously at what
Faron said, then he took to just plain smiling outright. He never
could resist a fan.

"But say," Randolph said, "I notice you're
not playing your guitar today. That is a mighty fine banjo you have
there. Looks a lot like the one Sam Hawthorne used to play. Wasn't
that a terrible thing?"

"It surely was, brother, it surely was. I
have seldom felt so bad about anything in my entire life," Willie
said with heartfelt sincerity and a quick sharp glance at Anna Mae
Gunn. "And as a matter of fact, this is Sam's very own banjo,
Lazarus, I'm told he called it. A good friend of mine was at Sam's
side when he died and Sam told him to hold on to it for safekeeping
since none of his other friends or relations were handy. Tell you
the truth, my friend Mark watched Sam Hawthorne die and it troubled
him a lot. I kind of think now that he may have come out to see me
because he didn't like a few other things he saw either, but he
never got to really talk about it too much because on the way over,
he was in an accident—"

"No!" Faron said.

"Yessir, or at least I took it for an
accident. But now . . ." He let the sentence trail off
meaningfully. "Well, I had no idea how bad Mark had been hurt and
neither did he. But after we'd been talking for a while, he got
kind of fuzzy-tongued and slow and I thought he was just sleepy.
Next thing I knew he was dead, and there I was with Sam Hawthorne's
banjo as sacred a trust as it could be to me from two men I counted
as friends, for though I never knew Sam real well, I played with
him a few times and he was always an inspiration to me."

"Don't that beat all?" Faron said, half to
himself.

Willie sensed he was losing his audience.
"But I appreciate your kind words and your asking about it. That
was a real interesting set you did. You don't happen to be related
to Vance Randolph, by any chance?"

The young man nodded. "On my daddy's side.
And thanks, but I really blew that set. Don't know just what was
wrong but I couldn't seem to remember the words to songs I've known
most of my life."

"In case you missed some of it, that little
problem was the point of my whole set until it was—ahem—cut a mite
short by certain parties."

"You seemed to be having trouble at first
with your song, but you broke through it," Faron continued.

"Well, I had Lazarus and Gussie here to
prompt me. This is Gussie Turner, by the way."

Faron waggled a couple of fingers at Gussie.
She waggled back.

Avoiding Anna Mae Gunn's eyes, playing the
genial host and celebrity, Willie said, "Gussie's daughter and
son-in-law, Lettie and Mic Chaves, are two of the nicest people
you'd want to meet. Lettie runs a record distribution business for
privately produced recordings and Mic just generally makes himself
agreeable, public relations, that kind of thing."

"You're Mic and Lettie's mom?" Faron asked
Gussie. "I heard what happened to them. They're good friends of my
in-laws." He shook his head sympathetically.

Anna Mae Gunn reached over and touched the
banjo's tuning head. The instrument emitted a drone. She looked as
if she were seeing Sam in his coffin, as if she knew in her heart
for the first time that he was gone. Willie took a deep breath,
exhaling his tension and anger, and said, "I'd have told you if
you'd given me half a chance."

She looked back at him with eyes bleak and
black as the aftermath of a forest fire.

"Mind if I was to play a lick on that banjo?"
Faron asked.

Willie lifted the strap over his head and
Faron lifted it over his own. He sat down cross-legged on the floor
and strummed the strings lightly. They gave back a chorus of "Come
in, Stranger."

He picked the rest of it, adding a few licks
of his own here and there, and started something else, opened his
mouth, closed it, and handed the banjo back to Willie before he
stood up again, shaking his head.

The door had been left open and Anna Mae's
friend Sylvia appeared in it now. "Just about time to finish up
concerts and start the campfires. You want to make any
announcements?" she asked Anna Mae.

* * *

The sky was dark already, but clear with
stars and a half moon shining bright and pretty—Gussie remembered
that later, how clear it was. The clover scent rose sweet from
under her feet and soft plumes of dove-gray smoke tickled the
blackness as they rose from the campfires that twinkled like
fireflies in the pastures on either side of the house. Peepers
chorused from the river and cicadas from the yard, drowning out the
hum of the microphones as the last note of the last act died
drifting through the pasture.

Anna Mae called for a finale, and asked
Willie and Faron, Brose and Julianne, the angry young man and the
chanteyman, the gospel singers and the jug band, to come back
onstage to sing "Amazing Grace." Only once they got up there,
leaving very few people in the audience, nobody could remember the
words. Faron Randolph's lips moved, as if he was swearing to
himself, and then he stepped up close to Willie and Lazarus. His
Adam's apple took another dive into his shirt collar and
resurfaced, then he began to sing:

"Amazing grace that we're gathered here

A couple hundred strong

To sing for souls of mem-o-ry dear.

If we can recall the songs,"

He stepped back, scratching his head, but
Julianne caught the idea and squeezed in next to Willie,

"Amazing grace, how sweet the sound

Of voices raised in song

If words are lost, more can be found . .
."

Her voice faltered and she made a face and
shrugged. Willie stepped back up to the microphone, Lazarus
plunking the time like a gaited horse, and finished, "So raise them
voices strong," grinning at his own departure from the general
reverent tone.

It was time for a chorus and Willie knew it,
the banjo was plunking toward it, the audience was straining their
necks with the will to sing it, and he felt it bubble up in him but
the bubble just would not surface in his brain. He was sweating
from the heat, perturbed from the argument with Anna Mae, and weary
from sending out search and retrieve messages to his brain to bring
back those song lyrics alive. It was very dark by then but by the
alligator clamp lights rigged as stage lights he saw people in the
front row looking puzzled and moving their lips as if mumbling to
themselves, and he knew they were trying to remember the words
too.

Then the strings surged under his fingers and
a memory came back to him of standing in a starchy white shirt and
a hot jacket in church beside his grandma and hearing old Mr.
Armbruster, who had once been a circuit preacher to the Indian
Nations and who still had a carrying kind of voice, bellow out the
first verse even when everybody else was on another one,

"Amazing grace, how sweet the sound,

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost but now am found,

Was blind but now I see."

The audience followed him a step behind and
then wouldn't let him stop. They had to sing it three more times,
just like Mr. Armbruster, so as not to forget it. Willie was
wringing wet with a queer combination of satisfaction at having
remembered it and the frightening knowledge that he had forgotten
it in the first place and that the finding of it was not all his
own doing.

"That sure was a fine performance, Willie,"
someone said. "Have a drink on me? I came well prepared." He didn't
see the face in the dark but accepted the offer gladly.

"Don't mind if I do, friend."

"What'll it be?"

"Seagrams and seven," he said. A plastic
tumbler was placed in his hand. "That was mighty quick," he
said.

"Like I said, I come prepared," the voice
said. Willie just assumed it was a man, but the stranger's outline
was vague and androgynous in the dark and the voice was husky and
half-lost in the general commotion of people making their campfires
and settling down for the evening sing. Still, the voice seemed
familiar—a lot of voices did. A man met a hell of a lot of people
in thirty to forty years of singing to and with crowds.

"MacKai, I want to talk to you," another
voice said. This one Willie recognized. It belonged to the
sour-looking fellow who'd sung three or four absolutely legitimate
old ballads that it was no wonder Sam Hawthorne didn't do. They
were miserably gloomy and violent, even for murder ballads. For
comic relief the guy had thrown in two Leonard Cohen songs and a
long dismal Phil Ochs protest number about how everything was going
to hell. To Willie's mind, the song had been too true to be
entertaining. Ochs had been a better prophet than a showman.

Willie took a long pull at the tumbler. "Okay
by me. What's your problem?"

"What's yours?" Sourpuss asked. "What do you
and your friends mean changing the words of a sacred song?"

"Huh?"

"The words to 'Amazing Grace.' You and your
friends changed them. I saw you laugh about it! What do you mean
doing something like that? That song has been sung in worship for
years by good people who liked it the way it was."

"Yes, brother, it surely was. That's what I
was thinking about when I sang that last chorus." He said it evenly
but he was getting a little tired of being hollered at.

"That may be, but those other verses are not
the ones collected in the version I have—"

"No?"

"No, according to the Judy Collins
songbook."

"With all due respect to Judy, who is a great
writer, she's hardly one of your good humble folk singing in the
church choir anymore now is she . . ."

"It's a sacred song. You have no right to
change the words just because you can't remember them."

"Well, brother, I see your point. Why don't
you sing the other verses for me just to jog my memory? Write 'em
down for me."

"I will—I mean, as soon as I remember them. I
couldn't quite recall them but I have them at home."

"Fine. Until then we'll do as we see fit
about addin' on a little. Which church do you go to anyway,
friend?"

"What's that got to do with it? I'm
agnostic."

"They got a lot of good hymns in that
agnostic church, have they? Well, you better try to recollect some.
I got a few things to say at the campfire tonight might make you
want to sing every one of them. You come on along if you want to
but I'd appreciate it if you didn't interrupt our made-up verses
until you can remind us all of the original ones."

He finished the booze in the tumbler and was
about to start toward one of the campfires. Lazarus thrummed with
"Brandy, Leave Me Alone," as the familiar husky voice said, "You
sure told him, Willie. Refill?"

"Don't mind if I do," Willie said, and as he
moved toward the fire, felt the comforting presence of the person
with the drinks move along behind him.

He settled down onto a log someone had
dragged up and pulled the banjo in front of him. The crickets sang
and the fireflies danced beyond the edge of the fire and from
somewhere there rose another voice, singing something he didn't
recognize.

People crowded around the fire just so the
light illuminated about half their faces, except when the wind
carried more flame one way or the other. Then smoke would twine
toward one direction and the people would fan themselves and cough.
Julianne said, "If you say, 'I hate rabbits,' the smoke will leave
you alone." After that, any given conversation or song was broken
at intervals with someone mumbling, "I hate rabbits" in various
tones of sincerity or levity.

One of the fellows from the Irish group was
there, and the woman doctor named Clarissa who played the bodhran,
and they started a tune together on mandolin and drum. It was
lively and everyone clapped at the end.

"Sing that one you did for the hospital
benefit, Clarissa," one of the gospel singers urged. "You know, the
one about Dr. Kildare's ancestor cursing and swearing." The gospel
singer was a chubby black man with a soft, educated voice. Clarissa
grinned at him.

"You're a better physician than you are a
folklorist, Mel. Maybe you'd better wash out your own ears for a
change. That's Lord Kildare, except the guy's name was really Lord
Grey, and he's the villain. The hero is Fiarch McHugh."

"Whatever. It's a great song. Sing it."

The mandolin started tinkling and Clarissa
got a good roll going on the drum, then someplace they took a wrong
turn and the song began to sound like "Drowsy Maggie," then the
"Star of County Down," then it died. "Sorry, Mel," Clarissa said.
"Can't seem to remember it."

The fellow who had been singing the sea
chanteys hummed and let forth a couple of notes, then let his voice
drop and mumbled, "Cursing and swearing and Lord Kildare and Fiarch
McHugh and what?"

Mel shook his head sadly. "They're gonna
throw all of you out of the IRA, you don't be careful."

Willie watched all this quietly, finishing
his second drink and having it quietly refilled from behind by the
stranger, who patted him on the shoulder as he retreated back to
the shadows.

"There's a reason y'all can't remember these
songs," he said.

"You said something about that earlier,"
Clarissa said.

"Yes, ma'am, I did. And I'll say it again and
keep on saying it until people believe the truth of it."

Oh, God, Gussie thought to herself, here he
goes again. Poor Willie, his brain must be more pickled than
anybody realized. She didn't know how much to believe of his story
about some whore telling him that supernatural forces were aligned
against folk music. Nor did she know what exactly to make of a
banjo that even now was lightly thrumming "Whiskey, You're the
Devil." But she thought he was foolish to be bringing it up in
public like this, not knowing who was listening or what they might
be thinking of him. Why, they might just lock him up in a padded
cell and forget about him. He'd be better off taking people aside
and talking to them one at a time maybe . . .