Sweet Song (33 page)

Mary set paper and pencil on Bob’s lap. Then she introduced the others one after another, and nodded to John when she was finished.

Bob picked up the pencil.

A moment later, John began to run a baseline rhythm singing, “Bum, bum, bum, do-dip, bum. Bum, bum, bum, do-dip, bum,” repeatedly.

Bob listened. No one looked at him except Jenny who only glanced occasionally in his direction. He closed his eyes for a moment just to escape the room and its occupants. His nervousness rose to a pitch of its own. What if he couldn’t do it? What if nothing came to mind?

Soon Mary, or Joesy, began to hum. It soothed him. Martha came to mind, humming in the corner of the white-washed shack. He was a little boy again. Another voice placed a twinkling, tighter rhythm over the other two. It was as if the entire room had been filled with music.

Bob followed the sound to the fields where he grew up. He opened his eyes, thin slits, only enough for him to see the paper where he wrote: “The yellow-tipped fields of grain/ where I grew to be a man/ are long behind/ here I sit blind/ at the end of life I stand.”

The words continued – his life but not his life. An old man remembering youth, a youth that Bob never got to experience or live out. But in the sound, somewhere, there rode the possibility for him to live out a different life, one where he didn’t have to work a day of double-chores, stealing time alone when he could. He wrote on and finished the song. The old man dying with a hint of a smile for the strength it took to travel through life.

When he put his pencil down, a tear braced itself at the corner of his eye. He brushed it away. He had fallen into a dream. The room and the voices had disappeared for a time. They could have eaten lunch and he would not have known it. The beautiful and empty feeling he experienced while riding the lyrics swelled inside his chest. He sighed out of relief and exhaustion.

Somehow Mary and John and the other Sisters understood the calm, the sacredness of what he’d just done. They stopped humming and singing, but did not say a word. No one reached for the paper.

Jenny sat still.

Bob didn’t understand what he had just done. He didn’t know how much effort writing lyrics was supposed to take. He wasn’t
aware of how it was supposed to feel. He just allowed it to happen its own way, just as he had done his entire life.

He stirred. Then he bent to look over what he’d written. He wasn’t sure about the way the words flowed. What would the accompanying music sound like? Who would sing the words he had written down? “I don’t know,” he said, breaking the stillness, the silence.

The room came alive. Several Sisters stood up and left the room. John leaned back and placed a big hand on the top of his own head, then let his shoulders relax. Mary said, “I could juss feel it. Didn’t I tell you, John?” She reached for the paper that Bob held onto.

He released it. “I don’t think it’s very interesting,” he said.

John spoke for the first time. “You wouldn’t know. Once it come out, it take somebody else to know. Mary tell you da truth. Yes, sir.”

Bob looked over at Mary. She appeared to read the paper several times over, nodding at her own tunes. Each reading brought a different nod. “Well,” she said.

Bob didn’t feel good about how she said well.

“It’s close.” She slapped it in front of John, but she spoke to Bob. “John can fix it. We juss need our instruments.” Just then the other Sisters came into the room carrying guitars and banjos and a fiddle. “Here they are,” Mary said.

John read through the lyrics as everyone except Mary stood and took an instrument. Jenny and Bob stood too, but backed away and against the wall to give the group space.

Although Mary appeared to be in charge, she looked at John to lead them on. He had a deep voice that resonated like music even when he just talked.

“Gonna start happy,” he said. “Da boy in his chile-hood play. When we gets to the part where he growed, life still good, but more routine.” He looked at Joesy and Bet. “I’ll signal the change. You all keep a repeat chord so’s it sound like life be the same day after day.” All the while he spoke, he picked at the guitar slung over his shoulder using a piece of frayed rope. His words and the notes he played mimicked each other. “The end. Da lass bar, that one he sad.”

No sooner had he stopped speaking, he handed the paper back to Mary and began. The others came in a little clumsily at first, then
smoothed out as they played. The transitions were rough and painful to the ear. Mary stumbled over words and would bend to her knee and mark the sheet. After one run through, John suggested a few more changes. Instead of ‘yellow-tipped fields of grain’, he changed it to read ‘yellow-tipped plains’, tightening the line to go at a faster pace. He made similar changes to each line for the first half of the song.

Bob sensed that he had failed to produce what they’d wanted because they didn’t just accept the lyrics out of hand. Then, as the morning progressed and the music became more complex and smooth, he understood that their adjustments were necessary, and what he had given them was a solid foundation on which to build.

“We breakin’,” Mary said late into the morning.

Instruments all went down near one wall and out of the way. “This song,” John announced, “we picked up from an old black man, blind as can be, livin’ out his final days in the sun next to the mid-western flat plains of his youth.”

“I likes that,” Mary said.

“Me too,” Bet said.

And as they left the room, Bob realized it was no longer his song, no longer his childhood, but everyone’s and no one’s.

He turned to look at Jenny who had stood as silent and in awe as he had.

“I have never seen anything like that in my life?” She laughed as if in relief from the tension in the room.

“It was beautiful,” Bob said.

“The song was beautiful. And sad,” she said.

Those were the first words about the song that gave Bob the least bit of credit. He felt partly responsible for what had occurred, and that was enough.

“I have to find work,” he said quickly.

Jenny touched his hand with her fingertips. “You said you’d come by. I’m looking forward to listening to those feet.” Her smile appeared tight, her wet eyes sincere.

Bob’s nervousness had his legs shaking, so he walked away. At the door he looked back. “I’ll come by after dinner. We could walk somewhere?”

“I’ll be ready.”

Outside, Bob let out all the air that had been trapped in his lungs for what seemed like hours. He felt light-headed. He wandered a bit, stopped in for nut bread at Jasper’s, who didn’t charge him. They actually laughed together about nothing in particular, they were so happy to see each other.

“I pray you’re doin’ fine,” Jasper said.

“Very fine,” Bob told him.

“Well, you look it.”

“And you too. Thank you for the nut bread.”

“My pleasure.”

With his lunch in hand, he walked to the swelled river, bleached with floating logs, dotted with river rafts. He sat on the bank and listened. A breeze kept the mosquitoes busy, and clutches of gnats hung over the water’s edge as if they were held in place by a thin thread.

He noticed how his life had changed. He had run from harm, a black boy. He knew even growing up that he was treated differently than the other Negroes on the farm. And he had heard stories of even more horrible treatments than he witnessed. He had been different, and to a community of workers, like the clutch of gnats sticking together, different meant outside. And to people afraid of being outside, like Edna, that meant evil. Yet, Leon had been different only in his features and his skin color. But that had made all the difference in the world.

“Leon,” he said aloud as though it were someone else’s name.

In crossing the river, he had been baptized by dark and by water. He had walked through fear and survived. He had learned about his other heritage. His white heritage. But freedom, white freedom, had its complications, too. On either side of that color line, a trusting soul seemed difficult to find. Bob had been beaten worse as a white man than he had ever been as a Negro. He had been cheated, threatened, and emotionally assaulted because of his difference, whether for skin color or social aptitude.

The river carried the song of his life more than the fields he had written about. Perhaps a river song would come to him next? He had not gone far in his travels: a long walk, but a short distance. He was
still perched along the West Branch of the Susquahanna River. He had crossed it a second time, returning, in a manner of speaking, as a white man. The river had truly cleansed him. He laughed at the thought. “Bob White,” he said, and in a moment recalled his dead friend.

Bob looked at his own hands. How had he come out of Bess so white? Raised by the Negro farm-boss who should have been his father. A man and a family alienated by the color of a child born to them. He wasn’t the only Fred Carpenter child born in that row of shacks. He bet that there were even more half-white children living there now that Hank and Earl had most likely taken on their adulthood.

Bob dipped his hands into the river. He washed the lard-induced stickiness off his fingers, and brushed them dry on his pants.

He thought of Jenny. Could he have a normal life with a woman, after what he’d been through? He tensed when around her, but the tension was not the same as he remembered. The tightness was in his heart not his skin and muscle.

Hugh had been wrong about him. There was no doubt that Bob was white now. He could only have white children. Perhaps one black skinned and one white skinned could bare either color, but two white skinned? It was common sense what would happen.

Bob strolled to the other side of town and beyond the streets, then stripped down and entered the river in a spot where an island had been created, where the current had slowed. He cleaned himself and his clothes, then sat under a tree until his clothes dried in the sun. He slept for an hour, which took the edge off his sleep-deprived night. His clothes were stiff as he put them back on.

The river sang. The wind had the trees and bushes chattering among themselves. Wrens flitted inside the bushes. He could hear them, but could only see the flurry of their movements inside the foliage, as if they were the live, internal organs of the trees and bushes themselves.

He wasn’t hungry, but he decided to go back to town and eat anyway. It would kill time and the urge to eat later. He didn’t need his stomach to churn while talking with Jenny.

Refreshed, relaxed, and satisfied by a small meal, Bob headed for Finch’s. Before he could even knock on the door, Jenny opened it and stepped outside. Her hair was pinned back, one loose strand sticking to her neck, which glistened in the remainder of heat from the day.

The streets had filled, many of the men heading home, while others aimed themselves for Jimmy Finch’s.

As Bob and Jenny walked east and out of town, heads turned to watch them. Bob couldn’t decipher the glares they sometimes got. And other times people would smile and say, “Good evening,” as if their walking together was a natural occurrence.

Jenny thanked him for coming by.

“I said I would,” Bob said. He stared ahead, afraid to meet her eyes.

“I know. It’s just that—”

“There are too many people who—,” he started to say.

“Yes,” she said. “Not everyone does what they say they’ll do.”

Unsure how to speak with her, he didn’t add to the statement. He led her east, downriver.

She said, “At least when it comes to me they’re not honest.”

Bob spoke to the river. “Why would you say that?”

“It’s the company I keep.”

“Like me?” he said, turning to look at her.

Her laugh-giggle came out. “No, everyone else. Well, not everyone, but many of the others. It doesn’t affect Jimmy and the boys like it does me. They can do that.”

Bob stopped and looked at her. “What are you talking about? What’s Jimmy doing?”

“Why, Bob White, you don’t know?” She lowered her head. Her face flushed. “You might wish to take me home.”

Bob scratched his head. “Do you want to go home? Did I do something wrong?”

Her head went back and forth slowly. “No. No. And, no again,” she said. Then Jenny reached for Bob and rubbed his arms as if consoling him. “It’s because of the acts. Because of what my ma and pa did. Running the railroad.” She stamped her foot. “Goodness. I’m with Negroes most of my life. The white men don’t appear to think that’s okay.”

Bob looked at her. She still held onto his forearms. Her comments continued to sink into his mind. Was that why he felt familiar around her? Did he notice how comfortable she was around Negroes?

She shook his arm. “Say something.”

“I don’t know what to say,” he said.

Her hands dropped from his arm. “I understand,” she said. “I’ll go home.”

He reached for her as she turned to go. When he pulled her back around by her elbow, she floated through the air toward him; so easily did she move that her body fell into his. Her arm slipped over his shoulder. He let go of her elbow and embraced her.