Bone Music (33 page)

It took the Santa and her party most of an hour and a half to cut their way through the demon horde. Dan sang until his throat grew hoarse, and he kept singing, because he knew that the moment that his song should fail the horde would be upon them, tearing them limb from limb. . . .

They all sang, even dead Elvis — all of them but the Santa. Maybe she had no song inside her heart, or maybe there was no room for song inside her as she cut the path before them with her great fiery sword that flared and sputtered each time it drew the ichor of a demon, and the fire and the chary bits of demon-hide were everywhere, filling the air like an unholy rain, spattering their clothes, their skin. Caustic on Dan’s skin, acrid where he breathed the vapors from it, and now as Dan looked at the grue that covered him he wanted to scream — scream and turn and run for his life and his sanity.

Run for the hills! he thought, but there are no hills around New Orleans, and anyway he’d be torn to ribbons the moment that his song should end. Despair tried again and again to consume him, but he didn’t stop singing. Not even for the time it would take to breathe. He didn’t dare, and he knew it; his fear was greater than any despair could ever be.

And then they came around a corner onto Loyola, and there in the distance was the Tower.

So beautiful, that Tower! From where Dan stood it seemed to be made of pure white light, and it spoke to his heart of hope and the promise of Redemption. Filled his song with hope and joy, and now as they heard the sound of machine-gun fire the Santa‘s sword cut hard and fast through the horde, and the horde opened up before them to reveal a battlefield.

Someone in the distance shouted, “Don’t shoot! They’re on our side!” and Dan couldn’t begin to imagine how they knew such a thing, but he was glad they did.

As the Santa raised her sword before them to light the way, and now they passed unchallenged through the lines of the Louisiana National Guard.

Come midnight the crowd inside the songsters’ compass huddled close before the Tower, and the revival started of its own accord. Washboard Sam, standing on the steps that once led to New Orleans City Hall, let his song drift away, and he addressed the crowd before him as though he were a revivalist and the stair-steps were his platform.

“My friends,” Washboard Sam the revivalist said, “my friends, I have called you here tonight so that we may all behold the testimony of three sinners!”

And the crowd roared in response, repeating his refrain: “Testimony of the sinners!”

“Three people whose acts and deeds in the course of their mortal lives and their damnation have condemned them to tarnation, and given them the cruelest fate a body may endure. But all of these sinners have heard the Glory of the Word of the Lord, and that word is God! Yes, yes, my friends, yes it is!”

And the crowd roared, “Yes it is!”

The revivalist stepped out onto the front edge of his platform, and he picked out one of the damned residents of New Orleans, seemingly at random. But there was nothing random in his choice — nothing at all.

For the woman he chose was the worst of sinners. Her name was Rebecca, and she was the owner-lady of the Greenville bar — the woman who’d spent a week in a state of assignation with Robert Johnson as her jealous husband looked on; the same woman who’d given him the succor and the strength to shatter the Eye of the World.

The woman stood when the revivalist pointed to her, and started toward the platform. She trembled as she walked toward it, and trembled worse as she climbed onto it.

“Before you stands Rebecca Carter,” the revivalist said. “In her day she was a good woman and a bad woman, too; she fell into temptation, and in the end that sin consumed her.

“But there’s more to Rebecca Carter than the sin. There’s the light inside her, too, the light in every one of us who’s heard the Good Word of the Lord —

“Good Word of the Lord!” the crowd roared.

“— and it shines through her sin as gloriously as it shines inside that Tower!”

The owner-lady wept as the revivalist described her.

“My name is Rebecca Carter,” the owner-lady said, “and I have sinned.”

“Sinned!”

As she spoke, as the crowd roared, a torch-bearing procession made its way through the crowd, and the torch its captain held was no torch but a burning sword. Somewhere in the crowd Emma Henderson saw the procession and the people in it and shouted, “That’s my baby! My baby Lisa!” and she tried to run to embrace her child. But the sinister man beside her took her arm and held her back, and he said, “No, Emma, you can’t — she’s got a special place this evening,” and after a moment the frantic mother relented.

As the procession passed through the crowd, climbed the platform, and continued past it, into the glorious Tower made of light.

“My first sin was adultery,” Rebecca Carter said. “I loved my husband, but I saw another and I took him as though he were my own.”

A murmur passed through the crowd. Someone repeated the last line of her confession, as though it were a refrain: “As though he were your own.”

“He wasn’t mine, and I knew it. And even worse I took him in the plain sight of my husband. And that drove his heart insane.” She paused, as though she expected a response, but there was none. “My husband tried to kill my lover, and he beat me half to death. When the beating was over, I tried to save my lover, and I very nearly did it. But he died — partly because his death was foregone, partly because his vanity consumed him in a hail of fire and brimstone.”

“His vanity consumed him,” the crowd responded, but softly, softly, as though the words consumed them, too.

“I didn’t return to my husband when my lover was gone, but took up in a boardinghouse, and kept to myself while my heart recovered from my loss and my body recovered from the beating he gave me.

“And then one night, three months to the day after the beating, I put a pistol in my purse to ensure my self-protection, and I went to my husband’s new tavern, intending to give that awful man a piece of my mind.

“I found him in a dark corner of the tavern, writhing in a barmaid’s arms. And there and then a thing came over me that I never imagined I could know: I felt a jealous rage consume me!”

“A jealous rage consumed her!”

“I saw him, that man I reviled and the wanton girl, and where a moment before I’d despised that man now I knew I owned him, and could not bear to see him with another. In that moment I forgot myself. I took that pistol from my purse and shot them both, and then I shot again and again, for the rage in my heart demanded I make certain they were dead. And then I ran from that place, and my life, and all my worldly goods, into a life of poverty and misery and terror of the law.

“But from that day to this, no matter what the misery that found me, I never regretted. Not for a moment. That rage consumed me until this evening, when I saw the Tower and the light. And now as I look upon it I know the error of my ways, as light dispels the darkness of the heart!”

Now Rebecca Carter wailed, and her cry was a sound of torment as like to anguish the damned. Her face became a mask of grief and regret, and as her wail trailed off she began to sob piteously.

“I was wrong,” she shouted. “He was a dirty bastard, but he was mine, and I loved him, and he’s gone. And I killed him, Lord Lord, Lord, I killed him.”

“Lord, Lord, Lord.”

Lisa didn’t stop playing her kazoo until the Lady led them into the Tower made of light. And even then she kept it in her hand where she could get it in a moment if the darkness pressed on them again — but it didn’t press. There was no dark inside that Tower, no dark and no possibility of darkness. It was the only homely place Lisa had been since, since, since so long she couldn’t remember anymore.

So beautiful. So wonderful. So safe. Lisa felt as though someone had taken an enormous weight off of her back.

As the Lady led them through the base of the Tower, onto a winding stair that seemed to rise endlessly into the sky. They climbed that stair forever before they finally reached the top of it — where a great wood-and-iron door opened into the most amazing room Lisa had ever seen.

Inside that room there was a forge — like the blacksmith’s forge in a movie Lisa saw when she was six, but cleaner and brighter and more beautiful.

The Lady piled seven logs into the forge’s hearth, drew her sword, and set them afire. In a moment the fire was roaring, and the Lady took a bellows from the wall to stoke the flames hotter, brighter — and now the whole room glowed with the fire’s heat.

All that while Robert Johnson, dead Elvis Presley, and the man and the woman who’d come with him stood watching the Lady intently, as though the fate of the world hinged on the fire she was building.

And maybe it did — Lisa could feel something great and important weighing on them, and every moment the weight grew more intense, till suddenly Lisa’s shoulders could no longer support it. Then she felt so tired, and she thought, What if I crawl away into the corner of the room and drift off to sleep. . . ?

That was such a crazy idea, Lisa thought. But the lethargy consumed her, and she knew that if she didn’t give in to it she’d stumble off her feet and collapse to the floor. Besides, no one would notice. They didn’t really need her, did they?

But she knew they did, because the Lady told her so.

She kept thinking that as she sat in the corner, trying not to drift away: They need me need me need me need me how can I sleep when the world has broken open? — And then her dream began, and Lisa knew why sleep had overtaken her.

In her dream there were seven Kings, the old Kings who’ve only walked the world and Hell as vaporous phantoms since the battle on the ridge in Tennessee. The Kings stood around a forge, stoking the fire inside its hearth, and they were solider and more real than Lisa had seen them in any other dream. As Lisa approached the forge, one of the Kings — the one they call Blind Willie — turned to face her. He knelt to look her in the eye, and whispered to her.

What he whispered was a song: “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring,” recast and recut as blues. When the song was done he said, “Remember that, Lisa — it’s important.”

And Lisa said, “I don’t understand. Why is it important?”

Blind Willie frowned, and hesitated. “When the Lady forges the Eye,” he said, “You need to sing that song. There’s a fire in that song, and the Eye needs a fire like that. The King will sing it with you. If he doesn’t, you’ve got to make him sing.”

And then she woke, as suddenly and wakeful as though she’d never slept at all.

As Rebecca Carter sobbed and shivered on the platform, a man approached her from the crowd. He was a horribly disfigured deadman with the scars of six pistol shots in his skull. When Rebecca Carter saw him, she gasped. And shouted, “Fred!” as she ran to embrace him, sobbing and wailing and shivering all the while, and after a while he led her away from the stage.

And maybe they shared a good eternity in damnation together, or maybe they were each other’s damnation, and that was always meant to be. Or maybe they found that other thing that came upon the City of New Orleans late that night — who can say for sure? People hurt each other when they love each other. It’s wrong and it’s destructive, and maybe the cure is to run away and never look back — but maybe there’s a time and place where people who’ve hurt one another can learn to live in love and peace, respectfully and Godfully, and maybe Fred and Rebecca Carter found that for each other.

Who can know? Who can say? Some days, some times, the only thing that we can do is pray.

When Lisa woke she saw the Lady taking the shattered Eye of the World from her carry-bag. So beautiful, those fragments — like jewels, but brighter and more glorious. One by one the Lady took them from her bag and placed them in the forge, till now the furnace hearth inside that place made the glittering fragments shine like tiny suns.

Lisa went to dead Elvis and tugged on his sleeve. “I had a dream,” she said. “Blind Willie says you have to sing.”

The deadman yanked his arm away from her. He had an expression on his face like she’d bit him hard enough to draw blood; he swore profanely under his breath.

“Get away from me, girl,” he said. “I ain’t got no business with Blind Willie.”

“You’re wrong,” Lisa said. “He told me! He said, ‘
The King will sing it with you. If he doesn’t, you’ve got to make him sing
.’”

Dead Elvis scowled. “You’ve got the wrong man,” he said. “The King you’re looking for is Furry Lewis, out at the revival.”

“No it isn’t. I know who is the King, and I know you when I see you. You’ve got to sing.”

When Rebecca and Fred Carter had disappeared into the crowd, Washboard Sam returned to the platform and peered again out into the crowd. This time he chose one of the greatest among the fallen — Sister O.M. Terrell.

When he saw her and pointed at her, the Sister stood unsteadily. The revivalist said, “Behold before you, sinners, Sister O.M. Terrell, who heard the sweet word of the Lord, and sang it to us all!”

“Sang it to us all!”

“She heard the good word, but she sinned. And that sin carries her to this day.”

The crowd gasped, and there was a quiet hush — a hush so sad it like to break the Devil’s heart, because he heard it where he sat upon his throne in his Mansion called Defiance, still aching from the cut Leadbelly gave him. Of course he heard it! When the Devil listens he hears everything in Hell, and that night he listened intently.

“Let her sing,” the revivalist shouted, and the crowd roared, “Let her sing!”

And Sister O.M. Terrell staggered half-drunkenly to the edge of the platform, then climbed up onto it in a clumsy and unladylike fashion. When she was on the platform the crowd saw that she was holding her beautiful guitar, and no matter what else had become of her she still had the majesty and the poise that marked her as a giftie songster.

She strummed three chords, and the crowd murmured with awe.

“I lived a hard life, my friends. And it led me to this sorry state they call damnation.”

Someone whispered damnation. A child in the back began to cry.