Bone Music (6 page)

The Present

Emma took Lisa’s body from Mama Estrella and carried it to the garage. She cradled it in her arms so carefully, so lovingly — in her imagination the corpse was Lisa, alive and sleeping soundly, her beautiful delicate head resting on Emma’s shoulder. When they reached Mama Estrella’s car Emma stretched dead Lisa across the back seat and lingered above her for the longest while, savoring the sight of her. After a moment she stooped, kissed the dead girl’s forehead, squeezed her cold limp hand.

Closed the back door, got in the front passenger seat, and watched Mama Estrella ease the car out of its parking space, out of the garage, onto the city street. She kept thinking of all the beer, and how drunk Mama Estrella had to be, but there was no sign of drunkenness in her driving. Just the opposite, in fact: she handled the car with a sureness most sober people can’t manage when they’re navigating Harlem.

She drove quickly, too — twenty minutes after they’d left the garage they were out in Brooklyn, driving through the cemetery’s broken gate, past great grandiose monuments that crowded one another in columns without order, like unearthly soldiers run riot. They cast long shadows underneath the full-bright moon.

Emma knew those shadows hid the worst sins in the world.

She didn’t like that place, not one damn bit. She didn’t like bringing her precious little girl into it, either. There are things, Emma thought, that even a dead child ought never have to see — and maybe she was right. But by the time Mama Estrella’s five-year-old Escort rolled into that cemetery, Lisa had seen worse things already.

And worse things still lay ahead of her.

Mama Estrella drove half a mile through the cemetery’s twisting access roads, and then pulled over in front of a stand of trees. “Are there others coming, Mama Estrella? Don’t you need a lot of people to have a ceremony?”

Mama Estrella scowled. She shook her head and lifted a beer from a bag on the floor of the car, opened the can and took a long pull out of it.

“You wait here until I call you, Emma,” she said. She got out of the car, lifted Lisa from the back, and carried her away.

After a while Emma noticed that Mama Estrella had started a fire on top of someone’s grave. She made noise, too — music, almost. Chanting, banging, shuffling her feet like a bluesman keeping time. There were other sounds, too, sounds that weren’t music or even counterpoint. Emma recognized those noises, but she couldn’t remember what they were, no matter how she tried. Then she heard the sound of an infant screaming, and she couldn’t help herself anymore — she got out of the car and ran toward the fire.

By the time Emma got to the grave, it looked like Mama Estrella was already finished.

When she saw Emma she got annoyed. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said, scowling.

“I thought I heard a baby screaming,” Emma told her.

She stepped away from Lisa for a moment, looking for something on the ground by the fire, and Emma got a look at her daughter. Lisa wasn’t breathing, but her eyes were open, and as Emma looked at her she blinked.

Emma’s heart lurched.

Lisa. Alive.

She could see Lisa was all empty inside, like a shell pretending to be a little girl, but even so Emma wanted to cry or pray or sing or something, anything. She ran to Lisa, grabbed hold of her and sang into her dead cold ear. “Lisa, Lisa, my darling baby Lisa.” When her lips touched Lisa’s ear it felt like butchered meat, but all the same she cried wet tears of joy.

As she cried her tears fell onto Lisa’s face, into her eyes. And after a moment Lisa reached up to wrap her arms around Emma, and she said “Mama,” in a voice that sounded like dry paper brushing against itself.

Emma heard Mama Estrella gasp behind her, and looked up to see her standing over the fire, trembling. “Something’s inside her,” Mama Estrella said.

Emma shook her head. “Nothing’s inside Lisa but Lisa.” Emma was sure. A mother knew these things. “She’s just as alive as she always was.”

Mama Estrella scowled. “She shouldn’t be alive at all,” she said. “It isn’t good, a soul alive in a dead body.” She frowned. “Her soul could die forever, Emma.”

“What do you mean?”

“It isn’t right,” Mama Estrella said. “We need to put her back to rest.”

Emma felt herself flush. “You’re not going to touch my baby, Mama Estrella. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but you’re not going to touch my baby.”

“Emma —”

Emma pulled her daughter away. “Damn you, woman!” she said. “Damn you straight to hell!”

Mama Estrella gaped at her. Emma thought she was going to say something, or do something, or — something. But she didn’t. She didn’t say a word, in fact. Didn’t so much as move a muscle.

After a moment Emma took Lisa’s hand. “Come on, child,” she said, and she led Lisa out of the graveyard, out through Brooklyn, back toward Harlem and their home. It was a long, long way — longer than Emma would’ve imagined back in the cemetery when she’d walked away from Mama Estrella and her car. Lisa never complained about the distance, but a mile after they’d left the cemetery Emma began to worry about her walking that far in nothing but her bare feet, and she took the girl in her arms. After that she carried Lisa most of the way to Fulton Street, where Emma hailed a livery to drive them home.

When they got home, Emma put Lisa to bed, even though she didn’t seem tired. It was long past her bedtime, and God knew it was necessary to at least keep up the pretense that life was normal.

Twenty minutes after that, she went to bed herself.

November 1948

Blind Willie Johnson died ten years after Robert Johnson broke the Eye of the World. He died of pneumonia quietly and humble in the same Marlin Texas hovel where his mother had borne him. When he was gone his wife called on the men from the burying ground to take him and put him in the soil.

For three days he rested still as stone in the Texas dirt, dead as any deadman waiting for the Second Coming.

And then Peetie Wheatstraw came for him.

He paid the gravemen good money to dig with shovels — hard, slow, careful work that lasted hours where the backhoe could have dragged the coffin up in the time it would have took to soften up a wad of chaw.

Peetie Wheatstraw had good reason to be careful.

When the gravediggers’ shovels scraped Blind Willie’s coffin, Peetie Wheatstraw made them stop, change tools, and clear the remainder with garden spades.

Then the coffin was clear, and they lifted it gently to set it on the grass beside the open grave.

Wheatstraw himself hammered out the nails that held the lid secure. When they were gone he pried it free to expose Blind Willie’s carcass to the light of day.

Peetie Wheatstraw stooped over the open coffin, peering at the corpse. After a moment he murmured derisively. “Get up,” Peetie Wheatstraw commanded the corpse. “Ain’t no sense you lying there, Blind Willie. It ain’t the time for you to go to no reward.”

The gravediggers sidled away from Wheatstraw; one of them mumbled something about a burial he needed to attend to.

The corpse lay silent, still as stone.

“Get on with you, Blind Willie! Ain’t no use you try to lie there. The angel Death already come for you, took you home, and brought you back. She left you here on earth where you belong.”

Blind Willie didn’t answer.

One of the gravediggers cleared his throat. “He’s dead, Mister. Can’t you see?”

Peetie Wheatstraw looked up. “You think I don’t know? I know a dead man when I see one.” He shook his head. “Jesus Christ Almighty, what do you think I am?”

The grave digger gave no more answer than the carcass had.

“You got to understand,” Peetie Wheatstraw said. “This isn’t any ordinary body. Blind Willie — he’s a Hoodoo Doctor. Being dead ain’t no problem for a hoodoo man.”

And suddenly the corpse sat bolt upright in its casket.

“Damn you!” Blind Willie shouted. “Damn your hide to Hell, Peetie Wheatstraw!”

Peetie Wheatstraw laughed so hard he like to fall into the open grave. Two of the gravediggers turned and ran for their lives; the third would’ve run with them if he hadn’t been too scared to move.

Blind Willie scowled; he mumbled curses so quiet that only the Devil heard them — but those curses were so foul that the Devil took delight to hear Blind Willie speak them.

“Your time has come and gone, Blind Willie. But the world still needs you, and you’re here. You better get used to the idea.”

Blind Willie wouldn’t hear it. “Go away,” he said. “You want to talk to me, I’ll see you at the rapture.”

That got Peetie Wheatstraw started laughing all over again.

“It ain’t a going to work, Blind Willie. The blues have got you, and they’ve made you to a Doctor.”

“I never sang no blues,” Blind Willie said. “I sang to serve the Lord.”

Peetie Wheatstraw rolled his eyes. “We all serve the Lord,” he said. “God makes us who we are.”

“You’re wrong,” Blind Willie said. “I seen the light, and I seen the darkness. I seen the halls of hell and I seen what folks who dwell there. God never made a place like that for anyone He loves.”

Now suddenly Wheatstraw grew serious and sober, and when he spoke he spoke so quietly that even Blind Willie — dead and alive with the hoodoo that consumed him despite every good intention — so quietly that Blind Willie hardly heard him. “God loves us all so dear He makes us free to grow as great as we can dare.”

“Free to be wrong, you mean. Free to sin!”

“Damn right.”

“You better get yourself religion, boy,” Blind Willie said. “You better learn to serve the Lord.”

Wheatstraw didn’t answer right away, and when he did answer he answered at right angles to the point. “Get up, Blind Willie. That grave no longer can contain you.”

Blind Willie didn’t answer that at all. He sat perched still as stone in his coffin, staring at the horizon for the longest time.

And then he began to pray.

On toward late afternoon a cold wind came down off the plains, and now the boneyard took a chill as deep as death. After a while Peetie Wheatstraw put his arm around the gravedigger who was still too terrified to move, and led him back to town.

The Present

Everything should’ve been great after Lisa came back. It should have been fine and wonderful and true; it should have been a renewal that gave them life where life had slipped away. But it didn’t work that way, because life never works that way: Lisa woke to her new life as angry as a jaybird frightening a pigeon.

It was hard to see at first, because she was still in her heart a good little girl who spoke politely and minded what her mother told her — but underneath the goodness and the deference the girl had a temper.

A bad, bad temper.

Emma first saw it the morning after Lisa’s resurrection. She’d put her coffee on to brew and gone to Lisa’s room to tell her breakfast was ready, and found Lisa awake in bed, playing with a mouse. God only knew how the girl had caught the thing, and damn the exterminator who’d promised to rid the building of mice two months ago, but there it was, acting like some child’s darling pet, crawling back and forth across Lisa’s papery hands. Such a darling little dear, Emma thought, maybe they ought to buy a cage and keep this one mouse as a pet — and then the creature stumbled, hissed, and bit deep into Lisa’s left thumb.

Emma swore and rushed to her daughter’s side to nurse the wound.

As Lisa screeched.

Grabbed the mouse with her free hand.

Closed her hand around it and crushed it to a pulp.

“Lisa!”

Lisa glanced over her shoulder, still angry; she looked surprised to see her mother.

“It bit me, Mama,” Lisa said. And then she glanced back at the red wet goo that sopped down from her hand into the bedclothes. She sobbed. “It never should have bit me.”

She sounded like she wanted to cry, but she sounded angry, too.

Emma bit her lip, tried to make her stomach be still. “The mouse is dead, Lisa,” she said. Emma wasn’t sure why she chose those words, but they were the only ones she could find. “You need to wash yourself, child.”

Lisa looked from her mother to the dead mass in her hand and back again.

“Yes, Mama,” Lisa said. She sounded like she wanted to say something else, too, but whatever it was she kept it to herself.

Emma led her to the bathroom, where she flushed the bloody mass down the toilet and washed Lisa’s hands in the sink.

“I don’t know what’s got into you, child,” Emma said. “I never seen you hurt a fly before.”

Lisa frowned.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” she said, rinsing and rinsing her hands in the water. And then her face seemed to crumble, and suddenly she was sobbing, sobbing and crying like a baby lost alone. “I miss my friend,” she said. “I want him back.”

“The mouse is dead, Lisa.”

“He never should have bit me,” Lisa said. And then she cried some more.

The mouse bite oozed pus for three long days, and when it stopped oozing Lisa’s whole thumb hardened stiff as wood.

It was like — like she was still dead. She didn’t eat except when Emma told her to, and every time she did the food came back up a few hours later, smelling like death. Lisa smelled like that, too, sometimes — like meat left to sit in the sun for days. And her breath! So sulfury and strange, like brimstone burning closer than you want to think.

One night Emma dreamed that the stinking rotten thing in her daughter’s bedroom wasn’t Lisa at all — it was some dead thing, a zombie, just like Mama Estrella said. It was a monster inhabited by demons, and the only peace she’d ever know was if she burned it in a bonfire.

But there was courage in her heart, and she knew the difference between her convictions and her fears.

And she knew Lisa was her daughter, her precious little girl who’d suffered a terrible miracle, and she knew that if she kept the courage of her faith the Lord would see her through.

There are some — like Mama Estrella — who would say Emma was a foolish woman, and that she should have put her daughter down to rest before she died forever. And there’s reason in those words, no question. But there are times when courage and faith are better guides than reason, and this was one of those.

Emma’s heart told her this was just that time. But Mama Estrella told her different. She called on the telephone over and over, trying to frighten Emma, trying to persuade her.

“Your baby’s going to die, Emma,” Mama Estrella would say as Emma lifted the receiver. “She’s going to die forever, girl.”

But Emma didn’t frighten easy.

“You’re wrong,” she said. And she hung up the phone.

What did worry Emma was Lisa’s temper. There were times it seemed unnaturally inspired, and other times it seemed natural but out of all proportion.

The night she had that awful dream Emma wandered into the kitchen for a glass of water and found Lisa by the sink, killing roaches and painting pictures with their innards around the edges of the drain.

“Lisa!” Emma had shouted, all bleary and confused, “What are you doing, child?”

When Lisa saw her mother she looked ashamed.

“Just killing bugs, Mama, that’s all,” she said, and her voice sounded guilty and repentant even if her words tried to make out like it wasn’t something heinous and disgusting she’d been doing.

“Why would you do such a thing, child?”

And Lisa had looked up at her mother like she was about to cry. “I just get so mad, is all,” she’d said. “Sometimes I get so angry I don’t know what to do.”

And all that night after Emma went back to bed she lay awake wondering which was real, the demoniac thing that drew her daughter to hurt those bugs, or the little girl who did such things even though they shamed her.

She never knew for certain.

The next day Mama Estrella and her sisters came looking for Lisa while Emma was away at work. She knocked three times, demanding to be let into the apartment, and when there was no answer she used her master key to open the door.

Lisa heard her, and she hid in the back corner of the closet, terrified of the chanting women and their incense. They looked and looked all through the apartment, but Lisa lay still as stone down in the dirty laundry, and they never found her.

When Emma came home she found Lisa still hiding terrified in her closet. Emma asked the girl what she was doing hiding there, and when Lisa told her Emma hit the roof.

She got on the phone and gave that Santeria Lady a piece of her mind.

But Mama Estrella didn’t hear a word of it.

“Emma,” Mama Estrella said, “your baby could die forever.”

Emma took the phone into the living room and closed the door as much as she could without damaging the cord. When she responded her voice was even angrier than she meant it to be. “You stay away from Lisa, Mama Estrella Perez. My Lisa’s just fine, she’s going to be okay, and I don’t want you going near her. Do you understand me?”

Mama sighed. “When you make a zombie,” she said, “when you make a real one from someone dead, I mean, you can make it move. You can even make it understand enough to do what you say. But still the body rots away. It doesn’t matter usually. When a zombie is gone it’s gone. What’s the harm? But your Lisa is inside that zombie. When the flesh rots away she’ll be trapped in the bones. And we won’t ever get her out.”

Emma felt all cold inside. She’d seen the rot; she knew what was happening to her little girl. But there was a truth in her heart, a knowledge and certainty that rose above all argument and justification. She reached into her heart and trusted what she found, and when she answered the Santeria Lady her voice was a crucible of rage. “Don’t you say things like that about my Lisa, Mama Estrella,” she said. “My Lisa’s alive, and I won’t have you speaking evil of her.” She opened the door and slammed the phone into its cradle before Mama Estrella could say another word.