Joplin's Ghost (34 page)

“A hunnert years,” the conjurer said. “Prob’ly mo’.”

“Excuse me?” Scott said, thinking he’d misunderstood his dialect. “A
hundred
years?”

The conjurer nodded, his face vacant. “Ya’ll’s souls is stuck like cold sap to a tree.”

“Then she’ll be well soon?” Scott said, feeling more foolish than ever for his relief.

The conjurer gathered his bones, and tossed them again. This time, gazing at whatever messages were supposedly hidden in their random positioning, the conjurer’s face slackened. He chewed his bottom lip, shaking his head. “She ain’t gon’ be well,” he said at last.

Turn and go on your way. Don’t listen to another word of this,
Scott told himself, but he couldn’t walk away. He hadn’t realized how unburdened he’d felt by the prediction that he and Freddie would live together for a hundred years until it had been wrested away.

“What do you mean?” Scott said. There was anger in his voice.

“Her lungs ain’t right,” the conjurer said, and shrugged.

Scott forced himself to laugh, although a laugh was the furthest thing from his heart. “You tell me in one breath we’ll live together a hundred years, and that she’ll never be well in the next? I deserve more clever lies for my dollar. You can do better than that.”

“I ain’t said a hunnert years in
this
world,” the conjurer said. “I ain’t said nothin’ ’bout
livin’
.” He was gazing at Scott head-on, challenging him. One corner of his lip turned upward, the beginnings of what would be a vicious smile if he loosed it.

Scott stood rooted, his heart crashing in his chest, stanching his breath. This stranger was playing a cruel game with him, yet it was nothing like a game, at least not any Scott knew. Suddenly, he felt as if he were bargaining for his soul. “
Living
is the only damn thing I care about,” Scott said. “Tell me what you see for me in
this
world.”

The conjurer picked up his bones again, and threw them for the third time. They fell across the wooden plank with a scrabbling clatter.

Scott’s hands trembled, and he took a single step away, but not so far that he couldn’t see every weathered line in the conjurer’s face as he leaned over to peer closely at the bones, or couldn’t smell the sharp scent of the conjurer’s sun-broiled skin and old chicken grease on his fingertips. Scott had led himself into a trap. He didn’t know how he knew, but the realization made him want to run the entire twenty-seven miles home.

The conjurer looked up at him, this time with a grin. Several of his teeth were missing, making his smile hideous. “This world ain’t got no luck fo’ you. All yo’ luck’s waitin’ in the next,” the conjurer said. “So I guess you ain’t so biggity now, is you?”

“I apologized for that,” Scott said, his voice unsteady. “There’s no reason to—”

“Any bad turn you can think up, that’s what’s gonna pass yo’ way in this life. That’s what the bones say.”

Scott shuddered. “You’re a trickster,” he whispered.

“Your wife won’t never git well. She won’t live to harvesttime. You sick an’ don’t know it, and you won’t never git well neither. You gonna lose them fingers, too. Time comes, you won’t be able to hold yo’ own dick to take a piss. You been bit by the dog, ain’t you?”

Scott’s blood had drained from his face at the reference to his fingers, but he felt faint when the conjurer said
the dog
. Impossible! He took two more steps backward, nearly stumbling over a block of wood half-buried in the dust. The boy’s eyes watched him, doleful.

“Don’t t-try to make me think you’re putting a curse on me,” Scott said, pointing a shaky finger at the conjurer. If he’d been wearing a cross the way his mother had always advised, he would be clutching it now. It was as if the devil himself had stepped off the train and crossed his path. “I’m a Christian man, and I don’t believe in hoodoo.”

“I ain’t one to throw curses, but if I
had
underworlded you, you’d know it,” the conjurer said. “You axe me fo’ the future, an’ that’s what the bones say. The future ain’t nothin’ to be skeered of, boy. The future’s already came an’ went. Yo’ wife’ll be lost from you fo’ a time, but we all gits lost. You’ll see her agin by and by.”

“The bones don’t
never
lie,” the boy said, shaking his head, and climbed back to his berth.

Scott felt his stomach heave, and it took all of his body’s restraint to keep from spilling his last meal on the ground. He pressed his hand to his mouth, hardly daring to move. He watched in silence while the conjurer climbed up into the wagon’s bed and pulled the door up behind him. The half-starved mongrel sniffed near Scott, lured by the lingering chicken scent, and Scott didn’t move to shoo the dog away. He stood in a fog of fright.

“I don’t believe you,” Scott said, desperate to break the man’s strange hold on him.

“I ain’t axe you to b’lieve me. You the one axed
me,
” the conjurer said. His smile was gone, and he looked at Scott as impassively as if they’d been chatting about the train schedule and last night’s rain. “I ain’t the one skeered o’ what’s gon’ come.”

The boy clucked to the nag and snapped the reins, and Scott watched the sorry wagon jounce away. The conjurer gazed back at Scott from where he sat with neither malice nor pity, a man untroubled to deal out death every day.

N
o, sorry, this isn’t Marcus Smalls. My name is Gloria Katz, and I’m Phoenix’s personal assistant, so I’m taking her manager’s calls this week…Yes, Phoenix
is
available for interviews, if you’ll let me check my book…. Who are you with again?”

Phoenix heard her cousin’s voice through the cracked bedroom doorway, so professional that she fooled her again for a split-second, making Phoenix wonder when she’d hired an assistant, or how she could afford it. Sarge had kept most of his phone work away from Phoenix’s hearing, so she hadn’t realized how intrusive his telephone was, like a child in constant need of feeding. Phoenix would have preferred to shut the thing off after Sarge relinquished his phone to Gloria in the limousine—saying he’d had enough, that he’d put up with as much as he could stand—but Gloria, true to her spirit as a lifesaver, insisted on answering its constant ringing.

Career CPR,
Phoenix thought.
Good luck with that, cuz.

Phoenix couldn’t keep her own attention anymore, so she didn’t blame Sarge for quitting. Creative differences, that was all. Sarge was stubbornly trying to live in the present, and suddenly Phoenix was more fascinated by the past. Sarge was playing family man today, sightseeing with Serena and Trey, and Phoenix couldn’t be mad at that.
That’s what he should have been doing all along
.

Phoenix raised her head from the pile of books in her lap long enough to gaze at the gathering of strangers in her living room; not one, not two, but
six
psychics watching the videotaped image of her playing her keyboard the night she had sleepwalked. The music on the tape preserved another era while they craned to see her on the tiny black-and-white video monitor Finn had left, since she and Nia didn’t own a television set. All of them sipped peppermint tea from styrofoam cups someone had brought, nibbling from a plate of homemade brownies, as if Phoenix were hosting the monthly meeting of the City of Angels Psychics Club.

Heather and Finn were here, and so were a white-haired Mexican man with tortoiseshell glasses who cleared his throat a lot; the guy with the flowing mane of dark hair and a moustache who reminded her of a famous magician she’d liked as a child, but whose name escaped her now; a woman in her late twenties with crew-cut red hair and bright freckles across every inch of her visible skin; and a middle-aged black woman they all deferred to, Johnita Somebody, who had written a best-selling book about being a psychic and flown in from Seattle because she was Heather’s mentor.
What do you call a meeting of psychics? A gaggle, like geese? A murder, like crows?
A passel of psychics, Phoenix decided. That sounded right.

The passel had been here since early morning, walking through her apartment the way she’d walked through the Joplin House, trying to catch his vibes in the walls.

Phoenix was doing a good job of ignoring the psychics, just as she’d mostly been ignoring Gloria. Phoenix had reading to do. The five books about Scott Joplin Carlos had brought her after yesterday’s television performance were plenty to keep her occupied, and she sat on a corner of her futon marking passages with a neon green Hi-Liter dangling from her mouth. Words and phrases jumped out at her: Syphilis. Teacher. Sedalia.
Treemonisha
.

But she always came back to Freddie, the stern photograph of the appealing, pale-skinned woman Scott Joplin had pictured on the cover sheet of his original publication of “Bethena” in 1905, the photograph that might be the only remains of Joplin’s second wife.

The wife, incidentally, who had died while they were married.

Carlos had neglected to mention Freddie’s death when he first told Phoenix whose name she had heard in her ear, but Phoenix understood why he’d hesitated. That night by the pool, she had already been freaked out, peeing on herself, so she wouldn’t have been ready for that knowledge then. But things had changed. She was ready to understand, or at least to try. Phoenix felt as if she were preparing for an arranged marriage, trying to learn everything about her betrothed the way she’d studied Ronn, hoping to glimpse the breathing man hidden in the pages of facts and dates.

Freddie had almost been erased from history, Phoenix had learned. Historians had known about Belle and a third woman Scott Joplin married late in life, but apparently none of the people who’d known Joplin best mentioned Freddie in later interviews, not even the widow who had survived him. It was as if Freddie had never existed.

When Phoenix had called Van Milton yesterday to tell him about her television appearance and the first lyrics to
A Guest of Honor,
their conversation turned to Freddie after his excited speculations about Joplin’s link to Phoenix. The curator mentioned that Freddie might not have been unearthed at all if not for his friend Edward A. Berlin, the Joplin biographer who had discovered her existence in the late 1980s. Phoenix recognized Berlin’s name: He’d written one of the books in her stack,
King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era
. Phoenix convinced Milton to give her Berlin’s number, so she and Carlos had called him at his home in New York last night, late for the East Coast. The gracious musicologist had been too polite to offer any opinion on the scores Milton had sent him—
Yes, this isn’t the first time
A Guest of Honor
has mysteriously shown up on my doorstep,
he’d said dryly—but Edward Berlin had been happy to talk to her about Scott Joplin and Freddie.

Such an unhappy, sad, depressed man, and he wrote this joyful music,
Berlin had sighed, as if Joplin was a friend. Berlin told her about how he and his research assistants had combed historical cemeteries without any luck while he was researching Joplin’s biography, hoping to find a second wife he suspected existed. He’d pieced the second marriage together from vague references in interviews with people like the granddaughter of a man named Solomon Dixon, where Joplin had boarded for a time in Sedalia. Berlin had finally found Freddie’s death notice in several old Sedalia newspapers—the
Conservator, Democrat, Sentinel
and
Capitol
—rescuing her memory from oblivion.

Freddie had been a kid when she died, twenty years old, and she had been married to Scott Joplin only ten weeks, not even three months. They’d hardly known each other when they got married, and their marriage had lasted the blink of an eye. But Berlin said Scott Joplin had obviously based the young lead character in his beautiful opera,
Treemonisha,
on Freddie: strong-willed, educated, a leader. His perfect woman.
And he’s still mourning her now,
Phoenix had thought while she listened
. Either that, or he thinks he’s found her again.

“Freeze it right there,” Johnita said suddenly, and Finn paused the tape. Johnita was wearing a loose, African-inspired dress and large hoop earrings dangling near her shoulders. Her dark hair was short enough for West Point, dotted with silver strands like paint specks. “
There
. Do you see that streak of light in the upper-left-hand corner? He’s behind her.”

The passel scooted forward to look more closely at the monitor, and a round of
ahhhhhhs
made its way from person to person, along with breathless smiles. The Mexican man began scribbling notes. Phoenix glanced up, too, but she couldn’t see anything on the screen worth noticing. It was hard to get excited about a blip on a videotape when she’d seen him sitting on her bed, and he’d sung the words to
A Guest of Honor
through her mouth just yesterday.

But her ghost wasn’t going to come while they were here.

Her ghost had hidden himself the first time Heather was here, and she understood why after listening to the Houston Grand Opera recording of his opera,
Treemonisha
. The evil villains in
Treemonisha
were conjurers. A band of old conjurers kidnapped the heroine and conspired to keep the freed slaves ignorant and superstitious, trying to sell them bags of luck and rabbits’ feet while Treemonisha preached education. Conjurers must have really pissed Scott Joplin off, Phoenix thought. Her ghost wouldn’t visit while the passel was here.

She knew him, at last. A little, anyway.

“Phoenix?” Johnita’s voice said gently. Phoenix looked up again. She hadn’t realized the video had stopped playing, and now the passel’s eyes were on her. “Heather mentioned something about an accident with a piano when you were a child. Where’s that piano now?” She folded her hands, bright eyes waiting.

Phoenix felt possessive, suddenly. Van Milton had asked about that piano, too. “I don’t know. My parents sold it to a collector a few months after the accident.”

“That piano could be very significant, the root of your connection to Joplin.”

“Yet, it hurt her,” the Mexican man said.

“But that was an accident. Joplin came through to make sure I knew that,” Heather said, and the other psychics nodded, gazing at Heather like a sage. “He’s her spirit guide.”

“Oh yeah, totally,” said Freckle-Girl.

“But that piano…” Johnita pursed her lips, sighing. Phoenix thought she could see plans for her next book in the woman’s eyes. “It’s a loss. It must have had significance to him.”

Instinctively, Phoenix looked around for Carlos, before she remembered he’d gone out to get her groceries. She was tired of the passel now. She didn’t like the way they talked about her like a science project, and she was ready for them to go away and leave her to her reading. Scott Joplin was the only one who could teach her what she needed to know.

“Sugar?” Johnita said, and for the first time, Phoenix heard a pinch of the South in the woman’s accent. Sarge had told her his mother used to call him
sugar,
and Phoenix liked the word’s cozy warmth. She’d never had the chance to meet Sarge’s mother, who had been long dead when she was born. “You look like a rabbit caught in a trap. Hon, we’re not here to hurt you or exploit you. I know it’s unnerving to have a room full of psychics. I’m grateful you’ve invited us here into your sacred space. If I’m pushing too hard, just say so. My feelings don’t get hurt that easy. Heather is a gifted lady, she told me there was something special here, and she was right. But this is
your
journey. Now…I know you’ve had some fear through this…”

Phoenix nodded. “I’m starting to get past that.”

“Well, that’s excellent, sugar. Sometimes it takes people years to get over their fear of the dead. Right?” She turned to the passel, and they agreed.

“My twin sister died when we were three,” Freckle-Girl said matter-of-factly, “and I
still
wig out when I turn around and see her behind me.”

“I drive a mile out of my way every night to avoid the cemetery,” said the man with long hair. “I’m not proud of that, but it’s true.”

“And this is all happening to
you
in a matter of days,” Johnita told Phoenix. “You didn’t believe in ghosts, and now you’re working to embrace one in your life. You thought all psychics were frauds, and now you know some of us are the real thing.”

That
was true. Heather had been all the proof Phoenix needed.

“So I’m sorry if you thought I was trying to claim your experiences, that I want to book myself on Oprah with Scott Joplin’s haunted piano. That’s not the case, I promise you.” At that, Johnita smiled. “All right, I have to tell you something: There’s a presence in this room, and I’m being scolded. She’s reminding me there’s more than one Oprah. Does that ring a bell?”

Phoenix blinked, and her nostrils stung. “My mom’s mother was named Oprah. She died when I was fifteen. She bought me my first piano.” Phoenix didn’t tell Johnita that she thought about Grandma Oprah a little every time she played a keyboard, and that her death was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Those things were private. Phoenix wasn’t sure if she was glad to hear her grandmother’s name or annoyed at the psychic’s casual intrusion in her loss.

Johnita nodded as if she’d quizzed her, and Phoenix had passed. “This room is full of people who love you. I know you haven’t asked me for a reading, but you should think about it, sugar. I’m booked nine months in advance, and there are people willing to pay crazy money for what I’m offering you for free.”

“I don’t know. My last reading was a downer.” Phoenix avoided looking at Heather.

“I promise not to tell you anything I think might upset you.”

Which means there’s something bad, and she knows it,
Phoenix thought. “OK,” she said, although she wasn’t sure it was.

“Would you rather do this privately?”

Phoenix shook her head. “Nah. I’m good.”

The Queen Psychic didn’t hold her hand or hesitate. “A name starting with J is coming through, or maybe Jay
is
the name. He’s a friend.”

When Phoenix blinked, a tear shook loose. “Yeah. My friend Jay, from high school.”

“Jay wants you to know he’s fine, and he’s proud of you. He says he misses writing songs with you.” Phoenix suddenly remembered her notebook from fifth period Spanish in high school, which she and Jay had passed back and forth as they wrote lyrics; most of them bad, but some of them very good. When she’d had her band—when she’d been actually collaborating instead of only giving in—Phoenix used to ask herself,
How would Jay write this?
and the words would come. Johnita went on: “I can’t linger with anyone too long, because there’s a lot of crowding. Sorry about that. Now I’m feeling a very powerful spirit, a matriarch. Not Oprah this time, but another grandmother, an L name.”