Joplin's Ghost (46 page)

“What do I think? I think the keys are sticky with blood,” Scott called up to her.

“Shoot, I know how to get rid of blood,” Lottie said. “What you
think
?”

Blood aside, Scott still didn’t care for the piano. Rosewood was attractive, and it was ornate enough to be called art in its own right, especially with the old-fashioned candelabra to betray its age. But it wasn’t his Steinway. His Steinway had a sound elegant enough to accompany Sam and the other singers he and Lottie entertained at home, because in Lottie, thank God, he had found a woman who had created the musician’s haven he’d craved since he married Belle more than a decade ago.
This is not the piano I wanted.
That thought railed in his mind, a child’s tantrum.

But that wasn’t all. He sensed it, but couldn’t put a voice to it. There was something else about the piano he did not like, something beneath its polished wood and bloody keys. It looked too much like the one in Sedalia—as if this piano, like his grief, had followed him all the way to New York. He understood why the man in the brown suit had walked away so quickly. Scott touched one of the piano’s keys, the high G, and the single note rang in the alleyway as the hammer met the string, a strident sound. The note sounded as lonely as any Scott had ever heard. The rash on his feet, one of his illness’s more annoying reminders, suddenly itched terribly. He’d been in a bad mood before he laid eyes on the piano, but his mood felt worse now.

“What did I just tell you about looking a gift horse in the mouth?” Sam said. “Take this damn piano inside before somebody else does. It’s probably worth sixty dollars outright, or more. You oughta clean it up and sell it, if nothing else. You got no mind for business, Scotty.”

“You tell him, Sam. All he’s talked about is needing a piano. What am I gonna
do
with this man?” Lottie’s voice drifted down.

A white man with wide-set eyes scowled at Scott. “Say, what gives you claim to it?”

“He’s Scott Joplin, that’s what,” Sam said.

“Yeah, sure he is, and I’m President Taft,” the man said, and mounted his bicycle to ride off. The piano’s allure diminished when the question of its future seemed settled, so the other onlookers began to drift. Even the two newsboys scampered away, as if they’d heard their mothers calling from the distance. If he wanted this piano, Scott thought, it was his.
This won’t replace my Steinway,
Scott vowed to himself.

“All right, Sam. You take one end, I’ll take the other.” Scott hoped he wouldn’t kill himself trying to get the desecrated instrument up the stairs.

As it turned out, he and Sam had to solicit the help of two Negro men leaving his building after their day’s last ice delivery to haul the piano up the ten steps, with Lottie calling out advice from the landing. For every step they climbed, the piano tried to lurch back two, as if a lead weight were rolling inside the cabinet. The piano made Scott think of a wild horse defying its trainers. But the more difficult the effort to move the piano, the more determined Scott felt to have it. Excited, even. How could he have nearly walked away from such a godsend?

Upstairs, the piano made their parlor look tiny. There was no clear spot big enough for it with the way their furniture was arranged—a six-octave boudoir piano might have fit, but this one was too large—so the piano sat squarely in the center of the room, with Lottie walking around it to offer Sam and the two deliverymen cool glasses of water and fresh-baked dinner rolls for their help. Scott could only sit in a straight-backed chair to catch his breath after the ordeal, perspiration streaming off his cheeks, forehead and chin. His arms and legs trembled slightly; not enough for anyone else to notice, but enough to alarm him. He was too young to be so taxed. This exhaustion was his illness at work, not his age. He didn’t need a doctor to know that.

The deliverymen left with grateful thanks for the rolls, and Sam put on his hat and jacket as soon as he’d drained his glass. “I need to get in my hour of practice on my saxophone before my show,” Sam said. “It’s got a hell of a sweet sound, but I’m a cornet man, so my mouth don’t know what to do with a reed yet. The sax is where we’re going, though.”

“You’ll get it. You can play any instrument you touch, Sam,” Lottie told him.

“Knock on wood. Congrats on your new piano, Scotty.”

Scotty was too tired to respond verbally, so he only waved good-bye.

Once they were alone, Lottie leaned over Scott and kissed the top of his head, the spot above his temple where his forehead encroached upon his scalp. Scott smiled up at her, although he was almost too tired to smile. “What’s Lottie Joplin’s secret to getting blood off piano keys?”

Lottie winked at him. “Two parts salt, one part lemon juice—and don’t ask how I know. But come on to dinner first. Don’t you want to eat?”

Scott shook his head, taking a deep breath as he stood up. His joints had calmed, thank goodness, and he didn’t know how long his second wind would last. “Let me get her cleaned up. I can’t stand to see a piano so ruined. It would keep me awake to leave it overnight.”

“Aw, that piano’s not ruined. Sometimes things just
look
ruined, ’til somebody comes along to fix ’em up. You’ll see,” Lottie said, and left him with his new acquisition.

After lighting candles in the piano’s candelabra to give him the best light, Scott took the rags Lottie had brought him and pulled up his chair to begin. A closer look at the stained keys turned his stomach, and he doubted if he’d have an appetite later. Some droplets were already so dried they looked like powder, but the keys from middle C to high C were bloodiest, and Scott wondered if the soupy crimson would ever wash completely away.

Scott used damp rags to mop up whatever blood he could without scrubbing. He rinsed his rags in a bucket while he worked, and the water slowly went from clear to pink to muddy red, murkier with each wringing. The piano might as well be wounded and bleeding, a mirror of his own soul.

“What happened to you, poor girl?” Scott said. He doubted that anyone had been blinded, gutted or had his heart cut out, but whatever had happened over this piano had spilled a lot of blood. As he worked, gummy blood crept beneath Scott’s short fingernails, staining them, too. Scott thought about Louis and his razor fights, and every skirmish and scuffle he’d been witness to in dance halls, brothels and on street corners. Would Negroes and whites ever be at peace?
Or will Negroes kill each other first and save the lynch mobs the trouble?

The piano looked better after his preliminary wiping, but the ivory was still stained red across at least ten keys, and he could only guess how much blood was still trapped between them. Lottie’s salt and lemon juice mixture came next. Scott’s steady buffing motion triggered a bath of perspiration, until his shirt clung to his skin. He bit his bottom lip from his effort, but he hardly blinked as he worked, his concentration fixed as dissonant keys sounded again and again beneath his strokes.
The neighbors must be in misery,
he thought.

The job took Scott two hours. He hadn’t noticed while he was working, but the sharp, coppery scent of blood filled the entire parlor and coated his skin and clothes. He’d splattered runny blood across his shirt, which he figured was ruined—unless Lottie knew a secret to removing blood from clothes. She probably did. Scott didn’t discard any clothes lightly anymore. He had a spiffy white suit he wore when he wanted to high-prime in crowds of diamonds and furs—Negroes never ceased to amaze him in their crusade to dress like they had more than they did—but that suit felt more like a costume. Most of his clothes were modest and worn.

Scott heard Lottie humming passages from “A Real Slow Drag” in
Treemonisha
as she walked toward the parlor, and his heart felt stung. He hadn’t dwelled on his setback while he worked on cleaning the piano.

Quickly, Scott got up to open the parlor windows so the room could air out. Lottie shouldn’t have to tolerate the smell of a stranger’s blood in her home. But Lottie didn’t complain.

“Well, my, my, my,” Lottie said. She had changed into her flannel gown, her slippers flapping on the wooden floor. “This could be another line of income for you, Scotty boy. You’re a mess in that blood, but your piano’s pretty as a new bride.”

Lottie was right. The piano that had seemed so ominous to him in the alley looked nothing less than splendid now, with its engraved wreath across the cabinet’s breast and the ornamentation carved up and down both legs. It wasn’t his Steinway, but it would do until he could afford it. The freshly scrubbed ivory keys shone like precious stones in the lamplight.

“What are you waiting on?” Lottie said. “Let me hear how it sounds.”

Scott rested his foot on the sustaining pedal, testing its spring. The pedal was responsive, like new. “What should I play?”

“That one you just wrote. It sure gets my foot to tapping.”

Despite its ordeal, impossibly, the piano was reasonably tuned. But Scott expected that, because there was nothing ordinary about this Rosenkranz.

Scott played the delicate introduction of the piece he’d been working on, one Lottie said he should call simply “Scott Joplin’s New Rag.” It was a fitting name, since he’d been so busy with
Treemonisha
that he hadn’t written many others. He didn’t know where he would sell it, except that it wouldn’t go to John Stark. John wasn’t offering royalties for new pieces, and Scott’s patience with him was done anyway. Just because Stark had published “Maple Leaf Rag” a lifetime ago didn’t mean Scott owed him his life that remained.

But Scott had barely begun his piece’s merrily circus-styled A section when a sharp cramp shot from his knuckles to his elbow, nearly taking his breath. The pain startled Scott so much, he stopped playing. The room went silent.

You gonna lose them fingers, too. Time comes, you won’t be able to hold yo’ own dick to take a piss.
The memory of the conjurer’s words raked Scott’s spine.

“What is it, baby?” Lottie said, her hands on his shoulders. Her skin smelled like rosewater, a welcome departure from the smell of blood, but then the irony struck him: Lottie smelled like Rose, the octoroon from St. Louis whose company he and Louis had shared.

“I don’t feel much like playing,” Scott said, realizing how rarely he’d uttered those words. Any other time, he could play even when he could do nothing else.

“You don’t have to. Play it tomorrow.”

“The show’s off in Atlantic City.” He hated to tell Lottie more than the cast, even.

“I know, baby. Sam told me. It’ll all be fine. Come on to bed, Scotty.”

Scott blinked, thinking of Freddie’s slim, youthful nakedness with a pang. He almost never thought about Freddie when he was with Lottie, something he was proud of. He wanted to do right by Lottie. She knew he’d been married twice before, but the first night she invited him to dinner at her apartment, she’d told him plainly that she didn’t want to know about the women in his past, and he wasn’t to ask about the men in hers. That agreement between them might be the cornerstone of their tranquility. He only wished he were still man enough to please her the way she deserved. Like Freddie, Lottie was not the kind of woman who would consider relations with her husband a duty. When he was able, Lottie cherished relations with him.

“You go on. I think I’ll stay up for a while,” Scott said.

As always, Lottie’s kiss to his lips was soft and loving. Lottie’s kisses sustained him. She had given him his life again when he’d wondered if he had any left. Scott knew he would cherish her the rest of his days. “I sho’ ’nuff loves ya, Scott,” Lottie said, imitating Bert Williams’s vaudevillian minstrel style.

“I sho’ ’nuff loves ya back, Lottie.”

With Lottie gone, Scott sat rubbing his cramped knuckle. All that labor, and he’d barely been able to play a note. “You owe me better than that,” Scott said to the piano. Louis had addressed his pianos frequently, but Scott had never taken up the habit, until now. “You can see what I did for you. You’re mine now, so what will you do for me?”

It was an inspiring idea, like the tale from
Arabian Nights
. What
would
he ask for, if Aladdin’s fabled Jinni appeared to grant a wish? Scott knew the answer in a heartbeat.

“Immortality.” He spoke the word aloud, a confession to no one but himself.

That was the truth of it. He wanted to spread the gospel of education in
Treemonisha,
but didn’t he also want to be recognized? Didn’t he want to prove that Negroes were artists, not just showmen? Didn’t he crave assurance that the music God gave him would not be ignored? Sam was fooling himself if he didn’t think all artists wanted to be remembered.

Maybe Sam was too young to think of such things, unchained by thoughts of death. What a blissful luxury! Scott could think of hardly anything
except
death. When Freddie died, Scott’s hopes for progeny had died with her—and with no children to bequeath his memory to, only his music would remain. Lottie kept every scrap of paper he sketched a tune on, but that was not enough. Just as Jim Europe and Will Marion Cook were ignoring him, so might the world, and forever. How could Sam claim that Music itself didn’t starve without an audience to hear it? Scott had sacrificed poor Freddie on the altar of his music, dragging her with him from town to town to scrape a few pennies together—and for what?