Mockingbird Songs (3 page)

Henry cut a tape demo of “Easier than Breathing to Love You” that afternoon. He felt more relaxed, and there was no one watching him, at least no one he could see, and the man who spoke to him through the headphones seemed unhurried, as if all the time in the world were at their disposal. He had Henry sing the song a couple of times, “Just to check the levels, son …” and then told Henry that they were finished.

When the man appeared, he was all elbows and knees, sapling-thin, had a smile as contagious as a summer cold.

“Folks just settle down when they think they ain’t on tape,” he explained. “Great trick, but works only one time. You done good, son. Got a good song there, nice voice. Few years more you gonna sound as fine as anyone I’ve recorded.”

Henry took the compliment. He expected nothing. He’d just bused it to Abilene for the adventure.

Herman Russell took the recording away, told Henry and his ma to talk a walk around the corner to a soda shop, have a root-beer float or some such, come back in a while.

They took a walk, they had a float, came back in a while, and Herman was awaiting them.

“Spoke to the big boss with the hot sauce, played him your song. He was very impressed, but he ain’t gonna tape you now. Wants to wait a coupla years, let your voice mature a touch. Wants to know if you’d be interested to sign a holding contract.”

“A holding contract?” Nancy asked. “What on earth is that?”

“Nothing really binding,” Herman explained. “Just means that you’re gonna give us first refusal on your songs should anyone else express an interest in Henry, professionally speaking. We give you five hundred bucks, we get first refusal on your material if someone else wants to record and distribute you, and when Henry here turns eighteen, he comes on up here again and we cut some more demos and see what’s cooking.”

“And the five hundred bucks? If we want to go with some other record company?” Nancy asked.

“They buy Henry out for the same amount. Like I said, it’s kind of informal, to be honest. More a gentleman’s agreement than a legally binding contract. No one’s gonna go see a lawyer for the sake of five hundred bucks, Mrs. Quinn.”

Henry signed the paper. Nancy signed it as his legal guardian, even though she thought five hundred bucks was little short of a money mountain. Herman signed it, too, but with a flourish, like it was the redrafting of the Constitution. He gave Henry the money right there and then, and in a music store two blocks east, Henry bought a 1968 Gibson Les Paul Custom guitar for two hundred and sixty-five bucks.

Henry knew he wanted it the moment he saw it. It was like meeting an old friend.

“Guitars is like guns, son,” the salesman told him. The salesman’s name was Norman. He had it woven above the pocket on his chambray shirt. “There’s a gun for every man. Soon as he picks it up, he knows. Feels like he’s shaking hands with someone he can trust. Guitars is the same. You got yourself a bargain there. Good as new, should be about three twenty-five, but we sold it six months ago only for this lightweight feller to come back and tell us it was too heavy. Not a mark on it, not a scratch. Coulda sold it as new, but that’d be dishonest, and we ain’t dishonest.”

Nancy stood aside. She said nothing. It was like listening to a different language. A conversation between aliens. Alabama rednecks, maybe.

“You got yourself an amplifier, son?”

“Got a Lafayette.”

Norman smiled, said, “That’d be like putting cookin’ oil in a Cadillac. Need yourself a Fender. Should git yourself one of these here Princeton Reverbs.”

Norman took Henry into the back. Nancy stood a while and felt like Henry now loved something just as much as he’d once loved her. She knew the music thing was inside of him like a blood-borne virus. There was no cure, only a medicine with which the symptoms could be managed and allayed. That medicine was playing and singing and being the center of attention and all else that went with the life her son had evidently chosen. Or maybe the life had chosen him—she wasn’t so sure which it was.

Henry walked out of Abilene’s Finest Music Store with his new gear and enough change for a good dinner. He and his ma went to a diner a couple of blocks from Arthur Sears Park, and here they talked a little of the past, a great deal about the future, and Nancy Quinn understood in her heart that soon her son would be leaving this life for something unknown, untried, untested.

As it turned out, less than four months shy of that scheduled return to Abilene, a trip that might very well have seen Henry Quinn cutting records for Herman Russell and Crooked Cow, Henry would get drunk and play fool with a loaded .38.

By the time he was released from Reeves in July of 1972, a great deal of life would have happened. The United States had apparently put a man on the moon, though Henry Quinn would have been among the first to question that; Mary Jo Kopechne drowned at Chappaquiddick; the hippies found free love and peace, and Manson lost his mind; even the demise of the Beatles could not keep Vietnam from the headlines; trigger-happy National Guards, much the same as those who had quelled the Reeves riot in 1959, shot four students dead at Kent State; Arthur Bremer tried to assassinate George Wallace, and J. Edgar Hoover’s ghosts and paranoid delusions finally provoked a heart attack big enough to kill him.

The young man who bought a ticket for Calvary at the Greyhound depot in San Angelo was a changed man in a changed world.

He carried with him a backpack, that selfsame Gibson guitar he’d bought in Abilene all of five years earlier, and a letter to a girl called Sarah from a father she’d never seen.

Henry Quinn believed that Evan Riggs’s friendship had helped him maintain his sanity in Reeves. He’d said he would go down to Calvary and speak to Evan’s brother. He’d said he would find Evan’s daughter and deliver the letter.

As far as Henry Quinn was concerned, there was no real difference between a promise given and a promise kept. That was just the way he was made.

THREE

Rumor had it that Calvary was once called Calgary. Just as in the Bible, the place of the skull. The place they nailed up the king of the Jews.

“They sure as hell done that ’fore any Texians done got here,” someone once said. “Texians here too darn drunk and too darn lazy to do anything so fancy. Woulda just shot the dumb sucker ’stead of buildin’ all that fancy riggin’ and whatnot. Shot the boy and then thrown him in a ravine or some such. Let the coyotes git ’im.”

Way back before all the border wars and suchlike started, Texas didn’t rank so well in the popularity stakes. It was too far from the other colonies, there were too many Indian raids, and something about the endless panorama of dust and nothing debilitated the soul.

Calgary, if it was even called that back then, came about by accident.

Lincoln’s election in 1860 saw South Carolina set on secession, and five other lower South states followed suit, Texas among them. The Civil War played out, the army of Northern Virginia finally surrendered, and Reconstruction began. Congress welcomed Texas back into the Union in 1870, but it seemed once more that Texas was like a distant and unruly cousin, bad-tempered, prone to drunken outbursts, volatile at the best of times. Invitation was little more than a resentful obligation, the loutish and unsophisticated uncle at a genteel Southern party. While everyone was drinking watermelon juleps and talking politics, Uncle Tex had cleared half a bottle of bourbon and was trying to fuck the help. Texas seemed to offer nothing but agricultural depression, unrealistic demands, and a landscape sculpted by wind and an endless caravan of hard wheels and hooves.

Until the oil. Until black gold burst from the ground south of Beaumont in January 1901, and Spindletop defined the new Texas. Seemed there was no looking back. Texas possessed a currency that everyone wanted and everyone could spend. But that did not make the state any more hospitable; nor did it prevent the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. It was only the Second World War, the vast influx of federal money that built army bases, munitions factories, and hospitals that really changed the state’s fundamental nature. Three-quarters of a million men left Texas to fight, and those who returned did not return to stare at featureless horizons and work an inhospitable land.

One of the Texans who did return from the war was Evan Riggs, twenty-one years old, and the homestead he returned to perhaps defied the seeming inclination toward progress that characterized so many other towns and cities statewide.

“One of those places Jesus forgot, or just plain gave up on,” was the way Evan’s father, William, described it, but he’d already set himself to farming all of three hundred and fifty acres of cereal, was stubborn enough to set his spurs as deep as they’d go into the haunch of West Texas.

Born in Marathon, just on the other side of the Stockton Plateau, in the late summer of 1896, William Riggs was West Texas in blood and bone and everything else that made a man. William bought a plot of land that he would, in time, expand and establish in his own methodical way. He was twenty years old when he went out there, but West Texas had a way of accelerating the years on even the most unsuspecting and naive young man, and by his second decade, William was as able and confident as would ever be required for survival.

On a clear-skied day in October 1918, William Riggs married a seventeen-year-old girl called Grace Margaret Buckner. Though he had known her less than six months, William loved that girl with a missionary zeal equaled only by those first Spanish colonists of the late 1600s.

Perhaps Grace agreed to the marriage as an escape route. Her own father possessed a skittish eye, as if always watchful of things others could not see. Stray dogs, lost kids seeking forgetful parents. Even ghosts. Folks called him crazy, but they meant something a good deal harsher. Rumor had it he
messed
with his own kids, and not just the girls. William Riggs saw the man had no manners. Never ate nothing but it wasn’t with his fingers and straight from the pan, and when it came to the marriage day, Lester Buckner’s face was nothing more than a twisted knot of grievance and displeasure.

However, Buckner had good sense enough to let his daughter go. The deal was done, and Grace was now a Riggs. Just seventeen years old, she went out to Calvary with her new husband, and though she may not have felt true love in her heart, she certainly did feel that the life ahead could only be better than the one she’d left behind. Thankfully, it was. Better, but no less tough. William Riggs was a good man, no doubt about it. He was honest and straight, a worker, a churchgoer, a good friend, and a decent husband. He did not want children, not yet, not until they had settled and stabilized, and this was something she could understand and appreciate. If you were going to bring a child into the world, then best make that world as good as it could be.

And so it was with trepidation and anxiety that Grace informed her husband that she was pregnant in April of 1919.

William stood stock-still and silent for some time. His expression was unreadable, but it was an expression Grace had not seen before.

He opened his mouth to speak, seemed to reconsider his chosen words, and then simply said, “No one to blame but myself.”

William Riggs left the house and did not return until dusk.

Grace asked him if he was okay. He replied, “I was all set on gettin’ myself angry about this, but now I don’t feel so much like it.”

Something had changed in the man. As if something inside of him was broke down and irreparable.

“It’s going to be okay,” Grace assured him, but she did not believe that, and it was obvious in her voice.

The pregnancy was endured. It was not easy, not at all. William spent all the hours God gave him in the fields. He hired extra hands, coloreds and Mexicans, worked them hard, paid them a decent wage in comparison to his neighbors. Riggs earned a reputation as a fair-minded and pragmatic man, even somewhat empathetic. To his wife he became a distant memory of something that might have been. He was never abusive or violent, far from it, but there seemed to emerge a cruel streak in him, a coldness perhaps. Whatever tenderness may have once been there seemed hardened and resolute, as if blame was being apportioned and he’d assigned her the lion’s share. Perhaps he believed that his authority had been undermined. He’d said no to children, at least for a while, and yet here was a child on the way, like a letter in the mail that could not be delayed. Perhaps, as some men do, he took this as a sign that he was not master of all he surveyed, that there were other forces at work that could defy and derail his intentions. Whichever way it came, he had decided it was a bad thing.

The child came in January of 1920. Same day the federal government saw fit to prohibit alcohol.

William Riggs held his firstborn in his arms, a son, and when the child opened its eyes and looked at its father, the father felt little of anything at all. Riggs had sense and humanity enough to understand that this absence of feeling was wrong, but he could not force himself to feel something he did not. That the mother loved the child was evident in all she said and did around him, but Riggs did not connect with the boy. They called him Carson, and he was a strong boy, a fighter. He never sickened, he slept soundly, he ate enough for two, and he grew like a tree. But Riggs watched that boy as if he were the fruit of some other man’s loins, and though he knew that such a thing was impossible, it still sat like a shadow among his thoughts. It repeated on him again and again, like sour milk on the palate. He desperately wanted to love the boy, but he could not. Grace saw this turmoil, this inner conflict, and she grieved in her own quiet way. The atmosphere was one of melancholy, akin to a wake, but she could not fathom what William believed he had lost.

When Grace told him she was again pregnant in the latter part of June, 1923, William stood in the kitchen and looked at her, a glass in his hand, a mustache of milk on his upper lip, and he said, “Seems like we’re destined to have a family,” which wasn’t what he wanted to say, but some type of distant cousin.

The second child, once again a boy, arrived with a good deal less fanfare and drama in March of 1924.

Whatever internal knots were tied with Carson’s birth seemed untied once more in the moment that William held Evan in his arms. The newborn gurgled and blinked, his tiny hands reaching toward his father, and the obdurate stone that had temporarily replaced William Riggs’s heart gave up its tenancy without a fight. The man cried. Never would have admitted such a thing, but he cried. He carried that babe out to the veranda and stood silently while his exhausted wife slept. Carson, now four years old, was elsewhere, perhaps taking this opportunity to secrete further comestibles about his person as if continually allaying the risk of starvation. His dungaree pockets were a mess of crumbs and crusts, his fingers forever finding ways into Weck and Mason jars, his face a smear of chocolate or preserve. There was something simple, even base about the boy, William believed, as if his intent in life would never be anything greater than taking as much of everything as he could and yet giving as little as possible.

To him, even in those first moments, Evan was different. Never a man for poetic and elegant words, William was inspired to find terms such as
lightness
and
presence
. The child, even in those first few days of its life, brought something to the party. Carson, it seemed, was a taker. Evan was a giver. That was the only way William saw fit to define it. And though his temperament and love for Carson would never match that which he felt for Evan, nevertheless he believed that Evan had rehabilitated something he had lost. Evan showed his father what there was to love about his eldest son, for within those first few weeks of life, the newborn expressed an affection and affinity for his sibling that prompted comment from both parents.

Grace could not have been happier, for she recognized in her husband the man she had married, not the man she feared he had become.

William and Grace Riggs attended the small church in Calvary; she made preserves and cookies for the school bake sale; William brewed a potent fortified wine from blueberries and the like, and once a month he and a half dozen local farmers gathered for cards and cigars and ribald anecdotes. The Riggs were a well-liked and much-respected family, and within that environ the boys grew side by side, the slower Carson ever vigilant for the swifter-witted Evan, their similarities few, their mutual affection unquestioned.

And so it seemed that life would progress ever forward from good days to better days, and in the handful of years before the Great Depression, there was little for which William or Grace could have asked.

But then it seemed the devil came to Calvary. Wearing a hat and a coat and a crooked smile, blown in by some ill wind from beyond the Stockton Plateau and the Pecos River, a dark kind of trouble walked its way into the lives of William and Grace Riggs.

For so many inexplicable reasons, life would never be the same again, and it all began on Evan’s fifth birthday in March of 1929.