THE INSTANT Sugar Mecklin opened his eyes on that Sunday morning, he believed that this was a special day and that something new and completely different from anything he had ever known before was about to jump out at him from somewhere unexpected, a willow shade, a beehive, a bird’s nest, the bream beds in Roebuck Lake, a watermelon patch, the bray of the iceman’s mule, the cry of herons in the swamp, he did not know from where, but wherever it came from he believed it would be transforming, it would open up worlds to him that before today had been closed. In fact, worlds seemed already to be opening to him.
When he later came into the kitchen and sat down to his Sunday breakfast of chocolate milk and homemade bread, toasted and smeared with sweet butter and fresh cinnamon, his mother noticed a difference in Sugar and placed her hand against his forehead and said, “Are you running a fever?”
And then when Sugar’s father came into the room, Sugar leaped up out of his chair and did what he had never done before, he grabbed his father suddenly around the neck and hugged him and said, “I love you, Daddy.”
This is the kind of day it was. This is the way Sugar Mecklin’s summer morning started out.
First there were the mice. Sugar was still asleep when he heard them singing. Sugar was dreaming that he was standing alone in the shade of tupelo gums and cypress and chinaberry and weeping willow and mimosa and that the water of Roebuck Lake was exactly as it was in real life, slick and opaque as a black mirror, with the trees and high clouds reflected perfectly in the surface. He dreamed that he walked out to the end of a short pier, the one that in real life he had built, and saw a beautiful creature of some kind, a mermaid maybe, rise up from the water. Her breasts were bare, and she was singing directly to him as she combed her long hair with a comb the color of bone, and in the other hand held a mirror as dark and fathomless as the mirror-surface of Roebuck Lake.
He believed that this creature could foretell his future, or endow him with power and knowledge. There seemed little wonder to Sugar Mecklin, waking up to such thoughts, that this day should turn out to be special.
And then once he was awake, there was Elvis. Until this very morning Sugar Mecklin had never before heard the name of Elvis Presley. And now here he was, this Elvis person, in full uh-huh complaint on Sugar’s Philco radio, and he seemed truly to be singing about the dream that Sugar Mecklin had just dreamed. Elvis told Sugar you’ll be so lonely you could die.
It was as if the mermaid’s song had come to him first through the sweet voices of the mice in his mattress and then from WMC in Memphis.
These were the reasons Sugar Mecklin astonished his father at the breakfast table by grabbing him suddenly and holding onto him for all he was worth and almost actually saying, pleading, Don’t ever leave me, Daddy, I’ll be so lonely I will die.
He did not actually say these words, he said only, “I love you, Daddy!” in a bright voice, and his father struggled and finally muttered, “Good luck on your travels through life,” and then went out to the garage to get paint buckets and brushes and dropcloths and a stepladder to paint the bathroom, which had needed painting for a long time, probably.
And then after breakfast, while Sugar Mecklin’s father spread paint and Sugar Mecklin’s mother ran cold water through a colander full of figs to be put up in paraffin-sealed Mason jars as purpley preserves, Sugar Mecklin thought it might not be a bad idea at all to comb his hair with Wildroot Cream Oil and put on his hightop tennies and take a walk right down the middle of Lonely Street and stand along the shore of dark, wooded Roebuck Lake and look across its waters in search of barebreasted women. It was a day in which such a thing might happen, he believed.
His mother said, “Are you going to Sunday school this morning, Sugar?”
Sugar Mecklin said, “Haven’t decided.”
His mother said, “I wish you would put on a clean shirt and go to Sunday school once in a while.”
Not today. Today was a Sunday, this was a whole summer, in fact, in which magic might prove once and for all to be true. It was a summer in which Sugar Mecklin noticed many things, as if they had not been there before, like the mice in his mattress, like Elvis Presley on the Philco. This summer Sugar Mecklin heard the high soothing music of the swamp, the irrigation pumps in the rice paddies, the long whine and complaint, he heard the wheezy, breathy asthma of the compress, the suck and bump and clatter like great lungs as the air was squashed out and the cotton was wrapped in burlap and bound with steel bands into six-hundred-pound bales, he heard the operatic voice of the cotton gin separating fibers from seeds, he heard a rat bark, he heard a child singing arias in a cabbage patch, he heard a parrot make a sound like a cash register, he heard the jungle rains fill up the Delta outside his window, he heard the wump-wump-wump-wump-wump of biplanes strafing the fields with poison and defoliants, he read a road sign that said WALNUT GROVE IS RADAR PATROLLED and heard poetry in the language, he heard mourning doves in the walnut trees.
And for a moment, when he arrived at the edge of the water, Sugar Mecklin almost believed that he had found whatever magical thing he had come looking for.
When he looked across the water to the spot where in his dream he had seen the woman admiring her own reflection in a black mirror, he heard clear sweet tuneful voices raised in plaintive anthems to God in heaven.
There was a cow, a brown-and-white heifer with horns, standing chest-deep in the water directly across the lake. The cow was not supposed to be there, it had only wandered there and could not be coaxed out of the water in time, and so it only stood and once or twice flicked its tail against invisible insects that may have been flying in the morning air.
All about the cow were men and women in white robes—black persons, colored people, Negroes, whatever they were called—and they too, like the cow, were standing chest-deep in the water, and it was their voices that Sugar Mecklin heard in song.
It was a baptizing. I come to the garden alone the voices said, in complaint as profound as Elvis Presley’s uh-huh and the voice I hear falling on my ear the singers sang, speaking of Jesus, who would take away loneliness.
The song went on, and then when it finished there were other songs, questions—shall we gather at the river, the singers wanted to know the beautiful, the beautiful river—and in a way all of the songs were about loneliness, and the defeat of loneliness, and the heartbreak if it could not be defeated, as probably it never could you’ll be so lonely you could die
And so this was the happiest moment Sugar Mecklin had ever felt in his life. He was almost delirious with strong feeling. His face was flushed and even in the Mississippi heat he was almost cold, almost shivering with emotion. The sweat beads on his arms were like a thin film of ice.
And then another child showed up.
Sugar Mecklin was startled. It was Sweet Austin. Where had Sweet Austin come from, so unexpectedly? Sugar Mecklin thought Sweet Austin looked a little like he had seen a ghost.
Sweet said, “Hey, Sugar Mecklin.”
Sugar said, “Hey, Sweet Austin.”
Sweet Austin walked out onto the narrow pier and stood behind Sugar, and for a minute or two neither of them said anything. Sugar and Sweet were the only two completely white-haired, blue-eyed, freckle-faced, skinny-assed boys in their whole class. People thought it was funny that they looked so much alike and their names were almost the same, Sugar and Sweet.
They only stood and watched the baptizing, oh what needless pain we bear sang the choir on the other side of the lake.
Sugar Mecklin said, “You know about a singer name of Elvis Presley?”
Sweet Austin said, “Hey, Sugar . . .”
Sugar Mecklin said, “He sings this song about Heartbreak Hotel.”
Sweet Austin said, “Hey, Sugar, listen . . .”
Sugar Mecklin said, “His voice, this guy Elvis Presley’s voice . . .” Sugar didn’t know exactly what he was going to say about Elvis Presley’s voice. That it made you visible to yourself and invisible to others.
Sweet Austin said, “I’ve got to show you something. Something bad.”
Something was definitely wrong with Sweet Austin. Sweet Austin had definitely seen a ghost.
Across the lake the choir had a friend in Jesus. God’s grace was amazing, they said, and sweet. There was a church in the wildwood, they said, and their voices floated across the lake to the pier where Sugar and Sweet were standing and the voices reached them like angels’ voices and invited them to come to the church in the wildwood, come to the church in the dell, whatever a dell was, it might be like a swamp, mightn’t it, or a bog, or a quicksand pit, what the hell was a dell, anyway?
Just then the brown-and-white cow decided it was time to leave the water and, as the choir sang a final song—oh I’m tired and so weary but I must travel on—the cow, as if it had been waiting for just this moment in the music, opened its amazing and sweet old cow-mouth and hollered one long heartbreaking bellow and moan, one incredible tenor note in perfect tune and time with the rest of the choir, as if to impart some message about hope, or maybe hopelessness and loneliness, who could tell the difference, or maybe just to say goodbye I’ve had enough of this, these horseflies and this sentimental music are driving me crazy, and then turned and slogged its way past the robed communicants and out of the water and up the muddy bank and into the pasture towards a barn.
there’ll be no sadness, the choir sang, no sorrow, no trouble . . . and Sugar knew that when you say these things what you really mean is that sadness and sorrow are all there is and all there ever will be. And then somebody, a young woman in a white robe, waded forth, chest-deep in the black water, and allowed herself to be dunked backwards, out of sight, by a white-haired Negro woman, who held her hand over the young woman’s face in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost and held that young woman beneath the water for a long time while catfish and cottonmouths and snapping turtles joined with Christ Our Lord to wash away all her sins in the dear sweet magical blood of the Lamb while the choir sang songs.
Sweet Austin said, “I was running trotlines and found it. You’ve got to come with me.”
SWEET AUSTIN had come here in a boat. That was how he had appeared so unexpectedly behind Sugar Mecklin on the pier. When they had walked down the lake bank for a few yards, Sugar saw the boat pulled up in the weeds in a clear spot between the cypress knees. They crawled into the boat, first Sugar Mecklin, up front, and then Sweet Austin in back. Sugar looked out across the lake at the shanties and pulpwood along the ridge on Runnymeade plantation, where the Negroes lived.
Sweet Austin stuck a Feather paddle into the gummy leaf-moldy bottom of the lake and used the paddle like a raft pole to shove the boat away from the bank and to ease them out into the deeper water.
Sweet Austin said to Sugar Mecklin, “I don’t know what to do, tell me what to do, Sugar. If I had a daddy I would know what to do.”
For one second, when Sugar Mecklin spotted the bare feet and legs sticking up out of the water, he managed to believe that Sweet Austin had brought him here to see the mermaid. He knew better, of course. He knew this was a dead person.
They were far down the lake now. White cranes stood in small gossipy groups along the shallow water near the Runnymeade side of the shore. Turkey vultures sailed like hopeful prayers above them in the wide blue sky and then settled into the empty branches of white-trunked leafless trees. Deep in the water there were fish everywhere, invisible to Sugar Mecklin, no one could know how many of them, bream and perch and bass, silver and gold and blue, and for the first time in his life the thought of hidden fish and all their familiar coloration and feathery gills and lidless eyes terrified Sugar, he could not say why.
It was a body, of course, snagged upside down in a drift of brush.
Now here is the oddest thing. When Sugar Mecklin saw the naked legs poking up out of the water, he thought first of his daddy in speckled overalls back at the house, standing on the fourth rung of a stepladder and holding a bucket and brush and smearing paint over the bathroom ceiling.
Sugar Mecklin said, “Turn the boat around, Sweet Austin. We got to tell somebody. We got to call Big Boy Chisholm.”
The body was an old man, it turned out, who may have had a seizure of some kind before he went into the water. Later on, his boat was found with a fishing rod and baited hooks in the floorboards. There were two catfish still alive on a stringer hooked to the side of the boat. The old man had been missing for a couple of days—he lived on Runnymeade with his daughter. The daughter, the Greenwood Commonwealth reported, had told her father not to go out on the lake by himself, because he had “spells.”
Sweet Austin and Sugar Mecklin did not know all this yet. They only knew that there were legs and feet sticking up out of the drift, and so they did the only thing they could do. Sweet Austin dragged the paddle behind the boat in a sculling motion and turned them in the direction of a camp-landing a little farther on, near the town dump where the rats were as big as yellow dogs and howled all night at the moon. Sweet Austin dipped the paddle deep into Roebuck and caused the boat beneath them to move steadily across the lake to Raney’s fish camp, where somebody would let them use the telephone to call Big Boy Chisholm, the lawman.
When they docked at the fish camp, Mr. Raney made the call for them, though it took him a while to find his glasses and even after he did find them he dialed the wrong number four times. Each time he said, “I. Godfrey,” and then dialed again. He said, “Y’all just get yourself a Co-Cola out of the icebox.” He said, “Are y’all boys all right now?”
Sugar Mecklin and Sweet Austin said that they thought so, they thought they were all right. They looked at one another to decide whether this was true.
Mr. Raney said, “Y’all boys look enough alike to be sisters.” This was Mr. Raney’s kind way of making a dead man in the swamp a little less horrible idea than it actually was.
Mr. Raney was the last man in Arrow Catcher, Mississippi, who could spit into a brass spittoon from a long distance. He did this now. Ptooey! Pting! He did this as a way of thinking things out. Or maybe only to make a joke, nobody knew which. Ptooey! Pting!
A young man named Hydro—it was Mr. Raney’s own son, his only child—who had a big head on his shoulders and a peach pie in his lap, sat down in Mr. Raney’s high-backed rocker and rocked so far backwards he turned the pie upside down and nearly turned himself over in the chair, and said, “Shit far and save matches!” Hydro often chased cars and howled when the firetruck turned on the siren and had to be given ice cream so that he would stop.
Then several more times, Mr. Raney spat in rapid succession, ptooey pting! ptooey pting! ptooey pting! while Sugar Mecklin and Sweet Austin shifted from one foot to the other and listened to somebody pull the crank rope on an old Evinrude and start up the rattly little engine down by the dock, where it idled for now, smelling of gasoline and warm oil, and waiting for Big Boy Chisholm to show up so somebody could help steady him while he got into the boat and then lead him down Roebuck Lake to the brush pile where he would collect the corpse.
Mr. Raney said, “Hydro, get your lazy no-count ass out of my rocking chair, or I’ll pistol-whip you within an inch of your worthless life.”
Hydro was eating his mama’s peach pie with a big steel spoon—he had gotten the deep dish turned upright again and had not lost much of the pie—and he did not hear his daddy just then, so Mr. Raney just blew his nose hard into a red bandana and said, “I. Godfrey,” and let the matter drop, what good did it do to argue, what difference did it make anyway.
To Sugar Mecklin and Sweet Austin, Mr. Raney said, “We’re all going to be a little edgy for a while, it don’t mean nothing. It’s normal after you find a floater.”
Sweet Austin did not go to his own home that night. He couldn’t do that. Sweet Austin’s mama would be working late behind the bar at the American Legion Hut. She would turn on the switch that caused the Miller High Life sign to revolve. She would scatter sawdust on the little hardwood dance floor for whoever might want to take a turn to the music. She would reach into the cooler for long-necked beers in dark bottles, maybe Pabst Blue Ribbon, or Falstaff, or Jax, or even Pearl, and crack them open with a church key and say to men wearing bunion pads on their feet and Vitalis in their hair, “You don’t want no glass with that, do you, loverboy?”
She might take a shot of Early Times herself and chase it down with a swig from one of those men’s long-neck bottles, and then peel the label for him. She might belch real loud and make all the men in the Legion Hut laugh and make all the women think she was common. She might sing a song, too, if anybody asked her. She might sing “Honeycomb” if she felt like it, she might sing honeycomb won’t you be my baby oh honeycomb be my own just a hank of hair and a piece of bone my honeycomb Her arms would be tired and cold and maybe numb from the ice chest and from weariness and loneliness because her man was dead, or she hoped he was anyway, and her apron would smell like the stale beer and cigarettes and her fingers would be crinkly from being wet all night, when she got home and finally found the light switch in the hall and scared the cockroaches off the counters and back up into the kitchen cabinets where they belonged, and staggered a little in the hallway, where she finally propped herself up and took off her shoes.
She might go into the room where her son slept on an army cot and wake up Sweet Austin and tell him what a no-count scoundrel his daddy was, and always had been, and she might tell Sweet Austin he was just like his daddy, just ee-zackly like him, and then she might crawl in right alongside Sweet Austin on the army cot and fall asleep and wake up full of regrets and no energy to apologize to her boy or to anybody else.
Or she might not come home at all that night, that was surely a possibility, a distinct possibility she herself might say, not if Al the Boogie Woogie Piano Player, who had two gold teeth in the front of his mouth and silver taps on his shoes, asked her to go somewhere with him after they turned off the lights of the Legion Hut and unplugged the slot machines and washed the last beer glasses and re-bagged the last of the pretzels and beernuts, especially if he asked her to go riding with him in his Oldsmobile, with the rag top down on this warm summer night and maybe kiss a few hard, whiskey-breathed kisses beneath the Confederate memorial.
She might sleep that night in Al the Boogie Woogie Piano Player’s bed where he lived for now in a damp room of the Arrow Hotel, and she might feel just so damn awful after she got there and got her stockings off at long last, that she couldn’t sleep and so she might ask Al to sing her a baby lullaby to help her drift off, she might ask him to sing a song she remembered from her own girlhood, on a record that she sneaked around to play on a wind-up Victrola, a song called “Let These Red Lips Kiss Your Blues Away,” and Al might actually know the song, since he knew every song in this bad world, but he would be too tired to sing it, and so Sweet Austin’s mama might have to go to sleep without it, it didn’t matter, she had gone to sleep sick and lonely plenty of times before, what difference would one more time make, none, it wouldn’t make any difference at all to anybody, why should it.
And so Big Boy Chisholm dropped the two boys off at Sugar Mecklin’s house. Big Boy didn’t turn on the siren today—the whistle, he always called it—or the revolving light on top of the car, though normally he did when he gave a child a ride home. Today he only drove them from the fish camp and stopped the car out by the iron fence in front of Sugar’s house and said, “I’m sorry y’all boys had to bear witness to that floater, I truly am sorry.” He waited until the two boys had left the car and slammed their doors good and were clear of the road and out of harm’s way and up under the catalpa trees, which were covered in locust husks, and past the iron hitching posts in the shape of black horses, and then Big Boy Chisholm drove away in his car, real slow, down Lake Front Road.
It was late in the afternoon now. Bessie Smith was on the phonograph, so that meant that Sugar Mecklin’s daddy was already drunk. Sugar Mecklin’s daddy called his Bessie Smith records his wrist-cutting music. It was Bessie Smith singing a long time ago when Gilbert Mecklin stuck the ice pick in his chest, my mama says I’m reckless Bessie Smith had sung that day, and he knew just what she meant too, he was reckless too. my daddy says I’m wild Bessie Smith sang. Nobody knew better than Gilbert Mecklin what it meant to be reckless and wild. Nobody in this world. I ain’t good looking she sang but I’m somebody’s angel child Bessie Smith had been singing that day before Sugar Mecklin was even born. In a way that was the good old days, Gilbert Mecklin remembered them fondly, that day long time ago when he had let the record play to its end and then jammed an ice pick straight into his breastbone.
Sugar Mecklin had heard all about it, and he couldn’t help wishing that Bessie Smith was not on the phonograph on this particular day. He wished instead that his daddy had waited until after Sugar had had time to come home and say, “Me and Sweet found a dead man. Can Sweet sleep over tonight?” before he started playing wrist-cutting music.
And, if the truth be knew—this was a phrase that Gilbert Mecklin used and drove Sugar’s mama straight out of her last and only mind, “if the truth be knew”—Gilbert Mecklin was just this minute saying to himself, he his ownself would have preferred not to be drunk this afternoon. If the truth be knew, Gilbert Mecklin was sitting there in his chair thinking, Now I wonder how this happened again, just when I didn’t want it to happen, how did it come to pass that I am sitting here unintentionally drunk on my ass with wrist-cutting music playing on the record player when I have great need to comfort two children who have lost so much and seen too much death in their little lives? The alcohol made Gilbert Mecklin groggy. He felt a little like he had been hit over the head and covered with a heavy blanket.
On the phonograph now there was a trombone. It started way down low, and it could have been the voice of a Texas longhorn cow at first, or an alligator in a swamp quartet singing bass, it was so low. Gilbert Mecklin listened to it. He had to. Nobody else knew how to listen to it. His wife sure hell didn’t know how to listen to music. She didn’t appreciate music. The trombone note was rising now, rising up and up. Listen to that clear note rise up from the muddy waters of the Delta!
Sugar Mecklin and Sweet Austin were standing in the doorway of Gilbert’s bedroom, trying to tell him about the body.
Gilbert already knew about the body. Big Boy Chisholm had called him from the fish camp, had told him Sweet Austin was coming to spend the night. He didn’t need to hear about the body.
Sugar said, “Hey, Daddy.”
Well, the thing was, after the trombone note got up in the air high enough, it started to blend in with another horn, a trumpet maybe, that took up the note and brought it up even higher, headed up to the moon, until another note got inside these two, a clarinet, so high it was a squeak, like the sound at the tail end of a long crying spell, and then, well, Gilbert Mecklin couldn’t very well say hey to Sugar right this very minute, because now Bessie Smith was right there in the room with him, talking to him about his whole life.
Dixie moonlight, Shawnee shore Bessie Smith said to Gilbert Mecklin. She seemed to be sitting right there on the bed beside his two boys. She had only one leg, she lost the other leg in Clarksdale, the night she was killed. Oh those sad brass horns, like a crying child. Bessie Smith said she was headed homebound just once more she said she was going to her Missy-Sippy Delta home. The trumpet was still there, but now it had a mute on it, and it was weeping real tears. Oh yes, it was a good thing Sugar Mecklin’s mama had thrown that ice pick up under the house all those years ago, this was a song that took a man back to better days.
Sugar said, “Me and Sweet Austin found a dead man, Daddy.”
Gilbert Mecklin said, “Hush, hush up, Sugar. Listen to this song.”
Gilbert had not meant to say this. The last thing in the world he meant to do was tell his boy to hush up. What he meant to say was that there was just so much death in the Delta, it was everywhere, he didn’t know how a child could stand all of it. He meant to tell Sweet Austin that he had known Sweet’s daddy—if Curtis Austin really was Sweet’s daddy, who knows about this kind of thing, who can ever really know for sure—he had known Curtis well and one time watched him play semi-pro ball for the Greenwood Dodgers, a farm team for Brooklyn, where he played second base and got three hits that night under the lights. He meant to say that Sweet Austin’s daddy was not an evil man, not completely, and was still alive, Gilbert knew this, and believed in his heart that he was doing the right thing by staying out of Sweet and his mama’s life.
Sweet Austin said, “Hey, Mr. Mecklin.”
Gilbert Mecklin said, “Hush up, Sweet Austin. Listen here, listen to this here song.”
The music played, and Bessie Smith sang on, and the Delta was bad, bad, she was saying, and it was magic, it hypnotized you, you couldn’t resist it even if you tried, and now it was calling her back. I hear those breezes a-whispering she complained I hear those breezes a-whispering come on back to me
Gilbert Mecklin wanted to tell these two boys, one of them his own boy, and the other one, well God knows, Sweet Austin, only God knows—so, Lord, anyway, he wanted to tell them that there are worse things in this world than bodies in the swamp, and worse things than having a daddy who died there, or who ran off and left you, or didn’t run off but just left you anyhow, there are worse things than being so lonely you could die. If you were real unlucky you could turn into one of those daddies who left.
Sugar Mecklin said, “Daddy, we saw the feet and legs.” Sugar and Sweet were sitting on the edge of Gilbert Mecklin’s bed, right next to Bessie Smith. Though Bessie Smith was black and a long time dead and had only one leg, the three of them looked enough alike to be wild and frightened sisters.
Sweet Austin said, “Lodged up in a drift. I was running trotlines, I didn’t know what to do.”
In a way it was a good thing that Gilbert Mecklin was so drunk right now, really it was, it wasn’t a completely bad thing to be so drunk if you looked at it in the right light. Drunk like this, he didn’t have to tell these two scared boys what it meant to have chickens in his back yard, Plymouth Rocks and Rhode Island Reds, the layers and bantams and the blue Andalusian rooster. He didn’t have to say that when he walked out there and scattered shelled and fragrant corn from an enameled dishpan, one slow handful at a time, he could forget his own father, who spent all his family’s pennies for shoes made of kangaroo leather and for Havana cigars and then beat him and his brother with fists and sticks and straps and then, worst of all, went blind for spite and had to be waited on hand and foot for the rest of his life.
And so Bessie Smith just kept on singing about the Delta. In fact she was singing about Arrow Catcher, Mississippi. She was singing about Roebuck Lake, right near where she died that rain-swole-up Delta summer in a crash on the highway and lost one of her legs, muddy water ’round my feet Bessie Smith was saying, and right now all of a sudden it wasn’t Gilbert Mecklin she was singing to, it was Sweet Austin, who didn’t know she didn’t have feet, only one foot, there on the edge of the bed, like it was the edge of a cliff and he might fall off.
Bessie Smith was telling him what he already knew. You are trapped here, Sweet Austin, we all are. It don’t help to have a daddy, you’re trapped anyway, daddies will always leave, always die, always be somebody you don’t know. Daddies ain’t your trouble, Sweet Austin. Your trouble is the geography. You better learn to like it. Bessie Smith said there was muddy water ’round my feet muddy water in the street She said just God’s own shelter down on the Delta
Sweet Austin knew about Sugar Mecklin’s daddy and the ice pick. He said, “Mr. Mecklin, how come you want to listen to wrist-cutting music?”
Bessie Smith said muddy water in my shoes
Gilbert Mecklin looked and saw that Bessie Smith was not really sitting on the bed beside the two boys. Well, that was good anyway.
Way back behind Bessie Smith was a slow piano. Just one chord, and then her strong sad voice and then another chord, like punctuation. Sweet Austin thought of Al the Boogie Woogie Piano Player, he thought of the Oldsmobile and his mama’s hair blowing in the Delta breeze. There was a one-note clarinet back there too, as slow as the piano, like an old, old, one-trick pony. Yikes! the clarinet said, like a sad swamp bird, and yes yes yes.
Sugar Mecklin’s mama came into the room now. She said, “Gilbert, don’t fill these boys’ heads with drunk-talk. They’re worth more than that.”
Sugar Mecklin loved his mama’s hairbrushes and bobby pins and facial creams, he loved her clean underwear in a drawer. He was glad she wasn’t a floozie like Sweet Austin’s mama, he was glad he didn’t have to come home at night and wonder if she was sharing a room with Al the Boogie Woogie Piano Player at the Arrow Hotel, he was glad she never slipped into bed beside him and slept drunk all night.
Bessie Smith said muddy water in my shoes, rocking in them lowdown blues The piano, the squeaky old-fashioned one-trick-pony clarinet, and now one low and rising note from the trombone, like a good memory. And just then Sugar Mecklin started to know something that he had not quite known before. He knew that he was not all alone in the world after all, as he had for so long believed.
There was his mama, who always seemed sane in comparison with his daddy who was not sane at all. She was out of her mind with old grief, old loss, her own tyrannical father, her fat brother who could not get out of his bed for fear of lightning. She hated music, she secretly broke and threw away Gilbert’s favorite records, one at a time while he was drunk, especially “Summertime,” which seemed to Mrs. Mecklin an affront to everything decent—those first three high-squealing notes of self-pity and false sentiment—and which Sugar found in a million ragged pieces of plastic out by the chicken-yard fence. She dreamed of trains crossing frozen landscapes, she made up stories of escape, using models in the Sears, Roebuck catalog for characters to represent herself and her fictional friends, she pretended she grew up as a serving girl in Canada and that for spare pennies she made beaded bags, huddled over her georgette-stretched beading frame, her fingers feeding beads and thread to her crochet needle like lightning.
And there beside him was Sweet Austin, who looked enough like himself to be his sister, and who looked enough like Gilbert Mecklin to be his, his, well, God only knows what. The world was not what Sugar Mecklin wanted it to be, but he was not alone, he would never be alone.
Bessie Smith said I don’t care, it’s muddy there, but it’s still my home
Sweet Austin said, “What was so bad, Mr. Mecklin, was, like, I seen them bare legs poking up out of the water and I thought it was my daddy. I knowed it wont, but I thought it was.”
Bessie Smith was wailing now, weeping in song I don’t care, I don’t care, it’s still my home The muted trumpet was back and it was crying like a baby.
Gilbert said, “Naw, Sweetness, it wont your daddy.” The alcohol was beginning to wear off a little. Gilbert Mecklin felt a little less bushwhacked than before. Maybe he better have one more drink, just so he don’t get sick. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn’t.
Mrs. Mecklin sat down on the bed beside Sweet Austin and put her arms around his neck, and Sweet Austin leaned into her shoulder and started to cry. Sweet Austin was a big boy, a little taller than Sugar and maybe a little broader shouldered. When did that happen, Sugar wondered, when did he start to outgrow me? Sugar Mecklin felt funny sitting there and looking at this young man holding his mama and his mama holding him tighter than he himself had ever been held. They rocked back and forth to Sweet Austin’s crying and to the sad old bluesy sentimental music.
Bessie Smith said got my toes turned Dixie way
Mrs. Mecklin said, “You just cry now, Sweetness, you just go right on and cry.”
Bessie Smith said ’round the Delta let me lay
Sweet Austin was really going at it now. He was boo-hooing flat out. Boo hoo, boo hoo, boo-fucking-hoo, man. He was getting snot in Mrs. Mecklin’s hair. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter to anybody, not even Sugar.
Mrs. Mecklin said, “Your mama loves you to death, Sweet Austin. And so does your daddy.”
Gilbert Mecklin was wondering if he might risk getting up just this minute and easing into the kitchen for another nip of that Old Crow, just to settle his stomach.
Sweet Austin and Mrs. Mecklin were rocking and reeling now, slow, slow. Mrs. Mecklin was whispering like a mama. She said, “And me and Gilbert love you too, Sweetness. We love you like you was our own boy.”
Yessir, no doubt about it, Gilbert Mecklin could certainly use another drink.
So that’s what he did. He stood up and steadied himself beside his chair and then eased on out towards the kitchen, just so he didn’t mess around and get sick from having an empty stomach. Maybe a beer would settle him down some. The carbonation, the food value. Maybe a shot of Old Crow would taste good with it.
Sweet Austin cried. Mrs. Mecklin sang him a soft baby lullaby. Sugar Mecklin believed he was a part of a family, and this filled him with love.
The world was not the way Sugar Mecklin wanted it to be, but he had to admit, this particular day had turned out even better than he had expected when he woke up to the sound of mice and Elvis Presley and the voice of a barebreasted woman singing into a black mirror.
Bessie Smith said my heart cries out for muddy water