She was thinking about one day a long time ago. Bob had sent her away, over her protests. “Six months, girl, and if you don’t like it, come back,” he had said.
“He made me go away once,” Leo had said.
She had signed a six month contract with an agent, and she had returned. It was like walking out one door, turning around and reentering through another one.
“I’m back,” she said that day, walking in on Bob and Leo working on a new arrangement.
Leo had burst into song, “Hello, baby, it’s so good to see you back where you belong.”
“Leo, hush up. That voice is enough to make frogs take to drink,” Bob said in his growly way. “Welcome home, honey. Come sit by me. There’s something I been waiting to try out with you.”
The music was already in place. She sat by him and looked it over, and they began, “I really must go.”
“But, baby, it’s cold outside.”
Now, in the kitchen in the Memphis house, she heard the music in her head, her own clear young voice, his gravelly voice as they sang through the musical dialog the first time, and then again and yet again with variations. When they finally stopped, laughing, they were all dripping with sweat. Leo’s face looked like melting tar, Bob wiped sweat dripping off his nose with the back of his hand, and her hair was plastered to her head. It was one of the happiest days of her life.
Leo got in the last word that day. “And baby ain’t never goin’ away again.”
“Damn right,” Luellen said. She decided to make up some mint juleps. She had a feeling that the young man out there talking to Beth was here for a reason and it wasn’t to write a nonsense piece of fluff about Bob.
Beth had been aware when Cindy began to practice her recital piece, and when she began jazzing it up. She stood, shaking her head. “Chopin must be spinning in his grave, and her teacher will have a heart attack on the spot if she does that at the recital.”
Jake was grinning. “Chopin never sounded so good.”
She frowned at him and started back to the house. Jake looked at his watch for the first time since--he couldn’t remember since when, but he felt a mild shock. Six o’clock, and he had a plane to catch at eight-thirty. He hurried after Beth.
Luellen met them in the kitchen and handed him a frosty glass of mint julep, and another one to Beth. “Can you stay for dinner?” she asked him.
“Thanks, but I can’t. I have to leave soon. Luellen, when you guys played, you said people came to listen. Did you charge them?”
“No. Sometimes a few of them played along. Some brought their own brown bags. Some of them left donations, but we never asked for anything. Why?”
“You could have a restaurant down there, play some of the old music, maybe draw in some live music.”
Beth shook her head. “Neither of us knows a thing about running a restaurant. Luellen’s a wonderful cook, but she isn’t going to start cooking for a restaurant crowd. And good cooks cost money.”
“Not a full scale restaurant. A cabaret or bistro, a limited menu of just a few New Orleans specialties. Not even full time. Enough to have a business that pays for itself and maybe makes a few dollars more. What you need is enough to keep up the house, take care of taxes, things like that. You could do it. I know you could.”
“Thanks for the suggestion,” Beth said in a way that meant it was dead on arrival.
“Honey, you give me a week in New Orleans and I’ll have us a cook,” Luellen said. She looked at Jake. “We’ll talk about it. Folks are having a wake for Bob in two weeks. They’ve been getting in touch from New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Detroit, even New York, and they intend to do it up right. Come back, you hear?”
He couldn’t stop thinking about Beth on the flight back to New York. The way she ducked her head, the quick glances she cast his way now and then, her soft Virginia-accented voice. The way she twisted her wedding ring when she spoke about her dead husband. “Forget it,” he told himself, knowing that he could not do that. Another thought came to mind. Roberto Gomez. The only good thing about his job was that through it he had met some good people, interesting people, and Roberto Gomez was one of them. He ran a small recording studio that specialized in new groups cutting demos. And he had a room full of recording equipment.
The next day he called Roberto and invited him out for a beer. Two weeks later he and Roberto drove to Memphis in a rental car that Jake had paid for. All expenses, he had promised, suppressing a groan at the thought maxing out his credit card.
They arrived at eleven in the morning, thinking they would be the first, only to find the house already starting to look crowded. He motioned for Roberto to come with him, walked past the strangers, and on to the kitchen. Luellen spotted him and said they had a permit, they had invited all the neighbors, and they had to stop at two in the morning, and for them to make themselves at home. She and several others were preparing a huge kettle of red beans and another of rice. For later, she said and shooed him and Roberto away.
The music started at two in the afternoon and didn’t stop again, although now and then it paused, especially when the tape started Luellen’s song, “My Mama done told me.” There was what Jake thought of as a reverent hush until it ended, and then wild applause. Beth was at his side with tears in her eyes.
Roberto had become manic, Jake thought once that night. Roberto had been reluctant to come, dismissive of the idea of a New Orleans wake as something out of the dinosaur age, or staged for a tourist crowd. In his forties, he had seen musicians come and go, and he had heard it all, but that night he was everywhere with his recorder, getting autographs, and even dancing with two other guys.
Jake met a lot of people whose names he couldn’t keep straight, people with trumpets, with saxophones, guitars, clarinets. Most of the time he stayed close to Beth, until he would become aware of what he was doing and go somewhere else, only to gravitate back near her. Late, almost midnight, he went out under the oak tree where a group was playing “Old Man River,” and a singer who could not have been Paul Robeson but sounded like him was singing. When he finished, the group played “Summertime,” and Luellen sang. She still had the voice, Jake thought in wonder and awe. She still had the voice.
Now and then he caught a glimpse of Cindy, and she even played the piano a time or two. When she played a jazzy Chopin there was explosive applause. Beth ordered her to bed at midnight. She vanished for a short time, but she didn’t stay away.
At one-thirty a trumpet started to play “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Luellen’s voice rose and all other music stopped as she sang. When she finished, others took up the melody, then others, and soon more than two hundred musicians were all playing or singing together.
At two in the morning, it was over.
Jake went out to the oak tree where he found Beth and a few others. Roberto was there, drenched with sweat, a great big smile on his face. “Man, I owe you,” he said as Jake drew near. “I owe you big.”
“When you’re ready,” Jake said, “we should start hunting for a motel that’s still open for business.”
“You boys don’t need a motel,” Luellen said. “Folks are going to be crashing all over the house, but I kept a room up on the third floor for you two.”
“Good and better,” Roberto said. “I’m wiped out. Totally wiped out.”
When Jake woke up late the next morning, Roberto had already left the room they had shared. He found him in the breakfast room having coffee and a beignet. Thinking Roberto would be more than ready to head back home, he was surprised when Roberto said, “Let’s hang out awhile. Something I want to talk over with Luellen.”
“Stan Marconi brought a bushel basket of beignets from New Orleans,” Beth said. “A crew started cleaning up a few hours ago. They’ve all been so terrific!” She looked exhausted, but happy. “The poor meadow took a hit, but it’s tough. It will recover. I planned a low maintenance meadow back there from the start. You can’t kill it with music.”
A large brown man looked into the room, searching, spotted Roberto and asked, “You got any more of them releases? I didn’t sign one yet.”
“Sure do,” Roberto said. “Guido, isn’t it?”
“You got it, man.”
Roberto pulled a paper from a bag by his chair and passed it to Guido, who had come into the room. “On the dotted line, pal. Terms and signature.”
Without more than a glance at the printed paper, Guido scrawled his name, and added something Jake couldn’t see. He waved generally at them all and left. Roberto put the paper in the bag without a word.
It was late in the afternoon before everyone was gone except Roberto and Jake. Luellen joined them in the breakfast room. She sank into a chair and said, “Whew!” Then she turned to Roberto. “You said you wanted to talk to me. I may not be very coherent, but what’s on your mind?”
He was all business after that. He wanted to produce an album, a New Orleans Wake. “I’ll filter out the noise, make some selections, and go on from there,” he said. “When you open your cabaret, you can play it nights you don’t have live music.”
She shook her head. “We can’t do that, pay all those folks for releases.”
Roberto pulled out some of the papers he had been collecting, glanced at a few of them, and passed them to her. “I told them all what was happening here, what you wanted to do to keep the place, to keep Bob and Leo safe without a big box store sitting on them, or cars dripping oil on them.”
Luellen looked at the papers he had given her and caught in her breath. “Releases? You were getting releases all night? Guido, Pete, Sully, others, all they want is a free meal after we’re open?”
“Some of them wanted real money, but they won’t be included in the album,” Roberto said smugly. “They cut themselves right out by wanting cold cash. God knows there’s enough others to make up an album, to make two, three albums.”
“But why ask me about it?” she said. “You can produce an album and you have the releases to do it.”
“You didn’t read the top part,” Roberto said. “It will be your album. I’m just the producer.”
“How can that work?”
“I want the lead song to be yours, the one you played last night. ‘Blues In the Night.’”
Beth stood then and said, “I’ll leave you two to discuss business.”
Jake got up too and walked out with her. They went to sit under the oak tree. “You’re really going to do it? Open a cabaret?”
“We crunched numbers and came up with one we think we can work with,” she said. “It really was a great idea, Jake. I never would have thought of it, but we think we can make it work. And with music from last night, I’m positive we can. Eventually we’ll bring in live music, but this will be a start.”
Jake visited many times after that, with or without an excuse. He was there for the opening of the cabaret. On Cindy’s tenth birthday, Beth was no longer wearing a wedding ring.
Now they often sit under the oak tree in the long warm summer evenings. The cabaret is open three nights a week, and they talk sometimes about making it four nights, but there’s no rush. Reservations are lined up for months to come. Weekends that Cindy and the Krewe play, the place is jammed, with reservations required a year in advance. Cindy never leaves for long. She seldom goes on tour, but sometimes her group goes to New York to produce a CD in Roberto’s snazzy studio. His first album was a hit. As Luellen’s heir, Beth receives the continuing royalties and license fees, not big money, but sufficient.
Often out here, under the tree, Beth tries to think through a conversation she had with Luellen when she asked if there had ever been a lover in her life.
“Honey, love’s a funny word. Means so many different things, now doesn’t it? Family love, love of country, of flag, mother for child, religious love, love of a friend, love for your mate. All different. There were a few men along the way, love along the way, but it never was the right sort of love. None of them really did fit in, belong somehow or other. I reckon there’s something even stronger than the love we talk about, more than friendship, more than sexual love, more like a finishing of something not really whole. I think I learned that when you find where you belong, it’s foolishness to keep moving on.”
Beth suspects that she hasn’t yet thought through to the bottom of that, but meanwhile she’s where she wants to be, and doing what she wants to do. And she has Jake. It’s enough.
Sometimes they talk about opening a real restaurant up in the salon, which no one ever uses. “Maybe some day,” they agree. Jake writes a column for the
River News
, and he is writing his book about Uncle Bob. It’s going slowly, but over the years Luellen told him so many stories, so much magic, it can’t be hurried.
They hold hands and talk, and sometimes, especially when Cindy is away and the basement is still and dark, they listen to the other music. The songs vary, but what he likes best is when Uncle Bob is at the piano, Leo with the clarinet, and Luellen is singing, “‘My mama done told me . . . .’”
Shadows on the Wall of the Cave
ASHLEY WAS DREAMING WHEN HER PHONE RANG. In the dream she was in absolute dark, running wildly, crying out soundlessly, screaming, hearing nothing. A pin point of light, a single star in a void, blinked out when she ran toward it, only to appear somewhere else, again and again.
She came awake, wet with sweat, shivering, and groped for the phone. It was her father.
“Your grandmother died during the night,” he said. “I’ll catch an eight o’clock flight. Do you want to fly down with me?”
She shook her head. “I’ll drive.” Her voice sounded hollow, strange. She cleared her throat. “I’ll get there tonight.”
“Give us a call when you get in,” he said. “Drive carefully.”
After hanging up, Ashley pulled the thin summer blanket over her, then pulled the bedspread up also, cold, shivering. She seldom knew what brought on that nightmare, but three times this week she had known. Before her mother had flown to Frankfort to be with Gramma, she had said they would go to the farm after the funeral, and she wanted Ashley to go with them. “There are things she would have wanted you to have,” she had said.
Ashley had refused. The last time she had been to the farm, seventeen years ago, she had promised herself that she would never go back.
Huddled in bed, covered, even her head covered, in spite of herself that day surged into memory again.
For years every summer, Ashley’s mother Maribeth packed up Ashley and suitcases into the car and drove from Pittsburg to her parents’ farm in Kentucky. Ashley’s Aunt Ella left Atlanta at the same time with her two sons to spend the same weeks on the farm where the sisters had grown up, where Grampa had grown up as well.
It was a time of joyous freedom for the children when they could run in and out at will and play without the restrictions of a big city. Their companion in play was Grampa’s dog Skipper, a short-haired brown and white mutt, who, Grampa said, would kill any snake he came across and wouldn’t let a stranger on the farm without setting up a ruckus.
Below the house, past the kitchen garden, through a small area of woods, was Rabbit Creek, no more than ten inches deep, where they could splash and play, hunt for crawdads, find miniature monsters lurking under rocks. Sometimes they populated the creek with crocodiles, or piranha, watched lions and tigers come to drink, or they spied submarines on secret missions. The woods on one side after a few hundred yards gave way to corn fields, and on the other the land rose in a low rocky hill, their Mt. Everest, or the magic mountain. Big Foot lived high on the mountain, or a dragon guarded its treasure, or bears prowled.
But best of all was the cave. The entrance was narrow, one-person wide, with a massive boulder on one side, and a limestone outcropping on the other. The passage curved around the boulder, widened and descended in a shallow slope to a small chamber where the cave ended. No more than twenty feet in all, dry, dimly lighted from the outside, it was a hideout, a castle dungeon, a spaceship, submarine, whatever Nathan declared it to be.
Nathan was eleven, their leader in all games, Ashley was nine that summer, both with hair turning darker, mud-colored, Ashley said. Joey was seven, still a towhead, a daredevil who was determined to do whatever his big brother did. Neither Ashley nor Joey disputed Nathan’s leadership.
That day they were explorers in the dark African jungle, alert for headhunters who were roaming the area. “There’s a gold mine somewhere out here,” Nathan said. “We’ll find it. I’ll buy an airplane with my share.”
Joey nodded. “Me, too. A jet fighter.”
“I’ll buy a castle,” Ashley said. “With a moat.”
Nathan consulted a scrap of paper. “Ten paces from the river, turn right, and find the big boulder. This way.” He led them to the boulder and cried out in astonishment, “Look! A mine entrance!”
“The headhunters!” Joey yelled. “I saw one over there!”
He pushed past Nathan and fled into the cave, with Ashley and Nathan close behind.
“Skipper, stay. Guard,” Nathan ordered.
There was no point in trying to get the dog to go inside. No amount of coaxing or cajoling, or bribery with a bone or dog biscuits had ever enticed him inside. He flopped down at the entrance, tongue lolling, and became a guard dog.
The chamber was a foot or so higher than Nathan’s head, irregular in shape, and big enough for three to be comfortable without touching one another or the walls, although a step or two in any direction would put a wall within reach. Joey sat down cross-legged as Nathan unslung a small day pack, prepared to hand out provisions, cookies and a thermos of Kool Aid.
“We’ll wait them--” Nathan started, and the light went out.
Ashley reached for Nathan, but her hand felt nothing. “What happened?” she said. “What’s the matter?” Her voice rose as she called, “Nathan, where are you? What happened to the light? Nathan?” The black was intense, without a glimmer of light, and there was no sound except for her own voice, and then a strangled sound of her whisper. “Nathan! Answer me! Joey!”
The silence was as intense as the darkness. Ashley took a step, another, to where Nathan had been. She was sweeping her hands before her, trying to find one or the other of them, crying now, pleading, calling Nathan, then Joey. Panicked, crying, yelling, she ran with her hands outstretched to reach the wall, to reach anything. Running this way, that, screaming, encountering nothing, hearing nothing. No walls, no cousins, no light from outside. She began screaming, “Mommy! Daddy! Mommy!” There wasn’t even an echo, as if the darkness swallowed her cries.
She ran and cried and her screams had become whimpers only when she saw a tracery of light and ran toward it. As she ran, the light increased until it defined the narrow cave entrance. Stumbling, she ran to it, scraped her arm on the wall in her dash to get outside, to safety.
Skipper rose to greet her with a wagging tail, and she tripped over him, fell, then pulled herself up and ran as fast as she could to the path that led to the house.
“Mommy!” she screamed when she ran into the kitchen. Her mother was at the sink. She dropped a pan and caught Ashley, who flung her arms around her and pressed her head hard against her, wracked with great heaving sobs that left her unable to scream or speak.
“What happened? Did you fall down? Honey, it’s all right now. Calm down. Tell me what happened?”
When her mother tried to push her away a little, Ashley clung ever harder.
She heard Nathan’s voice and lifted her head enough to see him stagger into the kitchen. “Jesus! Oh, Jesus!” He said again and again, his face the color of dry putty.
“Nathan! What’s wrong?” Aunt Ella cried. “Where’s Joey?”
With the question the nightmare became family business.
Years passed before Ashley could sort the snapshot memories of that day, late into the evening, and the chaotic days that followed. Relatives came, her father and Nathan’s father were there. Strangers, some with dogs, were everywhere, policemen, reporters and television people. Skipper was tied to the porch rail and he lay groaning, moaning, growling. Different people asked Ashley a lot of questions. A woman doctor asked her if Nathan had done something to her. Others asked if he had done something to Joey and scared her so much she promised not to tell. Did Joey have an accident and she and Nathan had become afraid and hid him?
That first day and night Ashley had clung to her mother as a baby might and her mother had to stay with her until she fell asleep. When she woke up during the night, alone in the dark, she began to scream and couldn’t stop. After that, she kept a light on in her room day and night for fear of the return of the blackness.
One of the most vivid snapshot memories was when Grampa grabbed Nathan by the shoulders and shook him. “Tell me the truth, boy! What happened to Joey? What did you do to Joey?”
Joey was Grampa’s favorite. They all knew that. Grampa said Joey was Bill made over. Ashley’s Uncle Bill had died in Vietnam when he was nineteen. He was just a name to her, as unreal as any other historical figure.
There were theories: a pool of gas had formed in the cave, sickened and disoriented the children and Joey had run out first, had hidden somewhere, maybe in a smaller cave. He had found a second passage, wandered into it and had become lost. A kidnapper had grabbed him. The tabloids suggested flying saucers, alien abduction. Grampa rejected all of them. He had played in that cave, his kids had played there. Experts had gone over it inch by inch. There was no other passage, and no gas. And Skipper had not barked at a stranger, a kidnapper. The heavy question remained in the air: had Nathan killed his little brother, buried him somewhere?
When Christmas grew near that winter, her mother said maybe they should go just for a day or two. They had always spent Christmas at the farm along with Ella and her family. Ashley became ill and vomited repeatedly for the next two days. No more mention was made of going to the farm for Christmas. It wasn’t even brought up as a possibility for the regular summer visit. Ella had collapsed that spring in a nervous breakdown.
Ashley finally forced herself out of bed, into the shower, to get dressed, pack some things for her trip. Her grandmother’s death had been expected for months. Grief had long ago morphed to a dull acceptance, possibly even relief. It had not been a kind death. She had become ill with cancer, had surgery, and spent her last two years in a nursing home in Frankfort. Grampa had stayed with her, leaving the house empty, and a tenant farmer managing the farm.
During a visit to the nursing home, Ashley had seen Nathan again, the first time since that summer. They had kept in touch since then. He would go to the funeral, he had told her, and they planned to attend the church service and the funeral itself, and then duck out of the family gathering afterward. Gramma and Grampa had many living relatives in the Frankfort area, nephews, nieces, their offspring, cousins. Ashley knew very few of them.
The problem was what to do about Grampa. Decisions had to be made. He wanted to go back to his own house, his farm, back to the daily chores he had done all his life, but he was also developing dementia. An indelible image in Ashley’s head was of Grampa shaking Nathan, demanding to know what he had done to Joey.
When Ashley thought of Joey, he was always running, screaming in the black void until he went mad and died.
It was a long drive, but done in one day, and she had a motel reservation for when she arrived. She had left her departure date open. There was little need for her to return home at any given time, working as she did for a Web design company whose employees worked at home for the most part.
The service was as awful as she had feared, and her mother insisted that she ride in the limousine with the family to the cemetery. That part, at least, would be brief, Ashley thought, and went with them. At the graveside the preacher had just begun a prayer when suddenly Grampa jerked away from Uncle Walt and pointed at Nathan, who had been standing as far from him as space permitted.
“He’s the one!” Grampa yelled. “He’s the one who killed my Billy! He’s the one!” He began to cry.
Everyone turned to stare as Nathan walked away swiftly. Ashley jerked loose from her mother’s grasp of her arm and hurried after him.
She caught up at the parking lot and fell into step at his side, nearly running to keep up. “He’s demented, Nathan. Really demented.”
“Yeah, I know. Did you come in a limo?”
“Yes.”
“I drove myself. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They were both silent as he drove aimlessly, out into the countryside, back to the city, out again. Finally he pulled up at a tavern. “Let’s get a beer,” he said.
In a corner booth in the nearly empty tavern with steins of beer before them, he said, “It’s been hell, hasn’t it?”
She nodded. “More for you than for me. I just had counseling and shrinks for a couple of years.” She took a long drink of beer. “They tried hypnosis to make me remember what really happened.”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? What happened? After Mother’s breakdown, as soon as I turned twelve, it was off to a boarding school for me. I never really lived at home again. Boarding schools, summer camps, prep school.”
She hadn’t known that. “You said you were studying physics. In college, I mean.”
“And philosophy, and psychology. A lifetime studying, and the question still is what happened? I’m something of an expert on disappearances, and even alien abductions. Ask me anything.” His smile was without mirth. He drained his stein and held it aloft to signal for another one. “You know Gramma left us some money?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t even know she had money of her own.”
“Dad told me. A hundred thousand for each of us. Maybe more than that. Apparently she stashed something away for each grandchild when we were born, and it’s grown and grown. Like Topsy, I guess. Anyway, it’s there.”
She almost laughed at the thought of money of her own. Her father had become a rather famous economist, had written books that were considered important to other economists, and he would be more than ready to advise her about wise investments of a new-found fortune.
“All those years going to school, didn’t you come up with anything?” she asked after a moment.
“A physics instructor, a pal, said Joey fell through a hole in the universe, into a parallel universe maybe. Of course, the family still thinks I conked him and buried him somewhere.”
“They used search dogs. They’re trained to find bodies. The family knows that.”
Others were beginning to come into the tavern, the noise level rose as someone put on twangy country music.
“It’s a question of what to believe,” Nathan said. “The impossible, or the unthinkable. They prefer the unthinkable. Facing an impossibility is more than they can deal with. Would you believe if you hadn’t been there?”
“I’m not even sure I believe in spite of being there,” she said, but the words did not carry the light tone she had intended. “It
was
impossible. And I have trouble with holes in universes. But people see and accept the impossible a lot. A weeping Virgin Mary, or a Christ figure oozing blood. Others. Reports from around the world say the same kinds of things.”