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THE PSALMIST
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PART ONE
YOUTH
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Blues a healer, all over the world…
--John Lee Hooker
I remember those first recordings I heard of him. What his voice made me feel. The
richness of the patterns—the range of it. Those coincidences that aren’t coincidences when you
reflect on them later—the words of his songs. And I don’t know what else to call it but God.
What the heart hears when it's broken.
And maybe I remember because I made a wrong turn. The first time I heard him sing.
One of his songs came on the radio, KDHX St. Louis community radio (down on the lower end
of the FM dial), and I’m not sure when I stopped paying attention to the road. All I know is I
came to a railroad crossing near the Mississippi River bottom, the American Bottom, a
crossroads, just as the lights started flashing—a train coming. I watched the train as it passed,
but even to its deafening sounds—the screech of the wheels on the rails—the vibrations still
could not persuade his voice to die. I suppose that’s when I became a fan. And why I decided to
write this book about him. A fiction and not a history lesson.
You can go no deeper than your birth. In the questions you ask. No deeper than the first
song you make. But just like that first time I heard his voice sometimes he turned a corner he
made you turn a corner, and you came across yourself again you saw yourself again, but this at a
different time, and in that moment you didn’t recognize yourself the details of what you look like
your greeting to yourself as to a stranger in this world. And if asked you would probably say you
don’t even know where the thoughts came from that make you realize this, this feeling of
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meeting yourself as a stranger, when it happens, when you remember the first song you made,
hearing it again like hearing his voice—the implicit fact that your time is created, your life is
created, by your memories of what just happened. And in these transcripts that follow, the
journals, in the recordings of conversations of people that knew him, in the interviews and stories
I collected about him, I stumbled across this truth. The truth that this book I’m writing about
him, this book about his life, David’s life, had already happened, the fiction of writing of it had
already happened, the questions about his life as a musician already answered. And I guess now
it just reminds me of that train going by. Lost at a crossroads. And this is what I am left to face.
I am faced with what had to happen. I am faced with asking the questions. Turning the same
corner he did and becoming a stranger to this world. The sound of his voice still echoing like a
locomotive in my head.
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I’m a goin’ fishin’, yes I’m goin’ fishin’, and my baby goin’ fishin’ too…
--Taj Mahal
David Threnody was born in an apartment above a pawn shop on 129 N 8th Street in East
St. Louis, Illinois. He was born in winter, the 28th of February 1918. The pawn shop was owned
by his father, and his family lived above it, his father's business a place where you could
exchange gold, even your broken jewelry, for money, among other things. He was the eighth of
seven sons. His mother, Cleota nee Williams, along with one of his older brothers, Dewey, who
is still living (the transcripts of our conversations about David during his childhood and the
journal their mother kept an invaluable resource) recall the time when David was born, what was
happening then, both in East St. Louis and in the Threnody household. They also recount his
father's work at the pawn shop, a business his father owned and ran for over thirty years, through
The Great Depression, before passing it on to his sons, and what he really wanted to do, which
was to cook, Horace Threnody, a man who went by the name of Duke to those that did business
with him.
David's father was the son of a sharecropper, his paternal grandfather an itinerant tenant
farmer in the fields of northern Mississippi, a cotton-picker. The family name came from when
they were slaves, David's paternal great-grandfather given the surname Threnody for his singing,
his songs at slave funerals. After farming black land dirt through most of his youth, Demetrius
Threnody moved his family to East St. Louis in the mid 1870's, just before the railroad strike that
ended peaceably in the summer of 1877, this after profiteering gambles due to railroad and
manufacturing expansion and the optimism of land speculation overextended the credit of many
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businessmen and inflated the income of the railroad companies, bringing a recession, a burden
placed on the workers, the railroad cutting wages and forcing employees to work without pay.
Many black men left their southern rural communities and migrated with their families to the
industrial cities up north after the Civil War, for employment, filling these jobs, and Demetrius
worked in the stockyards for the railroads, processing cattle, in a jurisdiction of East St. Louis
isolated from other areas in the city so neighbors didn't have to know how their meat was
butchered. He wanted his son to be a dentist. But Duke wanted to be a poissonnier, a fish chef.
A fish fry was a common thing in the Threnody household on Fridays, and Duke sometimes
cooked for the local chapters of area organizations, for the union workers, and the summertime
picnics. He liked preparing fish dishes, and even more so—he liked to fish. In the transcripts I
have of Dewey Threnody, in our conversations about David, he tells the story this way:
Yeah, man—all he wanted to do was fish. I remember he had this slop bucket. We kept
it in the kitchen, though our mother hated it there, and we put all our scraps in it—you
know—our food scraps, leftovers. He'd take that slop bucket, when it was full, out to this
hole he had in the garden (Ma had a garden out back, a small one, for her cooking
spices—spices he used when he baked or fried up the fish he caught—mostly river
catfish, or bluegill and bass, that or his favorite, the one he thought was best tastin'—
crappie). And that's where he kept his worms, in the garden, in a hole there—big, fat
ones—because they fed off that slop... In the springtime, after it rained—that was the
best time when we were children. Because we knew what Pa would say and we'd be
waitin' on him. He'd take us out, after dark, with lanterns, and we'd hunt for worms.
He'd come into our room, after we were supposed to be asleep, his head pokin' through
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the door, a shadow across the foot of our bed, and we waited for those words—“Want to
go wormin'?"... I suppose he pretty much fished everywhere, the surrounding lakes and
ponds and streams, sometimes traveling miles, but mostly you'd find him fishin' out of
the river, down on the muddy banks not far from the stockyards where his father worked.
Sometimes we fished with him—I know he took David with him a lot even when he was
barely big enough to walk. But I didn't enjoy the fishing as much, especially when I had
to clean them. I liked finding those worms. Sometimes I even prayed for thunderstorms.
I prayed for rain. To see those worms come up out of the ground...
Duke didn't become a dentist like his father wanted (Demetrius Threnody dying just after
the turn of the century, in a railroad accident, his right hand crushed in a coupling
miscommunication with a yard boss, the wound leading to a blood infection, killing him in a
matter of days) and no money was to be made on fish, no one paid Duke to fish, and though
many people enjoyed his cooking, it wasn't enough to feed a family. So after a few years
working in the stockyards like his father, Duke opened a pawn shop, a second-hand store, more
lucrative than a fish fry, for the black workers at the steel mills and in the stockyards of the
railroad, who never quite made enough to feed their families either, and he married Cleota
Williams, a homely country girl from the rural outskirts of East St. Louis, raised on farm in
Southern Illinois, who was fifteen at the time of their marriage. Together they had eight sons, of
which David was the youngest.
Dewey Threnody lives in a senior care center now on Bond Avenue. He's never left East
St. Louis. Born four years prior to David, he was thought to be the youngest and the last of the
Threnody children born to Duke and Cleota. Duke was already in his mid-thirties when he was
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born, and Cleota, though still in her early twenties, thought Dewey would be her last son.
According to accounts of people that knew her, surviving friends and family members, including
the recorded conversations I have with Dewey, the transcripts I have of those conversations,
Cleota was a quiet woman, soft-spoken, rarely ever raising her voice in the Threnody household,
always agreeing with her husband’s decisions, even when it came to the children, his intolerance
to David’s desire to be a musician, reminiscent of his own father’s intolerance to his desires, how
Duke just wanted to fish.
One of her granddaughters (Duke and Cleota had over twenty grandchildren) remembers
spending a holiday with her, a Mardi Gras celebration, in the late 1970's (this after the massive
urban fire that wiped out entire neighborhoods of East St. Louis, Cleota’s house burned down
and she living with her sister’s kids), the second largest Mardi Gras celebration in America, in
Soulard, a neighborhood of south St. Louis known for its French heritage and kinship to New
Orleans. She recalls that Cleota joined her in the Saturday parade before Fat Tuesday, along
with her family, though already an old woman by then, and widowed (Duke dying of a
pulmonary embolism in the spring of 1955), and how Cleota gave her beads to a young boy,
seemingly fatherless, standing on a ladder on the parade route, which ran down Broadway
Avenue towards the North American headquarters of Anheuser-Busch. Her granddaughter
recalls how she was there with her own children, visiting St. Louis at the time because someone
in her husband's family was having surgery at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, a little boy sick with
leukemia, and how when her children saw what Cleota did, they gave their beads to the boy too.
But the funny thing was when asked later, about why she gave the beads to the boy, and why her
granddaughter remembers it so clearly, was Cleota's apparent aversion to the drunkenness she
saw there that day, her gesture a defiance of it, a rarity in her character because she hardly ever
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passed judgment on anything or anyone, and her granddaughter was surprised with her
knowledge of French (it was unknown to her that Cleota's mother was French, and her father an
alcoholic, Duke also a heavy drinker), because the word soulard itself in French means drunkard,
and apparently the boy's father was ignoring his son and paying more attention to his beer, not
with his son on the ladder, but out on the street, near the young girls trying to attract attention
from the floats with their flesh, something an old woman notices after seeing many parades—
what we do or don’t do because of our parents, the role of our fathers, either absent or present in
our lives. And as you get older you're more careful about missing out on things, maybe giving
beads to that young boy on the ladder reminding her of her baby, her youngest son, a sad but
light gesture of it, Cleota living a long life, one of the only the things she missed seeing David
one last time, seeing David's death (whiskey his poison, the legend of his death alcohol
poisoning, alcohol laced with a cocktail of painkillers, though there are other possibilities), dying
just a year before him, this over forty years since those first recordings we have of him, in the
summer of 1987. She didn't miss David first perform there though, in Soulard, despite Duke’s
disapproval of his career choice—his absence there—one of David’s first performances for
money (he wasn’t paid in beads though it was another Mardi Gras celebration—he and his
partners paid $27 plus tips to play the popular tunes of the day, gospel, and some say even one of
the early versions of a song well-known from when he crooned with Johnny Tribout on his
harmonica—“Fattening Frogs For Snakes”), one of the first demonstrations of his guitar playing,
his voice, for that is another thing Soulard is known for—its live music. Sometimes the habits of
musicians just going along with it.
What we know best about Cleota comes from her journals, and she wrote in them
prolifically, starting soon after her marriage to Duke. They show a side of her unseen by those
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that knew her, shedding some light on her otherwise quiet demeanor. There's an entry just
before David's birth, written when she was still in her twenties, the words somehow coming out
with wisdom beyond those years:
August 6th, 1917—I suppose some consider laughter an insult, but I've never understood
that. I am pregnant again, and my belly is full of laughter, not heavy with the weight of some
serious meaning. Laughter comes as no surprise. It comes after the surprise. After the fear of
the unknown is over. And I suppose when I laugh it's not to make fun of someone else's
seriousness. My laughter is not to point that out, though to someone taking it seriously it may
seem so. No, my laughter is detached from that, detached from whatever truth might not be
funny, like the disappointment of a father with his children, or a child feeling discouraged
because of their father. My laughter comes when you laugh too, sometimes maybe just a wait in
between, when the surprise of your disappointment and discouragement are done with, and all
fears are laid to rest—like the weight of your importance, and your birth into truth.
I am unsure if my husband wants this child, but maybe in being unwanted he will be a
great blessing, for I know it will be another son—I know because I can feel by the way he moves
inside me. And I suppose it reminds me of a story my mother used to tell me as a child, a story
she always started the same way. She always started it with a warning, like it was a warning to
herself, a warning to all storytellers, to all singers of songs (because she also used to like to sing
to us—old French songs), and she said: "Remember, Cleota, whenever you feel that the need is
urgent, whatever it is—something that needs to be said or done—remember that the sense of
urgency will pass, so be careful what you communicate, because people may laugh at your
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urgency and forget the message, whatever it is you're trying to do or say. Because sometimes the
message is in the messenger—what they read off of you more powerful than anything you give
them to read—the message of your face and eyes, your voice, the real sense of what you have to
say, the perceived action. And laughter is what you get to anything you hold important that they
don't... so make them laugh."
She always began the story that way, and by beginning it that way, I guess I heard what
she had to say differently. I suppose because I was listening for something else. I was listening,
closely, for what she thought was important. It was a rather old story, and not one she had
created herself, but I realize now she embellished it in her own way. It was a Greek story,
dealing with one of the Greek gods—Momus. She told it to me as a bedtime story, when I
couldn't sleep, a story about the New Orleans of her childhood, for that was where my mother
was born. Her father, a failed Creole businessman, moved the family to Southern Illinois when
she was a teen, after his book shop on Royal Street went bankrupt. Her father knew more about
books than farming, which is why he failed at that too, but he was good with animals, and by the
time she was ready to wed (she also married young) her father had moved the family to the town
of Chester, along the Mississippi, where he opened a taxidermy, doing some veterinarian work
on the side, something he managed some success at until he retired. But Amelie (that was my
mother's name) remembered what it was to be a child in New Orleans, a Creole, and the story
she told me was a version of a story her mother told her, as a child, about the Krewe of Momus, a
fixture of the New Orleans Mardi Gras parade schedule, founded in 1871 and parading on the
Thursday before Fat Tuesday, a secret society whose members were unknown—all but one
member, that is, a man that went by the name Alias.
Momus is said to have been exiled from Mount Olympus for his criticism. Even
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Aphrodite, the Goddess of Beauty, he found to be too talkative, with noisy shoes. And his
complaint against Mankind the fact that we didn't have doors in our breast, by which our
thoughts could be seen. This idea what my mother found fascinating, which is the key, I guess,
to why Alias said and did what he did, what I was left to tell, and that was the theme to my
mother's story, how she told it the way she did, how she let me tell it, and what I listened for—
because how do you not hurt somebody that wants to be hurt? You see it always started the
same. It always started the same because he was real—he actually existed—at least he did
according to my mother, and so the story always started with the same seed. Alias was a critic, a
satirist, and like Momus and the secret society of which he was a member, he liked lifting the
mask, even if it was the mask he was wearing himself. The tragedy, I suppose, what he wanted,
as is all tragedy when you want what you can't have. And this is what I think my mother thought
was important—the idea of our desires like a window to the heart, making our thoughts seen, and
how it exposes us to the derision of those who don't desire the same thing, maybe because they
already have it, or, as in the case of most laughter—it's something you wanted but don't want
anymore, the laughter your experience of that—wanting what you can't have and then the
acceptance that you can't... What Alias poked fun of was this, in Mardi Gras pamphlets he
distributed on the street corners of New Orleans before the Krewe's annual parade (my mother
liked to elaborate and add that the pamphlets were printed in her father's bookshop). He poked
fun of the idea of freedom, and those who wanted it. The reason being maybe it was the same to
him as love, what we want in love. And as he liked to say, or as my mother would have him say,
these weren't bad things, freedom and love weren't bad things—we just went about wanting them
in the wrong way. And that's how my mother always started the story. About a man named
Alias, who in 1877 was part of the playful rebellion to the Reconstruction government in place
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over New Orleans at the time, a government established after the Civil War, corrupt as all
political remedies are corrupt—open to the satire of what is and what could be—the irreverent
theme of the secret society's parade that year, "Hades, A Dream of Momus".
When you’re pregnant you don’t think about heaven, but maybe in a way you do—you
think about your children. Which is why, I suppose, my mother told me this story, why I’m
reminded of it again. Because she always started the story this way, a story in which a man
openly admitted his mockery, his defiance to what is, not hiding it as a part of a secret society of
which he was a member, using a false name of course, but not wearing a mask, his pamphlets
heralding his open display for the parade, a parade inevitably leading to the governing bodies
seeking retaliation—Alias an easy target, being made fun of, ridiculed, because of making fun—
and this was how my mother always began the story, always the same way, but how it ended was
different each time. It was a different because I was allowed to finish the story—I was allowed
to tell it—what happened during the parade, what happened in the "Dream of Momus" and
after... I suppose most of the time it was a tragedy, just as it started out, but sometimes I had
different endings for Alias, different stories of what happened to him, some of them realistic,
others magical, like a dream, but all of them, all of the stories I had to tell, where happy in their
own way—they were happy because I was the one telling them—with a child's imagination.
This, I think, is why my mother let me tell it. She allowed me to start with something I
was capable of imagining, but where it led and how it ended was up to me. I could choose,
which I think is what my mother wanted to show me, what I'm reminded of again in my own
children, in this child that is being born. And I can still recall that strange feeling I had, in telling
my own story, my own story of a man named Alias, defiant to the established order, how
sometimes I was sympathetic to him—his reasons for why he did what he did—sympathetic yet
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still just, still true to how my story would end, how all stories must end when the hero turns out
to be the villain, if given enough time, at least in a child's mind—and I can still recall the peace I
felt, as a storyteller, the peace I felt to the choices my stories followed—wild and imaginative as
some of those choices were, and when I was done, when I ended my stories at bedtime, my
mother would say: "Remember, Cleota, remember these stories and how you told them.
Remember laughter is a tool like anything else. It's a tool for Hope, an answer for the
possibilities of your stories, the coincidences you find there, even the ones that don't make any
sense (because my stories got better as I got older). Remember, no matter what God is in
control, even over the Devil..."
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Listen to the jingle the rumble and the roar/As she glides along the woodland through the
hills and by the shore/Hear the mighty rush of the engine, hear the lonesome hoboes
call/You're travelin' through the jungle on the Wabash Cannonball…
--Roy Acuff
He was a sickly child. At least at first, as a baby, Cleota breastfeeding him 'til he was
nearly two years old. Colicky, but even with an upset stomach he didn't cry much. In fact when
he was born he hardly made a sound, the mid-wife concerned about the umbilical cord. He was
small, low-weight, and for a long time he only opened one eye.
Many things are misjudged when you are born. In fact you’re not really sure what world
you’re born into, and though you don’t know that, you try to recall it in your memory, in your
imagination, and this is reflected in what you see ahead, later. Because you are given so many
things. Just your responses to it are limited. At least they are at first, until you are able to
question what you’ve been given. And this is when other worlds are born, other possibilities,
and you begin to see the patterns, the different shades to realities, based on the responses you’ve
chose. And when you begin to see this, when you begin to see what’s revealed in what’s hidden,
you have to return to what was first given to you—this truth—for all the other truths that you
discover along the way are only possibilities of what is, but not what is. Because what is never
changes. You change—based on your perceptions of it, your choices. And that is why you are
born without guilt. You are born into a world you will never know, fully. What you don’t know
your forgiveness. Your guilt what you try to take that’s not been given.
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The summer before David was born was a tumultuous time in East St. Louis, a time of
riots. And it was the Relay Depot, the end of August, 1917. Cleota stands by a stack of railroad
ties, pregnant, looking over the converging lines—the tracks that enter. Her children are around
her, Dewey about to turn four—not wanting to be held—the older children chasing each other,
laughing as they're caught, and then running again, splashing in puddles from a misty morning
rain. She is waiting on a dead brother, a younger brother, Theophilus, killed at the Battle of
Passchendaele—his pine box coming in on a westbound train. He had enlisted in Canada,
serving with the British, and was killed in one of the first assaults in an attempt to destroy a
German pillbox, a battle in which later Adoph Hitler was injured during a gas attack. There are
no men at the Relay Depot.
No white men at least. Black volunteers were initially rejected by the Army, the military
still segregated, and while local industry boomed because of the war, social tensions were high
among the white men still stateside, either not of draft age or on strike as companies recruited
workers from the South, black men to work in their place in the factories and mills, resentment
rising over job security. And just a few days before Memorial Day, a mob raged through the
streets, a mob of white men spurred by the suspicion of their women fraternizing with black men.
It began at a white labor meeting. It began with rumors. And this is the origin of chaos. It
comes from that feeling you have when you have a question that can’t be answered.
It is the first question you have, before you even have words for it, and Cleota tries to
find words for it now, as she stands their at the crossroads of the railroad tracks, inspired by her
children, her children’s faces—that look of questioning, un-masked, as they stare at a woman, a
black woman, dressed not like their mother. And it’s that feeling you have, about people—that’s
what Cleota senses. She senses it from her experiences and the perspectives it’s created,
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something her children are still learning about—that memory of something happening to you and
the feelings and judgments it fuels afterwards—the reality you begin to see because of it and
over time accept. Your common reaction to things, to different people. And she feels controlled.
Because she doesn’t want to look at this woman a certain way, but she can’t help it. The sight of
her immediately brings up memories of other women she’s seen dressed that way, and in seeing
her children see her she remembers herself as a child, first seeing a woman like that, and how she
didn’t judge her, how she was taught that, by the other people around her, the people in her life
looking at this woman and responding in a such a way that she felt she should respond that way
too. And it wasn’t even said. Nothing was spoken to her by the adults around her, her parents.
Just their faces said something. Their eyes. Their words around that judgment on other things.
A language that spoke to her of what it is, what it’s like—being scorned. And now as a woman,
as a mother, she sees this woman, waiting on a train like the rest of them, and senses what those
judgments caused, what they caused in her and the women she saw this way. How before
anything really happened a reality was already created, like an inevitable chain of events,
dictating the role she would play, the roles of what she judged, and then it became like a game,
which led to that first question—that first question we all ask but have no answers for.
She was a prostitute. She didn’t need to wear a sign for people to know that. And that’s
why Cleota thought of her children. How they would learn of these signs that exist without
evidence. The only evidence the thoughts of your own mind. And she wondered what roles they
would choose, what roles they would play, what they would become, all of it based on evidence
she would never know. She would never really know what she instilled in them even though she
felt controlled by it.
The train’s whistle blows. Loud and frenetic. Like a knife in the air, cutting Cleota’s
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world into different levels. But at least it’s not hot, for August, the humidity bearable, the air
almost smelling like fall, like that smell of burning leaves, probably just the smell of burning
coal, the plant nearby, the river close by, but still reminiscent of that other smell, the combustion
of something colorless. She is trying to hold Dewey, his eyes not on her, but on the other
woman. He’s looking at her shoes. How this woman stands there, her hand on her hip, not
walking because when she does it looks like her high heels are giving her blisters, and even from
a distance he can see her toenails are painted, red in contrast to the dirt on the cobblestones next
to the tracks. And Dewey’s wearing that look, not in response to the blow of the train whistle,
piercing as it is, but to the woman, her powdered face shadowed by the rim of her flowered hat.
His look has even caught her eye, the prostitute looking up into the sun to look back at him, his
head resting on his mother’s shoulder—their eyes connecting that way—hers illuminated and
squinting, his shaded, but open and wide, empty like they are just a mirror to her. She smiles at
his look, the nakedness of his question, and then looks past him, down the tracks, to the train
approaching.
That’s when Cleota hears the women, between the blows of the train whistle, more than
five but maybe less than ten—white women in heavy long skirts—the noise of their voices,
hands brandishing clubs, turning the corner of the riverfront warehouses and entering the street
that leads to the Relay Depot, their destination the railroad tracks, and the woman in high heels.
It’s just before 5 p.m. and a train is rolling in, the buildings behind from which these woman
emerge destroyed by the riots, the existence of their voices verified as they turn the corner, their
words indistinct, and though Cleota can’t hear what they’re saying, she still gets the message, she
senses the urgency.
“Girl, you better watch out! They’s comin’ for you!”
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Cleota says this loud, but not loud enough, swaying and rocking Dewey next to her
breast, turning her upper body in such way so Dewey can’t see the woman anymore, even though
he tries turning his head, peeking over her shoulder as she sways. And the other children are
screaming. Making a game of the train’s whistle. Still running and catching each other. In a
circle around where Cleota stands.
244 buildings were destroyed during the riots. Black men were lynched, and one account
tells of a mother being scalped and her 14 year old son watching before being killed himself.
Chaos. A film reel of atrocity to the mind trying to picture these images conveyed by words.
Like seeing it happen in silence, the silence between sounds, like the pause before the blow of a
train whistle, and the smell of something burning.
And what burns, man? Do you know? Is it something old or something new? Or do you
think fire really discriminates? It’s what we don’t understand that burns. It burns behind our
eyes. In our chest. The weight of it, the fuel—our differences. You know. That strange feeling
you have the moment someone disagrees with you. Maybe this happening with someone you
thought would understand. In someone you thought saw the world the same as you. And when
this happens long enough, often enough, the world you see begins to burn, you begin to burn—
alone—a person on fire. And everything you touch begins to blaze—what you touch trying to
understand it. Until you come to a mirror, to a frozen reflection of yourself that won’t burn, and
you hear the music melting in the flames. And this is what purifies you, that image of your heart
and bones, beneath, the same food for all fire. The same love we all have in common. What you
love about yourself what hurts you when you're not sure if you should love it. Because you take
it seriously, and that’s always open to scorn—your own doubts. What you don’t know about
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yourself the supposed property of others. What you don’t know about yourself hell, man—you
know. And that’s why loving yourself burns if you’re going to love anything at all…
--David Threnody, in an Austin Chronicle interview, September 1981
Duke’s pawn shop wasn’t destroyed in the riots. Even when black men began to
retaliate, to fight back, against the rumors that lead to violence. A violence that stems from sex
and leads to race. Sex the spawn of the race, stifled and perverted by fear. Just like all
beginnings fear the end. Why our perceptions become reality. A sign in the window of the pawn
shop. A cross. Underneath, the words: Christian Owned and Operated. The banner above the
door bolder, bigger, in red: Cash for Gold. But the sign in the window what saves the building.
Rioting men given pause, hesitating and moving on. The Threnody family upstairs watching
from the apartment windows. Children’s eyes covered to the beatings in the streets, to the dead
effigies hanging from street lamps, the world on fire lit in the windowpanes. Dewey, though not
even of school age, recalls memories of that summer:
It was loud. That’s what I remember—noise. Sirens and fire trucks. Bells. And maybe
David heard it in our mother’s belly. Maybe in the womb it was music to him. Maybe he
heard the sounds of the earth—a lamentation—you know. What the Blues is, a wail,
played note by note, a chord progression, turning in on itself… That day we were at the
Relay Depot we were already at the cemetery. I suppose why I remember that what
happened to that woman that day—what happened to that whore our mother tried to
protect. I remember the noise, the voices I heard that day, what maybe David heard,
unborn. The music of angry women. Angry white women mad at the threat of their own
21
power. And the color difference didn’t matter. That was the origin of the music…
Yeah, I suppose I heard a lot of voices that summer. Powerful voices. Voices trying to
be heard. Voices carrying over into other worlds. My world and their world. Each of
them different. Each of them an individual signature. And then, sometimes, especially
that summer, they all rose up at once, sounding the same. In pitch and urgency, in
suffering. Like a voice you've heard and been to its world because you heard it. The
words. The message under the words. Decoded. Your reality changing, even if only for
a moment, as you ponder it, ponder what you heard. And sometimes you forgot and
sometimes it stuck with you—sometimes you were constantly reminded of it—by maybe
a familiar voice, that first voice you listen to, or other intonations of it. And you looked
at yourself. Even when you know it's better not to look… This maybe a good thing,
sometimes, because you saw other possibilities. Fresh fantasies to the dream world of
yourself just thinking. Imagining what could be. The words of others and why they said
them not taken lightly. And other times it was just a waste of time. A rut to your
problems—thoughts stuck on the same wheel, turning over the same grooves. Like a line
that repeats—the same words, just different accents—the antithetic parallelisms of
songs—attention getters, cues to the beat. And you just get stuck in the simple
mnemonics of it, you know… I know I remember hearing that whore's voice that day. I
remember hearing the voices of those women comin' for her. And I can still hear it, even
though it's been over ninety years. I remember it like I heard it this morning. The pain.
The harsh laughter. It's stuck with me through many memories, enhancing them in a way
a guess, or in any case making them different. Almost like a sadness I can't get rid of.
Some truth that just won't go away. My truth—because it happened to me... We were
22
gathering flowers. That's what we were doing that morning, us kids, with our mother at
the cemetery. We were gathering flowers off the graves so we would have some when
that pine box arrived—I remember even holding one, my mother's dead brother arriving
on that train, that same train that whore was waitin' on—what or who she was waitin' on I
will never know. Even though I think about it sometimes—I imagine... despite the fact
that I'm an old man now, weary of what people have to say, and why they say it. I
suppose that's why I still think about it, why I still go looking for surprises. Even though I
don't find none. It's just the same old noise as I heard that summer. When all hell broke
loose. It's just the same old fear...
All Cleota's children had flowers. That day at the Relay Depot. They ran with them in
their hands. Sometimes crushing them as they caught each other. They weren't phony flowers.
They didn't have phony flowers then. The kind that last without being watered, without being
cared for. The petals too fragile for their stems fell at her feet, Cleota's feet, as her children
circled her. And she stared down at them, where they'd fallen, as she listened to the women
approaching, their voices more distinct now, and their faces more in focus.
Cleota didn't have to look too closely to see their faces said they had found an enemy.
These white women, middle-class. Their houses clean. Their dinners planned and prepared,
used to getting cold. They had found something on none of their check-lists, an item unlisted as
something to do. And what they were coming for was more than just a whore. More than just a
woman waiting on a train, dressed unlike the rest of them. She was more than just a black
woman suspected of cavorting with their white husbands. She was a body, a physical being,
something they could take hold of, something they could touch—an actual vessel for their hatred,
23
something they could see, a contemptible mirror for all their phoniness. For that's what they
were really attacking—what is fake. What was fake about themselves that a whore exposes.
What a whore exposes and distracts us from at the same time. A truth about money and what we
do for it. Because a whore exposes the nakedness of money, literally, while distracting us from
who really gets it, the money that is—those nameless hoarders of our investments. Those
mysterious pimps who cash in on our desires, our fears. In other words, the rich.
“Girl, don't make me have to go over there... Heaven's name—don't these women have
anything else better to do? All this over a man... Cuz that's what it probably is too—fussin' over
a man. My lord!"
And Cleota puts Dewey down. His hand still holding a flower. The other children still
running in circles, almost knocking him over as they make the corner around their mother.
"You children watch it now! Watch your brother! Momma's got to do something, I
guess. Lord knows no man would, if they was here. Lord sakes! Watch your brother now!"
And then it's that first step you make. Cleota takes the first step. Not a movement to
change anything. That's not why she begins walking towards the prostitute. Cleota knows her
progress towards them—these other woman—is not to change anything. It's merely to stand in
between. She's moving to stand in between the hate. And of course what she really wants to
address is not there. What's not there is not some man or woman, but an idea. It's an idea of
having something, and not just Cleota having something, or that whore, or the angry women
coming for her, for really it's something they all have, but they just don't know it. In fact they all
think they don't have it, and that's what they're trying to gain. The whore thinks the other women
have it. And the women brandishing clubs think the whore has it—Cleota just in the way. In
fact her progress to stand in between merely giving all of them the lurking suspicion that maybe
24
she has it—what they want, what they want but don't have a name for. And of course as they get
closer to one another they give it all sorts of names—material names, names for money and our
slavery to the color of our skin, our possessions—and some would even call it class warfare. A
battle between the haves and have nots. The joke being they were fighting amongst themselves
for something that was not in anyone's possession. Because what they were really fighting over
was power—the power they already had. The illusion that they didn't have it just all the names
they gave to it—the names they gave to money—and wanting more of it. That's what they were
really fighting over—resources—not realizing all they were really doing is losing what they
already had—each other.
No one woman was ahead of the other, so Cleota wasn't sure who would speak first. She
wasn't really looking at the white women anyway. Instead her eyes were on the prostitute, who
by then knew the women were coming, and why. She had turned to face them, but what was
interesting, what Cleota noticed, was her body wasn't noticeably tensed—she didn't have the air
about her that her guard was up. In fact she looked at the women (Cleota counted six) without
fear, or at least that was the appearance she gave, almost like they were just passing strangers not
important enough for a second glance, but when she noticed Cleota walking towards her she put
her hand up, like a salute underneath the rim of her hat—to shield her eyes—looking beyond
Cleota to the approaching train, and to her children still at play—to Dewey in the center of them.
And that was where her eyes rested, on Dewey, holding his flower, translucent, a faint smile to
her lips.
And it was Cleota that was first to reach her. The progress of her steps halted, her hands
on her hips like whenever she stopped what she was doing to wait on her children, like when she
was about to scold them. The prostitute's eyes fell to her again, noticing the way Cleota was
25
standing, but indifferent, and for a moment Cleota thought she was looking at one of her older
children—the way they looked sometimes when they knew they made a mistake, that feeling you
get when you know you're in the right place at the wrong time, but now old enough to be familiar
with that feeling, and hating anyone calling it to your attention. And sometimes it made you
wonder if it really was a mistake, or if it was something done on purpose. The sneaking
suspicion that an imperfection just wants to be noticed—to see if you will catch it, or if it will
remain uncorrected—and how you live with that. The knowledge of this going unsaid—the
knowledge of what you know and what an imperfection knows—what the person making the socalled mistake knows. The mystery of it, the deception, solved with whoever speaks of it first.
"Well, whatch you want?" The prostitute mirroring Cleota now—hands on hips and her
chin out, like she was ready to wag both, like she was just waiting to wag her finger and her head
at all of them, the other women almost to the railroad tracks now.
"I was wonderin' what you're aimin' to do."
"'Bout what?"
"Girl, you know what. Just like you know why I walked over here, why I'm askin'—are
you gonna stay or are you gonna go?"
"And where exactly am I 'sposed to go? I'm just waitin' on a train just like you..."
And there was that look in her eye, the whore's eye, of both defiance and despair, and it
was the despair Cleota responded to. She sensed it beneath the defiance, the defiance merely a
defense. She didn't ask these women to judge her—she wasn't dressed for them—and yet in
whatever she was really there for, whomever she was waiting for on that train—that didn't really
matter. Because to the women approaching (they've stopped now, just a few yards away, one
woman out front now, one hand holding what looked like a broken-off broomstick, slapping it
26
down on her other hand upward in supplication towards it in front of her, her eyes beady, buried
in the rolls of her plump face beneath a recent coiffure of curls) it didn't matter why she was
there, or for what good reason—as far as they were concerned she was there for them to judge
her, for them to carry out their swift sentence on what they could not condone. And it wasn't for
anybody to question how they knew she would be at the Relay Depot—it didn't matter how they
got their information. What mattered is they knew, and what they knew could not be known
without some kind of action.
This is where the defiance comes in. As a natural response. When strangers, people that
don't know you, decide to judge your lifestyle, your values. When by whatever means (through
evil gossip, or casual eavesdropping) like peeping toms they condemn and feel justified in doing
so. They don't feel guilty in what they saw, in how they saw what they see, even though in their
perception they're just as guilty as the object they wish to judge, for by seeing something you
can't condone you must first understand it—you must know it is evil. These are the same
judgments Cleota felt when she was a child, before she knew what a whore was, but she knew
how others responded to it and this was it—the fear. The fear of thinking we understand
something we really don't understand, and being made aware of it. Our judgment of it as
something outside ourselves our defense to this fear. And so you're left peering in. And it was
like masturbation. Except instead of being ashamed you condemn what you spy on instead, like
your own guilt for spying doesn't make you a partner to it. Smug in the judgments of what your
fear doesn't understand.
And that's what these women were—afraid. They were afraid of the whore even though
they outnumbered her. Their numbers their only strength, for it gave them the reassurance they
needed. And when you know this, when you've been a victim of it (as we all have)—there's a
27
harsh truth to face. A truth about living in fear and what it does to love in human relationships.
What a mother feels for a newborn child (because maybe in her womb David sensed what was
going on, kicking, as Cleota turned to face those women). What you feel when the burden is on
you, the burden not to be afraid. With no accolades after. And you can put it as simply as sex, if
that's where you want to go with it. As these women were, angry—having those dirty, jealous
thoughts we're all capable of, fed by fear, basic—stemming from trying to possess something,
playing a loveless game of ownership and needs... But this is not love. Counting on the fact that
someone needs you, as these women felt about their husbands, and using it in such a way to
assert control, feeding a dark and urgent desire—to see that fear in another person's eyes and not
your own, this in an effort to blind yourself from your own fears about what you need. Because
this really wasn't a race or class difference—it wasn't about who had money and who didn't. And
it wasn't really about the differences between man and woman—that synthesis of hate spawned
from gender roles, roles that trap us, and that we must dignify with an answer because of our sex.
No, these are the tools of the ignorant, merely the pawns of a power play much more perverse,
hiding the stupid from the stupid, in order to gain what is of this world for those that bank their
profit in it, losing their souls. And this is the harsh truth—aloneness, feeling alone, and feeling
that despair that whore felt—what Cleota saw in her eyes. Caught in the treadmill of either
feeling holy or sinful depending on your mood. Depending on the injustices wrought or the
justices fulfilled with each day, and all those strings attached to the nameless players of our
emotions, those strangers and friends to our lives, predictable under duress, and yet still
somehow the occasional up lifters to our sorrow even when it's not intended.
And that's when Cleota bends over. It's hard for her, with the weight of her belly (the
evidence of her pregnancy just beginning to show), but she kneels—placing her fingers in the
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dirt, the dirt by the railroad tracks, just as the train pulls into the Relay Depot. No one could hear
it, but they did. Like you hear the sunlight sometimes (and it was there, making a shadow of the
train as it pulled in, spectral, the rays reaching over and around, peeking through the cracks,
illuminating—to the women facing Cleota—her kneeling figure, her fingers in the dirt). The
sound was there, in her hands—sounds of a stalling engine and brakes—like a current through
her fingertips, what she wrote there. And it wasn’t words. It wasn’t the sounds of words.
Merely lines (for that is what she drew with her finger, furrows in the sand—a scale with musical
notations). What she wrote there became the sound of that train, coming in slowly, a gospel of
burning coal, the wheels turning ever more slowly, their grooves there forever determined, and
she put it there, in symbols of uneven sand. She was writing in a key that kept a theme, but these
women didn’t know the limits of it. They only saw what they could hear. They only saw what
was in the dirt.
“We ain’t the only ones here now—you know that don’t you? I ain’t the only one here,
or this woman behind me that you came to see—we ain’t the only ones here. My children are
over there, watching, playing—just like we’re doing. We just don’t call it that… the train’s here
now…” and Cleota keeps writing in the dirt, almost as if she has it memorized—what she’s
writing—like she knew what came next before it was even spoken of in her mind—the next
sound. “You see other people are with us here. Right now. Maybe not in this place at this time,
but right now. In other places that are also here. In the past and in the future, passengers… And
haven’t you seen enough killin’ this summer? Enough bloodshed? Somewhere right now
someone is being born, maybe even born of your own blood… and right now someone’s dying,
maybe too of your own blood—a part of you. All this is a part of you. And it’s happening right
now. Almost so’s you can hear it…” Cleota looks up for a moment, with the sunlight behind
29
her, to stare at these woman, at the one woman up front, who at first looked like she was going to
speak, but somehow that moment had passed, the time for it had passed, and now she doesn’t
know what words to use, like somehow Cleota kneeling there, writing music in the dirt, has
made her see intelligence, a plan more intelligent than the anger that spurred her to lead these
other women to the Relay Depot, almost like the next note Cleota puts in the sand is spoken to
her mind as well, and she can hear it, before words—a conception without perception—and
sense it isn’t perceived it speaks of an intelligence incomparable to any expression of it, for in
the expression it’s compared, judged as one thing or something else, for this is how all things of
this earth are estimated for their worth… “You can almost hear it, can’t you? The violence? The
violence of birth, death, life being choked out by your hands… You see the villain now, don’t
you? You see the enemy. And it’s you… So should I go ahead and ask it? Should I go ahead
and ask if you got a stone to cast?”
And even before Dewey walks over with his flower these women know. They know the
intelligence of sin—sin’s intelligence, as if we touch one another with it. They could sense it in
the shadows of the halted train, expressionless as a machine, moving only with consumption, an
unwelcome visitor who still somehow managed to abide, heavy in its presence, and in it, in the
train they saw their own monster. They know this, and they try to make comparisons—trying to
identify it with something in some way, other than with what they see, the railroad workers
(black men) appearing now, walking along the sides of the railroad cars, opening compartments
and placing steps by the doors, the passengers and freight waiting as they get things ready to
unload. They try to remember their husbands, the imaginations that sparked their jealousy, but
instead of feeling it they examine it, trying to remember what they know now with what they
knew then. And the existence of the train, the whore too peeking over Cleota’s shoulder to see
30
what she’s writing, is suddenly a distraction. And though they can’t admit it, not in the inertia of
their premonitions, they feel the urge to go home, and not for any kind of reconciliation, but to
remember what was before, before they had weapons in their hands. They feel this urge so a safe
world can be created again, where they knew what was going to happen next, or at least they
could think they knew, which makes the adventures of the future more defined, more
comfortable, because it was a future limited by their pasts, a past that could forget what was
happening now, that intelligence they sensed, an intelligence hinted in the shadows of the train,
hinted in unfamiliar music that with time becomes familiar. Because everything around them
hinted at knowing this, hinted at what they really knew, and what they knew was there were
witnesses now, witnesses in the windows of the train—a powerful reminder to those momentary
insights that don’t allow you to deny your own guilt. Because what they knew now was
everyone there was alone.
But the light was still there. Though some of it was hiding behind the train. It
illuminated the dirt at their feet. It illuminated Dewey, walking towards them, the rays resting on
his shoulders—going forward with him, like the light and his child’s walk were leading each
other. And the rose he’s holding is what’s left when the stones drop. The prostitute, somewhat
bent over trying to read what was on the ground, even straightens when Dewey comes to her, his
flower extended.
“Take it,” he says.
And he lets go as she takes it, takes hold of it. A flower from the dead. Found from a
grave that morning. All of them, all of the women watching.
And this was the summer before David was born.
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4
What happens to a dream deferred?
--Langston Hughes
Though he had seven brothers, David liked to play alone. Being the youngest, he wasn’t
a very assertive child, but then in being the youngest he didn’t really have to be. He wasn’t as
assertive as Dewey, who may have given those women pause handing a flower to a prostitute
that summer day by the Relay Depot, the summer before David was born, the gesture maybe a
glimpse of something, but it still didn’t change anything. Those women still chased her. They
still chased that whore off. They just didn’t use their weapons, what was in their hands, instead
calling to the few white men appearing from the train to catch the woman—catch her and kill
her—the white men looking after them with dumb stares... What was written there in the sand,
in the dirt by the tracks—scuffled by their feet—so that if it had any meaning—what Cleota
wrote there—it was lost and incomprehensible now.
David’s school records show he was an intelligent child. Not that any school records or
tests could show this, for it is a statistical comparison, and this is the strange thing about genius.
The recognition of it. And yet it is—it moves, elegant—in beautiful laws. It moves in the laws
creating comparisons in the first place, giving meaning to the statistical variations. And like the
river valley in which David was born, the boundaries shift, generating bluffs that were once
shores, and water where there was once land. It shows itself in the weird, in the things that are
not normal, what abides in these statistical laws, highlighting the outliers, and the question is
how we define what’s out of range. It could be a deficient, a degeneracy, a weak link in the
chain of all causes—something that mars the otherwise beauty of our perceptive order—a burden
32
to our society, our paperwork. And yet still serving a purpose somehow, a measure of the
bottom, what is at the bottom, in the lower frequencies of existence, providing perspective on
what’s above. This the catch, the logical dilemma, that same thing college students hear entering
their career field on experience—you can’t get a job without experience and you can’t get
experience without a job. The same thing children like David pondered in their secret worlds of
learning language, learning life—the question of what came first. This paradox in everything,
and yet still shattered and fixed, solved somehow, overcome as trivial, as something you can
look back on wondering how it happened, like how a river rages and then subsides… We need
our outliers to establish any sort of range, to set our boundaries for the normal, that normal life in
the suburbs keeping up with the Jones’s that we need defined by our comparisons of
perspective—and this is the catch. Because any perspective measurement is a fallacy, and
always unsatisfying. Like a ruler that only goes to eleven inches, our cubit spans are only as
wide as our arms can go, what our bodies, our minds, can reach. It’s just that some of us think
we’re looking in, while some of us think we’re gazing out. But in either case you still have to
imagine something outside of this—these reflections—to make this comparison. You create a
world to make the measurement, and in making the measurement you change what you’re
measuring. Because you can only measure to the limits of your perspective. That is why there is
always a limit to your truth. To what you recognize in this world. And though we ignore it all
the time, even though it seems it can be ignored, we will never know what came first, just like
there can’t be anybody around to judge what’s last. It’s simply the rules of our own game. How
we test each other’s intelligence in subtle ways.
David had a game he would play. This after school age, when he began reading. It was
game he played with sleep. With trying to fall asleep, because now he was old enough to be
33
aware of it—those transitions between night and day. And he began a conversation. A
conversation with it—sleep—a conversation with his dreams, the ones he could remember.
Children know nothing of addictions. Usually what they want is what they need. The
discernment not there, perhaps just existing as kernel then, most of what they perceive still
subconscious, inexpressible. But then they begin to communicate with their world. They begin
identifying objects and people. They learn responses to a response, each a key that unlocks
another door, not only to the outside world, but also to what waits to be awakened inside them.
And this becomes an addiction—it becomes how an addiction is formed—memories rekindled
from the blank slate of their birth. And so David began to learn of what he didn’t need. And
when this first happens the knowledge of it happening is distorted, as all habits are when they are
first formed. He was blinded by the experience of it, the experience of something new, and
everything was new then, each new day was new. And at first it was all handed to him, at first it
was just his mother’s breast. But then he could sit up. He could hold objects like spoons and
forks, and touch them—put them in his mouth—the potential to gain knowledge, to learn the
motor functions of holding something, bringing it to his mouth to taste, existing even before his
will to know these things, to learn of them. In some respects the intentions of his will
insignificant, like he already knew how to walk before he learned to walk, just crawling first to
get to it, to slow things down so he could grasp time, the insouciant inclinations of it. And
perhaps after he learned to crawl, after he learned to walk, after that day he can’t even remember
when he first mastered the steps, the stairs leading up from the pawn shop to their apartment—
this is when he began to animate time, to interact with it in his exploration of the objects around
him—what lurked that was still out of his reach, perhaps even put there so he couldn’t reach it,
Cleota and his brothers protecting him, or else protecting what they didn’t want him to destroy…
34
You don’t remember when you first became aware that you can’t make yourself sleep just by
willing to do so, and the potential that was already there becomes lost in this awareness, and this
is when you know your will corrupts you even though you still don’t have a name for it, and you
go through life giving all kinds of names to it, to your desires, but it will never banish what you
knew in your child’s language, which is why you can’t remember it. Why you converse with
your dreams instead. It’s why David made a game of it—talking to his dreams.
Cleota remembers at first David didn’t want to go to school. Not because he was a shy,
clinging child, afraid of children his own age. She relates it to something else, something that
happened then, when he was perhaps five or six, something he saw with her on one of her
errands in the city, for by then he was at that age when he walked with her from the pawn shop
every morning when she went to buy milk and Duke’s newspaper. It was when he began having
trouble sleeping.
It was different then—East St. Louis was different then. Where David and his mother
once walked abandoned lots now, paved long ago, the buildings that once stood there burned
down or destroyed, rebuilt and then destroyed again from later riots, fires and floods, leaving lots
of cracked concrete surrounded by torn fences almost beautiful when you drive by them.
Because they’ve been left alone, the tall weeds allowed to grow through the cracks, some of the
earth even in upheaval, rock slabs disjointed and shining with the reflected sprinkles of broken,
brown glass—beer bottles thrown down there by passing bums—and it is their earth too, for they
are also left alone, rooting in the junk piles of abandoned blocks of a city left behind, what was
burned or destroyed just left in piles (rusting plumbing fixtures, knotted and discolored two-byfours with the nails still in them, jagged, blackened cinder blocks—rubble almost piled neatly,
looking on at the weeds swaying gently with the breeze around them, the empty tallboys still in
35
their paper sacks, welcome to either sunshine or rain). These places are left alone with the
remnants of their history. All of us to look on as we go by, including the ones that live there, not
seeing what once was, but what happens to what once was. And we leave it alone, not as a
reminder, not as a cinemascope into the history of times when Cleota and David once walked
there (passing neighbors and houses, flowers being watered on front porches, the swept
sidewalks of businesses that once thrived after those summer riots of 1917)—we leave it alone to
get to where we’re going. To the pawn shops that are still there, next to iron-barred convenient
stores covered with the paint of old signs, hiding the ancient redbrick of those former times. To
get to the hospital closing because it can’t afford the Medicaid costs anymore, the trauma center
already shut down. To get to the federal courthouse for jury duty on drug dealers shooting one
another, to file bankruptcy. To make it to the local DHS (a newly refurbished building built on
one of these old lots, cheaply built from recycled materials) for SNAP benefits—food stamps for
your children… We leave it alone, these lost blocks, to form all this again—our own history—
what will be left alone by those that follow us. The trash and broken concrete silent and
immune. Watching us. Waiting on us all to clean it up.
And still even then Cleota and David had to walk by a bar—a hole in the wall tavern even
by today’s standards. And this is where David meets his first musician, a drunk one—standing
in the doorway with the first beer of the morning in his hand. David saw it in his dreams later. It
was the image he conversed with. What he remembered in darkness. The strange thing what he
pictured was sunlight. That special kind of light of morning, the rays coming through trees
planted along the sidewalk, in tones of green and white, the leaves upturned expecting rain. And
he remembered the man—a black man wearing a black hat with a purple band. His face showing
the age in the eyes, in the cheeks—unshaven whiskers peppered black and white. A loosened red
36
tie and an off-white shirt. The suit worn at the elbows, faded black with pinstripes. Scuffed
polish on his shoes. His other hand holding a cigarette, his index finger hued by the smoke and
toughened with wrinkles.
In a way he looked like any musician of the time—what we picture when we think of a
blues musician—maybe just tinted with the pallor of a man down on his luck. Maybe this is why
David conversed with it—this image. Maybe it gave him that recognition we all sense,
precognitive, and when it happens we always come back to it, like we always knew, like we’d
always been there, like we’d never been away. It’s a recognition so powerful that most people
never converse with it. It becomes repressed—revealed in perversions, decadence, selfdestruction. It’s the identity we all have that’s unfulfilled in us. Sometime mirrored in opposite
behavior, controlled by illusions. Vague memories of dreams. And David talked to it. What he
saw—what happened that day he met his first musician. He talked to it as a child. After his
mother wished him goodnight and kissed his forehead, sleeping with his older brothers, the
doorway cracked leaving a line of light in the room. Sometimes he kept his eyes open. Staring
up at the blank ceiling, shadows passing from the window. He would stare until induced into an
almost trance-like state where he conversed with it—this recognition—and a voice answered.
He made no distinction where it came from—this voice. What he imagined as a child
was simply hearing an answer to his question. And it was what he called prayer, at least it was
the word he used. A word he’d already learned in church, in his mother’s teaching. And so that
is what he called it. His mother had told him it was like talking to God, but she had never said
what he should talk about. At bedtime his older brothers said the Lord’s Prayer, but he also
heard them pray for other things, and he would listen to them, wondering if he should pray like
them, if he should pray for these things too. But then he began having dreams, child dreams he
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remembered. The dream of that man—the first musician he met. And it changed what he
decided to talk about.
It’s something you can’t do. Watch yourself fall asleep. Time becomes different in
between. And as you fall in between time, strange images, strange memories wake you up for a
moment, followed by oblivion—dreams that don’t make sense, yet real in your existence there.
Then maybe a loud noise wakes you up, and your eyes open—heavy. You reposition your body,
turn your head, eyelids fluttering. What your eyes see then not the world, not your waking life,
but whatever it is you come from, what you can’t remember or define—time a borrower of these
moments, hiding the witnesses to your slumber, the life going on all around you, giving you that
gentle nudge of what to dream. And maybe that’s when David saw his real life—his future.
Maybe it’s what we all see. But what we think we know denies it. And David had no denials yet.
Even before he could express it he knew every time he went to sleep he would wake up. But
after seeing that man and smelling marijuana for the first time he began to question if he would.
It was a stimulus that brought out a response—his response to an unknown. And it is in this
unknown when you first question death and what comes first—how it identifies with life, how
it’s a part of life, and he became afraid. He became afraid to sleep. Because he realized he
didn’t know where he went, only the ambivalence of remembered dreams the remnant of it, and
he was afraid he wouldn’t come back. Of course he never spoke of it. He couldn’t put it into
words, at least not yet, and since he couldn’t put it into words he was scared of it. Only later, in
the words of his songs, did he try to name it—this crossover between being asleep and awake,
that transition between death and life. His music an expression of being freed from it—a
sublimated representation of this freedom. And maybe that’s when he decided his dreams were
merely a foreshadowing of what happened in that last time you close your eyes never to open
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them again—a dimension of an afterlife, what comes last, his own unique recognition of it—
what was waiting for him. And he made songs to become friends with it. To be on speaking
terms with those latent memories recalled in alpha waves, that oscillating alertness appearing and
disappearing in the measured electricity of consciousness. He tried to copy its language. So he
could speak to God.
David first dreamed of that man that night. The drunken musician he met with his mother
on their morning walk for milk. And the dream took over what really happened. Later it was all
he could remember of that day, and every time he smelled marijuana, this even years later, he
thought of it. He thought of that night falling asleep—his prayer—and the dream that followed,
hinting at what he should recognize:
“What’s your name, boy?”
The voice not coming from a musician in a tavern’s doorway, but from that voice that
answered as his mind rested, when he closed his eyes. And he knew even before he answered
the real reason the question was posed. He knew the voice already knew his name, already knew
the answer. Because the question was asked for another reason. Outside of what comes first and
what comes last. It was asked so the ideal brain wave would be manifested to deal with the
situation—his fear and what he hoped for. It was a gift. Becoming his prayer.
And what is my name? What pronounced sound do I answer to? And why do I answer?
Perhaps soon enough I will be old—old enough to know. And I will be accountable for what I
know. This not answered, not asked for. But happening nonetheless. In the acquiescence of
time. Its recognition before learned words. What I felt that morning and what was in my
prayers that night—seeing my first musician as I went with my mother on her morning errands,
39
afraid of a then unfamiliar smell and what’s associated with taverns. I heard it in a piano as we
returned home (for even though it was a rundown tavern it housed a piano, the worn keys that
drunkard touched then—the music—drifting into the street as we passed). To me it seemed it
was just as the weather drifted. Because a storm had rolled in, darkening the air. I felt the heat.
A still wind. The chords the musician played mixed with a distant rumble in the clouds. And I
remember I paused. Just as the wind was doing. My mother beckoning me to catch up so we
could escape the rain. But I was listening to the music. A sudden strong gust of wind making its
own music in the nearby surrounding trees—a branch falling. Large, ponderous raindrops
beginning to splash on the ground. The temperature of the air cooling dramatically. I watched
and remembered the darkness, recalling it my bed later that night. The same darkness as that
morning just brought about differently. For I already knew then the sun existed during the day,
but I was learning how it could also disappear. How it disappeared in violence, in a beginning
calm, in the collision of a cold front with warm air. How the light disappeared in a slow
rotation. I was learning how darkness could exist even when it wasn’t night, when it wasn’t time
for sleep. And this is what I prayed to. This first and last. This was the name I answered to
when asked. Because I heard it then. I heard the voice in the music. I heard it in the power
failures brought about by storms. I heard it coming from that tavern, from a drunken piano
player who hadn’t even conversed with sleep the night before. Who conversed instead with the
steady falling rain. Me just a boy watching, a witness to it—getting wet. And that’s when I
realized what I wanted to pray for, what I would talk about. That’s when I knew how I would
talk to God. And this is what I dreamed, reaching out to the world I perceived around me…
--David Threnody, childhood recollections—from his journals 1966 to 1975
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And David would hear that tune again. He would hear the composition again later, many
times, playing it himself, recognizing it a different way each time—a Waltz in A Flat by Brahms.
And its peace he would always relate to storms, which is why he was never afraid of them. The
fear he felt from something else, from some different dream—a recognition of his future. The
sadness hinted in the music. That sadness of what you knew before you knew your name…
One of David’s contemporaries—Pinetop Wilson—remembers what it was like in those years,
what is was like growing up in East St. Louis at the time—the music then. What maybe David
heard walking with his mother past that tavern. He died recently, at the age of 97. He had the
opportunity to know David then, in his former years, and perhaps even heard David speak of it—
those dreams he conversed with, what was conceived in David’s recollections of seeing and
hearing his first musician, and how he spoke to it, how it spoke to him. These are his words:
Sure it’s different now. But shouldn’t it be? I know I’ve changed. And the music
changed around me. The timing’s changed. Sometimes it seems like the beat goes a little
faster. Sometimes it feels like it’s slowed down. Any old-timer will tell you that.
Because when you’ve been playing music as long as I have you feel it in your heart.
What’s stolen and what’s been stolen from you. And I’m weakened by it now. I feel it
when I awaken in the morning. In the dreams that follow me. I think that’s what David
was talking about, what he conversed with. The joy stolen in the truth of sleep. Only
partly regained in what you express of it waking up. What he expressed in his music.
That past note leading to the next. Each new sound relying on what fades in the last
expression. He was trying to reach the future, and what he found instead was only a
memory of the past. Remembrances of a child. Hearing that language for the first time.
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The language of music—a measurement of time. Recording time in pitch and frequency.
The key and scale broken down and rebuilt over and over again in repeated lines, in
turnarounds to find beauty—to find that sacred breath in a world where love has grown
cold… I’m not sure what happened. And I’m not going to speak about it as an old man.
Just as I can’t speak from youth. What I remember of it jaded now. Jaded by experience.
My own expressions in the measurement of time. Because I know I’ve played the songs
of evil just as I’ve played songs of good. I’ve fed both in my life. But I know this world
I live in now isn’t a better place than the world I was born into. I know it’s partly my
fault. My choices what I see now. Memories of regrets. I know the power in that. The
power of what music makes you feel. How one rhythm can stir a lust for life and
laughter—dance—while others stir sadness, tears—inflections that mold chastity in a
myriad of emotions. Because I’ve played them all. Both celebrations and requiems. I’ve
learned how to express both, and everything in between. And I can’t curse the
instruments I’ve used to express these emotions without scandalizing my listeners. For
I’m merely a taker of requests. Watching from a stage what I instill as a response. And
I’m sure David learned this too. Maybe it’s what he recognized from an early age in the
games he played with himself, in his first practices with his art. Maybe it’s what he lost
sleep over. Playing from dreams what he could never reach in life…
--Pinetop Wilson, from a PBS interview, September 1971
Sometimes the tragedy of musicians is the habits they form performing. For instance
Pinetop, a well-regarded piano man of jazz and blues who played with all the giants of his time,
including Muddy Waters, battled a heroin addiction in the early 1950’s, an addiction that haunted
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and almost ended his career. And according to one source piano wasn't even his first choice of
instrument. He started on the guitar. But because of a misunderstanding with a woman he was
stabbed in the arm, switching to piano due to tendon damage. He went on to play the blues for
the next sixty years, smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. His needs simple, as he says: “A
cheeseburger, a cigarette, a glass of beer, and the company of a good-looking woman—a good
woman with a sense of humor…” He died of cardiac arrest, three years before his hundredth
birthday, passing away in his sleep.
At first David’s needs were simple. He just needed to hear the music for the first time.
The music he began a conversation with, in his game with sleep, and what comes last. That day
he met his first musician, walking with his mother, became a memory that stuck with him. It
became something he couldn’t leave alone, something that followed him all the days of his life.
It became how he answered to his name. His one and only dream. And who knows? Maybe
every time a storm passed over, every time the river valley in which he was born flooded
followed by the waters that subsided, he remembered the intelligence that responded. He
remembered all our comparisons, our limits and fallacies to truth. Maybe he did hear something,
some voice that answered. And his game with God left something other than silence. It left
what we hear of him now.
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5
Deep down in Louisiana, close to New Orleans/Way back up in the woods among the
evergreens/There stood a log cabin made of earth an' wood/Where lived a country boy
named Johnny B. Goode/Who never, ever learned to read or write so well/But he could
play a guitar just like a-ringin' a bell…
--Chuck Berry
This is the story of how David acquired his first guitar. How it was brought to his
father’s pawn shop. How he first learned its secret chords:
It was Memorial Day Weekend 1927. The flags were hanging from neighbor’s
doorsteps. An afternoon parade was beginning. A Sunday parade. David nine years old. Old
enough to begin interpreting those dreams he had now. How they followed him into the
morning. At first his mind holding onto them. Hesitant of what to believe. What reality was
true. Sometimes comforted in waking to what he knew before falling asleep. Sometimes not.
And am I in some prison? And if I am—where are the walls? Perhaps if I could
recognize them I could climb them. Or else break them down. Brick by brick. Each stone, each
block a detail. And if I could concentrate on each one—knowing their truth—I would know what
they build. I would know what they try to make me remember. And put together, connected—I
would know my real world… Last night I dreamed it again. That man who played the piano.
But there was no composition. No method to what he played—this different from what I
remember of that day—the comfort of the melody. And that man, that musician, became my
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father. I saw his dreams. Heard before his death. What maybe I will remember of him after his
death. When I can no longer converse with him in this reality. The rules of my expression here.
And I was sympathetic in the dream. I felt what he wanted and what he needed. How he was a
prisoner too. Only comforted by the routines that established his days. Leaking into his dreams
of what I would dream. Giving me his blessing… And I know my purpose now is to be an
interpreter of these dreams. Where no rules apply. Where anything can happen based on what
I’m conscious of—my focus. I wished to please my father in this dream. The smell of it a smell I
know now, mixed with the taste. The sadness what I will forget. Why I say it here. So maybe I’ll
remember. Remember what my dreams have stolen from me. This innocence in methods
unsound—this insanity recognized in dreams. The play of my imagination. Because I knew
before he even came. The escaped prisoner who brought me my first guitar—pawning it in my
father’s shop. I knew what I would play. I would play the opera of tragedies. The music of
taverns. The smell of marijuana and the taste of spilt beer. I would see it in the applause of
parades. In holidays for my mind. Just a child tending sheep…
--David Threnody, on dreams—from his journals 1948 to 1955
And the river was on a rampage that year. 1927 was a year of heavy rains, and flooding.
To David it would instill the muse. It would be the inspiration of what he first heard. Recalled
later in his music. What he would play on his first guitar. Merely an imitation of what he saw
passing a tavern with his mother—what he would remember there. The lost dreams of his father,
and his father’s silence to his own dreams.
But the river wasn’t silent that year. It spoke. This what inspired David and many other
musicians. What inspired him also giving him his first experiences with silence. With silence as
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a response to his response. What follows the deluge. Because at first his music had no audience.
At least an audience he could hear—perhaps the greatest pain to an artist. Reaching into his
heart he expressed what came out. But the earth was silent. What inhabited it was silent. Just as
you can’t hear what’s beneath the water. There was no feedback to his beginning distortions.
And so he learned early on to hear the silence. What’s beneath the surface. Hear what it had to
tell him. The fear that no one was listening, or if they were—fathoming the reasons why they
didn’t respond. And at first he thought it was his fault. That his art wasn’t good enough. The
silence a kindness. But as he got better he learned there might be other reasons. How something
taken seriously is met with no sound. Just as the water goes where it must go. How what was
wild and free in his music had nothing judging it. How the song of a bird was only met with the
wind that carried away its melody. Never sorry for the lack of praise or even the breath of
derision. For the bird merely sang. It sang to the earth, which gave it its song. And by giving it
providing refuge. No God to look down and criticize. God’s existence silence. Yet present in
the song, felt in the inspiration of the opening notes—the impulse which brought it all into
existence in the first place. David began to realize his only audience was God. Not some
person, not his family or friends or other strangers and loved ones. He began to realize what he
reached into his heart to express, from dreams and memories, from the example of his own
father, was the gift itself. And when he went looking for the praise of what he created he
remembered his own prayers and how they were answered. Not by the voice he heard, what as a
child he began speaking to, the muse of an ever-widening river, but answered by all that had
fallen, by a bird—frozen and drowned— never to sing to the earth again. He saw that in every
creation the only equality found in them was their impending death. He realized every song
died. And that was how it found its equality in the eternal. For eternity was silent. The noise of
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time muffled out by the infinite. By an ever-changing river. What a song captures in its final
notes. Its death renewed in new life, inspiring forever what comes next, until it too is fallen—
silent but listening to what it leaves behind when the floodwaters recede. And so all the reasons
for silence, for the lack of response to all his artistic creations—be it jealousies or indifference,
whatever it may be—didn’t really matter. What mattered was he still spoke to it. It still spoke to
him. And in his mind he found God. He found the memory of all who had died, their cries of
pain unheard, reflected in the harmonies they created, and how they became equal in their last
breath, in the last sound from their lips. And so no matter what response his art received he
knew God was pleased. Because his art came from God and that was where it had to return. In
abject awe and worship. In the silence of all voices hearing the one Voice that brought them
forth. And when he forgot this he forgot his happiness—his true purpose. His purpose to please
the silence, to please God, for by speaking to the silence he made it not exist, and when his song
ended he knew he could only rejoice, for by its death God existed for him again, inspiring the
faith needed for the next song… And so he listened. His own silence allowed him to listen. It
allowed him to create his own death, defining for him what it was to be alive.
People were scared of the river then, the destructive forces of the high water and heavy
rains that fell in 1927—the worst flooding in U.S. history. In the winter of 1926-27, the rains
were so heavy that on the tributaries of the Mississippi the water overflowed the banks. On
Good Friday, April 15, 1927, the Memphis Commercial Appeal warned: "The roaring
Mississippi River, bank and levee full from St. Louis to New Orleans, is believed to be on its
mightiest rampage... All along the Mississippi considerable fear is felt over the prospects for the
greatest flood in history." That Good Friday morning, the rains came, setting all-time records for
its intensity. The rains came down over several hundred thousand square miles, covering much
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or all of the states of Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana. In New
Orleans in 18 hours there were 15 inches of rain—the greatest ever known there. The river
swelled so high and flowed so fast that for the residents along the river, "It was like facing an
angry, dark ocean." And by Memorial Day, the Mississippi had broken out of it levees in over
145 places, flooding 27,000 square miles, an area 50 miles wide and more than a 100 miles long.
The land was inundated by water to a depth of over 30 feet, causing more than $400 million in
damages and killing 246 people in seven states. “Out on the water there was unimaginable
silence. As far as the eye could see was an expanse of brackish chocolate water. There was not
the bark of a dog, the lowing of a cow, the neighing of a horse. Even the trees turned dingy, their
trunks and leaves caked with dried mud. The silence was complete and suffocating.”
Raymond Ducette, one of David’s childhood friends, talked about what was happening at
the time in a PBS interview before David’s death in 1988. He remembers the floods of 1927,
and the innocence then, the fear—David’s innocence, his boyhood naiveté as a playmate in the
streets of East St. Louis before and after the flood:
I think he was musical even then. I think maybe he listened to that water. The heavy
rains that fell then. The high waters, and how it flowed. The sound of it coming. And I
don’t think he was afraid of it. He wasn’t afraid of storms. When we’d be out playing
and a storm was coming, he’d have this look on his face. Like he was in a trance. And
he’d just stand out in it—those summer rains. The water collecting in the streets with no
place to go except low ground. The mud flowing into the sewers. Stagnant puddles
beginning to smell with their green surface sheens. He’d just stand there, in the middle of
it, his arms hanging at his sides, but his palms up—sometimes the only white thing
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showing in those darkened downpours. He’d just stand there ‘til his mother called to
him. Called him to come inside. And even then he’d stand at the window. Looking out
on the water. Mesmerized… I guess at first we thought he was kinda slow. He’d have
this lost look when us boys would be talkin’. Talkin’ fast about boy stuff—ya know.
Stuff we’d come to know about the world standin’ outside the markets where the older
boys lounged against the redbrick walls smokin’ cigarettes. Stuff ‘bout girls… He didn’t
catch on to the words we learned from the older boys—ya know—and I don’t think we
ever heard him cuss. And when we did his mouth would just sorta open up, like he was
goin’ ta say somthin’, and his eyes would get real big… I ‘spose he was just sheltered.
By his mother and older brothers. So he didn’t know ‘bout that stuff. I mean when we’s
was learning about sex he still didn’t know what his thang was for—ya know… But he
still used it—he used what he learned us sayin’ and it came out in his music… He was
always bangin’ on somthin’. He’d carry around these spoons, and he’d always be playin’
a beat, bangin’ em together, beatin’ em on passing walls and metal trash cans. And he
always came up with songs ‘bout what he was doin’. He’d just be walkin’ down the
street with us, bangin’ on his spoons and singin’ bout what he saw passin’ by… I
remember he came up with a song that summer ‘bout this ol’ tomcat we saw in an alley
one day, starvin’ and feedin’ outa the trash. He’d bang on his spoons and sing ‘bout that
tomcat stayin’ out all night, its fur all wet cuz it couldn’t stay outa the rain… He was a
simple, good kid, honestly. Not getting into trouble like some of us. He was just fresh to
the world. Shy ‘bout smokin’ his first cigarette, and learnin’ ‘bout what the grownups
tried ta keep from us. And when he did begin to learn I think it saddened him. Like he
didn’t like the truth. The truth ‘bout why some of the neighbors argued and ‘bout what
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some of the girls of the neighborhood had to show’em. Maybe it’s why he liked the rain
so much. Why that flood inspired him. Like it washed it all clean—it washed it all clean
for him. So he could hear his music. Shit… we hardly ever saw him after he got that
guitar…
--Raymond Ducette, from a PBS interview, September 1971
Duke’s pawn shop never closed. Not even on the holidays. Not even when the waters
began to rise. So the shop was open that Memorial Day. The day after the Sunday parade, and
the prison break. It was business as usual. And business was good. Farmers along the
floodplains became frequent customers. Their wives selling jewelry to offset the loss of cash
crops after the levees broke. And this is when Jonathon Bonnor came in. Ready to sell his
guitar.
Before his story is told, however, another lesson in history must be clarified. The history
of hemp farming in America. Some of its farmers along the floodplains of the Mississippi
customers to Duke’s pawn shop. Hemp is not marijuana. This is a misconception. But its
history in America is inextricably tied to Jonathon Bonnor’s story, and how he came to sell his
guitar to David.
The psychoactive varieties of cannabis originated in Asia where they were valued by
certain religious sects. Medicinal uses were well known to classical pharmacology. In the
nineteenth century recreational use was popular among the talented European literati. By the
early decades of the twentieth century use by certain minorities in America had begun to draw
attention, its popularity among artists and bohemians well known. But hemp's major use in
Europe and America at first was as a cordage fiber. Its natural resistance to rot recommended for
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maritime uses, and as European seafaring expanded so did the importance of hemp. Laws were
passed in England and in the American colonies requiring farmers to allot a portion of their
acreage to the production of hemp. Cannabis hemp quickly became legal tender in most of the
early settler days from 1631 on into the early 1800s. Taxes were paid with hemp for over two
hundred years, and between the 17th and 18th centuries it was illegal not to grow hemp in some
areas. Some colonies even enforced jail sentences for those who did not participate in what
became a patriotic act, especially during the revolutionary war. Benjamin Franklin owned one of
the first paper mills that processed hemp into parchment. The Declaration of Independence,
Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense”, the Federalist (and Anti-Federalist) Papers, the Articles of
Confederation, and the United States Constitution were all written on hemp paper. But George
Washington not only grew hemp for clothes (home spun), he also states in his diary from August
7, 1765: "— began to separate the male from the female hemp — rather too late." Today that
technique is used solely for drug potency in marijuana. Thomas Jefferson is said to have even
smuggled seeds from Asia, the origin of the psychoactive varieties of cannabis. In fact seven of
the earliest presidents were hemp smokers. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James
Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce all smoked
hemp.
Jonathon Bonnor wasn’t a hemp farmer. It wasn’t the heavy rains that brought him to
Duke’s pawn shop, though maybe it was a cause as to why he was free to do so. He wasn’t a
hemp farmer, but he smoked marijuana. He was a musician. And in 1927 it led to his
incarceration. Not because marijuana was illegal. Because it wasn’t then. It was just who he
had to associate with to get it. Gangland kings—bootleggers. It was prohibition then, alcohol
was prohibited, and among black market profiteers commodities such as booze and cigarettes
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were sold in the same spheres as reefer cigarettes—you had to know somebody in the black
market to get it. And at the time, most gigs for musicians were found in such spheres. In
speakeasies and juke joints you heard the music that was termed as mental drunkenness.
Musicians smoking marijuana because it led to contemplative tendencies. Inspiring the
melodies, the cool jive spoken by players of instruments, and Jonathon was a guitar player in
these places. At least he was until he got involved with a boss’s girl, who liked to dance to his
tunes.
Her name was Frieda, and she was a flapper. One of those girls with bobbed hair,
lipstick, and a dress above the knees. She smoked cigarettes. She smoked marijuana. And
though only eighteen she had no family except her friends, her fellow hustlers on the streets. A
hat-check girl at one of the more popular underground jazz joints popping up in East St. Louis at
the time. Taken care of by the owner, a man that went by the name of Bulldog Taylor.
Bulldog was a pimp. At least that’s what he’d be called today. A business such as his
wasn’t a good business unless there were girls. What might be called a precursor to ladies night,
but much older than that—the truth that men go where the women are, and spend their money
there. They spend their money on the women, so Bulldog made sure his place had the stuff
women want, which isn’t really about the stuff, but the idea of a man paying for it. The
accoutrement, as it were, the battle for things that go with fine living—the finest clothes and
jewelry, hospitable surroundings, good food and drink, and the best music to celebrate it. That’s
where Jonathon came in. And this is what he’d have to say, what I’d imagine him saying, as the
giver of David’s first guitar:
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I always wanted to be a good friend. Especially to the ladies. And I ain’t the first to say
you have to be a friend to have a friend. You have to speak like a friend does. That’s why you
have to learn the secret. The secret to a woman’s friendship. It ain’t really about the stuff you
can give them, though it helps—what some would call security. But that ain’t the security they
really need, or what they really want. You gotta make a girl feel special. And that’s where you
gotta make them feel like their weaknesses are really strengths. You gotta placate their selfesteem, show’em what they’re most insecure about, whether it’s the way they look, or what they
feel they can’t do as good as another girl—those fears we all have really, man or woman—you
gotta make those fears go away. And if you can do that a girl will follow you anywhere… Of
course I guess it depends on the woman—what kind of woman you’re dealing with. It depends
on if she’s already been damaged—hurt by love. Something happens to a woman then. Because
they’ve been humbled. And once humbled it’s hard for them to be humbled again. But that’s
what love is really—humility. You can go by all the other definitions, patience and kindness and
such, but the most important thing about love is its humility. All its other traits can be mimicked
and seem it, but without humility it’s shaded by other reasons. Because the devil can talk to you
all about love. The devil has all the wisdom of love, but he doesn’t have humility, and without
humility there’s no guilt, and without guilt you don’t learn anything.
Frieda had been hurt. But she didn’t feel guilty. Instead she felt like a victim. And a
victim can be the most evil person you meet. You feel like you can do anything you want when
you’re a victim. I guess it just goes under the name revenge, jealousy. And jealousy is an ugly
thing. Victims are jealous. Jealous of what they think they deserve. Jealous of justice. But love
never plays the victim. If it was it never was love. It’s self-love. And love don’t have self in it.
Funny thing is we can’t seem to give anything without expecting something in return. Even when
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we act like it with the best of intentions. It nags us from inside, like we’re watching ourselves,
and by watching ourselves we can’t help but be involved. Seems like you can’t get rid of it
unless something dies, and we can’t just kill ourselves like that. Even if we try… She told me
how it happened, and I felt sorry for her. How she sold herself like that, how she fell in love and
lost everything. How she lost her family, the respect of her family, and respect for herself. She
just believed in a boy’s lies. What a boy lies about to get what he wants, and after he got what
he wanted he abandoned her, leaving her with nothing. That’s why it’s hard to compare,
compare a broken heart with love. It’s not just a coincidence. But it doesn’t seem fair that what
you thought was love leads to that. Yet it happens in this world all the time. And most songs are
about it—most music… Love should make you happy, but there are a lot of unhappy people
walking around out there that tried to love, and it makes you wonder if it’s just an idea, an idea
that just can’t happen, not with what nags you inside. Like it’s something we lost and we know
it, and no matter how hard we try we’re disappointed trying to find it again, but we keep trying
anyway because we know it. We keep waiting in vain with our knowledge. It’s beautiful in a
way. And I thought Frieda was beautiful.
But I should have known when she grew cold. I should have known it didn’t feel right.
Of course I knew she was Bulldog’s girl. It’s just that there were moments alone together when I
thought she loved me, and because she loved me I forgave her—I forgave her past, her history
with other men. I tried to understand that she’d been hurt, which was why she was acting the
way she did. But then there were moments when I looked in her eyes and what I felt then should
have told me something was wrong. It was like she turned off, and I can’t say it was just
indifference I felt. Because it was more than that. I felt what evil was like. Sometimes when I
was with her I felt all alone, even though she was right there. It was like the whole basis of our
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relationship shifted, and instead of being with a friend I found myself with an enemy—someone
against me, in disagreement to everything. The hints in all the little things given about loving
yourself and being who you are. And that was the funny thing. Because she always told me to
love myself like she was telling herself that, but in those times when she was distant everything
about her response to me, from her eyes, to what she said and how she said it, seemed to be
telling me there was something wrong with who I was, that I did nothing right in her eyes—and I
couldn’t please her then, or make her feel special when this happened. Because she made me
feel like a failure. And a woman can be very good at making you feel this way when they want
to. They can bring you low and walk all over you just as easily as they can make it hard to get
your feet on the ground. And I didn’t like how this felt. This insecure feeling, even though I
knew it went with the territory. I felt I didn’t deserve it. Because she wasn’t looking at me when
she manipulated me in this way. She was looking at something in her past, and I knew it.
Frieda’s first love, the first boy she gave her love to—took pictures. Pornographic
pictures. Nude pictures of her that she trusted him to keep private. But he didn’t. And soon her
whole neighborhood knew of them. Her family. Her father. Maybe if there hadn’t been pictures
she could have forgotten it. But they existed—a constant reminder. Of broken trust. Of
nakedness, and vulnerability. And since she couldn’t forget she couldn’t forgive. She couldn’t
forgive herself. And it changed who she became. She had to become the girl in those pictures.
At least this is what Frieda learned. After her father kicked her out, after the boy she thought
loved her left her high and dry.
But that’s not all he left her with. When she was nine months pregnant she decided to
jump from a bridge—the Eads Bridge. Built in 1874 it was the first road and rail bridge across
the Mississippi, connecting St. Louis with East St. Louis. Named after the man, Eads was also
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the one that recommended a jetty system along the Mississippi after the floods of 1890,
narrowing the river’s channel and increasing the speed of the current, deepening the main
channel of the river and preventing floods, but top officials of the Army Corps of Engineer
lobbied Congress for levees and flood walls of their own design—a design that failed in 1927,
causing the disastrous floods then… Eads Bridge was made out of steel, the first of its design.
And Frieda decided to climb it and jump. It was a late Sunday night, and Frieda hadn’t been to
church that day. Of course she drew attention, even at night, bringing fire trucks and police and
curious onlookers. She jumped, but it didn’t kill her. I guess she just wasn’t high enough. And
so with everybody watching she merely swam to shore—downstream, where rescuers were
waiting for her. And she had the baby, healthy, but it was given up for adoption immediately.
Frieda never got a chance to hold her daughter, and who knows what she learned of love, what
she was taught, but then I guess maybe she didn’t need to know what her mother knew. She
would have to learn that on her own.
When I met Frieda her stretch marks were gone. She was a woman. And she acted like
one. I guess it was the way she danced. The way she danced to my music. I played with a fourpiece band then. Me on guitar. This was before amplification. Before a man could play by
himself using pedals, before recycled feedback. Now musicians talk their own language, not
about music really, reading music, or even making it—they talk about their equipment.
Language like this:
“How's the Fishman?”
“Other than the channel 1 XLR input burning out just hours after its first voyage, I love
the thing. Switched to the 1/4" guitar in and run vox off side 2…”
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“Huh. I've never had a problem with the XLR input for channel 1. I agree with the extra
for outdoors. I've been using a Mackie TH15 400 powered cab but recently upgraded to a QSC
K8 with 1000 watts. That oughta do it…”
But when I played it was just a four-piece band. No speakers. We had a woman on
vocals then (she didn’t just play with us—she was Bulldog’s singer—the main event at his place,
her name on the marquee—Evangeline…) At least that was her stage name. I never knew her
real name. But she had quite a set of lungs. She sang with all the boys then, and I was sitting in
on a Saturday gig when she introduced us, because I asked about her after watching her dance—
and that’s how I met Frieda.
At first it was grand. Even the sneaking around. Frieda had a room above the club.
Bulldog usually slept in his office, and like most women she learned his routines well—bored
with them quickly. She hated the way he snored. I think he had a deviated septum or some sort
of complaint—too many broken noses growing up tough. And she hated the smell of his cigars.
So that’s why he never slept in her room. He just paid her visits, which she had down like
clockwork. What was also nice was outside her window there was a fire escape that led down to
the alley behind the place—the back door where the musicians came in, where they lounged on
their breaks so people not accustomed to the smell wouldn’t mind. It was very convenient.
But who would have thought it would be a wink? Just a simple wink. That’s what set it all off—
what got Bulldog suspicious. There’s power in a woman’s wink. The bat of an eye. And when
Frieda would flutter her eyelashes it could make most any man’s tongue drool… You learn of
this just as you learn of love—its silent communications. Less is more when it comes to this.
Because the less someone gives you the more you put yourself into what they give. This is what
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you control. Not how you are loved, but if you will love in your response to this—no matter what
you feel. What you see out of pride or humility. Your better angels or the dark seeds of doubt.
Frieda’s wink just instilled lust. At least that’s what I got out of it when I saw it. But that was
my point of view—where I was coming from—the memories I already had of her, of us, which
that simple wink immediately made me think about—a mix of emotions, feelings of male pride
and that quell of hope after our last argument, our last fight where she made me feel like a
failure again. And it’s funny how you can feel all that, just in a passing moment, my fingers
pressed on strings still leading to the bridge (for I was in the middle of a song)—Evangeline’s
voice the pathetic fallacy to what I was feeling (for it was a love song)… And I hated what we
were fighting about. Because we were fighting about money. It came to me clearly in that
simple blink of her eye. Our last naked argument in her bed.
A musician’s pay isn’t much. That’s why she wouldn’t go with me. Because you see I
wanted her to tell Bulldog. About us. And I guess I was just baffled. Bewildered by that wink
after her response to my pleas. Because she said she could care less about money. She didn’t
care about that. But she knew my salary was unstable. My bills were unstable—what I could
provide her. And I suppose that’s a unique trait of a woman—they see the value of money in a
very practical way. Because money really means nothing to them—mere paper and metal—it’s
what it provides in this world, what they know is necessary—this they use at their discretion.
And it’s not about spending money. It’s how they feel spending it—this the truth that eludes most
men. Men think the amount means something. But it doesn’t to a woman. Enjoyment of life, the
numerous colors outside of black and white, the smell of something cooking, cultured tastes—
dead flowers—a woman shares this with a man just as she shares her body, regaining a little bit
of paradise for all of men’s ponderings on reasoned loss—and this I saw in the hint of a memory,
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like a vivid dream, in that brief moment when I looked up from my guitar and saw her wink as
she danced.
But Bulldog saw it too. And this brings something else to the table when you talk about
the love between two people, another of money’s evil little manipulations, an age-old story—the
clash between classes—that irritating patronizing of rich aristocracy (who keep artists such as
myself as their pets), the smug silver spooners if you will, and the chipped shoulders and
ignorance, the violence, of the poor. Bulldog was a self-made man. And when he saw that wink
he too thought of lust. He thought of the lust for refinement he didn’t have the luck to be born
into. I wanted Frieda, and so did he. I was haunted by the doubts of what maybe I did wrong in
our stormy relationship—what that wink made me think about—our secretive liaisons. And I
thought I needed to change. She made me feel like I needed to change. And it was the same with
Bulldog. Maybe just a little more vague with denial. But instead of thinking he needed more
money, he saw in that wink something he couldn’t offer, for the very brusque nature that allowed
him to become a self-made man lacked the characteristics of a tender lover, and he knew that,
just as we all know our weaknesses brought about by our strengths. Bulldog had to fight for all
he had, but he didn’t know how to fight for Frieda. He didn’t know that fight that money can’t
buy, what muscle can’t move. And his knowledge of what he was unsure of only made him rely
on what he was sure of, even though deep down he knew it would never solve the problem.
I met Frieda that night. After that wink. I climbed the fire escape. She was waiting for me. But
so was Bulldog. With paid men at the door. Law officers. And it wasn’t the marijuana in my
possession. It wasn’t that which got me arrested. Frieda was smoking it in bed. No, it was a
trumped up charge on a dirty gun. A gun they put my fingerprints on. Used in a recent bootleg
heist where an undercover agent was killed. A man with a family.
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And that was the last time I saw her. She never moved. Just the smoke curling up from
her fingers. Her lips thin. Her eyes lidded from her prone position on the silk-sheeted pillows
strewn about the bed. Maybe she didn’t know what to do. Maybe she didn’t know what to say.
If she cared I will never know except in believing it—believing in her memories of me and the
other times I came to her window… As far as I know Bulldog still kept her in that room above
his place after he got me out of the picture. She still worked for him as a hat-check girl. And if it
hadn’t been for the rain, the rain falling then, I wouldn’t be alive telling you this. Telling you
this story of a friendship I once had. And a sold guitar…
And so Jonathon Bonnor went to the County Jail that night he left Frieda’s room in
handcuffs. The St. Clair County Jail. It was the Friday before Memorial Day, 1927. And it was
still raining outside. And maybe if it hadn’t been raining—flooding—Jonathon wouldn’t have
kept his guitar in his possession. This after making a small fuss to a rain-soaked guard about
insuring his instrument didn’t get wet. He wouldn’t have been able to play it during his
incarceration. No one would have heard it. A woman wouldn’t have heard it. A woman named
Zelda Glass. A matron and guard for the female inmates, a secretary. Named a special deputy
sheriff for the county that spring.
Zelda was born and raised in Belleville, the seat of St. Clair County. An alumnus of
Notre Dame and Washington University. And an athlete—a track star during her school days.
In fact her first athletic feat accomplished when she was only 18 months old, when she fell from
a second-story window and was uninjured. This well-documented in county records from the
sheriff’s office—her name in the paper when she was named special deputy sheriff in the spring
of 1927. What isn’t well-known is why she fell from that second-story window. And why she
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set Jonathon Bonnor free that Sunday morning before Memorial Day. Why he was able walk out
of prison during the rains and floods happening then, and how he was able to walk into Duke’s
pawn shop that Memorial Day with his guitar. Maybe David Threnody’s journals say it best:
Yeah, I remember what he said. The way he looked at me while I was eyeing his guitar.
My father recognized his clothes, so he had to say something. But he didn’t really speak to my
father—he spoke to me. That I remember clearly. Because a boy of nine remembers when an
adult talks to him like that… He spoke about a woman, but I recall he was vague, and it seemed
like he was referring to two different women—one woman who got him arrested and one who set
him free. But both of them danced. I do remember he mentioned that. One danced to his music,
and the other had been hurt by it—some sort of fall from a window as a child—from leaning out
too far because she heard music outside… And that’s what he talked about—music. And I was
interested so I listened. I saw the words he spoke. The images they represented. So when he
spoke about a woman, a naked woman—I saw what he was talking about. I saw her. Prostrate
on a bed. The sheets in disarray. The pillows indented from where heads used to be. I saw her
naked back as she reached out, as she fell from the foot of the bed, the sheets crumpled about her
waist and her arms out in front, hands clasped together, her head bowed and her hair falling
over it, the curve of her spine prone, and just the beginning, the beginning curve of her hips
exposed… I saw this. I saw a woman pleading with a man in her bed. Pleading for him not to
leave. But pleading as a woman pleads. Not humbled, but threatening. Her body such as it was,
leaning out and half-exposed, her breasts crushed on the edge of the mattress—not a sight of
supplication, but a temptation—a temptation of another visitor to her bed. Another man to raise
her up from where she had fallen… And in that was the music. I heard it. I heard this man
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playing it. A story of love and sex. These acts conjoined—beautifully perverse. And I saw him
walk away. He had to walk away with this memory, his music sharing it. The last view of a
naked woman, a naked back, hair in disarray covering the face, and the threat, the pain, of
another man touching it—touching this pure vision of loss… And I guess this was my first
introduction to the Blues. What I would play for the rest of my life. Something selfish and
personal, but somehow shared in such a way that it was all ours—a charitable act of forgiveness
for what we can’t forget—given and as such rewarded. Even though it is never spoken of—you
just hear it. You hear it and recognize it in yourself. That elegant mystery. That drug addiction.
That brilliant misunderstanding of being understood. Of feeling that… And so even though this
man was vague, though he seemed to be talking of two different women, I knew they were the
same to him. He saw them as the same bondage and liberation. That both were necessary. That
both were in both…
--David Threnody, childhood recollections—from his journals 1948 to 1955
And how Jonathon Bonnor escaped from prison is no mystery. Just as the rains falling
then, in that great flood of 1927, just as that distinction between hemp and marijuana—the
history of it—all decisive moments, every act that leads to momentous change in the lives of
great and small, in the ants and those who walk through the ant hills—it’s still you, you yourself
decide how’ll you remember it. And usually any choice’s memory yields its importance in how
it makes you recall other choices, and the memories that come from them. This the butterfly
effect, synchronous to our long talk with time… Zelda Glass had memories. She doesn’t
remember falling from that window, but she remembered the music, and what happened after.
You see her father was supposed to be watching her. Her mother working extra shifts at a
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sewing factory for Christmas money. Her father a boiler-operator currently unemployed. Laid
off due to budget cuts at the power plant, but not really because they lacked money. It was due
to financial indiscretions, administrative moral hazards on land speculation, due partly in fact to
the floods of 1890, another bad year for river bottom farmers… Her father was making her a
bottle, and there were carolers outside. And that’s what she heard. The window within her
reach, un-locked and cracked to provide ventilation in the stuffy upstairs rooms—her playroom.
And so she fell listening to the singing, the snow on the ground dampening her fall. And though
she was uninjured it caused injury to her parent’s relationship, already tenuous due to finances.
It led to their divorce. Her mother taking her away to live with her sister. Her father becoming a
drinker… And that’s what Zelda remembers, not the fall, but the music, the songs of carolers
that led to her parent’s divorce. And she blamed herself. And the music haunted her… And so
when Jonathon Bonnor came to prison, his guitar in his possession (his one and only possession),
she was reminded of that fall when she heard him play, making her rounds at mealtime. She
knew he was there on a trumped up charge. Everyone knew. Bulldog Taylor, like many men in
his position at the time, had paid officials in his pocket. Zelda just wasn’t one of them.
And so it was the Sunday before Memorial Day. And the rain falling, the flooding then,
what hastened his escape. The jail was short-staffed. It being a holiday, and many of the men
excused to protect their homes, called to sandbag the levees threatening to break. And Zelda had
the keys. So she asked him to play a tune. A tune for his breakfast. A song her mother once
liked. A song she remembered her mother once danced to after her father and mother split up.
Her mother playing it on the phonograph, staring out the window, unaware that her daughter
watched. A song in waltz time. An influence of the Ragtime of her youth—Joplin’s “The
Entertainer”. Jonathon played a version of it on his guitar. Not the same as the piano Zelda
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remembered from her childhood. Not the same as those carolers that caused her fall. But still
haunting her in a way. And it’s what made her turn the key.
Maybe it reminded her of something. That world we all imagine. Where love lasts
forever, for always, unconditional. Unmarred by what we learn, what we have to do, and what
we have to become. Maybe it made her think of her parents being together, staying together—in
love. It made her think of a world where that happened. Where what she listened to, what
caused her to go to that window, didn’t cause a fall, an innocent mistake, the guilt of harsh
consequences. It was just strange that the music that caused her pain also made her believe in
that—a world where that existed—where two people fell in love and stayed in love… And so
she turned the key. She opened the door that set Jonathon Bonnor free—what led him to Duke
Threnody’s pawn shop—and this how David got his first guitar. This course of events what
maybe makes it exists—that idea of enduring love—just not seen the way we think we’ll see it.
In what we have to do day by day to survive. Zelda’s choice allowing Jonathon to survive.
Because Bulldog didn’t just want to see him incarcerated. There were no illusions that Jonathon
would have made it alive out of that jail. Everyone knew that too. And so maybe that dream
Zelda held onto in that haunting memory of her parents found fruition in its own mysterious way.
The loss and pain in one life yielding forgiveness and freedom to another—connected by that
long talk we have with time. What David Threnody learned to play on a guitar. Jonathon
Bonnor’s guitar. Maybe in a way a friendship that lasted forever. A pawned gift on Memorial
Day… And it gives me this to write. The story of how David Threnody got his first guitar.
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6
Everythin'… Everythin’ gonna be alright this mornin'…
--Muddy Waters
David had no teachers. No one taught him how to play that guitar Jonathon Bonnor left
at his father’s pawn shop. In fact he had to beg his father to let him have it. And he started
slowly. Making his fingers pliant to the simplest of chords. But maybe it’s not right to say he
had no teachers. Because we all do. Maybe just not in a classroom. Not in the role of mentor
and protégé. But tests nonetheless. Pop quizzes to a game we all have to play. In the roles we
choose to what life hands us. Different each day. Yet also quite the same. Motifs underlying
the dichotomies. Paradigms met. Memories reenacted… Just as Zelda Glass had memories that
made her turn the key. Just as Jonathon Bonnor’s ambivalence when he entered that pawn shop.
Giving all he had because he needed money in his last days as a musician of East St. Louis. And
some say he went to Chicago. Others say he went south. To New Orleans… Either way he
followed the river. And just like other musicians he sang about it. He sang to that old familiar
smell. He sang to the tradition of the floods that year. The memories of many branded by it.
That great flood of 1927.
But now it’s six years later. David fifteen. And though he had no teachers he still was
taught. By that same voice we all hear. That voice of encouragement. That voice of doubt.
And maybe it’s what happened to Duke’s eldest son, David’s older brother—Gerald—what
happened in the summer of 1933 that led to the firstborn of the Threnody’s being hospitalized.
The betrayal behind it. The betrayal to one thing—to God, friends and country—and the loyalty
to another, what Gerald remained loyal to by being true to himself. This taught David
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something. It taught him something he would never forget.
They say the key attribute of insanity is repeating the same action over and over
expecting a different result. A weakness in our character we all can trace in our past when we’re
honest with ourselves. Yet most of us are in denial to this brush we have with insanity. We do
not name it in ourselves as such. Giving it other names. Other rationalizations. This the strange
thing when we try to put our finger on it (something David learned as he began placing his
fingers on the simplest of chords—this on a guitar well-worn, the wood beneath the strings worn
from where Jonathon Bonnor’s fingers once rested). We makes sounds to recognize this fear in
ourselves, but we have no names for these sounds—no key to the musical notation. And this is
the fear of the unknown. What we fear not something supernatural. Not known to some God
comforting us, known to some demon taunting us. It is the game. The game between people.
Where our reputations are at stake. For what we fear is not what we don’t know. We fear what
another knows that they keep from us—the game. The game of trade. Inside information the
key to power. The language of group discussions. And the root cause of loneliness.
And maybe David Threnody was touched by it somehow. That voice of encouragement.
That voice of doubt. He heard both and put both into his playing. Soothing somehow in its
honesty. It was a tragic language he heard—much harder to express than comedy. The wit of
that. It’s easy to make fun of things. Maybe not so easy to make someone laugh—truly laugh—
but it’s easy to make fun of things. This sarcasm, this satire—second nature to us. The natural
response to the corruption we learn about. The corruption of love. Morality... And it is
adolescent. A rebellion. And an honest response, to be sure, but immature in its tactics—no
matter how clever or witty. For it is merely the language of that unknown, revealing what is kept
from us—the comedy of exposure. Somehow making it all okay. But that’s why it’s immature,
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small as a response—for indecent exposure doesn’t change what you see. It is merely part of the
destruction. A bawdy ballad to the fire. A coping mechanism that treats the disease, but doesn’t
cure it… This why we need tragedy. We need tears. And they can be tears of laughter. But
there must be tears. A rejuvenation in salt. Preserving the memory. Seasoning the
consummation… It’s hard to make good tragedy. The tool of comedy making it divine, or else
exposing the corruption in its purity. Pure comedy not existing, tasting of what it destroys. Pure
tragedy transforms us into adults. Where we must take some things seriously. And feel pain.
Maybe that’s why David Threnody sang The Blues. He heard that voice. That voice of
encouragement. That voice of doubt. And inside he took it. Making a language not regularly
communicated. It soothed those inner demons we all have. Those demons that make us laugh
when we can’t cry. And David played to them. He played to what was within all of us. What
was in his brother Gerald. What made him do what he did… It came out in his songs. One in
particular. One of his early songs. Before the war, the war that brought our country out of its
depression. And maybe there’s comedy in that. In what came out in David’s songs. In what
came out of contemporary satire then. Something seen globally now. Not just personal. Not
just national. But universal. Connecting us all. To calling the bluff. If economies are to exist at
all. The people within them, suffering—each with their own stories to tell, their own songs to
sing—what they lost because somebody else gambled, what they lost because of their own
risks… Maybe there is comedy in that. Typical in how it benefits one while ridiculing and
causing pain to another. The way of all money and laughter. Because how easy is it to hurt
someone when it doesn’t affect you? Do you give this thought? When you’re making a quick
buck? Garnering an easy laugh? That is why there is tragedy in comedy. What’s so light and
easy in it actually carrying an unseen weight to the psychology of the target, the object of what
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we try to get one over on. And yet we pride ourselves in it. We pride our hustles and our wit.
This the corruption from which it stems. The insanity of profit speculation with no capital to
back it up. Only war reestablishing the natural distribution of resources. That loss of patriotism.
The cause of expatriation. This happening over and over. The balance to all stories. To all
songs that satirize the sadness of it.
It was a song David never recorded. Only the music sheets what we have left of it. The
dedication there—the dedication he made of it to his brother, Gerald Threnody:
If I was a woman I’d surrender all my claims
Yes, If I was a woman I’d surrender all my claims
You can’t spend what you ain’t got
And you know no woman is to blame…
Feeling a woman’s love is like heaven
And feelin’ no love is hell
Yeah, feeling a woman’s love is like heaven
And feelin’ no love is hell…
You can act like you’re lovin’…
But a woman can tell…
No love can make a man go insane
Yes, no love can make a man go insane
He can work for that money
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But his time gives it another name…
I wish I was a woman
I’d surrender all my claims…
Yeah, I sure wish I was a black-skinned woman
I’d surrender all my claims…
You don’t feel what you ain’t got
And you know no woman is to blame…
--Black Woman Moan… Written by David Threnody: July 18, 1933
Maybe this song David wrote tells some of the story, but it doesn’t tell all of it. It has to
be heard to be told. And we don’t have his voice to listen to. We don’t have his guitar in the
background. We do have the story of Gerald though. The story of what happened to David’s
older brother. And it has to be heard as well. It can’t be told:
Gerald was the oldest of the Threnody brothers, but he wasn’t the biggest. Duke
Threnody wasn’t a large man in stature, and Cleota gave the appearance of being petite and
demure. Perhaps Gerald inherited this from her. This somehow transmitted to him as the first
child from her womb.
In the summer of 1933 Gerald Threnody was twenty-seven years old. He was still a
young man, but that wasn’t considered a young man in those times. At twenty-three, when the
stock market crashed, he was already married and had a young daughter. He worked delivery for
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the local grocery stores, black-owned, a job Duke Threnody lined up for him with his business
connections. It was good money in those days, and he was his own boss, most of his money
made on commissions, delivering produce from the river and stockyards. But after the crash of
’29 the market shrank, and his routes declined. And like many his debts accrued, his assets
slowly sold off to keep his family in a rented tenement and the water and electric paid. To insure
milk was at the door every day for his newborn daughter—Elsa. But then there wasn’t even
enough money to pay the power, and the milk bottles were left empty on the doorstep, and it was
a cold winter. His wife came down with a bad case of bronchitis, and the baby became sick as
well, with a high fever.
And so how do you define a man? How do you define him when this happens? For
Gerald was unable to provide. He was unable to support his family. No money for doctors or
medicine. No money for heat. He did not abandon his family, but fate led his family to abandon
him. His wife and baby not alone while they were sick—Gerald at their bed-side, feeding them
cold, water-downed soup, no meat to the broth. He provided the emotional security they needed.
He did that as a husband and a father. Making them secure that they were not alone. But no
money. That he couldn’t provide. Though every day he went looking for work. Hired
sometimes as a day laborer, but this always temporary—never enough… And his wife and child
died that winter. They died of a sickness that could have been cured. And so what kind of man
was Gerald? Where did he fail? As a man?
As stated, he wasn’t large in stature. He had small hands and feet. Maybe that’s why he
wasn’t picked some days when he waited with the other men at the employment offices, at the
gates to the factories, looking for work. Maybe if he’d been bigger his wife and child would not
have died. In that slow process where what he once had—a good living and a comfortable home
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for his family, a safe and secure home—was stripped away, a piece at a time. Sold or given up.
Sacrificed. And so what happens? What happens to a man when this happens? For with every
piece of furniture, with every item his wife and child once treasured taken from them ( in the end
Elsa only had one toy left—a ragged doll she clutched to in her sick bed), with every bill that
eventually went unpaid, the collectors coming—what does this do to a man? A man who has to
look into his wife’s eyes, his daughter’s eyes, his answer not a yes. The bad news read from his
demeanor, his shrunken stature. It was like his pride, his honor—was taken from him—piece by
piece—cruelly slow, with occasional false hopes that it would get better. And so Gerald
Threnody became the small man that he was. Not in the physical sense. But in his soul. In a
heart broken by pain and loss. And by the time he was twenty-seven, his wife and child dead, it
changed him. It changed who he was.
And he went home. He returned to the apartment above the pawn shop. To his father
and mother. His younger brothers. And David. Duke and Cleota struggling as well, as all their
neighbors were at the time. The pawn shop barely staying solvent, and this only because of
other’s insolvency. Gerald returned to his father’s pawn shop and worked there. Handling
inventory while David perched on a stool, experimentally strumming on his guitar—well-worn
now from his use and not just from Jonathon Bonnor’s. Gerald listened to David play, and it
soothed him. It comforted his memories of his wife and child as he did figures in the balance
book. And in a way he almost prayed to it. Like it answered his call. His cry of grief. But he
never told David this. He never commented on his playing. That confidence was given to a
whore instead. A woman named Elsie. She in a way almost acting as a familiar to his dead
daughter. In her name. In what he calls her. For he calls her by her Christian name—the same
as his daughter’s—and not by the name she wishes to be called.
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“So do you think someone answers. After?”
“Who?” Elsie replies. She’s sitting up in bed, next to Gerald, who lays there on the
pillows, staring at her naked back, curved as she wipes a rag between her legs.
“Do you think God answers? To our grief?”
“No, but I think you’re right… I think someone answers.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know… Maybe not who you expect.”
She turns to him. She turns her head and looks back at him, down to where he lies, his
fingers caressing her back. She folds the wet rag and tosses it to the foot of the bed. Then she
rises, walking naked in his full view to a vanity where she sits in front of a mirror, grabbing a
hairbrush. She has long black hair. It curled at the ends. She applies the brush to them. Her
head pulled in the downward strokes. She watches him from the mirror.
And he watches her. She still has a good body, though she’s older than him. Her breasts
only sagging slightly as her waist twists to the ministrations of the hairbrush, the rolls of fat there
seen by him as voluptuous, not indecent, but necessary—needful to what he touched when he
made love to her.
“What should I expect?”
“Well, not an answer… more a response that it was heard. If you listen back that’s
answer enough… Do you think I’m beautiful?”
“Yes…”
“Are you just paying me to say that?”
“Why would I pay to say that?”
“We all pay… that’s what you should expect.”
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Gerald leans over the bed to a nightstand and pulls out a cigarette. He thinks about what
Elsie just said. And he thinks about what happened before he came to her room. The two
homeless men he met along the darkened street on this unlit corner of East St. Louis where her
house stood—she not the only inhabitant of it—for it was a house of ill-repute.
He met them randomly. And in this maybe God can be found—extrapolated from
statistics—determined. God in science. Existing within and without faith. A real variation. The
mean and the median. A confidence interval in our standard deviations. For randomness is a
science. Theorized and represented by numbers, both negative and imaginary. And we can
place our faith in the cut-off rates. The time it takes to reach them. The mechanisms of the
metabolism. Cause and effect. The laws of reactions. And not that cause determines effect.
That one thing leads to the other. This proven by skeptics. Our world defined by our beliefs.
Certain mindsets that enable our facts to be what we want them to be. The infinite diversity in
this. And no boring sameness in all the grand equalizers… Maybe this where God lies. Hidden
in what we call real. Real in what we call hidden. Given so many names, yet nameless.
Explained away by all foreseeable factors in those miracles we call a point of view… And
Gerald had a point of view. He saw homeless men on a walk to a whore. Comforting and
comforted by this. No money for one so that it could be given to another. Just cigarettes
distributed evenly as charity, saving what was needed for after. For what he needed in bed.
Feeling dignified for what he had to give.
Gerald’s throat is dry and burns with the smoke, his head propped on the pillows,
watching Elsie through the mirror, watching his own reflection through what drifts up from the
cigarette between his fingers. He sees her eyes and he sees his. The same look in both. Almost
glassed over, and not bored, but empty of surprise. This where God is and isn’t—in our eyes
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surprised, in our eyes sure of what we see. Elsie and Gerald see objects. They are objects to
each other, and that is why their eyes are old. No longer as a child’s—subjective. For they are
together for their own reward. And though it’s not really business, it is an honest trade.
Something given for something returned. The proper drugs involved. The right brain chemistry
for them to do it again—their appointed meetings… But the men Gerald met on the street
weren’t appointed, though they had that same look in their eyes (when he gets close enough to
see them)—they were asking without want—no real need though their words said differently.
And when Gerald told them he had no money they settled for a cigarette. The only difference
between them how they walked on, for one said “God bless you” and one did not, instead
complaining about the heat and the wish to take a bath.
Gerald reflects on this. On this difference in partings, and he wonders if it means
anything. If it’s as Elsie said, some answer back to his quest for meaning. Some verified price.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Your hair.”
“My hair? Why?”
“I’m wondering why you don’t cut it.”
“Why would I cut it?”
“So you could be what you want.”
“And what do I want?”
“You want the same thing I want… You want to be a man.”
“Is that what you really want? Is that the answer you’re looking for?” She turns around
again to look at him. Not using the mirror.
“Sure… because I’m just like you.”
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“And what am I?”
“You’re just another girl in the world…”
Elsie smiles. Looking in the mirror again. Gerald’s image behind her out of focus. She
sees the lines in her face the smile forms—the look in her eyes. Almost something dangerous.
Something that shouldn’t be spoken of. Some deadly clarity. Like the rag she left at the foot of
the bed. She knows about Gerald’s wife and child. She knows the answer he seeks. But she
can’t answer for him. She can only open the door when he comes in. Taking the money he
leaves behind… And that’s what’s tragic in tragedy. How comedy is used to try and cure it,
thus becoming it. How we do not want to cry when others cry. We don’t even want to be
around it. Its reminders of sadness. Maybe because it reminds us of our own sadness. And this
we can’t face. Proud of our wit to escape it. Wording it in such a way that we can laugh.
Maybe even making the one who cries laugh. Teaching them that. Our own excuses for why we
don’t waste our time with it. Feeling good about ourselves if it’s accomplished. Like we got one
over on it. And it’s not cheating—we don’t see it as cheating tears—but an embrace of repeating
something obscure and making it our own. We see it as a noble triumph over death and
suffering. Finding ways to laugh in the face of it… Elsie sees this in her face. What all whores
see in the mirror. The key to their survival—accepting money in the world’s oldest profession.
“I wouldn’t want to be a man.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be a man either. I want what you have.”
“And what do I have?” Elsie still looking in the mirror. Gerald’s image still out of focus.
“You have what you see every time you look. I don’t have what I see.”
“You never know… you might have what you’re looking for.”
“And what am I looking for?”
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“What you look like in other’s people’s eyes…”
Elsie focuses on Gerald now in the mirror, her face now out of focus. She puts the
hairbrush down. Her hair straight. No longer tangled from where her head rested on the pillows
strewn about bed. The pillows now propping up Gerald’s head. His cigarette nearly burned
away.
“Do you miss them?”
“Who?”
“You know… do you miss how they looked at you?”
“I remember how they looked at me in the end. How her little hand looked in mine. And
how she placed it on my head. As it was bowed in prayer by her sick bed. That’s why I want to
look different. That’s why I want to be different.”
Elsie rises and walks over to where Gerald lays. She puts her hand on his head, running
her fingers through his hair. Closing her eyes for a second, almost as if she’s giving him a
blessing. Gerald is eye level with her groin. He stares at the hair there. His eyes half-closed.
Soothed by her touch. Soothed by remembering.
“My next appointment will be here soon.”
“I know… Just don’t stop. Don’t stop, Elsa. Don’t stop what you’re doing…”
And how it happened was the next morning. It happened in the morning hours. Not long
after the pawn shop opened. Gerald opened the store for his father, who was becoming used to
sleeping in, his body aging, wearier to the light of sunrise. In fact, Duke let his son handle most
of the shop’s business now, and he stayed in bed longer with his wife.
Maybe this is what Duke wanted. What his body wanted. And maybe not like those
homeless men Gerald met who wanted to be alone, and got what they wanted. In this maybe the
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great betrayal. And not to God and country, friends and family, but to yourself. The curse in the
genius of it. Getting what you want and not what you need. Because have you thought about it?
How easy it is to hurt someone if it doesn’t affect you? Maybe it seems so easy, but it isn’t. For
in that long talk we have with time it leads to our greatest depression. Not just seen in countries
where moral hazards are overlooked for a quick buck, dismantling economies, not in the ease of
garnering a laugh at someone else’s expense, not just in the statistical determinations that make
us wonder of God—because it all comes back to you. What’s within you. Those inner demons
that make us laugh when we should cry. When we laugh because we don’t know what else to
do. Because it’s inevitable—we get what we want. Only to discover it’s not what we want at all.
For it’s not what we need… And it’s the same with wanting to be alone—this urge for
solitude—it’s easy to seek this answer. To listen for it when we don’t hear in others what we
want to hear. Some understanding that doesn’t differ from our own. That hurt when others fail
us. When they leave us in death, or what’s worse—because they choose to. And so maybe Duke
is happy to sleep in. There are no ghosts in his bed. The body of his wife is still there, breathing.
And he just has to reach out to feel her warmth. He just has to awaken to see his children.
And that’s how it happened the next morning. When that homeless man walked into
Duke’s pawn shop with a gun. The same man Gerald randomly met the night before. And not
the one that said “God bless you”, but the one who complained of the heat and wanted to take a
bath. This after Elsie gave Gerald her blessing. For the answer he sought. For what he wanted
that he couldn’t be. Even if he didn’t fit the definition of a man. With the loss of his wife and
daughter. With his small hands and feet. With the almost feminine way he talked that made you
wonder… And David was there. He was downstairs in the pawn shop with Gerald when that
homeless man walked in with a gun. He was strumming on his guitar after his breakfast.
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Soothing Gerald just as if he had his hand on his head bowed in prayer. What Gerald
remembered of his daughter as he sat beside her sick bed. What a whore tried to give him as an
answer for his comfort. Something Gerald never answered back. Never commenting on what
David played.
But then maybe Gerald answered that morning. He chose what he would not betray.
And so in someone being a bad person he was allowed to be good. You never think of yourself
as bad. Just as you think little of how easy it is to hurt someone when it doesn’t affect you.
When it’s for your own gain. We never think of ourselves as bad people, but bad people exist.
Necessary in our equations of heroes. Of doing the right thing. And that’s what Gerald did that
morning the homeless man walked into the pawn shop with a gun:
“Give me your money!” The gun raised and aimed at Gerald’s chest.
“Okay… Okay… I’ll give you what we have.”
Gerald opens the cash register. David behind him. Out of focus to the man aiming the
gun. Still perched on his stool with his guitar on his lap.
“I know you. Don’t I? I know you! I’ve seen you before—what you look like.”
“Just take the money… nobody has to get hurt.”
The homeless man still hasn’t taken a bath. And he is sweating. The morning already
hot. He awakening to it. Sleeping on a park bench. Old newspapers for his pillow. Old news of
an economy leading to war. The morning dew leaking through the holes in his shoes. He
awakes hungry and hot. No cigarettes. His only possession the gun. A super .38. A
government pistol from when he was good. When he still had a job. Before his country failed
him and the economy caused him to lose his family. His story not much different than Gerald’s.
Other than the fact he’s now holding the gun and aiming it at Gerald, placing him in the role of
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what we would call a bad person.
Gerald places the money from the cash register on the counter and then puts his hands in
the air. That’s when David moves, putting him in focus.
“You! Where do you think you’re going?”
David freezes at the end of the counter. Holding his guitar in front of him. The homeless
man franticly grabs the money on the counter, placing it in the pocket of his stained and dirty
trousers. He keeps the gun aimed at Gerald, but when David moves again, the hand pointing the
gun is directed towards him.
“Hold on! We don’t want any trouble! Just keep pointing the gun at me. He’s my
younger brother. He’s not going to hurt you.”
And now Gerald moves. Towards David. Towards the end of the counter. The homeless
man’s eyes look down. They look down to the guitar.
“Give me that guitar! I used to play myself. Pretty good too, you know… Seems like a
long time ago. Before my wife left me… Yeah, I’ll take that too!”
“You can’t have my guitar,” David says. His voice not yet broken. Still a boy’s. A boy
of fifteen. A boy’s look of fear on his face. Something he’s still trying to resolve. Still trying to
find an answer for.
“I’ll take that guitar just like I’ll take your money and anything else I want… now give it
to me!”
And the homeless man makes a move towards David. And David reacts. He reacts as a
boy. Scared. He turns to run. To the back stairs leading up to where Duke and his wife are still
sleeping. That’s when the gun goes off. Just a split second after Gerald also moves. From
behind the counter. The only difference the gun is aimed lower now. Not at Gerald’s chest.
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And that’s how it happened. That’s how Gerald got what he wanted. What he wanted,
but maybe not what he needed. The homeless man running out of the pawn shop after the gun
goes off. Never to be seen again. Not even randomly. And David runs to his brother. Where he
lays at the end of the counter. The wound not to his chest—the bullet piercing his groin instead.
In the split second he stepped between David and the homeless man the gun’s aim lowered—a
statistical explanation for this. In a point of view where maybe God exists.
And Duke awakens to the gun shot. What happens after the cuts and blurs of things out
of focus. The doctors at the hospital unable to save what was wounded, but saving Gerald’s life.
Stopping the bleeding… And this all happened in the summer of 1933. When David was fifteen
years old. As he was just learning of that area where Gerald was wounded. Teaching him
something… And Gerald did not stay after that. He did not stay in the country. After being
released from the hospital he took a train. A train and then a ship to France. Gerald’s family
never seeing him again. David never seeing him again. Elsie never seeing him again… But a
song was gotten out of it. The song David wrote. A song about a whore that tried to comfort his
brother—teaching him something. It taught him something he would never forget.
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7
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees…
--Robert Johnson
And now it’s 1938. David is twenty. Those five years in between. Those five years
since his brother Gerald was wounded and became what he wanted the subject of what comes
next. Because it’s not the whole story. Not of what happened that summer morning in 1933.
Because when that gun went off it wasn’t just one shot. Two shots were fired. One wounding
Gerald. And the other a ricochet—a bullet hole through David’s guitar… It made it sound
different. The guitar. David heard it after in his playing. And it changed how he played. It
made it new.
But that’s not the whole story either. Elsie, or her Christian name—Elsa—was also not
just a random character. Not just a whore who tried to comfort Gerald in what he wanted. What
he needed after his wife and child died. Because she was at that train. That train sixteen years
prior—she was the whore Dewey gave his flower to. Before she was run off by those white
women… And she was at that train station—the Relay Depot—for a lover. A dead lover. A
man killed in action on the front in France. She told Gerald of it once. A man she thought about
when she closed her eyes. That look that passed through her eyes when she smiled in the mirror.
When she comforted Gerald one last time by running her fingers through his hair. Her hand on
his head, bowed in prayer like when he remembered his sick daughter.
And so it makes you wonder. How these things can be tied together. How they happen.
And if it really means anything. If it’s supposed to mean anything. If there really are such a
thing as bad people. And how you know them. Perhaps some things gone unforgiven. Some
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things never forgiven. And you have to go on living your life this way. Remembering this.
Reminded by it when you don’t want to be. By how seeming random events tie together. Giving
new sound to the story. Changing some things, but really changing nothing. Just like David’s
guitar had a new sound after what happened to his brother Gerald. How it made what he played
old.
It was Mardi Gras. A happy time. A time of judgment, but not your regular form of
judgment—more of a laughing nod, a comedy to the corruption not tragic—a time of revelry.
Where people dress up in sarcasm, sarcastic to whoever or whatever is in power, and their failure
at it, as is inevitable in anyone trying to usurp it. In anyone trying to take control. And that’s
what time it was—a time of admitting no one is in control. No one was in charge. Not over an
economy trying to get back on its feet. Legislative and executive branches haggling deals—New
Deals. Over really something very old. Changing some things, but really changing nothing.
Just like the sound of David’s guitar.
He was out of school by then. An average student. No honors. Less than perfect
attendance. Really just sort of anonymous. Below the radar for the unimportant things you look
for. Like honors and perfect attendance—clean records… He’d dated some girls by this time
too. Learning. Reminded of his brother Gerald. What he lost and what he wanted—in the end
getting what he needed. Just how it always works out. This also really something very old.
Why girls think boys are silly and vice versa. That miracle called a point of view—how we see
it differently… And maybe sometimes this is forgiven. You don’t have to live your life feeling
that it isn’t. And this happens when you don’t say anything. When you don’t speak up, asserting
your miracle—your point of view. The real miracle happening in that whoever or whatever
you’re seeking forgiveness from sees it your way, without you saying anything. And how this is
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communicated a mystery. Silent. But somehow it gets a second look. A re-determination, and
you’re forgiven. The seeming random events tie together. And there is synchronicity—a light
goes off. The answer coming from the dark. Pre-cognitive and outside of cause and effect.
Because you created no cause in your silence. The cause found in the forgiver, after—when they
have time to reflect. About what you didn’t call to their attention. How it comes to their
attention the miracle… We are all taken to school on this. The teacher anonymous. The lesson
un-graded.
You want what you’re not born into. And this is the subject of what comes next. Tied in
with Gerald—what happened to him and what it taught David that he would never forget. Tied
in with the season—that time before Lent. Tied in with a salted life—the beginning of David’s
manhood. How you learn honesty—real honesty. When you’re no longer eager to please.
Because you can’t be honest when you’re eager to please. There’s fear in eagerness. And
there’s no honesty in fear… It’s a part of growing up. Becoming a man or woman. The
knowledge of what being eager to please gets you. That anxiety. Trying to please someone or
something spans really to the infinite. A never-ending frustration. A worry to do this or that, but
always something left out, fallen short, unaccomplished. It can never be gratified. It is a want
that is stillborn. And as you get older your learn this. Your learn this honesty honestly. That if
your goal is to please someone or something to be happy you’ll never be happy. Because in all
honesty it’s taken for granted. Sometimes even with intentional malevolence—to control you,
keep you on your toes—a slave to another’s whims. Because the truth is you can’t make
someone else happy. And the sooner you learn this the better… This the salt that seasons you.
Salt to your life. A fear laid to rest. A burden made easier. And how real honesty is acquired.
You must do what pleases you. This is how a man becomes a man. A woman a woman. And
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maybe, just maybe, if your moral intentions are good—you’re doing all you can to please
someone else anyway. And you can truly be what you’re born into. You can be what you want.
There’s a trick to this though. What’s either comic or tragic about the honesty you
acquire. Something David learned out on the golf course, what led him down to Mississippi,
what led him to join the Army—caddying for a retired Colonel to earn money once he was out of
school. Because David had learned tragedy from his brother Gerald. In that ricocheted bullet
that gave his guitar a new sound. He learned how comedy is in tragedy, and how tragedy is in
comedy. In what we want and what we need. He learned the roles we play and the roles chosen
for us from this. And though he was eager to have this old retired Colonel like him, he learned to
be honest with him in a funny sort of way. Maybe learned from what he couldn’t forget of
Gerald. Being reminded every time he played his guitar after. For there is an abrasive form of
honesty and an honesty that can make you laugh. And maybe first you have to learn this
abrasive form to practice the subtler craft of being truthful with humor. Because at first you’re
still a little afraid. You’re afraid to be yourself and tell the truth. And fear begets fear. You act
unafraid to tell the truth to make others afraid. And many people never leave this stage, this
level of honesty, priding themselves in being consistent, defending this practice to explain why
they’re not well-liked—because they think they’re telling the truth and that there’s no nice way
about it. But once you’re more comfortable with the truth you see the laughter in it—you find it
in what you reveal being honest. David learned this out on the golf course, he learned it from the
Colonel he caddied for in the summer months of ’36 and ’37, taking his advice once he was out
of school, and he took it with him when he first walked on a stage with his guitar. When he first
began to play in Soulard. His mother seeing his first performance in 1938 during the Mardi Gras
celebration there—his first paid performance. He learned to be honest on stage without being
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abrasive, without trying to please his audience. And so he performed well.
Maybe he learned how to answer to his name. That first question he heard asked as a boy
in early dreams. In what he recalled of his first meeting with a musician. And the conversations
he had with his dreams of it later. Because you lose time in dreams, in sleep. Your sense of it.
And maybe in this we come closest to God. And the honest truth. After all, if we didn’t sleep
we’d have too much time on our hands. Idle time. Which is good sometimes—when you have
some catching up to do. But when you have too much time on your hands you become anxious.
You become eager. You become afraid. Too much time leaves you time to worry. And some
things better left alone become tampered with. You begin to tinker with your memories. Second
guessing. Because usually the first thought is the best thought. Why this is so you shouldn’t
second guess. For it’s like playing God, but you don’t get close to it awake. In fact you get
farther away. Reflections on reflections, and you become easily lost. And this is doubt—the evil
side of time. When you question what you’ve done, what you didn’t do, and other’s roles in this.
Minor things become major. And what could have easily been forgotten instead becomes
dwelled on—fear creeping in. You lose honesty. You lose faith. In yourself and in others.
Intentions unseen at first suddenly appear. And you don’t know what’s real anymore. You
forget how to answer. To what is called forth in your sleep.
It was about this time that he learned to slide. He learned slide guitar. Metal to the
fingers of his left hand. Sliding out of the note. Expressing loss. What you learn trying to
impress a woman. And what is given in order to do this. A movement of the hips. Of frets.
The haunting sound of the Devil in a turnaround. And all privacy—all private thought to the
soul— lost…
They were standing behind a tree. At first they thought the ball was lost. But David
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found it in the tall grass. Enough room still for the old Colonel to make a swing.
“It’s what you associate with.”
“What?”
“Associations… that’s how you know where you are. That’s how you found it, right?
You followed it with your eyes. And without thinking you associated it with landmarks. You
associated it with this tree here…”
The old Colonel didn’t really show his age, even for a white man. There was no gray in
his hair. Not even in his beard. Only the crow’s feet around his eyes told something. The tan
lines hiding the wrinkles. The softened skin and muscles. He was of slight build. Only a small
paunch about the waist. Skinny arms and legs. But a chest and shoulders held back by a back
that was still strong. At least strong enough to still make a full swing with his golf club. A feat
for a man nearing sixty. And you almost didn’t notice it—the thumb missing. The thumb from
the right hand. Lost from a grenade in the battle of Verdun. Actually a bullet—a ricochet that
won him a medal—a silver star. The enemy grenade tossed from the trenches, his hand wounded
as he returned the toss climbing a ladder—saving several men in his company.
The Colonel had a good swing, and a low handicap. The lost thumb causing his only
weakness—a fade to his shots. His club face opening up at impact because of his grip, causing a
slice to his drives, an altered stance to his approach shots to the green. He was addressing the
ball as he spoke, as he spoke to David, who was holding the bag.
“It’s the same with people, you know. That’s how you know where you are. The people
you’re with, the people you associate with, are landmarks too…”
And it was David’s first paid performance, in Soulard—Mardi Gras 1938. That’s when
his domain was established. He found his address. And the slide to his guitar was just the first
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step. The first step for him going electric. Because he took a trip that past summer. Hitchhiking
south at the Colonel’s suggestion. Just south of Memphis—into Mississippi. To a place called
Horn Lake—where the Colonel was from. Where he taught because you see he was a
schoolteacher before the war. He taught English. And that was how he knew of a place. A
place where the Blues were played. Out on Highway 61, if you traveled it south—down to
Clarksdale and Yazoo City—to Jackson…
“That’s where you’ll find it. What you’re eager to find. What you’re looking for—that
association. So you’ll know where you are… There ain’t no better place to find that honest
sound. Your honest sound. I heard some good players down there… Before the war.”
“I just want to play better.”
“Yeah, I bet you do. I’m sure you ain’t bad now, but if you really want to learn that
guitar you always talk about that’s where you need to go. They’ll teach you what you need to
know down there. And maybe you’ll even find out why you’re so eager to know it… Because
it’s a girl—ain’t it? Yeah, I know all about trying to impress a woman. Sometimes a man will
sell his soul for that—won’t he? Play that guitar well and you might even get some pussy. And
you can stop hanging out with Rosy Palm and her five sisters—you know what I’m sayin’?
Course in my case I lost a sister, but at least it was the ugly one—the ugly thumb… Ha Ha…”
The Colonel waggles a bit, gripping the club again with his bad hand. He takes a swing
with his altered stance. The tree not really in his way. Not with his slice. The ball goes high
and fades right from the spin on the open face of the club—a seven iron—but it falls short of the
green, landing in a sand bunker. The Colonel keeps his position in the follow-through, watching
where the ball lands. David behind him, shielding his eyes with a hand salute to his forehead.
“Shit… sometimes this game really pisses me off. But somehow I still love it. That’s
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something else you’ll learn about women.”
David hoists the golf bag to his shoulder and follows the Colonel back onto the fairway.
They walk side by side up to the green. David on the Colonel’s left, always just one step
behind—out of courtesy.
“Your father should be telling you this, but I’ll tell you too. Be careful who you pick as
friends. Especially if you go out on the road like I suggest. If you go down to Mississippi. It
don’t seem like much at first—getting to know somebody. But you gotta trust your gut. Don’t
associate with people that ain’t your own kind. You’ll know what I mean. Stay in your
station—the people you were born into. And if you digress from that always go higher. A man
don’t need a friend in low places…”
“Well I talk to you, don’t I? And you’re white.”
“Yes I know. And don’t you know I talk down to you? Not because I’m white. Not just
because I pay you to carry my bag out here on this godforsaken golf course… You think it’s
because I think I’m better than you—don’t you?”
“Well why else would you do it?”
“Boy you are just a kid! I ain’t no better than you. I’m just older, and I know. And what
I think I know is I know more than you… Ha Ha! That’s what you gotta learn, son. People
who talk down to you just think they know. And half the time they don’t know. That’s why it’s
a bluff. For show… Think about it. Have you ever been caught? Caught in something you did
wrong? Sometimes you know it, and whoever caught you knows it. But then there are those
times when you get away with what you thought you wouldn’t get away with, and you get caught
with things you thought you did right. You see what I mean? Good intentions don’t mean shit in
this world, boy! Don’t be eager. Because good and bad don’t mean shit. It’s about what gets
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attention and what don’t. And mostly it’s just bullshit. Because so many bad things go
unnoticed. And what people fuss about really don’t matter none—it’s just that someone higher
up noticed it and wants to let you know that they noticed so they give you the illusion that they
know—that you think they know everything. And if you believe it they got you… Remember
that if you go down to Mississippi… It’s bullshit, boy. And that’s why. That’s why you
shouldn’t associate with an old man like me…”
And I learned from him. I learned the rules of the game. A game where you play against
yourself. Just as I learned from my brother Gerald. How everybody read my brother wrong,
and what it did to him—what it made him become. I learned what we read in images. How we
place our importance in them. Forgetting sometimes what they represent. Because it’s about
what gets attention. What gets noticed. A bleep on the radar. A detected discrepancy.
Something differing. Left for someone else to see. Someone that follows you. Someone checking
your work. This is what gets noticed. What draws attention. And not really the work, but what
it represents. The image it poses. Making someone other than yourself look bad—a tarnished
reflection of your own image. A measurable refraction—a bad shot putting your blame into
focus for all to see… This is what we read. Quickly. In first impressions. That indelible mark
etched in the glass—a smudge—seen in the mirror of our eyes. It’s how you smell fear. A shying
away that brings doubt into whether to trust someone. It’s a loose connection that screws up the
whole circuit board, causing that momentary lapse in communication that backlogs the whole
system, leaving our operators scrambling to catch up on missed calls—delayed cues… And how
fragile this really is! What we read in these representations. These images. Sometimes we only
give it a moment’s thought before we make our judgments—usually right—but if delved deeper
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what does it really mean? And what happens when we misread? When we miss the unseen
breaks? Maybe we’re not really paying attention, or maybe the image put into focus before us is
false—a deception. Intentional slight of hands. Bumbling dishonesties. And what I learned is if
it’s all just about the images it’s easy to create illusions, and that’s what it all becomes. You
learn to read and be read. In life, the skill of creating your image—what you want people to
read—how you become a confidence man. This how it becomes a confidence game. What really
is no longer really mattering. The image only mattering. The outcome. The result… And so it
becomes just a house of cards. A menagerie where we all walk around in masquerade. In fear
of smelling of fear. The illusion of our happiness the effectiveness of our falsities. This merely
measured in the number of strokes it takes for us to find the hole… And it takes all kinds. It
takes all kinds I guess to learn this. We see the weak and poor—the tortured sensitives— in
people with bad tells, bad poker faces. We measure success in the blank stares of our bluffs. In
making others fold to the penalties of lost balls… All of us really lonely. Lonely to those
moments when we can finally expose our true vulnerability. When someone frees us to do so.
And this we call love. This our blind search in that funhouse of mirrors where we uphold our
images. Tallied in our scorecard we keep with ourselves. Where we hope for birdies, but we’ll
settle for making par…
--David Threnody, on playing golf before the war—from his journals 1941 to 1948
The golf course the old Colonel played was off of St. Charles Rock Road. Built in 1901,
Normandie Golf Course was the oldest public golf course west of the Mississippi River. It was
designed by Robert Foulis, a student of Old Tom Morris of St. Andrews. It had unique routing
and a throwback style, Bermuda fairways and undulating greens. The Colonel may have had a
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bad slice, a fade due to his missing thumb, but he could putt. He knew the greens of Normandie.
He knew how to read them.
And David took his advice. In the summer of 1937 he left his father and mother, his
older brothers, and he took a bus to Memphis. From there he bummed rides. Not making it very
far, but making it to Horn Lake, where his ride broke down—the driver putting too much oil in
his Ford at a gas station near the bus station in Memphis. The Colonel gave him an address. Of
a schoolteacher friend. An old maid who taught at the same school where he taught English
before he volunteered as an officer to fight in France. She provided him a meal and a bed. And
from there he walked. Hitching short rides here and there taking him further south. He had
fifteen dollars in his pocket. From caddying at the golf course. And he had his guitar, Jonathon
Bonnor’s guitar, with him.
And of course it was a crossroads. A tree. Not unlike the trees lining the Bermuda
fairways he walked with the Colonel—where David took his rest. And not like the trees of the
South—the live oaks with their Spanish moss. Denser. Its trunk thick with age… It was a hot
and humid August afternoon, and David needed some shade. A sign along the road, near the
tree—marking it as Highway 61 South… He was almost asleep. That’s when the car came over
a hill, slowing, coming to a stop at the crossroads—an old beat-up Ford similar to his first ride
from Memphis. And the rest David should tell:
It was like I was in a triangle. The shade from the tree looked like that. The point of it,
where the shade ended and the sun began, directed towards that car. Towards the man that
stepped out. A black man in a black suit. A gold pocket watch hanging from a chain attached to
one of the suit buttons. His eyes hidden by a black felt hat. A hat he tipped to the sign on the
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road… He wasn’t a big man. Not tall. But you could tell he ate well. His suit tight around his
chest. And as he walked over to where I was sitting under that tree I saw his hands, his fingers—
the fingernails uncut, long and sharp, but clean underneath—no dirt under them. And as he
came close he was smiling. A broad smile. His teeth amazingly even and white. And when he
looked up, when he looked up and down the tree once he was under its shade—that’s when I saw
his eyes…
“Boy, you’s a smart one, ain’t ya? Hidin’ out in the shade of this here ol’ tree on a hot
day like this…”
“It’s still hot. Even in the shade.”
“That’s because you’re in the Delta, boy. Things is always hot ‘round here. Yessuh!”
And this how the association started. How I met a girl, and went electric. How I started
smoking grass, from memories of that smell, memories of that first musician I met as a boy. And
how it all ended, and how I became a drinker—my way of coping with losing the dream, a lost
dream that did not deaden my spirit. What I thought my spirit lost. What I thought my soul
lost… Her name was Rosie, and she was in the car. She wasn’t family. She wasn’t family to this
man who stopped to pick me up. She just danced for him. Exotic. At his place, at a roadhouse
juke joint called “The Hi-Way Host”. But then maybe she was in that car for a reason. Maybe
she was why I got in. Why I went for this ride.
“I see you got a guitar there… Can you play?”
“I know a few songs…”
“Shit… come along with me then. I’ll teach ya a few more… What’s your name, boy?”
“David… what’s yours?”
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“Oh, I go by a lot of names. What different folks like to call me. Depending on whom
I’m associating with… Like this girl here. In my car—I want you to meet her. I have a feeling
you two will get along fine. She calls me Scratch. On account of how I like her made from
scratch chocolate chip cookies. You like chocolate chip cookies, boy? I think you’re gonna like
hers. Ha ha! Yes indeed!”
And this was the summer of 1937. Before the war started. I stayed there ‘til the fall.
Because I took that ride. And I came to know Rosie. I learned to go electric. With a Gibson ES150 (ES for Electric Spanish and 150 reflecting the $150 price—a guitar made popular by
Charlie Christian, a famed jazz guitarist who first performed with it) a guitar that old man gave
me. Amped at his roadhouse. Where I came to play on Friday and Saturday nights. Unpaid of
course. A deposit down for my new instrument, and my room and board—a bed I shared with
Rosie—and the marijuana she enticed me to smoke… You don’t care about money when you’re
high. You don’t really care about anything. I suppose I was happy then—that long, hot
summer—without really knowing why. I guess I was befuddled. My eyes and ears glued shut
with pussy juice and resin. And I was happy with the new sound I made. The new sound I made
with that guitar. With the slide I learned then. What the other musicians partnered with Scratch
taught me there. That devil moan—sliding out of a note. Everything jumbled together. Hazy in
smoke. The frenetic movement of hips and frets. The sweat that poured out of my body playing
on Friday and Saturday nights. The sweat I saw and felt on Rosie’s body as she danced to my
music, as I felt her cheek against my chest as we lay in her bed, after. I suppose I lost my talk
with time. And I didn’t dream at night. And when I woke up on Sunday mornings I never came
down.
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Your heart breaks when it hears too many voices. And I guess I wasn’t sure what I heard
then. Sometimes I thought Rosie was an angel. Sent to talk to me. To teach me. The ways of
love I learned in her bed. Her startling honesty about everything. Even about us. Because she
held nothing back. Nothing back about my performance. Which as a man what I cared about.
Worrying about my performance the irony in not performing well at all. And she knew that. And
she was honest. In laughter about my weaknesses. The laughter making me strong by letting me
know how I was weak. And in this I thought she was an angel. Because she made me feel like I
was enough. Without the doubt of patronizing… But then I saw her dance. I saw her dance to
my music. My performances. Raw. Sweaty. Exhibiting sex with clothes on. What she brought
to our bed tenderly, in comic defiance, but on stage it made me afraid—the power of it. What
transfused from my fingers electrifying her movements—for all to see… His voice, that old
man’s voice, whispering, whispering in my ear.
“What you want, boy? You want her to surrender to you? You want everbody to
surrender to your greatness? It don’t happen that way—don’t you know that? You think you’re
the best that’s ever been? You think that’s honesty if someone tells you that? Nobody will never
admit you better than them. And all they gonna try to do (if you get their attention) is make you
doubt yourself and find your weaknesses and play on them. They’ll put it all back on you.
Haven’t you learned that yet? The thing is you too smart for your own good. And what you know
you think other people know, but they don’t. And that’s what’s always goin’ to torture you. The
high of thinkin’ they do, and the low of thinkin’ you don’t… That’s the game, boy. That’s how
you play. Nothin’ good or bad about it. Just positioning. Winning and losing at improvisations.
The relevance of associations. Where we all want to be on top… Where we’ll always be
negotiating. You and me… Ha ha!”
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And I didn’t need him to tell me that. Rosie told me in so many other ways. Without
words. With her body. Something I’d learned from other girls. Girls I dated before I took that
trip down to Mississippi. Something I thought I knew when I listened to that old Colonel talk out
on the golf course. When I didn’t care how I thought he talked down to me. You see my pride
my weakness… But the emptiness of it I only learned with Rosie. And when we slept, holding
each other, after—there was nothing. Sweet nothing. And in the morning only possibilities. The
possibilities of what was, what could have been. And even now I don’t regret taking that ride.
Even if it killed me. Killed something inside me. Because between feeling that—feeling love and
the losing of it that it entails, the nothing after—I’ll still take love. The grief of it in all its forms.
The good in the bad, and the bad in the good. Because that’s how it comes. And nothing is just
God. The potential of it. The potential of love. And what it always returns to. And we can’t be
that. We can’t have that. Only in our sleep do we come close to it. In our daydreams of
possibilities. In our nights of exhaustion… There is just this. This moment. And our memories
of it later. And the nothing in between staying in between. An empty road. Leading nowhere,
but somewhere. To a marker out on that highway, Highway 61, which I revisit sometimes. In
dreams. And how it takes me home now. Home, but not home all the way. Just the coincidences
of it. Seen in the mirror of others. What they remind me of in my own thoughts. Talking to
myself for too long… You see Rosie was white. Hispanic. And it came out in her words. When
she rolled her R’s. In words I could not understand. My other weakness—my strength. Deaf
and lost communications due to the loud sound of my own voice. Its sample carryovers.
Haunting me like a ghost…
“De nada…”
“What?”
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“You’re welcome…”
“I’m welcome for what?”
Half of Rosie’s face buried in a pillow. Her naked arms folded underneath it. The bed
sheet pulled down to her lower back, the curves lower hidden in the folds.
“Your thanks… your thanks for nothing. Because you know—don’t you? You know
you’re just as evil as I am. Maybe you’ll even learn later to read through it. Read through my
coldness—a woman’s coldness… What a pickle we’re in—no?”
Half her smile concealed by the pillow. In her eyes a different smile. A different
laughter. What she was saying now only said here. In her bed, with me. Other addictions
unspoken of—unspoken of in other certain company. Confiding an honesty. In a game of
associations. What her eyes were laughing about as she saw what was in my own eyes. What I
could feel was in them. Exacerbated by the joint we just smoked. What I used alcohol for later
to remember differently.
And so maybe I stayed too long. I stayed too long in Mississippi. Learning too late what
I needed to learn. From her and my music—a late bloomer I guess. And what I came back from
I took with me. That emptiness of a soul losing time. Needing a reset. A recalibration… The
guitar stolen. That Gibson ES-150—the echoes from it. I just went out the window with it one
night while Rosie slept. She slept to my tears—knowing of them. And I headed back on Highway
61 before the sun came up—north this time. Those negotiations. Those negotiations between
Scratch and me put off for a later time—for another meeting down the road. And I remembering.
Remembering what she said… The deal between us broken. Only the remembrance of those
smiles—those eyes—what my eyes shared in her bed. And this not because I was afraid. Not
because I was afraid she was right. But because I was afraid she was wrong… I was afraid I
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was too good for her. For that position—that place. And so I lost. I lost my eagerness. I lost
what could have been. And I traded it for nothing. I traded it for my name. That signature of
how I sign my name now. The sound of it as it rolls off my tongue as I come on stage now to
perform. And that was how I disappeared…
--David Threnody, on Mississippi—from his journals 1966 to 1975
He held the flag for him. David held the red flag for the old Colonel while he read how it
would break. His eyes moving back and forth from the ball to the hole. Then there was the crisp
contact. The soundless rolling. And then it fell. It fell into the cup. Distinct. And final.
It was twilight. The last hole after the turnaround. The roar of locusts and frogs coming
from that edge of darkness. Their origins unseen. Their cries plaintive. All around them.
Surrounding them like a halo. Like a self-defense. The game was finished. David walked with
him. He walked with the Colonel back to the clubhouse. In step with him this time carrying the
bag.
“It ain’t easy for you to make friends—is it? With women?”
“Is it ever easy?”
“Sometimes it’s better to be alone, kid. Sometimes not. I can tell you this. Your sense
of time changes. When you have someone to care about. It can bring out the best in you. It
brings out your potential. That potential we all have really. That potential to be beautiful. To do
good things—the right thing. That’s why you’re indebted when you give. Your motivations
apparent. Your eagerness apparent. Because loving someone brings out the best in you. And it
helps pass the time… The trick is who you feel that for though. The trick is who gets your love.
That’s why you got to be careful how you pick your friends. Who you fall in love with. Because
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you become what you surround yourself with. And there are bad people in this world—don’t kid
yourself. And when someone receives your love they have the power. They have the power of
how they’ll take it. And whether they’ll be playful or not in giving it back… It’s more blessed
to receive. I don’t care what the books say. And good people receive love different than bad
people do. That’s how you can tell them apart. That’s what you’ll have to discern. And the
sooner you learn that the less pain you’ll go through. The less trouble you’ll have in life.
Wasting your time giving of yourself to people who don’t deserve it… Don’t tempt the Devil
with your love, boy. Tear up that scorecard. I ain’t keepin’ score… Come on. I’ll buy you a
beer…”
David never saw the Colonel again after that summer. The summer he went down to
Mississippi. When he came back, hitching rides up Highway 61, taking a bus again from
Memphis, David no longer caddied at the golf course. He no longer stayed with his father and
mother, his older brothers—Gerald gone. He found a tenement house. And began playing in
juke joints all around East St. Louis. And he joined the Army instead. This was the late fall of
1937. But he didn’t enlist until a couple of years later, until after the war started, after that
performance—his first paid performance—and the performances that followed. Somehow now
it easy for him to make friends. Sitting in with other musicians around town. That’s what
changed after Mississippi. And it was his first paid performance at a Mardi Gras celebration in
Soulard, 1938. In that time before Lent. The performance his mother came to see. His earnings
$27. That’s when he first played the song. A song made famous later by other Blues players
David came to know, players he came to be friends with:
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It took me a long time, to find out my mistakes
Took me a long time, to find out my mistakes,
it sho'h did man
But I bet you my bottom dollar, I'm not fattenin' no more frogs for snakes…
I found out my downfall, back in nineteen and thirty-eight,
I started checkin'
I found out my downfall, from nineteen and thirty-eight
I'm tellin' all of my friends, I'm not fattenin' no more frogs for snakes…
And the rest would come later. The rest of the song. It would come later. It would be
recorded later. Making his (and others) name known. The slide to that electric guitar he stole—
that Gibson ES-150—giving it a haunted sounded. A harmonica in the background.
What most people don’t know. What most people don’t talk about after David Threnody
started getting people’s attention, is what he played when he was by himself. In those couple of
years before he joined the Army in the summer of 1941. Living in a small room of a tenement
house in East St. Louis—maybe his neighbors knew. Maybe they heard it. Because when he
was by himself, David didn’t play that Gibson. He played Jonathon Bonnor’s guitar. The one
with the bullet hole in it. Acoustic. It reminded him. Of Gerald. Of what he learned from other
people. Other people he loved. And what he learned for himself. He played his memories.
Singing to who he loved. To who he lost. And I wish there was a way to hear it. I wish I could
hear it now. I wish there were recordings of it. But then maybe I do—I do hear it. I hear the
haunting turnarounds. I hear it every time I think about it. What can’t be forgotten. I hear it
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every time I think about my own mistakes. And why… And I guess if I could go back I
wouldn’t change a thing. I would do nothing different—even if I could.
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PART TWO
WAR
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8
Come down off the cross
We can use the wood…
--Tom Waits
Some people ask why David Threnody joined the military. He wasn’t a failure. He had
other options. Some people think he was influenced from what he learned out on the golf course,
caddying for that old Colonel—a veteran of the first Great War. Influenced from his time spent
in Mississippi. But that’s not really it. David had his reasons for joining the Army, and I’d like
to say he was just following that voice. That voice he heard inside him.
In a popular World War II cartoon strip there was a character who was a naive, confused,
lazy, bumbling private—a character happy enough, and almost lovable. That’s how he was
portrayed at least, but in real life it was something else. Un-softened by cartoons. Something
ugly in our history. Something covered up. For in real life there wasn’t the naiveté. There was
the real reaction. The real reaction to hatred that bears hate. For in real life this character was
really a miserable person. And unhappy himself he tried to make everyone around him equally
miserable. He was filled with hate for the hatred he felt—for his officers, for the Army, for other
blacks, Jews… whoever—all establishments... And whenever he could get away with it, he was
a bully. He was a habitual liar. He disappeared when real work or fighting had to be done. And
not only did he fail to carry his weight, he was a constant and serious drain on efficiency. He
was a mean, vicious son of a bitch, without a redeeming virtue. He was the effects of what
always happens in things not created equal. He was the effects of segregation. He was Jim
Crow…
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And it is that question. That question of questions left unanswered. That question that
left unanswered leads to crucifixions—what is truth? For it is where we stop. Where we stop
when we examine origins—that gives us our truth. That is how you know. Your truth where
you stop. Where you stop at where you believe it starts. This relativity. A relation to a motion.
And what finally is un-moving. Your point of view defining whether it’s an end-point, or a
starting point. The radius of an arc. Going round and round in an unending number. And what
is unending having no start—no origin. Leaving you with the question. The question that can’t
be answered except in reference intervals. All blame and all credit merely temporary names,
labels to the motion, to the revolution. Giving you your unstable perspective. Your unstable
resolve. And so like many others before you there is nothing you can do. You can do nothing—
say nothing—that is true. And you are left to wash your hands. Wash your hands of it. The one
and only true sentence.
And so we must go back. We must go back in time to tell the story. A different part of
the story, a different facet of it—pieces of a puzzle that bring us closer to the truth. The truth of
what happened after maybe explaining why David joined the Army. Because everything is not
there all at once. Sometimes you must go forward to find out what happened before, and vice
versa. And so we must flash back—to 1934—when David was sixteen years old. To a
prophecy. A prophecy made over him by a woman. A visiting singer/evangelist to the church
David’s mother took her children. A Sunday evening service with only a few in attendance.
And I had to dig to find this. In his journals, David Threnody only makes reference to it
once, mentioning a woman by the name Clarissa Smalls. With a little library research I found
her book, a memoir she wrote after the war, in 1948. Recounting her work on the advancement
of civil rights. Her work in the procurement of freedoms for African-Americans. Particularly
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African-American women. And it’s the following passages in it that gives us the story, another
part of the story. Below comes from the preface:
Nobody told me how. But I could do it just as good. I could do it just as good as any
man. Because you see I always had this resolve, this iron will—an energy people sensed.
What I guess attracted my body, my mind, to the opposite sex. For I felt their eyes on
me. Men’s eyes. And the truth is I was repulsed by it. I didn’t enjoy it. And at first I
had no idea what this attraction was. For I did nothing to support it. I didn’t primp in
front of mirrors like other girls, and my abrasiveness usually made other girls steer away
from me. Funny how that same abrasiveness attracted men. Even white men. Maybe
because they saw in me what they wanted for themselves. My confidence. My honesty.
From a young age I never faltered. I was never wishy-washy in my decisions, my
intentions. And I never second-guessed my judgments. I never felt guilt… Some would
say I was harsh in my judgments, but I don’t think so. With only my father raising me
(my mother died in my childbirth) I learned to call things as I see it. Without hesitation.
This maybe learned from my father. How when I walked with him he would point to
things, asking me what they were, and so I learned at a young age to identify objects,
quickly, without hesitation. With intuition. An out of work light post, an erratic crack in
the sidewalk, scattered paper with words scratched out by a trashcan, a sign painted over
with graffiti… and I used this way of identifying objects on my walks with my father
with people too, reading their eyes, their auras—a hurried businessman, a dissatisfied
whore, a drunken bum sleeping oddly in a doorway… And my father didn’t tell me how.
I just knew. I knew how to intuit these things. I could just look at someone and know
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what they were. Never once doubting my impression, my judgments. And this what
gave me resolve, my will—what I suppose attracted men… Then there was the
sickness—what I learned from it. When I was twenty-three I almost died. Edema and
water in my lungs. From walking pneumonia. Maybe brought about from smoking
because I was a heavy smoker then—I started at the age of thirteen, the same year I
started my first job—working in a laundry, in the hot steam of iron presses, in the fumes
of oxidizing bleach... And there was a boy then. An apprentice carpenter that worked for
my father. A boy pushed on me by my father, who wanted to see me get married and
taken care of—a boy who loved me, I suppose, and I thought I loved him, or at least he
was tolerable enough as I tried to acquiesce my father. At least I was curious about it.
This when I learned of sex. The distaste I came to have for it. The smell of it. And what
I sensed. For I didn’t like just lying there. That boy on top of me—ardent. It’s when I
knew. I knew I could do it just as good as any man could. Maybe even better. For in my
sickness, that bed-ridden illness that almost killed me, and in making love to that boy, I
saw that I was stronger. The sickness didn’t scare me. Being alone through it didn’t
scare me. In fact it’s what gave me my voice—my singing voice. Adding a grating,
husky tone to how I sounded. Making what I had to sing more soulful. And I gained
strength in my resolve to be alone—I needed no one taking care of me. And I didn’t have
the nagging doubts that boy had about what he could give, what he could offer. And
that’s when I decided men really didn’t have anything to give. They had nothing to offer
me that I wanted. Except their buffoonery. This how I knew. How I knew a woman
could take on anything a man could give, but not the other way around. How I knew I
was called. Called to the ministry. To sing and prophesy to my people. To enable the
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women of my color. A better preacher of sex and the ills of earthly love than any man
could be, weakened by his natural temptations. For I had none of these. I had none of
these temptations. I was done with that. The joy in my heart—my resolve—that it was
better to be single, independent. Giving my service to God instead. To beaten-down
women of my race. And so I became a prophetess. I sang this good news to women’s
souls, and read the fortunes in people’s eyes…
And the following passage, the reference I found of it her memoir, is at about the right
time—the mid to early thirties. When Clarissa Smalls traveled the country. A guest at revivals
and small black churches throughout the Midwest and the South. It sounds about right to be
David. That it’s David Threnody she’s talking about. That the prophecy she made over the boy
she refers to is him. The prophecy about him, and what he needed to hear then:
It was a city church. In East St. Louis. Not normally what I was accustomed to visit.
My singing ministry normally devoted to rural revivals. Out of the way country
churches. But I suppose why I remember this church (a diminutive building on the
outskirts of a slaughterhouse, near the stockyards and rails) was how I had to sing over it.
I had to sing over the sound of trains. Their whistles blowing as they came in, as they
left. And I remember thinking it was an odd time for trains to be switching up at the
Relay Depot they had there, for it was a Sunday evening, and I thought that would be a
quiet time for trains—but it wasn’t. It was almost like they knew I was singing. Like
they wanted to be heard. And my voice almost broke—it lost that grating huskiness that
came to me after my illness—sounding almost shrill… And that’s when that boy came
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up. Came up to the altar. With those eyes. Those eyes that reminded so much of the only
boy that loved me, that boy who worked for my father. A boy who wanted to marry me.
He had the same countenance. That same beautiful countenance I remember of him, in
those times when he was trying to give to me. And it almost made me hesitate. It almost
made me falter in what I had to say to him… It was quiet then. No trains approaching or
leaving. The church silent. Almost like you could hear the sound of crickets. And he
was the last to come up. The last of his brothers. For his whole family was there. That is
except his father. The mother bringing him and his older brothers—six of them. She
brought them up—one at a time—to ask my blessing. To ask for their anointing. For me
to prophesy over them. And they were all sturdy men. Good in stature—bigger than
their mother, who seemed small in comparison to them, as she stood by them bringing
them up. And she said something about the eldest. The eldest brother—not there. Some
sort of accident happening to him that she wanted me to divine. But I had nothing to say
about him—nothing came to me. Until he came up. The last. The youngest. That was
when I hesitated. For I saw in his countenance what I needed to say, but I was afraid to
say it. I saw the aching beauty in his eyes. The pain. And I wanted to comfort him. I
wanted to comfort him with the right words…
“The Devil is a liar!”
And he said nothing. Only his eyes changing. Some alertness lost. Lost in a reflection.
And I knew he was thinking about his brother.
“You are loved… Don’t ever doubt that. You can be loved. And you will be loved.
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You will have a life-long friend…” And the rest I said to him like a song. A psalm… Not
saying it from quoted memory. For the words meant something different saying it to him. And I
knew it just as he did, which is why I said them…
“Surely goodness and mercy shall follow you… All the days of your life… And you shall
dwell in the house of the Lord… forever…”
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9
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king…
--Desiderius Erasmus
That was 1934. And seven years passed. Girls were dated. Girls that led to Rosie, and
David’s time in Mississippi. The reference he made to it. The reference he made to it in his
journals—the prophecy made over him—vague, dissimulating. And in 1941 he joined the Army.
An army still segregated. And maybe that’s why it’s vague. His reference to it. Maybe he was
still trying to find his way. His way out of finding himself coming back. It comes after the
performance—his first paid performance at that Soulard Mardi Gras celebration in 1938.
Marking his entry as a professional. His beginning as a professional musician:
I never did it for the money. There was another question I had. Another question I asked
in my music. And maybe she heard it. Maybe that’s why I still remember what she said. In the
silence of that church… You can’t hide from something smaller than you. And see, that’s the
thing about sex. It’s either about power or love. If it’s about power—a woman always wins. If
it’s about love, it’s usually the man. And after Mississippi I knew. I knew there was a king. A
king to this world. A king you start out a slave to. And you’re a slave in fear. And over time
that fear makes you become a servant. You become servant to those forces, those forces inside
you that reflect what you see in the outside world. And this, this how you discern a bad person.
A bad person is a slave. A slave that’s become a servant to what they were once afraid of. In
service to making others afraid of the same thing—in service to this world, and the ruler of it…
Everyone has a god. Even those who are proponents of atheism. For that too is a god. A faith
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without faith. For we all worship something. And it is the heart. The heart in contrition. That
pleases your god… So after Mississippi, after remembering what she said—I asked the question.
What’s it going to be? And I chose not to be a slave. I chose instead to become an outlaw. An
outlaw to the lawlessness. An outlaw to those slaves of what is godless. To those slaves now
servants to what they fear. To those who give into being their own gods. Those hapless servants
to the forces that tyrannize this world. Those fools thinking they’re not fools, for they have
forgotten what contrition is… This how I answered. How answered in my music. The music
that I played, and what I would always play. When I felt fear, and knew it, when I was forgiven.
I knew I was forgiven. And so I knew her prophecy was true. And I trusted it through all the
lies. The veil lifted over this world. And the slaves now servants to it. Their haughty confidence
in its power a sham that brings me now only to laugh. The life I chose, and the lives of others—
your life and their life—marvelous to me now. All part of something divine. And I only feel pity.
I pity what I’ve come to know about bad people. What I’ve come to know about bad people
being good, and good people being bad. How the lack of guilt—pride in making others afraid,
losing trust through lies—makes us just naked. Poseurs to false gods. All of us wanting to be
emperors, in new clothes… The wisdom. The supposed wisdom into how this world really
works, and how to survive in it—just dirty rags. And the servants to this, the open sores on their
bodies, apparent to me now… No, I never did it for the money. I never did it for anything in this
world—the true emptiness of it what it has to offer. I did it for the next world. What is always to
come. The slaves to what is now merely followers to the next chapter. Followers to the next
chapter in the illusion. This illusion of this world’s history and its future. What you see in it
now always what you lack, now…
--David Threnody, on the Civil Rights movement—from his journals 1966 to 1975
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And so now we must go forward. Forward in time to tell the story. In order to tell what
happened before. To understand it better. To come to some semblance of truth. In that neverending arc of perspective. We must go forward to 1985. To what happened then—three years
before David’s death. To what happened to Cleota—his mother. To what happened to her after
a long life, perhaps a life lived too long. Because by then, by 1985, she was too old to take care
of herself. Too old for her children even to take care of her. And she had to go into assisted
living—a nursing home.
She was there. She was present in 1938, in Soulard during Mardi Gras, for that Fat
Tuesday performance for which David was paid for, not in beads but in twenty-seven dollars
cash—split unevenly with the rest of his band. A drummer and man on harmonica, a piano
player. The early players of his first performances—men he would play with again after the
war… David kept five dollars from that first performance. And he gave it to his mother.
Something she always remembers. When she thinks of Duke Threnody, after his passing.
Something she remembers in other memories, like giving beads to that boy in the Mardi Gras
celebration she witnesses with her grandchildren, in the late seventies—spoken of earlier…
$27… And the tips went for beer afterwards.
She was there, and so he was there. David Threnody was with his mother in her last
days. In the nursing home that later I visited to speak with Dewey, his older brother. A care
center on Bond Avenue, in an old part of East St. Louis. Amongst stripped buildings and
abandoned lots. Of once neighborhoods David walked with his mother on trips to get milk and
Duke’s newspaper. Not far from that first bar he passed, where he saw his first musician. And
smelled what was on him.
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Sometimes you live too long. You live too long for your life. And the light fades. And
you begin to sense death in life. Each day beating it into you with dank submission. You begin
to feel the gods no longer smiling on you. And your quiet hours leave you wondering if there is
no God. You are left with only memories. To play before your mind in a bad setting for them.
In the stale urine smell of a nursing home, mixed with covering bleach. Dining rooms with
spilled food and wheel chairs to the table. Old women screaming as CNA’s force spoons in their
mouths. Spoons of cold food, food that dribbles out of the side of their mouths—mixed mush
easier to digest because they have no more teeth. The hallways outside, soft light and darkened
corners, where old men sit in their dirty diapers. Waiting for someone to change them. Waiting
with bruises on their arms from the Plavix and Coumadin that causes their blood to no longer
clot. Unshaven, white and gray hair tousled, matted and greasy—the dandruff apparent. Their
eyes that see no one. No one coming to the alarmed doors with keypads to visit them. The
hallways lined with them—too many of them—skinny old men and sagging old women—in
wheel chairs they can’t get out of the way. Moans heard. Screams and indecipherable language.
And sometimes, sometimes you hear the word: Help!
Cleota in her nineties now. And it happened slowly. Cruelly slow. First she was still
able to walk and cook for herself. Then accidental falls and bad hips. Toaster ovens turned on
forgotten. Then trouble getting out of bed. Accidents in the night. The toilet seat too low.
Getting in and out of chairs a long and harried task. Then finally unable to walk at all. Stateissued diapers like gunny sacks rubbing her skin raw. Her nakedness no longer private as nurses
put on her clothes—outdated clothes from the sixties when she still worried if she was in fashion.
Pink polyester pants and floral-patterned blouses. The buttons now obstinate to her shaking
fingers. Her personal items inventoried. Stolen. Nothing for herself anymore but what had her
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name stenciled on it… This how David visits her. What he sees and hears as he comes through
the door. Indecipherable words. And words said over and over.
“Mother…”
All he can say. The only thing that can come out as she looks up at him through bifocals.
Her neck disappeared in the drooping, hunched shoulders. Her wheel chair locked and pushed
against the wall. She just another old face lined up with the others… And he’s old too now.
Sixty-seven. A long career behind him. Many songs. Many songs played. Some of them
recorded. Some not. Some live performances, like that first one in Soulard, only memories.
Only echoes. To what it was like then. For a black musician. A black woman or a black man.
And he still dressed for it. Wearing a Mississippi necktie. A suit and felt hat like the man who
met him at the crossroads out on Highway 61. Some of his teeth missing now. Because he never
saw a dentist as a child, and saw no sense in seeing one as an adult. But the ravages don’t show.
The ravages of his drinking. This after nearly fifty years of it. Wine and beer. Whiskey. Only
some yellowing in his eyes. His face a perfect image. The perfect image of the face of a Negro,
a Delta Blues Man—large nose and lips, a few darkened pits in his cheeks, and the white
whiskers he lets grow under his mouth. The long hands, the slender fingers—the calluses there.
Hands that have a played a guitar. For over a half a century. Hands that know where they’ve
been, and what they’ve come back from. Nothing to say. And yet saying all they can say about
it.
“Hi, son… Bend down low. Bend down low here. And hug your momma…”
“They been treatin’ you well, momma?”
“Oh I just try and sit here, quietly… I try not to make a fuss. Sometimes they come into
my room though. They watch that TV you got me. Bad things—what those women do on it… I
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wish you’d take it back… I don’t want them watching that filth in my room… You know I’ve
been thinkin’ bout it. How long has it been? If your father was alive how long would we have
been married now?”
“Oh I don’t know… I guess near eighty years…”
“Eighty years…”
And she lowers her head. Her head sinks to her chest. Her breath coming out as a sigh.
And then a moan escapes. Her voice breaks and becomes a pitch higher as she starts crying.
“I’ve been prayin’ to the Lord to just die… just let me die—you know. I’ve been livin’
too long. Too long in here. Hours seem like days… And I have to keep tellin’ myself—you
have Jesus in your heart. And if you have Jesus in your heart you have the mind of Christ… It’s
just so hard in here… They just take it all away. They take it all away from ya. Little by
little…”
David kneels and puts his hand on the shaking hands of his mother. And there’s nothing
he can say. No songs come to him. No songs for this. And he feels like it was for him before
the war. That injustice. What he felt as a black soldier—the rage. And there is no song for this.
Nothing he can sing to. For he doesn’t know who to address with his pain. His anger. All he
can think about is having a drink. A drink to deaden the dream. The loss of the dream. He’s
thirsty. And he can almost taste it. The thirst of his habit. That emotional release it gives him.
And he almost smells it again. His mind goes back to walking with his mother. His hand raised
up to hold hers. That first musician. The scene stoned. Just as this scene here—with his sick
and old mother.
“Do you want me to move you? Do you want me to move you to another care center?”
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“Oh… it would just be the same. It’s all the same… just leave me be, son. Leave me be
to die… Take me to my bed. I want to lie down and rest.”
And so he wheels her. David wheels his mother to her room. He bends down to take off
her shoes—her worn slippers, stained. And he has to lift her. Hardly any more weight to her at
all now. He lifts her to the bed and scoots her up to the pillow. Lifting her legs and placing them
beneath a quilt. A quilt she’d sown long ago. One of many quilts—quilts she made for all her
children.
“You still playin’?”
“Yes, momma… I have a show to do tonight.”
“That’s good… You just think of me now and again. Think of me sometimes when
you’re playin’. Think about what you came from…”
“I will, momma.”
And that’s how he leaves. One of the last times he sees her alive. And lucid. For soon
her mind goes. Sometimes she’s recognizes him. And sometimes not.
One of the floorwalkers comes to the door. He knocks. A white man—middle-aged.
Chubby and his white shirt and black pants dirty. Telling that they’ve been worn for more than
one day. And an eye-patch. A black eye-patch over one eye—his right eye.
“It’s time for her supper.”
“Can you let her rest? She’s tired.”
“It’s her time now. We have set times for the patients to eat… Don’t I know you?”
“No…”
“Yeah… I’ve seen you before… I’ve heard you play!”
“I got’s to go now. Just let my momma rest. Maybe she don’t want no supper.”
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And he thinks again. David thinks again of something long ago. Back to churches and
bars. To a road. Memories of his mother when she could walk. When she was strong. Fighting
for her children’s blessings. He thinks of this world. The world he is in. The world he was in
that once was. And seeing this man. This white man with his eye-patch he thinks of all the land
he has traveled. The towns and cities. Land blindly traveled. Traveled for ambition. To play
the music so he could ask the questions. The questions he always had. And that one question,
the question of who would be king—king of last suppers… Which now led him to this. Facing a
one-eyed man. A floorwalker charged with the care of his dying mother… David leans down.
He leans down to kiss his mother’s forehead. And she looks up at him smiling and says not a
word. And then he stands. He stands to face the man. And then walks by him and out the door.
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10
It could be a spoonful a-sugar/It could be a spoonful a-tea/But one little spoon
Of your precious love/Is good enough for me…
--Willie Dixon
And some things are worth fighting for. Some things give you the energy. The drive to
make it happen. Self-perpetuating. Like a pendulum in motion. Day after day the same thing.
And day after day you do it again. You do it all over again. The only thing that stops the motion
ever asking why. Because you don’t ask why of love. You don’t ask how it comes, and you
don’t ask how it goes. To ask of it—to ask that question—you surfeit the answer. For there are
too many answers to it. Depending on who you ask. What you ask.
Day after day it is the same thing. Each day you do it again. You live your life based on
answers to questions you do not ask. And everybody will tell you different. Because you either
love something, or you hate it. Indifference is not really indifferent. It is a form of hate—a lack
of care. There is no love in it, and so it is hate. Hatred merely the absence of love. And where
love is absent, hatred abounds. And you know. You’ve had the feeling—that feeling about
someone. You know if you like someone or you don’t. And it is the same with things. Each of
us with our own opinion. Because some people like their boss, and some don’t. And they’ll give
you reasons why. Reasons why they like someone. Reasons why they don’t. It’s just funny that
it can be the same reasons why you like someone that someone else hates them—the same
facts—some act done, some work—and the judgments of it after… All of it merely a form of
dialectics. For you either love, or you hate. The shades in between colored with these polar
opposites. What magnetically draws you to one person’s traits repels another. And so it is
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question you should not ask. A question multifarious. With answers you cannot trust. Because
we’ve all asked it. We’ve all asked it of someone—Do you love me? Why do you love me?
And the answer we’re seeking remains unknown even in the best of answers. Even in specific
answers. Personal answers. From memories of experiences. This leading to what we all fear—
the conditions of love.
It is the question David Threnody asked. He asked it of Rosie in her bed in that time he
spent in Mississippi, which led to the tears that she knew of—hastening his exit out the window
with that Gibson guitar on his back… Unconditional love—the question we all ask. At some
point in our lives we all ask it of someone—hoping for the right answer. Hoping for the answer
we want to hear without really knowing what it is. And the pain. The pain of time in this life.
The pain of time shared with someone—the memory that they once loved you—and what comes
after. After the love is gone… Some would call it strength. The knowledge of this. The
knowledge of it happening in your memory. Remembering the answer to that question—do you
love me, and why—and after, after the answer to that question changes. Woman or man, it is the
same. The same with all things once loved that now you’re indifferent to, that now you hate.
Because time is the answer to the question—it is the measure of that change, held tight in your
memory. The synthesis to the dialectic. The temporal attributes of this. Of whether you love
someone, or you hate them.
This what comes next. What comes next in the story. David’s return to Mississippi—to
Biloxi, in the summer of 1941. Not as a guitar player, but as a recruit for the Army Air Corps, to
be trained in aircraft maintenance. And the friend he met there—Johnny Tribout, a mean mouthharp player in his own right. His story, relating to David. And how it led to what happened in
the war…
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And I don’t really know what to say about friends. I’ve had some. Maybe not a lot of
them, but I’ve had some. Some would call it the measure of your life. Friendships—and what
you’ve gleaned from them. But maybe it’s really more a measure of how you made it—made it
through. The good times. The bad times. A use. A given… And I guess it comes and goes.
Friends walk into your life. And they walk out. And I’ve taken trips down memory lane with
this. Usually when I’m driving—old familiar roads. Landmarks. Maybe a restaurant where I
shared food with someone. Conversations over empty plates where maybe I shared a few laughs.
A movie theater—a picture show—where I was with someone in an audience. Places that I’ve
shopped in the company of some other—bought things… Sometimes my mind is haunted with it.
Places that I’m in now flooded with memories of that place before, in memories of shared
experiences. Shared with someone I loved once—what hurts not that I loved them, but that they
once loved me—and they’re gone now. Ghosts of what once was, and me now—alone—alone
and only with these memories… And it’s all like a girl you once knew—you know. A girl maybe
you made love too—that place that it happened. And it was just you, and her. In that moment.
In secret—that communication. That communication that comes between two people, a man and
a woman, alone together, after making love. Alone and seemingly outside the world—those
moments in time—that’s what I’m talking about. Those moments in time, shared with a girl,
alone, that you remember later, after the girl is gone—her friendship, gone… Because that’s the
best kind of friendship, when like a dog you are befriended. No longer a lone stray—you know—
but taken in. Taken into someone else’s body—a woman’s body—that warm feeling… and it’s
more than just physical. And you feel like your soul has a home… Yeah, I’ve had some friends.
Not a lot, but some. And sometimes I wonder if it was worth it. The memories you have of it
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after. Because no friendship lasts forever. It ends just as it starts—in a recognition, a
momentary recognition… And as for other friendships, friendships I’ve had with other men—
well, that has something unspoken to it as well. It isn’t the same kind of love. There’s another
measurement involved. A measurement of where you stand. A fluctuation. Between either being
gracious, or deprecating. Depending on your level of need. Depending on if you need that
friend more or less than that friend needs you. Depending on when it’s your turn to play… The
same as a woman I guess, but with a woman sex is involved. And sex is a whole other need…
Maybe this sounds selfish. Severe. But in a way it’s the truth. Because when you remember,
when you take that trip down memory lane, thinking about a friend you once had—what do you
think about? Do you think about what you gave out of it, or what you got?
--David Threnody, on playing with other musicians—from his journals 1948 to 1955
Boot camp. What can you say about it? I went through it myself. So I know all the old
clichés. It’s rigorous. Stressful. And it’s the military. The only difference when David
Threnody attended it was still segregated. Blacks didn’t associate with whites. And whites
didn’t associate with blacks. And this is where we have Jim Crow. What it was like in
Mississippi in the early forties, in 1941 before America entered the war. That history that is
well-known now—the opportunity David Threnody had then—to be part of something historical.
Joining and becoming part of history. Becoming one of them. Becoming one of the Tuskegee
Airmen… That’s where Johnny Tribout comes in. The friendship. The friendship David had
with him. A white man (because Johnny was white). And what happened with the father. The
father of a daughter. The father the base commander in Biloxi at the time. The overseer of basic
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training for the fresh recruits that came down on trains. And the daughter who had relations,
intimate relations with Johnny Tribout.
And it’s psychological. What happens in boot camp is psychological. A test. And that’s
where the story leads next. To something psychological. Taut. A mind movie with two parts.
Two different points of view. Two different camera angles. And told as such. Like a
screenplay—vignettes of what happened that summer of 1941, just months before Pearl Harbor.
The story of Johnny Tribout, and the father. And the amorous relationship with Nina—the girl,
the daughter...
“Don’t believe in nothin’ that makes you feel bad.”
Johhny Tribout is shining his shoes—his boots. They aren’t bunkmates. David stays in
different barracks, with the other black men. And they have different officers. Different
authority over them.
You see Old Jim Crow ruled in the Army then as much as it did in the South. Blacks had
their own units, mess halls, barracks, bars—state-side, England, France, Belgium, it didn't
matter. There were no black infantry units in the European Theater of Operation during the war.
There were nine Negro field artillery battalions, a few anti-aircraft battalions, and a half dozen
tank and tank destroyer battalions. Some did well, some were average, some were poor. The
causes of why some did poorly were familiar: they were untrained, with white officers who were
the castoffs of other units, and usually they were poorly equipped… Shortly after the end of the
war Walter Wright, chief historian of the Army, commented that the real trouble was the inferior
officers. Blacks had to have the best, Wright insisted, because "American negro troops are illeducated on the average and often illiterate; they lack self-respect, self-confidence, and initiative;
they tend to be very conscious of their low standing in the eyes of the white population and
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consequently feel very little motive for aggressive fighting." And why should they, Wright went
on, when every black soldier knew "that the color of his skin will automatically disqualify him
for reaping the fruits of attainment. No wonder that he sees little point in trying very hard to
excel. To me, the most extraordinary thing is that such people continue trying at all."
And maybe that’s why Johnny says this. While he’s shining his shoes. His boots. Why
he says this to David. About what you believe in—what you can believe in—and why. Because
Johnny knows himself. Poor himself. Illiterate himself. Raised on a farm in Alabama. Which
is how he knows about Tuskegee—the opportunity David could have there. His friendship
trying to make that happen. His friendship why the opportunity was lost.
This where the psychology comes into play. And not just the psychology used to train
fresh recruits, fresh soldiers in basic training. Those methodologies. Those military methods are
not my concern. For I know them—I know of them. What matters is what you see—what David
saw when he returned to Mississippi, after what happened to him before the last time he was
there. What he came to know becoming a soldier in a segregated Army. And what happens to a
man in this situation not just on the exterior, but what happens interior—what happens inside
when on the outside you are treated separate from the rest…
He never really talked about, but then he never really let you in about things important to
him, things that bothered him. He was kinda into himself—ya know. And you had to
read into that. You had to read into him. And sometimes it was hard to read him right…
It was like he was always in a movie—in his own movie, a picture show. And there were
always unexpected twists in the narrative, like he was making it up as he went along,
improvising—based on what he was given—how he took it. I guess that’s why you could
call him a dreamer. He lived that way. He saw life that way. As an interactive dream.
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A lucid dream. And I think sometimes it was a nightmare—it turned into a nightmare for
him. But I guess that’s what happens when it’s your own movie. When you live your
life like you’re asleep. Because it’s only you—talking to yourself. And no one gets
along with themselves all the time… Maybe that’s why you need someone. A partner to
your dream—ya know. So you know what you’re seeing. You know for sure.
Otherwise your reality is always in question. Because it isn’t shared… I think it was hell
for him sometimes. What maybe hell is really like. He never talked about it—
Mississippi. He never talked about what happened his first trip down there. And I think
that’s why he came back—why he joined the Army, being a black man. He wasn’t
drafted like I was. He volunteered. This at a time when the Army drafted just as many
black men and they did white. And there wasn’t much resistance to it then. In fact many
men were deferred so that manpower for the production of war materials could continue.
Because the women couldn’t do it all… But he never talked about it—being back in
Mississippi again. And I think it was hell for him. Not being able to share what it was
really like—what he felt being back. Isolation—ya know. Maybe that’s what hell really
is. That torment that your whole life… is just a dream. Like you’re in a coma and
everything you think is happening to you is just a projection of your mind, a mind movie,
and everything, everything happening to you—is just you. The horror that you think
you’re in control, but you’re really not. Because you never really know. You never
really know if it’s real or not. There’s just the hints—the taunts—of other’s in the same
hell. Sometimes letting you know it’s real. Sometimes letting you know it’s not. And
you never really know. You never really know if it’s your dream or someone else’s…
At least that’s my idea, my idea of what hell’s really like—everyone insane not knowing
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if they’re really there or not… Funny how I can imagine that, but I have no idea what
heaven’s really like. But then maybe in heaven you’re just not all by yourself.
Everything is everyone’s—ya know—all the pain, all the joy—is shared, shared by
everyone. And everyone knows that for sure… I just wish I could have shared that with
him. I wish he would have let me in. But then maybe what happened to him—what
happened in Mississippi—he just didn’t know how to share, and maybe even if could
have I wouldn’t have known how to share it with him, share in it with him in a way he
could trust it for sure… I don’t know… Even though he was hard to read sometimes, it
still felt good to call him a friend. And he sure could play that guitar…
--Johnny Tribout, from a PBS interview, September 1971
To collect a flower, and keep it alive—you must first capture its roots. Something of
David Threnody’s roots has been captured here. The non-linear and cyclical origins in his
music. The time before his birth. Something of his brothers—his older brothers—what
happened to Gerald. His mother and father. And going down to Mississippi that first time—the
prophecy made over him… Now we are to the war, the summer of 1941, when David
volunteered to join the Army. This after his first paid performance at a Soulard Mardi Gras, and
the performances after, living in a tenement house in East St. Louis. The friendships he made
with other musicians then, other performers he played with. And now we are to the war, and his
war-time friend—Johnny Tribout—and what happened then, what happened in Tribout’s
involvement with the base commander’s daughter before the American involvement in the war in
Europe, in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor. How David had a chance to join the Tuskegee Airman,
but lost the opportunity, enlisted in an anti-tank battalion instead. This because of what
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happened with Johnny Tribout, how he served on the European front as well, and how David
Threnody saved his life.
You must first capture the roots. And perhaps some more of these roots will be captured
in the movies that follow, the mind movies David imagined based on the conflicting stories he
heard from Johnny and what the girl’s father had to say—about Nina—the daughter, about
Johnny’s amorous relations with her. Mind movies of that time spent in Biloxi in the summer of
1941, reflecting on what happened to David before, when he came to Mississippi before, to that
crossroads—searching for answers to his questions, sleeping in Rosie’s bed. And perhaps that
flower will be kept alive. That flowering of David’s mind then—the inspirations that led to his
music at the time, a time when he was coming into his prime, and perhaps feeling too much,
feeling too much at one time. For he was starting to realize the cause of his shyness—why he
was shy as a child. Discouraged even though he shouldn’t have been. You see even though
Cleota and Duke loved him, perhaps they loved him too much. His mother’s worries a negative
implication in everything he tried. His father’s severe judgments and disappointing lack of
interest in David’s musical ambitions in an attempt to steer him in another direction, biased by
his own goals for David’s life, something that haunted him always. The truth was he was a vain
child. And he became a vain man. This is what happens with too much attention—too much
negative attention. Seemingly trivial doubts become monumental, and thus the attempts to
overcome them become monumental as well. His parents raised David to be introspective
because they forced introspection upon him. In the driving need they fed in him to change, to
become better—because they loved him—perhaps too much. Because shyness is driven by two
contradictory forces—the desire to be unnoticed, anonymous—for fear of failing,
embarrassment—and the desire that if you are noticed, the attention drawn upon you finds
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perfection—that what people find is something perfect, something special… It drives what you
seek in friendship. In what you fight for. In being a friend and having a friend. Which maybe
explains what happened that summer of 1941. In David Threnody’s friendship with Johnny
Tribout, and what happened after in the war, after the war… And so now the curtain rises.
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11
You can't spend what you ain't got.
You can't lose what you never had…
--The Allman Brothers
INT. BILOXI MILITARY BARRACKS—DAWN
The beds make a neat line down the center aisle of the
barracks.
A perfect line.
symmetrical.
linearity.
blankets.
The beds on either side
The impression it gives a sense of measured
But then you see men’s feet poking out of
White men’s feet, which attacks the order sensed
in the layout, like everything is a slave to it, a slave to
a neat and orderly arrangement, and the feet sticking out
don’t belong... The windows are open, letting the first
morning light in, and you can hear fans going, circulating
the stifled air and the soft snores in the shadows where
the rays of light don’t fall, none of the men’s sleeping
faces apparent, the beds arranged in such a way that the
light from the tall windows overshoots the heads of the
beds.
So you only see the white feet.
A door at the end of the line of beds opens, letting in all
the light from outside. A pinkish-gray light that’s the
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indication of a sunrise.
The Drill Sergeant enters and
grabs an empty trashcan by the door, banging the metal of
its empty interior with a night stick.
DRILL SERGEANT
Once bitten, twice shy—Ladies!
grab your socks!
Don’t make
Drop your cocks and
me have to say it twice!
Roll call!
The drill sergeant carries a clip board and walks briskly
down the center aisle as the men pop to attention at the
foot of each bed.
Their clothing uniform—white V-neck t-
shirts and white boxer shorts.
The drill sergeant makes a
head count calling out the name of each man as he passes
them.
Each man yelling, “Sir! Yes, Sir!” as he passes.
But then the drill sergeant stops.
He stops at an empty
bunk. The blankets still hospital cornered in at the folds—
even and measured, not disheveled from the restless prods
of feet asleep.
DRILL SERGEANT
Tribout! Goddammit! Where’s Tribout!
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Snickering can be heard behind him and the drill sergeant
turns.
DRILL SERGEANT
Alright… what do you men know about it…
You! Tell me!
The drill sergeant gets in a soldier’s face.
SOLDIER
I think he got bit, Sarge…
More snickers can be heard.
DRILL SERGEANT
Bit?
What the hell do you mean?
He got bit?
SOLDIER
Love bit, Sarge…
More snickers.
Someone whispers, almost inaudible: “Here
Kitty, Kitty!” And full laughter breaks out in the
barracks.
Male laughter.
Loud.
And harmless.
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DRILL SERGEANT
Shit…
Damn fool.
Just a damn fool… Alright.
We got another one AWOL.
Get dressed, men.
PT in five minutes!
EXT. A ROADHOUSE—NIGHT JULY 14TH, 1941
Music.
Blues music—an electric guitar and harmonica—can be
heard coming from inside.
A neon sign flickers.
A jeep
pulls up. Two soldiers getting out wearing the black
armbands that identify them as Military Police. They walk
to the door
MP #1
I don’t get this music…
MP #2
That’s because you have to be colored…
INT. JAIL CELL—DAY
David Threnody and Johnny Tribout sit opposite of each
other on their bunks.
You see them through the bars.
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Johnny is shining his shoes.
His boots.
A harmonica lays
on the bed beside him.
DAVID (V.O.)
And that’s one thing that wasn’t segregated
back in those days.
There ain’t no black jail
and white jail—it’s just jail.
That’s how we met.
A cell shared…
How we got to be friends.
Because when those cops came in they broke up
my set—looking for him.
And the girl—Nina…
Normally I don’t let folks just sit in with me,
especially a white boy.
But when he came up to
the stage with that mouth harp—his girl watching—
well, I figured what the hell…
INT. ROADHOUSE—NIGHT
David has a small stage in the corner.
to the bar.
The back room where the cooler is.
beer kegs are kept.
audience is white.
Where the
The place isn’t that crowded.
And the
A couple of regular drunks sitting on
stools up at the bar.
room.
Near the rear exit
Some tables in the center of the
Some of the men sitting at them in uniform.
this is a roadhouse just outside the base.
For
Most of the
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clientele military men and the girls that associate with
them—some whores, and some that just like a man in uniform.
DAVID (V.O.)
It was a Saturday night and I was on a weekend
furlough.
The thing is—he wasn’t.
restricted to the base.
had his suspicions.
him.
Or her.
He was
The father already
But I guess that didn’t stop
And maybe I wouldn’t have helped, or
let him sit in with me if I had known.
Known she was
the base commander’s daughter…
David hunches over his guitar, sitting on a chair on the
stage.
Johnny stands beside him with his harmonica to his
mouth.
And they play off each other.
moving quickly up and down the frets.
harmonica with his hands.
faces concentrated.
Johnny cupping his
Sweat on their foreheads.
Their
David’s right foot tapping out the
beat. Nina sits at one of the tables.
bottle in front of her.
The two MP’s walk in.
David’s left hand
Alone.
A full beer
A beer she hasn’t drank.
Nina is the first to see them. A
faint almost indiscernible smile crosses her face as she
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turns back to Johnny.
But David and Johnny have their
heads down—busy with what they’re playing.
DAVID (V.O.)
And I guess I could have stayed out of it.
could have just let them take him.
playin’ good.
I
But we were
And I never liked that—
being interrupted.
Being interrupted in something
I was trying to make perfect.
And there was
perfection there—I sensed it.
It was happening,
and it was improvised…
That’s the thing, you see,
in any work you do—it’s not someone else coming
along and saying you did it right.
got to finish it.
It’s you that’s
Finish it your way.
mistakes you’re aware of.
Even in the
You got to finish it.
So you know—you know you did good…
And when those
cops came in and broke into the sound it wasn’t
finished.
And when they said stop the nigger
music… well… I guess I just saw red…
INT. JAIL CELL—DAY
JOHNNY
Sorry about your guitar…
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DAVID
Ah… that’s alright…
I stole it anyway.
last time I was here.
Mississippi…
The
The last time I was in
So you gonna tell me about it?
JOHNNY
What?
DAVID
You know what… the girl.
INT. ROADHOUSE—NIGHT
The music’s stopped.
stage.
The two MP’s standing in front of the
They don’t notice Nina slipping up behind them with
the beer bottle she hasn’t drank.
of their heads.
She breaks it over one
This distraction all David needs, pushing
Johnny toward the rear door near the stage.
David rushes
back to grab Nina’s hand, pulling her along to follow him.
The MP she injured on the ground and the other MP bent over
his fallen comrade.
EXT. ROADHOUSE—NIGHT
134
The back door from the cooler opens and David, Johnny, and
Nina rush out.
car.
Nina taking the lead, showing them to her
David pauses.
He pauses when he sees her car—a look
of recognition passing over face.
It’s an old Ford, and he
looks at it like he knows it, like he’s ridden in it
before.
He looks down at his guitar, because he took it
with him when he quickly exited the stage, pulling the
plug.
He walks back to the door and jams the arm into the
door handle.
DAVID (V.O)
And I knew it wouldn’t hold them, but I did it
anyway—after seeing that car—what it reminded
me of.
Like it had already happened.
it had happened before…
guitar no more.
Because
No, I didn’t need that
I knew it before I did it, and
somehow I knew I knew I would know.
That
feeling you get sometimes about how time really
works.
Your whole life already happened… making
it happen… so it can happen.
Like your death is
in your birth, and your birth is in your death.
That line we perceive in between somehow
135
curving in on itself—parabolic—parallels meeting
somehow because they begin and end the same—in
something lasting forever…
It was like I was seeing
myself in a mirror, in broken glass, but it was
someone else being me, and yet I still knew it was me,
it being already a memory, a
memory of something
going to happen…
Johnny stops before getting in the passenger seat and looks
back to where David stands looking at his guitar jammed in
the door.
Nina is already starting the car.
JOHNNY
Come on!
Get in!
INT. JAIL CELL—DAY
DAVID
That sure was one hell of a wreck, wasn’t it?
JOHNNY
Yeah…
I should have drove…
Girls tend to get
too excited when they’re driving a get-away car.
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DAVID
They would have caught us anyway.
JOHNNY
You didn’t know who she was.
Would you have
gotten in that car if you did?
DAVID
I don’t think I really had a choice…
like I’d already made it.
Seems
A long time ago…
JOHNNY
I knew too.
I knew we weren’t going to die…
Sometimes I wonder though.
I wonder about it—
about people who die violently—no fore-warning—
just quick, and sudden.
I wonder if they know
they’ve died…
DAVID
It’s probably better not to let your mind
dwell on that.
JOHNNY
Yeah…
you’re probably right…
So do really want
137
to know?
DAVID
Know what?
JOHNNY
The girl… about the girl.
EXT. BILOXI BASE OBSTACLE COURSE—DAY
Johnny is doing push-ups.
young.
He’s a handsome white man.
A body young and fit.
well with his square face.
Soft brown hair that goes
A strong chin.
Blue eyes.
Intelligent eyes for the son of an Alabama farmer.
You see
him look up to see legs. Legs standing in front of him.
girl in a red dress, Nina.
And
A
And she’s toying with a sucker
in her mouth.
JOHNNY (V.O)
Weird things happen all the time.
We’ve all been
witnesses to it. What’s funny is how different it is—
for the witness and what’s going on in the head to who
it’s happening to, what they feel in the situation
being witnessed…
I’ve seen some pretty strange
138
things, but it’s strange how it doesn’t seem like much
when it’s not happening to me, in how I share it with
others, how I can be nonchalant about it, but when
it’s happening to me it seems like so much more, the
cause of psychic wounds hard to heal, hard to forget…
I guess sometimes we all go to the zoo, and it’s just
not the same—it looks different from inside the cage
when you’re the one looking out of it and not the one
looking in…
INT. NINA’S CAR—NIGHT
Nina is driving fast.
Her face is serious, and it makes
her features more beautiful.
pale skin.
Full, red lips.
She has long, dark hair, and
And a sharp nose.
Her eyes
are green, light green, and they sparkle in natural light.
She is twenty-four.
A grad student at Ole Miss.
the summer with her father on the base in Biloxi.
Spending
Bored.
An expression seen easily in her eyes most of the time,
which makes her beauty even more appealing, because you
want to win its attention.
the dark road has it.
wheel tight.
Her attention.
And right now
She’s gripping the large steering
It’s a road along the beach, along the Gulf
139
coast.
The moon over the water reflecting in her window.
The only illumination inside the car.
Why she swerves out of the way of the squirrel in the road
seen in her headlights can be seen as an absurdity.
An
impractical response from the anxiety of making their quick
escape from the roadhouse.
anything.
doing.
But the truth is she can’t kill
From the look on her face she knows what’s she
But she’s driving too fast.
nail on the shoulder of the road.
has a blowout.
And maybe there was a
Whatever the case, she
The tire on the front passenger side.
She
loses control.
EXT. HIGHWAY LEADING FROM THE ROADHOUSE—NIGHT
Nina’s car swerves off the road.
the left side of the road.
Towards the sand dunes on
The squirrel safe.
scrambles safely across the highway. To a tree.
It
The car
jumps the embankment and overturns in the sand, coming to a
stop inverted.
The sound of wreckage and broken glass.
The wheels still spinning.
The rotating lights seen from a distance get closer.
spinning red lights of the MP jeep.
The
They were apparently
140
only a moment behind on the road following them, following
Nina’s car.
You see the jeep pull up slowly to the wreck.
White flashlights appear shining through the darkness,
harsh compared to the soft illumination of the moonlight
over the water.
They move over the scene, shining on
Nina’s overturned car.
DAVID (V.O.)
I lost consciousness.
For a moment.
Only a moment.
The next thing I saw lights—a flashlight in my face.
And I was lying on the roof of the car in the back
seat.
Music in my head.
Echoing.
A harmonica. And
for a moment I thought we were playing again—Johnny
doing a solo…
The rest a dream—a cartoon.
A Sunday
morning newspaper comic in motion…
CARTOON SEQUENCE
You see pencil drawings.
Silhouettes. Black and white.
Their movement in flipping pages.
first meeting.
face unreadable…
hand.
Her legs.
Johnny and Nina.
The sucker in her mouth.
Then them walking together.
Then he draws her to him.
Their
Her
He grabs her
And they dance.
You see
them back at the roadhouse—Johnny on stage with David.
141
Nina dancing, not sitting in front of a beer, but dancing.
Pulling her hair up as she dances.
Then an indiscriminate room.
A bed.
Hot from her movements.
Maybe a motel room in Biloxi.
Curtains drawn back in a window.
Color for a
moment.
The various colors of neon lights coming into a
window.
Then back to black and white.
bed.
Making love.
Nina on top.
Nina and Johnny in
Then Johnny.
The images
repeat. A close-up of their hands together—clasping.
the fingers relax…
nut.
Then
A picture of a squirrel nibbling on a
The squirrel climbing a tree, going around and around
the trunk.
Going up…
Color again—a colored drawing.
spectrum of light through the bars of a window.
A
Of a place
where normally the sun never shines—the jail cell—the
military brig.
Then black and white again.
A close-up of
a plate on a food tray—eggs, bacon, flapjacks—half eaten—
teeth marks in the flapjacks.
syrup…
Music in the sequence.
First electric.
Then acoustic.
A close-up of a cup of
Music of David’s guitar.
The haunting sound of a
slide…
JOHNNY (V.O.)
Yeah… weird things happen…
INT. JAIL CELL—DAY
Love is weird—ya know…
142
Focus on Johnny’s hands.
polish.
His hands.
A rag smeared with black shoe
One holding the boot.
shining it with the rag.
on the bed.
The other
Then the harmonica again.
Lying
You hear its music.
JOHNNY (V.O.)
You replay it.
Over and over.
Pictures of it.
A man and a woman together.
them to be together.
fall in love.
In your head…
What led
Watching and hearing two people
And how it is lost.
What it spurs in
your memory—making you a jealous audience—your heart
aching a witness of it.
laughter…
Bringing
It’s what you hear in the music.
see in the light.
EXT.
Bringing tears.
What you
The harmony in a motion picture…
BILOXI LIGHT—DAWN July 15th, 1941
Biloxi Light is a lighthouse adjacent to the Mississippi
Sound of the Gulf of Mexico. The lighthouse has been kept
by female keepers for more years than any other lighthouse
in the United States.
lane highway.
It now stands in the middle of a 4
And as the sun comes up, police cars are
parked on both sides of it.
The area cordoned off.
Police
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officers scouring the area.
are parked as well.
pictures.
Cars of newspaper reporters
Men with cameras trying to take
Pictures of the naked body.
Pictures of Nina.
Her body lying spread-eagled at the lighthouse door.
reporter stands by the red tape.
A
He calls to an officer
walking by.
STARKS
Hey, Olson!
What’s the word on the victim?
OLSON
No comment, Starks…
We’re waiting on the coroner.
STARKS
Come on, Olson!
You can give me something.
OLSON
A white female, mid-twenties.
to lacerations of the face.
blunt instrument…
STARKS
Jesus!
Any suspects?
Looks like death due
Possibly beaten by a
144
OLSON
I can’t say…
but we know who she is…
STARKS
Okay, Olson…
Come on help me make my beat…
Who is
she?
OLSON
She’s Popovitch’s daughter…
STARKS
(whistles under his breath)
Shit—no telling! The base commander’s daughter?
OLSON
Yep…
STARKS
Anything else?
OLSON
Yeah… it was almost like she was embalmed—the blood
drained from the body…
and the lacerations, the
lacerations to her face (hesitates)
145
STARKS
You can tell me, Olson.
You got no beef with my
beat…
OLSON
It looks like the perp used a piece of broken glass.
He slashed the face from the edges of the mouth to the
ears…
STARKS
The Glasgow smile…
OLSON
The what?
STARKS
The Chelsea grin…
I heard about in when I was over
in England covering the bombings… an intimidation
tactic used by street gangs…
makes the victim look
like they’re smiling at you…
OLSON
God…
I hope it’s not going to be one of those…
146
STARKS
Popovitch’s daughter?
Jesus!
Good luck in it not
being!
The moon is still illuminated in the blue morning sky.
The
sun is rising, taking away some of the moon’s brightness,
making it just look white, a pale white orb in the colors
of the dawn.
You see the lighthouse like your right next
to it, looking up.
Nina’s eyes.
Looking up to the sky.
And then you see her feet.
Like your
White feet…
FADE OUT
And now it’s what comes next—the next mind movie… Everything happens for a
reason. Even regrets. What works in repetition. And what comes next is always the same—it’s
what you want. What you want sometimes without even knowing it. Sometimes even seemingly
a mistake…
Nina Popovitch was murdered in the early morning hours of July 15th, 1941. David
Threnody and Johnny Tribout were already incarcerated. Guests of the brig. The accident the
night before leaving them unharmed, including Nina—just slight bruises to the head. Nina
wasn’t taken into custody. This where the dance comes in. Her dance. With the moon that
night. For she had dated military men before. Even priorly engaged—to an Army Air
Corpsman—the son of a mortician. Just one of the possible suspects to her murder—then
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unsolved. A bad love affair where both parties lost. His death happening later. In the ChinaBurma-India Theater of the war.
The murder case was sensationalized in the news. Reporters coming up with nicknames.
A memorial to the terror. Fathers in terror for fear of their young daughters. This the next
movie, the next mind movie telling the story of Johnny Tribout, David Threnody’s friend—the
story of Antonin Popovitch—Nina’s father…
INT. JAIL CELL—DAY
David and Johnny have already eaten breakfast.
tried to.
A food tray on the floor.
Or at least
They’re interrupted.
By a guard at the bars.
GUARD
You’re wanted Johnny…
see you…
The base commander wants to
You too Threnody.
JOHNNY
(looking over at David)
Here we go…
The guard looks like he’s about to say something else,
but hesitates.
Johnny notices.
148
JOHNNY
(smiling)
What is it?
Are we going to be court-martialed?
Drawn and quartered?
Hung at high noon?
GUARD
No… that’s not it…
You didn’t hear it from me…
JOHNNY
(he stands and puts his hands on the bars)
What?
GUARD
It’s Popovitch’s daughter…
Nina…
Johnny’s hands fall from the bars.
his face.
she’s dead.
Expressions cross over
Incredulity. An un-wanted smile.
JOHNNY
Come on!
You’re joking—right?
GUARD
No…
I’m afraid I’m not…
She’s been murdered.
149
EXT.
THE MISSISSIPPI SOUND ON THE GULF OF MEXICO—DAWN
Focus on the water.
Its surface sheen.
The ripples in
crests of waves—the tide moving in and out.
You hear the tide.
Your hear it.
The wet sand at the shore—the
watermarks from the salt water there.
A sand crab washed
up in the foam, disappearing in it for a moment, then seen
again scampering as the brine recedes.
Then the surface of
the water again, further out where the waves don’t crest,
only swells.
glass.
You enter it.
Dried blood on it.
And you see a shard of broken
You enter the water with it,
going deep, looking up as you go down.
Some light at
first, that first sunlight at dawn, pink on the surface,
reflecting faintly in the glass as it sinks.
go down deeper.
Deeper into the darkness.
There isn’t silence in the deep darkness.
life underneath the water is heard.
dissonance.
But then you
But no silence.
The acoustic
Audible resonance and
A trebled theme—soft at first—then louder.
More distinct.
A message…
DAVID (V.O.)
And I was thinking about Rosie.
The image just came
to me as the guard told us the news.
Her bed—a brass
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bed.
The bed of the girl I met in Mississippi the
first time.
In that car I got into. Almost like it
was waiting for me at the crossroads. That crossroads
where I said yes.
it.
Yes to a ride…
And we’ve all done
We’ve all accepted that’s there no silence.
when we think we hear it.
Even
In what follows bad news…
We think we hear silence, but then really you’ve heard
something, some animal in the dark, and then its pause
to make you think of it—to make you think of silence—
to imagine it…
You see, God got rid of that.
moved across it.
dark waters.
When he
When his spirit moved across the
The voice enacting all voices—the
acoustic harmonies.
For even the water vibrates.
vibrates with sound.
being born again…
too much for us.
The sound of life.
It
Dying and
Sometimes the frequencies are just
They go too fast or too slow.
And
we create a reality on what we don’t hear, what we
can’t see.
Killing the life that is with a life we
manifest as our own creation.
in song.
murder.
Our imitations on instruments.
Our denunciations.
What never was.
EXT.
What we come to worship
Our claims to silence.
And what never will be…
A MISSISSIPPI FOREST—NIGHT
And it is
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Trees.
Trees coming at you like you’re traveling through
space passing stars.
a crossroads.
A flashing picture of a lone tree at
A full moon above it in the sky.
movement again.
And you know you’re running.
Sharp
Running
through the gray illumination of moonlight in a forest.
The dark underbrush barely visible.
beneath you.
running.
Heavy breath.
The ground moving
And then you see yourself
Running as a wolf.
Gray and white fur.
Muscles
rippling beneath fore shoulders as legs extend and the paws
beat the earth.
silence.
Running.
A howl escaping what isn’t
Then you see a man running.
From behind.
His
form vague and indiscriminate in the dark contours of
moonlight.
You hear a woman screaming—Nina’s voice.
he’s running from it.
murderer.
Or to it—you can’t be sure.
Blood spilling from it.
And then it falls.
song.
INT.
The
Focus on a blunt instrument—a black crowbar.
Raised to the night sky.
now.
And
It coming down.
Raised again.
Red fluorescence in the darkness.
It falls out of sight.
The hum of David’s guitar.
Only the hum
His voice moaning out a
A slide and turnaround. And a moan…
BILOXI BASE COMMANDER’S OFFICE—DAY
152
You see a man.
the top.
An old man.
Buzzed white hair and bald on
In uniform—a Colonel’s uniform.
Sitting behind
his desk, a large oak desk, papers piled on it neatly, a
plaque front and center—reading: Col. Antonin Popovitch.
Pictures on the wall.
An American flag.
open.
Certificates and awards—decorations.
He’s looking out the window—the blinds
He’s just bit the end off a cigar.
leaned back in his chair.
He lights it,
Large scruffy eyebrows.
Below
his eyes—a glinty blue—musing…
POPOVITCH (V.O.)
I remember my father.
When he’d come inside and sit
at the kitchen table at summer dusk, his boots muddy
from working the land, and he would smoke a cigar—
lighting it on the stove…
“Know thyself, Mitri”…
would say, using my Russian patronymic.
speaking to himself…
Mine and his.
He
As if he was
This how I learned of origins.
The origins of where I came from, of
who I was—what made me me…
Many years have passed
since then, since sitting with my father as a boy.
Many years as a man and many years as an old man… And
in thinking of my daughter maybe I know now what it
meant.
Knowing yourself in your children.
yourself as a child.
Knowing
In the habits formed then—the
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personality, the character…
And in knowing these
origins, being aware of them in myself, I become as a
child again, only now with the knowledge of why I say
what I say, do what I do…
is a surprise again…
And everything, everything
A surprise without fear, for as
a child you don’t know these things in fear—you don’t
fear these surprises in yourself.
And it’s like a
past that was and is, a past still happening—the
future set.
In these responses I know in myself.
The
surprise not in what happens—this foreseen from the
past… no, the surprise is in being aware of it in
myself, and seeing the outcome with this knowledge.
And I become… old…
INT. ROSIE’S BEDROOM—MISSISSIPPI, SUMMER 1937 DAY
A bed with no one in it.
where heads were.
sleeping feet.
Un-made.
The pillows scrunched
The sheets and blankets pulled back by
A window.
Soft sunlight coming in.
Shining on the headboard made out of brass.
floor.
Clothes on the
Plates of eaten food on the nightstands.
above the bed.
A picture
A blown-up portrait of a marijuana leaf.
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Now Rosie and David.
side.
Looking up.
for a cigarette.
In the bed after.
Laying side by
David reaches over to the nightstand
The ashtray there over-flowing.
lights one for her and then one for himself.
fucked.
more.
Fucked and wanting more.
Large eyes.
He
Rosie looks
A beautiful face wanting
Her breasts showing.
And even though
her body lies still it looks like it’s dancing.
The curves
moving beneath the sheets.
DAVID
Sometimes I don’t feel like I’m from here…
ROSIE
(taking a drag from her cigarette)
What do you mean?
DAVID
Like I’m a guest.
An unwanted guest.
people are gracious…
ROSIE
It’s because you’re black…
DAVID
And only some
155
That’s not it.
ROSIE
Do you think I know what you’re thinking?
DAVID
Yes…
ROSIE
(Reaching over him to ash, kissing him)
Well…
I don’t.
DAVID
Something’s going to happen…
like.
That’s what it feels
Like something’s always going to happen…
ROSIE
You wanna smoke some more weed?
DAVID
No…
ROSIE
Well…
I need to.
It helps me sleep.
156
DAVID
It just makes me awake….
ROSIE
You could drink…
DAVID
I guess it’s just how it happens—what happens… after.
You feel naked.
ROSIE
You are naked.
DAVID
That’s what I mean…
you see it?
And it’s not what I mean.
Can
Can you see it in my eyes?
ROSIE
What am I looking for?
DAVID
A guest…
missed it.
a guest just staying at a hotel…
I missed the check-out time…
And I
157
ROSIE
(laughing, a laugh that makes you look at her)
Well maybe I should ask for a tip before it’s too
late…
DAVID (V.O)
And it’s the same story, every story, all stories—the
story—the story of a man who wanted more, and a girl
who brings him down to her level…
And she knew.
I knew I was naked.
The difference—the story—the fact that
she was okay with it…
And there is no end to how you
come to live with that.
INT. JAIL CELL—DAY
You see David through the bars.
bunk.
He is sitting alone on his
He looks at the harmonica Johnny left on his bed.
He reaches over and grabs it, turning it over and over in
his open hands.
A FLASHBACK SEQUENCE—TRACED PICTURES COLORED IN
158
You see Nina as a girl.
birthday party.
progression.
Maybe five.
At an outside
Blowing out candles on a cake.
Time lapse.
Time
Like seeing the brake lights of
cars going over a bridge at night—seen like strobes—dots
and then streams depending on the pause of the shutter.
Nina—growing—a girl, a teenager coming down the stairs, a
woman.
You don’t see her body—growing—you see her face.
Her hair.
picture.
Maturing.
The eyes look different in each
Each sketch filled in, and colored.
NINA (V.O.)
You think there’s a secret.
you lose your innocence.
relationships.
between…
Over time.
In those first
Their beginnings and end.
And then you think you know.
awakening.
Usually after being hurt.
fooled and embarrassed.
tool.
You sense hints of it as
The in
You have an
After feeling
After someone uses you as a
The awakening an afterthought.
A musing on a
reflection, a memory of something that happened to
you.
And then you think you know.
secret.
You know the
Like at first you weren’t really alive.
you’re alive now.
You know the secret.
But
Like an
animal cornered and killed and then brought to life
again—remembering…
You know the secret and then you
159
become the secret.
You become what you thought was
secret, what you thought was kept from you.
you keep this secret from others.
revealing it in subtext.
And then
You hide it.
Only
The subtext in all your
conversations with others…
It’s happened to me just
like it’s happened to you.
We’re not that different—
you and me.
Our origins are the same.
Our fears.
But only a few really know, or think they know for a
time, before they too are sucked back into it—
cornering animals just as they were once cornered.
Only a few know there is no secret.
subtext.
No code.
No real reality other than this.
No
For the
secret is the figment of our fears—and all of us know.
All of us are in on it together.
This the fallacy—the
fault and phoniness in everything we compete for.
game no secret.
Playing it no secret.
only falling asleep again.
within a dream.
The
Your awakening
A deeper sleep—a dream
The inception into your real world a
game you only play with yourself.
And only when you
really wake up, and are done playing, do you finally
realize you’re not alone.
you never will be…
to stop playing.
begin with.
You were never alone.
You just have to stop.
And
You have
Stop hiding what you never knew to
Then your whistles will be true.
Then
160
your hypocrisy becomes authentic hypocrisy.
realize the true genius of comedy.
And you
And when you
laugh, your laughter can bring tears…
EXT. PETROGRAD WINTER PALACE—NIGHT OCT 1917
It’s a St. Petersburg street like Dostoevsky would
describe.
The early morning hours near 2 a.m.
isn’t white—concrete, brick, metal.
on these things too.
snowflakes.
Snow.
What
A soft layer of snow
The street lamps a halo for the
The city called Petrograd now.
Soon to
undergo another name change after the October revolution.
You see Antonin Popovitch as a young man.
for the White Army—a Cossack.
A Russian guard
He stands at a tall wooden
door that leads into the cavernous interiors of the palace.
POPOVITCH (V.O.)
Not a shot was fired.
Despite the propaganda later.
Really just a few illiterate rebels.
They broke in,
got lost in the hallways, and accidentally happened
upon the remnants of Kerensky's provisional government
in the imperial family's breakfast room…
maybe I shouldn’t say they broke in.
But then
I let them in…
161
The signal was a whistle.
A low whistle from a
darkened corner…
The following seen almost as if it was filmed with the
technology of the time.
in the reels.
Black and white.
The timing off
Scratch marks in the corners of the picture.
Poorly dressed men appearing at the door Antonin guards.
Most of them not even armed.
At least not with rifles.
Almost like a mob, but not quite big enough. Just strange
folk.
Wannabe gypsies in a city.
A close-up of Antonin—
his finger to his lips as he ushers them in…
Then the same black and white reel.
in Mississippi.
sky.
But now a crossroads
A hill—pleasant to the view in a cloudless
A car comes into view at the top of it—A Model T
Ford.
You watch its progress as it comes to the crossroads
where a lone tree stands.
You watch it slow and stop, as
if it’s meeting someone.
POPOVITCH (V.O.)
It was my secret.
ago…
How I betrayed my people so long
For money—not much.
family.
But I needed it.
I was starting a family.
wife with child—our daughter—Nina…
For my
Just married.
My
Money for passage
162
to America.
To start a new life…
Thousands of
Cossacks died in the days that followed.
executed by the Soviet Regime.
Some
Some deported.
Some
starved in the man-made famine of our fertile lands
that followed…
I thought my secret was buried in my
family’s flight to America, but perhaps it was
whimsical of me to think that…
You have to look ahead
to find any form of heaven, but sometimes, sometimes
what’s behind you are the tracks, the tracks that are
not covered with snow…
EXT. ST. LOUIS NEAR THE CENTRAL WEST END—FALL 1937 DAY
David is walking down Lindell Boulevard.
He’s been walking
a long time, and for a moment you picture him getting off a
bus at the station downtown.
Cathedral Basilica.
He stops in front of the
He puts his guitar case down.
The one
holding the electric Gibson he stole from Mississippi.
opens it for people passing by to throw money in.
He
His
other guitar—Jonathon Bonnor’s guitar—is around his back.
He slides the strap around and begins a tune.
with her child walks by.
A mother
The young girl points to the
bullet hole, as the mother holds her hand and pulls her
163
along to keep walking.
There are tears in David’s eyes as
he plays a slow, sad tune.
POPOVITCH (V.O.)
I guess sometimes the mirror lies to you, or you lie
to it in what you see back.
Youth.
A memory of beauty.
A warm and true smile reflected in the eyes…
But then maybe someone captures a picture—a picture of
you in different light and shade.
above you or below.
And you look different.
all what you see in the mirror.
yourself in the past.
ghost.
Maybe from an angle
Not at
The memory of
And sometimes you see death—a
Pale, gaunt skin, blood-shot eyes, your hair
looking dirty.
Almost like a smell.
captured in the picture.
A smell is
And instead of seeing
yourself and loving yourself you see filth…
sometimes your deeds are captured.
Because
Your works.
Your
dead faith reflected in what your memory can’t see in
mirrors…
It’s as with all bad habits.
how they start.
Their origins—
It’s just funny that something that
at first tastes bad, smells bad—you acquire a taste
for, you revel in the smell.
comes after.
smell.
But I know something
After that first taste.
That first
And what comes after is somehow worth it.
164
Worth these first bad things…
child we knew.
A child knows.
As a
Something that hurts at first.
Something that makes us feel bad—we avoid.
Somehow as
adults we lose this common sense. Maybe because we
know what comes after the pain makes the pain worth
it—it takes away its pain and all other pains too.
And so we escape into something bad in order to feel
good, for a while, until we remember again.
Leaving
us at first never wanting it again, but then doing it
again to forget this.
We must forget why we do
something bad by doing something bad again.
funny tragedy.
How we come to know this.
This the
How we come
to know that the bad things we do absolve us from how
we came to know…
A MUSIC VIDEO—EIGHTIES STYLE
A man and woman going up on an elevator.
and Nina.
Or David and Rosie.
You see the buttons light
up as they reach each new floor.
low on the frets.
Could be Johnny
David playing the guitar—
The interior of a hotel room.
undressing.
Black lingerie.
White stockings.
the jungle.
Not a Mississippi forest.
The woman
Then it’s
Jungle sounds.
night—the full trees gray in the darkness.
At
What’s lit up
165
in the trees could be eyes, but you’re really not sure…
Then an interstate.
Cars lined up in traffic.
interiors of the cars.
A woman putting on her red lipstick
in the rearview mirror.
the dashboard.
The
A man eating a doughnut placed on
He’s wearing a short-sleeve button down
white shirt with wrinkles.
falling on his tie.
Crumbs from the doughnut
You see the fat gold band on his
wedding ring finger as it taps the steering wheel in the
bumper to bumper traffic—the morning commute to work…
Then
a Russian military progression parading through a square.
The men in uniform marching in step.
in the background.
again.
rest…
Maybe some drums as you see the jungle
Trees in the daylight now.
and monkeys.
David’s guitar always
Animals in them.
A black cat sprawled out on a limb taking its
Then a calm, clear ocean at sunset.
a height.
Birds
You see it from
Like you’re looking from a tower—a lighthouse.
Like the one where Nina’s body was found.
she was murdered.
But not where
For you see a Mississippi forest again.
The face of a white wolf.
Its teeth bared.
or a snarl, but you’re not really sure.
Either a smile
And if there were
any lyrics to David’s guitar they would be sung by Johnny
Tribout.
And they would probably go like this:
JOHNNY (V.O.)
166
Tell the truth.
You like to see fear.
make others afraid.
Like a smell.
You like to
When you sense it.
The power in that.
Like a vibe.
Having the power.
The power to put fear in another person’s eyes…
the truth to have the truth.
Tell
And enough of this
civilization—what we call civilization.
Speaking in
codes to create this fear.
Always making
someone look to the past.
This power.
In what was just said.
hearing what it really meant.
And
And this is what
civilization really is—not some progression to the
future, but an erection to the past.
That last moment
to think about while we play God with our technology.
Give me de-civilization—the truth.
angry.
Get mad.
Tell me what you really feel.
me for food.
Give me the truth.
Get
And try to kill
How you make look
calm, but you’ve already murdered me three times in
your head.
It coming out in the poison of your words.
What you give me pause to think about after in what
you really mean in what you just said…
Civilization?
That’s just plastic and phony—like transplanted fake
hearts.
The old guard still stands ready to take over
when the heat in the room gets to be too much.
The
past always waiting, watching—creeping in on you.
Laughing at your efforts to make it better, to change,
167
to put quality back in to all this we have manifested,
all this we have created to get us out of the trees.
To help us crawl out of the water…
INT. HOSPITAL MORGUE—DAY
You see Antonin Popovitch sitting in a chair.
room with glass windows.
In a waiting
You see him like a surveillance
camera would see him from a ceiling corner perch.
and white—no sound.
A detective comes in.
Black
Maybe one of
the officers on the scene at the lighthouse earlier that
morning, but you don’t know—you only guess.
In the way he
approaches Popovitch.
No sound, and all you really see is
the detective’s feet.
Because of the camera angle.
you see Popovitch lean forward.
if he could only reach them.
And
His head down to his knees
His hands clasped over his
head.
POPOVITCH (V.O.)
And where does what you forget go?
remember it again?
beginning.
And how do we
This how an end is maybe a new
How you recall things.
Maybe a note to
yourself on something you want to change.
you learned.
Something
Some insight to a truth—a different way
168
of looking at a memory that already happened.
But
where does it go that we may recall it again?
A name.
A number.
A password…
from your past.
Maybe it’s a face.
And you try to place it.
A face
You place
it in a situation—many situations in a moment’s
thought—trying to capture why you remember something
about it, something about that face that tells you
you’ve seen it before…
daughter’s murderer.
Maybe I saw him.
My
Maybe in a grocery aisle as I
bought bread—he was there—just a casual shopper
browsing the same shelf…
view that’s true.
believe it.
There really is no point of
But it is true to you if you
What’s easy to forget sometimes is
there’s nothing to prove by it—you don’t really have
to prove anything.
it.
You just have to really believe
And be willing to stand up for it from time to
time…
I will not go into the past.
I will not
remember those last days in Petrograd before I escaped
to America with my family.
what my past has wrought.
a room to identify her.
searching for it.
forget.
But now I must look at
Soon they will call me into
My child… So do not go
What you forget you are meant to
And when you remember it try to remember why.
But if you can’t that’s okay too.
Because there is a
169
happy ending to the judgment you are facing.
don’t have to try to remember anymore.
You
You don’t have
to try to recall all the options to your defense…
What finally absolves you the sacrifice.
Your
sacrifice, and others, to the monument that sets us
all free.
You see that’s the never-ending deal…
INT. BILOXI CASINO BLACKJACK TABLE—NIGHT
Johnny Tribout doesn’t know how he walked into it.
casino.
Built on beach-front property.
after the war, and what happened there.
But this maybe
With his friend,
who he would call a friend now—David Threnody.
both there.
table.
This
And they’re
They’re both sitting there, at this blackjack
The sounds of slot machines all around them.
And
this maybe why it’s a dream. Because it was after she was
murdered.
Nina. After the car wreck over an innocent
squirrel.
Like instead of them going to the brig they
ended up here…
The dealer looks familiar, and so do the
rest of the players sitting at the table.
their pictures taken before.
Like they’ve had
Like they’ve been on the back
cover of books.
DEALER
170
(to Johnny)
Do you want a hit or stay?
Johnny looks at his cards showing.
recognize them.
Pausing like he doesn’t
He doesn’t recognize their value.
The
dealer dressed like he’s from the fifties though they
haven’t happened yet.
A handsome man.
A copy of a
railroad brakeman’s handbook sticking out of his leather
jacket pocket.
JOHNNY
I guess hit me…
The dealer slides a card out of the shoe and flips it face
up in front of Johnny’s chips—a queen, a queen of spades.
The dealer now looks at David, who slides his finger across
the green cloth, as a symbol that he stays, and the dealer
goes to the next gentlemen at the table.
A man dressed in
a white suit with what looks like a river boat pilot hat
on.
And he wears a name tag, but you know it’s just a
pseudonym—a term boatmen use to measure the depth of the
water.
A term used to navigate the channels of a river.
And that’s how they’ll be addressed now—by what they’re
wearing—what identifies their work.
171
RIVER BOAT PILOT
Now what the difference between a smart man and an
imbecile is around here?
One knows he’s putting you
on and the other actually believes it…
I’ll take a
card.
DEALER
You oughta apply for the railroad.
It’s much easier
work and you get more pay…
DAVID
(whispering over to Johnny)
Don’t believe it.
here.
Don’t believe nothin’ happenin’
It’s just a dream you’re havin’ and I’m in on
it too.
Because it’s the same dream I had.
dream all men have when they love a woman.
love a woman and something else…
The same
When they
You’re just in
Mississippi, man…
A white-haired gentlemen is next.
And a pipe.
forties.
He sports a moustache.
He wears one of those wool suits from the
And something is sticking out of his jacket
pocket as well.
A folded screenplay.
With ink corrections
172
apparent on the pages.
He takes a card.
Then he speaks
with a quick, Southern accent.
SCREEN WRITER
Seems like the bad writers of songs these days reflect
on the past too much.
Dwell on it-you know.
control issues—I imagine…
compartmentalize you work.
can’t dwell on things.
next thing.
Due to
You see you have to
Just like your life.
You
Once it’s done, move on to the
It makes memories all the more passable.
So when you face them again, you see them… the right
way…
Course you can’t look ahead either.
Then you
either numb up, or get wound so tight the whole thing
just unravels…
You gotta control your thoughts.
yourself what you’re thinking about—and why.
Is it
about things you wonder if you had control over?
sad thing is good writers have to do it too.
abhor silence…
And my song is about over.
that face card did me in…
Ask
The
We all
I’m afraid
Don’t get up, Gentlemen.
I
bid you Adieu…
You watch him rise to take his leave.
had hooked to the back of his stool.
stage.
Gathering a cane he
And then you see a
Almost like it’s not far away.
The red curtains
173
closed.
A spotlight center stage.
out to it in front of the curtains.
Johnny Tribout walks
Not in close-up, but
viewed from the back of the audience.
JOHNNY
I thought it was my fault.
When I heard that she was
dead—murdered—I thought I had some hand in it.
over memories.
I went
Trying to see if I missed something.
If my gut reaction to the moment was wrong, and in
reflection meant something else.
my moments with her…
I went through all
But then I had a thought.
thought on how to change my thoughts.
A
I realized I
wanted to be in control of something that nothing in
my imagination could control.
Something I try not to
forget though the thought tells me to.
so easily…
And I forget
I try to remember to forget.
And maybe
not forget, but just really not remember until later,
until maybe there’s some judgment for it.
judgment is always fickle.
And
The only judgments you
face are from others who judge the same criteria.
The
rest is just misreads, and the only time you really
feel judged is when you judge yourself…
And I don’t
know—maybe I did have some hand in it. With Nina’s
death.
Maybe I never really listened in what she was
174
judging me for in our time together.
Maybe I was too
busy listening to what already happened, trying to
find in it all the reasons she should love me.
When
really she just wanted to love me being there—right
there—with her…
The blackjack table again.
Maybe the stage Johnny was
standing on off to the right.
passing through the tables.
wants a drink.
The cocktail waitresses
Maybe one asks David if he
Free when you’re playing.
looks like Rosie.
In the eyes you only see in the morning.
And she moves on to the next table.
bunch.
Musicians.
A familiar looking
And maybe they’re all twenty-seven.
Each wearing what they died in…
a fire in the casino.
A morning mist.
woman in a white dress.
Then smoke.
A rising sun.
You’re not in the casino at all.
there.
Red.
cemetery.
dates.
In morning fog.
And you’re following someone.
A
But when the rising sun shines
She is Rosie.
A naked back.
And then you know you are in a
Nina is walking between the rows.
The names.
Like there’s
Just the smoke still
through the mist sometimes it looks red.
She is Nina.
And maybe she
You read the
Etched in different tombstones.
get closer to her each time you see one.
You
And then when you
175
look at her as you follow she gets farther away.
speed skipped.
That
And you can’t judge the distance.
NINA
(like she’s just talking over her shoulder)
It is fear.
That is what you feel.
A racing heart.
Sweaty palms.
In your dry lips.
That is fear.
The
only time you lose it when you truly see someone else.
And you let go…
isn’t a test.
situations!
depth.
It isn’t chaos—you know.
Look how easy it is to defuse
And it only goes deeper.
The surface your search…
not being judged!
Deeper to no
Wake up!
You are
We are surrounded by judgments that
don’t really mean anything.
Here—with me?
It really
Do you see that now?
So quick… and how so easily it fades…
And nothing to mourn.
A secret if there ever was one…
And you know what you have to do—don’t you?
happens.
When it
When you go back to origins of nakedness—
thrown out into the world after sweet, lovely
insights…
You just have to tell me.
Not in how they come to you.
to tell me in your eyes.
Not in words.
But in your eyes.
Learn
Do it here, now—with me.
For here is where forever is measured…
176
The smoke clears.
wasn’t a fire.
the tables.
The casino again.
Apparently there
The sounds of slot machines.
The blackjack tables.
Following a cocktail waitress.
You pass by
The Caribbean Poker.
You go by Johnny and David.
The others at the table, and the tables beyond.
Rosie.
Or maybe it’s Nina.
you know them.
periphery.
Maybe it’s
But they’re not dressed how
You’re distracted by what’s in your
Until she gets to the stage, which was to the
right, and Rosie climbs the steps, walking to the spotlight
in uniform—holding a tray with two empty glasses.
COCKTAIL WAITRESS
And you ain’t heard me talk yet.
this, in what I’ve seen here.
loved him because of his fear.
wouldn’t really call it fear.
better.
At least not like
Who I’ve served…
Though maybe I
Because he knew—he knew
But he did not want to survive.
fearless in him.
I
That I found
A will opposite of all directions.
He fought when he shouldn’t fight, and just listened
when he should have said something…
It was the little
things that scared him—what came out in his playing—
his music.
He wanted grace.
But you can only die that way.
I made my deal long ago.
Grace under pressure.
It’s not for living…
Not in any demonstrative
177
way—that ain’t the way a woman does it.
walk.
A walk in the woods.
talk…
Then it’s a game afterwards.
brain dead.
And you hear the trees
Sometimes not…
The surface your search…
up dead.
To see who’s
To see who’s talked to trees.
a light shining.
depth.
It’s more a
Sometimes
A depth with no
One day you’ll wake
Maybe then you’ll have your answers.
Until
then I’ll continue to keep it real.
I’ll continue to
do it for him.
I love him for
Because I love him.
how it makes me feel…
through his fears.
I love how he speaks to me
In his songs.
awaiting the same judgment…
A guide for others
For these things are
simple—a child’s knowledge—what you learn as a child.
The basics.
What evolves from that a world view.
Triggering connections.
A circuit break.
don’t dwell on as adults—a given.
go back on that deal.
survive do that…
Only an artist does that.
Her face looking like it made
The blackjack table.
Among the men sitting there.
When you feel not threatened.
each other.
Because you don’t
Only those who don’t want to
The light around her fades.
a mistake.
This we
A calm atmosphere there.
That strange vibe you get.
These men aren’t playing
They’re not even playing the house.
They’ve
178
come here because someone has imagined them that wants to
learn from it. Johnny is learning something.
too.
And David
Facing a past that is in the present.
place again.
Revisited.
without even being there…
Like an old highway you can drive
The next gentlemen.
in the middle and slicked back.
smoking in a tuxedo.
loose.
A time and
Hair parted
A twenties haircut.
A master of the Jazz Age.
He’s
The collar
And you can tell he’s recently been with a woman,
maybe his wife.
doesn’t work.
He knows he’s distracted and why.
You can tell that too.
way he uses them.
woman as well.
He
By his hands.
The
But he has money, maybe that from a
And so we will call him rich.
RICH MAN
You know you don’t have to have money to understand
those that do.
How you become rich is no secret.
Charity begins at home.
And so does money. It begins
with that first voice you hear, asking “Why not?”
begins with whether or not you answer…
It
You strive to
win or lose so that one day you may not have to care
if you win or lose.
the poor want.
This is what the rich have that
And it will always be in the hands of
a few who will spend it to distract you from what they
have…
Maybe this will be judged.
I don’t know.
For
179
now it works.
Somehow.
Someway.
first voice in all of us…
The dealer busts.
water.
way.
Our butterfly…
Everybody wins.
alcoholic bloat to his face.
Maybe led by that
And now you see that
Something easily cured with
And since this is Johnny’s dream you sense it that
The burnout that comes with waking.
DEALER
I just want to talk anyway…
anything I already have.
If I could tell you
And where do you take it?
Where do you take it from there?
The life after vanity.
forget.
This the vanity.
Something you remember to
Waiting on words…
last words.
The silence
you never knew existed…
And then you hear a voice.
could be David.
sleeping.
Maybe it’s Johnny’s.
Whispering because they’re afraid you’re
A hint of doubt in it that you haven’t learned
anything from them.
That they haven’t learned anything.
You catch it in the tone.
repeating something.
And you know they’re merely
Something the dealer has said.
by hearing it you repeat it with them.
peeking in.
Or it
Peeking behind the curtain.
And
The price of
Thinking you have
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knowledge when really all you have is something someone
told you…
Hix Calix!
And now it's David on stage.
his words.
No guitar.
No music.
His face and body saying them.
like he knows he's a dream.
And he speaks
A friend's dream.
mind unraveling what just happened.
Just
Part of a
How a man loved a
girl, the daughter of a powerful man, but couldn't trust
her.
And then she was murdered.
where they all nearly died.
at it on the outside.
a snapshot.
that measure height.
Holding his number.
David is a friend who can look
A witness.
A mug shot.
This after an accident
And for a moment you see
David in profile next to lines
His arrest photo.
Black and white.
The word Mississippi put into focus.
White magnetic letters on a black board.
DAVID
He loved a girl.
old plot.
Just like I loved a girl.
That same
What storytellers make of their work.
Heroes and villains.
Predictions based on the past.
All of it practical—simple.
Rest when you can.
Harness your resources.
And be willing to lose.
Feel the
181
pressure when it all comes weighing down.
said before.
to this.
The reactions
And then what other people say.
people do.
simple.
What you’ve done before.
What you’ve
What other
Complicated, but ultimately deceptively
Because what is great?
great things?
long after.
Great people?
How do you recognize
These are things judged
Long after they happen.
For while they
happen so many other things are going on—filtered
stupidity.
The mundane.
The mechanisms…
know how you learn what you learn.
You do not
The curriculum
designed so you don’t ever ask this.
What you read
the comfort of everyone else sharing the same reality—
a reality where you don’t even have to finish your
next sentence because someone else can do it for you—
they too on the same page.
The same laughter.
Sharing the same drudgery.
And so now I’ll finish it for him.
I will finish his dream.
same breath as great men.
A dream where he shared the
A dream where he took the
cards that they denied—and won.
winner.
He loved a girl.
Because Johnny was a
Just like I loved a girl.
And what he lost was not in her death.
this not his fault.
of loss.
you.
Her murder—
No, what he lost was the meaning
This is what time in Mississippi does to
Because the world is loud.
This earth is loud.
182
And only in silence is what is great recognized.
movement continued.
The revolution.
The
The turning of
the wheel…
EXT. PETROGRAD STREETS—DAY OCT 1917
A riot.
Men and women.
street.
The sidewalk.
one to the next.
Even children.
You see their faces.
Angry.
Scared.
Confused.
see each face you see their story.
work.
Where they live.
thresh wheat.
kitchens.
Filling the
Farmers.
Some repair shoes.
The children at play.
You move from
And as you
You see where they
Factory workers.
Some
You see the women in
And each time you see
their story—their work, their home—a picture of Antonin
Popovitch.
A Cossack guard at the Winter Palace door.
finger to his lips.
A
And in between you see the Biloxi
Light, different snapshots of Nina’s naked and dead body.
Her feet.
Her eyes.
And what they see.
POPOVITCH (V.O.)
And how is it then?
what was inspired?
How is it that I’m inspired by
How do you follow a dream to its
beginning without first knowing the end?
This how
time stretches out, enfolding the idea of itself in
183
our concept of it, our measure of it.
the dream as real until you wake up…
Why you accept
I don’t know
what I’m going to do with them—these men.
They are
not the cause of my daughter’s death, but they know
too much.
They know too much of the original
inspiration, and the truth there…
man.
I am a foolish old
Sometimes I feel like I’ve learned nothing.
Nothing from the faces that stir in my memory.
Nothing from the pain I’ve caused that gives me pain.
For that is the secret.
The secret to good dreams.
And why bad men embrace nightmares.
You don’t do the
right thing because someone told you it’s right.
don’t do the right thing to please anyone.
to have peace, to feel peace.
caused from your memory.
You
It’s more
And forget the riots
The riots your memories see
when you know you could have helped someone, but you
didn’t…
INT. THE MURDERER’S BEDROOM, BILOXI BOQ—DAY
Nina’s dress is in the window.
shoes.
High heels.
window open.
A black dress.
They are aligned perfectly.
Olson is on the scene.
There on a tip.
Cameras flashing.
And her
The
Along with Starks.
Other police officials—
184
MP’S—and reporters moving about.
room.
Different aspects of the
A bookcase with only one book on it.
clothes.
The bathroom light on.
the hanging body.
A corner of
A closet door ajar…
From a ceiling fan.
And
Still going.
Situated at the foot of the bed—made.
STARKS
(looking up with his notepad)
No telling…
A Russian agent?
OLSON
(over by the bookcase, setting the book down)
According to the passport and documents—an attaché
from the Stalin ministry, an officer under a Nikolai
Yezhov of the Soviet Secret Police, NKVD in 1938, and
assigned as a junior advisor to the State Department
1940…
the question is—what’s he doing in Mississippi?
Involved in the death of a decorated Army Colonel’s
daughter?
An officer also Russian.
STARKS
Is that really a guitar string?
OLSON
185
Yeah…
looks like it nearly cut his neck in two.
STARKS
(looking at a chair knocked over)
It’s a hell of a way to go…
falling…
Must have felt like
Think he did it?
OLSON
Shit!
A squirrel is in the windowsill.
high heels.
Crouched by one of Nina’s
Olson goes to shoo it away.
It merely jumps
to the nearby branch of a tree outside.
STARKS
I find the format all wrong.
right.
Something doesn’t smell
Whatta you think?
OLSON
Hey…
it’s above my pay grade…
the cuts and abrasions
on his hands and neck say that he struggled.
suicide?
room…
think?
No note.
But
And no sign of a struggle in the
Sounds like I should just agree…
Don’t you
186
STARKS
I just write the story.
the details.
trick.
Funny how it all comes out in
That’s the trick—you know.
You know the
When you’re listening pretend like you aren’t.
And when you should listen pretend like you did.
OLSON
Well… it’s a military matter.
The Judge Advocate…
It’s going to the IG.
Did you hear about the two boys
they picked up the night of the murder?
Apparently
one of them was the daughter’s sweetheart.
some guitar player.
The other
Here to be a pilot I hear.
Popovitch has got them locked up.
Some accident on
the road…
And then you go out the window.
high heels.
Over the top of Nina’s
You see the squirrel in the tree and then you
move on like you’re following something.
cord.
Or a continual painted line.
road.
A country road.
in the distance.
other cars.
Some electrical
And then you’re on a
And it feels historical.
Churches
Just two lanes—one going each way.
No road markers.
must be late summer.
No speed limits.
Early fall.
No
And it
For the fields are bare.
187
Bales of hay rolled up gray and brown.
Looking like wooden
wheels from tinker toys intermittently sprinkled across the
checkered field, giving you the feel of a chess board being
played.
This seen not through windows.
in a car.
You’re walking.
You’re not driving
But time sped up almost like
you’ve seen all this in a memory and then rewound to fast
forward.
INT. A COUNTRY CATHOLIC CHURCH, GREEK ORTHODOX—DAY
You go down the lines of pews.
Turn left at the altar,
everything gold there, and face two confessional booths.
One of them with the curtain open.
the booth.
In the red tones of the curtains.
through the wooden slot open.
Popovitch.
down.
Then the darkness of
Light
And you see the shadow of
His balding white head.
Bent down—looking
His voice and the priest—low whispers.
POPOVITCH
Bless me father for I have sinned.
PRIEST
When was the time of your last confession?
188
POPOVITCH
24 years…
PRIEST
Why so long?
POPOVITCH
Because I don’t believe in this.
I am here to confess
for my daughter…
PRIEST
(his voice now coming out younger—younger than Popovitch—in
his question)
Why don’t you believe?
POPOVITCH
Have you ever had the feeling to confide?
strange when I feel it now.
choose to confide in.
people.
about.
It’s
It’s strange in who I
Because it’s about other
At least that’s what you usually want to talk
Why someone bothers you.
And so then you try
to find someone akin to your language.
You sense out
someone you feel not so different from you, and you
189
tell them.
You tell them about the differences in the
person that bothered you.
other person?
And have you ever been that
The person confided in?
You see it all happen.
You see it.
And maybe you’re even more
akin to the person causing the offense…
Do you agree?
Do you say nothing to the judgment you’re faced with?
And how does this make you feel?
If you remember this
when you want to confide something?
The priest coughs.
Like he’s preparing.
PRIEST
We’re all put in situations.
is one way it could happen.
do agree?
The situation you posed
For instance, what if you
What do you feel then?
Perhaps some bond
with the person that confided in you?
And what if
what they confide is not some insult?
Not some pain
or injustice, or something to laugh at.
instead it’s about helping someone.
What if
And someone just
wanted to share that with you—indebting you in the
same way.
To seeing the world with love.
And more,
seeing that with the person that confided in you, and
feeling that—feeling the love confirmed?
190
Popovitch smiles.
POPOVITCH
I don’t know, but just speaking for myself—the only
way you truly sense that is with a woman, and it just
happens sometimes…
The children.
you do that, make you know that…
The children make
And then you see
them lose that, you see them grow—little by little—
making you wonder about all those times, all those
memories when you laughed and thought it was cute—that
thing you want to help, help them to know…
they don’t ask for help.
And then
They learn how asking for
help doesn’t make you learn anything.
Because
somewhere, somehow along the way they were alone—they
felt alone, and had to learn this—what to know for a
situation—so when it happens again they don’t have to
feel that way… Perhaps I failed her.
Maybe I gave her
this feeling—the first feeling of it, when the process
began—of no longer asking help for certain things…
Funny how you grow old.
You learn of so many
situations you forget them all.
your body well.
something.
Diet.
Sleep.
And you learn to know
Going without
And getting used to something…
I can’t
191
believe I’m still afraid sometimes.
hasn’t happened before…
Like it all
and she will never see that.
PRIEST
Yes, but do you remember what you laughed at?
remember what your child lost?
Do you
Do you remember what
you as a child lost?
POPOVITCH
You don’t remember what you lost.
But you remember
everything around it.
PRIEST
I think there are moments when you still remember.
That’s why you remember why you laughed.
laughed at a child.
And you know that laughter…
Where the child laughs with you…
I know of pride.
The euphoria…
Why you
I’ve felt it.
I may be young, but
The burden of it.
Where you right every memory.
Where
you look out at the world like everyone sees you…
I’ve felt its deep cuts.
about…
That aloneness you speak
But you know what I’ve found?
to look for.
There’s nothing to learn.
There’s nothing
Have you ever
felt like having no pride but having no shame?
And
192
not carelessness—just no pride…
Those moments.
It truly is free.
Those moments when you feel that.
When you feel like those moments when you watched your
child grow up.
When you laughed.
And made them
laugh…
POPOVITCH
My daughter is dead…
a secret…
For a judgment I made—a choice,
And now I want someone to listen.
the in between.
Not to
What I accomplished in between.
the perfection I sought.
myself and my family.
The goals I attained.
In
For
That doesn’t matter anymore.
No one was listening then, and no one is listening
now.
That is the pride you speak about.
identity I sought.
choice.
After the judgment.
After the
The in between like yesterday.
A dream I
awoke from.
judgment.
is dead.
And I awoke to the judgment of the
The choice after the choice…
My daughter
And how I ended the story was another
choice, another judgment.
Again no one listening.
Except in what I tell you here.
you…
That
In what I don’t tell
And maybe the judgments mean nothing.
are so many of them.
For there
And now I must choose which ones
193
I pay attention to.
For my pride—my identity.
The
laughter long forgotten…
PRIEST
No one knows anything unless you tell them.
confess.
You must
And then the loud silence becomes one voice—
the truth.
The true response to what you want people
to listen for, to what you want God to answer back…
Do you think God wants judgment?
you want?
Is that the ending
You know what that means just as I do.
is the only way the imperfect becomes perfect.
God is not the instrument of that.
It
But
The Devil is… Only
judgment brings the end, and only the Devil wants
that. You’re lying to yourself.
We all lie to
ourselves when we want the end to come—the final
judgment.
listening.
we do.
We lie to ourselves believing no one is
To the evil done to us.
To the evil that
This is how the Devil wants to be God.
is the great lie.
And it
The illusion of our suffering.
thirst for justice and revenge…
No, mercy.
forgiveness is spoken all around us.
Our
Mercy and
It is being
spoken to you. Now, in the sorrow of your mourning.
In everything you’ve done or thought of doing…
take this world into your own hands.
Do not
For you will not
194
find love…
voice.
But you know this.
I hear it in your
It is a voice that’s seen death, confronted by
the law, the law that makes us all see our death.
It
is its silence that you hear now…
The confessional darkens.
Popovitch.
You no longer see the head of
You no longer hear the voice of the priest.
You see trees.
The leaves different colors for the fall.
Red and orange.
Purple.
them—a morning mist.
The green mixed in.
And the sight makes you feel the
leaves drawing in the water from the vapor.
drink.
Then trees on fire.
Black smoke.
A fog around
Blue flames.
Tall trees.
Their last
Not deciduous.
Then a silhouette of that lone
tree that stood at a crossroads in Mississippi. These
images transmitted subliminally.
the eyes don’t see them.
The murderer’s bedroom.
Shown quickly so almost
But the mind does…
The body hanging from the
revolving ceiling fan by a guitar string.
through graves.
Nina walking
The window with her high heels.
squirrel in the tree.
The
Johnny and David at the wreck the
night of Nina’s murder.
Popovitch.
Other images.
Being ushered into an MP jeep.
Examining David’s electric guitar…
These
images flashed in the background of the trees and their
195
colors.
the moon.
Then moonlight.
A road that seems to be following
Bright and full.
Large and low in the sky…
POPOVITCH
And what laws?
What laws are you speaking about?
It’s just people getting together to makes laws above
the laws.
Reasons and imaginations.
For why the moon
waxes and wanes.
Why seasons warm and grow cold…
want no endings.
In fact I’ve never seen one.
my mind makes that.
another…
others.
Only
As one memory unfolds into
I’ve given up perfection.
In myself and in
But the last took me a long time.
wanting to see what I lacked in others.
had their moments.
I kept
But they only
Their moments of truth.
When I
came together with them, and saw the same thing.
same shared reality.
Some happiness.
What you say is true.
It’s true as you speak it.
then what I say is true as well.
say true.
What I’ve experienced.
Some pain…
But
It’s true as I speak
it because I’m bringing myself into it.
your truth.
The
Even if it was only something I
experienced long ago.
witnessed.
I
What I’ve
Just adding to
Making what you say true just as what I
For we are both confessing…
both know about death.
Its last breath.
About what we
But I felt
196
nothing.
I felt nothing when I felt it.
something I had to do.
happens.
It was just
Imagining death before it
To make that ending in my mind.
And if that
is evil then you’re the same kind of bad as me…
INT. BILOXI BASE COMMANDER’S OFFICE—DAY
You come in through the window.
go past the flags.
behind his desk.
Nothing in the sill.
The decorations on the wall.
In uniform.
sitting there.
And then David.
Johnny
And the salute as
Like that part was edited out.
residuals left.
And a
Just a hint of an image of
them coming in at attention to report.
they leave.
Popovitch
Smoking a cigar.
chair centered perfectly in front of the desk.
You
Only the
Ghosts paying a visit to an old man.
POPOVITCH
Tuskegee?
I don’t think so.
You made yourself a
friend so stick with your friend.
Now that you’ve
been guests in my prison you can be guards there.
expecting a shipment of prisoners next week.
officers—pilots shot down over England.
have already gone through.
tomorrow.
I’m
German
The papers
You report to duty
197
Johnny leans forward in the chair.
The same chair.
Formalities now.
And David sits back.
The passing judgment.
In the sunlight coming from the window.
DAVID
(mixed with Johnny’s voice)
But we did nothing wrong.
POPOVITCH
No, you did nothing wrong.
But you’re not being
rewarded from doing something right either.
authority…
Here’s your guitar back.
been confiscated.
You fled
The contraband’s
What we found in my daughter’s car.
I don’t know where you found it, but your new CO has
been informed.
We better not smell it on you.
are your responsibility now.
won’t see war.
POW’s
And don’t think you
I made a note in both your files.
Infantry assignments for both of you, an anti-tank
battalion, when our involvement escalates in Europe.
DAVID
It’s missing a string.
198
POPOVITCH
You shouldn’t leave things behind you don’t want to be
used.
Just be glad you got it back.
It belongs to
you—doesn’t it?
JOHNNY
(mixed with David’s voice)
Did you find him?
Did you find Nina’s murderer?
POPOVITCH
There was nothing to find.
closed.
you two.
He killed himself.
Case
And this is my last official act—dealing with
My letter for early retirement has been
accepted.
DAVID
I heard he was an old man.
An old man like you.
POPOVITCH
Age means nothing when you’re dead…
baseball?
Do you like
I don’t watch it that much, but to me it’s
a very interesting game.
Psychological.
You steal
another man’s hope, another man’s faith, and you
practice not to let another man steal your faith, your
199
hope.
This done for one simple reason.
love of the game…
You’re not going to get anything.
I don’t know what you expected.
than this.
Necessities.
Done for the
Some ending other
Some magic to my words.
Some revelation…
That’s all you’ll find here.
that’s happened leads to this—now.
you may have imagined…
This is your life.
Everything
Barren of what all
And is it too simple for you?
Your life and what comes next
decided this way, here in silent rooms like this.
Because I have the power and you don’t.
secret.
I am…
That’s the
And if that makes me an old man then I guess
You can leave now.
And take your papers with
you.
EXT. MISSISSIPPI CROSSROADS—DAY
You see the back of a Model T Ford.
drives over the next hill.
Leaving the crossroads behind.
And the lonesome tree there.
Centered perfectly.
The back window as it
No music.
The back of David’s head.
No sound.
As it and the
car disappears.
JOHNNY(V.O.)
Don’t believe in nothing that makes you feel bad.
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DAVID (V.O.)
And I knew it wouldn’t hold them, but I did it
anyway—after seeing that car—what it reminded
me of.
Like it had already happened.
it had happened before…
guitar no more.
Because
No, I didn’t need that
I knew it before I did it, and
somehow I knew I knew I would know.
That
feeling you get sometimes about how time really
works.
Your whole life already happened… making
it happen… so it can happen.
Like your death is
in your birth, and your birth is in your death.
That line we perceive in between somehow
curving in on itself—parabolic—parallels meeting
somehow because they begin and end the same—in
something lasting forever…
It was like I was seeing
myself in a mirror, in broken glass, but it was
someone else being me, and yet I still knew it was me,
it being already a memory, a
going to happen…
FADE OUT
memory of something
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12
A modern-day warrior/Mean mean stride/Today's Tom sawyer/Mean mean pride
--Rush
And did the curtain really close? What was it? What was this mind movie—in two
parts—it’s ending naked and bare, a repetition of something already spoken…? That day. That
day Johnny Tribout and David Threnody were judged. Their future judged. Their friendship
judged. That day was just a day. All the words in between—the thoughts and emotions in voice
overs containing the ending in them—the secret. So when the ending comes you’re left with
only memories. The ending itself empty. No voice. No voice to speak it. This the surprise of
everything new. And the words for the next chapter.
David Threnody had a friend now. And maybe he lost what he was planning to do, but in
losing the plan he gained something else. That feeling of seeing someone fall in love and feeling
what that means… That curtain never closes. Because the story continues in what’s hidden in
the end. That world always continues. And pretty soon you get used to living in it.
Funny how things come back to you. And when I felt it in my hands again it was right. It
was right in my hands. Like I’d been holding it a long time. Like I’d always been holdin’ it…
No, I can’t say I missed going to Alabama, to Tuskegee, and that’s the funny thing about history,
about what gets recorded—how it all comes back. You can say your life is this or that. Because
of this or that, and I ain’t sayin’ everything happens for a reason—it’s just how time works.
How it works on you—like a playful friend, always pulling pranks… Somethin’ got finished. I
know that. Johnny had a look in his eye—a guard up—after that night we met. The night of the
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wreck. The night of Nina’s murder. Like someone took a pen and erased his past. What you
know after you know something. And the way we got treated. By Popovitch—Nina’s father.
Well, that was no mystery either. You give up time for something else. And then that time
becomes a memory. Whether it’s a good memory or not depends on what you gave up. And
that’s where sometimes choices haunt you… But they teach you too. They teach you to take the
history out of the choice. For what you feel now is not what you’ll feel later. And when you
know that. When you really know what you know—you ain’t that surprised when it all comes
back. The surprise you like about it not being surprised… Yeah, it felt right in my hands. The
missing string easy to replace. Making it sound the same. As when I played at The Hi-Way
Host. Scratch’s roadhouse shack. And watched Rosie dance. And I didn’t care where it had
been. I didn’t think about that when I left it and I didn’t think about it when I got it back. You
shouldn’t look for that in rooms you go into. You shouldn’t try to sense it in objects. Just like I
didn’t question the justice of it. Popovitch had to write his own story. And Johnny and me were
just minor characters in that story—his story. We weren’t the history, though we had history.
No, if Nina really loved him then maybe she didn’t really die for nothin’. Maybe that’s why he
and I met. So our history could continue after Popovitch’s history was over. And Nina livin’ on
too. In how she introduced us as musicians. In the music we played together afterwards… It
really was a strange boot camp—my enlistment—a strange return to Mississippi. I didn’t lose
nothin’ I came with. And Johnny really lost nothin’ neither. We were military men now. And I
found prison guards have a lot of time on their hands to play music…
--David Threnody, on Biloxi—from his journals 1941 to 1948
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And so that time was compartmentalized. Later to be reflected on. On sometimes
beautiful days. Sometimes not. But that’s what happens when a negotiation ends. When what
you’re bargaining for is gone. You’re only left with what others have to say about it.
And there was plenty of that. Biloxi wasn’t a small town. But the murder and the
resolution to it was splashed across the news, thanks to reporters like Starks. Johnny and David
became minor celebrities on base—seeing their names in the police blotter. That’s how they got
attention in the late summer, the early fall of 1941. The good thing about it more people came to
listen. At the roadhouse outside the base where they first met. More people actually came to see
them play. This in way how it all started. How it all started for David Threnody—his musical
career. The bars he played in East St. Louis before joining the Army, Soulard Mardi Gras,
Scratch’s roadhouse—this just the beginning. The beginning of a long career playing the Blues.
And the stories behind them that made people want to listen.
Sometimes you imagine the attention you never wanted. You wanted it, but what you
imagine is not what you get. This what gets misconstrued about situations. And the truth there.
Because if you go in with a point of view that’s one truth. Each person involved with a point of
view. Each with their own truth. But if you go in without a point of view, instead sensing others
with yours in the background, another truth appears. Something more universal. In consensual
perceptions. In something not alone… By the time David Threnody became a prison guard, and
with the audiences that began to gather at the roadhouse outside the base, he began to feel a
certain anxiety around people. Maybe it was being in Mississippi again. His strange recruitment
into the Army, and his new buddy Johnny Tribout. Whatever it was, his eyes formed strange
habits—passing someone on the street a pain to him. He didn’t like to be touched, rubbing
elbows with someone, and though he could carry on a normal conversation, there was somewhat
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of a social retardation there, something not all there—real and sensing that universal truth in
situations. He’d been burned. And by the time he was 21 he was already drinking every day.
This to numb the retardation he knew existed. That universal truth—that common sense in a
unified point of view—the love there, in all its phases through life, came out only in his music.
His hands. Moving and picking strings. And in a way that was the only way to get a true sense
of him. By watching his hands. In how they moved even when they weren’t holding a guitar.
Yeah, you got this strange vibe off him sometimes. Like he could connect with you, but
he didn’t wanna… After Nina was murdered is when we became friends I guess. If she
hadn’t been killed we probably would have just spent a night in jail together and that was
it. Just somebody you played a few songs with. But after Popovitch handed us our new
duty assignment we sorta got stuck together. That’s how I knew he could sympathize.
Because he listened—you know. To what I had to say about Nina. Like he felt it too.
Because all you have to do is imagine. Imagine what it’d be like if someone you loved
died. If they was murdered… It’s kinda worse than dying. Because you gotta keep
living, but it’s like you’re blind or somethin’. Like you can’t see the pictures no more.
You can’t see who you loved no more. But you can hear their voice… I think he needed
that. He needed somebody to sympathize with. It’s a good feeling—you know. When it
ain’t just you—alone—and somebody just tryin’ to help. When it’s all of us—together—
able to feel the same thing, even if it’s bad feelin’s… You don’t want lose that. Give up
your time losin’ that. Ain’t nothin’ like spending time with someone you love. You feel
everything. And you don’t need to write a book about it. You don’t need to sing a song.
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The shame of it is an artist gives that up from time to time, so we can feel that. So we all
can feel that. And remember it…
--Johnny Tribout, from a PBS interview, September 1971
David had a list he made. It was recovered written on military stationary. From his time
as a prison guard on the base in Biloxi. From reading it you’re not really sure who it was written
for. Ostentatiously, it was written for himself. Something he wanted to remember. Something
he wanted to remind himself of. But it’s written almost as if someone was looking over his
shoulder. No one in particular. He could have been thinking about Rosie, or Nina and Johnny,
even Popovitch. It could’ve been written for them to read, but that’s not really the sense of it
you get. It was like one of his songs—they too not written to anyone in particular. They’re not
written that way, but when you listen it could be you—it could be you he’s talking to. And
maybe there’s a formula to it—this kind of writing—vague yet engaging. It’s like you take
something particular, a detailed experience that gives you an insight, and then you strip it of the
details, leaving only the essence of the insight—what that particular experience, and the passing
thoughts from it—make you feel. This taken from that moment and written in a way it could be
placed in any moment… It was common, really. Finding something in common. Like those
simple skits on Sesame Street where you find which one is not like the other. It’s seeing what
roles we play as universal. How men who don’t speak the same language can still get together
and talk about the work they do—what they do for a living. They can talk about sports. Hunting
and fishing. How women from all nationalities, from different cultures, can still get together and
talk about their hair, and ways to make it pretty… I guess it was a list like that. Something you
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put on your bathroom mirror. So when you get up in the morning you see it while you’re
brushing your teeth.
1. Always leave yourself enough time for things you have to do. Don’t crowd your days,
and enjoy the allotment of it.
2. Appreciate cloudy days. There is beauty in them.
3. Don’t be afraid to die. It’s a part of life—face each phase of it without fear.
4. Things are given and things are taken away. But it’s people that you’ll miss.
5. You know why there’s a Golden Rule—don’t you?
6. Procrastination feeds on itself, emptying time.
7. There’s something sad in everything. Just as there are good things and many other
things that don’t even matter. Feel them in part just as you know them in part.
8. Forget what you learn so you can learn something new.
9. Dirt doesn’t dig itself.
And his name was Schultz. He was sick when they brought him on the train to
Mississippi. David and Johnny didn’t see him at first. Time in the infirmary. Maybe David
wrote the list for him, later. As something to read recovering from a long sickness. After he
came to the prison and heard David playing one night. After he began whistling. A low whistle,
weak to be sure, the sound asthmatic. Unlike that low whistle Popovitch heard that night in
October at the Winter Palace. But a beat, a rhythm. Counterpointing David’s guitar. Keeping
time to the chord changes.
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Who ever heard of a German drummer? To look at him, that first time—he looked about
a step away from dying. A head injury shot down over Southampton—a bad landing. His eyes
looked sick, and by the time he came to us it was one of those long sicknesses—you know. The
kind of sickness that kills even the fear… He’d lost a lot of time. I guess that’s how it happens.
You forget your normal life—whatever your normal life was. The people in it long gone. The
places in it long gone. And you wake up in a strange country. Different trees. Different skies.
But a toothbrush still a toothbrush. A mirror a mirror. What he saw in it tormented with
familiar objects, but at a different temperature. Measured in a language calling it all a different
name. Maybe when you wake up to this, remembering only deliriums in between, the only way
your mind can accept this new world is to accept itself as new. Everything of the past burned
away in a fever… And so he wasn’t even afraid. He wasn’t disillusioned with his meager
surroundings—the cell walls Johnny and I guarded. He accepted the food. The bed. He wrote
no letters to loved ones. He sketched no homes from memory. Only that whistle, that low
whistle—so shaky you thought it was going to tremble out—that’s how I guess he started over.
That’s how he became who he was to us. He was Schultz. A Bavarian mountain boy from
Munich who knew how to play the drums. And a good drummer is the heartbeat. It’s the life of
the song…
David Threnody, on prison time in Mississippi—from his journals 1941 to 1948
Maybe that’s when David began wondering. Wondering about where he was going.
Wondering if he was on the right path. And that time in prison—that time as a prison guard and
meeting Schultz—was what he needed. And maybe it was what happened in New Orleans.
Later, after the war. After David returned a war hero. After he defeated the Goliath and saved
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Johnny’s life. When his star was up, and rising. When he was living over on the West Bank, in
Algiers, and played the blues in the city. In bars in the French Quarter. And Popovitch again.
Retired now, an even older man. Living in New Orleans because he had relatives there. This
1945—David twenty-seven then. And Popovitch in the audience one night, in some hole in the
wall on Bourbon Street, watching him play that Gibson ES-150 he stole from Mississippi the
first time he came, and how it came back to him the second time, after Nina’s murder, absent a
string. This was after his first record, David’s first album cut. Johnny Tribout on the album,
playing harmonica. Maybe David knew someone would be watching. Someone from the
audience. Maybe he knew he would have to meet an old friend from Mississippi again—
Popovitch’s story not really over, in how he almost had Johnny killed, and in fact ending them
playing together—David and Johnny—and how David didn’t get another record deal. Not after
being busted growing a crop of reefer in the vacant strips of the Algiers rail yards in the spring of
1946. And it makes you wonder, or at least it made David wonder. Because David never made
it big after that. Later on he made more records—sure—and his name was known, but he never
made it big. His music only providing him a modest living. And looking back, it wouldn’t have
happened if he never met Johnny that night Nina was killed, playing an electric guitar he got in
Mississippi the first time. All that needed to happen so these things could happen later.
So was he on the right path? Prison gives you time to think. And maybe David’s time as
a prison guard in Biloxi, Mississippi, meeting Schultz, gave him time to question it. Not the
morality. Not morality issues or thoughts of repentance. Not in habits lost and how new habits
form. But in feeling good. Feeling good in where you are based on where you’ve been, and that
hint, that hint in it of the future you imagine. When you keep doing the things you’re doing. Of
course he never had to join the Army. He never had to go down to Mississippi the first time.
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And the love triangle between Nina, Johnny, and Popovitch’s past, his friendship with the
German POW, Schultz, didn’t necessarily lead to what happened after the war, but it limited the
choices, of a curse maybe—a curse cast and then lifted, only to fall upon him again—passed on,
from one history to the next. Popovitch wasn’t just another listener in the crowd when he came
to New Orleans after retirement, and he really didn’t get David busted for growing reefer (five
plants in all—not to sell, just his own homegrown), and he really wasn’t trying to get Johnny
killed. That was more David’s fault than Popovitch. Because of another love triangle and a drug
deal gone bad partly due to Popovitch’s interference, partly because David wanted it to happen,
almost getting Johnny killed in the process, and killing another man, a husband. But that’s for
the next part, the next part of the story, after the war. On Bethany—David’s wife.
David Threnody wasn’t sure what he did. He only knew what he had to keep on doing.
To live with who he was now. And in guarding Schultz he gained a new awareness into who he
was by seeing someone different. And he knew. He knew someday his body would tell him all
about it. It would tell him all about his habits. It would remind him. The same body that felt
good doing them. And how that’s judged. Outwardly and inwardly. Inwardly for all of us the
same. Outwardly simplified by differences. Like the color of your skin.
I guess it took me a long time to know. I didn’t know my body, and for a long time I
didn’t give it much thought. It was always just strange to me—something to use. I thought it
was other things, other problems—spiritual maybe—I don’t know. But those processes were
wonderful then—a mystery. And my imagination could work on them. How everything was
apparent, but you never spoke of it. And to me it was either evil or good. I wondered how I
could be evil or good. And I saw how I was both. How I did evil things and thought bad things,
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and how I did good sometimes, and those moments when that was clear, even after taking that
ride at the crossroads… Now it all just seems natural. Just chemicals. How you feel when your
blood sugar is low. After too much sleep or not enough. It’s what you surround yourself with.
And really the whole world is just a drug. You walk around in it and it just seeps into you.
Through the pores of your skin. Perceive one thing and something gets fired in your brain, and
if you like it you want more of it, until you get too much of it, and then you don’t like it… You
like fighting? Then you’ll fight until you don’t like fighting no more. You like making love?
Then you’ll make love until that too is over. Your days and nights is just drugs. Pains and
pleasures. Too much of one becoming the other. Too little of one becoming the other. And fear.
Jealousy. Hatred. These too drugs—addictive. And so to me it wasn’t about bad and good no
more. Why a black man gets judged as being this or that, already something before he is
anything—it’s what drug you want. It’s what drug you want at that particular time… In
Mississippi, when I was there before the war—I saw it. And I saw what prison does to you.
What it does to your body, and what drugs you want. Funny how it’s meant to be a punishment.
How it’s meant to make you change. It makes you change alright. And it ain’t no good habits
that come out of it. No good habits come from idle time. Bodies just rot that way. And what
color’s the skin of a dead man anyway?
--David Threnody, writing on his marijuana habit—from his journals 1966 to 1975
Schultz had a book. It wasn’t a Bible. It wasn’t a Bible he brought from the infirmary.
It was a yellowed hardcover of a Mark Twain book—Huckleberry Finn. David watched him
read it as he recovered, reclined in his prison bunk, his face hidden by it—gaunt, and his thin
hands still with that pallor of gray hinting death. He read it and then he read it again. He spent
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his days doing that. And at night when David played he whistled, sitting up in his bunk, his back
and head against the wall. That’s how it began. Because after days of this he went two days
with only 8 hours sleep. Schultz had read the book too much. And he began that strange
traverse. Where one thing, just one thing—becomes everything. Maybe after the long sickness,
the disorienting deliriums of it, he found it easy to pour his mind into it. You know how it is.
Read a sentence. Then read the sentence again. Maybe go have a drink and smoke a cigarette.
Then read it again. It has its first meaning—its best meaning. But as you read it, and read it
again over lapses of time you begin to let it in, and you enter into it. This the connection that
brings connections. Memories that it leads to. And then as you begin to believe in it—believe in
its power, as some truth to your soul, its world seeps into yours. Experiences become examples
of it. Deeper meanings haunt apparent simplicities. And this, this how it happens—how a
sentence, a phrase, a book—becomes iconic… But icons can’t be foundations. Not when you
fall and are trying to find your footing again. Because the cracks appear. And you begin to see
the foundations of your foundation. For it is an imaginary world brilliant with light, shouting
truth. But the book must close. The last words must be read. And then your life. Your life goes
on and you go about your day. And instead of just one it becomes one of many, one of many of
those treasures that comfort you when you seek about in your mind as you falter, in reminders
during stressful moments, in rest and thankfulness, when it’s time to tell a joke… That’s how it
began. How David and Schultz began talking. About that trip Huck Finn took down the river
(Schultz selected the book in the infirmary because he thought it would inform him about his
new home) and how David had to talk him down, because he was in that world and had lost his
own, and that’s the first time they smoked together. That’s the first time David shared a joint
with him.
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It’s easy to become sure of something. It’s merely a matter of repetition. And then
you’re so sure of it you become bored. Bored and wanting change. Until that illusion is
shattered—what you were so sure of. As you learn something new, as you learn something new
about yourself, and the doubts of unknowns. And then sometimes you want to change back.
You want to change back to what you once knew. Like Johnny Tribout after Nina’s murder.
Why he began playing the Blues with David Threnody. And talked to him. Why Schultz began
to whistle in that Mississippi prison. And needed someone to talk him down. Because the truth
is you don’t want to change. You just want to make your world what you are.
And of course this could all be legend. David’s visits to Mississippi. The stories of what
happened there. The only records of that ride at the crossroads are from David’s journals, from
stories he told friends. And as for the war and what happened before the war—his recruitment in
the Army and his time as a prison guard, well—that too could just be story, a story friends make
up when asked about their history. Embellishments over the years. Because who ever heard of a
Russian Colonel in the American Army before the war? Later on, in later journal entries David
recounts some of that time, some of it recorded here, and some to come later, in his memories
after the war when he talks about Popovitch again. He shares how Popovitch paid an
immigration official to forge his family’s U.S. citizenship when he came to the country in 1917,
using money from his betrayal at the Winter Palace. This expedited by providing information to
the State Department on his involvement with the overthrow of the Russian government and his
contacts with the new Soviet regime. How he played both sides. His loyalties as a Cossack.
And who he knew from Red October, who he let in the door. This information providing him a
commission in the Army with paperwork in order. Rising quickly through the ranks because of
what he knew. And David speculates on Nina’s death—how it was possible someone from the
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Russian secret police knew him, knew him from then, maybe even Cossack in origin. And came
to find him in Mississippi… But a Russian base commander in Biloxi before the war? A
German POW named Schultz who played the drums? They could just be stories passed around
like a guitar. There’s no history of a Popovitch being in Biloxi in 1941, nor are there really any
records of David Threnody’s enlistment. The only documents coming from war-time records.
Possibly because he was black. As stated before, the officers and logistics offered to black
soldiers before World War II were meager at best, as is the paper trail of their involvement.
Maybe he changed names. Maybe he changed their names—Schultz and Popovitch. Maybe
some of it was true—what he was sure of, what he became sure of—later, writing it down. And
Johnny, and other people that knew him then—still alive or interviewed before their deaths—just
went along with it, because even if it wasn’t true it was something true about him, it was a truth
about David and his life, in how he possibly made it all up and how he told it, told it as stories
behind his music, as something to say in that pause between his songs.
And you know why you want change. Why you want to make your world what you are.
It was why David learned something from Schultz, a Nazi, someone seemingly so different, and
why he talked about him in his journals—you just want to be happy. And in talking to Schultz
David learned how what we want can be used for ugly things, in the story of Schultz’s family
and how he grew up under the rising shadow of Hitler. Schultz had a father, broken by the
crippled German economy after World War One, his business as a shoemaker in Munich nearly
gone, barely enough to support his family. And he was tired. He was a tired old man scraping
by to provide for his wife and Schultz’s two other siblings when Hitler came to power.
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And I guess it was the food. The prison food. I started bringing him plates from the mess
hall. Left overs to compensate for the poor offerings given to the men we were guarding. I’d
bring him his food and sit outside the bars. Sometimes I ate with him. And afterwards I’d smoke
with him. That’s when we began talking. Not just about the world of Huck Finn, but about
music, and I learned he could do more than just whistle, and he told me about his family—his
father—and what it was like growing up in Germany before the war. What it was like after the
Great War, his country stooped in a depression, the economy in shambles and so many things
destroyed… I guess his father knew. And now Schultz knew. In seeing me. Seeing America, as
a prisoner—the clarity after a long sickness. And maybe that’s what his father knew it was—a
sickness. What fear does to you. It makes you sick. You no longer know who you are—what
your world is—and you don’t trust it. You don’t trust yourself. You just know you don’t want to
be afraid no more, and it makes you desperate. You can do a lot of things you don’t think you’re
capable of doing when you’re desperate, when you’re looking for ways out of your unhappiness.
It makes you listen to things you would normally ignore. And you rationalize. You rationalize
your morality… The Nazi Party made promises to people that were desperate. People sick with
fear. Their propaganda for the defeated. Their scapegoat educated to children. What’s
interesting is Schultz had Jewish blood, from his mother’s side of the family. And what his father
had to do, what he had to do to family records so his son could join the military… It was just a
good career. A way his son would be alright, would be able to support himself, and have things,
have the things that take that fear away. He was a father looking out for his son, maybe even
aware it wasn’t right—what was happening outside the windows of his shoe store, what was
happening to his neighbors, his country… This what makes it human, I guess. Not political. Not
bad government or good government. Not the stability of an economy. The building of machines
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for money. It was all this, but it was also just people. Given that gentle nudge in the balance
between fear and unhappiness and the promises for a better life—pushed into things under the
influence of a drug, that opiate for domination—an illusion. That illusion to feel in control
again—those lies you’ll believe as temporary relief from your fears. People responding to this
ugliness in different ways. Some embracing it. Some just trying to tolerate it in others. Some
even more afraid, afraid of what their fears have brought. What makes us human lost in a
crowd, and you’re pushed into moving, moving in a direction you may not want to go. What
started the movement the mystery, at least the deeper meaning of it. For the mechanisms are
easy, easy to manipulate. It’s easy to manipulate people out of fear. And maybe after the long
sickness, after even the fear causing it is eaten away—you see the humanity once again. You see
the deeper meanings for what you chose as a scapegoat. This maybe why Schultz got lost in
Huck Finn, and why he was able to talk to me. And he remembered his father and understood.
He understood what any father would do. How you can lie and be dishonorable in your world if
the world given you is lies and things you can’t honor. Sometimes it’s the only way. It’s the only
way to be who are and be happy. It’s the only way the world gets changed, I guess, and it begins
this way, it begins in your world and what you really hunger for… No, the prison food wasn’t
that great, and Schultz’s English was poor at best—broken and accented—but it’s amazing what
you learn about people when you eat with them.
--David Threnody, on Nazi Germany—from his journals 1966 to 1975
“So when did you start smoking?”
Schultz hands it through the bars. He still looks sick and his head is shaved. His eyes
deep-set. David has a chair pulled up to the cell. A tray of eaten over food by his feet. He has
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Jonathon Bonner’s guitar in his lap. He’s wearing his uniform neatly pressed. When he passes
the joint he strums a few chords and then rests his arms on top, his right hand hanging over the
bullet hole. Schultz has already asked about that, and David doesn’t really say, but now he
answers.
“It was a girl. I started because of a girl, and then I liked it. I liked how it made me think
about my music… This used to be another musician’s guitar. He brought it to my father’s pawn
shop when I was nine years old, and when I was fifteen it saved my life I guess—from a
ricochet… the other bullet my brother took. He’s in France now I think. Course now with the
war on he could be someplace else… He was the first one to talk to me about girls. When we’d
be sitting in my father’s pawn shop… Funny how you have to humble yourself—you know.
You have to humble yourself to get any of a woman’s favors. You have to give up being a man.
I think he knew that which is why he wanted to be one. And sometimes it’s worth it. Sometimes
it ain’t—feeling there’s some sort of injustice to that… No, I’m a drinker, man. Especially since
I use this, to take the edge off. But it was a woman—yeah… You go in. You go into a woman,
and then you got to give up. You got to give up to them. And when you do that, when you do
that sincerely, a woman gives you more than what you gave up—you know. Even if you gather
some of her bad habits along the way, you ain’t the same. You ain’t the same in what you knew
before. Ain’t no mystery no more. Ain’t no more fear. Just either pride or a woman’s
friendship… Didn’t you have any? Any girlfriends back at home? It really ain’t no secret.
Every man knows he can’t be a woman, but life makes a whole lot more sense when you try to
get to know one…”
And it went on like this. Their conversations. Schultz telling stories. David telling
some. And soon they knew each other’s histories. They knew each other’s pasts. And though
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Schultz was older and an officer—a pilot—he took the role of the younger man. Listening to
David as if his advice and opinions were something new, something to ponder, mixed with that
perverse desire to want the opposite because even if what David had to say was true he was
different and it didn’t apply to him. His silence sometimes not necessarily agreement, and his
hesitance to propose another point of view not necessarily because he didn’t have one—David
aware of this—Schultz was just sick, and like anyone weak around someone that’s strong, even
if that person has less education, less experience, you listen and have a tendency to think the way
they do. David was charismatic to Schultz. He was black and he was American. And they had
the music in common. David was just a veteran smoker by then. Schultz wasn’t.
Nah, I didn’t smoke. That was just Schultz and David. I mean I knew what it smelt like,
and it’s not like I didn’t smoke cigarettes on duty—I guess I just figured I had enough
stuff wrong to start doing that. And after that fight at the roadhouse, that night we
brought Schultz out to play with us, some of the officers on base caught wind of what he
was doing, but he kept doing it anyway… You asked if it helped with his music—nah, I
don’t think it did. Cuz you see I saw him play when he was high and I saw him play
when he wasn’t. I couldn’t tell no difference, and I’m not even sure if he knew, if he
knew the difference, if he thought about the music more or not. I don’t think it was good
for him though. I think he just wasted energy on it. Energy he could’ve used for
something else—I don’t know… Something about him embraced that. Waste. I guess
you can’t stop it from happening. You try not waste money, live on a tight budget, and
then your car breaks down and costs a thousand dollars to fix. You know—that sort of
thing. In a way everything goes to waste. Food’s wasted. Time’s wasted. You look
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back on all those hours you worked for money to live and wonder if you was really
living… Maybe that’s how David found his peace with that, in his habits. Not fretting
about the waste. The songs he could’ve sung. And his listeners. What he needed from
them so they could listen. They helped him and hurt him. Just like when a day goes by
in bed, in sleep. And in a way his smoking and drinking sorta put him to sleep, so he
didn’t have to think about all the things he could have been doing, all the things he should
have done. Because you don’t think about that. You don’t think about that while you’re
sleeping. You just wake up thinking you did. And it’s like missing the daylight and only
seeing night… Nah, I didn’t ever really smoke with him, but I know he was thankful
sometimes. Thankful like when you see the sunrise. When the music was just music and
nothing else. He needed that most of all—I think. Prison time is a constant reminder of
waste. And if we’d had stayed at it, our duty in Biloxi, guarding German POWs, I think
it would’ve gotten worse for him. I think he was glad when we got our papers, this just
after the New Year 1942, and even though he made friends with some of them, some of
the prisoners, friends with Schultz, he was ready to go fight them… Funny, ain’t it? I
guess that’s why they say one man’s garbage is another man’s treasure.
--Johnny Tribout, from a PBS interview, September 1971
And what happens after a sign? You want them. You ask for them. But what happens
after? After the barriers to your illusions are broken when your heart calls to something outside
itself and hears something back? And no real miracles. Nothing really supernatural. Nothing
really bending or breaking laws. Just a sign. As you take on the day. And you say give me
something… You don’t say it with your mouth. Maybe you form the words if you’re all alone,
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but sometimes it’s while waiting in line—a prayer. A voice inside speaking. Asking.
Beseeching… And then it happens. A situation arises—similar to your prayer. And you see a
way out. Your heart starts pounding because you’ve been given that gentle nudge. And you take
it. You take it as a sign. A phone call just at the right time. Your alarm clock broken and the
different chain of events that happen because of it. Because of being late. That coincidence of
meeting a stranger who says just the right thing… But what happens? After? Maybe you know
you’re luck hasn’t run out. That’s the first reassurance to your mind after you believe you’ve
seen a sign. And your faith returns. Your faith in things unseen. Once again—no miracles. No
mountains moving. Just something more. More to the earth and the wind, and you listen and
you see. You see beyond all the illusions that make you happy. You’ve been distracted from the
distraction… Because work is good—sure. But what is it you’re working for? And for a
moment you see, you see a system—grand really—of slaves and masters. You see slaves to the
masters of the system. The masters too really slaves, but they know they are, which is how they
make you a slave. And work is created. Either the work created for the slaves, or the slaves
created for the work—some ambiguity there—but why the work created no mystery—this the
mechanism set in motion, an unstoppable force… Dominion. And the masters give you all
kinds of reasons for it. Some say breathing room. Some say gold. Some even say freedom. But
really it’s just digging holes and filling them back up again. Getting your mind right to it. What
the earth said to you lost as the wind dies… This too a sign, perhaps, of what happens after a
sign. Because there are no miracles. Nothing will save you from this. Seeing an illusion doesn’t
save you from it. There’s just time to think of it after, and your slow return to idols. And this
maybe what the signs are for, moralities established—religions—to teach you to abide in it,
abide in the illusion. Not for reward or future gain, but in the practice of simple ways, ways to
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be happy in it, in the world you see before you now, and how it will end… So maybe David saw
it as a sign. After that bar fight at the roadhouse. When he was drunk and wanted another drink,
but the owner wouldn’t give it to him because he was black. And how Schultz saw it. Because
sometimes you have to fight. Sometimes you have to use your illusion. And you have to be
humble to your fate—the illusion being what it is. But that doesn’t mean you can’t show a little
character.
“Something’s got to die—doesn’t it?”
This after. Schultz’s eyes looking even more deep-set now that he has a shiner. His nose
might be broken too. He’s sitting with his legs up on his prison bunk. His pale hands dangling
over his knees. Smoke in front of his face because he’s holding it before passing it back between
the bars to David.
“Ain’t nothin’ dies that can’t be born again.”
“No… I mean people have to die. They have to die in order to change anything.”
“What you talkin’ about? There’s places for me. There’s places for me to go. Just like
there’s places for you to go. What? Just cuz you was able to get a drink and I wasn’t? You
didn’t think that was fair? Thing is—I can play music in your places, but you can’t play music in
mine… maybe that ain’t fair neither.”
There’s that moment when they look at each other—to judge how serious they are. Then
they start laughing as David dabs a handkerchief to his bloody lip.
“So it doesn’t bother you?”
“Sure… sometimes I lose my patience. When I start believin’. Believin’ that I’m really
different. Because somethin’ in me wants to believe that, even when it hurts… You know cuz
of what happened tonight—and you know what you did? You just stopped thinkin’ we was
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different—me and you—and just started thinkin’ that bartender was different. Even though he
was white—like you. And you gave up everything you believed in to do it too. But it felt good.
It felt right—didn’t it? It was a different kind of different. Somethin’ to do with good and evil—
I don’t know—but you’d even give up being who you are, maybe just for a moment, to do what
you felt was good, what was right… We’s curious creatures. Capable of so much bad stuff, so
much hate, but sometimes we do good things mainly because we just can’t help ourselves. We
have to. Just takes time. The right moment. Right influences… You gotta be tricked into doing
good—that’s the curious thing.”
“Yeah… but does someone have to die?”
David’s eyes are downcast, but the light bulb above his head does not shadow them—in
fact the light reflecting in them as he looks down, bent over in the stool he set beside Schultz’s
cell.
“No… you just have to be willing to die. It ain’t the death that changes things. It’s the
willingness—what people see and remember of it after. Not some corpse. Just something
before, something in it that makes you want to be good, that’s remembered long after…
Schultz sighs. He leans his head against the prison wall behind him. Maybe for a
moment he’s with David, there in that cell, or maybe he’s in Germany, remembering who he was
then, before the war. He thinks of his father and girls. And then maybe he remembers the sign.
The sign outside the roadhouse door, a piece of cardboard in the window, saying: Whites Only.
And he remembers other windows and other signs, outside of businesses neighboring his father’s
shoe store, and in other towns of his country—two overlaid equilateral triangles that form a sixpointed star. And maybe he wonders how he never really noticed them—these signs—never
really paid attention—until he was made to.
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“Well, how was I?”
“How was you what?”
“You know…” and Schultz pats his hands on his knees and whistles a few notes.
“Oh, well you was off a little on the last set… sorry we couldn’t get ya more than a snare
drum—Johnny and I stole that from the Color Guard closet… but you did good, man—at least
you didn’t try to run off on us… And you did pretty good with that bartender too. You ain’t a
bad man to have in a fight…”
And this one of their last conversations. Because it was in the news—early December,
1941—Roosevelt’s speech to Congress. David and Johnny’s papers processed quickly. Tickets
on the next train out of Biloxi. Their fame had run out, and after the fight at the roadhouse,
senior officers on the base no longer wanted David and Johnny fraternizing with the German
prisoners, especially since a Mexican with a large quantity of marijuana in his truck was pulled
over trying to enter the base—David’s name mentioned in the interrogation, an apparent delivery
addressed to the prison infirmary. They were heading to England. On a slow boat across the
Atlantic. And this the next story—David Threnody’s combat experiences during the war. How
he defeated the Goliath, and saved Johnny Tribout’s life. And as for Schultz, he didn’t go back.
After the war, after he was released, he settled in Mississippi, and became a farmer. There’s no
proof that he ever played with anyone again. He never sat in on drums with someone. But
maybe he kept it. After meeting David he kept it and couldn’t say he knew nothing about it. He
kept a copy of it, that book, he kept that copy of Huck Finn that he had.
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13
And after all the violence and double talk
There's just a song in all the trouble and the strife
You do the walk, yeah, you do the walk of life…
--Dire Straits
They didn’t think it could be done. They couldn’t believe it. Too many men had died.
Died already. And it’s hard to believe in something if you think you’re going to die believing it.
It’s kind of like that saying: Kill you with kindness. Hard to believe. Doesn’t seem
possible. And so you’re tempted even after being warned. The secret telling you the secret.
Then it just takes time. Time and faith. What time does to faith, and what you come to hope for.
How this form of forgiveness kills you, over time. It kills you if that seed is planted, and you
remember.
It’s what David Threnody knew—he knew it after—after coming home. Coming home
after the war. The kindness he was shown for the things he had done. The hardest thing—the
hardest thing about it finding something to believe in again. Something to believe in that didn’t
kill him… It was the Ardennes, Belgium—December, 1944—and that was what David was
thinking. He was thinking about going home and being treated kind and what that meant to him
now. He was thinking about opinions—his opinions and the different opinions of his comrades
on the planned counteroffensive. Because it was Christmas. Christmas Eve in Bastogne. And
they were all cold and hungry, willing to believe in anything. They were ready to eat their own
guts. The snow in the trees at night un-silent and illuminated by the artillery bombardments of
the siege. They were willing to believe anything, but they couldn’t believe it. They didn’t think
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it could be done. Their faith frozen. Their hope gone. No one believed David Threnody could
save the church where so many of the families huddled. Patton was too late. The town would
fall. They were all going to die, slowly, if not suddenly with bullet or bomb, then under the kind
unanswerable siege, the duress of time and starvation.
No, time didn’t change it. It didn’t take it away. Even after the things I’d done—the
things I’d seen—watching men die. Children die. Mothers… Even after that shock, that
concussion of air in an explosion—that disorientation and how you remember it after—you don’t
get rid of it. You don’t get rid of the fear. That gut response when you go into a fight. When
you’re just waiting. Waiting on an enemy. No, all time did was press down, press down
everything at once—time pressed it in a line—and you almost became unthinking. You just did
it. You just pulled the trigger. You became used to the dirt on your body, the wrecked buildings.
The rot and disease. Snow in rooms without roofs, almost like the furniture was in some art
display in a museum, red under white covering not meant to melt—ghost trimmings of the
artist… But you never lost the fear. Nervous ticks surfacing under the stress. Certain
compulsive rituals a soldier went through in superstitions they never would have believed before
coming to the front. You just get to know it. You get to know the fear. How it feels coming out
alive. And by the time I came to Bastogne I’d made friends with it, I guess. I made friends with
the fear. I placated it with my knowledge… but I would never loan it money.
--David Threnody, on Bastogne—from his journals 1941 to 1948
And maybe it’s easy. It’s easy to make friends with fear. It’s easy when you realize it
has many friends. David knew he was lost. Lost in the shuffle. Just a name. A number. He’d
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seen casualty lists that looked like this. Deployment orders. Where you forget about the men—
individual men—and see only battalions, companies, regiment symbols. He was small. The
little guy. And expendable… It’s almost safe in a way. Because you’re not alone, but you are.
You belong to something—a race, a gender. You acquire habits others acquire. You have your
religion. Even your weird hobbies can find a community. You belong to something so much
bigger, and in a way your vote doesn’t even have to count, with so many others like you…
When you feel that way the fear kind of goes away. Your life and the choices you make lose all
its significant drama, and you are free to do what you want. You are free in your anonymity.
Sometimes it’s good to feel small. Sometimes it’s the only way to get a good judgment
of your worth, and you find strength you never had. You find it because it’s given to you in that
moment you lose everything else. You find it when you find your insignificance. And David
was on guard that night—Christmas Eve in Bastogne. A night when he could look up at the stars
and feel it. He could feel his insignificance and his strength. His breath just a small cloud in the
wintry expanse. And all the things he could think about, all his opinions on the matter—this
erased, blank—what he received from the silence all around him more because of it. His
anonymity still responsible to his fate.
There were just larger forces at play. By December, 1944, the goal of the German
offensive was the harbor at Antwerp. In order to reach it before the Allies could regroup and
bring their superior air power to bear, German mechanized forces had to seize the roadways
through eastern Belgium. Because all seven main roads in the Ardennes mountain range
converged on the small town of Bastogne, control of its crossroads was vital to the German
attack. The siege began on the 20th of December, leaving American forces waiting to be relieved
by elements of General George Patton’s 3rd Army. David Threnody was a part of these forces,
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along with Johnny Tribout, and the remnants of what was left of their anti-tank battalion. It may
seem strange that a black man such as David Threnody saw the fighting he did, and in Bastogne
was found in a white man’s outfit, but that’s a story in itself. The story of this story. According
to David, and in interviews Johnny gave later, it was their music. David’s guitar playing got him
where he was, commanding officers overlooking the color of his skin because of what it did for
morale. The fact and fiction of it, the story of David seeing his share of battle and soothing evil
spirits during the war with his guitar has a nice ring to it, and by December of 1944, he was a
seasoned veteran and still just a number. He was still anonymous, and the fact he was black
unimportant—given the mess, the mess in how logistics are handled during a war. Records
being what they are we’ll never know really, and all we have is the story, the story of how David
had to be there. He had to be in Bastogne, Christmas 1944. He had to defeat the Goliath. Not
because he was significant, but because what had to happen was.
We were just together—in it—Johnny and I. We weren’t always together, but we were in
it. Didn’t matter where he was. Where I was. A soldier’s story ain’t really about reality
because the reality’s too real. No, a soldier’s story is dreams. And I suppose he knew my
dreams just like I knew his, and when we ended up together in Bastogne our eyes were wide
open… His outfit didn’t seem to mind. We had bunkered in for the siege. Counting our
ammunition and keeping warm by a fire inside a building with its structure still mostly intact.
And I had my guitar and Johnny had his harmonica. We played Christmas songs… I saw two
children. That night I made my patrol of the Bastogne streets—Christmas Eve. I was checking
on our perimeters, and the Germans had ceased their bombardment, at least for a while. The
days were short so soon after the solstice, so it might have been early even though it was dark—I
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don’t remember—but I saw them through a window. Two girls, sisters I imagine, and they were
decorating a tree. Not really a tree—it looked like a broken wooden post, possibly from a hall
tree or standing coat rack, on which they had hung ribbons, hair ribbons. And they were
playing, playing and fighting at the same time. In just standing there at the window for a minute,
I saw them go through a whole myriad of emotions. They got mad, cried, and then were
laughing. Neither of them were of school age, and the younger one you could tell had just
learned to walk, only knowing a few words while the older one did most of the talking. I
remember thinking what they were doing now, decorating a tree as sisters will, was worth
fighting for. It was worth me giving up, not to some enemy—not defeated—but giving up
thinking there was something to give up—that arrogance. So they could grow up and see what I
saw… I saw them doing what you don’t mind children doing, but if it were you or me—an
adult—we might watch and be ashamed. We might watch and judge. They were just being
themselves, and I don’t know when you lose that and become something else—something you live
with—and this not about lost innocence—that’s not what I felt looking through that window,
watching two sisters wait for Christmas to come—too much had happened already and I had
forgotten about that—that answering to my name. That’s not what I was feeling. I was thinking
what was outside of this. This street where I stood, looking in a window—where that street led,
outside of this town, outside Bastogne, and who was there waiting in the darkness. There was
something out there that wanted to hurt them—these children. Something out there wanted to
hurt them, and I couldn’t get my head around it. There were just men out there. Men with
children, some of them at least. Men remembering children, this night—in the kind lies they
were told. I couldn’t get my mind around it. How you become something you shouldn’t be.
Even when you try to do the right thing, when you’re told you’re doing the right thing, and not
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doing what you’re told makes you wrong—makes you dangerous. But these children—they
knew—they knew what it was not to do what they were told and were sometimes disciplined,
sometimes just amusing, but they were never dangerous, never a threat… I couldn’t get my mind
around it, not in how this is lost, not in how we even live with it—this a basis for all our stories,
all our sketch comedies—but how we become threatened by it, how we become threatened by just
being ourselves. How there’s something out there that wants to hurt that, some force giving
absurd orders we must follow, and what happens if you choose to be a child again, if you choose
not to listen, not do what you are told—how that’s looked on in an adult world… I just wanted
to help. I wanted to help these children, and the only way I could do that was to kill what was
out there, kill men merely following orders—I had to hurt what wanted to hurt—and I questioned
what I was really defending, who I was protecting. Was I really protecting these children? Or
just protecting something I needed to hold onto, some idea I saw through that window that gave
me sanity in the reality I faced. The reality those children faced—Christmas Eve in Bastogne…
--David Threnody, on Bastogne—from his journals 1941 to 1948
And so you answer. You answer first and think about it later, and then, if it feels right—
you stick with it—you defend your answer. And that’s what happened in this case. Contingents
of the Fifth Panzer Army encircled Bastogne the night of 20 December, and on the 22nd of
December, when they demanded surrender, the American commander, Brigadier General
Anthony C. McAuliffe, responded with derision: "Nuts!" And he stuck with that answer.
It was a good answer. An answer that wins when asked, when asked the question: Why
should you love your enemies? It was answer that never meets defeat. There is no defeat because
there is no enemy to defeat you… Strange—this filtering process, this filtering of reality—when
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you think someone wants to hurt you. It is societal and it is individual. A society works when at
its basis you do no harm to another. No one will is imposed on another—this the mirror of a free
society. This is the mirror of individuals trying to be free, and you’re never free when you have
enemies. When you see someone as an enemy. And I suppose it happens when wills clash. When
what you desire interferes with what someone else desires, and you feel threatened. They want to
take something from—take something away—and you feel you must defend yourself, defend
your beliefs, defend your life. What’s strange is when you’re put in this position, this position of
defending your life—everything becomes ugly—manipulations, angles, negative emotions. And
in a way you lose what you’re defending anyway—by seeing the world this way, seeing your
world as an enemy. In a way you are defeated before you’ve even fought, not in winning—
because you can become very good at that, you can become very good at war—the tactics of
such—the trick the details of the spirit, not in physical damage—that visible destruction merely
the effects of what’s completed first in the heart of your opponent. For what an enemy takes from
you is not your freedom, but your faith that it’s even possible, and once that’s accomplished the
rest comes fairly easily. This form of winning is really losing. You lose in what you have to
become, and your world is not something you really want to live in—it becomes a mirror of lies.
A world where you must hide your weaknesses, deny them, and build protections around them.
You can never feel guilty because it will be used against you. You can never be yourself… But
they say love your enemies. So obviously enemies exist in order for you to love them. In this life
you still must distinguish between an enemy and a friend. There are people out there who wish to
harm you. They want to make you afraid. They want to steal your hope. And it can be ever so
subtle. Destroy a man’s purpose and you destroy the man. Disrupt his routines. Upset his order
of things. Given enough time—chipping away at him like this—you will see him fall… That is
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unless he loves you. Then even as he falls he is not defeated. He has killed you. He has killed
you with his kindness… And it is hard. It’s hard to get you mind around it—that subtle trick that
turns love into hate, and vice versa. It’s hard to make someone feel that. Feel really loved, feel
loved in order to love. It’s hard, but then it’s really easy. It’s easy when you make that
discernment, that discernment between an enemy and a friend, and you love them the same,
when like a child you don’t change who you are because of them. It’s easy when you are
yourself, and all that that means.
And that’s when the door opened—David by the window, a soldier with snow on his
shoulders, his hand frozen holding the strap of his rifle—the door opened and a woman came
out, the mother. She was the mother in how she closed the door, quietly, still peeking in on her
children by their tree—David could still see them through the window—and it was that sense
that he got, an impression of a mother on Christmas Eve night, bundled up in any warm clothes
she could find, distracting her children for a moment so she could hide from them, hide from
them for a moment in order to bring them gifts, like she were sneaking out to go to where they
were hidden, maybe a wood pile, or a garden shed. That was the impression he got, but that’s
not why she came out. She had seen him, watching, as she listened to Berlin radio, her husband
bed-ridden, one of the wounded in the house (for it was her whole family there now, and others)
her husband’s head hurt from one the earlier bombardments, when part of the ceiling fell, this in
the house she was born in, for she was born in Bastogne—but she had seen David, she had seen
him watching her children through the window, and that’s why she came out.
“Can you help me?”
And she doesn’t stop as she asks David this. She is still walking, walking by him,
expecting him to follow. She doesn’t stop, but as she passes he can see her face, clearly
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delineated in the shawl wrapped around her head, in the scarf about her neck tight beneath her
chin. The eye contact is only for a moment, the face what he remembers, like the eyes make it in
focus—the face and not the problem the eyes pose. And it becomes something else, something
else better told in his mind—David’s mind. Like the response to a dream:
She had me follow her to a grave. To a funeral that happened that day. You don’t think
about funerals too much during a war, but they happen. It’s just that they’re really not observed
the way you imagine. I guess there’s just too many of them. Too many for any one to be unique.
And it was almost like she wanted to tell me something like I was her husband. Like she wanted
her husband to go with her on this journey, but he couldn’t, and she needed a man, any man—to
be her friend… It was a boy she remembered. The first boy she kissed—she told me the story as
I walked with her. We went by the school where they first met, the first floor of it still standing,
on our way to a field where the graves were dug—a new cemetery…
“He treated me like I was person. He didn’t laugh like the others when I first tried
putting on make-up. I was thirteen and I was afraid he would laugh, but he didn’t. He told me I
was pretty… And he taught me to kiss—nothing more—he didn’t go any further than that, but we
kissed a lot. It was the summer when I started my first period, and we met by the river, the River
Meuse. We met by the river and kissed…”
I felt she needed me. For what I wasn’t sure. But she gave me another choice in those
limited options we felt under the siege of Bastogne. She gave me the choice to feel needed. To
listen to her pain, her goodbyes, not like that cold impersonal force out there waiting for our
surrender, but as a human who had failed as well. She needed me to hear a story. A story of a
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kiss. A story of a kiss between a boy and girl. And even though the man was dead, she as a
woman still remembered, and there is no evil in a woman’s memory.
“Maybe I’m bad. Maybe I’m a bad woman. I don’t know when I became bad, but maybe
I’m bad. You get broken enough times maybe that’s how it happens. You have nothing more to
give and you have to protect what you have left and you don’t know how to love anymore. My
husband’s a good man, but sometimes I hate him. I hate him for failing me. I hate his weakness.
I hate that his head is hurt. I hate how I have to take care of him now, how I have to take care
of our children… You Americans think you’re saving us, but my town is being destroyed just the
same. And do you think it’s them? Do you think they are in control? The Germans? Maybe
that’s how it happens. Enough time under siege like this. Enough time wanting something from
somebody that they won’t give you—you get tired of hurting. You have memories. Ideas. Like
how I want to see where he’s buried—the first boy I kissed. But it’s selfish… I’m doing it for me
now, not for him…”
It was the night before Christmas. And I found the humor in it. The humor in the errand
I was taking with this woman. I found the humor in my importance. The town in a blackout.
The only white the snow. And maybe she sensed my impressions and knew they were more than
just the situation we found ourselves in. I was just a stranger here. I didn’t know these streets. I
wasn’t born in Bastogne. I was black… But none of that really mattered. None of my
impressions mattered, nor did her responses to them matter. We were just being tempted. I was
a soldier waiting on reinforcements, and she was a civilian caught in the middle, a citizen of a
town that suddenly contained strategic importance to the larger forces at play. And that’s what
we were—pawns to these forces—being tempted into believing we were nothing more than just
pawns. That even her doubts, my doubts in her and her intentions in needing my help, were just
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the intentions of what put us there, what put us there together, what made us meet—me a witness
of her children through a window on a lonely patrol. Intentions that made us equal…
She thought there would be flowers. She told me the boy had many friends. He was the
son of an important man in town—a member of a large family. There would be flowers. Flowers
to mark his grave. But there weren’t. There were no graves with flowers in the new cemetery.
Only the fresh dirt told you where someone was buried. And it was dark—we couldn’t see… She
didn’t look for long. It was cold, and our hands were frozen. I watched as she walked over the
graves, stooping down, trying to read the words on the erected crosses.
“I just need to say it. Not to him. Not to you. Not even to myself. I just need to say
things. Good. Bad. It doesn’t matter—not here. Just things you say for the moment. Things
you say for this day, and what you feel now, saying what you think, the thoughts about what you
feel, now… Things you say and you mean them when you say them. Answers to life’s questions,
life’s meaning—you say them here and the silence lets you know someone is listening. And what
you say today, what you’ll say tomorrow—you become these things as you say them. You are all
these things as you say them, and trust, doubt, good and bad—they are all you. You become
what you say here, among graves… And I’m just a woman. A woman just trying to say goodbye.
Goodbye to an old friend…”
I took her home. I took her back to that window where I saw her children. I said nothing
to her, and I don’t think she expected me to. Maybe I’d been a husband to her, in that walk
looking for a grave. I was what she needed from her husband… There would be fighting
tomorrow—I knew it. And I wondered if we would hold. If on Christmas we would fall—the
town would fall. And this was significant. This battle we were in was significant. Not because
of some map, some objective. It was significant because of this woman—what she showed me in
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the search for a grave—she would fall if we fell, and what would happen? What would happen
to her children?
--David Threnody, on Bastogne—from his journals 1941 to 1948
And this is what happened. Told not in David’s journals, but implicit in the action he
referred to in them later. In his writing and reflections years after it happened. After he had time
to think about. And if he had written it then, as it was happening, maybe it would be different.
His feelings on it would be different, and the story wouldn’t come out the same way. The hero
would be different, and so would the villain… Johnny Tribout told it different, in what he had to
say about the siege of Bastogne—in seeing David again, and playing music with him, in the
waiting they did together as the remnants of American forces trapped there December, 1944. He
tells a different story even though most of the facts are the same. Johnny has his own take on the
myth of David defeating the Goliath, on how he saved the people in the church Christmas day,
1944, and on how David saved his life:
I guess it was like a nightmare where you really aren’t scared. And you know those kinds
of dreams when you wake up from them. Because you’re not sure what you want to stay
in—the dream, or what you wake up to… He told me about the woman. When he came
back from that reconnoiter Christmas Eve night, he told me about the children he saw
through the window. He told me about the mother and her search for a grave. And he
asked me the same question. The same question he asked later in his journals, when he
reflected on what happened then, what happened during the war. And I’ll be the first one
to tell you, tell you his journals aren’t all true. You folks want a biography of him, but
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you can’t just go by his journals. Because that’s just like his songs, and like his songs
they are merely expressions. You can try to get to him in listening to him, in reading
him, but they will always fall short of who he really was. They are only part of his love,
part of his hate, and they are not really his doubts, for his doubts are what created them in
the first place… He did save me—when I took a bullet in the leg. He did save that
church, but I don’t know and I don’t think he knew if he saved them—those children he
saw through that window, if he saved that woman he took a walk with. After the German
offensive, after the attack on Bastogne Christmas day, he went back to that window. He
went back to see if they were still alive—the children and the woman’s family. But they
were gone. The home was gone—destroyed. Just rubble from artillery fire. And in the
hectic days that followed, in Patton’s reinforcements arriving and the evacuation of
civilians, David didn’t know if they were alive or dead, and I think that silence haunted
him—like a nightmare—and I don’t think even he was sure what he wanted—if he
wanted what he remembered from the dream he had of them and the pain it caused him in
sharing what they shared, or the reality that they would always be missing, missing from
his life, because they were never a part of it. And what he did, what happened, the other
families he saved that day stopping the Goliath from destroying the church—didn’t
matter. It didn’t matter because he didn’t know if he saved them. If he saved those
children he watched through a window. He didn’t know if their mother ever found that
grave of an old friend. He didn’t know if they were in that church. And it was personal,
his own personal remorse of that memory, that dream—that’s what haunted him and what
caused him to write about it later… But I guess that’s what a musician does—you know.
Because there ain’t no winners in a war. There are just degrees of losing. And the best
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of you, the best of music, the best of anyone—comes from losing. If you can put that in a
song you win in the only way you can…
--Johnny Tribout, from a PBS interview, September 1971
It was kind of a weird invention. A weird weapon—and I’m not sure why they called it
“Goliath” because it was only a foot tall. But in a way it was the first of its kind. Remote
controlled. Technology we take for granted nowadays, but in 1944—advanced. Maybe that’s
why no one believed it. No one believed it could be done. Morale was pretty low—Christmas
under a siege. Maybe that’s why David knew he had to do something. He knew he had to put
his guitar away. Now was not the time for songs. There would be songs later—sure—but now
was not the time for them. The people in Bastogne, the soldiers, didn’t need words right now,
sung or otherwise. And when Johnny Tribout tried to save that little girl who ran from the church
doors, wounded in the process, David had to do something.
And that’s why David stayed awake. He didn’t sleep. He saw Christmas Eve turn into
Christmas Day, and everyone, even those that slept, knew there would be an attack—they all
knew the enemy would be coming in the morning. And so maybe David went over it. He went
over it in his mind. He thought about the children he watched through a window the night before
on his patrol. The dream of it, and the woman. Maybe he saw what he had to save. He
remembered being a child, remembered how he talked to his dreams then, talked to the sleep that
wouldn’t come, talked to that voice that asked him his name, that same voice you heard in his
journals later. And he was twenty-six years old now. Soon to be twenty-seven. He was old
enough now with all that happened before—his childhood in East St. Louis growing up with his
older brothers, with the memories of how he got his first guitar and how he first learned to play
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it, the bullet hole that gave it its new sound, his trips to Mississippi, going electric, his
recruitment in the Army and what happened then—he was old enough now, with all that had
happened, to stop his interrogations. His interrogations of himself. And of course he still asked
questions, but now he knew what the answers would be. He knew how he would have to answer
if there were to be any answers at all. And what he asked now depended on how he knew he
would answer… They all knew. They all knew the enemy was coming, and David knew there
were no words to it. Because once the interrogations are over you don’t answer with words,
directly. You no longer speak of it. You just act. You act according to your name, and his name
was David… All I can really do is replay the scene for you, the action of what happened there in
Bastogne Christmas Day, 1944. And all you can really do is conduct your own interrogations
based on what I tell you, based on what you know, based on your name—what you get out of it
what you bring to it. The rest just window dressings. Window dressings to your soul. Your
eyes perhaps remembering the child you once watched through them. The child you once knew
that now you remember through the glass. A child not much unlike that little girl running from a
church door that Johnny tried to save. And so… this is what happened:
GOLIATH DEFEATED
"Battered Bastards of Bastogne"
Stars and Stripes
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Published: January 6, 1945
BASTOGNE, Jan. 6th – Private David Threnody of the 969th Anti-Tank Battalion saved more than just a
little girl. He saved more than just a church where war-torn families huddled around fires built from
broken wooden pews. His altruistic actions helped boost the morale of depleted American forces holding
out for reinforcements in the bitter winter siege of Bastogne, establishing him as a lesser-known hero of
the Ardennes counter-offensive.
When Patton learned of General McAuliffe's response "Nuts!" to Nazi surrender demands, he’s reported
to have said: "A man that eloquent has to be saved." The commander of the 327th GIR interpreted it to
the German truce party as "Go to hell!", and out of this defiance many stories of bravery and heroism
have sprung up. The story of David Threnody’s actions during the siege of Bastogne is no less a tale
depicting this American defiance against superior forces. His small victory over German troops Christmas
Day captures the humanity of that spirit.
“I guess she just wanted to play in the snow,” says Threnody, of the three-year old Belgian girl, who
slipped away from her un-suspecting mother hiding with others in the church.
Liberated by the Allies in late 1944, Bastogne was attacked by German forces shortly after due to Hitler’s
plan to re-establish control of the Ardennes. The goal was to advance to Antwerp, to cut off supply and
separate British from American troops. On December 16, taking advantage of the cold and the fog, the
German artillery started what is now being called Battle of the Bulge, attacking the sparsely deployed
American troops around Bastogne. A few days later, Brigadier General McAuliffe and the 101st Airborne
Division along with elements of the 10th Armored Division and the 82nd airborne arrived to counter-attack
but, after heavy fighting, became encircled within the town. All seven highways leading to Bastogne were
cut off by German forces by noon of 21 December, and by nightfall the conglomeration of airborne and
armored infantry forces were recognized by both sides as being surrounded. Allied control of Bastogne
was a major obstacle to the German armored advance, and the morale of Allied forces elsewhere on the
Western Front was boosted by news of the stubborn defense of the besieged town.
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Johnny Tribout, of the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion—a friend of Threnody’s—shares the account of
what happened Christmas morning:
“We couldn’t fall back. There was nowhere to fall back to. And I felt like they were gloating at us—ya
know… Allied forces had ushered most of civilian families into St. Pierre church, and we had taken up
defenses there, in the Place de St. Pierre… I was the first to see her, running out in the street. German
artillery bombardment was temporarily under a reprieve, but we knew a panzergrenadier regiment was
advancing. While under cover fire, I ran to save the girl, but was wounded in the leg in the process…
That’s when I saw it, and I guess David saw it too. We saw the Goliath advancing, its goal the church.”
The German assault—led by 18 tanks carrying a battalion of infantry—pierced the lines of defense
Christmas day. However, Allied forces held their original positions and repulsed the infantry assaults that
followed, capturing 92 Germans. The panzers that had achieved the penetration divided into two columns
and halted by tank destroyers of the 705th.
The Goliath tracked mine is a remote controlled German-engineered demolition vehicle, also known as
the beetle tank to the Allies. Employed by the Wehrmacht since 1942, this caterpillar-tracked vehicle is
relatively small, approximately 4 feet long, 2 feet wide, and 1 foot tall. Carrying 75–100 kilograms (170–
220 lbs.) of high explosives, its intended use has multiple purposes, such as destroying tanks, disrupting
dense infantry formations, and demolition of buildings and bridges. The vehicle is steered remotely via a
joystick control box. The control box is attached to the Goliath by a triple-strand cable connected to the
rear of the vehicle. Two of the strands are used to move and steer the Goliath, the third is used for
detonation. Using 650 m of cable, each Goliath is disposable, blown up with its target.
“It was kind of like cutting of the head,” says Tribout. “First he grabbed the little girl and ran her inside the
church. Then, under heavy fire he advanced towards the Goliath. He had only one shot at it. The
vehicle was already in proximity to detonate. And maybe he was lucky—I don’t know—maybe God was
with us, but he managed to cut the right cable, the detonation cable. After that it was useless, and he
dragged me back to safety… And we held. We held our position. David saved that little girl. He saved
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the church. He saved me. And I’m not sure we would have done that, we would have held. Not if David
hadn’t done what he did. Not if he hadn’t faced that Goliath…”
Elements of General George Patton's Third Army succeeded in punching through to Bastogne, reaching
the lines the day after the Christmas attack. Ground communications with the American supply dumps
were restored on 27 December, and the wounded were evacuated to the rear. Among them Johnny
Tribout, who told combat reporters of “The Stars and Stripes” about David Threnody’s defiance and
heroism.
When asked why he did it, why he saved the little girl and Johnny Tribout, why he stood up to the Goliath
threatening the church, he had only this to say: “I’m just a guitar player. I’m not really a soldier. I did
what I did for personal reasons. I had to save that little girl because I thought I knew her. I thought I
knew her mother…”
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14
They were all my friends, and they died…
--Jim Carroll
And so now it’s maybe a good time to talk about friendship. What friendship really
means, and what we do for it. Because maybe David Threnody saved Johnny Tribout’s life that
day in Bastogne, Christmas Day 1944. He saved a little girl, the mother unknown. He saved the
church from the Goliath. But he couldn’t save Johnny from dying someday, and this is the story
of how Johnny Tribout died, years later, years after the war. A story of what that friendship
meant to David, and how it was construed.
I guess I have to take something back. I have to say something about survival, and
whether it’s really good or bad. Because it is both good and bad. The story of David’s survival
during the war and what he had to do to survive can’t really be seen as ugly—it can’t be
construed as bad. Not because he didn’t have to do ugly things, and not because he had to make
choices that can’t be judged as bad. Sometimes you have to make bad choices, wrong choices,
because the other choices offered to you aren’t the lesser evil, and no matter what choice you
make someone is going to get hurt. In war, and in tough situations in life, there are necessary
evils. What makes them necessary is the substance of tragedy. Some would say money is a
necessary evil, in what you have to do for it. Some would say rebellion to an authority you can’t
condone is necessary and evil, and in unique cases you have to wonder if evil is actually good.
Sometimes you have to make bad decisions because regrettably they’re the best ones you can
make. And this is how survival can be seen as ugly and selfish, or heroic and brave. In the war
David had to kill people. He had to kill other human beings to save human life. In order to save
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that church in Bastogne, in order to save Johnny Tribout and that little girl, human sacrifice had
to be made. And why this had to happen was beyond David, maybe even beyond any of us to
understand. We can explain it. We can justify it. But to the winner and the loser it is a different
story. If you have to hurt somebody to get what you want, what you need—survival can be seen
as selfish and ugly. If you have to hurt somebody to save somebody, to save an idea sacred to
you—survival is justified by the human spirit—what must live on if we are to call ourselves
human at all. And so you have to be careful. You can’t weigh your survival lightly. It is a
heavy burden, and down the road you will be judged in how you defended your actions, in why
you made the choices you made in order to survive. People were kind to David after his war
experiences. He was decorated for his actions at Bastogne. And this haunted him, years later.
He remembered faces, faces of the dead, and despite everything he did he couldn’t stop the
dying. He couldn’t stop his friend from dying, which is why the story of how Johnny Tribout
died must come now.
It’s almost like you have a sign on your forehead. All of us. All of us have a sign on our
forehead we can’t see. Others can see, and you can see theirs, and we make bets on it, wagers on
our confidence that what they see is not of lesser value than what you see. We even make it a
game. A game we play with friends—Indian poker we call it—Blind Man’s Bluff. And the
question becomes: Can you keep a straight face? Do you keep upping the ante when a friend is
only showing the two of hearts? But sometimes you’re not just betting beers. Sometimes you’re
not betting money. Sometimes the wager is your soul—a soul you can’t see, but others can.
And the bluff is making you fold. Making you think your soul isn’t worth much, compared to
what others are showing. David played this game in Mississippi, and you can say he was young
and didn’t know what he was doing, what he was holding. You could say he was naïve to bad
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friendships. Nevertheless, the consequences—the outcome—was the same. He lost. He lost
something in Mississippi, which is why maybe he joined the Army and returned there, and the
friend he made, his friendship with Johnny Tribout, gave him the chance to fold again even
though he knew he could win. But what he was folding on this time wasn’t the wager. Just like
the sign on your forehead, sometimes you don’t know what you’re wagering. The bet is the bet,
and you play not to win or lose. You play out of compulsion. You play because if you don’t
something in you dies. It dies without a funeral, without mourning, and what survives can’t be
defined as human.
Johnny Tribout didn’t die during the war. He didn’t die in the love triangle that occurred
before the war during his enlistment. He didn’t die in the love triangle after the war, playing
with David among the local denizens of New Orleans, when David met his wife—Bethany.
Johnny Tribout died at his own hands in the winter of 1975, some thirty years after the war, after
he had David met, after they split and stopped making records together in 1946. His last
statements on his friendship with David documented in a PBS interview televised in the fall of
1971. He died because of a woman—his wife of nearly twenty years—after a nasty divorce and
speculations she made into his sexuality, questions she brought up on the true nature of his
relationship with David Threnody (unsubstantiated but nevertheless damaging to his reputation),
and how his two children, his two daughters, nearly grown and out of the house, looked upon
their father after the allegations were made.
Maybe all the bets were in. All the bets were in for Johnny Tribout. And he decided to
cash out. Because eventually you do get to see. You get to see the card you’re holding—the
sign on your forehead. You get to see what you were betting on when all the chips are in. You
finally know what everyone else at the table saw, and they know what you saw. And the winner
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is the holder of the high card—true—but maybe everybody wins, everyone wins once they know
what they were betting on. Everyone wins because everybody knows—you know and they
know. There’s no more room for bluffs or folds. There’s no more room for fear. There is only
knowledge, and the memories of what led to it.
Johnny Tribout’s memories were destroyed by lies. The knowledge of lies—a woman’s
lies. And when David Threnody learned of his death, he wrote something, he wrote of it in his
journals, one his last entries before his own death in 1988, when perhaps he was reflecting on a
long life and what survived. Maybe he had finally come to terms with it—what happened in
Mississippi. In any case, these are his words, his final ante on how he felt about Johnny Tribout,
and their friendship:
… I loved him. I loved him like a brother. In this day and age it’s almost become a pat
answer—the smug having it all figured out—catchphrases gone viral on sex and psychology,
gender roles and identity. So I’ll defuse the situation. I’ll admit what the profilers accuse me of,
what Johnny’s vengeful wife accused us of—I loved another man. How this is turned into sex not
a mystery… And if it’s true we have nothing to worry about. It’s all figured out. Red flags
indicators to our reasoning. Men being effeminate. Women being masculine. Gender identity
no longer with clear lines drawn. No boundaries… I loved a man. I loved him like a brother.
But instead of this being natural and good, it’s made unnatural and only condoned as natural if
admitted it has a sexual nature. And what is this sexual nature? Do we eat through our nose?
Breathe through our ears? But this is rhetoric. The truth is loving someone of your own sex is
healthy, and we corrupt it with sex, which really has nothing to do with it. Sex is not an act of
love anyway. Rarely have I been thinking about love when I’m making love—this idea a need, a
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psychological need to have a woman’s attention, the giving of her love, but the act, the sexual act
itself, is about control and dominance. Sex is physical, and only if you’re lucky does it become
metaphysical. No, good sex, the most satisfying sex, is usually angry and violent. There’s
nothing civilized about it. Only a woman benefits from this. The more personal it is, the more
you care, the weaker the performance, and then the truth just becomes their truth—a big bang
where afterwards everything goes limp… That’s why it’s okay now. It’s okay to be gay.
Because you’re free then. You’re free to be uninhibited. So I’ll defuse the situation. I’m gay.
I’m bi-sexual. I love men just as much as I love women. I don’t like to hunt. I don’t like to fish.
I don’t like sports, watching them or talking about them. My voice is high-pitched sometimes.
My pinkie sticks out when I hold my coffee cup. I like opera, the performing arts. I like to talk
about books. I like poetry. I have feelings. The truth being women want sex just as much as
men do. That’s why it’s ridiculous… We were brothers. Johnny and I. We fought together in
the war. And even after we parted ways, after what happened in New Orleans, when Bethany’s
first husband was killed, after Johnny was almost killed because of me, because of what I did to
win Bethany, after our first and last record deal playing together as musicians, after all this—we
still kept in communication with each other. Over the years there were phone calls, letters. He
even sent me a card every Christmas… That’s why I’m angry. I’m angry writing this. I’m
angry at him for taking his life because of a vindictive woman and her lies… The irony being
sensitive to this, being a sensitive artist that tries to understand this—this depth of love and
revenge—all the red flags go up as indicators that you’re gay. And so you can’t win… All I
know is I miss him. I miss a man that I loved and who loved me. I miss a man I played music
with…
--David Threnody, on homosexuality in America—from his journals 1975 to 1981
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And maybe it is obvious. The parallels are obvious. And so I must admit the
synchronicity—the meaningful coincidence. How David Threnody’s life parallels the story of
David in the Bible. How he defeated the Goliath at Bastogne. How his friendship with Johnny
Tribout compares with David and Jonathan’s relationship in the book of Samuel. How
Popovitch compares to Saul. How what happens next, the next part of David Threnody’s story,
his biography, the next section of it—on Bethany—compares… But I’ve already said this. The
truth that this book I’m writing about him, this book about his life, David’s life, has already
happened, the fiction of writing of it has already happened, the questions about his life as a
musician already answered. And I guess now it just reminds me again of that train going by lost
at a crossroads—it reminds me of his voice and what makes me write about it…
You don’t have to look hard. Just Google it. The story of Jonathan and David has long
been a favorite of gay people, who easily identify with the challenges these intimate friends
faced. At his 1895 trial, Oscar Wilde cited the example of David and Jonathan in support of "the
love that dare not speak its name". Many gays believe that Jonathan and David were same sex
lovers, based on the way God presents their story in scripture and based on the Hebrew words
used to describe their relationship. Scripture speaks in glowing terms of Jonathan and David’s
loving intimacy, exchanging clothing, embracing, weeping together, hugging and kissing each
other. When David learns of Saul and Jonathan's death, he chants a lament, which in part says:
Saul and Jonathan, beloved and pleasant in their life, and in their death they were not
parted; they were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions... "How have the
mighty fallen in the midst of the battle! Jonathan is slain on your high places… I am
distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; you have been very pleasant to me. Your love to
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me was more wonderful than the love of women… How have the mighty fallen, and the
weapons of war perished…”
David Threnody made a lament as well. Years after the war. When he learned of Johnny
Tribout killing himself. After his ex-wife made sexual accusations against him and threatened
civil action to make him pay back child support. After learning of her threats on adultery. And
maybe it’s tongue in cheek. Like his journal entry—his so-called coming out of the closet. How
he found it ridiculous being accused of being gay. His sarcasm coming out in the song, his
sadness over the death of a life-long friend, and his ire against the woman who caused it. And
you can note that he made a distinction—that there are bad women and good women in his world
view. It’s obvious in this song he’s addressing whores:
Don’t come too soon!
Yeah baby, make it last…
No, don’t die too soon!
Yeah baby, make me last…
I ain’t drunk for your love,
And baby this ain’t a fast…
Good women don’t make no threats
But bad women do…
Uh hmm… Good women don’t make no threats
But bad women do…
Good women take you in
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And a bad woman kick you out without your shoes
(Oh boys, don’t I know…)
Men have a load
That good women take…
Yeah, men have a load
That good women take
But fast or slow, burden don’t matter to a bad woman
Givin’ or takin’ with a bad woman you know you buying a fake
I once had friend
Boys, aint that sad?
Yeah, I once had friend
Young men, ain’t that sad?
He died for a woman who said she was nice
But old man knows she was naturally born bad…
Don’t come too soon!
Yeah, baby make it last…
No, don’t die too soon!
Yeah, baby make me last…
A whore might like it if you die quickly,
But a good woman don’t make you pay for the past…
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--Bad Woman Blues… written by David Threnody: Feb 1, 1975
David was fifty-six years old when he wrote this song, this lament. Soon to be fiftyseven. A young man reads what’s obvious in it, but an older man, and man in his late fifties, his
children grown, his wife a familiar friend by now—would read it different. And that’s what’s
not obvious in it. What’s missing—the wife, the woman, the familiar friend. What’s not
obvious in it is the sleight of hand, the distraction. Because sexuality is not the issue here.
That’s an issue of youth, the lament of youth. What maybe David captures in tongue of cheek, in
sarcasm, as a man not really concerned with sex or sexual orientation, the sexual satisfaction of a
woman, but an old man mourning a friend, and not a male friend—a woman friend. It’s the
lament of an old man mourning a male friend losing a woman friend. Drawing attention to the
vulnerability—a young man just reading it with the wrong head. Men of a certain age don’t need
that kind of external validation anymore. That sexual validation. They don’t need this form of
proof from a woman anymore, or from anybody for that matter. That’s not really a concern, and
David drawing attention to it, his anger and sadness, his questioning, is merely misdirection. A
hat trick drawing your attention away from the real problem.
Johnny Tribout was close to retirement when his wife divorced him. For years it had
been his work. His role as man, as a husband and a father—to provide. And then that was taken
away from him. His purpose was taken away from him. His wife’s accusations the claims of a
woman feeling second best. A woman feeling her man loved something more than her. Not
another man—that’s misdirection—but his work. And maybe this happens over a given length
of time. It happens when you lose yourself in a role. They were a man and woman who lost
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themselves in the roles they came to play as a married couple, as husband and wife, as a father
and mother. Roles they assumed because they thought that’s what they had to do, but everything
got mixed up and they forgot the vows that brought them together. What once was was no
longer, and what they had now was almost like a staring contest where they went looking for
what had already died. And when the anger was over—the mad feelings involved in a breakup—it’s easy to get lost remembering what once was and not remembering what it is now. The
momentum is lost, the only wind in your sails the renewed venom felt between two lovers now at
war. But that soon ends, the war ends, and despair sets in. And that’s where Johnny Tribout
found himself when during a phone call with his ex-wife he sensed her unemotional detachment.
She was no longer angry, no longer vengeful (at least not in tone and appearance), this not giving
him the renewed energy to defend himself. She just didn’t care, and this hurt Johnny the most.
After all those years with a woman he now sensed he meant nothing to her. There was no fight
left to love himself. And so he doused himself with rubbing alcohol and lit a match.
After the war, after he and David split up and stopped playing music together, Johnny
took a steady job for a life insurance company. Not in Alabama, where he was from, but in
David’s hometown—in East St. Louis, his wife from there—they met accidently at a winery
where Johnny performed gigs on the side, at a wedding reception in a small rural town in central
Illinois, this after Johnny took a train north to escape questioning in the murder of Popovitch and
Bethany’s first husband in New Orleans in the spring of 1946, a botched drug deal with David to
blame, Johnny left with a scar on his neck from his involvement in it. David urging him to
escape and suggesting where he go. She liked his music and that’s how they met, but it wasn’t
his music that enabled them to marry, this over a decade after he left New Orleans. It was him
holding a steady job. White people still lived in East St. Louis then, before the massive urban
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fires razed entire neighborhoods in the late 70’s. He and his new wife bought a house and had
their first of two daughters after only a year of marriage. He worked overtime to give his family
all they asked for, and it became his life, his world. The music he once played with David
becoming just a harmless hobby, a way to make a few extra bucks now and then. His wife no
longer listening to him as he played. That passion he once felt, that youthful entanglement with
Nina before the war, forgotten except in occasional dreams brought about by bad digestion. His
work became everything, and then the rug was pulled out from under him, but when he turned to
his family it was like it was no longer there. The insurance company he worked for went
bankrupt from the misappropriation of funds, the revenues on premiums not enough to cover
death disbursements. And his wife had become bored after their children began high school,
young girls learning things on their own now and no longer needing or wanting her attention. By
then they had assumed roles that really didn’t include each other even though they had assumed
them in good faith. So when he lost his job he lost his role, and she didn’t have the role anymore
to support him. He lost his retirement and pretty soon they were broke. And so he lost his wife.
The accusations, the arguments, just a matter of course, the icing on the cake—finances being the
real reason for their estrangement. It’s what became obvious in what they had lost long before
this.
Something happens to a man when his purpose is taken away, when his work is taken
away, his children, his family. And you must be fair here. You must be fair to his wife. Her
world was taken away too. And it’s really a common story, with common themes, the basis of
an episode you might see on Oprah. Because it’s not really about the money. It’s about the
stuff. The stuff money buys that replaces living over time. It replaces the love that brought two
people together, and over time you just grow comfortable in it. And at their age, at the age they
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were by then, Johnny and his wife, it’s hard to accept being uncomfortable again. It’s hard to
start over again. And that’s the situation where Johnny Tribout found himself. The situation
where his wife found herself. She just wanted things to be simple again. She wanted a house
with a back lawn—a simple life. People kill themselves when they feel there’s no hope and
they’re afraid to start over. And that’s what happened to Johnny Tribout. His wife not really a
bad woman, it’s just that women don’t kill themselves when they feel like they need to start over.
They instead try to kill whatever impedes them from it. She’d grown cold. The power in a
fading relationship going to whoever cares about it less. But power isn’t happiness. And as for
Johhny Tribout’s suicide all I can say is I found something in it. I found something in David
Threnody’s response to it, a story of what that friendship meant to him, and in my research I
found a statement given by Johnny Tribout’s eldest daughter to the police after his death. I was
able to talk with her, and she allowed me to disclose the information in it. Johnny Tribout killed
himself on his birthday. The following transcript a record of the investigation into his death. It
perhaps explains better than I can the awful truth of what happened:
CIRCUIT COURT OF THE 20TH JUDICIAL DISTRICT
State of Illinois
Case Number: 1203P7
County of St. Clair
Detective Pelosa: 1 February 1975, the time is 1300. Case Number 1203P7: John Amos
Tribout. Statement of Claire Anne Tribout to Detective Frank Pelosa on the incident of 22
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January 1975, St. Clair County, Belleville, IL… Would you please state your name and
relationship to Mr. Tribout.
Claire Tribout: Claire Anne Tribout. I’m his daughter.
Detective Pelosa: Can you please state in your own words what happened on the date in
question.
Claire Tribout: I was with friends. I received a call from my mother. She’d received a
disturbing phone call from my father. She was calm, but I could tell something was bothering
her. She said she was afraid my father had hurt himself. I told her to call the police. Officers
went to his residence (he was staying at a friend’s house) and found him in the bedroom badly
burned. EMT personnel arrived on the scene and my father was sent by ambulance to St. John’s
burn unit in St. Louis.
Detective Pelosa: He was still alive?
Claire Tribout: Yes. He had third degree burns across 90% of his body, but he was still alive.
The burn unit at St. John’s was unable to do any grafting. He never regained consciousness. He
died three days later.
Detective Pelosa: Do you know the nature of what happened on the night in question? Do you
know why he called your mother?
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Claire Tribout: My father and mother separated on the night of 6 January. She issued an
emergency order of protection served to him on 13 January. She claimed he was suicidal. She
wanted him to stay away from her and my sister and I.
Detective Pelosa: Your sister’s name and place of residence?
Claire Tribout: Ella Tribout. Both she and I still live at home… our mother’s home… my
father’s home. At least it was until they separated. She switched his keys after an argument, and
when he couldn’t get back in the night of 6 January, he went to stay at a friend’s house, a music
buddy. My father was a musician...
Detective Pelosa: Are you and your sister still the legal dependents of John Amos Tribout and
your mother… Christine Nina Tribout?
Claire Tribout: Yes, I turn eighteen in November. My sister is sixteen… Our mother didn’t
work. She’s never worked. Just some temporary part-time jobs for extra shopping money with
her girlfriends. Our father supported us—that is until he lost his job. He quit due to ethical
reasons. He’d worked in life insurance for over twenty years, but he found out the company he
was working for was misappropriating funds. This happened over a year ago. My mother
wasn’t happy. She was afraid we would lose our house. My father tried several jobs, but he was
over-qualified and too old. Most firms wouldn’t hire him. He tried to go back to music. He
played before he married my mother. He served in the war… My father and mother’s separation
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on January 6th wasn’t their first separation. She kicked him out before this, after he kept failing
to hold a job. My mother became threatening and their arguments escalated. Even though he
was still paying most of the household expenses with odd jobs and some music gigs he arranged
with friends, she told him she would have an affair if he didn’t find a job paying like his job
before he quit doing life insurance. She wanted a man that could take care of her, and she wasn’t
going to take care of him. She accused him of not keeping his job because he didn’t want to
support us. She made other accusations, and after this last time, this last separation, she made
allegations about his friendships. His friendships with other musicians… He paid child support
during their previous separations, even though there wasn’t a court order saying he had too, but
my mother threatened he would have to pay back child support, that they would impute his
income based on his previous earnings. That if he didn’t they would take away his visitation
rights with us, take his driver’s license, that he would go to jail. She even threatened she would
say things about his relationship with us—his children—horrible things…
Detective Pelosa: Do you think this is why? Why he did it? Why he called your mother even
though she was under an emergency order of protection? Why while on the phone with her he
doused himself with rubbing alcohol and set himself on fire?
Claire Tribout: My father wasn’t suicidal… He wanted to see us. He wanted to see me and
my sister, but she threatened to even take that away, that she would lie to do it… What was he
supposed to do? My mother says she was just protecting herself. She was just doing what she
had to do to survive. Even now she says she isn’t to blame. She calls my father a coward…
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Detective Pelosa: Do have anything else to say—for the record? Is there anything else you
want to say in your statement on your father’s death?
Claire Tribout: My father was a good man…
Detective Pelosa: This concludes the statement concerning John Amos Tribout and the incident
in question on 22 January, 1975. Let the record show that Claire Anne Tribout, daughter to the
deceased, makes this statement in good faith and without willful cause to perjure herself. This
statement will be on record according to guidelines indicated in the Freedom of Information Act
and the Privacy Act of 1974... Thank you for your time, Miss Tribout.
David Threnody learned of Johnny’s death through old friends in East St. Louis, when his
funeral was announced in the paper. He was in Texas at the time—Austin, Texas—but returned
home to attend the funeral. And he wrote his song, his lament, for Johnny. They were friends,
old friends. They were friends during the war, after the war—this the next part, the next section
of the story—what happened after the war in New Orleans, before Johnny took a train north, and
met his wife… But before this, before the next story, the next story on David Threnody’s life,
and his wife—Bethany—a good-bye, a final fare-the-well. A requiem, a salute to a soldier, and a
father of children. I’ll end it with these words. The words spoken by David in the Bible, the
words of a warrior and a singer of songs, sorrowful words, a let my people go, mourning a
friend…
“How have the mighty fallen, and the weapons of war perished…”
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PART THREE
BETHANY
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15
I have a little red rooster, too lazy to crow for day…
--Howling Wolf
She was Cajun. She wasn’t born in Louisiana. She wasn’t a true blue Acadian. But her
roots—her family origins—were Cajun, French Creole. And if you want to know about her you
need to know something about her mother, her grandmother—what her father was like.
Her mother’s name was Valerie. Her father’s, Robert. They were married in the winter
of 1918, about the time David Threnody was born. The French ancestry comes from her father.
Her mother was German, at least on her maternal grandfather’s side. Her mother’s mother—
Bridgette—black, but with mixed blood. The father, Bethany’s maternal great-grandfather—a
white scalawag from Missouri, who with the help of exploitive carpet-baggers made his money
on land speculation in Southwestern Louisiana, on ruined sugar cane plantations, before he
disappeared North again after the Reconstruction, leaving Bridgette to be raised by her mother, a
daughter of slaves who believed in the promises of Northern reformers after the Civil War, the
promises of a man, a stranger, an educated man, who told her she deserved more than what her
freed parents could offer, banking on her fears, the fears instilled in her by god-fearing, poor
people, who rightly distrusted the new freedoms promised them. She settled in Orange, Texas in
the mid 1880’s, never married and raising her illegitimate daughter working as a cook for a white
family. Bridgette married young, her first marriage to Francis Duvette in 1898, a barber from
Bayou La Batre—Valerie their second child.
Robert Labeau was firstborn, a birth certificate from 1895 listing his parents from New
Orleans, from an ancestry rich in French Creole blood, originally from Haiti, but also mixed with
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Anglo-Saxon heritage, and there are rumors, shadowy records, that his father was arrested, tried
and executed for killing a white man in a duel over a tryst with the man’s wife. His mother
escaping the city and settling with kin (some of them with white ancestry, Cajun) in Port Arthur,
Texas, where a young Robert was raised and learned the trade of a blacksmith—shoeing horses.
He inherited a parcel of land in Sabine County, from his mother’s uncle, where he built the house
where Bethany was born.
So I will assume it. I will assume her voice in what follows, as a way of telling it, telling
her story and what she came from. The research what enables this—family records, journals—
Bethany’s journals— transcripts of interviews with friends and family, the voice of David—this
what enables her voice to tell it the way that she does. In the fiction of it. In the lack of suspense
of what you already know happens. How David Threnody comes to know her. How he sees her
for the first time—bathing in a pool…
August 6th, 1945—I was born in June. In the summer of 1923. I was born in the
summer, but conceived in the fall, and this—this is where my life begins. In the conception, the
conception that birthed my world. For you can go no deeper than your birth, no deeper than that
first song you sing to the world, but you can—you can go deeper if you imagine, if you believe.
If you believe that all you have is your soul… I dreamed of it long before I saw him with my
own eyes, before he saw my nakedness with his eyes. I dreamed the dark man—the baptism
which gave honor to him. I dreamed the man he saw at a crossroads, at a crossroads in
Mississippi—my lover, my dark lover—and so I knew of the negotiation long before he knew he
was negotiating. He was no stranger to me. And his eyes, his eyes upon me—my nakedness—
this ordained in my birth, my worship to the creation, and the lord of it… I was conceived of
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earth and my body is earth. My eyes opened in the womb, in placental blood and semen, and out
of this mixture was made the dirt of my flesh. In honor of him and the proclivities, the powers of
seduction he gave unto me… I am the daughter of devils and conceived as such. My shape, my
form—the image of fallen angels and all their lost beauty. I am good, pleasing the eye, and I was
made for him—my lover. I was what he asked for in dreams. I was the answer to his name.
And in his talks with God I hinted to his nature all that his flesh wanted and yearned for in
seminal dreams… I was born a woman to a man asleep. And when he awakened… he found
me…
This how she tells you it, tells you this in the way that she does. For she is hidden in not
hiding. She is revealed by being veiled. And she not evil, an incarnation of evil. This too
easy—too simple to say. She was a woman born, and nothing more. Given the power by
believing in her power. Because what she says is not what she said. They are a man’s words on
a seed planted in fear, lacking an understanding in how the seed was planted. They are the words
of a battle lost before it is even fought. And a false knowledge of enemy poised as a friend, the
history there… But I must say them. I must say these words that I have her say to begin her
character. To draw the first sketches of an artist’s wife, and what she came from. David
Threnody’s wife. I must use these words as a muse, and more of them will follow. To build an
idea. A conception of what happened. Why David killed for her. Why he had her first husband
killed as a symbol of all her former lovers, and why her son rose up against him. Why the child
they had together tried to kill his father. But this later, and for now only more musings. More
musings of the muse, and the liberty I take with them. To capture the fever, the fever of a love
turned cold, fruitless, and the possibilities as to why.
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She was born in June. The year 1923. Bethany Marie Labeau. And the muse begins
with her birth—her conception. The story behind it. The story of her baptismal. How she told it
to David in their bed. And the fevered imaginations it inspired in him. The songs he wrote as a
man because of her whispers, her whispers in his ear. What he tried to grab hold of—not to
capture, not to hold—but to embrace what he wanted to exist. Soft flesh, warm, and not an idea,
but actual—real. He wanted her to be real to him.
And maybe David Threnody had the idea of her before he knew she even existed. Boyish
dreams he talked to, expecting an answer. Those dreams of a boy still unanswered in the man—
an idea. The idea of a woman. This too a dialectic. Opposing dilemmas on what to love, what
to hate. Fears and doubts. Revelations and assurances. And so maybe he got what he wanted—
he wanted a bad woman to be good to him. He wanted a good woman to be bad to him. Unsure
of which force to awaken. And he walked it, those dark sides of the road, along that long road
from hell that leads to the light. And since he wanted both he became both—his woman a mirror
of both. When he wanted to be a devil he was a devil. When he wanted to act as a saint he
received his patron blessings. His life partly in shadows. His contritions enlightened with tears.
But all this still—an idea. And ideas become nightmares, or hopeful schemes. Raw existence a
barren desert, a white and endless room, the furniture of which, like the mirage of an oasis and
the dancing around of dried bones—architecture of the interior decorator—you. You furnish
your existence with so many ideas, so many hopes and fears, ministering angels and monsters.
And sometimes you feel lucky and blessed. Other times cursed. These too manifestations.
Ideas of your existence, and the nothingness you begin with—you. And the stone you skip
across the water goes on forever because you never threw it, only the idea that you did makes it
sink. Maybe David just began with a stone—a natural stone. And he chiseled away at it—the
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jagged edges—making contours and curves—polished smooth. He sculpted a woman. The idea
of sculpture taking away so to see what you’re left with. And like Pygmalion of old he needed a
name. A name for his woman. So that when he called to her she would answer. She would
know how to answer. And this was love—David’s idea of love—he created it. By taking away
to see what he was left with. The opposite of beginning with nothing. For his woman began
with everything. And only time. Pressure and time. Would reveal what remained.
Bethany Labeau’s grandmother, her mother’s mother—Bridgette—was a whore. Not in
the professional since. Just a barfly. She gave up her husband, her children, for the bars of East
Texas. Her second husband died and she lived with her son (Bethany’s uncle, though the same
age as she, in fact slightly younger) in what’s now the 9th ward (what’s left of it after Hurricane
Katrina). This soon after the war ended. When David came home after the war. When he
settled in New Orleans. And so I’ll make it like a recording—her voice—Bethany’s
grandmother. Like Jonathon Bonnor’s voice. I place it here like it was dictation. The shorthand
of my imagination. The sound of it like it’s playing on an old phonograph, telling the story of
what she came from. Like David Threnody’s first Blues recordings. And handicapped only
slightly from her COPD, the consequence of years of chain-smoking, her voice as grating as the
subject of her words:
I always wake up cursing. You don’t want to be the one waking me. I’ll curse ya two
ways from Sunday, and it’ll take ya a month of Sundays to say your Hail Mary’s for every name I
call ya… Ask her—she knows. When she was a child she used to wake me. Maybe that’s why
she’s my favorite, my favorite granddaughter. Because I called her every name in the book,
every name under heaven, and some not even known to us down here on earth… Maybe it’s my
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fault. Or maybe it was fate. Hell if I know. Maybe what’s in you is your fate. And I have a
temper.
‘Spose it’s true though. All that you have inside of you is all that you are and what
happens to you. I mean what if I had been different. Maybe I wouldn’t have met the men that I
met. Wouldn’t have loved some of them, and hated some of them. I could even look the same—
what I’ve seen in the mirror all these years. Just a slightly different temperament. A slightly
different way with my words. What I like now, what I have an affinity for, all jumbled up and
reversed. I mean what if I didn’t wake up cursing? What if instead I smiled, just smiled to a new
day, and had kind words for it? What if instead I just yawned? And I guess I can’t really
pinpoint it—the hour and the day when I lost my first husband’s love. I know the day he took the
children. When I came home the next day—he knowing I’d been with another man. And I can’t
say it all happened that day. There wasn’t just one defining moment. Because I remember what
led up to it. Prior arguments. Where I lost my temper. And said things. Done things. Things I
knew hurt him.
He wasn’t from France, but everyone called him Frenchie. He was from Bayou La
Batre—a shrimpin’ town. Round the turn of the century he moved further west along the Gulf
Coast and became a barber. God knows why. He wasn’t that good at it. I let him cut my hair
once. Just once. And after that he stuck to man’s hair. We met at a church pot-luck. I’ve never
much set foot in a church and probably never will again, but some of my girlfriends from the
bars told me if I wanted to find a good man I should go to one. I’d just got beat up bad by a
man. That’s why my girlfriends recommended it. And I only went to one, one church meet and
greet, but I can’t say the men are any better there than what you find in bars. Honest-wise at
least. He was a horny old devil—my old man, my first husband. Maybe that’s why he got the
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name Frenchie. Not on account he was from France or even been to France, but because of his
lovin’ ways—the old skunk. Sometimes even I had to go tell him to just masturbate, especially
after he knocked me up three times. His damn thang got me into whole loads of trouble. And
after tryin’ the married life for a spell, well, I figured my bar gals had it wrong and they had it
right. You might find a good man at church, a man that don’t beat ya at least, but a good man
just gets you children, children a bad man don’t want.
Seems like as you get older hopes just get replaced with regrets. Seems like if it’s just
fate it wouldn’t be like that, but it is. And you can say one thing leads to another, and I suppose
it does. But what about that one thing—that first thing—you? What made you you—that leads to
all these other things, these other things that happen? Maybe if I’d had a better father, one that
didn’t run off when I was child—maybe that would have made who I am different—I don’t know.
I’ve had a temper as long as I can remember. Maybe I inherited it. I inherited from him—my
daddy that run off. And seems a shame when your inheritance just becomes a hand-me-down
that don’t do anybody no good. I see it in her—Bethany—my granddaughter. Her mother ain’t
a lot like me, but she is. And I don’t know. I don’t know how that happens and who you should
blame for it. Seems like you get stuck with a bunch a things about yourself that you can’t
change. And they hurt you. They cause you pain. The worst of it—the worst pain of it—when
you judge yourself for it. When you don’t like those things about yourself you just sorta got stuck
with. Bad blood that bleeds ya. Bleeds ya ‘til you’re dry. And it don’t seem really fair—does it?
Don’t seem like you should be responsible for it if it’s just fate.
Wish there was something I could do about it—my temper. Wish I could control it some
way, but I can’t. It’s just a part of me I gotta live with I guess. And I’m too old now to change
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or even waste my time with it. But it don’t change the regrets no ways neither. That’s something
I gotta live with now…
And maybe it’s funny how the record skips. This imagined old phonograph recording of
Bethany’s grandmother. Almost like they’re the first original recordings of David’s voice,
David’s guitar. How maybe if it was replaced with Bethany’s voice it wouldn’t sound much
different. When she was born in 1923, in the town of Hemphill, Texas, her grandmother lived in
a cabin her father built on the land they owned there in Sabine County. She was already into her
forties, but she hadn’t married her second husband yet. She hadn’t had the son she lived with in
the 9th Ward yet. She hadn’t done some of the things she’d come to regret yet. Some of them
had already happened. Like abandoning her three children from her first marriage to Frenchie
Duvette for numerous superficial encounters with other men in the bars of East Texas. But some
of them hadn’t happened yet. It wasn’t in her voice yet. You didn’t hear it in her voice. Maybe
Bethany had to be born. She had to be conceived for it to happen. For it to come into her voice.
And this is what happened. This is what happened the day Bethany Labeau was born…
She was christened with it. Rooster’s blood. That damn rooster that woke me. I still
remember it. Looking out that window—looking out that one window in a one room country
shack I came to live in after I got too old for the bars. After my body was too old for it. Valerie
convincing her husband he needed to be good to me though I hadn’t been no good to her,
abandoning her when she was only five years old… He was a quiet man—Robert—didn’t say
much. He made his money as a mechanic, after his trade of shoeing horses got replaced with
automobiles. Two jobs really—he worked night shift at a power plant, burnin’ coal.. Never had
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a day off as long as I knowed him, and though he was twenty years younger than me he looked
like he could be my father, suffering from diabetes though none of us knowed it then—knowed
what that was—from not eating all day and having his meals at night. Bethany sometimes
staying up with him before he went to his job at the power plant—buttering his bread. That’s
what he ate—a whole loaf of buttered bread. He worked in the garage he owned during the day,
taking a cat nap in off hours of the afternoon and staying up all night working as a maintenance
man at the power plant—a new thing then, most homes still without electricity. That one room
shack I stayed in, the one he built from scraps with his own two hands—without electricity,
without water… Can’t say it really bothered me none. I was used to hardships, used to hard
livin’, but that damn rooster—that damn rooster woke me up cursin’ every mornin’. And that’s
what I saw—out that window—the day Bethany was born. That damn rooster a-crowin’ on top
of a cow’s back.
A strange sight to see really. A strange thing to look out at wakin’ up. A rooster standin’
on a cow’s back. Just as strange as that mid-wife. That old black woman Valerie hired for the
birthin’… I ain’t never dabbled in it. That’s where she ain’t like me—dabbling in that voodoo
witchcraft. Tossin’ chicken bones and such to see the eyes of the future. Can’t say I really
believed in no God so I guess you could say I didn’t believe in the Devil neither. Never did like
rules much, and both have rules to follow I ‘spose. Either way you’re servin’ something, and
after seein’ what happened to my mother I never wanted to be no one’s servant. Them’s man’s
rules. Rules made be men. A woman’s got no place in them. But she wanted her. She wanted
that mid-wife to birth her first child. Out of fear. Out of hope—who knows. Maybe she figured
somethin’ had her back. She wanted somethin’ givin’ her protection, and I ‘spose she figured
she needed the earth, somethin’ from earth protectin’ her birth, the birth of her first child… I
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never worshiped nothin’ ‘cept what came out of my own mind, but maybe I can see why she did
it. Maybe creation needs creation. Needs its assurance. You don’t know nothin’ ‘cept what you
came from, and I guess Valerie just wanted that blessing—the earth’s blessing, for what she was
bringing to it, what she was bearing forth out of it. But it still seems like fool’s superstitions to
me, and ain’t no rooster, nor its blood, gonna protect ya from what the earth does to ya.
But that’s how Bethany came into the world—bathed in a pool of rooster’s blood. And
spit rum. Blessings of protection given from cola nuts tossed like dice. Lots of chantin’ and
prayin’. The blood ‘sposed to soak up bad vibes. And I guess that cow didn’t make it neither.
Robert butchered it that day for a celebration feast… And that’s what happened. It was the
summer, June 1923. The last day I woke up cursin’ to a rooster’s crowin’. That’s how I
remember the day my granddaughter, Bethany, was born. And I ain’t gonna make no judgment
of it. Good or bad. It’s just what happened. The judgments will just have to wait, but I’m not
goin’ to do no waitin’ on ‘em. That’s just a man’s thing again. Maybe tomorrow I’ll feel
different, but I don’t guess I will. All I know about tomorrow is I won’t hear no rooster. I’ll
have new things to wake up to and curse…
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16
Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe…
--John Lennon
She found her first lover when she was thirteen. And it wasn’t a man. Her first love
wasn’t a man. It was a plant—a plant that grew wild like a weed in her father’s pastures.
Marijuana. And maybe this is tied, inextricably tied—to the music. To her love of the Blues.
It was 1936. Hitler was coming to power in Germany. David Threnody was learning
about friendships out on the golf course—eighteen and about to take that trip to Mississippi. He
was about to take that ride at the crossroads. About to go electric. This connected. Connected
to the woman, the young girl, who would become his wife. Her meditations in smoke, and how
she liked to listen to the kind of music David liked to play.
Music is a language. A language of numbers—revealing God and our failures in trying to
gain this knowledge. And so the patterns emerge. For if God is love, and love is patient—you
must wait. You must wait until the end of the song to know what is spoken. In numbers
patterned by time. Felt in rhythms. Key notes to a determined beat. A universal scale limited,
but unlimited in what that makes you feel—when you hear it. The lyrics, the words, not what
you hear first—these words just chained to a pattern, freed as they are played along with the
notes that accent them. Showing you what’s down under, what’s down under them. And to
Bethany, the music became an obsession. She heard in it what she wanted to say. She saw in the
numbers, unemotional, the expressions capable of all emotions. Dark emotions, like anger,
pride, hate. Light emotions like laughter. Sad emotions—some strings played stirring in her
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tears. And love—the love of first loves. Kind time—answering to your patience that what
unfolds, what unfolds in a song, can answer all your fears on being alone and misunderstood. A
song quells arguments. It brings lovers together, and enemies can hear in it all the justice they
feel they deserve. A song soothes a troubled spirit. And the words, the words that are sung—
become poetry. Metered remembrances that enable you to listen without thinking. You don’t
think when you hear a song, when you let it in. You feel. This why it’s the language of God.
Our only way to talk to what we can’t conceive, what we even doubt exists, but a song—a good
song—gives you faith. It puts you in touch with all the things it becomes so easy to become out
of touch with when you’re in pain. Music heals the sickness. That sickness of loneliness—the
lie of it. For you can’t prove what you feel. You can only feel it. And if you’re patient, all that
you really want is given to you. For all songs are spiritual. Their truth is spiritual. They are the
bread and water that keeps you alive in the prison of your mind. That strange paradox of how a
mind creates music, how it hears it being created. Because every song can be deconstructed,
broken down to its parts, its instruments, its voice, and you can become obsessed and driven
crazy by the numbers, the mathematics that are a song’s foundation. But if you hear it, if you
truly listen—you don’t need this. You don’t need this knowledge. You just need let go, let
yourself dance, let your mind dance. And if you do—you find it. You find your first love—your
beginning. And that’s why I need to speak of it. What happens when the music’s over. I need
to tell you about Bethany Labeau’s first love, and the music she found as an expression of it.
“Do you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“Them birds… The birds sure are singin’ today…”
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You couldn’t tell her age. She hid it well. Bethany wondered if it was because she
smoked, or some other secret. Sissy Walker was her name. She lived down the road, the dirt
road that led down from her father’s mailbox, in a house just off her father’s land, near one of the
river inlets—along the Sabine River—her porch looking out over it, hidden in the shade of trees,
among the pines. This before the river was dammed to the south and the reservoir formed—the
Toledo Bend Reservoir—to counteract the damaging effects of river flooding.
If Bethany had to guess, she was in her early forties. A daughter grown and married.
The father gone long ago—run off. And that’s why Bethany visited with her. To hear her
records. Her husband a guitar player, a singer of the Blues, and Sissy had a lot of records. She
never said if any of them were of her husband, and Bethany didn’t ask. She just liked sitting on
the porch, listening to the phonograph Sissy set in the kitchen window. She liked sitting there,
smoking with Sissy, listening to the guitar playing, the voices of black men moaning, singing
about heartbreak and loss.
“Ain’t like the birds, is it? Birds don’t sound so sad. Makes you want to know their
secret, don’t it?”
“My granny just complains they wake her up.”
“Oh sure, sure… They do sing in the mornin’. Loud and uninterrupted. ‘Spose they’re
just happy here. Happy ‘bout their homes in these trees…”
Sissy sits in a rocking chair. She stops the motion of it for a moment. The soft creaking
noise of her rocking. And she looks up through the trees, the tall pines, and closes her eyes,
letting the sunlight that comes through the shade of the high and hovering branches warm her
eyelids. The hand holding her meerschaum pipe relaxes on the arm of the rocker. Some of the
ash falls on the old, knotted gray wood of the porch. The pipe is rich in color from age and use,
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amber tones in it now from its base up. There’s an aroma from it on the porch, mixed with the
smell of pine needles.
“Well I like hearin’ them birds. Them whippoorwills just at the break of day… Legend
has it they can sense a soul departing, and can capture it as it flees… I sometimes think I hear my
old man in them. Ol’ Wishbone. Wishbone Walker—my man. I sometimes think I hear him
moanin’ with ‘em. Like he never gone away…”
Sissy smiles with her eyes still closed. The waning sunlight still on her eyelids. Then
she looks down at her pipe. She grabs a matchbox from a table set beside her and relights it.
Puffing slow and deep. Then she reaches out with it. Resting it on Bethany’s shoulder—she
sitting by the porch steps, close to her bare feet.
“What happened with him? Why’d he go away?”
“Oh, girl—who knows? I’m not sure what he loved more—making whiskey, love, or
song… Maybe I was jealous of it… He was my first love, my first lover—you know… Maybe
you ain’t old enough yet. Old enough to understand. How old are you—thirteen? You got
plenty time to learn of it—love and hate. You don’t need an ol’ reefer woman telling ya ‘bout
it.”
“I reckon I’m old enough. I started bleedin’ this summer. Momma says I’m a woman
now. I can make babies…”
“Make babies! Lord, child. Don’t be thinkin’ ‘bout that yet!”
“Well I’m old enough to come here and be with you. I listen to your music and
understand it…”
“Sure… sure… you can listen. But you ain’t ready to sing it yet! Lord! Lord!”
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“Well tell me about him. Tell me ‘bout your husband. Did he sing like what’s on those
records?”
“Yeah… he sang… I’m surprised you ain’t heard the rumors. What folks say ‘bout him.
‘Bout maybe what I did to him.”
“What’d you do?”
“Well some say he’s in the outhouse yonder. In back of my little garden—he, he! Some
say I hit him over the head with a skillet and kilt’ ‘em… Some say he ran off to New Orleans
with another woman… that I was a scorned woman…”
“So what really happened?”
Sissy smiles again. Looking down on Bethany with lidded eyes. Bethany sitting with her
arms wrapped around her legs, drawn close to her chest, the beginning bud of breasts there, just
barely noticeable in the contours of her gingham dress.
“Woman’s got many secrets, child. And you know—you’ve seen that door to your mind
open. Sittin’ here with me. Listenin’ and smokin’. You can’t say you ain’t intuited it yet—a
woman’s secrets… Some say we’s weaker—the weaker sex. And sure, a man can destroy you.
He’s got stronger hands that can choke you—choke the life right out of you. He can destroy you
with his hands, or more civilized—with money… But a woman, a woman can destroy your
soul…”
Bethany rests her chin on her knees. She’s not looking at Sissy looking at her. She’s
watching the water in the distance. The sunlight on the water. The dark pools near the shore.
“God didn’t create no better than us. You be proud of that. Proud of your womanhood.
Your strength. Ain’t nobody can love better than us, and ain’t nobody better at hate… Because
a woman can lie. We’s born to lie. Lie to a man. Good lies to make him better. And bad lies to
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make him worse. Not even a born salesman can lie better than a woman… Hell hath no fury—
ain’t you ever heard of that? Thing is—what they don’t tell ya—we make it. We make a man’s
heaven, or his hell… That’s our inheritance… That’s what we sell… But don’t listen to me.
I’m ugly with it now. I’m ugly with the price. The price a woman got’s to pay for that power—
that power to destroy a man. What we lose. The beauty we lose. We lose the song them birds
are singin’…”
“But you still listen. You listen to them. You listen to those records…”
“Sure… I listen… but I don’t hear it—I don’t hear the words. The words in them.
That’s the cost… I don’t hear God. I don’t hear God no more…”
November 9th, 1947—That’s a lie though. One of those good lies gone bad with age.
Gone bad with what she had to become to tell it. Because I think she heard. She heard God.
She just lost her way in listening. And what she heard didn’t make her a child again. What she
was trying to tell me—what she heard—raw efforts making me into an adult… That truth. That
truth a woman knows. A woman a guardian of it—the truth. That truth of the earth. How it’s all
one big lie—a veil over our eyes. The practical truth of stone and water, grain and sand, life and
death—their interaction, and synthesis. What a woman becoming a woman knows. About that
urgency. The urgency of a man. And a woman’s response to it. In communion with rivers
pregnant of the sun drawn close. Those fallen leaves of many colors. Cold eyes pondering
naked trees in ice storms. Those first green sprouts, those first flowers of spring. A woman in
cycle with the seasons—the calendar of the moon. Our gravity—that gravity that puts us here—
grounded of the earth and its dirt. Made of its laws—what nature speaks to us. Why we have to
lie to a man. To cushion them from the truth they can’t handle in their blind courage entering
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into us. Their illusions of the womb that their strength is a match for it—the earth’s giving and
its taking away.
I had a dream. I dreamed of him just as he dreamed of me. And he was my guide in
forests. A forest that would be dark if not for what he was—an artist, a singer of songs. His
mind a light to the past from which he came, foreshadowing his coming. I was guided by his
remembered childhood—he being the father of my children. That seed which he contributed—
their blind courage to the blood that awaited their right timing, their insistence. And we ate of
them—the meat of ribs. We ate meat and drank milk. Guided by a child—our children—and
what they made us remember. How we were free. Not free from the earth’s laws, but free from
our knowledge of them. And we only knew good, the good that was our light in the darkness,
the darkness of that forest we walked, each tree we passed an anchor to that evil that brought this
world of ours to life. Unafraid of it hiding from the light—un-existing in what we chose to exist.
A dream forest unknown to nightmares. Where we had each other and all that we were. Not
ignorant of our capabilities, but enlightened by a will relearned in their usage. How they were
the mysterious tools of love and time… And we were no longer angry, angry at God, angry at
ourselves. We were thankful. Thankful for the gift of our life, and the peace we made with all
its dark desires. Our beginnings…
And so Bethany listened. She listened to the birds. The sown seeds that were not their
food—allowed to take root and not carried away by their wings. She became the muse of these
words, these songs. Songs she listened to on Sissy Walker’s porch. Black spirituals of cotton
fields. Primitive earth songs hiding their civilized depth. But now we must try. Try to speak of
it. The weeds grown-up that try to choke these seeds. These seeds of songs. We must invoke
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the goddess. And sing her intonations. We must talk about Bethany and not let her talk. What
comes next a representation, a discussion on a habit, and how it formed in her soul. Bethany’s
first love, her first lover. I have to tell you about the first boy she loved, and her reverence, how
she came to love smoking marijuana.
You see he was watching. He followed her. He followed Bethany on her walks to
Sissy’s porch, hearing from a distance the Blues that came from records playing in the kitchen
window. His name was Jeremy, the son of the local doctor for black folks living around
Hemphill—a man uninvited to Bethany’s birth though he paid visits after she was born to see if
she was growing well, if she was healthy. Robert Labeau paying him with a pig after she had a
bad bout of strep throat when she was three… Jeremy’s head was misshapen. The proportions
weren’t right. Not from a bad birth—that went well—but from an accident as a toddler, a fall
down the stairs. He wasn’t retarded. He just looked it when you saw his profile. Only his eyes
bright below his high forehead, and with long hair, if he let his hair grow—you wouldn’t notice
his deformity. And he was good with numbers, from an early age. In fact that was what he was
doing when he fell down the stairs. He was counting them, counting the steps as he went down.
Jeremy heard the numbers in the music playing from Sissy’s window. He would touch his
fingers as he hid behind Sissy’s house. Starting over when the music—the count of it—started
over.
And Bethany knew. She knew he followed her. She liked how he kept it a secret. Her
visits to Sissy. What he knew she grew in her garden. He knew about the bible. Sissy’s bible—
the compartment in it. You see that’s how Bethany was introduced to it—her first time. How
she got introduced to marijuana. That summer after she turned thirteen. The summer she began
to bleed.
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“Well, I figures you old enough… it’ll help. Help with the pain—the cramps. It’s
always helped me—he, he!”
Sissy Walker opening the bible—a family bible given to her at her wedding, her wedding
to Wishbone. Showing Bethany the hole in it. Jeremy peeking around the corner of the porch—
watching. He saw the hole in the bible. The paper with words on it cut out, rolled into joints,
almost as many as in a pack of cigarettes. That’s what was in the hole. What was hidden in the
bible. The hole perfect—its sides symmetrical—the edges where the paper was cut, the hole
deep, un-jagged, smooth.
“And I know what you’re wonderin’. Why’s I keep it in here. It’s a symbol—
symbolical, I guess. ‘Bout what I choose to be the truth. The architecture on how small worlds
build into bigger worlds. Somethin’ you’ll come to know when you’s get older. What you’re
already learnin’ ‘bout with the pain you’re feelin’ now—becomin’ a woman. Because you see I
just told you somethin’ without sayin’ nothing. By giving you this, in how it’s given. What I
hide. What I reveal by showin’ you what I hide. It’s the art—the art of woman. And you’re
becomin’ a woman now so you should learn it. Like the music, the music you’re hearin’ here.
Why you come here to listen. Like cookin’. There’s a recipe. And thing’s gotta be mixed right,
in the right proportions, if it’s goin’ to taste right… If it’s goin’ to have the right taste… And
it’s the same. The same with truth. How you feel somethin’ to be the truth.”
And after that day. The day Bethany got introduced to Sissy Walker’s bible, Jeremy
began to walk with her. Along the dirt road that led from Sissy’s house to her father’s mailbox.
And they had talks about it. Talks about what was in that bible.
“Does your Daddy read it to ya?”
“Read what?”
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“Don’t your Daddy read to ya from the bible. Don’t you go to church?”
“We go on Christmas Eve… and Easter. Daddy makes us go then, but I don’t think my
Momma likes it. She says he does it just so other folks don’t talk.”
Bethany is looking down at her feet. Her bare feet. She didn’t wear shoes on her walks
to Sissy’s house, and the dirt is caked on them. There’s dirt between her toes. Jeremy’s looking
down too, and he’s counting. He’s counting their steps silently as he talks to her.
“My Momma says you got to ask him. You gotta ask Jesus into your heart…”
“My Momma don’t say that.”
“Sometimes when I’m layin’ in bed I listen to it. I listen to my heart. I try to count it.
Count it beating…”
“That’s strange… I could hear it in my ears. I took a few puffs of Sissy’s cigarette and I
could hear it in my ears…”
“Well you’re ‘sposed to ask Jesus in… though I don’t know how he could live in there.
It seems awful small. How do ya suppose he lives in there?”
“Maybe our heart’s bigger than what we think. Maybe it’s a symbol—like Sissy says.”
“I like numbers. They’s symbols I guess. I see numbers everywhere. I hear numbers in
that music you like listenin’ to.”
“Well then maybe it’s like a big number. Small numbers make up big numbers, and
numbers can be really big, but it’s small to say them, to think about them. They seem small, but
they’re big in what they represent… Maybe it’s the same with our hearts. Maybe they seem
small, but they’re big in what they represent. Small worlds makin’ up bigger worlds—like Sissy
says…”
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Jeremy’s eyes still look down. They’re almost to the mailbox. He reaches out. He
reaches out to grab Bethany’s hand. She smiles, and takes it.
“I’d like it if you were in my heart,” he says, almost in a whisper.
“Do you think there’s enough room?”
December 26th, 1947—And this how I learned. Learned of circles and squares. Their
geometric connection. Between the earth and the divine. That gruesome ecstasy of the sensual
world, embodying the wide spectrum of the human experience, that union of polar opposites—
between the Nature that art tries to capture, and the logical science revealing the stable patterns
of God. The archetypal union of the feminine mind with the masculine, and that old, familiar
smile on a man’s face contained in the urge to return to the primordial mother. Sin’s beauty
when it’s not seen as sin—only passion. And I became a student of the earth’s comedy—
teaching it to him—my first lover. How I captured him in the aromas of the smoke he inhaled
with me… On our walks we passed a cornfield, bordered by a creek running dry that summer as
it fed into the Sabine. This where I revealed myself to him—I revealed my breasts, his eyes
lustful, but his hands afraid.
And I began to learn what she was trying to say—Sissy Walker in my visits to her porch,
in the music I listened to there. I understood the threats of my grandmother—her gypsy curse.
For he was a Bloodwood, Jeremy’s uncle—our country doctor’s brother—the father of my uncle.
Their marriage short-lived. This shortly after the summer of my birth in 1923—their liaison, a
marriage annulled in death—Bridgette’s, my grandmother’s second marriage. Warren
Bloodwood (the brother—Jeremy’s uncle) dying from cancer of the mouth, from the chew ever
present under his lip—at least that’s the story told. But he didn’t die before birthing a son—my
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uncle (though slightly younger than me) a son my grandmother would live with later, in old age,
in New Orleans after the war. And the story of what happened there—in the 9th Ward. That
story coming later, the story of my husband’s death, and my remarriage—to him. To a guitar
player and a singer of songs. The Blues his guitar strings, his voice played—reminding me of
that summer, and those walks from Sissy’s porch. The music from that kitchen window fading
with the steps that boy Jeremy Bloodwood counted.
And this is what I learned. What I learned from him—my first lover. In his absorption.
His fascination with numbers and what they represented. I learned of control and its tragic birth.
How it’s maintained in love. For that is a man’s weakness—his self-absorption. How when you
give it attention you feed his self-love. This what he really wants from you. That attention that
makes him feel good, passionate, what gives him his confidence. And how when you take it
away it’s like the withdrawal of a drug. He becomes sick with loneliness, starving for the love
and attention of your sex. The art in how this is measured without him realizing you’re making
this measurement. Dosing him as it were. Giving him what he needs and then taking it away.
All he realizing is he wants you without knowing why. Only knowing when he has your
attention his life has meaning, and when you take it away his food loses its taste… It’s the secret
of a woman’s power. How our eyes falling on a man gives him his existence. How our looking
away causes him to disappear. For we are the meaning in his mirror…
“You stay away from that boy! That Bloodwood! You hear me!”
Her curses and shouts heard from out that window. The same window from which she
saw a rooster crowing from atop the back of a cow the day of her granddaughter’s birth.
Bethany’s grandmother—cursing—once she came to find out about Bethany’s walks from
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Sissy’s porch. The meetings she had in a cornfield between there and her father’s mailbox, and a
boy, a Bloodwood, chasing her along a dry creek bed with his pecker out.
And you must see her—Bridgette—Bethany’s grandmother. Nigh into her fifties now.
Her son, William, a pre-adolescent—not quite old enough to understand Bethany’s misdoings
yet. No father to teach him of that. Warren Bloodwood frozen in the ground going on more than
ten years now. The marriage, Bridgette and Warren’s marriage, arranged by shotguns. Bridgette
already showing when they tied the knot—why they tied the knot. Bridgette fooled into thinking
she was menopausal, but she was not. Fooled into thinking letting a man back into her bed
would do no harm, but she was wrong. And she shows her age now. The age of a grandmother
trying to be a mother again. There’s fear in her voice now.
“Do you see me? Do you hear? Ain’t no good will come out of you cavortin’ with a
Bloodwood. He may be boy now—a boy you got wrapped around your little finger. But he’ll
grow to be a man, and you’ll see what I’m sayin’… Look at me! Stayin’ in your father’s cabin
because I ain’t got nowhere’s else to go. Raisin’ a son of a man who’s dead. A son he didn’t
want… Time’s hard on woman raisin’ children all by herself. And you need’s to know ‘bout
that man. That Bloodwood... You’re learnin’ ‘bout a woman’s power now—listenin’ to that
Sissy and that damn music she likes to play—rememberin’ her man. And you oughta know—
she ain’t doin’ you no good. I know all about her, ‘bout her and that garden… You’re learnin’
‘bout a woman’s power, but you needs to know ‘bout a woman’s weakness—and it’s time, child.
Time ain’t no good to a woman… Look at me! Look at my skin, my face, my body! Look how
it sags! My eyes ain’t allurin’ no more, and with eye shadow I just look like what I am—an old
whore… I’m ashamed, ashamed to look at myself now. I’m ashamed of mirrors. My breasts
once towers of wisdom, once enticing to a man, once granting me favors—now just useless
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udders of an old woman and her sour milk. You think a woman ages nice—like wine? Well,
they don’t. But that boy… that boy might be naïve to your charms now, but he’ll age, and time’s
fond to a man… That damn Bloodwood! He knew! He knew he looked good for forty, and even
with that chew, that tobacco spit that disgusted me—he was experienced. He knew what made
me wet… And that’s a woman’s weakness—a man’s confidence that she ain’t given him. We
hate it, but we’re attracted to it. I remember how he was—why I let him in my bed. He was
impervious to my threats, the fears I tried to plant in him, and the monsters I tried to manifest in
his mind were just toys to him. Toys for him to play with, to swallow. I was a toy to him… He
wasn’t afraid of me, and that’s what you need to be afraid of—a man that ain’t afraid of a woman
and what she can do with her words, her looks… You need to know they win. They win every
time. Because time’s on their side. Because the moon don’t give no light in the darkness ‘cept
the reflected fire of the sun. And the mirror ain’t no good to a woman with a clock tickin’… A
grown man don’t need no woman in his mirror. He laughs at mirrors. He laughs at our
reflections thrown over his shoulder. He forgets our names once he’s done with us. And he
knows our smells—our stank. The illusions we try to put in the mirrors he laughs at. A man that
knows a thing or two knows what time does to us. And he laughs! He laughs at us! You oughta
know—you oughta know this. Because you’re young now, but time will do it to you too. We
might be the mothers, the mothers to the earth, but a man is father to time…”
And her father, Bethany’s father—Robert Labeau—had a story too. He had a story to tell
his daughter once he found out about her running from a boy in the dry creek bed just down from
his mailbox. A story of a river, and what it means to get to the other side—the price of it. The
price of returning, wanting to return. With the knowledge gained from it.
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He told it standing at the water pump. The well he had dug before her birth. On ground
that had grown sour. Too many minerals in the water—calcium deposits—hard water, not good
for pipes. Soap that wouldn’t lather when they tried to take baths, and Valerie complained about
her hair.
“You know I knew him—Warren Bloodwood. I knew his uncle, that boy you’ve be
seeing. I knew him before he married your grandmother. Your mother hastening the marriage
because she didn’t want folks to talk. There were enough stories goin’ around about your
grandmother comin’ back here, stayin’ with us, for your mother to take on more rumors about
her family…”
“Was he like him? Like his doctor brother? I know his father is nice. You told me how
he helped my sore throat when I was little. I remember the pig you gave him. And he’s nice—
the boy’s nice. I like the attention he gives me. I didn’t ask him to follow me. We just take
walks, Daddy…”
“Is that all you do? Take walks?”
“He’s just a boy, Daddy! He’s nice to me…”
“And you’re just tryin’ to be nice to him—is that it?”
“Yes…”
Bethany can’t look her father in the eye. She can’t. She doesn’t know how to talk to a
man about boys. She doesn’t have the words yet. The eyes that can look at a man, her father,
and say them.
“Well he did have the mouth cancer. That’s true. But that ain’t how he died. It wasn’t
the chewing tobacco that kilt ‘em…”
“What happened, Daddy?”
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The bucket her father’s drawing water in is almost full. He stands up straight from the
pump and wipes his hands on his overalls. And he nods his head to the pig sty, to the trough by
the fence behind his daughter.
“You carry this bucket over there and I’ll tell ya… You’ve been visitin’ Sissy Walker’s
place—haven’t ya?”
“Yes, Father.”
He walks behind her. Her body strained to the right side as she tries to carry the bucket
without the water slopping out. And though she doesn’t realize she’s doing it, she’s counting the
steps she takes to the fence. She’s counting with her tongue between her teeth. Her face tensed
and mouth clenched with the weight of the bucket.
“Well, just like Sissy, your grandmother’s got a history with men. A history of some bad
choices… You need to find you a hard workin’ man—a simple man. And you won’t have the
problems your grandmother’s had—what Sissy had with that man—that Wishbone Walker…
You see, your grandmother ain’t really mad at you ‘bout a Bloodwood—she’s mad ‘bout what
Sissy’s man did to ‘em. What Wishbone done to Warren Bloodwood before he disappeared…”
They’re to the pigs now. Bethany strains as she lifts the bucket over the fence to pour it
in the trough. And you hear the loud snorts as the pigs come running over. Robert watching,
leaning his elbow on one of the fence posts as the pigs come over to drink.
“Did Sissy do somethin’ to ‘em? Did she do somethin’ to her man like folks says?”
“No… it ain’t what she did to Wishbone—though there’s been rumors. It’s what
Wishbone did to Warren Bloodwood once he found out he’d been visitin’ Sissy while he was
away. Playin’ his guitar at juke joints across the county… Warren was always kinda a ladies
man. And Wishbone had a reputation for it too. Which is I guess why he didn’t like another
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man tip-toeing in his garden… And it was your grandmother that told him. She told Wishbone.
She was pregnant at the time, and you’d just been born. I ‘spose Warren just wanted a little a
variety with your grandmother bein’ pregnant and all, and I ‘spose he got it… No, no
Bloodwood died from cancer. Though that’s the story told now. He died from Wishbone’s
knife. He bled to death because he’d been fixed. Kinda like how we fix these pigs to keep’em
from breedin’… Do you understand now?”
“I think so…” Bethany watching the pigs now, letting what her father’s telling her
digest. The pigs fighting over slop in the other trough. The trough next to where she poured the
hard well water. Their snorting loud as the fight over the slop.
“I ain’t sayin’ that Jeremy Bloodwood’s a bad boy. He might be simple enough. Simple
enough for a boy. But you go mixin’ in with him and that Sissy Walker you might just stir up
trouble. A troubled past that you wish you didn’t know ‘bout.”
“What happened to Wishbone? What happened to Sissy’s man—after?”
Robert’s eyes look over the pigs now. Like he’s trying see something far away.
Something off his land. But then he looks down at his daughter who’s looking up at him,
questioning.
“Who knows… What does Sissy say? I ‘spose that’s her secret. And if you keep goin’
over there. If you keep takin’ walks with that boy—you might just find out… I ain’t tryin’ to
tell you this to make you wise, darlin’. God knows I ain’t tryin’ to do that. You get wise and it
just makes you a durn fool—a fool in God’s eyes… Kinda like that river over yonder—the
Sabine. On the other side is Louisiana. But that’s not all that’s on the other side. Some men try
to swim it. Try to swim to the other side. Because they think there’s wisdom there. There’s
wisdom and knowledge if you go across. But bein’ wise to things ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
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Sometimes you just find out you’re a durn fool. You leave your family, your friends—to get to
the other side. And then what you find is you’re all alone. You know what you know—sure—
just like you know now about Bloodwood. You know a little bit more now than what you knew
then. About Sissy and Wishbone, about your grandmother and your little Uncle William. But
what does it get ya? How do you feel now? How do you feel ‘bout that boy, Jeremy, now?”
“I don’t know… I thought I knew, but now I don’t.”
“That’s what I mean, darlin’. Some wisdom, some knowledge, just leaves you feelin’
more foolish than what ya begin with. Kinda like crossin’ that river—to get to the other side.
You just find yourself alone. And the current’s too strong. It’s too strong to take you back to
where you started… That’s why it’s sometimes better to wait. You wait on them boys. You’ll
learn soon enough, and I bet you’ll wish you hadn’t. You’ll see how bein’ wise to things just
makes you a fool, a durn fool that’s responsible now for what you know. And responsibility’s a
heavy load… Come on. We need to fill that bucket again. Them pigs are thirsty…”
January 6th, 1948—The devil is in the details. That’s where you find it—wisdom. What
you read in what isn’t written on faces. That mysterious handwriting on walls. An ancient
language. Deciphered not by keys, but by a heart’s knowledge. A heart in darkness which
responds to this language. Collective memories, seen in dreams, heard in codes—music… And
as soon as you know—you don’t. As soon as you have an answer—another question. The
question of where the answer came from. For as soon as you know you have to ask how you
know. The answer to this what makes wise men fools, following stars in the East, asking dumb
questions of shepherds… The devil is in the details, enriching layers. The surface reality
drowning you in hints of what’s below. Your pride in not being foolish what makes you
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foolishly go deeper—to frozen cores. The fat of what you’ve eaten making you better to eat.
The game what it always was. The game up when you acknowledge it. The winner the next
loser. Because to win you must show your cards, and acknowledge what you’re trying to win.
And unless you have something else up your sleeve, what you have to reveal is now your
weakness in the next deal. The deal always continuing, and once you put in your first bet you
can’t stop playing. The compulsion of evil. You must play to win at all costs now, and now you
must entice others to play. Souls the bargaining chips. And why, why you know you are a fool
now the nagging knowledge that you should have never played, never played this game of tictac-toe. You should’ve stuck to chess, and made peace with your check-mate… I knew now.
And I thought this gave me power. What I knew about others what I now knew about myself.
And I fell in love with it. It became my lover—my dark lover. What I talked to in my bed when
I searched for sleep. What I awoke to each morning as my reality. The tests I made others pass
that I had passed. To become what I am now—a woman knowing a man—this knowledge not
our union, but a separateness. I saw him and he saw me, and what we saw made us alone.
Nothing changing. The curse of a fool this finality—the final knowledge of knowing what you
are with no one to share it with you can trust…
And how it ended was the mother. Jeremy Bloodwood’s mother ended it. How she
found out about their rendezvous in the cornfield, their chasings of each other along the dry
creek bed that fed into the Sabine, simple enough. It was make-up. Make-up on Jeremy’s face,
un-washed away by Bethany’s coy kisses. That’s what ended it. Her first love—the first lover
she revealed her breasts too. Her first sight of a boy’s erection. And it’s fitting it ended in
jealousy. A woman’s jealousy. A mother’s jealousy. A mother’s protection. A mother’s fear.
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Archetypal remnants of how the earth’s knowledge is a protector. And a destroyer when
crossed. How it ends in the talk she had with her father, feeding the pigs… He came home with
make-up on his face. Mascara on his eye-lashes. Rouge on his cheeks. Evidence of a girl’s
game to a boy’s willingness, his willingness to emasculate his sex in his desire for sex.
It was the summer, 1936. Bethany was thirteen, beginning her period. It was the
summer she learned about Bloodwood, her grandmother’s second husband and some of the
reasons why she woke up every morning cursing, and the story of Wishbone and Sissy Walker—
their past in the summer she was born. It was the summer she first started smoking weed,
discovering the hole in Sissy’s bible. And she knew now. She knew more now than what she
knew before. And so started the game she’d be playing the rest of her life. That game we all
play to out chase our foolishness. A game she grew good at, no longer an amateur by the time
she met him—David Threnody—for she had ten more years to learn of it. Their meeting, and
the deaths surrounding it, destined to happen in the spring of 1946, shortly after his first
recordings, those first recordings we have of him at the age of twenty-seven—his first album
playing the Blues. That voice I heard over sixty years later, waiting at a crossroads for a train, a
crossroads in the American Bottom listening to KDHX community radio, which led me to write
this. This account of his life. What I’ve shared so far just some of the details, the first details,
the first sketches of his wife. What’s drawn here just a faint showing, vague revelations into a
woman’s strength, and her weakness. Time being the only thing that tells, hinted in her as a
muse of it—a hint of a man’s strength, and his weakness. And that legacy. The legacy of a fool.
The legacy of gaining wisdom. For all that you are, all that you have made—becomes your
legacy—the world you leave behind… It becomes all that’s left in what slips away.
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17
Wives are leavin’ their husbands. They’re beginning to roam.
They leave the party, and they never get home…
--Bob Dylan
The closures of some things just aren’t meaningful. You want them to be. You imagine
how you want it to be. You romanticize. But that’s not how it happens. Warren Bloodwood’s
sister-in-law, Jeremy’s mother, maybe wasn’t acting out of fear of Bethany. Her playful practice
of putting make-up on a boy. She just knew about Sissy Walker and Wishbone—what happened
the summer Bethany was born. And she didn’t want her boy associating with it.
She was a Southern Baptist, and raised her boy that way. Her husband, the country
doctor for black folks in their parts, passive to her religious domination. Quietly maintaining his
scientific practice. Maybe instilling in his son the love of numbers and what they represented.
But Jeremy’s mother was studious as well—severe. Jeremy not touching another girl ‘til
practically in his mid-twenties, after graduating the seminary his mother prepared him for,
marrying a girl from his church—a girl that probably wouldn’t have minded putting make-up on
him at the experimenting age of thirteen just as Bethany had done, but that we will never know.
Let’s just say he never overcame certain inhibitions, inhibitions that might have found a healthy
outlet if his relations with Bethany had been able to continue to blossom, but that we will never
know either. That’s the problem with closures, especially those romantic in nature.
Psychological manipulations eventually become heart wounds. Wounds never resolved if not
given their proper window for resolution. And boys and girls with their first crushes need the
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right closure, the right fulfillment of the experiment, if they are to grow into men and women,
adults, lacking baggage. Repressed regrets on what ifs. Fantasies that never go away.
But we do have her journal. It’s what gives me her words. A journal Bethany kept where
she speaks of this first love of thirteen, an entry below written when she was eighteen, the winter
of 1941-1942. About the time David Threnody and Johnny Tribout were receiving closure in
Biloxi on their involvement with Nina, the base commander’s daughter, and their time as prison
guards of German POWs before America’s entrance into the war. In fact, she speaks of her
fiancée. Her engagement to a soldier, her first husband, who may very well have been doing his
enlistment in Biloxi at about the same time David and Johnny were there, possibly even hearing
the rumors that abounded about them then—their fifteen minutes of fame, at least for people that
read police blotters in Biloxi at that time. And I have it here, saved in Threnody family
records—the journal Bethany Labeau kept. Her entry that winter:
February 13th, 1942—I know what tomorrow is, and I wish there was snow. I wish it
would snow here. I’ve never seen it. I’ve seen it only in pictures in books, in black and white.
I’ve never seen it with my own eyes. Never felt it in my hands. I wonder if I would like it, or
just feel that it is cold… I’m eighteen now, and engaged to be married. And just like the snow, I
wonder if I will like it. What I will feel with this man I will marry. We’ve kissed, sitting on the
swing of my father’s porch, but nothing more. And now he’s gone away, going to a war across
the sea, and I don’t even know if I will ever see him again. If he will receive my letters, and
write back.
I can say it here because no one will read it but me. Thoughts I’ve had after smoking—
musings… I’ve kissed other boys. I’ve felt their hands on me, and honestly I can’t say his
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touch, my future husband’s touch, was any different from them, that I felt something unique
touching his lips with mine, that it was special somehow—meant to be… It reminds me of the
first boy I let touch me, when I was thirteen and just becoming a woman. How it ended abruptly.
His mother forbidding us to see each other, like I was bad somehow, bad for him. I thought
quitting then, quitting my visits to Sissy Walker then—opening her bible. But I just couldn’t see
how I was bad for it, that it was bad, because it doesn’t feel bad and I don’t have to wonder what
it’s like, like the snow—because I know. I know I’m not bad. That’s the strange thing about
people’s expectations though I guess. You try to be good when they expect you to be bad, and
so you’re bad. You try to be good, but it gets you nowhere with these expectations and you’re
human and give in. You give into the expectations in your weak moments, and I don’t think
being weak, especially when people are forcing your hand and enabling it, makes you bad. But
then when you’re bad people remember it, further enabling their expectations even when you try
to change, when you want to change and become a better person.
It’s the same with people’s expectations on how things end too. Their religion tells them
how it’s going to end, what happens after you die, and people try to live up to these expectations,
some of them fantastic and in no way compatible with a normal life. At least life here as we
know it. Certain facts about how people are and what they do—good and bad. I suppose they
just want some sort of meaning, meaning to the end, the end of their lives, even if it means living
a life that’s hypocrisy because they have these expectations on how it’s going to end, in the
meaning after… But I don’t think there is. I don’t think there’s any meaning in how things end.
I learned that with that boy, that first boy I loved, who touched me and I touched him. I mean it
ended so abruptly, without us being able to say goodbye to each other, at least in a proper way.
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A way that our hearts could go away from it and mend right. I couldn’t say the things I wanted
to say to him, and he couldn’t say what was on his heart.
Our last meeting was in the rain. That creek bed running along a cornfield where we
chased each other swollen with water. I thought the rain would just wash off the make-up I put
on him, but it just smeared, and his mother saw it. She came to my father’s door with him, not
allowing him to wipe it off so she could show it to my father. So she could rebuke my mother
for her ungodliness, her associations with that old mid-wife presiding over my birth, her shoddy
church attendance. I remember I could only catch glimpses of him peeking around my father.
How his face was downcast and ashamed, and how I couldn’t tell if he was crying because it was
still raining. I couldn’t tell his tears from the raindrops…. I never got to say goodbye to him,
never got to say why I did it, why I showed him what I did. That last playful pat I gave to the
erection he had when I showed him my breasts, and nothing more. A tease for both of us, in
what we expected, what we hoped to find in each other… There was no closure, and I don’t
think there ever is. Not in the way we imagine it to be, and it hurts. It hurts not to have that, and
be left with what you have—meaningless gestures, disconnected, nothing profound in the last
breath of lovers, or anyone for that matter. Sometimes there’s nothing good in it at all, just
malice. And like the snow I imagine, the snow I’ve never seen or felt, I will never know if it’s
more than that, more than just cold…
Once you stand up for something you must stand your ground. You can’t back down.
People won’t let you, and more importantly, you won’t let you. It’s not a choice you can put on
hold. Not if you want to be honest with yourself. And this has meaning, even when you don’t
see it, even when you try to deny it. It’s not all good—your life, your character—the injustices
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you see every day, in the ever present, and everything ends badly. Otherwise it doesn’t end.
And that’s where the meaning is. Not in some reflection of the past, some memory. Because
how do your memories come to you? What triggers it—some scene from the past? There’s a
relation to relationships, and one moment you judge it good, beautiful, and in another moment—
bad, something ugly and heavy on your heart. But you have to stand your ground, not on some
issue, some person—a relationship you may have had with them—you must stand your ground
in how you relate to it now, and if there’s any stability in this there has to be no judgment. You
must let the reflections pass like in a dream you’re having while awake. Like wind playing in
your hair. Sand through your fingers. Uncontained and uncontrollable water—beating upon
rocks. For the ground you stand on is not ground—it’s ice—cleansing winter water frozen in
suspension. And as soon as you’re sure of your footing, be ready to slip. Cracks in the layers
appearing the heavier you feel. But that’s the price for standing up for something, and if you
don’t—you’ll fall for anything.
Bethany was eighteen years old now. Eighteen when she wrote these things in her
journal on the first boy that touched her. A good age to be. An age when the meanings of a
child disappear and a sense of hypocrisy is heightened. Hypocrisy that over time you make
peace with. And you find meaning again in your defense of this peace. How it was brought
about from experiences where it was lost and then found again. Age and time and a few hard
knocks, a few hard falls, teaching you what you need to do to get back up again. And you learn a
thing or two about yourself in the process. You make friends with yourself, even after many bad
arguments. And maybe you even learn to remember that trick—the trick not to judge—yourself
or anything, anybody. Because yesterday was a different story and tomorrow is a new chapter.
The same themes threaded through all of it, giving it continuity, giving you your character. And
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hopefully, in the end, when the last chance at judgment passes you by—it’s a good story—your
life is a good story to tell.
Bethany was learning to be Bethany. To be what she was, is, and will be in every
moment, in every effort at love, in tides of sadness, in the drinking of wine and in the breaking of
bread in the presence of friends and unbeknownst betrayers. She was learning to pick her battles,
learning the burn in the heat of the moment, and the frustrating impatience of cooling off periods.
She had felt that restless, hungry feeling that does nobody no good. She knew what it felt to be
satiated and bored. And that’s why we need to tell it next—the mad love affair she had in the
spring of 1942, her fiancée off to war—and let the story be the judge, of that ground where she
took her stand, the thin ice of contrary lovers and how they find each other. What, in the end,
they find in themselves to be, and seemingly without choice—what they become, in the spring
thaw.
There’s no such thing as a good drug-dealer, or so they say. It’s easy to forget this
though when one becomes a friend—a lover. It’s actually quite hard to delineate—the good
things a bad person does, the bad things a good person does. It’s hard to draw the line of who to
accept as good in your life and who’s bad. For many good people are bad for you, and someone
you term as bad can bring good things in your life, in the very fact you don’t judge them as good
or bad—when you love them anyway. Jeremy’s mother—being a staunch Southern Baptist—
wasn’t good for him. She wasn’t a good mother. Though she gave to the church and performed
charitable acts. For it’s not the acts themselves that make you feel someone is good. Sometimes
actions don’t speak louder than words. Sometimes you sense strings attached, false motives—
that idea of meaning in closure already talked about. Jeremy always felt like he had to win his
mother’s love, and he winced at her harshness every time she was severe in judging him in the
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light of her gospel. He never felt good enough, and feeling good goes a long way in your
judgment of what is good. If you do something good because you expect good things in return it
sort of takes the good out of it. That’s why there’s a stigma with church people, some of the
show of them at least. You get a sense of the disingenuous that disappears when someone people
think is bad does a good turn. It’s what you feel when a person feeds you, for a soup kitchen of
the Salvation Army can make you feel shameful, but when a drug addict or gang member takes
you in and feeds and clothes you the perspective becomes slanted. For some reason you trust it
more—it feels right—and you’re less likely to question motives, especially if they ask for
nothing in return, not even the granting of small favors, when all they want is your friendship.
When a Christian does something for you you wonder if they’re doing it just to be Christian, but
when a bum off the street shares his bottle with you you’ve found a brother. And this is
strange—that feeling of kinship. We feel more akin to a wrong-doer than a so-called do-right.
Our compulsion is to hang out in the tents of the wicked rather than be doorkeepers into God’s
temple. We feel honest when others would say we are wrong, and doubts of ourselves only
appear when someone slaps us on the back for our attempts at a good deed.
Maybe it’s trick—I don’t know. How evil seems honest, and trying to be good just
makes you feel like a liar. Maybe you just need to take those first few steps in the right direction
to see beyond this illusion, an illusion that seems real in our emotional response to this world and
how it seems to work—the natural laws of it. But what really is the illusion? Fire is real. And
do you burn when you become as the fire—the laws that govern it—doing as it wants? Does a
fire know that it’s burning? Or does only what it burns know that? Bethany felt burned in how
her relationship with Jeremy Bloodwood ended. His mother making her feel like she should feel
bad about herself. That judgment leading to another judgment of what judgment brings.
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Because of how the self-righteous make others feel, and all that they do in the name of charity
becomes as filthy rags—what they really clothe the subjects of their charity with in their
condescending behavior, in their point of view blatantly apparent to their charitable subjects.
And I’m not saying give your brother a bottle, but if someone is really your brother, your sister,
what you give them was never really yours to give, and this is the point of view you should have
so as not to shame your brother, your sister. Maybe that’s why the wicked win, why they win so
often in the winning of hearts and minds. Why the righteous lose because of their righteousness.
For the righteous are judged by faith, a faith not judged by the illusions very real in this world—
the clothing you give off your back, the soup spoon-fed to the sick, your attention to the lonely
and downtrodden. Your faith is your faith, and for it not to be judged by other men by the
standards of this world, your faith should not be in what you do in this world—that is material,
bad faith—your faith should inspire faith, the good faith of truly making others feel loved. These
are the works you do that are not dead. And if you don’t do that, the drug dealer will win over
the pastor of a church every time.
Denny was a drug dealer, but he was an all-around good guy. He made others laugh. He
made his customers feel special, not guilty for what they wanted of him. He made Bethany feel
special, and it’s funny how they met, how he came to town, for it was a Bloodwood again. Not
Jeremy—that part of her life was over even if she didn’t feel like she got the closure she wanted.
It was William, her uncle—Bridgette’s son, her grandmother’s son. And it all started with Sissy
Walker’s bible—the weed she hid in it.
A woman gains control when she gets a rise out of a man, and her wrath is incurred when
this is scorned. Better to play along, play along with this game—aware of it—for the outcome is
always worth it. The outcome is that little death, that "la petite mort", which is the release, that
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spiritual release from the game, and all malice in the players of it. A good player knows you
don’t lose control when you relinquish it, and it’s fun—the objective—the whole point of the
game. For to play, to have others play with you, you must be gracious, good-natured. What you
lose called giving, so that you may receive what’s lost only in name. Denny was a player—a
natural. A lucky beginner in his initiation. The first time you play always an invitation, and you
have to be open to see it. You have to be open to a woman. Sincere in your words. For you will
never match a woman when it comes to words anyway. They know all their meanings, and how
small they are. If you asked Denny, he wouldn’t be able to tell how he acquired this wisdom, the
wisdom to never uproar a woman, the useless and damaging drama that unfolds if you do. He
was just lucky in his initiation (maybe a woman mothered him), and after the initiation
experience speaks for itself. He never stalked, but soon he was stalked—his charming smile the
irritating obsession of a woman trying to upset it. He came to know how a woman is protected
from what she can do, but how a man doing it would be perceived as a threat to chivalry, and in
this superficial perception are all the uninvited—those lonely men dumbfounded by the game
they never learned how to play. Frustrated by how easy it is if you only know it, and act.
And Denny should have been an actor. He performed his roles effortlessly. This
achieved without trying too hard to fake it. All great actors are born liars, but you don’t call
them this. Instead you admire their art in a world of make-believe, their methods to the madness,
and after all—that’s what the game is. Never a dull moment to the veterans of it. And if there
ever was a how-to manual for it, in spirit it would be called the fun literature of fools. Unrhymed
to reason. The free verse of a playful poetry—the language of ladies, and their leading men.
And so in their story, the story of their love affair—Bethany and Denny—I must tell the
beginning and the end. The in between only a mystery to those never called to play in this mad
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game called love, if it ever existed only lovers on the stage know, in how heartbreak is so easily
forgotten in what waits in the wings of the closing curtains. And so that will be their story—
their beginning and their end, for that is how a love story is told best, if there ever is to be poetry.
Bethany a bit of a poet, in fact why she went to New Orleans, meeting David Threnody there in
the late summer of 1945, was to sing—a blues singer in her own right. The first hints of it in her
voice maybe coming from her affair with Denny in the spring of 1942, when she was just
eighteen. The following from her journal, a poem written in the month of April, apparently soon
after they first met—Denny doing a bit of business in Sissy Walker’s garden…
April 2nd, 1942—
What does it mean when he smiles?
Returned without wrath of my considerate aggression
Quelled in teeth that don’t bite, but bared—nude statues frozenly etched
by peaceful canine inventors in Egyptian pyramids honoring cats
I see them as soft-stemmed white roses, smelling of my candy slavery taste
to chocolate skin and the green bud of a drug
Lips not red to the red of blood, sanguinity in its fullness
The turned up cheeks of angry clowns in remonstrance
to the weep and laughter of my own sins, all told in the carnival funhouse
of mirrored fools at play in the Lord’s prayer
My worshipper in the smile I’ve given him as temptation
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The notice of my own flower opening to his hard mystery
as his sun-seed feeds my darkness, rooted in earth and moon sand
And so players we be that we may be
staged in light and bedazzled by our reflexive victories in lines
The question of windowed eyes answering in the youth of an ardent mistake…
And the beginning began with an end. The beginning of Bethany and Denny’s love
affair—short-lived in the spring of 1942. The end usually where something else starts. The
differentiation of this depending on your point of view. Your relation to the event in question. A
judgment—a measure—is made. And the outcome depends on if you’re making the judgment or
the subject being judged. The possibilities of any determination on this indecipherable—infinite.
There are infinite measures and in infinitesimal number of measurers. It’s someone looking at
you and someone looking at them looking at you, and on and on like this. The fallacy of all
subjective judgments. Unless you get to some sort of objective, an objective viewpoint—a being
all-knowing, a being by which all other things are measured—a mirror without a mirror, outside
of time, in a time before time, and after it. And maybe, just maybe—this memory is in all of us.
We are all in part not set apart. The mitotic myopia we see as a reality our miserable illusion,
dispersing shattered illusions within illusions, and all our epistemologies without purpose,
making us seem all alone, sometimes a comfort when we don’t want to be like someone else,
sometimes the cause of our despair when we do. And we build walls not knowing we are all
walls, bricks when we could be cornerstones misquoting good fences make good neighbors. Our
boundaries on what’s important to us drawn, torn down, and drawn again as we play the rock of
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Sisyphus in time eternal. Who we invite into our lives merely defining all we have un-invited.
Smug in how we think this gives us our safety, our identity, until we too must stand outside
imagined pearly gates. Hell is only our boundaries. Heaven our need for no defense. All of us
together when we sleep, and we only think we are apart when we think we wake up. When we
think we are something by our negations of the nothing that makes us everything—the curse of
our Cartesian schemes.
When Bethany woke up one April morning in 1942 she didn’t have a lover, but when she
went to bed that night she did by denying another. And this is the strange story of life. The
paradox of love in our attempts to define it—our definitions of it the very thing that makes us
know it only in part. And that’s what happened in Sissy Walker’s garden on a fine day in April,
its beginning when she met Denny for the first time and finally got the closure she needed on her
first love with Jeremy Bloodwood. For they all came together that day only to be torn apart.
And this is how I’d tell it, Bethany’s poem on a man’s smile for the next day already happened,
and the end of one ideal love in every beginning of another…
“Hey, you…”
His first words. His first words to her—Bethany—as she came around back Sissy
Walker’s house, to the garden there. She was looking for Sissy and found her there, holding her
bible. That’s when she saw his smile for the first time, and saw the money in his hand. And
Denny wasn’t just buying a few joints hidden in the stash inside Sissy Walker’s bible. He had
bigger ambitions. Expanding on what grew there in Sissy’s garden in back of her house.
William Bloodwood, his first customer, sharing its whereabouts. And that’s what Bethany
happened to intrude on—a business transaction. Denny new in town, a visitor to Sabine County,
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crossing the river from Louisiana—where he came from, but not where he was from. His first
appearance witnessed by the men resting on the front porch of the general store in Hemphill, his
suitcase in hand, asking about work in the area. But work wasn’t what he was really looking for.
It was customers for what he had in his suitcase—a mix of pills and tinctures of laudanum, and
of course—marijuana.
“What’s goin’ on, Sissy?”
“Well, this boy here’s tryin’ to buy what I grow in this garden—think I should let’m?”
“Depends on if he’s trustworthy or not…”
“That’s hard to tell… He’s got a nice smile though—don’t he?”
And this is what he looked like. A cigarette dangling from his smile. His hat tipped
back. A suit a bit tight around the shoulders. His red silk tie knotted loosely at the collar of a
white shirt, the top button undone. Shiny shoes—pointed. He was leaning against the front
bumper of his car, his plus fours trousers pulled up revealing argyle socks—an old Ford with
running boards, mud on the tires from pulling up to the back of Sissy’s house, the dirt road
leading to it wet from a recent rain. The first impression Bethany had of him an out of work
baseball player from the Negro league. He just looked it to her, not a golfer, for some reason his
voice reminding her of hearing Satchel Paige on her father’s radio.
“Who’s the pretty girl?” he asks, striking a match to light the cigarette dangling from his
smile.
“Oh… she’s a friend a mine. Been a friend since she was a little girl. She visits me from
time to time. To listen to that music you’re hearing from my kitchen window, listen to the birds
a singin’… and she knows what you’re comin’ for too I imagine—he, he!”
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Bethany looks down from his eyes trying not to blush. She looks down at her dress, her
bare feet, wishing she wore something else, something that better revealed her figure. And she’s
trying to look for words, words to say to him defiant of his direct gaze.
May 1st, 1942—But I was at a loss. I was caught in surprise. Not expecting him there—
his smile—the direct look in his eyes that made me go searching in the past. Not to the
immediate past, not to yesterday or the day before that, but years ago. I felt thirteen again. I felt
myself going back to that summer when I first started visiting Sissy, first started listening to her
music, and was introduced to what was in her bible… It all happened so suddenly, but my mind
stretched back—to a bad memory. And it was like the music triggered it—the blues music
coming from Sissy’s kitchen window, and I was caught in its haunting turnarounds. I was caught
in how a bad memory from yesterday makes you go further back, further back in years to other
bad memories. Memories that made me feel naked and ashamed, faltering… And it’s strange
how I felt myself doing it—knowing. How my mind in some sort of bold defense went back to
other bad memories, further back from this hesitance I felt to his direct gaze and smile, making
me think of other eyes, other smiles, like my mind was trying to understand one bad memory by
going before it to understand what led to now—to find some sort of continuity that explained it.
Unhealed wounds… And maybe that’s why, why I knew and then this confirmed in my
periphery—I saw him there and knew, knew he’d been following me like he’d done so many
times before, but never like those walks again from that summer when I was thirteen, those
walks in a cornfield and the dry creek bed on my way back to my father’s mailbox. I saw him—
Jeremy Bloodwood—peeking from around the corner of Sissy’s house. He had followed me
here, and suddenly I remembered his eyes, his hesitant smile when I first revealed my breasts to
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him. This five years ago now, from that end his mother put to us. We’d never walked together
since, but he was there now—in the here and now, witnessing my faltering to this new man’s
direct gaze, his smile. And only after, after this moment that made me remember him, after his
confrontation and ridiculous fight with Denny was I to find out what brought him here again—
following me. And it was William, my uncle, his cousin—Jeremy too learning of the new man
in town after finding out William was a customer of his, selling him things from out his
suitcase…
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“I had to see you…”
“Do you think your mother would agree?”
And he’s come out from hiding now. They all stand in the garden. Denny by his car, but
no longer sitting on his front bumper. Sissy in the middle of what grew there, holding her bible.
And Bethany, turned away from Denny’s gaze, his smile, to look at Jeremy. The way of the
sunlight drawing out his deformity, his disproportional head. He’s not in a suit like Denny. He’s
wearing the clothes of a farmer and a straw hat. A hat he’s taken off, holding it in his hands in
front of him, turning it nervously. The music, Sissy’s music, the only thing breaking the silence
for a moment. Jeremy looks behind him and then turns back, acknowledging it.
“You know I’ve always liked this music. At first I thought I liked it because you liked it,
but now I know, I know why I like it. Better than the hymns my mother makes me sing in
church.”
“I don’t care, Jeremy…”
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“Wait… let me finish—I need to tell you something. Something I should have told you
when we were thirteen, when we took those walks… funny how hard it is to put into words
though my feelings are so sure of it. I guess I just know what’s ugly now, and what’s true. You
were true. What we were was true… and my mother’s wrong, ugly—dead inside—I see that
now. I was a fool… I mean what’s more ugly? A clean house and souls living in it afraid to
make a mess, judging others for making a mess, or a house that may be a little dirty, but people
love each other in it? That’s what I know now, Bethany. How hypocrites live in fear. They’re
afraid to do what they want and then what they want becomes ugly, perverted, quoting scripture
only when it behooves them… I think we’re all really noble inside, born noble creatures, but
then we come along with these—‘thou shalt not do this’, ‘thou shalt not do that’, instead of ‘do
what thou wilt’—and we kill what’s noble inside us, and what we prohibit just becomes what we
want anyway, but now we’re afraid of it, afraid of others doing it, and we clean our houses, our
outside, trying to make them spotless because inside spiritually we’re dead. Our souls are dirty.
And that’s why I like these songs you listen to, better than any prayers or hymns sung in church
because when I hear them I don’t feel dead inside like I do with those prayers said before a meal.
They don’t remind me of lies. They aren’t sinful—they’re true, true about what we are and what
we lose in life. And I lost you because I thought I needed God and now I see how wrong I
was… It’s the people with a little dirt in there house that know how to love, know God better
than anyone talkin’ ‘bout heaven, because they ain’t afraid of the dirt. The dirt don’t mean
nothin’ unless you’re digging it… And I miss you… I miss your dirt.”
“What’s this boy goin’ on about?” Denny drops his cigarette and steps on it with his
pointed shoe, grinding it into the ground.
“You hush now! Let her answer.” Sissy folds her arms, her bible clasped to her breast.
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“Jeremy…”
“This man is bad! He sold somethin’. He sold somethin’ to William. He told me, and I
saw him on it… some people ain’t hypocrites, Bethany, but they ain’t alive neither. They don’t
feel nothin’, neither fear nor good or bad. Maybe they didn’t like people telling them they
couldn’t do this or that, and instead of tryin’ to be phony leastways they just get mean. Mean
and angry ‘bout all the lies. They get so angry and mean they can’t see the truth no more… this
man is bad, Bethany. I don’t want you goin’ near him! He’ll hurt you…”
“Boy you better mind your tongue ‘fore I mind it for you…”
And that’s when Jeremy drops his straw hat and rushes him. He runs through Sissy’s
garden and tackles Denny at the waist, Denny with just enough time to sidestep a bit and grab
Jeremy about the neck as they both go down to the ground.
“You men stop it now! This ain’t the way!” Sissy running for a broom she has by her
back door. She comes back with it and begins beating them with it as they roll around on the
ground.
“Stop it! Just stop it!” Bethany gets in between Sissy with her broom and Jeremy and
Denny on the ground.
Denny is on top of Jeremy now. Landing punches on him, bloodying his nose and lips.
“You just take it! Come on boy! Take it! You asked for it, didn’t ya!”
“Stop! You’re hurting him!” Bethany pulls Denny off.
Denny brushes off her hands and stands up. He picks his hat up and walks back to his car
and sits on the driver’s side running board, dusting it off.
There are tears in Jeremy’s eyes. Tears of rage and shame. He gets up and wipes the
blood from his nose, looking at Bethany, his eyes full of pain.
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“I’m sorry… You’re right—I shouldn’t have come. But I had to tell you, and now I did.
I’ve done that.”
The music is the only thing again breaking the silence. A low moan and then the guitar
on the lower frets, playing in a minor key. Jeremy walks back to where he dropped his hat. He
walks around the garden this time, not through it. He doesn’t look back are turn around again as
he walks away.
October 2nd, 1947—And that was it I guess. Our closure. The closure I sought five years
back when we were both thirteen. I never saw him again after that. He went on to seminary and
married a girl from church, and after that spring with Denny I soon went to New Orleans, with
my grandmother Bridgette and William. They went there to follow their drug habit, which
started with William being a mule for Denny for free junk, shared with Bridgette, and I went
there to sing, and sing I did. Maybe some of it in my voice after—that last sight of Jeremy
walking away, reminding me of those partings we had at my father’s mailbox, when he asked to
hold my hand, asked me to come into his heart, always looking down, smiling shyly, how after
our walks he was always looking down at my bare and dirty feet, with that smile he had… And
maybe it all happened so it would enter into my voice, a voice of past lovers so my future lover
could hear—he would hear me singing as I bathed in a pool of light, a private stage just for him,
as a mirror for him to my past, my birth and baptism. And I learned then, at eighteen from my
first love of thirteen how to love a fiancée at war who would become my husband at twenty, how
to love a man that stole me from this husband because I wanted him to, inviting him in with
song… I learned how a love may seem true and right, but sometimes you must say no to it to be
true and right to yourself. The pain of this—the pain of saying no to a love and at that moment
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no love to replace it, nothing to ease the pain, just memories that put your heart in a vice as you
make your goodbyes to them, your fare-the-wells to a former lover and what you shared with
them, taking only what you learned now being without them and what was shared. And what is
this life when you have to say no—no to love, a past lover, in order to learn to love again? When
sometimes you must start over with only yourself and those memories rather than trying to start
over with them—the hurt, the regret of it? I said goodbye to Jeremy the day I said hello to
Denny, only later to say goodbye to him to say hello to my husband, and then finding my true
husband, the father of my children, wondering if that too would just be a momentary recognition
that would leave me alone again with all the memories of it. So many hellos that only lead to
goodbyes, and children the manifestation of it—the hard evidence of mirrors turned away from,
but not without the remembrances of last glimpses, last reflections of looking at myself, now to
face the world again in a game of hearts hiding the residuals of familiar guests that in the end did
not linger, becoming strangers to me just passing through… And I guess Jeremy was the first to
teach me of two worlds—one world opposite of the other, the strengths in one the weaknesses of
the other. Jeremy taught me the weaknesses of a self-absorbed man, which gave me power in
that world, and then the world of the Bloodwood past, my grandmother’s fears of a woman’s
weakness to time, the details of time’s knowledge, the past never over in what it brings to the
ever-present and our vague future hopes. I saw two worlds in what Denny had to offer me in that
spring of 1942, and in the truth of hypocrites, Jeremy’s mother and the inadequate injustices in
the fears of a mother for her son seduced by the seeming threats of a bad woman—that strange
role a woman is placed in becoming the mother of a son and knowing maybe why he will fall in
love with a woman. And I left the shelter that protects children, the nest of birds unable to fly,
after seeing this conflict in my first love, seeing the conflicted pain of Jeremy in his love for me,
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and I guess I just got tired of anybody tricking me into feeling tricked. For if one world needed
the other for its defense then they weren’t entirely separate worlds. And I decided to take a stand
by not making a stand on any basis that caused these conflicts to arise. I knew guilt, but it was
my guilt. Nobody was going to make me feel it because they thought I was supposed to because
of what they believed. And my faith was in having faith, nothing more… And so I wrote a
poem. On a day in April where I found one lover by denying another. A poem on a smile. And
if I’m a fool so be it. Because I believe if you see a smile you should return it. Even if it’s only
your own in what you see in a mirror and what lasts in recognitions…
“So how ’bout it? Would you like to take a ride?”
And Denny’s smile is returned. Whatever business he had with Sissy Walker could wait,
and Sissy knows this, shaking her head at the whole situation, at Bethany and Jeremy’s fight over
her and what she is about to do, maybe remembering Wishbone and Warren Bloodwood, her
own silly passions and past lovers–an old woman now beyond being sentimental about it, not
wondering what it all meant, but that simply it happened. Just as simply as Jeremy Bloodwood
walking away, to find another partner to hold his hand, maybe, to come into his heart and stay
for a while. She didn’t play mother because she’d never had the role of a mother to Bethany, but
she could imagine what a father would feel. What maybe Robert Labeau would say about the
whole thing. That thing a man realizes when he knows a woman he lusts after is also someone’s
daughter.
“You kids go on now. I’ve had enough stuff goin’ on in my garden for one day–he, he!
Lord knows! Here boy, take this for your ride.” And Sissy opens her bible and tosses him one
from inside.
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Sometimes you think you’re smart. Deceiving someone. At least you think you’re smarter
than the one you deceived because you deceived them. And you pride yourself if they’re dumb to
it. Even if they find out later. But that’s not really intelligence. Deception doesn’t make you
smarter than someone. Even if you think you know something they don’t. You’re deceived by
your own deception. And even if doesn’t happen to you, if you pride yourself in never being
deceived, it still all comes around… Bethany began a deception when she got in Denny’s car.
When she took that ride that began her love affair with him in the spring of 1942. She was
fooling her fiancée. The boy she promised to marry the previous summer before he went off to
his enlistment in Biloxi, the timing of this possibly allowing him to run into David Threnody and
Johnny Tribout and their love entanglements happening at that time. And maybe she was fooling
her own past. Her grandmother Bridgette’s past with the Bloodwood’s and Sissy and Wishbone
Walker, Bridgette’s son William now with a habit passed on to her–pills and laudanum and a
strong love affair with cough syrup–Denny arranging for William to be a mule, making trips
across the Sabine for him in exchange for free junk. Oxycodone his fancy–first synthesized by
the Germans in 1916. The funny thing about it all, Bethany’s fiancée became a bit of a junkie
himself. At about the same time William Bloodwood began his arrangement with Denny and
Bethany got into his car, he was fighting in Greece, and in Thessaly he was wounded in the leg,
which initiated his morphine habit–a habit he brought back state-side and into his marriage with
Bethany.
You see there’s a whole world out there outside your deceptions, your disconnected
heartaches and sentimental self-involved troubles. Pete Southhouse (that was her fiancée’s name)
had seen atrocities you can’t even name or put into words. Massacres of civilians–women and
children–witnessing their mass burials. He’d seen the aftermath of Kalavryta, in which
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Wehrmacht troops carried out the extermination of the entire male population and the subsequent
total destruction of the town. And though his own leg wasn’t amputated, he had the memory of
holding a buddy down while a medic used a knife to saw away what was left after stepping on a
mine, only the leather strap of Pete’s belt for him to bite down on and stifle his screams…
There’s a whole world of invisible wounds out there, what veterans coming home from war are
diagnosed with now, the name we’ve decided to give to it–PTSD–post-traumatic stress disorder,
and if you could see what they have seen your own consuming problems would seem small and
petty in comparison. And maybe even your deceptions would seem trivial.
There’s a whole world out there. But it’s veiled. It’s veiled by you and what you
believe. What you believe as a deception. So let’s talk it. Let’s talk religion. Just one veil that
clothes your identity. But for some it makes up their whole world and how they see it. Just like
the color of your skin makes your world. And I’m white trying to talk about a black musician,
trying to make a story about his life, the woman he married. What I find in common with him
just exposing the differences in what I’m seeking to find. The words I’ve used revealing the
words I haven’t. And what started as a song I heard on KDHX community radio waiting for a
train at a crossroads in the American Bottom has become this—all that I lack, the failures of my
methods. And all my research, what I’ve conveyed from transcripts and journals, interviews of
friends and family that knew David Threnody, that knew Bethany Labeau, the story I’m trying to
create of her before she came to New Orleans and met David over pancakes at the Bluebird Café
after a night of questionable judgment sitting in with him for a few songs in the Quarter—that
world, their world, I’ve tried to make mine, but I can’t. The differences I’ve tried to destroy
existing because I’ve tried to destroy them. There’s a whole world out there, but the truth is no
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further than three feet from your face, what comes into focus for you only what you bring it into
focus with your faith.
So let’s talk it. Let’s talk faith—the Christian faith. How it’s unlimited in its limitations.
Just one way of looking at your world, but in Hemphill, Texas, in the American South of the
1940’s, in the church songs David Threnody grew up with that inspired his take on The Blues,
what I learned about him in his journals and the journals of his mother, the journals of Bethany,
in the conflicts Jeremy Bloodwood had in his love for Bethany Labeau and the Bloodwood past
that creeped into Bethany’s life because of her grandmother, in her associations with Sissy
Walker and her business arrangement with Denny—that’s it, that’s what you have—Christianity
and how their lives were defined by it. For they were believers and non-believers. The
practicing and the un-practiced. There were no Buddhists or Moslems, Hindus or Taoists, and
the atheists and agnostics living in that time and place were defined on their stance to
Christianity. And the world of you and their whole world was permeated with this. The
deceptions of people that could be termed as bad by these standards, but still knew of honor,
integrity and love—like Denny. The dishonesty of people termed as good that professed a faith,
but their hearts uncharitable, judging, in fear of everything different to them—like Jeremy’s
mother’s dislike of Bethany and the love she and her son were trying to learn about. And what is
this world? Is it a world unseen with a battle being waged—all of us veterans? All of us
suffering from the disorder of it? For the preacher Jeremy’s mother listened to spoke of a
deceptive spirit, a spirit of a man of sin denying the flesh of the son of man. How those that
didn’t believe were deceiving themselves and the tools of a deception, the world and the
atrocities Pete Southhouse was witnessing at that time the work of a Devil whose trick was to
make you believe he didn’t exist. That those trying to live good lives but that didn’t believe in
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this still had hell to look forward to. That a story was unfolding as told in the Bible, and not the
bible Sissy Walker had and what was hidden in it. And what was true? Who do you judge as a
friend? As an enemy? Maybe I’ll let Valerie tell it—Bethany’s mother. You already know how
she had Bethany baptized, which perhaps is a bias to her point of view, but point of views is all
we have in this story—this story I’m trying to tell. And all you can do is whittle it down. Focus
on the immediate facts. So here’s a conversation they had—Valerie and Bethany—this after
Bethany got into that car with Denny, which maybe parallels that ride David Threnody took in
Mississippi a few years earlier in 1937. Maybe they both had to take that ride in order to meet.
“Do you love him?”
“I don’t know… He makes me laugh.”
They’re sitting over coffee. This on the morning she walks home alone from Sissy’s
house, where Denny is staying as part of his business arrangement, after the ride she took with
him, over to Louisiana, to Lake Charles and Holly Beach, where they walk in the sand and watch
the moon rise over the Gulf. Valerie has a pot of gumbo simmering. She started it the night
before, started the roux, letting it thicken as she waited on her daughter, as she cut and diced the
other ingredients.
“Well… laughter goes a long way.” Valerie holds her cup of chicory coffee in both
hands, steam rising from it. She looks into her daughter’s eyes, remembering the look she sees
in them, a look she’s had the morning after making love—a lidded expression, a noncommittal
defiance in the contentment there, hiding the glow. “You know I should probably tell you now
why. Why Jeremy Bloodwood’s mother never took a liking to you. It wasn’t the make-up you
put on him when you was both thirteen. It goes way back before that. To when we was girls.”
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“I thought she didn’t like me because you never took me to church.”
“Oh hell no… that ain’t it. Though she’d like you to believe that. She’d like her church
friends to believe that, but even some of them know… No, it was before I married your father,
around Easter 1917, that first Sunday after the full moon following a Spring Equinox—that’s
how Easter falls you know—and it goes back to what I found out that Mardi Gras—what she
did…”
“I didn’t know you knew her back then.”
“Oh yes… we was friends growing up. It was only when we started chasin’ boys we
weren’t girlfriends no more. Your Papa Frenchie raised us in the same church, the only black
folks church there was back then. Your grandma was still runnin’ round—she hadn’t come back
yet. She didn’t settle with us ‘til the year you were born… I always thought they’d get back
together—Frenchie and Bridgette—that’s a little girl’s dream ‘bout her parents I guess. Maybe
if she hadn’t married that Warren Bloodwood and got involved with Sissy and Wishbone Walker
they’d a got back together. Who knows? Maybe they still will. I ‘spose Frenchie still has eyes
for her, even after marryin’ that woman in Port Arthur… Love’s a strange thing, child. It don’t
make any more sense when you’s older… No, Cecily and I goes way back. It goes back to that
Mardi Gras season back then—what she did to get voted queen of our little krewe here in
Hemphill. How she got to wear the dressings of the Big Chief’s bride of our little Indian tribe
and got’s to parade in it…”
Bethany’s eyes are wide open now. She thinking of the Mardi Gras just passed. The
music in the streets during the annual parades. What she’d heard about New Orleans and how
the black folks celebrated it there—wanting to see it. And Denny talking about it on their ride.
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How he’d seen Zulu. How he promised to take her there to see it. The skeletons that walked the
graves Mardi Gras morning.
“You’re getting to be a woman now I ‘spose. So you should know it. It ain’t beauty that
always wins. Nor goodness or truth—bein’ the best at things. You see, Cecily Bloodwood
didn’t get voted queen of our Mardi Gras because she was the prettiest girl—the most charming
of the young girls vying for it. If that was true I would’ve won—he, he! No, even in small
towns like here it ain’t always about honesty and truthfulness—bein’ a good neighbor to your
peoples as it were. Because I found out what she done, and I went to the preacher with it the day
after—that Ash Wednesday. It just took forty days and forty nights for the truth to come out.
When what was rumored was exposed. How she paid our esteemed reverend fifty dollars. How
she had her father pay him—seein’ how he was the judge of our little Mardi Gras court, our little
pagan celebration—he, he! You see, that’s how she got voted queen, and not cuz of her good
looks…”
“You mean she paid him to win? A supposed man of God?”
“Yes, child! Don’t act so sheltered and naïve! You’ve been with a man now so you
should know. You should know and not be disillusioned by it—that’s for children—not for a
girl growin’ to be a woman… You need to know how this here world works. How bein’ good
and the best at somethin’ ain’t always rewarded, when money, or even somethin’ else, grants
favors—your so-called reputation among folks… I ain’t what you call a God-fearin’ woman. I
look to the trees, these woods around here for my peace when I’m troubled. When I feel the
wind blowin’ through them, and see their leaves fall… But that don’t mean I don’t see lies from
the truth. Maybe that’s evil’s best trick. And if there is a Devil his best lie is lettin’ you see the
lies of the people of God. So you’s don’t believe. Like how’s I felt after I learned ‘bout our
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reverend takin’ the money. How I exposed it that Easter Sunday and shamed Cecily Bloodwood.
That’s why she don’t like you. Not cuz of anything you done to her son… But that’s people for
you, child. God’s people. Sinners. Whatever… Just cuz you see a lie don’t make it all a lie.
Though it seems that way sometimes. And there’s a war goin’ on now. People fightin’ and
dyin’. All for an idea. Control over knowledge. And maybe knowledge is just God’s mysteries
slowly revealed. What all that scientific learning is about… Don’t be deceived. Don’t be
deceived by deception. Thinkin’ it’s all a deception. You got to discern, child. Just like you
gotta discern ‘bout this man you been with. And what you’re gonna do when the man you’re
supposed to marry comes home…”
So that’s when Bethany went to her—the mid-wife present at her birth—for advice. And
maybe now is not the right time to say it, but I’ll say it anyway. For in Bethany’s seeking
answers in the woman that birthed her, answers to questions on love, she was seeking answers to
the dream born when she was born. Because when we are born we are all born into a dream.
And in taking that ride with Denny she was awakened. Something in her now asked the
question. A question for which she already knew the answer, but she couldn’t answer until she
asked it. The question forming the answer in the question of it. What we all ask when our
reality takes on the form of a dream, a dream that awakens us to asking the dream if it is a dream.
Her mother’s revelations on the past—her past with Cecily Bloodwood and how this
affected her relationship with Cecily’s son, and her father’s talk with her over feeding the pigs on
the Bloodwood past, this five years ago now, her grandmother’s involvement with Sissy and
Wishbone Walker—this all made her present choices heightened by some dark, secret memory.
Her choice to take that ride with Denny and the deception that entailed in her promised
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engagement to Pete Southhouse, a man fighting the Axis powers in Europe, what he was
witnessing that she could only dream about, sheltered in a small Cajun town of the American
South—all this—it made that choice seem more than it was even though that’s all it was, and it
seemed like she was paying for something she didn’t ask to purchase. She was learning the
responsibilities an adult takes on, a woman’s burden, on mistakes she didn’t make, but
precursors to all the mistakes she would make—a foreknowledge that made hindsight all the
more painful and confusing. And she knew. She knew that all her little choices—right or
wrong—were part of something much bigger. That she was an investor of it. All the dividends
that would come back, compounded with interest.
Bethany Labeau was just a black Creole girl living as a remnant in a much larger dream
than the dream she questioned waking up from it—the American dream. And whether she knew
it or not (and maybe now she did) she’d been paying into it since the day she was born. She was
paying into it not with money, but a currency much more valuable. She was paying with her
will, her free will, that investment, that debt we all pay in our birth marking our death. She was
paying with desire. Suffering as we all do, as we wallow in the piss puddle of greed left by the
crooks that know our dream and rob us of it—they too merely mechanisms in the illusions they
create. The illusion that good things have ugliness in them. The illusion that bad things for us
still have their allurement. That illusion—that American dream—named in the will to power.
And not power over ourselves and the desires that chain us, but the power to create these chains,
and enslave other people. In the make believe that we will have love if we have this power—in
the spirit of capitalism. Profit the only essential. That game we play in all fun setting the price
much higher so that we bargain, haggle and deal and bluff, for the price we were aiming at in the
first place, thinking we got a good deal while the person on the other side of the table walks
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away with our souls. And the pomp and circumstance of our elitism, our hunger for members
only clubs, merely the deductibles garnered as insurance that we keep paying our premiums, our
payments into the dream. While the bastards only get richer and the poor are violent with
themselves in their rage over the injustice. And we can’t stop. We can’t stop the machinery,
this universal wheel—the desire. Because if everybody wakes up they’re gonna want their
money back… This is what Bethany Labeau was learning. She learned it in her ride with a drug
dealer, in the man that made love to her, and the deceptions she allowed for this to happen.
Something she would have in common with David Threnody when they would meet and sing a
few songs together. Something that happens to all of us. It happens to all of us when we ask that
question of the dream. The question of our desire. It happens to all of us when we ask to be
loved, and we’re afraid of the answer.
“What’s you come here for, girl?”
“I need help…”
“Help? Help with what? You had a dream that now you can’t remember? He, he! Ain’t
no one can help you with that, child. You think you can be born again? Born into a different
world? A different dream? That’s somethin’ I can’t help you with. I helped you be born in this
world. I named you in it, and this world don’t lead to no others…”
She’s feeding a rooster in a cage. Her voice mixed with the loud clucks of hens, also in
cages. Their shadows and fallen feathers in candlelight. Marie Toussaint’s cabin without
electricity, deep back in the woods and swamp along the Sabine River. And Bethany looks
around standing at the doorway, at strange statues of contorted human figures, all of them with
exaggerated genitalia and surrounded by the colored melted wax of candles that have burned
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away. Marie wears a tall black hat with a white feather in the silver band, a red shawl about her
shoulders—moth eaten and worn with holes. The brim of her hat covers her eyes, and only when
she looks up from her cages do you see the stars in them—the reflected candlelight of her
darkened room.
“I gave you your name before your first and last, but that ain’t the name you hear calling
you in your dream—is it, child? I see a man in a car, smiling at you—the moon beyond his
shoulder, his long white fingernails on the steering wheel… You took a ride with this man, and
now you want to know what does it profit you… He, he! What does it profit a man… like Sissy
Walker’s good book does says—ain’t that right, girl? You want to know if that blood I done
bathed you with when you were born will protect you from the earth making you a mother, as
it’s done all mothers before you, but you don’t want to be a mother now—not yet at least.
You’re waiting for that other man—I see him holding a guitar with a bad string. You waitin’ for
that man… Yes… this rooster’s done crowed twice. He done told me ‘bout the seed inside you
tryin’ to deny… he, he!”
“Is he a good man? The man that you see?”
“Good? Bad? That ain’t what you wonderin’ ‘bout. You’re wonderin’ ‘bout the anger.
The anger you come from—that past I born you into… Don’t lie to me, child. You just
wonderin’ ‘bout what’s in that suitcase of his. Whether that man you seen in your dreams has a
cold heart you can melt—some memory from his past related to yours. With his same doubts on
good and evil. Even though you seen him be kind to the poor. You seen him give change outa
his pocket to children that are hungry. You seen him help an old woman not feel so lonely with
her husband gone. You seen him make you laugh… And he helps all kind of people—yes he
does. He loves people that love people—yes… But what’s in that suitcase of his? How does he
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get his money? His power over you? And you wonderin’ if he made a deal that you’ll have to
make. That dark lover you’s sees in your dreams, holdin’ that guitar with a bad string… Ain’t
no remedy for the danger, child. The danger is part of the path. Those many paths that lead to
God, and that dark man in your dreams… But I can help you. I can help you with that seed you
don’t want. Just takes a drop of some bad medicine. A medicine that’ll make you sick and lose
that seed. But when you take the medicine it stays inside with you. It’ll stay in the name of your
first child. As penitence… The poison will be your protector. Because sees the poison just
don’t only do harm. The poison protects your character—your free will. If you couldn’t choose
to take this poison you wouldn’t be in this world. It’ll teach you to be alert and respect what’s
around you so when you do make that choice—that choice to have a child—you will know at
what cost you will have to defend it. You’ll be a woman. A woman that knows a good man
when you’s see one... You go on now. I’ve done all I can do for you.”
There’s a bottle of rum next to the rooster cage. Marie Toussaint mumbles a chant that
sounds like French to Bethany, but she can’t really be sure. She watches as the old voodoo
woman takes a swig of the rum and spits it on the head of the rooster. She watches as it prances
about its cage, angry at being wet. Marie hands her a small dark bottle with a rubber dropper.
She closes her hand around it and sees Marie smile, her teeth yellowed and rotten.
“Thank you…”
“Hah! You thankin’ me? Girl you still got a lot to learn ‘bout people—it’s all good…
You mind yourself now—hear?”
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May 5th, 1942—It’s over… Today I saw him drive off. To cross that river never to
return. A ghost to my arms and legs that held him in those last gasps of love, in those weak
moments he had after, looking into my eyes to see in me what I saw in him—neither of us in
control in our own small world of bigger worlds imagining other lovers such as we… The words
he couldn’t speak, after, now leaving me wordless. Only the music and smoke, my first lovers,
to console the emptiness of his absence inside. And I hear a song in my mind, unrecorded, not
on any record playing from Sissy Walker’s kitchen window—a song I will sing when I have the
words for it, but not now. Now it is stillborn. A sickness and blood of what I gave up for fear he
would not want it—I would not want it—buried in a garden, Sissy’s garden, her bible and what
was in it the only eulogy to the fresh dirt… He had to leave. After robbing the church. Cecily
Bloodwood’s church—the same old reverend there my mother knew, absolved from his financial
indiscretions from a Mardi Gras twenty-five years ago by forgiving parishioners that only knew
Ash Wednesdays anyways. He robbed the church coffers—given to Sissy for business, and an
anonymous donation for orphans and widows of the county that church goers didn’t see as
important as funds for raising a new building, a new church in Hemphill. And after spending
three days in jail my father bailed him out with my ring—the ring he gave me—a black onyx, for
which he promised our elopement. I would have given more if I could. I would have given him
anything… My father waiting as I stood by his car. His bail only granted on the contingent that
he leave Sabine County never to return. And I saw in his eyes the same wordlessness they held
after making love to me. I saw my eyes in his. The same burning… And I know what
everybody says. I will love again. I will learn to love my fiancée coming home from war—my
secret safe. But I don’t want it to be a secret. I want him to know. I want everyone to know. I
want them to know that I loved, and I loved well. For I feel it is the only way I will have closure,
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closure on this pain that everyone says they know, but I know, and it is mine—no others. It will
be in my voice now, my voice for all time. It will be in the voice of my grandmother cursing, in
the tired voice of my father working for his wisdom, in the voice of Sissy Walker and her kept
secrets, in my mother’s voice reciting recipes, in Jeremy Bloodwood’s whispers, in Marie
Toussaint’s puckered, toothless mouth chanting curses of protection over roosters—all this will
be my voice, faint and wordless in goodbyes to Denny’s last smile… I will remember them all
as betrayal to my own pain in this new birth of spring. I will remember what a woman
remembers, and not a man. Me, lying on the floor in the fetal position, being born again in
stomach-wrenching sobs… And this will be my memory—my song. Of a last kiss that meant
something. Of a car driving away. And the ride I once took in it. The home I will never again
find…
And so it ends with a song. The birth of new beginnings in what ended there in Texas in
May of 1942. A song sung later by Bethany in her career and travels with David Threnody as his
wife. A song sung by others and made famous by some. And maybe you can hear it. You can
hear it in her voice, their voice…
All alone, the party is over.
Old man winter was a gracious host.
But when you keep praying
for snow to hide the clover,
spring can really hang you up the most…
--Betty Carter
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18
I’ve got a home in that yonder city, good Lord. And it’s not made by hand…
--Johnny Cash
Now we must talk of those first recordings. The first recording David Threnody made in
the summer of 1945. When he was twenty-seven years old. Living in New Orleans. What led
him to write the first song, and then another. What kept him writing. Finding the music to go
along with it. In the play of his hands across the guitar—the Gibson ES-150 stolen from
Mississippi, lost and then returned again missing a string. The first notes always strummed on
the acoustic—Jonathon Bonnor’s guitar—for he still had it, from when it was pawned and given
him when he was nine years old. The bullet hole still present from what happened when he was
fifteen. He picked the notes and then found the words. None of it written down at first. Only
the sounds, the sounds coming from a room—leased on the West Bank, in Algiers—among his
people.
His room overlooked the dens—the warehouses of New Orleans carnival krewes where
the floats were constructed and stored. And he came in season to see the colors—the purple,
green, and gold of the fanfare. His enlistment ending soon after his heroics in Bastogne, and his
arrival in New Orleans coinciding with carnival time. The SP yard not far away. The Southern
Pacific rail yards known for their ability to repair or create replacements for any part needed for
any type of locomotive—the large vacant strips enticing David to plant the seeds of his
homegrown among the wreckage of old trains and stacked rail ties, the seeds left from dime bags
purchased from fellow musicians in the Quarter upon his arrival. And Johnny Tribout was with
him, a roommate, joining him in New Orleans after returning to Alabama first to visit family.
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David didn’t go home. He didn’t visit his parents in East St. Louis—his father’s pawn
shop still open and run by his brothers now. His ship came straight to port in New Orleans, and
he didn’t go any further upriver. He wasn’t ready to go home yet. He felt he needed to do
something first. He needed some sort of absolution from the killing he’d witnessed in the war,
and he thought New Orleans was the place to find it. Find his music again—his voice in the
music.
And maybe it was death. Death was on his mind. He’d had some close calls, and enough
had happened for him to wonder about it, even though he was only just turned twenty-seven. It
didn’t preoccupy his mind, but he wondered about it—how he was going to die. Not when—to
him that still seemed far off since he’d made it through the war—but how. We all have to die of
something, and he sometimes wondered what it would be. Would it be a slow sickness? A
sudden and violent accident? Would he die in his sleep as an old man? Or at the hands of some
enemy, someone who meant him harm, as he’d seen already in his war memories? Maybe it
would be a car accident, a slip in the shower. Something odd and utterly trivial. Or would it be
the consequence of some choice he made? Some unbreakable chain of events carried out by his
own doing. A bad habit maybe? His drinking? Maybe his liver wouldn’t make it, and he was
slowly killing himself even though he didn’t foresee it with each sip, each drink, and years down
the road it would finally catch up with him. Maybe his lungs would do him in from smoking—
each cigarette, even the enjoyable ones of a morning with first coffee, each one the how of his
death. But could he change anything? What if stopped drinking, stopped smoking—then
what—what would it be that would finally do him in, sooner if not later? And even now, as he
thought of it—someone was dying. The how of it was happening to someone right now.
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And what if he was evil? In an evil way when it happened? Was that it? David
Threnody wondered if his heart was right. If his heart was right with God if the how of his death
was to happen sooner than later. Of course for him to even wonder it belied the answer. For one
thing for sure is the surety of evil. David had done some bad things during the war, and even
though he had his doubts that he could be forgiven the very fact that a part of him wanted to be
forgiven meant he wasn’t purely evil. He wasn’t a bad man, even if he had done some bad
things, and was still doing them. A bad man doesn’t want forgiveness and doesn’t ask for it. It’s
a matter of faith really. Evil has supreme faith in itself. It never doubts itself. It never repents.
Evil knows it’s evil, and its knowledge is thorough and confident. You’d know for sure if you’re
evil, if you sold something you can never get back, and if any part of you doubts that or wants it
back, then these doubts and desires are your faith. It’s strange how your doubts on being truly
evil is your faith in being good, but it was something David Threnody was beginning to realize
after he came home from the war, after he settled in New Orleans, and began writing a few
songs—songs about his time in Mississippi. He needed this. He needed this time to come full
circle before he could even consider returning to his family and home in East St. Louis. And as
fate would have it he would meet his wife before this would happen.
Funny how you make yourself feel bad. Some would say other people make you feel bad,
but that’s only if you let them. Emotions really aren’t a mystery in how they’re stirred. Add a
little of this, take away a little of that—the ingredients are all there. It’s just some people are
better at remembering the recipe for what they want to make. They know the time and the
temperature to avoid things getting burnt. And it all depends on who you allow in your kitchen
what food you find on your table… Maybe I shouldn’t even invite myself in until I’m ready to
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cook. I have too many stale ingredients stirring, too many stale memories. And the only way to
get rid of something stale is to replace it with something fresh.
That’s why I came to New Orleans. For the music here, the food. To replace all the
nastiness, the rot of memories from the war. These streets are fresh to me, even in their old
French feel. And I like the sounds I hear, coming from doorways and windows—they are ancient
in their eternal adolescence, old by being young—slave songs from the fields that bring forth
dance and laughter on cobblestones—liberal, light-hearted songs of freedom comedic and
solemn in respect to this city’s self-rule. I’ve already seen things here that are incorruptible in
their denial of what’s deemed decadent. I’ve seen marriages and funerals conducted in the same
way, and I’ve walked in cemeteries where the smell of spring honeysuckle caresses the rain-worn
rock of decaying tombs. Everything is above ground here. Nothing is buried. And the voodoo
Catholics mix and commingle with protestant tourists and godless artists—painters and
musicians and writers—Jackson Square a colorful garden of everyone pedestrian coming alive
in their open greetings to each other, in their willingness to say yes, yes to what in any other
place would be a negative response, fear replaced with happy spontaneities, ignorance
disappearing in galvanized curiosity, and all thoughts on morality beatified rather in aesthetics.
I need this—to wash away what I remember.
I wish to give no importance to my memories. My memories from the war. They are not
forecasts of the future. They are not incensed with any fore-knowledge. They are dumb and deaf
to what’s outside them, in the time that goes on without them. And only when I enter into them
do I give them any power of a reality. What I knew yesterday in memory blind to what I
experience today and totally un-related to what happened before. This relation between what
happened and what will happen in my control, in how I relate it to myself. I make the recipe.
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My food either one of happiness or despair. My happiness an aware decision to downplay my
intelligence of what I know. My despair my pride in it. For my relation to myself doesn’t come
from a source within me. Only when I think it does do I lose everything but my death…
Memories are evil—even the good ones. Because they make you forget everything except them,
including how they were formed. And only their formation is beautiful. Memories belong to the
land of the dead, and I’m not dead yet. I will not repent to them, even the ones that remind me of
love. Remembering past love closes the door on its future. And maybe, just maybe, when I come
to that door where death comes knocking, I will not be tempted to remember all that’s behind
me. I will not become a ghost chained to some deal I made…
No, New Orleans is a good town—a good town to be. And even if I don’t feel it in me
now, I will heal. I just need a little good dirt in my wounds, and not the bad salt of looking back.
This is a town that doesn’t believe in memories. It holds them by letting them go. And the ghosts
here are neither happy nor sad. They just are in one moment to the next, neither following nor
leading… There’s life here in its acceptance of death. And I like it. I like the music. There are
memories in them, but they are played so you remember to forget. And maybe it’s time I make a
little music of my own…
--David Threnody, on coming to New Orleans—from his journals 1941 to 1948
Sometimes your world is spiritual. It responds back this way. And your memories hold
the data of this response when you go looking for it. It’s not all the time. It can’t be all the time.
Maybe because our minds can’t handle it—seeing the world this way, in and out of time, the
people we know in it responding to you, haunting dreams that don’t acknowledge what they
knew, what you knew when you allowed this other world to open up and have a reality—the time
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of days and nights no longer safe and comfortable with the normal facts that reassure you there
are no questions you’ve left unasked, afraid of the answers—the deeper meanings that seem to
disappear when your world becomes normal again, the people you know in it simple again. But
you have the memory of it happening, and that’s why these memories are no good, because if
you’re remembering correctly you must be crazy—you were crazy when it happened if the world
you’re used to is to exist and be the real world... David Threnody was having a hard time. A
hard time getting over it—what he saw and felt during the war. He was still having a hard time
getting over Rosie, and what happened in Mississippi when he was nineteen. He was twentyseven now. Eight years had passed and much in it in between, but a part of him was still there, in
Mississippi, in that time of no time, remembering that ride he took. A ride that would bring him
close to his wife, for when he met Bethany they would have that in common. They would both
know what it meant taking that ride, and because of it they would understand each other. It
would become the basis for why they fall in love.
And maybe I must transpose into my time to give it an analogy. For the first time, the
first time I heard those first recordings of David Threnody on KDHX community radio, waiting
for a train at a crossroads in the American Bottom, it was over twenty years after his death. It
was after 9/11 and the dystopian imaginations we have now of a government, the government of
a technological age where everything, everything you do can be watched. Your whole life under
surveillance. Your data trails, the fingerprints you leave behind on the internet with all the
gadgets part of your life now—how the cell phone you can’t live without has GPS marking your
every whereabouts, how the microphone in it can be turned on recording your conversations, and
even the windows around you can be measured for its sonic vibrations identifying your voice,
your unique voice patterns, how your status updates on Facebook and Myspace, your text
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messages, every debit card swipe, the black cameras in ATMs and on every street corner—all
this tech grandeur—now merely a computer algorithm that profiles your every move, an
eHarmony match on your personality and a behavioral prediction on all the probable choices you
will make. And you are controlled. You are under control. Corporate media dictating your
news feeds. Subliminal commands repeated over and over in Super Bowl commercials telling
you what to buy, what to buy so you don’t have to be afraid. The music on your radios, your
internet and satellite radios, a program of likes and dislikes that all seems fine because you’re
hearing what you want to hear.
This is an analogy I can create in my time of what maybe David Threnody felt in his
time, in his taking that ride in Mississippi in 1937. An analogy that you are being watched, your
motivations controlled, but instead of science, instead of technological innovations, instead of a
physical governing body taking an interest in you—now transpose it into the spiritual. A
spiritual world watching you, giving you those gentle nudges. The people you know and love,
all the people around you also being watched, being given those gentle nudges, and instead of a
computer crunching the numbers, the statistical options of the relations and interactions, spiritual
forces are controlling you, inside your head, knowing your every move before you do. Because
they make the recipe, adding a little of this, taking away a little of that—pushing the buttons that
direct your so-called free will in a world with natural laws as its parameters, surely, but once in a
while your mind is freed—you see the codes creating your world, terabytes of streaming data,
and by seeing it you bend the rules and the world you see responds, the people in your world
respond. Time stands still—real time and not virtual time. Everything then becoming
significant. Every choice you make being watched and guided. And your mind—your everyday
working mind—can’t handle it. It can’t be freed this way realizing how this freedom really is,
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and if you have any memories of this, a moment of realization such as this, where like in my
time you become aware of a government watching you, and transpose it to a spiritual world, a
world where even the dictates of time don’t exist, a world without even the limitations (for there
still are limitations) of a government armed with everything we can imagine in science fiction—
you can see how you would go crazy. How if you truly tried to live in this world you would be
locked up. But we’ve all lived it. We’ve all imagined it. We all have a memory of it. A
memory containing the vast world of a single choice—the choice of whether to believe in it or
not. This is the memory David Threnody had—what he wanted to forget. A memory of a ride
where he met a woman, and I must recreate in the only way I know how, transposing it into my
time and creating an analogy that perhaps better understands it. What I heard. What I heard in
those first recordings of him…
I got a girl from Nacogdoches
Call a friend of mine…
Yes, I got a girl from Nacogdoches
Call a friend of mine…
Don’t remember when we met…
I knowed the last time I see her just fine…
She say I smiled when I see her
But I don’t recall…
Uh hmm… I smiled when I see her
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But I don’t recall…
Say she got a heart as big as Texas
But I ain’t found her soul at all…
How come I can’t remember
When we took that ride?
Yeah, how come I can’t remember
We took that ride?
Wound up in Louisiana
Falled short the Mississippi side…
You can run from the law, girl
I’ll be your outlaw by and by…
You can run, you can run, girl
No, bad checks don’t tell no lie…
Left me for a chain gang
And kept runnin’…
Lazarus, man, can’t help her cry…
Now I’m down in New Orleans
No Nacogdoches girl gonna help me heal…
Yeah, I’m down in New Orleans
Dead man risin’ don’t never feel…
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Singin’ bout a woman…
Don’t know if she was ever real…
--Nacogdoches Girl… written by David Threnody: June 22, 1945
And she was. She was from Nacogdoches. At least that’s what she told me. Her last
name Soledad. At least that’s what she said. How she ended up in Mississippi in that car at the
crossroads she never did tell. She left me to wonder. Maybe so I’d write songs about it—I don’t
know. Rosie wasn’t a girl that made you feel good by making her feel good. I don’t think she
ever wanted that—at least not from me. No, in fact I think she wanted sufferin’. She wanted you
to feel good from her sufferin’—that was the love she taught me. Maybe that’s why I found her
with him. Why he had her there in that car waitin’ for me. To teach me that pain. That pain of
knowin’ a paradise. Lettin’ me in so I’d know what’s outside. So I’d always be wonderin’.
Wonderin’ ‘bout what was inside from what she made me know ‘bout outside. So I’d feel it when
I played my guitar—always tryin’ to get in—back in to what she made me realize I’d lost… And
that’s a woman for ya. Not makin’ you know what you got, but makin’ you feel what you ain’t
never had. And you owe them for this. You owe them for showing you this. Your world now
outside their world, what as a boy you ain’t got no clue, and as them makin’ you a man you
regret you ever found out. You regret the regret, and any man that’s loved a woman knows this.
He knows whatever sound he makes after knowin’ love is all he lacks of the beauty a woman
gives him of her beauty—sufferin’ it to him so’s he can suffer—so he can know what she gave.
And that’s the only sound he can give back—knowin’ it’s never enough… And so I wrote a song,
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and then another, lettin’ the guitar I stole from her and not from him say what she knew the
words would never say. They were just words so my voice could sing them. So my voice could
be heard singin’ them. And when I came to New Orleans, after all I’d seen in the war, I ‘spose I
knew I had to keep my end of the deal now—not with him, but with her. I knew I needed to make
a record after all my runnin’ around. After joining the Army to escape it, only to come to
Mississippi again and meet the friend I would save from his own love and his own loss during the
war. And I knew that’s why I got that guitar back even if it was missing a string. I knew I
couldn’t escape it no more—what I had to sell, what I had to sing. And maybe she knew all
along—what he knew when he asked me to get in that car with her—the girl I was goin’ to meet
that would only remind me of what she gave by taking it away. And so I found a studio. I found
it just like I found her. And put it all on wax…
--David Threnody, on finding Piety Street Records—from his journals 1941 to 1948
It was in a neighborhood of New Orleans known as the Bywater—in the upper ninth
ward. David learned about it from a man who played bass, a fellow player at The Corner Oyster
Bar near Jackson Square—one of the nightspots where David brought his guitar when he took
the ferry over from Algiers. The man had sat in on a few recordings there, and he said the sound
was good.
And so David took a walk one day to find it. A walk through an area sixty years later
would be under fifteen feet of water after the infamous levee break and the stories we now have
of it, of a government’s mishandlings despite all our technological breakthroughs, a story that
makes you wonder if anyone’s really watching even if they have the know-how to do it, if God’s
watching. But when David Threnody took that walk he wasn’t thinking about the future, the
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nudge of spiritual forces guiding him to put his voice on vinyl—he was lingering in the past,
pondering a last meeting, a last conversation before stealing out the window with that Gibson
ES-150 on his back. He was thinking about Rosie Soledad, the girl who baked him cookies and
danced to his guitar strings in that roadhouse juke joint called “The Hi-Way Host”, this after that
ride he took at the crossroads off Highway 61 in Mississippi the summer of 1937. He was
recalling the bed they shared in his mind movies of memories played out during his enlistment in
Biloxi before the war. The casino where he and Johnny Tribout gambled in dreams that they
weren’t dead, and heard their old lovers talk in cemeteries and on the stage.
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know…”
“Yes you do… You just don’t want what you know. You want what you don’t want—
what you know that you don’t know..”
And David looks up from his pillow lying next to her. To the giant over-blown portrait
of a marijuana leaf. He still hears the echoes of his amped guitar. The sweat on Rosie’s body
next to him not from her dancing, but from another exertion—a failed exertion to have him finish
what he started. The song they were making in her bed unfinished, and instead of it being prematurely over because of his arousal, her ministrations ended because he wasn’t.
“You just got to think dirty… Like how your eyes watched me dancing at the roadhouse
tonight. It ain’t no different. No different than the music. Just nobody’s watchin’ us now... Do
you need somebody watchin’? Maybe that’s what you need. So you know it’s dirty and so’s
you can think dirty… Think about him being here. The man you owe for your guitar. Think
he’s here if you want to. He won’t judge. He brought us together—made us meet…”
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“I don’t want him here! I don’t want him in no part of my life.”
“Hah! Boy, you wouldn’t be here in my bed if he wasn’t part of your life… Let me tell
you somethin’. Let me tell you a trick I learned. Maybe it’s those words your momma prayed
over you when you was a boy—that prophecy you told me ‘bout. Maybe that’s what’s holdin’
ya back. You think those prayers to God mean anything here, in our nakedness? It ain’t fearin’
God that keeps you from the pain. It don’t protect ya from bein’ hurt. All yur church goin’ ain’t
gonna keep ya from that, nor from hurts them church people will do to ya while they’s makin’
their prayers to God… You want ta believe in that—go ahead! Maybe it’s good for ya to
believe that, believe in that—Golden Rules and such… But let me tell ya. Let me tell ya ‘bout
how to keep from gettin’ hurt—you just can’t care… You hear me? You can’t care too much.
‘Bout anything or anyone. It’s the person that cares more in any given situation that walks away
hurt. Even if yur walkin’ away from a church-goer that believes in them Golden Rules… And
don’t say you don’t know, because you already done it. You already done it with me! You care
too much you feel too much of what people want from ya. You feel too much of what you give
to them and what you take away. Even that money you makin’ workin’ for Scratch now gets
weight to it in how it changes hands. You feel what the money feels even in even trades. Don’t
make it personal, boy! It’s just business…”
“Is that what we are? Just business?”
They look at each other on their pillows. Both of them lying on their sides, facing each
other, facing the center of the bed. The bed sheets up to their shoulders. Rosie reaches out with
her hand and caresses David’s cheek.
“Love is a business like anything else. You give and you get. You just don’t trade in
money. You trade in emotions. Things you feel and remember long after. That’s why it’s a
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hard business. A harder business than anything that involves money. You can forget losing
money. A lost bet. But you can’t forget losing what you feel…”
It comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. It was March in New Orleans, Mardi
Gras over, and David Threnody was thinking of a woman’s bed as he walked to the studio of
Piety Street Records. He was thinking of Rosie’s bed. The bed they shared back in those
summer months of 1937, those hot months following the March madness of winter turning into
spring and that time of Lent, spring turning into summer, and the fall, the fall season when he
snuck out of Rosie’s window—their business over. He was thinking and remembering even
though he knew it was no good, no good for him. But maybe it was the gentle nudge that he
needed. Something bad he had to do to make it good. For it would give him his first songs. The
songs for an album, and the deal he would strike, going over an old conversation in his mind, a
last conversation, as he turned off of Dauphine onto Piety Street, the original route of the Desire
streetcar line, and saw what he was looking for.
The Mississippi River borders the Bywater, and the boat horns blow through the day and
night. David Threnody heard one calling as he turned that corner and saw what he saw. People
of his own kind, and not black and not necessarily musically inclined, but dressed as he was
dressed, their politics like a sign on their foreheads—hipsters after the war, bohemians—those
poor patrons of the arts. They were his people, but Johnny Tribout was about the only friend he
had, even though he’d made a lot of friends, casual acquaintances, fellow musicians that he could
sit in with, that could sit in with him, and that knew the timing—knew when to play and when
not to, knew what notes and chords would sound good with his, and that didn’t need liner notes
for the songs, that didn’t need hints to the lyrics. They could sing them when he didn’t want to.
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They could sing them with him at a pitch that conjoined with his voice. But even with all this,
with people that understood his music—he still felt alone. He was still haunted with the sounds
of a roadhouse in Mississippi before the war. The scenes of it played in his mind reel of war
memories, mixed with the screams of wounded men. And he couldn’t understand. He couldn’t
understand how no one heard it but him—the sounds, those earworms, in the haunting how of
death already there, there in your memory. How no one heard Rosie Soledad’s gay laughter as
she moved in a red dress, in slow motion as it were, to the pickle he was in, to the slide of his
guitar amped inside that sweat and smoke of a roadhouse, that stage he went on where he made a
deal, a deal where everything else about him disappeared but that guitar he held in his hands,
everything gone but his lips close to that transduced electricity of a microphone carrying his
voice…
Maybe he felt he gave it everything—I don’t know. His eyes said it after a song. And
when we’d take five he’d sip his whiskey and wipe the sweat from his forehead with a
handkerchief, and if he smiled at all it was when the distortion went out. When the
distortion went out of the speakers as we laid our instruments to rest… I have some
pictures. Pictures of him taken during that first recording session. Taken over his
shoulder as he sat perched on a stool, the strap of his guitar turned so it was hanging on
his back. He’d sit perched there with his hand under his chin, a cigarette dangling
between his fingers, beads of sweat noticeable on his temples, his eyes lidded as he
listened to the playback from the sound recording booth. And I remember seeing him
there sitting under that hanging microphone, listening. But it wasn’t as solemn as it
seemed. For I have other pictures of him in the sound booth resting on his crossed arms,
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his mouth hidden and only his face above his nose showing. His mouth hidden, but he
was saying something to another member of the band, and the shot captures them
laughing, that first breakout of laughter passing across their face as they hear whatever it
was he was saying. Perhaps a comment on the playback. A comment on one of his
songs. You see them laughing, but all you have of him is his eyes and they are serious—
like they’re not even there, but lost in the music that the picture does not capture, lost in
the laughter he’d instilled in another… I think he was afraid of something. Afraid of the
silence. Like he knew the eloquence of it. The eloquent voice of silence. And if he
didn’t have a song to sing, if he didn’t have its looping playback—he would be lost in it.
Lost in the silence. And all the hipsters that congregated then in that time. The street
bohemians playing for change on all the corners we turned—they weren’t his friends.
They weren’t friends to him even though they were the people he had the most in
common. They weren’t on the other side of the argument, but he was making no
argument, and I think he knew what their response would be—what their response would
be to his music. He fought them not for their like or dislike of his songs. He fought them
for their silence to it. And even though I was a friend I could see he was haunted by the
loneliness of it. In what he gave to his music, and at what cost it seemed to him. He let
everybody in with it, and because of this no one could come in—no one was really inside
it with him. And the one friend he wanted. The one friend he wanted to let inside didn’t
love him…. Maybe it was a girl—I don’t know—a girl from his past. Maybe it was a
girl that had loved him, but didn’t love him no more, and that was the one love, the only
love he wanted. He wanted to earn that love and have that love because he had some
memory of that love being taken away, and that was it—that was what was in every song
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of his. What maybe made them timeless—how everything got in but the one thing he
wanted to let in. It’s what made them haunting and sad—what made them The Blues—
you know? And The Blues was his business…
--Johnny Tribout, from a PBS interview, September 1971
You don’t need what you don’t know, but sometimes you think you do. You don’t need
to know what someone you love is doing right now without you. You don’t need to know that
maybe they’re thinking about you, or maybe not. You don’t need to know that someone you
love is thinking about you right now, but it happens. Maybe they just woke up from a dream
about you, and their eyes open, but you’re not there. Maybe it’s you waking up from a dream.
And you are somewhere else. Living your life… You don’t need to know this, but sometimes
you think you do, and when you know this you know you also have life in their life. A whole
life of yours going on without your awareness—your life in someone else’s mind. And which is
more real? Your life in someone else’s mind? Or the life of your own mind, maybe even
thinking about that someone else? And which life? Which life do you prefer to live in?
Sometimes you notice this split even though you don’t need to notice it. You become aware of
your fractured lives living in the lives of others. You are not just in one place at one time. You
are in many places, existing in different times. And you are real in these places, real in these
times. You become real to someone else in their thoughts of you. And this is felt most
poignantly in someone you love, someone you once loved and that loved you, but your lives
have taken different paths, and you are no longer together in a time and place, but your memories
of each other make you exist with them, and they exist with you—every time you remember
each other.
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That’s how I know David Threnody exists for me. Even though he is dead. He’s been
dead for over twenty years, and I never met him when he was alive. But I’ve heard his voice.
His voice in songs. I’ve heard his guitar, and I have pictures of him holding it, playing it. I have
the memory of when I first heard his voice—those first recordings of him made in the summer of
1945 in New Orleans. And I’ve entered into his life, making him alive to me, even though now
he is dead. I’ve talked to people that knew him. I have his writings—his journals. I have other
people’s writings that lived in his life. And all this—all these things—create an image of him. A
legend larger than life. He is real to me in my thoughts of him, in this life of his that I’ve
created, and deep down I’d like to think he knows. He knows what I’m doing. He knows I’ve
been thinking about him. He knows he is still alive because he is alive in me. And as I go about
my life, all that he loved, all his past lovers, also live and still love him. They are also alive
because I’ve made them alive, in me.
And so maybe he didn’t need to know. He didn’t need to know what a girl he loved was
doing right now without him, as maybe he wondered about it, in those take fives when he laid his
guitar to rest in those first recordings we have of David Threnody, in his wondering about maybe
what Rosie Soledad was doing as he sang about her. She was there with him in those songs. In
his fears that she had learned to love another. Those fears that he was no longer in her thoughts,
and in the hopes that maybe he was, that she still sometimes remembered their moments
together, even when he wasn’t thinking about her, as he learned to love another. And my
realization of this opens up a whole other world. A whole other world operating inside all our
little worlds, the small happenings of all our daily routines in the absence of someone in our
thoughts, and our world without someone is really not without them. You are with them just as
they are with you, in every passing thought that makes you remember them, that makes them
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remember you. It’s how you can be sitting still, doing nothing, and yet be doing everything
imaginable in other lives that you have touched. You are in their adventures, their boredoms,
and you feel everything they feel—their sorrows and their joys. You are in the love they’ve lost
and gained. You are in everything that another will be. How you may be dead, but you still live
on in the humanity that you followed and that follows you. And that’s how I know what I don’t
need to know. David Threnody came alive to me on the day I heard him for the first time
waiting on a train at a crossroads in the American Bottom, and he still lives because now I’m
writing this, this account of his life, the fiction of writing it already happened and still happening
because I am thinking it. I am thinking about him right now.
It had a tin roof. And before it became a music studio it was a post office, built in 1927.
After it was a post office it was a center for retarded citizens. They still get mail for them there.
Now there’s a dog park across the street. Vintage furniture and junk shops just around the
corner. The décor inside a cross between an elegant Cajun fishing camp mixed with a turn of the
century Storyville bordello, or maybe your favourite grandmother’s living room. Comfort
combined with sound quality the goal. Rough cypress on the playing room walls, and
chandeliers hanging thrown out of an old Masonic Temple, the rusted tin ceiling in the big
playing room left because it looked good and sounded good.
This is where David’s first recording sessions happened—728 Piety Street. The signal an
analog, not digital. An analog signal one where at each point in time the value of the signal is
significant, while a digital signal is one where at each point in time the value of the signal must
be above or below some discrete threshold. In sound recording, fluctuations in air pressure strike
the diaphragm of a microphone which induces corresponding fluctuations in the current
produced by a coil in an electromagnetic microphone, or the voltage produced by a condensor
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microphone. The voltage or the current said to be an "analog" of the sound, and an analog signal
has a theoretically infinite resolution. And that’s how David Threnody’s voice, his guitar, was
recorded—on vinyl, his first recordings back in 1945. Its fidelity, its reproducibility, what I
heard years later, over twenty years after his death, on KDHX community radio.
But it almost didn’t happen. Not because of money—David had money saved up from
his GI benefits after the war. He had the money to pay for the recordings. And he had the songs.
Songs he started writing after meeting Rosie Soledad in Mississippi back in 1937. Songs he
played with other musicians when he lived in tenement housing in East St. Louis before the war.
Songs already part of his repertoire when he played in Soulard during the 1938 Mardi Gras, for
which he was first paid, when his mother first came to hear him play. Songs he practiced with
Johnny Tribout, after they met, after his love entanglement in Biloxi the summer of 1941. Songs
they rehearsed in their idle time as prison guards of German POWs before shipping out to
England—tunes Schultz whistled along to after Popovitch handed them their dubious assignment
following Nina’s mysterious death. Songs other GI’s heard between Christmas Carols during
David and Johnny’s entrapped siege at Bastogne in the winter of 1944. David Threnody brought
these songs to New Orleans, and in the summer of 1945 he was finally ready to record them, but
it almost didn’t happen. And what if? What if it hadn’t? Not only would I have not of heard
them, thus enticing me to write this story, but the rest of this story wouldn’t have happened.
Because you see Bethany Labeau wouldn’t have heard them, nor Popovitch in his early
retirement. These recordings, these first recordings of David Threnody what brought them all
together. What led Popovitch to find David playing one night in the French Quarter, and what
brought Bethany Labeau to sit in with him and sing, and the love entanglement that would ensue
involving Bethany’s husband and Johnny Tribout and Popovitch in a drug deal gone bad with
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some young toughs from Dauphine not far from the Piety Street recording studio where David
Threnody first cut these songs. It almost didn’t happen, and not from anything David did wrong,
but from what he did right—the jealousy of a sound engineer friends with a fellow musician, a
competitor, who didn’t want these songs to hit the air because he was afraid of what they might
do.
You shouldn’t be afraid when someone acts superior. You shouldn’t be angered or
dismayed. You should be flattered. For when someone acts superior to you they’re obviously
afraid they aren’t. You’ve struck a chord with them for them to act this way, and it happens in
various situations. In this case it was David Threnody’s art, his music. His music threatened
those who also played music, but they knew their music wasn’t as good. They were no match to
his voice, his skilled guitar playing, and they knew it.
What you should be afraid of is what people don’t know, and they know it. For that is
what they act superior to. The happiest feeling you can have, and your worst fear, the knowledge
of your unimportance—what people don’t know about you. Nobody acts superior to that—to
what they really don’t know, only to what they know they don’t know. You are neither
threatening nor threatened in what people really don’t know. And David Threnody had
something. He had something in his art, his music, but you only knew that if you listened. Then
you knew. You knew what you didn’t know. You knew the music, but you didn’t know the man
who played it. This anonymity David had sometimes like a warm blanket, other times leaving
him felt out in the cold. And David was learning the difference. He was learning about the
pressure in recognition. The recognition of having a talent and then learning to live with it. That
slip into feeling you’re important because of something you created, because of something you
have. David had made a few songs, and sung them. There was blessing in that. There was
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blessing in having created something and knowing that it was good. The curse was in having
others know it, what you have to sell of yourself to get them to listen, and then having no control
over how they respond. David was glad that maybe now somebody would listen, somebody
would listen and hear his voice, but he was also glad if they didn’t. For then he could still hide.
He could hide from the judgment of what they heard.
A man named Otis Redford heard. He heard the first song I heard, the first recording I
heard of David waiting at that crossroads in the American Bottom. He heard and was afraid of
what he knew he didn’t know, and so he acted superior, and threatened. He didn’t hear David’s
voice and embrace it as a fan, for he had his own musical aspirations, and rather than seeing a
colleague, a fellow musician he could play with in time—he saw a threat to his own importance.
And this is the deadliness in all hopes for fame and fortune, in the pressure of dreams to be loved
not for who you are, but in what you do. In this case what you do as an artist. And so when his
friend, the sound engineer sitting in on David Threnody’s first recording, shared the demo record
and allowed Otis Redford to hear David’s voice and his soulful frets on that guitar he stole from
Mississippi, Otis listened. And that’s the first step to any fame as an artist—getting someone to
listen. But getting someone to listen and like it. Getting someone to tell others to listen as well.
Well, in a perfect world, maybe—maybe this would happen and all your dreams of your own
importance would come true. But in this world, a world Bethany Labeau learned about in her
mother’s revelations of a Mardi Gras when she was a girl, about how you really win, how you
win first place—you learn it pays to be humble. You learn to aim low, and if you meditate on
anything, it’s not in how to win others love, but in concentrating on your ever-present goodness
in loving others. Anything else is inevitably doomed to depression and frustration, being crushed
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under pressures self-created, and any aspirations you have for your art, talented or otherwise, are
destined for failure.
And so we almost don’t have it. Those first recordings of David Threnody. Because Otis
Redford, a decent guitar player in his own right, asked his friend to corrupt it. To corrupt the
sound and damage the recordings. He paid him to keep the impurities in the sound, the phase
distortion. Phase distortion a type of undesirable sound alteration that comes from certain
frequencies going out of time with other frequencies. It adds a certain harshness to the feedback,
a dissonance to the signal. And this was how it was cut—David Threnody’s first record. Otis
Redford hoping the record company wouldn’t play it due to the quality of the sound. The funny
thing about it, the funny thing is—people liked it, the record label producers liked it. Even
David liked it, which is why they allowed it to be distributed even after discovering how the
sound engineer dropped the ball, and why. And so in way Otis Redford helped David Threnody,
even in his thwarted efforts to stop his sound, to keep people from listening. And that unique
sound, that harsh quality to David’s voice, that haunting slide to his guitar, was what made
people listen. It’s what made me listen the first time I heard him.
And other people listened as well, which gives me this story, the next story—how
Popovitch came back in the picture, and Bethany Labeau supporting her husband’s drug habit
from the war in a deal gone bad set up by her uncle, William Bloodwood, involving her
grandmother, Bridgette, and their previous mule habits with her past lover, Denny. It gives me
the story of how David Threnody and Bethany Labeau met, not just over a song, but in a bad
trade over several pounds of marijuana that almost got Johnny Tribout killed. And you can’t—
you just can’t—I can’t act superior in fear of what I know I don’t know. I am happy in realizing
my own unimportance in telling you this story. How I’m not selling you anything in trying to
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get you to listen. And who knows? Maybe just like with David Threnody, what tries to thwart
people from listening becomes the very thing that makes them listen. And you can’t be afraid of
this—what you know you don’t know. Sometimes embracing the chaos of fate what makes you
a happy man. In the governing bodies of physical and spiritual worlds. What makes you a
pilgrim on your way to what you don’t know. And maybe David knew this without knowing,
and without being afraid. It hides there in that first song. That first song, that first recording, in
that song where I first heard his voice, long after his death and how it happened, in how it tells
how sometimes there’s more than one way to get something done. There’s more than one way to
get to where you’re going…
Black cat’s got nine lives
I only got one…
Yeah, gypsy woman say she got nine lives
I only got one…
There’s more than one way to skin a cat
But there ain’t nothin’ new under the sun…
They say there’s lots a fishes
Under the sea…
Yes, they say there’s lots a fishes
Under the sea…
Catch one or the caught one
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Still seems like déjà vu to me…
Black cat’s got nine lives
I only got one…
Gypsy woman told me she loves me
Boys, ain’t that fun?
There’s more than one way to skin a cat
But there ain’t nothin’ new under the sun…
Black cat done crossed my path
Bad luck mirror says I got to start from nine…
I done counted down from eight
But havin’ trouble with the math…
(Lord knows my hands can’t do the sum…)
Do know somethin’ though, boys
There’s more than one way to skin a cat
And there ain’t nothin’ new under the sun...
--Black Cat Moan… written by David Threnody: first track recorded at Piety Street
Records, New Orleans: Aug 6, 1945
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19
The road goes on forever and the party never ends…
--The Highwaymen
The say God helps those that help themselves. And maybe you have to be at play to
know that. You are at play when you fall in love, and if you ever needed help it’s then. You’re
not a child when it happens. You don’t necessarily fall in love with innocent eyes. You don’t
necessarily ask for help willingly, but you are dependent. You’re dependent on the person you
fall in love with, and they are dependent on you if they feel the same. You help yourself by
helping them, by loving them, and so do they, by loving you. And so if two people are in love
maybe God is with them, and anything unrequited, any love unbalanced, has the groans of hell—
a place without God, a place of isolation, where you ask for help, but you have no one to help,
and you really can’t—you can’t help yourself. Maybe this is what David Threnody felt after he
took that ride in Mississippi back in the fall of 1937. Maybe it’s what Bethany Labeau felt after
taking that ride with Denny in the spring of 1942. They both had a memory of afterwards.
David remembered that night he stole out of Rosie Soledad’s window with the Gibson ES-150
on his back. Bethany remembered Denny’s car driving away to cross a river and a pawned black
onyx ring. And they needed these memories to find each other. Both of them happening to find
themselves, and each other, in a place called New Orleans, just after the war—a place with
people at play if there ever was one, a city that care forgot.
That’s the problem with love. It makes you care and it’s hard to forget. Its true form, its
most pure form, perhaps only an idea we read about in books, and I can’t say it really exists in
this book I’m writing about David. Maybe what I’ve written only captures love’s loss. It merely
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depicts our human failures in helping each other and finding God in our lives—I don’t know—
but then I guess it’s losing love that gives us our idea of its ideal in the first place, and every time
we fall short we’re still making progress, for the next generation of lovers maybe, in how we
help our children along, forgetting all our failures in them so that they can try again.
And maybe there are just phases and stages to it. There are different phases of love, and
we play out its joys and heartaches on different stages where sometimes we’re cast as the victim
or the aggressor, the hero or the villain. And sometimes it’s a comedy. Other times a tragedy.
Sometimes we’re watching from the audience, wise and on the lookout for other’s pitfalls. Other
times we’re in the spotlight, shamed and proud. And so maybe now’s a good time for a
soliloquy. It’s time for David to say something. Something he wrote in retrospect from his
journals after the war. About how he felt after cutting his first record that summer of 1945 and
what it led to—how it led to meeting Bethany one night in Pirates Alley, that little well-known
street without cars just off Jackson Square and near the St. Louis Cathedral, how he saw her for
the first time while he was at play on his guitar, and how she sat in with him for a song, helping
him along as it were…
Sometimes I fear I’ve gone mad. I hear voices from my past I’m not ready to answer.
And then it becomes simple. What I have to do becomes simple. When the memories come
crashing in. I wake up sometimes and thoughts come to me from years back. Childhood
memories triggered by seemingly nothing. I see myself in my father’s pawn shop. I see the
shelves still then too tall for me, for my arms to reach, full of trinkets people traded for money,
how they walked in and out that door, the door of my father’s business, their desperate tales
after the flood of ’27 of why they sold things, things precious to them for my father’s money,
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money to make it through that hard year. And I hear that train from a distance, its piercing
blow, and I can almost smell the burning coal from the locomotive as it pulls into that relay
depot where my brother Dewey gave a whore a flower the summer of 1917 before I was born—
that summer of riots from when I was still in the womb. I was not born, but I still have it. I have
that memory which isn’t even my own from what Dewey told me, because he told me about it
when we were still boys, as a bedtime story on nights in the room we all shared as children,
when we were waiting after a storm, a spring storm after that evening sun went down, and we
were supposed to be asleep. We were waiting for our father to come in, waiting for his head to
peek in our door, his lantern shining, waiting for him to ask us if we wanted to go wormin’,
because our father loved to fish… And I remember my brothers. I can see Gerald jotting down
figures in my father’s ledger the year after he lost his wife and child. I recall the eyes of that
homeless man as he came into the pawn shop that morning Gerald was shot, leaving a hole in
the guitar I still have, which makes me think of that day when I was nine and saw Jonathon
Bonnor come in—in prison clothes, and the vague images he made me see of women from his
past… I see the church my mother took me to where that strange woman prophesied, when she
looked in my eyes and told me the Devil was a liar. I see those children through a window
hanging ribbons on a make-believe tree the winter I defended them in Bastogne, during that cold
and brutal siege. I remember the smells of the brig, the prison where I first met Johnny Tribout,
his harmonica on the bed and shoe polish on his hands. How he told me don’t believe in nothin’
that makes you feel bad. This after the night Nina was murdered and I met Popovitch for the
first time, during that strange enlistment in Biloxi before the war… And I don’t know how it
happens. How I keep from going mad, and what happens to keep me sane, and no one else can
tell me. That’s the horror of it. There is just this inner knowledge, and I don’t know where it
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comes from—these memories that are mine and how I process them and what triggers them. To
try to speak of it, to dare it into existence, only makes it worse, but it’s there. It’s there in every
word, in every nuance of communication I have with the outside world before my eyes, and the
strange thing is I feel stronger facing it with an enemy I must guard against than with a person I
think I should trust. How I’d rather tell my whole life story to a stranger than to someone who
cares because if they care they just make the memories that much more harder to defend against,
and I’m afraid they’ll take over and I won’t know what’s real anymore… But then something
happens. Something happens that makes it all simple again. And the memories become linear
again, just one thing after the other and in the past, and suddenly I stand in the present, maybe
somehow remembering it all at once and somehow becoming who I am now with all that behind
me, making me me, but not interfering with what I am and what I have to do now. And I pick up
my guitar and I play a song and then I play another. And it doesn’t matter if it’s the guitar I
stole from Mississippi and what I remember happened there, that crossroads seemingly a
junction of all of it, all these memories, and it doesn’t matter if it’s Jonathon Bonnor’s guitar
with its eerie sound from that bullet hole in it—I am in the present, playing a song and then
another. The past has no hold on me except in how somehow it gives me the confidence to be
who I am now, unashamed, unafraid, guiltless from all I did wrong and regret… And that’s
where I was the night I met Bethany Labeau. This in the late summer of 1945 after I cut my first
record. I saw her bathing in a pool of light reflecting off the stage where I sat with my guitar—
the Gibson ES-150 amped and echoing from the last strings I had strummed on it. And somehow
I knew. Somehow it became simple. All the memories washed away. And I saw her calling me
with her eyes. And I felt… new. And ready to answer.
--David Threnody, on meeting Bethany Labeau—from his journals 1941 to 1948
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You would think David Threnody would have been happy after those first recordings,
those first songs he put on vinyl, but he wasn’t. This is the strange thing about art, with making
art, and making music is the same as writing a book, creating a sculpture, adding colors to a
canvas. There comes a time when it ends. Your life in the making of it ends, and what you
made takes on its own life. Like you’ve let go of a child learning to ride a bicycle, and you let
them ride on their own. You are left to watch them ride away, maybe once in a while they
looking back at you, smiling, and you wait to see them make it to the next corner, you wait to run
to them if they fall. Something ends when you finish a work of art, only to live on after you—
never changing. And this can be a haunting joy, an unwanted attention. Because the attention it
gets is not the love you gave it, and then for better or worse it may get no attention at all.
David wasn’t sure how he should feel after he finished recording those first songs. And
his lack of surety turned into depression, and a void came into his life, a silence. He sought
distractions. Distractions that enticed and taunted him at the same time. Things he looked
forward to, but that saddened him because he believed they were all he looked forward to. He
turned to his vices. His alcohol and cigarettes, his marijuana. And the music was there even
when he didn’t want it. Some songs he heard reviving him. Others drowning him sorrow. And
he went through moments in the day with a sick, heavy feeling in his heart. Even though his
own songs still came to him. He still strummed his guitar, thinking of new notes, new words to
sing, but he held no illusions any longer now to the response he would have of it after—the
aching silence. The frustrated dreams. But somehow he still knew. He still looked forward to
the simplest of things. Reading books he’d already read. Watching a show he’d already seen.
Hearing an old familiar song even if sometimes it made him sad. He learned to breathe and
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enjoy his breath. Enjoy the sun when it shined. The good things in all weathers. Each day there
was something to hope for, even if it was just a little thing, a tiny pleasure, something new. He
still knew he would rather have that than nothing at all, and he began to make his peace in that
strange world that is an artist’s. That strange world that opens up to an artist where you’re not
sure if you’re making the art or the art is making you, and that’s why he needed her, that’s when
David Threnody needed Bethany Labeau, and as luck would have it she was there. She was
there when he went looking from his stage, his eyes restless so soon after the war. She was there
bathing in a pool of light reflected from where he sat in the spotlight with his guitar, strumming
his songs.
First he bought her drink—an absinthe—for it was the Absinthe House, and it was as they
were sitting together, talking after one of his sets, that an old woman came over, an old black
woman that reminded Bethany Labeau of the mid-wife present when she was born, and the
conversation she started with David sort of went like this:
“I heard you on the radio…”
“Oh yeah? I didn’t know I was being played…”
And the old woman sits down next to him, across the table from Bethany, resting her
hands on a cane she carries. She has a smile that’s not in her eyes. They instead look wide open,
not necessarily out of fear, but to instill fear, instill a sense of uneasiness when she looks David
in the eye.
“Then you know. You know about how your songs are heard all around you. You’re
very good, very talented. Your songs have words in them that have a common thread in all the
conversations you hear. They speak of something so basic they have to be in every
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conversation—in the needs people have when they say things and why they say them… But you
already know that—don’t you? You’ve heard your words come back to you, and sometimes it
makes you wonder if you sang them because you already heard them, or you hear them because
of what you sang…”
The old woman senses the uneasiness she’s caused now. She sees a lost look come into
David’s eyes, as her words hit home, placating that self-absorbed folly of believing you have
everyone’s attention. That fear that everybody knows and plays as characters in your story, and
it doesn’t matter if they’re friend or foe because everything they do or say irrevocably ties back
to you, and you can’t escape—you can’t escape your mirror.
“Yes… you know what I’m sayin’—don’t you? You know how your songs have come to
life. Not because you gave them life, but because you remembered them before they happened,
and now they’re happening even after you try to forget them, because you sang them, and that
will never change… I’m just trying to help you—help you see that.”
That’s when David looks at Bethany. He sees her again in the pool of light coming from
the stage he just left, and her eyes respond to his naked look—they respond back naked, but she
isn’t lost. And she turns to the old woman to say these words.
“Isn’t that what you just told me? When you came over here to buy me this drink? You
told me something your father used to say. About how man is inherently evil, but you should
have an unshakeable faith in God…”
And with these words David comes back. He returns from where he was lost, and looks
now at the old woman with eyes that know. The trust that gave him fear replaced with
objectivity. He sees the old woman now as an object, and he stands outside himself looking at
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her. No longer self-absorbed in her words, and he sees the subjective weakness she preyed upon.
The old woman sees the change. No more words have to be said.
“Well, enjoy your drink with this pretty girl here. Seems like she’s got a good head on
her shoulders… I look forward to hearing you play again.”
The old woman rises with her cane and leaves their table. David’s break is over, but he
doesn’t return to the stage without smiling at Bethany. A smile that makes her look lost for a
moment, lost in some memory, but it lasts for only a moment and she smiles back.
“Want to sing a song with me?”
“Sure…” and she takes the hand he offers, following him to the stage.
And that’s how David Threnody and Bethany Labeau met. Over absinthe and a song
they sang together, an old Lead Belly song—“Goodnight Irene”. And it was what David needed.
He needed a girl. He needed Bethany after finishing those first songs, his first recordings. And
she needed him too, for they both had stories of a ride they remembered that they needed to tell
each other. The story of her stay in New Orleans over the last year what comes next, in how
David Threnody met her husband, met Popovitch again, and struck a deal.
But first we must talk about William Bloodwood, and about Bridgette, his mother,
Bethany’s grandmother. Because that’s how Bethany came to New Orleans, a little over a year
following her short-lived love affair with Denny, when her fiancée returned home from the war
after being wounded, how he brought home his morphine habit and got involved with William’s
frequent trips to New Orleans for pills, among other things, contraband William purchased from
people he came to know through Denny before he disappeared after robbing the church coffers
of Hemphill and had to leave East Texas—that last time Bethany saw Denny, seeing him drive
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off to cross the Sabine never to return, her pawned black onyx ring from their promised
elopement what got him out of jail. Another spring came and then winter, and Pete Southhouse
came home. They were married in March of 1944, and soon after that they moved to New
Orleans, ostensibly for a job he acquired at a textile factory, loading cargo on barges that came
up the Mississippi, but really because William and Bridgette had a good deal going, living in the
9th Ward, not far from where David Threnody made his first recordings, and Pete needed his
morphine just like William and Bridgette needed their pills, William hooked on oxycodone and
amphetamines, laudanum, supplying his mother with the same, that and cough syrup spiked with
codeine for her persistent cough from chain-smoking cigarettes. They all lived under the same
roof. One big happy family.
Bethany didn’t follow her husband just for his job though. She came to sing, writing
some of her own songs then at that time, just as David, but instead of sharing them she kept them
to herself. Not for fear that they weren’t good. She just didn’t have David’s courage. That
courage that when you bare your soul you better know you have. Because then it becomes a
game. A game that lovers play, helping each other and helping themselves, as it were. The truth
being when you know what you’ve revealed you really haven’t revealed anything. And it’s the
same with artists. With what they create. You don’t have to be out of touch to defend against
what people know about you based on all the gossip of what you’ve created. Their petty plays
on your conjunctions. At a certain age you’re no longer naïve to all the idle talk—you just don’t
care. Because you know not to focus on you. That’s no longer a surprise unless you want it to
be. And when you know that you know a little bit about the people trying to surprise you. You
see the emptiness of what they’re betting on. You’re not naked—they are. Anyone that’s sung a
song or two knows they’re not blinded by the spotlight. It’s just the other people are in the dark.
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Maybe David helped Bethany a little, when she helped him with that old woman with a cane. He
helped her have a little blind courage in that first song they sang together. And together they
became brave.
But William Bloodwood—that’s a story in itself. He’s what led them all to New
Orleans—Bridgette and Pete Southhouse and Bethany. He’s what led Bethany to meet David
Threnody over an absinthe. You see he may have been younger than Bethany, but he was
married before her, their first child born while he was still in his teens, while Bethany was
having her short tryst with Denny. This woman didn’t mind his drug habit because he didn’t
mind she was an alcoholic. She’d be what we’d call a cougar nowadays. Already having a child
from a previous marriage. Things went well for a while, but when money fell short after Denny
left town, tensions in William’s home-life got out of hand. She didn’t mind the money came
from drugs as long as there was money, but when William’s connections dried up after Denny
left, she couldn’t see financing his trips to New Orleans, even though he didn’t mind funding her
alcohol. So William moved back in with his mother. The funny thing is if they’d stayed
together they would have made it. William was a good father. He gave her child support, this in
a time before courts mandated it, but it wasn’t enough for her to make it on her own, and what he
gave her made him unable to make it, and he had to live with his mother because he had nowhere
else to go after she kicked him out if he was to live and give her any money at all. It’s a story
not unique in present day. How children are caught in the middle of useless passions, even if it’s
to their detriment and no one is helped by it. William just lost himself in the pills, and Bridgette
didn’t mind as long as he kept supplying her with laudanum and cough syrup. And that’s how
they all wound up in New Orleans. Pete Southhouse found a job as a cover for his veteran
weakness and found a house for all of them to live in, and William kept providing the contraband
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through people he still knew from his frequent trips across the Sabine in the past. William kept
mailing money to his estranged wife. She swore she’d never leave Hemphill because she was
born there, a small town all she knew and wanted to know, and so for a while his child grew up
without a father. At least that was the situation when David Threnody came into the picture.
This what led to a drug deal gone bad that sent William and Bridgette back home to Hemphill
and got Pete Southhouse killed. All that’s left is tell how Popovitch got involved, but first we
must talk about why Bethany put up with it, why she put up with her husband’s morphine habit
and what led her have that drink of absinthe with David.
Whatever you put up with in one relationship is the baggage you bring to the next. You
make a deal with yourself not to put up with whatever it is hurt you in the past, and you stand
your ground on some memory and all the things that remind you of it. It’s how you heal, how
you deal. How you help yourself get back on your feet, thinking maybe God’s got your back.
But you won’t find it in the bible—the saying that started this chapter, this story of how David
and Bethany met. A saying that stems from the idea that your world was set in motion long
before you arrived on the scene and it’s up to you now to find your way in it. Grace is not a
factor in this world view, and maybe it was grace that brought David Threnody into Bethany’s
life, what brought her into his. Though they didn’t call it that in finding each other. They didn’t
call it fate. Maybe because after memories of taking their respective rides, they didn’t believe in
fate anymore—they couldn’t if they were to believe the ride was over.
It’s hard to believe someone really wants to help you after you’ve been burned. After
Denny, the memories of that deception, that secret of her love affair with him she kept to herself
in giving her vows to Pete Southhouse, Bethany knew she had a private world she shared with no
one, not even her husband. She learned that hard lesson that it’s not easy find someone you can
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open up to and truly be yourself, where you can say anything and their answer is simply, “Yes”,
and there’s no judgment—you don’t feel judged. You don’t have to defend your self-esteem, or
feel blame for your weaknesses, and you’re comfortable in being vulnerable. Few people find
that, and most people never find it all. That love that makes you feel that. Feel safe. What
usually happens is you feel tricked into having a false sense of security. That’s how Bethany felt
after she saw Denny drive away. It’s what David felt after that ride in Mississippi that left him
stealing out a window alone before a sunrise. And once this happens to you it’s natural to
protect yourself from it happening again, even if it’s not fair to your future lovers. In a way
they’ve already let you down before they’ve ever failed you. Your guard is up to even the
smallest of indiscretions, and even if you’ve had many friends, many lovers, you live in a world
where you’re alone. You’re alone waiting on someone to lie to you and tell you you’re not, but
deep down you never believe them.
And so Bethany went through the motions. She went through the motions of love being
Pete Southhouse’s wife. She attended to his needs for attention because she saw it as her duty,
already learning from Jeremy Bloodwood how to minister to a man’s self-absorption, and she
supported his morphine habit because she knew he had some unseen wounds from the war. And
he said nothing of her smoking marijuana. That was her unseen world. She had a room with a
radio in it where she closed the door and listened to the Blues, an ashtray and the smoke her only
companions as she listened to the music. A place she escaped to with her own private memories.
Sometimes Bridgette losing her temper, cursing when she thought the music was too loud after
she awakened from her stupors, the pills and cough syrup wore off. And she took walks through
the streets of New Orleans. While her husband was at work. When the company of her
grandmother and Uncle William was too much for her—their frantic hustling when the pills were
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running out, and their docility when they had plenty. She would go out in order to go in, finding
her songs, finding that peace in being alone with the outside world, the strangers she passed in
her walks through the French Quarter assuring her that any loneliness she felt was only a matter
of a restless mind wanting something it wasn’t even sure existed. One of these walks leading her
to Pirates Alley one night, to hear a man she heard on the radio, and maybe we have that old
woman with a cane to thank, for sparking that question, that question between David and
Bethany, perhaps lulled by the intoxication of the absinthe, that question all new lovers ask
themselves already knowing the answer—should I try again, should I believe that this time I
won’t be alone, that it actually exists, that I can let this person into my secret world, and even if
they hurt me—it’s worth it.
But we don’t just have that old woman with a cane to thank, in how she reminded
Bethany of Marie Toussaint, the mid-wife present at her birth, spurring her on to listen, really
listen to David, and give him what he needed to lose that lost look in his eyes after that old
woman preyed upon his weaknesses, in the seemingly random way she decided to pay David a
visit that night in Pirates Alley, a fan come to hear a musician play—how she made him take a
look at himself, a process that always leads to something missing in your eyes. We don’t just
have her to thank, for this is where Popovitch also played a part. How his need for closure on
what happened in Biloxi before the war also brought David and Bethany together, making what
could have been just a chance meeting, a momentary connection, something more. But before
this, perhaps a journal entry Bethany wrote at the time, soon after meeting David, can shed light
on what led David to do what he did, what he wrote of it in his own journals, in involving
Popovitch with a drug deal gone bad, which not only led to Popovitch being killed, falling on his
own sword as it were, but also how in almost a matter of will on David’s part caused Pete
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Southhouse to die as well, Johnny Tribout, David’s friend caught in the middle of this love
entanglement, a scar on his neck his trophy from trying to help. All this what freed David and
Bethany to marry, to have children they could help along—that next part in the telling of David’s
life, how he met another prophet—a man, not a woman this time—who foretold his future and
the price he would have to pay for his sins.
September 11th, 1945—I took a walk the other night. I had spent the day alone. I awoke
alone and went about my day not really thinking I was missing anything. Not my husband who
left our bed while I was still asleep, for a job I knew he cared nothing about while he just waited
for his next fix, not in the routines that were part of my normal day, routines that didn’t include
talking to anyone. My grandmother and my uncle just bodies in the house—their routines never
interfering with mine—they had their rooms in the house and I had mine. The kitchen and
bathroom we shared at different times during the day… But it’s funny how you can be haunted
into feeling lonely when you really aren’t. Maybe it was a dream I had while asleep that I
couldn’t remember when I woke up, but it left me with the feeling it gave—the feeling that I
should think something was missing. And I guess it just made me remember Denny, that first
time I fell hard in love and was burned, and it started me reasoning, started a conversation in my
mind where I wondered if I was happy then, in those times we shared together. I went through
memories, trying to fix a point that defined the happiness, that declared the sadness of what I
missed once it was over. And it got me wondering if the happiness was ever real, if what I
missed in that time being with him was something I should miss, and I realized the hesitance I
felt was the conclusion I came up with, the conclusion that actually I didn’t need him at all, what
I needed was it to have never happened so I wouldn’t be fooled into missing it once it was over.
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I didn’t need what happened between us, but it had happened so I would think I need it, and for a
moment I got a glimpse of the eternal—how nothing turns into something only when there’s a
measurement of time, but without the measurement, without time, nothing was all there is, how
in our mortality of being we create time in order for things to happen so we can remember them
and record how they end, but without beginning, without end, nothing was created and nothing
ended—these were just manifestations of our minds which never existed. It was our mind’s idea
of time which made things happen. Things we mourn once we create the idea that they’re over.
That idea of God and love… And so I went for a walk, this strange conclusion on my mind
when I met him. His name David. And when that old woman with a cane came to our table,
after he answered my eyes, I remembered Marie Toussaint, the mid-wife who presided over my
birth. I remembered her words to me when I came to her for advice, for the poison I sought from
her. And after a day alone, taunted by an unremembered dream that I should feel lonely, that I
should feel something was missing, I saw in his eyes that I was never alone, even when I had no
one to talk to. Because when I listened to him I heard my life. I heard my life in his life.
Almost like he was inside a mirror which reflected me. And suddenly I knew I was never alone,
even in days such as the one I’d just had where I was all by myself talking to no one. My life
was going on in everyone else’s life, and if you listened you could hear it… And time stood still.
There was no measurement of it from one moment to the next when I took his hand, when I
returned the smile he gave me, and followed him to that stage where together we sang a song. A
song that never began and never ended, only existing now because my mind is trying to express
it—its beginning and end. And I knew this somehow—I remembered the dream. I knew I was
just a fool falling in love again…
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And I knew what it was. I knew it was adultery. I was taking something that wasn’t
mine, which made me fear what would be taken from me. Like a sound, a faint sound, heard
from far off, but you know what the sound is. You identify its source, and even with it being far
away and not right before you, it exists and is very real. I knew my music would be threatened,
that a new sound would come into it from that faint sound I heard far off. I was aware of having
something when she was in my arms, and I knew I’d lost something when she was gone. My life
on hold between her visits to my door, for that’s how our affair began. It began with singing a
song and a night shared, and then for months it went on painstakingly slow. Knocks on my door
in the West Bank as she crossed the river, stealing away from her family, her husband in the 9th
Ward—that door opening up to her, a world we shared together for a few hours that seemed like
all my existence, and then that door closing as she left to return to him. My bed empty, but full of
her memory, full of mirrors where we saw each other, sometimes the smell of her lingering, those
images of myself looking in her eyes as she straddled me, both before and after making love, as I
looked up to her, my hands caressing her naked shoulders, that smooth soft curve of skin, my
hands touching it, and the wordlessness of pain she must have saw in my want, my desire, to own
it as only my own, with no other hands touching it before me and none after. How I reached out
to her, somewhere up above me, and felt I loved a ghost, an angel haunting me with brief stays—
I under reprieve of guilt between those visits that made her real, and coveted… I don’t know of a
love that ends because I’m not sure how it begins. And days and nights—the idea of their
change and becoming each other—only makes me wonder what I have become and what
changed me into it. All I know is I don’t want it to end. Whatever it is that began. In first sin
and the price of it after. I sinned to have her and I would sin to keep her. And if this was the
price for love, how it begins and ends, I was willing to pay. I would search for the virtue in my
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selfishness. My cruel jealousy of how she had a life, a whole life not built around me. So that
she would be mine and no others—not in memory nor in imaginations of what was to come—
stronger than death and as inevitable as the grave. And my being in one was my nothingness in
the other. My consciousness split in their existence by her presence and absence in my life…
And I know now. I know my past was what brought her into my future. How my future relied on
her past. And a sound, far away, would give us our evolved identities… Everything she was
before me was what I was before her, and what we became together each time she knocked on
my door was that sound far off dying so that we could be what we were to each other in how we
remembered it. My guitar, where it came from—the clue, the missing piece in the puzzle that
would shatter everything from our pasts that we feared, and what would bring us together as
man and wife. How she became my best friend in the guilt we voiced between us. Maybe God’s
grace helping us. Because you can’t help anyone when you can’t help yourself—when you know
it’s a sin you need help with. And what God brings together no man can tear asunder, even if a
woman will…
--David Threnody, on committing adultery with Bethany—from his journals 1941 to 1948
This where Popovitch steps in. The mind movies of which he was a character in that time
in Biloxi before the war like a bad dream you wake from of a morning, souring your whole day,
giving it a bad start, like a nagging doubt of something you need to finish, give some final
absolution. You see his wife left him after Nina was murdered, after his early retirement and the
questionable suicide of Nina’s killer. It was why he came to New Orleans, having relatives
there. He was an old man, an alcoholic, depressed and clinging to the past in what had become
his lonely habits, which is maybe why he listened, why when he heard David Threnody’s first
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recordings he went looking for him, looking for that guitar, that Gibson ES-150 that he had given
back to David, absent of a string. And like a bad dream he awoke from, he saw himself as a
character in someone else’s story, that mind movie David played out before the war explaining
the love entanglement of his friend, Johnny Tribout, and why he returned to Mississippi. But
Popovitch couldn’t see himself as just a chapter in someone else’s life. His pride and loneliness,
his haunted addiction to memories from the past, would not let the dream sleep. And so he went
to a witch, to invoke spirits that were dead in order to ask them how to seek revenge of the
living.
It was a door on St. Peter’s street, on the corner opposite Royal. He knew she lived there
and did her business from a card a homeless man passed to him on one of his walks through the
French Quarter. How she was a soothsayer, and for a small amount of money she could tell you
your fortune. All she needed was to look at your hand and some small article from the person
you wished to know about, some trivial possession of the person you wished to do good or evil.
And so on one Friday morning in the middle of March 1946, at a time when David was still
questioning the response to his first recordings and involved in an emotionally exhausting love
affair with Bethany, she too tired of going through the motions being Pete Southhouse’s wife, in
fact ready to tell her husband, ready to end it, though he already knew, Popovitch went to this
voodoo woman’s door and awoke her.
“What you want, white man?”
“I need your help…”
“Hah! Here the trees are blooming and you need help. I know what you want. It’s
written all over your face. You want forgiveness from someone that won’t or can’t give it to
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ya… But’s that’s for leaves fallin’ from the tree and wasted words. Not for new leaves
bloomin’. Can’t you smell it? Smell that honeysuckle and jasmine? The lilac? Now’s the time
for flowers. Not fallen leaves mournin’ what’s dead…”
She could have been Marie Toussaint’s older sister. She had the same toothless mouth.
The same stars in her eyes. Under the brim of a black hat. Unwashed, stringy white hair
hanging limp below it. She ushered him in and down a long hallway, past closed doors to the
back room where she did her business. A typical house in New Orleans with its French
architecture—not very wide, but deep in how you went into it. Her back room with a table, the
legs covered by an overflowing cloth, a rich purple with frayed gold ends. Tarot cards played
out from a last meeting not necessary for Popovitch’s visit. Tall candles on black iron stands in
the corner. Thick red curtains covering the windows. And a birdcage. A small parakeet on its
perch. Next to a door that led to the old woman’s kitchen.
“Don’t you know you shouldn’t want something from what’s dead? Dead things don’t
help with living. Ask that man—Lazarus. He had to consider death twice—he, he! And I can
tell what you’re considering. Ain’t no good to consider yourself livin’ to a woman that considers
you dead. You’ll never know if they’re lying to ya. The lies they tell ya about another man just
reflections of what they found wrong with you… But you ain’t here for a wife—are ya? Do you
got it?”
“What am I supposed to have?”
“Money, fool! Think I’d waste my time with ya otherwise?”
Popovitch reaches in his pocket and counts out his loose change, his folded bills, and
hands it to her. She motions for him to sit at the table, and after he sits she sits across from him,
her arms reaching out and the palms of her hands face down.
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“Now… what can I do for ya?”
“It’s a man—a musician. He was involved in something. Something from my past—my
daughter’s death. I have some unresolved business with him. Him and his friend—his friend my
daughter’s last lover…”
“Yes, yes… some secret. Some deep, dark secret from your past. Something you
thought you did for your family, but it cost you that very thing—he, he! Let me have a look at
you. Let me see your hands.”
And Popovitch stretches out his hands before her—palms up. She grabs them tight at
first. Then relaxes her grip. Letting go with one hand to lift the small round spectacles she’s
wearing further up her nose. Like she’s getting a closer look with them.
“Now I’m supposed to say somethin’… Say, ‘Aha!’ But you already know—don’t you?
You know what I see. You think seeking for forgiveness you’re going to find it? Forgiveness
from someone you hurt and that hates you now? This ain’t no church! You didn’t sacrifice what
you should have sacrificed. And now you want them to listen? You want God to listen? You
used the power you had once, but you didn’t use if for good… and now you want forgiveness.
Forgiveness from what’s dead. Something you only have memories of now. It’s there—in the
lines of your hand. You carry the scars of a fool!”
“What can I do? What can I do about this man?”
“You know what to do. Bring me somethin’. Bring me somethin’ of his… And you
know what you need to bring. I don’t need to see it in your hands. I see it in your eyes… Bring
me that guitar. And you know I don’t even need that. Just a string. A string from it is all I
need… a string will do.”
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And there’s a safe world (what you feel is a safe world) and a world where you are living,
but you know it’s evil. About the time Popovitch was paying a visit to an old voodoo woman in
the French Quarter, seeking answers to his questions on revenge, Bethany was paying one of her
visits to David. A safe world, at least it felt that way to both of them in those few brief hours
they spent together in their nakedness, but also evil, for they were living and they knew it—they
knew it was a sin. And it’s funny how sin makes you know you’re living, even if what they say
about it is true—that the wages of sin is death. Maybe it’s because when you know what you’re
doing leads to death it also lets you know you’re alive. All the little vices. The bad habits that
go into your day—your defiance. Your way of saying to the world you know it’s wrong, but it
feels good now, and even if it hurts me later I know I’m living now because I’m not afraid. I
won’t fear what doesn’t keep me safe. Because safe doesn’t necessarily mean I won’t be sorry,
and in fact I might be more sorry letting my life go by without taking a chance, without taking a
risk now and then, so that when it’s all over I can look back and say, “I did that. That was me. I
was wild once. And I’m not ashamed. I’m not ashamed I was willing to live like that and face
the consequences…” Both Bethany and David tasted this. These words might have been on
their lips at each of their partings. And they were torn. Torn between two worlds. A safe world,
free from the emotions that left them both wild with sorrow when David had to close his door
and she returned to her husband. A world unencumbered with the known risk that surely
someone was going to get hurt. And that world which is like the high of a drug. What you have
to do to get that drug. Who you have to associate with in order to get it. Almost like an
underworld to a nice, quiet suburb where everyone’s insured, the house is paid for, and the worst
thing you have to worry about with your neighbor is picking up their mail while they’re away on
vacation. They were both torn. Torn between being bored or taking that ride again. A ride
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staccato that had heaven as its road signs, but by its descent you knew it was taking you
somewhere else.
“I don’t remember anymore. The questions I had—they seem answered…”
They aren’t in bed. They are at David’s door. Saying their partings. Giving each other
their momentary closures of something they knew wasn’t finished. Bethany adjusts the scarf, the
bandanna tied around her hair. She doesn’t need a mirror. She uses David’s eyes. Looking at
her.
“Is it what I feel? Do you feel forgiven?”
But she already knows the answer to this as well. She is the woman she can’t be with her
husband. She can be the woman that forgives because she is forgiven… Her husband, Pete
Southhouse, knows now of her visits—she’s told him as a woman tells a man these things. And
for some reason she thinks of the coffee. The coffee she drinks in the house of her husband, the
house shared with her grandmother and uncle. How it tastes different from the strong chicory
coffee David makes for her. How she wishes she tasted of it first. How she wishes that was the
first thing she tasted of a morning. With the marijuana they both share as a habit. That habit
something they both used to prefer to do alone. For the full effect without fear. But now she
wishes to share it with him. She wishes that was her mornings, felt even more so because it was
spring in New Orleans—a good time of year, a good time to be there, noticing all the little details
of nature becoming awake. The music of it. She wanted him to share in all this with her. She
wanted his coffee. His exhale of smoke. To make her awake.
She didn’t want to be the woman she was with her husband. A woman that couldn’t
forgive. A woman that had to be hard and fight. Wearing armor to her husband’s harsh words
when he wasn’t fixing up with morphine. The words he called her after knowing of her affair.
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When she was with him she had to be something she didn’t like. Though many women are like
it. The kind of woman that doesn’t take shit from no one. Tough. Spirited. Willing to lie for
practical benefits—survival. Other women her family in her war with men, any man trying to
keep her down. For that world, the world of her life in that house in the 9th Ward, was a place
where she could show no sign of weakness. No one would help her if she did. Instead she
would just feel helpless, and that’s not a feeling you want to have in that kind of world. A world
where love has somehow been so easily replaced with hate. Leaving you feeling baffled as to
how it happened. Over time. It does you no good. You can’t be depressed. Needy. For you
won’t find your fulfillment there, a haven, not in that kind of world. She had to be tough. She
had to be a woman, in full control of all her powers, and not a little girl, ready to break.
“You know you’re safe here. You’re safe with me…”
They both look out David’s door. To the morning becoming afternoon. And it’s like
their eyes are taking pictures. His last words reassured. By a soft breeze. Soft sunlight.
Radiating their world with a glow. Birds chirping. In praise of what spring makes you feel.
Even a spider weaving its web in a nearby tree branch of a live oak is beautiful, with drops of
dew falling on it from moist, green leaves. New leaves blooming bright green. Blossoming
flowers rich too in their myriad colors and fragrances. And even an impending thunderstorm that
makes that web shiver, the gray clouds forming in the distance, ushering in Popovitch’s
existence—what would happen—only made these fresh leaves, these fresh flowers with their
moist dew drops, upturn to drink in even more, drink in this coming rain. They saw all this
looking out together. In their parting at David’s door. And they too drank it in. No fear in how
they shared in it. How they shared in spring’s sin, marking winter’s true death. Its plotted
murder.
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“I don’t remember anymore. The days and nights in which I wrote the songs you’ve
heard me sing. I used to. Every time I would sing them it wasn’t like I had to remember the
words. I just had to remember writing them. What my life was when I wrote them. And each
time I sang them I remembered what I felt, what I felt writing them, putting that feeling into what
I sang. The song not really mattering, but what I remembered feeling. I don’t remember that
anymore. I can’t now—don’t you see? For any new song I write now will have you in it. I’ll
remember you singing it—writing it. And I don’t know if I can bear it. I can’t bear it just being
another memory…”
She puts her hand to his cheek. And they lean in to each other for a kiss. Lips parted
with an awakening that the birds around them sing. Their eyes so close that they see themselves
in them. And then she turns and walks away from his reaching hands.
That image. That image of David reaching out to Bethany. Finding only emptiness even
in a spring morning’s praise. That image what must lead to what happens next. Popovitch.
Leaving his card with a bar maid at one of David’s gigs in the city. A hole in the wall in the
French Quarter. After he sang those songs that made him remember what was happening while
writing them. A note on the back, which read: Meet me on the riverboat casino, the blackjack
tables. Tomorrow. 3 o’clock. Bring your guitar…
Hope is what you have when you don’t have what you want. David wanted Bethany.
And it was driving him crazy. It’s usually idle time. When you’re busy you don’t have much
time to hope for things. Other than maybe some time off to hope for something that doesn’t keep
you so busy. We spend most of our life this way. Hoping. Never quite satisfied with what we
got. What keeps you going today what you hope for tomorrow. If it wasn’t for our routines
we’d probably all go mad. Going over memories from the past. Wondering what we did wrong
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as to why things didn’t quite turn out the way we assumed they would. And doors close. Like
David’s door every time Bethany left. Leaving David wondering why he needed her. How he
couldn’t help himself from wanting her. Because you can’t help yourself from what you hope
for. That seed is planted somehow and then we are merely mechanisms, playing out our fortune
cookies, those messages, those signs we see in our life, guiding us to where we think we want to
go. You don’t really know what you want. Your life just kind of teases you with this. In the
cards you’re handed. And that’s what you go on—impulses, instincts—a gut feeling. Calling it
following your heart.
Sometimes what you hope for is feeling you have nothing to lose. The better safe than
sorry idea we use to protect ourselves from being hurt. A sort of hedge we put around ourselves
that allows us to risk it only when we think we need to if we are in any way going to get what we
want. David wanted Bethany. After seeing her bathing in that pool of light. Answering with her
eyes. In that strong connection she bridged to his past when she saw his lost look in speaking to
that old woman with a cane, and how she helped him regain his footing. How she brought him
back from a world where Rosie Soledad lay heavy on his heart, and gave him hope that he could
make that world better somehow. Almost like he could go back to what was then with what he
knew now and fix it—fix it somehow where that heart wound would heal. That he was a better
man now, and she gave him hope that he wouldn’t make the same mistakes. Those mistakes of a
lost soul… You have hope in what gives you hope, and David found that in Bethany. The only
problem was she was married. Maybe at first he thought he had nothing to lose letting her into
his world, but after he let her in he did. She became more than just a guest paying him visits on
the West Bank. Having tasted this he wanted more, and maybe that’s the problem with having
nothing to lose—this freedom doesn’t stay free, not if you want to play it safe, stay playing it
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safe. Because there’s a cost for everything you gain, and even when you’re betting on you have
nothing to lose, you’re still making a bet—a bet you can lose.
And what about Bethany? She had more to lose than David. Yet she still came to his
door. It’s hard to decipher the heart of a woman, but maybe it’s safe to say Bethany had a good
heart. Maybe she was just missing something. And women go looking for what they’re missing.
What they miss, and why, perhaps a mystery. It has to be intuited. Maybe she needed help.
Maybe she wanted to help somebody. And these two reasons are what brought David Threnody
into her life. Her own hopes and dreams. Her songs for today in what she wanted for tomorrow.
That banished hope when she saw Denny driving away not entirely abandoned. And when she
saw David play, when she heard his first recordings, heard his voice, it took her back to her first
love. And first loves are the reasons for all hopes. You can’t get to that, and no one can take it
away from you.
But it’s true—hope can be destroyed. You wouldn’t think that fulfilling your own hope
means destroying another’s. Yet what David hoped for, what Bethany wanted, meant somebody
had to lose. This where hope can get tricky, possibly evil—dangerous. When there’s a will
there’s a way, but to go that way is not without its sacrifices. Not only maybe the hopes of some
other, but in what you have to do, what you have to become, in order to get what you think you
want. David became a murderer, and Bethany was his accomplice. It wasn’t premeditated. It
wasn’t thought out, or planned, but it was there submerged in their subconscious drives. Their
need to be in each other’s arms. And Popovitch was like the fortune cookie. His left note to
David what got him thinking. Hesitant of a possibility. The temptation of one sin leading to a
deeper sin. And somehow Johnny Tribout got roped into it. The missing piece in a puzzle from
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the past. One man’s heartache from the past the satisfaction of a future desire for another. But
how could he know that? He was just trying to be a friend.
Call it inertia. A body at rest tends to stay at rest. A body in motion tends to stay in
motion. And it’s the same with relationships—their movement. Once it starts it’s hard to stop.
The same with sin. How one sin leads to a deeper sin. David and Bethany had started
something, and neither of them knew how to stop it. This what movement is. A starting point
and a stopping point. Somehow they had overcome the inertia to be at rest when they met each
other. But what was it? What motivated it to start? What motivates love to begin? What gives
it momentum? The mystery of this is more than rhetorical. Maybe you just know, and it’s more
than just a force, a compulsion. Like what makes you get out of bed in the morning rather than
stay in it. Maybe it’s not a movement that starts and stops. It’s more like a whirlwind—a
revolution that seems brief, but it keeps going around. Away from you for only moment before
it’s right back in your face. Sometimes just passing you by. Making you maybe think you
should be thankful. Other times it hits you dead on, and it’s quite a ride, until it drops you and
leaves you devastated. But if it is inertia, if it’s inertia that keeps love going, what was its first
cause? You can go no deeper, no deeper than your birth, and perhaps this is the first song of it.
Its first cry. And you were pushed, pushed out into it, and this is what got you going. Running
into others. Giving them that gentle nudge. This being, this is what it is. All of us floating. All
of us dancing. Dancing in the ether. Waiting on something to change us.
There’s no sense being sentimental about it. Good things, the good things in life—what
you should be thankful for—this isn’t considered very much. You don’t wonder about the good
things that happen. How they happened. Sort of that don’t fix it if it ain’t broke idea. Nobody
notices until you don’t do it. Call it superstition. Even if it spells ingratitude. You don’t wonder
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about these things. Oftentimes taking them for granted. Only if there’s an accident, a
misfortune—do you wonder. You do a little bargaining with yourself. You get angry, and
sometimes you get contrite. You ask yourself if you’re getting what you deserve, and you come
back with different answers depending on your state of mind. David went through all sorts of
emotions when he thought about Bethany. Sometimes she was evil to him—the devil paying
him a visit. Other times she was good—an angel ministering to his wounds. But was she both?
An either/or? What fits the profile sometimes doesn’t match later on when you take a second
look. The facts, the evidence for each case depending on who or what’s defending you, and
David’s conscience was on trial. You could almost pinpoint it with his days, with his nights.
Upon waking after dreams in the early morning he felt the blame, his sins casting shadows with
the dawn. But as the day went on, as he went about his routines, going over his grievances in his
mind, he found reasons to blame her and justify himself. And by evening, as he readied for
sleep, he’d played out the game over and over, sensing the outcome he needed to put it out of his
head for a while so he could rest and do it again the next day. But this isn’t really significant.
Only a narcissist would get sentimental about it. Because we all do this. We all play this game.
We all start out as shepherds to our beds. Counting our sheep.
But David wasn’t tending sheep anymore. He was no longer an adolescent youth. He’d
seen his share of battle. The memories in his mind from the war. His inertia had led him to
where he was now. And soon he would have more blood on his hands. In the choice he made to
win his wife. To have her. In that choice to open his door and keep on opening it, even if
sometimes it had to close in order to open again—in that inertia of give and take, in that truth
that nothing is ever at rest, nothing is ever in movement, without some outside reference to
compare it against. And so now comes David’s meeting with Popovitch.
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Maybe it was fitting it was a casino. A casino again—a blackjack table. Like in those
mind movies of David before the war in Biloxi. Where he consoled Johnny Tribout. On love’s
loss. But instead of former lovers—memories of past bets—it was the gamble of a new lover.
And in old man. No men at the table with pictures that may have been on the backs of books.
The only person dressed like a musician David. No sounds of slot machines. No familiar
cocktail waitresses, nor the smoke of a fire that looked like it could be the morning mist of a
cemetery. Just Popovitch. Waiting with his drink. His chips all in. His last bet as David
appeared holding his guitar case. The boat docked. Not in the middle of the Mississippi, but on
the riverfront. Awaiting gamblers. Tourists hoping to win a free meal after walking the wide
street of Canal.
And maybe I should speak of objectivity. The difference between objective truth and
subjective truth. One is observed and the other is an observer. One is a measurement and the
other is a comparison of the measures. A world without and a world within. Revolving and
centered. A point and a point of view. Phenomenal and noumenal. A thing in itself—
independent of the mind—and sensory reality. Conception and perception. What exists and
what we think exists… Now’s a good time to speak of it. In how I’ve been telling this story—
the story of David’s life. What David saw when he saw Popovitch, and what Popovitch knew.
The argument merely definitions. The definitions arguments. These very words adhering to one
truth or the other. In what you construct or deconstruct—your choice. Whether you believe in
free will or fate mattering little. Not in this story. How it is told. More or less the facts remain
the same. With or without consensus—this is what happened.
“I see you still have it.”
“Once I thought it would never leave Mississippi, but I was wrong.”
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“I was wrong too—wrong about a lot of things… How’s your friend?”
“Well, he made it home alive…”
“As did you… The war’s over now.”
David sets the guitar case down at his feet and sits on the stool next to Popovitch. The
table’s closed. No one else sits there. The dealer calling for another shoe. The horn blowing
announcing the boat leaving the dock soon. They don’t have much time.
“What do you want?”
“Oh… it’s just an idea I have. He could have been my son you know. If Nina was still
alive.”
“But she isn’t.”
“No… she isn’t. How about you? Have you found your paramour?”
“How did you know?”
“I have my sources… I’ve seen you play. Can I see it? Perhaps I’m being sentimental.
A sentimental old man. But you know why. You know why it has meaning to me.”
“Yes…”
David opens the guitar case. He takes out the Gibson ES-150 and hands it to Popovitch.
It looks strange in the old man’s hands, and you’re not sure what is more fragile—the guitar or
Popovitch holding it. And there’s a capo. A dollar bill wrapped around it. Popovitch unhooks it
from the fret where it rests, turning it slowly in his hand, examining it.
“What’s this for?”
“It shortens the playable length of the strings. A way to increase pitch… I use the dollar
bill on my acoustic. I put it in between the strings near the sound hole. Gives it the sound of a
snare drum…”
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The boat horn blows again, announcing departure.
“I can’t stay. There is a woman. She’s coming to see me today. Pretty soon she’ll be
knocking on my door. I don’t want to miss her.”
Popovitch holds the guitar by the neck and passes it back to David. The capo is still in
his other hand. They make eye contact for a moment, not looking down at their hands, but their
eyes address it.
“Keep it,” David says.
Popovitch smiles. Like he did in the confessional when talking to the priest before the
war. His blue eyes bright and glinty. David rises from his stool and puts the guitar back in the
case. He never took off his hat, and he tips it before walking away. Popovitch sits erect for
another moment. Then his whole body sags. He looks down at the capo and turns it between his
fingers. His face ponders, and then he unfolds the dollar bill from the capo. There is black
lettering on the back of it—a message: Tomorrow. Huey P. Long Bridge. River Road 9 p.m.
Johnny will be there…
“You still think you need help, white man?”
Popovitch pulls the capo out of his pocket, reaching up from her doorstep where he’s
standing to hand it to her. The old witch doesn’t take it and just smiles. Her door not open all
the way. Her head peering out of the crack. The spectacles she’s wearing low on her nose, and
she croons her neck to look through them at the article in Popovitch’s hand. Her stringy white
hair still hanging limp below the black hat on her head.
“Well come on in then. Looks like you’ve been given somethin’. And why is that? Why
you feel safe when somethin’s given to ya? Like you can give it up because it’s been given.
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God is good—yes He is… That’s why it blows your mind when bad happens. After it happens.
And you know why—he, he!”
Popovitch follows her again back to the room where she does her business. She doesn’t
so much as walk as shuffle. Like she has a bad knee or a bad ankle. But she doesn’t use a cane
and Popovitch wonders why.
“Let me feed my bird while you tells me what you want. Shame to keep a bird all caged
up—I know. But he’s my friend. Keeps me company. I even taught him a few words. Want to
hear them? Yes, little bird! If he could talk and tell ya all that’s gone on in this room! Make
your ears burn—he, he! If all you did is listen like him you wouldn’t be so lonely. Funny how
we talk just to hear ourselves. We is social creatures—aren’t we?”
She has a bag, a small grain sack, full of hardened corn kernels and seeds. She pours
some in her hand and reaches through the wires of the cage, letting the bird peck them one at a
time from between her gnarled fingers, her nails long and dirty. The room is dark with the heavy
red curtains. She is a shadow with her back turned to Popovitch, and she remains a shadow as
she turns to him.
“Now, let me see what you got for me. I trust you met him—the man you wanted to
meet? He gave it to you—didn’t he?”
“Yes, with a message…”
“Oh, I’m sure… Why else would he have given it to ya?”
The old woman takes the capo, unfolding the dollar bill, raising her spectacles to read the
black lettering on the back.
“You can tell a lot about a person by how they write. Not the words—the message—the
handwriting. This man writes like he’s a child…”
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“Can you tell me what will happen if I go to this meeting. If I go to the place he
indicates?”
“You already know you’re gonna go. So why should I tell ya?”
“Rose from the dead! Rose from the dead!”
The parakeet shrieks, spreading its wings and flapping them, its long tail feathers splayed
as its clawed feet hop and reattach to its perch.
“Hah! I told you this bird speaks. Just gotta let it think it’s part of the human flock…
Yes! Put a mirror in there with it it’ll just chirp like other birds. But surround it with humans
it’ll talk like a human… I cover him every morning and talk to him. Just like I’m talking to you
now—he, he!”
“What will happen? What will happen if I go to meet this man?”
“What will happen? What you want to happen! We ain’t just hustling flowers here.
Flowers don’t just spring up from nothin’. They grow on top of somethin’. Thing is what you is.
Are you on top? Or the bottom? This man—this musician—you heard his songs?”
“Yes…”
“I ‘spose he just wants forgiveness. Just like you do. But he sings it. You just listen. So
why is it? Why is it you’s lonely, but he isn’t? Yes… we’s social creatures. He does it for a
woman. What you doin’ it for?”
“Maybe I just want it to end…”
“Ain’t no song ends unless it begins. You haven’t even started. That’s why he’s the
better man. That’s why he’s gonna get the better of you. It’s easy to judge. Not so easy to be
judged. And that’s why you’re gonna go. It’s your time. It’s time for you to know what you
really are. I hate to be the bringer of bad news—I really do—I think you had a good heart once,
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but that secret, what you thought was always a secret, only God can help you with that now…
Go. Go and find your peace.”
And it’s been long enough. Long enough to tell finally what happened. William
Bloodwood had arranged the meeting. The meeting that would transpire along the River Road
under Huey P. Long Bridge. A connection with some men he met while muling for Denny.
What brought him to New Orleans bringing his mother, Bethany, and Pete Southhouse. A trade
that would lead to another trade. Bethany knowing about it because she was Pete’s wife, telling
David about it. And I’m not sure how to tell it. Maybe Bridgette should—William’s mother. In
that raspy, imagined voice from chain-smoking that sounds like David Threnody’s first
recordings. What she saw, just as she’d seen that rooster crowing on top a cow’s back that
started this story of Bethany, a closure that began with Bethany’s birth and the dark lover she
knew she would find. Maybe she should tell it. What happened when her son came home to
their house in the 9th Ward where Bethany was waiting with Pete Southhouse’s body, how she
first laid eyes on David and his friend Johnny Tribout, a fresh cut on his neck. The story of how
Popovitch died…
I’ve seen some strange things in my life. Live long enough your idealism goes with your
innocence, and late in the game you don’t wonder anymore how funny time is. You can’t lose
your temper over it. That night my son came home with Bethany’s husband shot was a time
where you couldn’t think ahead, a time when you couldn’t look back—it was just fast—time was
fast and slow. So much was in that first minute, when the door opened, that it wasn’t a minute.
It was so full that it spilled over and was in slow motion though everything happened so fast.
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The door opened and life and death was there. Strangers and those somewhat familiar to me yet
altered somehow entered the room, amidst shouts, my son covered in blood, Pete’s blood—a
home so quiet, Bethany and I waiting, knowing what we were waiting on, suddenly in an uproar.
And in an instant I knew why she was so nervous, more nervous than usual, looking at the clock,
but I didn’t have time to reflect on it until later—in the drive through the night William and I
took back to Hemphill. Leaving Bethany with a man I’d just met… Pete was still alive when
they came through that door. They laid him on the floor, and his bloodstained hand reached out
to Bethany. He couldn’t talk, coughing up black blood, but his eyes—I’ll never forget his eyes—
how they looked at his wife. I saw his last moments, and that’s what’s strange. I suddenly
pictured that rooster, waking up that day Bethany was born, cursing, looking out that window
and seeing a rooster crowing on top a cow’s back. And I saw how Bethany looked at her dying
husband, how she took his bloody hand and held it, how the emptiness of death wasn’t in his
eyes, but in hers, her lover standing over them, a dark shadow with his back turned to me, how I
saw her eyes look up at him, how they reflected him like glass. That’s what strange. Because I
just didn’t see someone dying. I saw something being born. I saw their union…
It didn’t come out ‘til later. What I didn’t know until it happened told to me by my son in
our quick escape back to Texas. He behind the wheel of Pete’s car, an old Ford he purchased
after the war, talking to me to calm me down, explaining what happened in his own shortened
breath and that thudded heartbeat you hear in your ears after fear and adrenaline, after that
hangover from drinking alcohol where it’s still in your blood being metabolized by your liver—
what I felt when I wasn’t drinking cough syrup, when the pills and the laudanum wore off, and I
was awake, wide awake on that darkened road we took out of New Orleans, Pete’s body in the
trunk, William assuring me we’d get rid of it, tied to a stone and sunk in the Sabine when we
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crossed it near dawn... The fragmented pieces came together, the hints I might have foreseen
revealed, and a story appeared. A story about some old man from this musician, David’s, past
and a deal gone bad in that meeting under the bridge. Law enforcement showing up because of
a tip. Because of this old man or Bethany’s lover unclear at first, but as I pieced it together in
my mind, from what my son told me, the horror of the deception became a lucid awareness as the
car entered Texas, as I helped William with the body, the headlights shining on the shore of the
Sabine in that darkest part of night just before sunrise, gray-pink light appearing on the horizon
above the tree line as we rolled the body into the water, watching it float for a moment with the
current before it sank below the surface. Our shaking hands as I took a nip from a cough syrup
bottle, as William handed me a pill, both of us having a hard time swallowing.
I knew Bethany had a lover, but I didn’t know who until that night. And his friend was
white. As was apparently the old man that showed up when the cards where on the table in the
meeting William set up with some men from Dauphine he knew from back in the day when
Bethany’s first lover, Denny, was in our lives. Several pounds of marijuana and a suitcase full of
money exposed for a trade my son was setting up to get a shipment of pills and morphine for
Pete. The old man coming out of nowhere after Bethany’s lover showed up with his friend, after
everything was out in the open, and that’s when the cops came. The rest hazy, happening so fast,
but William remembers the old man holding a knife to the friend’s throat, I saw the cut on his
neck when they brought Pete’s body in, the old man talking some strange language to David, the
men from Dauphine opening gunfire on the cops, and maybe it was a ricochet, a stray bullet, but
it got the old man in the head, and Pete was just in between, apparently confronting Bethany’s
lover, oblivious of the bullets in the crossfire, maybe confused why the old man was there, when
one got him in the chest.
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And I didn’t piece it all together—why the cops where there, why the old man was there,
why David Threnody was there, and his friend, his name I found out to be Johnny Tribout—I
didn’t know for sure why they were all there until Bethany sent me a letter, addressed to her
father’s house in Hemphill, the postmark showing it came from the West Bank, from Algiers,
where her lover, David, stayed. Apparently that strange language my son heard that night was
Russian. And it wasn’t just cops that showed up at that meeting under Huey P. Long Bridge, it
was men from the State Department, at least that’s what David told her. How he brought his
friend along, Johnny Tribout, because that old man (she referred to him as a man named
Popovitch) wanted to meet him, wanted something from him, some closure to something from his
past, something about David’s guitar, something about a string on it—I don’t know—which is
why he brought a knife to a gunfight, leaving a scar on Johnny’s neck for his effort. That’s why
they were able to escape, how they were able to bring Pete’s body back to our house in the 9th
Ward, and why William and I weren’t followed, how we were able to escape back to Texas,
drowning Pete’s body. She told me David was questioned after, the men from Dauphine not
killed, arrested, the contraband and money confiscated, and David just got slapped with a night
in jail for the homegrown they found in the SP rail yard not far from his house, his assistance
and whatever his involvement with this man named Popovitch sealed away in the records, the
newspapers just reporting a drug bust without my son or the Bloodwood name mentioned,
without Pete Southhouse’s name mentioned.
That’s what happened. Once we made it back to Hemphill my son reunited with his wife,
his daughter (my granddaughter, like Bethany was my granddaughter) just starting to talk, just
able to say the word, “Daddy”. William moved back in with his wife and got himself a steady
job, our days muling drugs over, and I found myself back in that cabin built by my son-in-law,
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Bethany’s father, though I don’t see nothin’ strange out that window no more. Nothin’ bein’
born or dyin’. Nothin’ needing help. I just see myself out that window now. My reflection.
Waiting. And sometimes I hear it. I hear the birds a singin’. Makes me almost wake up a day
without it. Remembering my old man. Makes me almost wake up a day without cursin’…
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20
Go tell that long tongue liar/Go and tell that midnight rider
Tell the rambler, the gambler, the back biter
Tell 'em that God's gonna cut 'em down
--Elvis Presley
Bethany’s grandmother might have stopped cursing. Being late in the game and baffled
by that long talk with time and love, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have to answer. It didn’t
mean David Threnody didn’t have to answer. And it was that same question as always. That
same question that led to other questions. The first and the last. That same question he heard as
a child talking to sleep. That same question as to how he would answer. Answer to his name.
It becomes a question of requirements. What you require of yourself. What you require
of others. And that depends on whether or not you think you have the upper hand. On an idea.
On an event. Or as often enough—over other people. When you require something of yourself
you give it up. You give up having the upper hand. Maybe it’s the sign of a good person, an
honest person—when you do that—when you give up control willingly. That truth in illusion.
It may seem David had the upper hand. In the course of events that transpired that night
under Huey P. Long Bridge. Things just sort of worked out for him, but instead of being
confident it went all according to plan, that it all happened for a reason, he became speculative.
He became merciful. Not to himself, but to the people he felt were hurt by it. How it changed
lives, and ended some. Popovitch was dead. And so was Pete Southhouse. Law enforcement
and a criminal element had lost lives. Johnny Tribout would have a scar on his neck. Bethany
was widowed. And Bridgette and her son’s fate were altered after that night. Their stay in New
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Orleans over. Escaping back to Texas to a life they knew before meeting Bethany’s old lover,
Denny. Maybe some good coming out of it. William Bloodwood reuniting with his wife,
becoming a father again to his young daughter. Possibly meeting those requirements of his wife,
giving her the upper hand as it were as to what was required of him to come back, maybe she not
even having to apologize for kicking him out in the first place, meeting no requirements of her
own, which makes you wonder, makes you speculate what really are the tenets of mercy. If bad
feelings from the past are really forgiven, if what you and another person have done wrong to
each other is really forgiven, or if one person just tries to forget as a matter of convenience.
Playing the victim for fear of the other person given that chance.
At least this was what David speculated on after that night and what transpired, after he
and Bethany by all apparent respects were now free to love each other, free to become man and
wife. He wondered who really had the upper hand. What were the requirements of it. And if
good things can really come out of something bad. How you answer to it. That idea, that truth
in the illusion of having control. The truth that your answer doesn’t really matter, but how—how
you answer—contains all the truth you really need have of whether it’s good or bad. What you
feel, mirroring love or hate, the solid indicator of where you stand. And so the speculation ends
where it starts. When you’re honest with yourself, when you’re honest with others, the only
answer you can come up with is it does—it does all happen for a reason. And it doesn’t matter
who thinks they have the upper hand, who has to meet certain requirements—it’s in God’s
hands. This the humble truth David was faced with. Not because he was weak, too weak to
assert the upper hand. Not because he was ignorant and mystified. It may seem trite to answer
the lord works in mysterious ways, but then the answer to your name is also trite and a given.
You’re given your name. And so your answer to it is also given. It’s just as the face you see in
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the mirror—a given. And how you choose to answer, what powers you assume—your pride—is
either a lie or the truth. You choose to either smile at yourself or cut off your nose to spite your
face. Popovitch brought a knife that night under Huey P. Long Bridge. David just brought his
guitar, and a friend.
April 1st, 1946—And then my words. My voice. In what lasts in recognitions. His eyes
and my own. Spring’s murder of winter. That long Lent after Epiphanies. And fools waiting on
Easter. What’s given to you so easy to give up. Only missed later in memories that defend your
lack of repentance. What’s not necessary in the invention of your love… I gave it to him—that
capo. A birthday gift I left at his door. A poem wrapped around it. Of a sentiment I made
myself feel because of what I wanted. Not repentance. I did not want this. For I wanted him to
see it—my nakedness. And the temper of my grandmother the fire of my blood—my temptation
to him. To say words kind. This basic. This necessary. The only truth we want and what we
want is to be loved even if we have to be lied to. Even if the very idea we have of ourselves is a
lie. What we see not what others see at all. Even if the fundamental constructs of our world are
shown to us as a dark con of man so that our eyes are wide open to the faith of our luminescence.
Our mind our con. A child’s beliefs lost in an adult education. In what we do and what we don’t
do in our tries at love… I gave it to him, and he gave it away. He gave it away to take what
can’t be given—power. To be the one telling the lies rather than being the one lied to. And the
innate how you tell yourself, how you tell yourself why you remember. When the night is over
and the morning comes—the dream. The dream you remember and how you tell yourself why.
That last thing of night brought into your next day. You are given the mystery which you give
up. You give up the mystery of a woman—in assumed mercy and unresolved hate. That dream
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you remember—the mistakes of your humanity forgetting the divine. The mystery of the
practical losing the wonder of the details… And that guitar, what he gave of it that was given to
him has in it all the emotions of the future, and the bare-faced facts of the past. I his companion
now. Silent in my secrets. The secrets that make me confident of who I am. Revealed in grandstanding. And my voice that’s changed—the only constant. This the sacred feminine hidden in
biblical truths. The unsaid in that blade Popovitch brought to his death. Shedding the blood of
his unwanted son and a daughter already born held in a chalice. All that’s left the prophecy of
the earth from which I came. The muse in all a man’s actions and the idleness that leads to his
temptation. What’s flesh remaining flesh. What dies meant to die in order to be born again.
Your love why you don’t repent. Your love your sin. What makes you who you are. The truth
you ardently deny. What a woman makes you. A fool or a king…
Truth is memory when you’re sad. It’s the present moment when you’re happy. And it
doesn’t seem like it, but sometimes you can be in both places at once. You can be in a happy
moment remembering. You can be immersed in a sad memory with a moment of reprieve. The
truth is subjective, acted on by objective realities. And what goes up must come down. What’s
up meeting a cusp, a differential slope reaching zero, and then a geometric curve going down, a
negativity, until another cusp is reached. You are a particle and a wave, sometimes behaving as
one and then the other. You are in the moment and in all moments. Inside an illusion of going
backwards or forwards. Your energy turning into matter and vice versa. Everything truly
uncertain, especially when you’re most certain of it. David Threnody was following a formula.
His behavior, his emotions—the verifiable actions of a choice. What’s baffling if the choice
made the actions, or the actions made the choice. The only thing he knew was what he learned.
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History repeating. A good time offset by bad. The price of one the cost of another. And that
question. All those questions. That question of names, love, and what’s it going to be—
answered and then answered again, sliced infinitely into frames of time, the area covered based
on the ground. David just not sure what ground he stood on. Bethany was in his life now. Not
somebody he used to know in that sad betrayal of lies, but a truth happening self-scrutinized.
Memory and the moment leaving him both happy and sad. Not afraid anymore of the answers.
But afraid of the questions.
When he went to sleep he was happy. When he woke up he was sad. Not because of
disturbing dreams his soul was illustrating in the book of his life, but because at both times, in
both moment and memory, Bethany was in his arms. She slept in his bed now. He knew he had
something to lose, and memories of Rosie Soledad sometimes returning to him. Her haunting
words that he was loved. How she said that—you are loved, not I love you. And he wondered if
he really had found a mate for his soul, or if his heart was crazy enough to believe that had not
already been stolen, been sold to mistakes from his past. And he wanted to be loved. Not for his
good, but for his bad. It’s easy to love something right, but to love your wrongs is something
quite different. To be loved when you’re bad—this is the mystery of good. How what’s weak
makes you strong—your strength defined by your weaknesses. How there is no repentance.
Only understanding in how you become yourself. Conviction not condemnation. A bettering not
by change, but by the observation of the change. Something fixed. David was guilty. He had
sinned to acquire a lover. This the mystery. Sin necessary for love, for love to be love. A liking
to which there is no other. Being bad creating the opportunity for good, the opportunity to love
all your wrongs—the very measurement of change outside the cusps, what isn’t the zero of
nothingness. And it becomes the identity of your voice in laughter and tears. The knowledge of
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your existence. It’s what David went to bed with in those last moments of consciousness, what
he woke up remembering. All of it softened somehow by his lover sleeping next to him. A
companion to his guilt. Knowing all his secrets, but loving him anyway. The truth in the
memory of it sad, and the moment of it happening your one and only friend.
And Johnny Tribout—he was there through all of it. He recalls that night. What
happened that night under Huey P. Long Bridge. That was the last night he and David played
music together. The last time David picked up his guitar while Johnny brought his harmonica to
his mouth, reminiscent of their first meeting in Mississippi, when Johnny had his own trials of
love and loss. They were men bonded in what they did for their women, buddies in the war.
These his last words to the story, on that advice of a friend. That advice you need remember
most in those momentary cusps of faith—don’t believe in nothing that makes you feel bad…
Nothin’ is ever permanent. That’s why you can’t win. Because you can’t conquer it—
the human spirit. Not permanently at least. It always gets back up. It always rises again.
And the conqueror is conquered. By fear. Fear of this immutable truth. How what you
fight always gets back up. How what you try to put down will never stay down. And so
you know you should have made friends. Friends rather than enemies. If you’re ever to
relax. If you don’t want to be constantly watching your back. Wishing you could just go
home. To a place you didn’t try to conquer. Where people don’t just greet you in cold
obedience, in the silent and dark forever searching your weaknesses, but people that
actually greet you, with open arms, giving willingly what you didn’t try to take… No…
it’s the winner that’s afraid. Not the loser. Because the loser can later win. All the
winner can do is lose. And I guess that’s what Popovitch was afraid of. He’d won once,
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but he was afraid he wouldn’t win again. The past is a horrible memory for a winner.
For you don’t remember your accolades. Your rewards. You remember what you had to
do to attain them, and how easily it can be taken away. That’s why the earth lives in fear.
For all it gains is the dead. There’s nothing in it that’s eternal. Just somethin’ bein’ born
and somethin’ dyin’. Just bodies churnin’ under the current of a waterfall. Hidden in the
noise and the mist. Ain’t no accolades, no rewards waitin’ for ya here. That’s why no
one likes a wise ass. Those that seek only to destroy. That’s just fear, and the slaves to
it. Ain’t no winners in that game… I saw it in his eyes that night. When David asked
me to go with him on a drug deal Bethany told him about. We’d been rehearsing. Some
new songs for another record. He said there’d be some boys there we met on our walks
to Piety Street Records. A meeting set up by Bethany’s uncle—a boy named William
Bloodwood—said he was gonna get a deal on some weed. Honestly I didn’t think he
should be associating with her, with Bethany. First of all she was married. And then she
had a weed habit. I wondered if it was love or some other love—that habit they could
share. Friends become friends in what they can share, and David found a girl he could
share what started for him in Mississippi—maybe a bad memory he wanted closure on,
so he could finally leave it—what happened there—I don’t know. I just wondered why
he had to bring that guitar. Didn’t seem like he had to bring a guitar to a drug deal, and it
was missing somethin’—I noticed it. Not a string like in Biloxi, after Nina’s murder and
Popovitch winning over on us—it was a capo. A capo she gave him as a birthday gift.
She left it at our door while they were carrying on their affair. Those visits she paid him
at our place over on the West Bank. Those days I knew we wouldn’t be rehearsing. He
left the guitar outside the door. The door to his bedroom—that was his signal to me that
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she was over—kinda like how you put your hat on the doorknob, lettin’ your buddy know
you had a girl in your room… But that night I saw it in his eyes. Not David’s eyes—
they just gleamed with some expectance, and I didn’t know for what (I just figured he
was excited about getting some weed), no, I didn’t know for what until I saw his eyes—
Popovitch—I saw the fear as he handed David back that capo and took out a knife… The
rest is just assumptions. What happened that night under Huey P. Long Bridge.
Assumptions about who won. Who lost. Who really had something to fear. David
already had my train ticket, and the names of some friends, some music buddies back in
East St. Louis—a place I could stay until things cooled off. He never told me why
Popovitch was there, or whether he knew Bethany’s husband, Pete Southhouse, would be
there. But I knew why the cops showed up. Men from the State Department. You see
Popovitch was a Cossack. A betrayer of the White Army back during the Red October
revolution in 1917 that began the Soviet Regime. What allowed him to escape with his
family to America, Nina just a baby. And what happened in Biloxi, well, that wasn’t a
secret no more, and his people, Popovitch’s people, had aided the Nazis while we were
fighting over there, when David and I met again during the siege of Bastogne, his people
betrayed by the British after the war, massacred by Stalin. Popovitch’s past I’m sure of
interest to the State Department, which is why they were there that night under Huey P.
Long Bridge. They weren’t interested in the marijuana… But all I have is assumptions.
And a scar on my neck. To this day I don’t feel like David betrayed me. Maybe he was
using me as bait that night. Maybe that’s true. I was the son Popovitch never wanted.
His daughter’s last lover. And David had a lover, which is why he did what he did. And
it all makes quite a story—a legend, you know. No… what I regret is we never made
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another record. And I wonder. I wonder if he still has that guitar—the one he stole from
Mississippi. I wonder if he still thinks about me every time he replaces a string. Nothin’
is ever permanent. I wonder if he still has that capo…
--Johnny Tribout, from a PBS interview, September 1971
It was the spring of 1946—April. A fine month in New Orleans. Bethany was soon to
turn twenty-three. David had just turned twenty-eight. It had been nearly nine years since David
had taken that fateful trip to Mississippi where he acquired that guitar of so much interest to
Popovitch, that string missing from it in the summer of 1941 after Nina’s murder. The capo
returned. And it had been four years since Bethany took that ride with Denny. Two years since
she’d been a wife. They married that April—David and Bethany—April of 1946. No poems
about it. No poems of smiles in Bethany’s journals. No new songs. No new songs recorded by
David. And after his homegrown was confiscated, after Bridgette and William Bloodwood
returned to Texas—well, you can sort of guess how they spent their honeymoon. Not married in
a church, but at the courthouse, lying to judge and saying Pete Southhouse had just run off. The
lease for Bethany’s house in the 9th Ward left for collectors. Johnny Tribout’s room empty in
David’s place on the West Bank. They spent their honeymoon searching. Trying to find a
connection for some more weed.
The honeysuckle was blooming. The smell of lilac was in the air. The breeze that blew
warm, but not humid yet—a fine month in New Orleans, Easter running late that year, a late
Sunday in April, a day finding David and Bethany sipping absinthe, like the first time they met,
after a walk around Jackson Square, a walk on the riverfront. They walked hand in hand.
Newlyweds acting as conspirators, drawn close by conspiracy, already choosing their roles,
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unashamed of being accused as happy—an accusation apparent on their faces, in their eyes
making contact with strangers, and even the judge before which they said their vows told them to
never change—that sage advice to happiness, what you accuse your lover of when it happens.
But for now they had a purpose, and their purpose was each other. David thinking those days
and nights in Mississippi, that lonely walk before sunrise after stealing out Rosie Soledad’s
window—a memory reconstructed, amended with a new freedom. And Bethany feeling that
emptiness after Denny drove away to cross the Sabine never to return circumvented by a new
promise, a new hope to fill what had once been the absence of a ring, a black onyx ring, even if
that river now hid the body of her dead husband, a body drowned by her grandmother, who no
longer heard that rooster cry. They were both under a spell, living in the illusion that the curse
had been lifted, that the mistakes from their past had left their haunted hearts and found peace in
some resurrected heaven, and the air of New Orleans in that time of month was their assurance.
They believed the judge that married them. They believed nothing would ever change.
And maybe it should be legal. Maybe marijuana should be legalized. How it alters a
mind into passivity, reflection of self-love—its paranoia only felt when there is doubt, and David
and Bethany were without doubt when they were in each other’s arms. The guilt of their drug an
appealed sentence. For they were not being judged. Their love had been legalized. Atoned.
Their flesh was each other’s and no other. And jealousy was spent on them. A nice feeling
when you’re high. They did not want this drug to be withdrawn, but maybe even then, in their
new happiness they knew. In those few moments when they were alone and not with each other
they were left to meditate. A seed in both of them was left to grow. Maybe Bethany
remembering Marie Toussaint’s words, the mid-wife present at her birth—what she said of
poison and a child. And David remembered the words of a prophecy—how the devil is a liar,
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but instead of being lied to he was being told the truth. A truth that leads to lies. How even what
has been made legal breaks certain laws—laws that sentence death. Not of the flesh that was his
and hers—consummated—but what came out of this consummation. And in moments alone they
felt fear. Fear that something would change. That this was inevitable by the very inertia, the
movement of their happiness. But this they forgot. They forgot it every time they looked at each
other—their original sin. They forgot it in the intoxication of the absinthe they drank that Easter
Sunday in April, 1946. That is until David found someone—a man who knew where he could
get them some weed. David took a walk with him, leaving Bethany at the table where they first
met, where she recited the words of his father about faith and man. And on this walk, a walk that
led from Pirates Alley into the heart of the French Quarter, David would remember those words,
for this man was no ordinary man. He was a homeless man, a prophet, and he had some words
for David, words that would remind him of his father, foretelling of him being a father.
“Looks like you’re leaving something behind.”
“No… she’ll be waiting on us…” David says. Looking behind him because of what the
man has said. A man that calls himself Nathaniel. After introductions. When David recognizes
a look about him. A man who would know where there was weed. He had a lazy eye. His right
eye. It wouldn’t focus—he had no depth perception. Maybe it’s what made him a prophet.
How he suppressed images to gain the truth of his sight.
“Is she really waiting? Or just dreading the future? That’s the thing with legacy. What
you leave behind. It’s not really what you want to be remembered for. It’s not really about
being remembered at all. It’s your presence now. You want it to be missed now even though
you’re right there… No, it’s not legacy. That’s not what a man wants. He wants the now in the
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after. He wants to own the moment, to know that it is his—later… Do you think she will give
you that?”
“Who? My wife?” And David asks to answer. To let this man know who the woman is
they’ve left behind on their walk. They’re on Royal, about to turn north—towards Rampart, to
what used to be the square where the slaves gathered. This is where the man knows somebody.
“Do you want me to envy you? It’s you that wants something… She is a fine looking
woman. And I can tell she loves you. But it’s you that’s afraid. You’re afraid you’ll be lonely.
That’s a fear I’ve already faced…”
Nathaniel has the look of a homeless man, a wino, but as David looks closer, walking
with this man—he seems out of place. By the way he talks. Like he isn’t taking this walk for
money. The middle man of a deal. He was sent. At least it’s the notion David gets, by how this
man’s eyes don’t focus, yet he isn’t lost. How in fact he’s leading the way.
“How much can you get us?”
“How much do you need?”
And David hates the searching. These questions. Questions that come from something
that isn’t legal. A world, an underworld, that it creates. A need and a supply from that need. An
upper hand where a weakness is asserted. The unobtrusive fact that what’s yours can be stolen
and the law cannot help you. That what you do is outside the law. Outside any philosophies of
mercy and forgiveness. That you are exposed with only the strength of what you allow yourself
to reveal.
“It would be nice to get a QP…”
“Hell yeah… I can do that for you. I know a man that knows a man… But I got to ask.
Is it more for you or for her?”
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“It’s for both of us…”
“Hah! That’s what I thought you’d say… She wasn’t always your wife, was she? Let
me tell you a story. That’s why we’re here taking this walk anyway. That’s why you caught my
eye. Maybe because you need to hear it. That’s why a story is told—isn’t it? Because someone
needs to hear it? I just heard it myself this last Friday, and here it’s Sunday—a good day to tell
it—don’t you think? What ends on Fridays starts on Sundays. Or maybe what starts on Fridays
ends on Sundays. What begins ends, and what ends begins—hah! That’s sort of the story—isn’t
it? All I know is it’s a fine day for a walk. A fine day to tell you a story you need to hear. I’m
anxious for you to hear it. Because that’s what a story needs to be a story. It needs somebody to
hear it—find a moral to it—ya know? Otherwise what is it? What is it you’re really leaving
behind…? By the way—you got the money? You got money for a QP?”
“I have enough…”
“Good… if you got the money I got the time. Time to tell you a story at least—hah! I
think you’ll like it. Maybe you’ll even relate to it. It’s a good day to relate to it at least—isn’t it?
Take up your cross and follow me…? Hah! Don’t you worry! I see it in your eyes. I won’t
forsake ya none. You’ll get what you’re comin’ for. So what’s it gonna hurt? It won’t hurt you
none to hear a story along the way. Like I said, you might even relate to it… And like you said,
she’ll be waitin’ on us. She ain’t goin’ nowhere. You ain’t leavin’ nothin’ behind… are ya?”
You’re defensive when you’re honest—passionate. Passionate for the truth. You believe
in what you say, and you want others to believe it. Liars are on the offense. Trying to get
something by you. Or lying in wait for your temper of the injustice to get the better of you.
Liars are predators. Honest men are prey. And it’s a shame when it’s wasted. When your
passion is wasted. Wasted on people that won’t believe you even though they know you’re
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telling them the truth. Some people don’t want the truth. They just want the emotion. Emotion
is their truth. And they feed on another’s passions. The sacrifice what’s sacred. Not the nature
of the sacrifice, whether there’s truth there or not—no, it’s merely the control of seeing it played
out. The blood. The sweat and tears. The energy. Misspent for someone else’s diversion. The
passionate are controlled by their passions. Not sure where they’re going. But someone is. The
manipulators. The schemers. With all their petty plans turned back on themselves when the
roles reverse, as they always do. It’s the pathetic fallacy in the dynamics of all conversations—
human nature—when one person feels and the other merely observes the feelings, like their
watching some inanimate object, and they attribute themselves to what they’re watching. Like
angry waves. With the choice to be kind and benevolent, remembering their own feelings, or
proud in their deceit when they’re love has grown cold.
David wasn’t sure where they were going. He just knew he was following a wino,
someone without a home, who may or may not have what he sought. Deep down he wondered if
it would be a waste of time, and he speculated on the contradiction of this walk, what would be
the moral of this man’s story. Because he was the one with the money begging. He was the
honest man being led by his passions, willing to lie to get what he wanted. And so he listened to
the man’s story even though he didn’t want to. He didn’t search out the passion in it. Whether it
was truth or not. All he really wanted to do was return to his wife, and not empty-handed. And
only when the story was ended did he begin to relate it to himself.
“A buddy of mine told me his story over a bottle of Thunderbird we were sharing, this
last Friday night. He lives on the streets now, like me, but he was once like you—he had a wife
and a home, a steady job… and maybe you can tell me. You can tell me what you would have
done if you were in his shoes…”
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And it’s movement. Time is measured that way. But what if you don’t move? Don’t
move long enough and people consider you dead. And time slows down. It slows down to the
infinite. Move fast enough and it’s like you never age. At least to the observer standing still—to
the dead. For they’ve gone deep—still waters run deep. And you know them by their smell—
their stagnant smell. Just as you know shallow waters by the noise they make. David stopped.
He stopped in his tracks while the wino kept moving. And in that moment, that moment it took
the wino to pause and stop too—a deal was made. An old deal. An old deal David had made
long before—in Mississippi—in that ride he took at the crossroads. And I can speak of it
because I heard his voice at my own crossroads, when I heard those first recordings of him
waiting for a train in the American Bottom. David knew the deal. He had always known it.
This old wino didn’t need to tell him a story for him to relate to it, and it’s when you deny the
deal that you lose. Only when you acknowledge it do you have the chance to win. This chance
your grace. Your chance to know your evil, and rather than being afraid you make a move. A
move that makes time begin again, and the observer, the observer in the deal—frozen. They are
frozen as they always were, hoping you will freeze, and go deep… But that is their reality.
Their knowledge of time, and what’s funny is you can pass them by—you can run by them in
your race—and while they’re here you’re there, at another corner. And that’s when you know.
You know they were always strangers. It’s only when you stop do you have time to make
friends. Only when you stop is the deal lost. You stop to start, and that’s what David did. He
stopped to make this wino, his new best friend, stop. And when David started moving again he
was leading the way, even if the wino knew where they were going. And that’s how you win the
deal—that deal with the Devil. That deal David made long ago in Mississippi. It’s that chance
you take. With how you know time ends, and what grace is.
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“Sounds like you don’t want to hear it.”
“No… I want to hear it. I want to hear your story. I just had to get my bearings. Tell
me about being in his shoes…”
And David meets him at the corner. The corner where the wino stopped, waiting for him.
They begin walking again—side by side. But now the wino is hesitant. You can tell in how he
starts the story. They’re near Rampart now—the northern border of the French Quarter. Near
the square where the slaves had once gathered. It’s that hesitance that starts every story, and it’s
in the teller, in that inner moment where you begin, where you garner your strength, and you ask
yourself—you ask yourself how deep you want to go, how deep your listener will take it.
“Funny how the necessary seems shallow, but if you go below the surface you begin to
wonder why it seems necessary. The compulsions behind what we do. It’s easy to say it’s just
money. Why my buddy lost his wife and lives on the streets now, but I don’t think it’s the root
of it. The root of the problem. It’s the seed that first takes root. And look how many there are
around us! They’ve fallen everywhere. That indication of spring. It’s a fine time, isn’t it?
Spring in New Orleans? All these seeds fallen from trees. Wasted on rock and pavement.
Looking for cracks in the earth to bury themselves and grow. Almost makes you wonder if
there’s a psychology to it—a behavior. What makes a seed a seed? What makes it do what it
does?”
“I don’t think they have a mind to call it psychology…”
“No… but they have a will. They do what’s necessary of them. And they must go deep
to fulfill their destiny. Deep into the earth. What they’re destined to do… Do you believe in
destiny?”
“No…”
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“Why not?”
“Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my own life.”
There’s a gleam in this wino’s lazy eye. A smile to his lips. He knows David is listening
now. And by making what’s apparent about his story he’s said something that it’s not.
“But there you just said it! An idea. An idea has a will—a behavior it follows. It has a
destiny. Like a seed that’s planted, it grows. It falls from a tree, another flower, in its
conception. It’s inspired by death—what’s cut down. But if it dies, it brings forth much fruit…”
“Seeds don’t die. They were never alive. They either take root or they don’t.”
“You don’t think something dies in love? You see my buddy didn’t just fall in love with
a woman. He fell in love with a married woman. And how does it feel? When you covet? Do
you make a deal? A deal with yourself almost like something else is there? He didn’t tell me
how the husband died, but it made me wonder. Wonder about what became necessary for him.
And we’ve already talked about that, haven’t we? What seems necessary? For a legacy? Why
seeds do what they do. Hah! And so now I ask you—was he punished? Cursed? He stole
another man’s wife. And then he went from job to job until there were no jobs left. And then
the woman did what was necessary. For there’s a man’s responsibility and a woman’s
responsibility. One’s accountable to reason and one’s not. So was he punished? Punished for
his passion?”
And David sees a bird. A bird passes over them. Low in the sky. Singing. David
watches it pass over. His eyes looking up into the sun. The bird a fleeting shadow.
“Yes… he was being punished.”
“You would say that? Even if the man was you?”
“Yes… I would say that.”
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“Why?”
“Because he made a choice…”
“But do you think it was necessary? Do you think a seed makes a choice?”
“It makes a choice if it takes root. For then it really lives…”
And that was the story the wino told David. They were where the wino wanted to go
now. The square where the slaves had once gathered, Congo Square, the future home of an
opera house. David waited while he went to meet the man. He waited in that transaction of
buying and selling. Something was sold to be bought, and something was bought to be sold.
And once it was over the wino didn’t walk back with him. He didn’t walk with David on his
return to his wife. It was Easter Sunday, 1946, and David wondered if he should be troubled.
For this was a different prophecy—this story a homeless man told him about another man that
was homeless. It wasn’t a warning on lies, but the truth. And David just wasn’t sure if it was a
memory or the moment—the permanence he felt—that question, always the questions, that ageold question of what was required of him. All he knew is when he saw her, when he saw
Bethany, it was like looking at eyes without a face, and the seed was planted. He didn’t return
empty-handed, and he knew he had already made his choice.
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21
Naked a man comes from his mother’s womb,
and as he comes, so he departs. He takes nothing
from his labor that he can carry in his hand…
--King Solomon
There is a time for everything, and now is the time to speak of fathers—David’s father—
in what he dreamed for his son. In the wife that he would marry. And the children they would
conceive… A time for everything. You learn that as you grow old. At first you’re in a rush.
Led by one passion to the next. You can’t wait to grow up. What you try just leading to the next
try. Like you’re at a buffet, and you pile on your plate. Like the food won’t be there when you
go back. And it’s funny—this contradiction. When you’re young you live like you’re gonna die
in the next moment, even though more than likely you’re not. But you learn to wait as you grow
older. In that experience that you don’t die. That there’s no rush, even though with each day
your death draws closer. You slow down as you come to the end. And Duke Threnody knew he
was coming to the end when his son paid him a visit with his young wife in the spring of 1947.
They’d been married nearly a year now. That first year a rush. A rush to get to know a person.
That exponential growth of knowledge that comes with living with someone. Solving mysteries
that lead to new ones. When there’s more than just one thought for the day. A hunger to try
everything about a person. Both old and new desires met. There’s almost no time to reflect.
Only age and more age gives that. It gives you that in what it takes away. It’s when we have the
impulse to reflect. Not in what’s given, but in what’s been taken away. You have time for
times. And what you learn is you’ve learned nothing. More a conditioning. An attrition. If you
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become a father you learn this from your children. For it’s in how time repeats that you know it.
You see yourself—as a stranger at a corner. And when you make that turn at the next crossroads
you know time. All that it is.
Duke Threnody was an old man. He’d seen that stranger at many a corner. When David
Threnody returned to East St. Louis with his wife it was like greeting a stranger. A stranger with
the same facial expressions. A hint of what you remember in mirrors. You remember what
you’ve sold and what you’ve bought. And in that time for times, in that time for everything
you’ve learned what to trust and what to not. For only fools rush in. But in that time—that time
where you reap and where you sow—you see it—Duke saw it in his son. You see a fool’s
wisdom, and Duke wondered—he wondered if his son was a fool. A good-natured fool.
Someone that trusts in good intentions. That when you give the benefit of the doubt people will
rise to the occasion. Always surprised when they don’t. And maybe, just maybe (this is what
Duke Threnody contemplated)—it’s the wise man that’s sold out. They’ve sold their trustful
souls for wisdom. They’ve lost their belief in idiot saviors. Those redeemers of our trust in their
naïve faith that people do the right thing if given the chance. But then maybe love and wisdom
don’t really mesh. It’s one or the other. In experiencing a time for everything you’re
conditioned by one constant fact—always protect yourself. You learn patience is a virtue, that
when you reach another corner at the next crossroad you never hasten your actions. You take
your time. Enjoying every nuance of it. But this is a taking—a receiving—you receive what
time gives you. Love gives—it gives to time. It gives its patience in the belief of the best of
others, trusting it will be rewarded in kind. And maybe that’s why the wise man meets strangers
at every corner. And the idiot, the fool, meets someone they’re ready to call a friend. Duke
wondered if his son was an idiot, whether he had foolishly rushed into this marriage. David was
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happy now, but as a father Duke wondered if he’d be happy later. In the different times that
come with time. But even with this—an old man’s doubt—he couldn’t deny it. He couldn’t
deny he was proud of his son. From the fragments of the story he heard about his betrothal to
Bethany, in the man he had become. He was proud and he was afraid. He was proud of his
son’s foolish wisdom, and afraid of the wisdom time had taught him of fools.
“It is what it is,son…”
“What? Love?”
“It makes you think good. That’s what you become wise to. What makes it is what it is.
You wise up… But then again I guess all you really do is learn to hate yourself. You’ve thought
what you thought by then—know what you’re capable of—and it reflects. It reflects in what you
see of others… Love? It makes you think good. And that reflects. Other people love
themselves too. That’s how it is what it is. Whatever it is you wise up to reflect…”
Duke Threnody wasn’t a large man in stature. He sat in the shadows of another after
Easter afternoon. By a window—the sunlight at his feet. He sat holding Jonathon Bonnor’s
guitar. He wanted to see it. Back in the pawn shop. In the apartment upstairs on 129 N 8th
Street in East St. Louis. The window by which Duke sat looking out in the back yard. To a
garden freshly planted. His old hands cupping the guitar. The fingers slowly gripping between
the frets. David stood before him, in the sunlight, and from where he stood his father looked
small, holding that guitar. But it wasn’t a bad kind of small. It was utilitarian. Benefiting
somehow because he could fit in places. Places a large man can’t go. Like a child and where
they go, and an adult.
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“Know where you are at all times. When you do that the words come. To make it is
what it is… Does she talk to you? Does she talk to you this way?”
“Yes…”
“Good… A man needs that. Don’t scoff at loneliness! We all need our love… And it’s
a fight. Don’t get me wrong. It will always be a fight. Even the good times. You wise up now,
you hear?”
“I seem to do alright.”
“Yes… you pride your foolishness sometimes. And sometimes it’s rewarded.
Sometimes it’s not.”
“I’m staying, Pop.”
“What? Here?”
“We’re not going back to New Orleans… I wanna help. I wanna help in the pawn
shop…”
So began David Threnody’s days as a provider. They’d cleaned out his apartment on the
West Bank before making the trip to East St. Louis in the spring of 1947. Driving a Chevy
coupe. Bethany riding beside David as they went down the highway. Duke Threnody had long
turned over his ownership of the pawn shop to David’s brothers—two still worked in it. David
was now the third, helping in an expansion, the pawn shop becoming sort of a thrift store, some
items given in good will, David helping with the stocking and inventory, and in giving some of
that money back to the community. David worked every Monday through Friday—8 am to 6
pm. Bethany finding them a little apartment on the other side of the river, in Soulard.
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There’s fear in providing. Not only fear in not being able to provide, but fear in what you
provide for. That it will be taken away. That it has been taken away. It’s natural to feel what
you provide for is yours, and no others. David had something to come home to, and he was
afraid. Afraid if he didn’t provide—what would happen. Afraid what if, if what he provided for
wasn’t his. This is the fear of a man. And it has to be overcome—you must overcome this
fear—and live your life… Fear is the begetter of jealousy and hate. It is the fruit of it—fear
over time making you hate yourself if you fail, jealous that what you have is not yours, that
someone else has had it. At first it is basic—this fear. And you don’t really overcome it by your
own strength. It’s more age and experience mixed with time and that fear. You remember to
remember where you are, and if it be a stage or not—you’ve had plenty of practice.
Despite the new work ethic, not much was really different. Their neighborhood in
Soulard French buildings reminding them of New Orleans. They settled in and Bethany made it
a home. These were still good times. The seeds of the fear had already been planted before their
betrothal, in what happened to bring them together, and all it takes for the fear to take root and
bud through the surface of the soil is one misplacement, that first chink in trust when you
suddenly feel alone with your lover. Then it grows, and that’s what’s funny about it, the fear—
how it doesn’t happen at first, but you know—you just know—you look at your future, and by
looking you’ve changed it. You can see what’s coming. You wise up, in those moments alone
with your lover. You know what you have to lose… One thing did change though. After the
bust of his homegrown the night Popovitch and Pete Southhouse were killed, Bethany and David
both vowed never to smoke again in public. They still looked at the searches, like David’s walk
with that wino, as an adventure, even the times when it was dry. And they didn’t really do it
from some moral or ethical dilemma, or because they were really afraid to. They just didn’t feel
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like running—good or bad—that’s what it was… David was sober in his father’s pawn shop,
and in his gigs around town (for he still had friends, music buddies, from his time in the
tenement housing before the war) David only smoked after a show… And maybe that’s how you
overcome it, the fears you learn, man or woman, in that age and experience of plenty of
practice—you make friends with it. Like one of those friends you don’t call back when they call
you. You know where you are with it at all times. And no matter what—it’s your life. And only
that… David was a provider now. He had become his father. It didn’t really make him
different. He just took more looks at it—the future—and in doing this his past changed, helping
him.
“You gotta get righteous again…”
“What’s that, Pop?”
“You need to get righteous. I ain’t sayin’ you didn’t fight for your girl, but that’s just one
battle—the first of many—and not just fights for her, but with everything! Look around you!
What is your basic response? Your response to fear? You need to get angry! You need to get
righteous. Ain’t nothin’ wrong with righteous anger. It’s just how you use it. Use it at the right
times… If you’re gonna work in my pawn shop you’ll have to get to know your people, not to
fight against them, but for them! With them! Nothin’ wrong with a fight if it’s for a good
cause..”
“What if I don’t see it as a fight?”
“Then you’re gonna have to fight to see that!”
They’re standing by the front store windows. The old signs from the 1917 summer riots
still there, chipped away at by age. And something is off. David senses it, and so does maybe
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his father, Duke, but the old man shows no sign. Maybe it’s the lack of sunlight. Outside the
store windows a slow April storm is passing through. Not a heavy rain, but steady. And maybe
that’s what they sense—a woman should be present. Either David’s wife, or his mother—not for
any role, but blessing it somehow. For things being off between a father and a son, the useless
powers of both, for they were just two men with different memories of the past. They didn’t
understand the rain.
“Are you sure you want to do it?”
“I’m sure, Pop… who knows? Maybe it’ll bring in customers.”
It’s the Gibson ES-150. It’s in the store window. A folded sign propped by it: Not 4
Sale… Absent a string. David removed it before placing it in the window of his father’s pawn
shop. Maybe so customers wouldn’t want it. They wouldn’t want it broken. But stuck to the
window is a playbill, a recent playbill of one of David’s performances. Black ink on purple
paper. David and Duke Threnody stand behind the window display. Looking out to the gray,
rainy day. Their hands in their pockets. And maybe the passersby with their umbrellas don’t
even see them. The reflection of the window making them glares and shadows. The white guitar
on red cloth.
“I never did understand it. Your music… but if you want your birthright you won’t get it
from me. That’s not how it works. It’s her—your wife… you get that from her. I’m just
supposed to be the one telling you that…”
Duke Threnody slowly reaches his hand to his son’s shoulder, and that was their time.
That was David’s time with his father. It was eight years before Duke Threnody’s death and
David was there. He worked in the pawn shop, occasionally taking trips to Texas with Bethany
to see her family and establishing an away from home clientele of bars and clubs he could play
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with fellow musicians. He always had a place to stay in Austin. And her father knew before
David’s father. The signs began to show during a stay in Hemphill in the summer of 1947, in
early June. Bethany was pregnant.
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PART FOUR
THE CHILDREN
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22
It takes a lot of water to wash away New Orleans…
--The Band
Quitters never really quit. You always start something else, even if it’s merely that
process of quitting—that change. When you quit something there’s always something else to
quit. Quitting is good when you quit something bad. Bad when you quit something good.
There’s always mixed reviews on that. Some pulling you one way. Some another. And nobody
wants you to quit them. Not unless they quit you first. Sometimes quitting is easy. Other times
very hard. And maybe that’s how you’re judged a quitter or not. How easy it comes for you.
The pain involved. You can be branded a hero, a winner, when you walk away from something
hard. A coward, a loser, when you’re viewed as just walking away. Sometimes it takes balls, for
lack of a better word—to face that fear of quitting and what it entails when the losses are
gathered in. Or you might be judged as never finishing what you start, no matter how many
times or how brilliant the start, but at least you try—you’re given that—and a weary wisdom is
attained. A world weary wisdom. When you see other people finish what you started, and see
what that means. How it really means very little. For you can love yourself either way. All you
have to do is look at all the failures. Countless failure and loss. The successors ugly somehow.
Even if they’re all washed and clean. Even if they smell nice. For you know they smiled once.
They once stared without blinking an eye. And lied. They’ve died without being born. It’s the
failures, the quitters, that are born again, and they never die.
You can love yourself either way. If you feel like you need a change, or if you don’t.
The constant is still you. Change for good or bad—it doesn’t really matter—it’s going to happen
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anyway. What you stop is always another start. And what you start inevitably stops. The
journey of changes are your mantle, but it doesn’t change what’s inside, what’s been you through
all of it. You carry it or it carries you. It just depends on what the love is founded on, and that is
only discovered in storms, not in just fair weather friends… David Threnody prayed. He prayed
when Bethany told him she was pregnant. He prayed a righteous fear. A righteous anger. He
was afraid of what he’d done, and mad to do what he needed to do. He began making
comparisons, and that can be a tricky thing. It all depends on what you compare yourself with—
you make that choice first. Like you’re all lined up in your physical education class, ready to
choose your players, and that depends on the game. You make the judgment if someone is better
than you before you make the comparison—that’s just the details after, the reasons—what
matters is that first choice, who you judge to compare yourself with. This is the essence of your
esteem, your self-worth, your love. And that’s why maybe you quit something because it’s not
good enough for you, or maybe you’re just not good enough for it. These the measures of pride
and shame. And depending on what you come into contact with, what game you’re playing, you
can love yourself either way. Maybe it’s just not your game. Maybe it’s not your people…
David wondered what game he was playing, who his people were for this unborn child. And
deep down he wondered if he loved himself enough to love this child, or would past sins have to
be paid.
There are ups and downs with a weed woman. David learned this with Bethany.
Sometimes it’s just you. Other times it’s her. And you play off each other... You can’t get
advice on a woman from a woman. You’ll never figure them out this way. And a man can’t tell
you about a woman either. They can just tell you what a man would do. There are masculine
and feminine sides to both genders. Sometimes a woman acts like a man. And a man can act
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like a woman. But these roles become nonsense once a child’s involved. Then the roles become
distinct, and you learn a little more on comparisons. You really don’t learn anything at all. You
unlearn it. What you are in everything. What a woman is. And a man. You just remember and
forget. Over and over. You remember and forget that love sees no differences, but it’s hard to
own up to that when loving yourself is threatened. That freedom without fear. Memories just
get in the way, and then you begin to depend on them. They are both the comforter and reasons
why you are afraid until you lose yourself in the comparison, and you believe all others have lost
themselves in the comparison too—this how you become connected with them. And live long
enough like this you discover there are sides to it. Good sides and dark sides, not discerned by
fear, but by what’s attained by them, what’s contained. For one promises something and the
other does not. The hypocrites the ones lying that they’re not making promises in one that’s a
denial in the other. The negatives in one the positives in the other—two worlds going on,
infinitely sliced together in the same time—all time.
And then it happens. A child is born. Between a man and a woman. That’s when you
really lose it. In the smoking habits David created with Bethany they were constantly losing
themselves to find each other again. They weren’t ready for this child, and even though they
celebrated in it, they were haunted by prophecies. David remembered the old man in the quarter,
his times in Mississippi sleeping in Rosie’s bed. Bethany remembered the old woman that
birthed her, in the medicine she was given with her ex-lover, Denny. And in the mirrors they
held up to each other in that small apartment in Soulard, their mornings together over coffee and
marijuana in the weekends David had off from the pawn shop, they pictured what was growing
in Bethany’s belly and they felt freedom in one world and guilt in another. They knew it wasn’t
about them anymore, but it was when they were high. Bethany sought oneness. David felt
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isolation. And together sometimes these roles reversed. In who was the man. Who was the
woman. Sometime they found themselves doing the same thing in a given situation. Sometimes
they didn’t, but summer was ending. The fall was coming, and then winter, when their child
would be born. They began to see those infinite worlds, the dark and light in all of them, their
roles in comparisons, and they knew. They knew they needed each other. The promises and the
negatives. The freedom and the guilt. It was in their eyes when they looked at each other, and
together they shared laughter. Alone they shared tears.
There’s no crux of the matter. No one defining moment. It’s merely a matter of focus.
What your eyes freeze on. It depends on if you read with imagination, or if you’re tired and just
say the words. No examples needed. No story. No conflict depicted in scenes. You know when
a world deemed good seems bad. When a world deemed bad seems good. Your hypocrisy acting
like you never knew when it happened—when you notice it. When the lies in one are the truth in
another. You become an observer, and ultimately you see you’re just a part of it. All of it
happening. All the contradictions. And when you see that you’re not threatened. You fear no
evil… I guess what I know now is that I know. I know what happens to a soul damned in love.
That unique position we’ve all felt. In that moment before freedom. I know the laws I live by are
death. They define my death. But my spirit will not be defined. It can’t be told what to do. Only
when I let it be told do I feel fear. What’s wide and narrow in the path. A small destination that
somehow still leads me to it when I answer the moment. Every moment becoming defined when I
reach it. I just a part of all of them. Witnessing being destroyed and reborn… Of course the
memory is still there. No amount of water can wash it away. No baptism of fire can purge the
past. It burns forever. And I listen as if I hear still waters. I listen to the birds and my soul is
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restored, it’s somehow restored by this, in where my spirit leads me… And that’s why I think
back now. To when I first met her. To when I first wanted her to be my wife. And if I’m honest
with myself I know I wanted to be destroyed by her. I wanted to be damned for loving her. I
wanted it because it was what I was supposed to want. I knew it in my belly. My heart defiant
enough to say it would be strong, contrite enough to always want truth—knowing always this
was the truth… I saw a big dog the other day being walked. It was a morning in the fall. I left
Bethany in our Soulard apartment, crocheting shoes for the baby, and took a walk through the
streets after writing some notes for a song. I was by the window and saw what a beautiful
morning it was and laid my guitar down, kissing my wife before I left, resting my hand on her
belly. And I saw this big dog (I don’t know what breed it was) pulling his master along. I saw
the anger this caused in the master as they walked the sidewalk on the other side of the street.
The master was smarter for she held the leash. But that big dog was stronger. And maybe by
instinct he knew—the dog knew it was angering its master—and rather than being choked by his
eagerness he changed his step and began to walk with her. And I don’t know—maybe he thought
he was pleasing her by leading the way, following smells, but in the strain he learned. He
learned what causes anger in being a pet. I watched it happen, walking the other way, lighting a
cigarette—I saw the dog strain, the face of the master, and how they began to walk together. It
made me think of the song I was writing. In how I noticed it—put it into focus. I saw the
compromise, not just because it was convenient—they were happier this way, the dog and its
master—they knew their roles, and they hardly even noticed this when they walked together…
This was the world I saw for a moment, and I thought of my wife at home, the child on the way. I
saw this moment and wanted to be defined by it. And so I hurried home. To look into my wife’s
eyes. And not just say the words…
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--David Threnody, on Bethany’s pregnancy—from his journals 1948 to 1955
They had a room they sat in. In their upstairs apartment in Soulard. Bethany decorated
it. With mirrors and paintings. Little knickknacks in the window sills. Pictures in frames and
hanging plants—a green fern. There was a red chair and a yellow chair. Bethany sat in the red
chair. It creaked when it rocked, and they both knew it would be soothing to the baby. The
yellow chair was gnawed on by a dog. The point of one arm rest left with teeth marks and
exposed wood. David would let his hand hang over it as he sat there, gripping it sometimes for
the feel of it, his fingers imagining a guitar—that feel—that feel you have for the strings…
Between the chairs was a record player. That’s where the music came from—between them as
they sat in that room. In the way that it sounded. Sometimes a wall. Other times a window—a
connection. And their eye contact depended on it. With some music David couldn’t look, and
his eyes rested on Bethany’s belly. Some music made Bethany look away, and she turned to her
needle and sew thread. But no matter what there was always the music—between them. The
between in between when they talked, as one song ended and another began, when it was time
for a record change. They talked as lovers do. When they know they are waiting.
“Do you love me, or is it just convenient?” Bethany looking. She knows why she says
this even though David does not. “I mean which do you love more. Me or your music?”
If he wasn’t tired from working in his father’s pawn shop all day maybe David would say
something different. But instead he says, “You know I love you more…”
And it becomes a mausoleum for a moment. No sound from the record player. Bethany
reading his face—David’s gestures—the way his hand strokes the gnawed wood. And for a
moment it becomes clear—that truth. The truth a woman knows of a man she knows. The
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deliberation. To give openly or be mean in the easy manipulation. What’s sincere also a trap.
For it makes the other person sincere. Believing. What you say then the opposite effect of what
you want. If you want them to care you tell them they don’t. If you want them to not to care you
tell them they care too much. Reverse images at play. In any and all conversations. In what you
want the other person to know and what you don’t know they know. And you succeed or fail by
this. In what you read in other people’s faces and what you want them to read of you later as
they ponder in that quick after moment. That brainwashing. That con of sides to good and evil.
When all that matters is if you take a look at yourself and whether you listen or not to what
someone wants you to see… You get old enough you even see it as a business. A convenient
store you stop into once and a while for the things you need. What makes it a mausoleum in that
between in between songs the realization a man gets with this, with a woman he’s loved but now
that love’s in question. Haunted by what you can’t pretend never happened and unrelenting
time. What David Threnody realized in that room with Bethany. Tired from his mindless labor
and his world upset that soon a child would need him. His fears as a man and a father and that
endless trick of figuring it out. The mourning of it coming now. The truth that no matter what—
a woman is always older than a man. For they know what love is and why they love. Not saying
a man doesn’t know this. But the woman knew first. Bethany knew first. She knew before she
ever met David and heard his father’s words…
July 3rd, 1947—And he can talk. He can talk all he wants. But it’s like beating a dead
horse… It was simple and it was complicated. The problem was simple enough. Simple
enough to fix. It was in the doing of it that it was complicated. He loved music because he was
a musician. But he married me and now a child was on the way. You can’t be an artist and a
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family man. You may think you can have both, but you’re really either one or the other. The
passion goes into either one or the other, and when you try to be one or the other in intervals, if
you try to share the passion, there is always a lack. Something needed doesn’t get met. That’s
why the fix was easy enough. Be either one or the other. What gets complicated is what you
want, for questions are asked, of what you want and what you are. You be what you want to be.
You want what you are. And so David had a tough choice to make. In what world was his. As
his wife I knew this. I knew it as a fellow singer. We couldn’t travel. Not anymore. We
couldn’t go from town to town playing gigs. And the nights he spent on stage around town in St.
Louis weren’t enough to support a family. He began working in his father’s pawn shop out of
his choice and mine. He knew I needed him even if I wasn’t going to tell him that. What was
growing in me needed him. He knew in that living room where we sat listening to music, as he
stroked the gnawed wood of the yellow chair where he sat… An artist is a child. Dependent on
the hand that feeds them. As a man David knew his days as a child were over and that now a
child would need him. But there was something, something from his past, some meeting at a
crossroads in Mississippi he told me about that bothered him. Like a splinter in his mind. And I
can’t say I was without the same problem. I thought of Denny and that old mid-wife, Marie
Toussaint. We already were something before we met, and we had become something in the
death of my first husband that led to our marriage. There was a price to paid. A price for our
childhood that comes to collect once we try to be adults. When we assume the responsibility of
no longer being dependent, but having someone be dependent on us. It’s the price my parents
paid and now we were going to be parents. And it was our last rebellion. The final rebellion.
That place where you choose your world and live in it… David thought he was somebody in that
old world. That world he knew before he met me and I became with child. It wasn’t the world
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he came from. In fact that was the world he returned to being with me. No—it’s that world you
become wise to. At first embarrassed of your naïveté. Maybe even blaming your parents for
sheltering you. Growing up in that pawn shop in East St. Louis under the care of his father and
mother (Cleota accepting me—accepting me as a daughter—the daughter she never had) David
was raised in a Christian world. A world of church and prayers. And then he went to
Mississippi. Maybe to escape hypocrisy. His own and others. And wounded by the faults he
found in the world of his upbringing he turned to it, he turned to that ride at a crossroads where
he first went electric. That guitar now in the window of his father’s store. He became wise.
Wise to the nuances in speech. The effectiveness of gestures and expressions. He became wise
to a hard life. Living paycheck to paycheck. Bumming around from stage to stage to have those
moments up there with his guitar and the songs he played on it. He hadn’t lived safe since taking
that ride, and he’d seen war. Coming home to find me in New Orleans—a known place of
underworlds, underground life. And once you lose it, lose that naïveté, aware now of what you
were ignorant to, there comes a time where you wonder if you should have lost it. Learning the
wisdom of wolves doesn’t really help you if you want to be a sheep. And that’s what David
came to—that choice—the choice of what world you want to live in. His associations of friends
in low places did him no good as a clerk in his father’s pawn shop, as a husband and soon to be
father. But he couldn’t pretend. He couldn’t pretend like it never happened. Just like I couldn’t
pretend in my memories of Denny and my dead husband. What we had become is what we
would be. And he was afraid. I know he was afraid, but even in this there was something with
him. Maybe remnants of that first world that now he was trying to return to after becoming wise
to the other—maybe that’s what guided him. For it had never left him even if he had tried to
leave it… But he was still afraid. He was afraid because he knew he was wrong. He still
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believed in justice. Still believed in faith and man. And justice—that’s the simple part. It’s the
meting out of justice that’s complicated…
And so maybe we should talk about that—justice, that first world, about mothers. And
churches. You see them as you pass by. The churches that is. Buildings with empty parking
lots through the week. No lights on. Nobody home. Except maybe a secretary. A deacon. An
assistant pastor delegated that role. Seems like the waste of a building. On land. Land that
maybe once had trees and all the critters that live there. An animal nature. Sublimated to a
building with stained glass. To ghosts of control…. And have you seen those pictures? Maybe
in a book donated to an elementary school. On YouTube. Maybe you saw it. A snake
swallowing an egg. Death in bones. This was the land. Before donations bring bulldozers. The
tithes to a more civilized world… A building was erected. Stone by stone. Brick by brick.
Carpentry of the very trees that once stood there. And hymns were sung. Sung up to the sky.
Sometimes a match for the birds, the frogs, and the crickets. Sometimes not. One a subjective
morality. The other not... The rat being constricted in the coils of a snake does not pity itself as
it suffocates. It doesn’t feel alone. Misunderstood. A victim. It is relegated by other laws.
Laws we have cast aside for our dogmas. Our own consciousness of fate… David and Bethany
weren’t married in a church. Nor on the land that once was that now you remember in shadows.
What you remember when you’re not absorbed in your own silly little world. When you know
your words come back to you in what you want to see anyway. In that mad anthropology that
give us our totems and taboos. The primitive dumbed down even more by technology,
commercialized into a name branded in us by those that want the power to brand. That age old
story of who controls the heat. The flame… David knew Bethany as his wife, but now he
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needed to know her as a mother. He had to answer to what he saw pass by. He had to answer to
the church and to the earth. This child depended on it, and he knew this without sonograms.
Without seeing what was in his wife’s belly. What was healing there… And so maybe I should
tell you about the time she was sick—Bethany. This midterm—1947, the late summer after a
long, hot summer, and the Indian David brought to heal her—this after he made his choice, in the
right and wrong of what to quit and what not to quit, after he was made aware of the roles of man
and woman in bringing a child into the world, coming to terms with his marijuana habit, but
before he made the choice of how to define himself in that world, that world of walking the dog,
that world that knows the wisdom of snakes—it was before he became intermittently conscious
of that choice of what world he wanted to live in and its never-ending revisions, the undefined in
defining moments, the existence and non-existence of undertones and how you live with that...
The man lived near the old fort there in the river bottom. That same river bottom, the
Mississippi valley—the American Bottom—where I first heard David Threnody’s recordings,
waiting on a train. A man that knew about wasted buildings, and the earth. And that strange
habit of his, of all Indians really, to look down after making eye contact. This maybe so because
to him it was like taking a picture. And it was out of reverence. Reverence for some of your
soul being captured.
Really all our souls belong to each other. That’s the purpose of eye contact. It’s only
when you try to own them there are problems. There’s reality and an idea. The idea connects to
reality, and reality connects to the idea. It’s just that sometimes we speak of one in terms of the
other depending on the point we’re trying to get across. Everyone erudite. Call it common
sense—whatever. We know the effects of a direct gaze and a smile. We know the truth and
speak it from time to time. All of us arm-chair philosophers. All of us sometimes put in the role
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of making a pep talk. Being wise even though we still allow ourselves to act as fools. We know
both the reality and the idea. At first just good imitators because that’s all we’re capable of, but
then we learn of what we imitate, and that still doesn’t stop us. Some of our mistakes made
blindly. Some with our full awareness, but our nature yearning to make the contradiction. And
that’s why we tell stories as a metaphor. That’s why we create morals. To help us remember
that we will forget. And so when I say this old Indian—Franklin Meeks his name—held his eyes
downcast in his greetings to people I don’t have to tell you how he knew the immediate
judgment this brought. He knew how he looked. He knew the reality and the idea. The reality
and idea of our souls. And his reverence was also a rebellion. A reverence for something we
don’t know how to use, and a rebellion against how it is used.
And maybe it was the same. The same crossroads where I waited. Hearing David
Threnody’s voice for the first time as a train passed by. Maybe David Threnody came to that
same crossroads looking for Franklin Meeks. After he heard the story about an old man that was
a healer, and not only that—he accepted pawned gifts as trade for his services. That or whiskey.
David didn’t have money for a doctor, but maybe it was also something else, some other reason
he went to this man. Maybe it was how he heard the story. After all, how you hear a story is as
important as the story itself, and we don’t come to the story—the story comes to us. How you
hear it is where it leads you, and maybe David needed to be led there. To that river bottom—the
American Bottom—to a crossroads again. Maybe he had to see for himself. That Indian’s
downcast eyes. To come to terms with his own reality and idea of his soul. Bethany was down
with a fever, and Franklin Meeks was known to make a fever break. And he was burning. David
too was burning. He was burning in that hallucination of what’s real and what’s not—worried—
worried about his pregnant wife whose eyes had that look too sick for it, that showing of either
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reverence or rebellion. They weren’t seeking perfection. In her fever they cared little for the
right or wrong ways to do a thing. They just mirrored a supplication. A supplication to be well.
And that’s one thing an honest man can’t quit. When you’re honest you can be who you
are. And you don’t—you don’t have to be ashamed of it—there’s nothing to change when you
can accept being honest. It’s just that sometimes it can’t be agreed on. What you feel in being
honest can seem dishonest to another person. And maybe it’s a matter of values. Priorities.
Everybody has a different number one. Usually themselves. And the strange thing is how
despite this we’re capable of getting along. In the basics. How two realities can become one.
This sometimes called married life. And then children. Their realities... It’s what Bethany was
thinking about. Besides herself. So at first she was skeptical of David seeking out this Franklin
Meeks. Even in her sickness she was able to doubt—her supplication protecting something she
trusted no one with—not even David. And maybe David knew. He saw it in her eyes, and he
remembered what he saw there before. It was unsaid, but said in so many words. In the actions.
The gestures. Prophecy hung over them. Not just from an old homeless man in the French
Quarter and his talk of seeds and holding a job so soon after their marriage, but what they were
before they ever met—this in their first sight of each other leading to what happened in that drug
deal gone bad with Popovitch and Pete Southhouse. It was in their affair when she came to him
on the West Bank. And maybe you could call it independence. The conflict stirred in the silence
after their eyes met. That intuition, that definition David sought in seeing that dog being
walked—what he wanted to show his wife in his eyes when he came home to her—his soul—in
that way identifying with her and her independence, her past. In that compromise of respect. In
that seeing of a soul and loving it even if you know if you do it can hurt you… But that’s the
funny thing about time in its storage of it—by loving a soul it can hurt you—in that he/she of
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wills. It hurts you because you make it a part of your soul, personally, and not just in that
community that’s convenient when talking about connectedness and similarities. You know
you’re hurt when you recognize it, but you do it anyway—you’re hurt every time you recognize
a soul… And that’s the one thing an honest man can’t quit. When you’re honest you don’t lie
about this recognition. Even when it hurts you. And so maybe that’s why David couldn’t lie.
What was in his compulsion to find that native healer living in the American Bottom. He saw it.
In her eyes. Her words. In her actions and gestures. He saw the hate was there even before the
love and he thought he could heal it.
Misdirection. Once you learn of it you have a lot to learn. And I know now what my
father was saying. About getting righteous. A righteous anger. Where only hypocrisy makes
you a victim—a dangerous sort. You must feel that gall. That hurt of seeing a soul you love that
doesn’t love you—to feel it. And it’s after you’ve been lost. Like I was. Under the shade of that
tree when that old Ford pulled up. I was lost because I wanted something. And it’s funny when
you’re seeking truth you find lies. It’s funny how you’re surrounded by people ready to sell.
And that gall—that gall you feel—is that you’re ashamed of it. You’re ashamed and they’re
not… Once you see that you have a choice. Because buying means selling. And only a child
wants to buy without selling anything. That’s the world. Only evil when you’re ready to sell and
you still feel guilty. But of course it’s not called that. You may have been lost once. You may
have bought a few things. But now you’re ready to sell… I just didn’t know. I was in a world
where children are still treasured—a world healed by what was growing in my wife’s belly. And
when that old Ford pulled up at a crossroads—Mississippi 1937—it wasn’t just Rosie Soledad in
the back seat. It was Bethany Lebeau. It was that misdirection. That loop back in time. That
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linear regression. It came from that fear of being a child. Stubborn to sell. And I saw it again
looking for Franklin Meeks at a crossroads in that river bottom, the American Bottom, my
pregnant wife sick… I wanted to call it good. I wanted to deny how animals greet each other.
That first look into the back seat window, seeing Rosie Soledad sitting there, that blink that made
it Bethany, Ol’ Scratch asking me if I wanted a ride. Maybe because I wanted to believe there
was no enemy, my history a conflict to that belief. My purity lost in it… Once you’ve been lost
you don’t want to be lost again. And so you give up—you give up that purity—and then it
becomes easy. Just talk to somebody for a few minutes. Ask questions. It’s not that hard to
make someone look stupid playing that game—that child’s game of truth or dare… But then
there are artists. The good ones. Not the ones with best sellers and a family. They diffuse the
situation. They blow it up in your face. Not your knowledge—your wisdom. They make you see
what you sold and you hate them. You hate them because they make you see love, and not the
world’s love—its conversations in eye contact—why I immediately liked Franklin Meeks when I
met him and he looked down—no, they make you see what’s sacred, and you do what comes
natural—you draw them close. You draw them close to belittle them, and they let you. But this
not weakness. Not might makes right. You just want to taste of what’s free, so you can
remember what you already sold, and since they’re free they let you do that. They visit your
prison, knowing the door is always open, and they are haunted—they are haunted by you
imprisoning themselves by their own device… Maybe that’s what I saw when I first looked
through that back seat window. Maybe that’s how I saw my wife. And it gave me my direction.
On healing her and healing myself…
--David Threnody, on the American Bottom—from his journals 1966 to 1975
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Fort de Chartres—what’s left of it—where Franklin Meeks dwelled, is located 4 miles
west of Prairie du Rocher, about an hour drive south of St. Louis. Built by the French it was
destroyed by the Mississippi River twice. What’s left of the stone fort that now stands handed
over to the British after the end of the French and Indian War, but the British abandoned the fort
and moved their outpost further in to the Kaskaskia. It’s a historical site now for travelers of the
American Bottom, and in 1947 when David Threnody came to that crossroads to meet Franklin
Meeks what he found was a man that lived on the trains—the railroad that passed through
there—homeless, existing on campfires and beans and supplies gathered from his visits to nearby
towns... In 1913 the Illinois legislature authorized the purchase of the old stone fort site and the
powder magazine was restored around 1917. In the 1920’s portions of the building and wall
foundations were exposed, and in the 1930’s the Works Progress Administration reconstructed
the gateway and two stone buildings. Today visitors will find a partially rebuilt eighteenthcentury fort. The north wall contains bastions, a gatehouse, musket ports, embrasures for cannon,
and the restored powder magazine. The King's Storehouse is home to a museum, which uses
items discovered during archaeological research near the fort, other artifacts, and exhibits to
interpret life in Illinois during the colonial period. The East Barracks and the Government House
have been outlined by wood frames, a technique called ghosting, to provide a sense of their
original size and form. And maybe that’s what Franklin Meeks was—a ghost. He provided a
sense of the original, his ancestors, the Native Americans that traded with the French and the
British—seen in his face, like the wrinkles in his cheeks, the crow’s feet around his eyes—a
stamp of that time, that history. Those poor relations of the new world meeting the old, and the
gold thought to be found… Now it is celebrated. In June of every year. A Fort de Chartres
Rendezvous, based on the traditional French fur trapper’s rendezvous where trappers and traders
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would meet at a predetermined location to trade furs for necessities. And it just so happened
that’s what David Threnody gave—the clothes off his back—or rather his hat. That’s what
Franklin Meeks wanted when David came to that river bottom looking for him. David following
the smoke. To the form that awaited him there—a ghost—what David felt finding him. No
words first. The eye contact brief. Just Meeks motioning to the hat David was wearing as he sat
in the smoke of a fire built in the ditch of a levee near the railroad tracks. A gesture that he
wanted to try it on. As a shield, a necessity, for his eyes from the sun if he was to look at this
man coming to see him, if he was to see David Threnody and listen to what he wanted.
“You like to be scared. But you’ll say that isn’t what you want. You’ll say that isn’t
what you want and you’ll believe it. Not because you want me to believe it—you just have to
say it. You think it’s appropriate in introducing yourself, but you introduced yourself a long time
ago, long before you gave me your hat…”
“It’s my wife. I heard you could heal her.”
Meeks sits with his legs folded. His arms resting on his knees. The brim of David’s hat
covers his face as he looks down, one hand holding a stick, which he uses to mingle the coals in
the fire. For a moment the smoke blows in David’s direction, where he’s standing across from it.
It doesn’t make his eyes burn, and some of his apprehension disappears in the smell of it—the
thick wood smoke inhaled in his nostrils. Meeks motions for him to sit, and David sits as he
does, across from him in front of the fire. The smoke white, making them dark forms as it nears
sunset—the light already below the levee of Meeks’ encampment—a pink and orange glow to
the yellow grass and brown dirt, the tufts at David’s feet that his hands play with because he’s
nervous. And he feels empty. David’s hands suddenly feel empty not holding a guitar.
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“Why do you like being scared? You’ve been here before, and yet you still feel it. Like
you have something else to lose. And not your wife, or the child she is bearing. Not even the
memory of how you came here before. In that ride that was offered, what that road that brought
you here reminds you of... You can’t say you’ve never looked through the smoke—because you
have. You’ve seen what I see. How you were not just one being when you came here to sit
across from me. You split and then split again. Your forms, your shadows, playing out your
past behind you… All your stories follow behind you. They turn into the energy of your
presence now. What you like to see in a mirror—in the pictures you take—the composition of
your past. Some people think this is in your eyes, but this is not so. The eyes lie just as the soul
lies. There are other signatures you leave behind that are not captured in the sunlight, not heard
in the darkness. They are the eyes of time. A moment for all you’ve felt… And yet you still
like to be scared. I feel your fear. You’ve become addicted to it like a drug. You’re sick with it.
It started as a poison you consumed because you liked how it made you feel. You liked how the
fear made you feel alive, and you didn’t think about what it was taking. What it takes from you
in what it gives—how in the end it consumes you… And you married it. You married it in a
fever and now you want me to take that fever away. But if I’m to help you you must admit what
you really want. You must tell me. You must tell me why you like to be afraid. You must tell
me why you want to be free.”
“I know I can’t be free…”
Franklin Meeks smiles under David’s hat. He continues to stir the coals. The moon is
up. Still in a blue sky. Waning—the full moon just past. Low, but still rising. Its dark spots
clear in the light of the sunset. Meeks facing the sunset. David facing the moon. For some
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reason they both look up at the same time. Their eyes almost squinted shut. The start of a
grimace on their faces that turns into a smile—calm.
“You strive for an identity and then when you make it you don’t want it anymore. You
have earned who you are. So why are you scared? The child will die. You already know that. I
can break your wife’s fever, the child will be born, and then he will die. You know, but you
think if you change it won’t happen. If you play a different role or position yourself a certain
way you think what you are will change, but it won’t for you are your past. That identity you
sought you sought for a reason. You made choices to follow it. You followed the river near us.
So did your wife… Go back. Go back with love. And take that guitar out of your father’s
window. You know it doesn’t belong there. I know your youth and your war. I know your
wife’s origins. It followed you here. And you think you sold something, but you didn’t. You
didn’t, but nobody believes you so you don’t believe it. You abandoned their success, and you
succeeded at what you wanted to be. But now you don’t want it? Why? Did you think you
could share it? That you can quit now? The identity—the reality that you made? You cannot
share being free, just as you will not be able to save your firstborn…”
and I did go back. As I saw Franklin Meeks stir the coals. In the way the wind blew the
smoke. I went back to being born. I saw him as that first musician. That first musician I saw as
a boy walking with my mother. I remember when I first held Jonathon Bonnor’s guitar. How my
fingers felt finding their first chords. That bus ride I took to Memphis. And that old tree at an
afternoon crossroads walking Highway 61. I saw love and being loved. Those children through
a window in the winter streets of Bastogne. Those slow days in the prison in Biloxi. That last
look of Rosie sleeping in her bed. And waking up to Bethany beside me… I went back to who I
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was, and he was right—I couldn’t share it. I could share love, but not being loved. And what I
mourned was not knowing our child would die, this I knew with numb certainty—I mourned the
evil in me—that part of me I’d shared with a woman. With Rosie Soledad. Bethany Lebeau. I
mourned what they needed from me and what I needed from them. But even though I knew, as I
went back into my past, there was something undecided. Something I couldn’t quit no matter
what role I chose to play. There was a reality I couldn’t escape, even with this man and his fire
encamped along the ditch of the levee and the railroad tracks. I had to be who I was even if the
seed of it would die… I would take this man to my wife. I would let him break her fever so I saw
her in her eyes, and then I would not speak of it. And then I knew what I had to do. I had to
laugh. I had to laugh with my wife as much as possible. I knew that was the trade made nearly a
decade before in that bus ride to Memphis, to Mississippi. I knew that was what that old man in
the Quarter was speaking of after Bethany and I wed, in that mad affair that led up to it, in her
birth and life before me, in what happened to Pete Southhouse and Popovitch, my old friend
Johnny Tribout. That was the trade. The trade I made was a trade with time, and I could mourn
my sins… but my sins would not mourn me.
--David Threnody, on being an artist— from his journals 1975 to 1981
And I’m halfway through the fiction now. Or maybe more than half way. My prose
different. Diffuse. Because I’ve entered in. This never a history lesson to begin with, but still a
history. Of how I came to this story and how it came to me. Of how it was written before I even
thought of it. And so I know this is not just a story of David Threnody, a black blues musician
who lived from 1918 to 1988, not just a compilation of journal entries and conversations. My
voice has become his voice and the people that knew and loved him. I have written as if I was
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him, and I’ve become the voice of Bethany Lebeau. I’ve written of his childhood and his youth,
his time in the war—his first love, Bethany’s first love—and I’ve led up to his life by living my
life, how I heard those first recordings of him in the American Bottom and what began for me in
2008—the inspiration to write this… The research was the easy part—David’s journals a
treasure—and online the facts simple enough to transpose. What’s strange is as I wrote of these
facts how I became the thoughts that supported them, how easy it was to imagine living them.
And now I’m halfway through—more than halfway through—my distance from the story in
question. Because I know what happens already. The structure, the narrative arc—in place.
David Threnody’s life had already happened long before I heard those first recordings of him
waiting on a train. But even though I have his life to go by, the story itself is in question. The
story that supports the facts. And I’ve already let the cat out of the bag. David Threnody’s
firstborn dying a few days after his birth despite David taking that job in his father’s pawn shop,
despite his attempts becoming a provider and not a full-time musician. His firstborn died—
true—but that’s not all—and David had a vision of it meeting Franklin Meeks in that same
American Bottom where I first heard his voice. That old Indian told him. He told him there
would be twins.
And David never did get that hat back. And Franklin Meeks never met David’s wife in
person. He merely threw something in the smoke—a green substance in the fire that gave it the
smell of potpourri—hints of rose and bay bean. And not even some chant—a prayer—just his
head bowed with his eyes, his face, covered by David’s hat. A promise that when David
returned home, to that apartment in Soulard, his wife’s fever would break—the remaining
months—the days through the fall leading to the birth, a happy time, a walk. With purpose…
David never told his wife about what Meeks said, but maybe she knew. Maybe it followed him
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like all his other stories. That fantastic and strange past we all have when we look back on our
lives and love ourselves. The memories almost chosen for us so we can be who we choose to be.
There was purpose in those months, those days through the fall of 1947. There was purpose, but
maybe there wasn’t love, enough love. Instead separation. What maybe was hinted at in
David’s past, Bethany’s past—what brought them together and what they left in New Orleans.
What they tried to forget in the death of one child with the life of another—Ben—for that’s what
they named him, born just a few seconds after his brother, who they named Richard. The
headstone in an above ground cemetery in New Orleans. I went to it, and saw it for myself.
And I don’t know why. Why we make heroes of the dead. Maybe because we’re waiting
on our turn. Maybe it’s what Bethany grieved, being the wife of an artist, and never forgetting
the loss of a child in the features of the one that lived. Maybe she had her own visions in her
sickness, in that fever that instilled David to go see Franklin Meeks. She’d always liked
cemeteries. In fact it was one of her favorite places to smoke. And maybe that’s why she
couldn’t worship—she made no heroes of the dead—and thus none of the living. Which makes
me feel I haven’t done my part, as a biographer of their lives. In what caused them to love and
not to love, even in the musings of Bethany’s voice, the voice of her grandmother… I have some
of her journals, and I have David’s. I have the transcripts of that PBS special from 1971, the
interviews of people, friends like Johnny Tribout and other musicians who lived in that time,
who knew David. I’ve met Dewey—his brother. The records I found from research online.
Screenplays of intentions. I’ve created this story and I’m not sure where to go with it even
though there’s more, much more, to tell… And maybe I just don’t want to fail. Fail in creating a
hero. Because it’s easy to talk about love, falling in love, but not so easy to capture how love
fades. How it burns out in that attrition of time. The struggles David and Bethany had
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financially at that time. No money from David’s music. And the paltry income from working in
his father’s pawn shop. It’s hard to capture how our heroes are traded for other dreams. A
quality of life, much like what Johnny Tribout faced when he died in 1975 after dousing himself
with rubbing alcohol—what his wife wanted—a nice house with a back yard, money for their
kid’s dreams. This maybe in the sadness later of David Threnody becoming an old man. In what
happened. What happened with Ben… Bethany Lebeau needed more than David’s music.
More than her own dreams, what maybe she mused upon when she smoked in cemeteries, when
she visited the grave of Richard, and so maybe I should talk about it. That February of 1948
when their twins were born. What quit between them, their fears, and the roles they decided to
choose. I need to tell you how David didn’t mourn. How he mourned when the baby was sick,
but after he died—this just a few days after his birth—David didn’t mourn. Maybe this how a
hero becomes hero. When they no longer mourn what they worship… And so maybe I need to
tell you another story about New Orleans. Because Bethany didn’t give birth in East St. Louis.
They made the trip back when she was almost full term. She had the twins back in New Orleans,
or at least David was in New Orleans—Bethany staying with her parents in Hemphill. And I
need to tell you about that. About why they went back. Why they went back to where they
began. Because there’s a story in that birth—maybe even a defining moment—a recognition of a
soul. The mid-wife present, the old woman cutting the cord and bringing Benjamin Threnody
into the world, none other than Marie Toussaint.
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23
I went down to St. James Infirmary…
--James Carroll Booker III
He dreamed it in his prime. David dreamed his songs before he ever wrote them. The
words coming first, coming before the music… And you can’t say he didn’t feel it. I felt it for
him. Maybe something dying. Something dying in that last chapter. More than just the promise
of a child. A seed. The process fragmented digressions, but put together—days of a day…
David Threnody dreamed those first things, the beginnings, but he wasn’t very good at endings.
Not while he was feeling them. But that’s how the songs came about. And that’s what he was
really waiting on when it came to sleep, when it came to answering to his name. The names of
his children. In its imitations of all our death…
…and maybe more than one story is being told. When I think about that time. The end of
1947—what happened in those winter months of 1948. It’s more than one story on the one story
we try to make it. In one story everything that lives dies. This story we would call our real life.
Everything dies in it. The mother and father that brought you into the world. The friends you
make along the way. Relationships. Marriages. All the critters we come in contact with. In one
story everything dies—even our children… Everything that lives dies. But I’m not sure if that
story is told properly—this story of our real life—because that’s not the only story we tell.
Maybe because we know, on a gut level, it’s up to us how we tell the ending, and whether we
omit another beginning. I don’t know if there is a God, but in the story I make of it I’m not sure
what I’ve created in my knowledge of being created. For how can God create death without
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knowing of it, without also being death? Maybe I created death. In that story I’ve made of my
real life, of this world, and everything that dies in it. God gave me life and I created death. That
is the one power given me—that choice. The choice to create death. And it gives me the power
to say God is dead… But that’s just one story, our first choice to know of our death, what the
laws of our real life give us in our awareness… This what I mourned. This was my mourning as
my firstborn lay sick and near death that winter of 1948. I mourned my knowledge. Not my
knowledge of death, but of life. And I knew that was how it was created—the song. The song I
dreamed. Words before the music... Life precipitates death, but the story that everything that
lives dies our illusion, our human illusion, and we learn it—we learn it the hard way. We learn
it by choice, and maybe I just refused to believe that choice was made for me. It’s how I took
responsibility. And I took responsibility. It’s there—in my music. I am responsible for why my
firstborn son died…
--David Threnody, an encomium—from his journals 1966 to 1975
You can’t serve God and money. So in a way you give up God for your kids. We just
don’t call it this, and some would just call it the American Dream—a fact—a truth we have to
face if we’re to succeed or fail at the rules of life… and the ways of this world. But we call our
children our legacy forgetting the fact that we were once the legacy of our parents. We forget
the continuation. And so one legacy dies for another to begin. This happening over and over.
As we hope it will be better. As we tell ourselves the same lies our fathers told themselves—that
lie that your dreams don’t matter anymore—you have children to look after… There is truth to
this, but there’s also truth in God being our legacy. All of us followers of it as children and then
as parents, in what goes out and what comes back—the origin, that continuity—that first cause,
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the first legacy that never died to beget another... And we sell it. We sell out to our fears, to our
knowledge that we will surely die—our eternity shunned for stuff. We know we’ve been beat,
but the stuff, well—that’s alluring. We decide we can’t be our father’s dreams. The legacy we
once were to our parents traded for the simple necessities—the necessities they provided in
giving up being a legacy as well. There were bills to pay. Mouths to feed. And happiness can’t
be won without it—what’s necessary—those simple, harsh necessities… David was just
stubborn. Maybe memories of that crossroads made him leery of telling himself a lie, that same
lie his father told when he wasn’t fishing. The lie that he would do it. He would do what he had
to do for money so his children would have what they needed. The same lie we tell today. So
our children won’t feel bad under peer pressure. Their clothes bought in the same places their
schoolmates purchased their clothes. All the same gadgets, personified in choices of ringtones
and screensavers. Summer camps and all the supplies for hobbies, whether it be paint, ice skates,
or dance lessons... It just seemed wrong to him. Though it caused David countless pain and
loss. For he might of thought it was wrong, but he was outnumbered—even his father not on his
side, on the other side of the argument—on that side in which lies lead to truth—for he was his
father’s truth. He was the truth in the lies his father had to tell himself.
You’re only alone when you think you’re alone. It becomes a self-generating reality.
David and Bethany left New Orleans together, but when they went back David felt alone. This
hard to put your finger on—what makes you feel alone. Sometimes it’s the choices you make—
the consequences—that self-generation of your world. But what’s hard to put your finger on is
how you view those consequences. If it’s really you or someone else telling you. Bethany didn’t
feel sorry for him. She didn’t feel sorry for David. She had a child in her belly, in fact twins,
and in the way she looked at it he’d made a choice, and now he had to take responsibility. And
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maybe that’s it—when somebody tells you that, tells you to take responsibility—somebody else
tells you, and not yourself. In his journals, years later, David tells us how he took responsibility,
but this was after, years later, and maybe then, in that fall of 1947, David felt alone because it
was Bethany telling him.
She was no longer singing. Bethany stopped singing in public a few a months after her
pregnancy, when she started showing. She no longer sang with David. Maybe she thought she
was giving it up for only a short while. Giving it up to be a mother. Maybe that’s what she told
herself. About a dream that never was her dream. And that’s what’s funny—what we tell
ourselves when no one else seems to agree…
July 4th, 1947—You’re alone when you’re free. When you declare your freedom. We
declare it together all the time. We even celebrate it. But the consequences—the true
consequences of facing it—are always felt alone. I am alone even with this child in me. Another
life is inside me, growing, and for it to be free it must come out of me. It must be born. It must
be born to be free… No one is born with you. And no one dies with you. Those are two things
you must face alone. One your first taste of freedom in this world, and the other the first taste of
the next. Our togetherness, our equality, coming from this fact. And all our revolutions, our
rebellions—always something—some common goal, some common enemy, and this is why the
goals, the enemies, always exist first, and your freedom from something is just your slavery to
whatever gave it to you—what you want freed from giving you your idea of freedom… I will be
a mother. David a father. And this child will have no other, just as I had no other father and
mother. Just as I am an American. This country born and asking for freedom just as we all ask it
of what gives us birth. We all ask it together. I’ve asked it of David, and he’s asked it of me.
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Love the question we all ask together, and sometimes—when we’re lucky—what we feel
together. But the answers, the answers we come up with when we don’t feel it, when we don’t
feel the love—those answers we always face alone… You can’t feel guilty and love yourself. It
takes the taste out of everything—the joy. It’s negativity—negation—it’s when you sense
disapproval, and pretty soon you don’t know what came first—the guilt or the lack of love. I
don’t think David ever got what he needed out of his parents. When we came to St. Louis after
our first year of marriage, after a year in New Orleans, scraping by on musician’s wages, odd
jobs David could find, he came home to meet his parents, and I met his parents—I sat down to
dinner with Duke and Cleota, and I saw it there even in the table manners. Something
withholding. An air of disapproval. In how they commented on the wasted food on his plate.
Money he owed. Even in going about the business of his father’s pawn shop, his ideas on
inventory and turning the trade of the merchandise into good will for the community—this even
met with hesitation, doubt. It was like he had to earn his love, and this is always paid in guilt.
Whether he got his father’s blessing, his mother’s love—I don’t know—I know they loved him,
in their own way, but his father didn’t understand his music, and his mother couldn’t stop
praying to save his soul, that Christian assumption that your soul needed saving, and maybe
that’s where his pain started. That seed to not love himself, as the guilt ate at him. It’s a sad
thing when someone you want to love you instead makes you feel guilty, when they make you
feel like something’s wrong with you. And that’s the nasty thing about love sometimes, what
happens to relationships in the reminders of your parents—the price of it—when someone loved
you but they don’t love you no more, and you’re always reminded of that, in having children
with them… I don’t feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I wasn’t raised that way. And David
knew that. He knew me, and maybe by the time we left New Orleans he knew a little about
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himself. Maybe he knew it wasn’t just that ride at a crossroads in Mississippi, his music what it
always was—a plea for forgiveness. Maybe he knew from knowing me the emptiness of that
plea, he knew the expression of this was beautiful—the truth that he didn’t have to be forgiven—
it was there in every song… And I guess I just have to let him go. I have to set him free—I have
to set David free. I have to let him love what he wants to love, and feel the guilt he was born
with. My fears—my fears for this child, the children to be born—answers he must face on his
own. With maybe his guitar helping him. And it’s funny. Love on the rocks—it ain’t no big
surprise. And freedom, our independence—maybe you only know it, really know it—when you
set something else free. And I know that now. I know it being a mother. A wife and a mother…
It was Bethany that brought up divorce. The hints of it were in that hot summer, that
long, hot summer of 1947, because the heat gets to everybody in the end. The hints were there in
her birth, in what her grandmother witnessed looking out that window the morning she was born
in the summer of 1923, in what Bridgette saw that night in New Orleans twenty-three years later
when she had to bury Pete Southouse’s body in the Sabine River on her flight back to Hemphill
with her son William Bloodwood—Marie Toussaint the mid-wife present in that baptism of
rooster blood, and present again at the birth of Bethany’s twins. And the hints became answers
after Bethany’s troubled pregnancy, after David’s struggles with making money, and when their
firstborn died leaving Ben without a brother, Bethany went to Marie Toussaint again for advice,
looking for it there, looking for her answers in chicken bones… Some people just think you’re
dumb. You’re dumb in helping them and in wanting to be helped. Some are that far gone—that
far gone in pride. And that’s why you need that poison, that poison an old voodoo woman told
Bethany about after her broken love affair with Denny, in her memory of the ride she took back
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in 1942, of a love in vain in that other hot summer before she turned nineteen, a pawned ring and
a car disappearing over the Sabine River —you need that medicine, that bad medicine. You need
guilt just as much as you need love. You need it to be human. To feel it in the death of a child.
What pride teaches you is there are reasons. Reasons why you help someone. Reasons why you
want to be helped. That lack of magnanimity those you help sense. Because they know. They
know you’re just as guilty as they are. They know how you feel when you need help too. They
know you want something, and denial is that key trait, that true symptom of stupidity and
ignorance—in the farce of playing dumb… David still wanted something from Bethany. And
maybe Marie Toussaint wanted something too. Why she helped Bethany find her answers in
chicken bones. For help, if it’s really to be called that, is just another word for love…
“God loves those that love themselves, child.”
She’s blind in one eye now—her left eye. She was old when Bethany was born and now
she’s even older. Just the wisdom not taken out of it yet. Taken out of the age. This in a time
when old age didn’t lose dignity in a family, though Marie Toussaint had no family—community
maybe a better word. These all just words. The connections you make to them what matters.
You just knew she knew more than you know. She knew what happens to a woman when she’s
pregnant. That change. That change in the connections we make to the word love. That change
to necessity and practical morality. That responsibility—that weight—an expectant mother puts
on the father. The legacy redefined entering into the point of coming and which has in it its
end—the death which begets life. And Bethany was pregnant thinking in these terms. Those
deaths we all face in the course of making a life. And a compromise. A compromise being
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made to the romantic love which leads to the love of a child—your child—a distinction so subtle
in what’s mine and yours—ours—in that union. That union that brings another soul in the world.
“He drinks… he drinks every day.”
“Yes… I said there’d be poison—didn’t I? It’s ripe inside you—the guilt? I said it
would protect you. And it’s free will—yes? It’s free will you feel. That fate that defines your
character. And where is he? Where is he now?”
“He’s back in New Orleans. Some business he had to do in the redistribution of his
record, the record he made when we first met. He said he’d be back for the birth. The birth of
the child…”
“Just one child? Is that what you think it is? Just one child inside you? You’re in denial
of the medicine. Don’t be dumb. Don’t deny what you already know, or I can’t help you. He
loves you and he loves something else. But you’ve already gone through that change. The
change in how he sees you. How you see him because of it. Ain’t no good can come from
evil—or can it? He! He! You see a man makes it. He makes an evil woman. In his mind that
leads to his heart. The purity in seeing God lost. The purpose. The destiny… A woman good
or evil is a man’s estimate—and what is that? What about your own? What are you in the eyes
of another woman? Changes the whole role of justice and mercy—don’t it? That lie that makes
you feel free in thinking you see evil, but really all you’re doin’ just lookin’ at yourself in a
prison of mirrors. That’s the denial. That’s what dumb—the silence in the answers. The
answers to the wrong questions. And he’s just full of questions—ain’t he? He! He! You are
what you are. Not what he makes you. Don’t forget your own power, child. Your choice.
That’s how the poison protects you. Just like you can’t forget the power of time—a man no
keeper of it. He just the seed of that. What grows your own doing… You’re not just his
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creation, but that’s what makes you created. What makes you forget forgiveness—love’s
greatest blessing—in all things created… Don’t you worry none. I’ll be there. I’ll be there for
the birth of your son. I still got one good eye! He! He! And don’t you worry none about what
dies the day something else is born. I’ll be around. I’ll be around to help you with that. And
your grandmother—your mother’s mother—she will be too…”
You make a shadow by blocking the light. Then it depends on the angles and
proximity—what you see on walls and on the ground. The light must exist for you to block it,
but sometimes you forget that, following your shadow. And what you feel in them you can’t
escape—you can’t escape your shadow—that’s true, but then you’re not facing the light if that’s
all you see. The past is a shadow, and Bridgette was facing it the day those twins were born.
You see her story wasn’t over, being the mother of Valerie, Bethany’s grandmother—her story
with Francis Duvette, Papa Frenchie, her first husband, wasn’t over.
They’d both been married twice, Frenchie and Bridgette, and it was the second marriage,
Frenchie’s second marriage—that’s the story that entangled them in a love interest again. What
happened that winter of 1948, during the time Bethany was birthing her twins and already
considering divorce, maybe a conclusion to what happened after Frenchie’s botched marriage to
a woman in Port Arthur and Bridgette’s exploits with Warren Bloodwood, Sissy and Wishbone
Walker, back when Bethany’s uncle was born, William, back when Bethany herself was born—
all of it some fifty years after the time they were first married, Frenchie and Bridgette, when he
first came to Sabine County out of Bayou La Batre, working as a barber. You can’t escape your
shadow, but you can change what it looks like if something else blocks the light with you, if
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someone else stands in your shadow, perhaps hidden, perhaps forming a different shape in the
overlap, the overlap of angles and proximity. It is your sleuth. Your clues to the past.
It was a leap year. 1948 was a leap year. Maybe that had something to do with it. What
happened that year in our world because it had an extra day. Richard and Ben born on it, born on
that extra day, only Ben Threnody surviving—David’s son. Shadows were at play that year.
The long shadows of David and Bethany’s past, this overlapping with Marie Toussaint’s help
with answers, and Bridgette’s help as well, in the juxtaposition of an old love renewing and a
new love dying. David was thirty years old. His birthday the day before the birth of his sons.
And maybe, just maybe, on that day David was thankful. Thankful to the shadows. And it
didn’t matter if he was seeing them looking ahead or looking back. Their existence at all said
something. It said he wasn’t in total darkness. It said there was a wall for them to play upon.
There was a ground. That the light, sometimes even translucent, existed.
... and I wasn’t there. I was in New Orleans on my birthday. The day my sons were born.
And maybe I should have made a wish. A different wish. To the candles burning. To the candle
I lit. For I was in church. A catholic church—the St. Louis Cathedral—the day before that extra
day of 1948, the day before Marie Toussaint gave birth to my sons in Hemphill, reciting her own
prayers, her own incantations… What led me there I don’t know. I don’t know what leads us,
what led me on that walk through Jackson Square among the artists, what led me to enter that
door of an old church, what spoke to me in that darkened oratory leading me to kneel, kneel
before the shadows of those votive candles and a statue of the Virgin Mary. I’m not catholic.
I’m not really a Christian or anything else, more just a student, a pupil of history—that history of
God—remembering from my own past the prayers I was taught. The prayers my mother taught
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me. What I imitated. All religions, all faiths—to me just that—imitations, imitations of finding
our own way when we feel nothing else leads us… But I was led that day, and that is what I will
call God, what was original in that walk which led me to kneel before those candles. What led
me to pray. Not as I’d been taught, but some other word, some other voice. It was something
being born without the knowledge of death. This what led me to kneel and light a candle. And
as I lit one another blew out. Maybe it was my breath. Or the wick burned low in the melted
wax—I don’t know—it could have been the door opening behind me and someone else coming in
to pray, that wind from the outside. All I know is as I lit one candle another stopped burning,
and this is what led me to pray. It gave me my words and not just an imitation of what I already
knew, not some memorization—it was not my knowledge which gave me my words. And I saw it
as a sign. How it was all connected somehow. A candle lit and a candle going out. I saw how
my knowledge was not in the light of a candle being lit, but in a candle burning out. And I knew.
I knew what was praying to—what I was praying for. I knew my song… And so I write this
knowing why I write this. Just as someone reading knows why they read. It was a birthday and
nothing else. It was a day of remembering how I was born, a looking forward to that extra day
to follow and my sons being born—a day of both hope and abandonment. Both together. Giving
their words to each other so that you may read them. So that I may read them in that strange
coming back to my own prayers. What is written down only a remnant, and what leads others to
read my words also a remnant—a remnant of a prayer—a speaking to God where the silence is
answered in reading those first few lines and then reading few more. A book opening only to be
closed. But you have that. You have that book being opened, and therein lies your pupillary—
that history of letting the light in and then constricting it to what your faith wants to believe—
therein lies your God… And then also maybe no one will read this. I can’t make them. I can’t
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make them read what I’ve written. Just as there can be music with no listener. Why I came
back. Why I returned to New Orleans so soon before the birth of my sons to have what I had
recorded redistributed, loose ends, a matter of business in my financial dealings with Piety
Street—those first recordings I had made. I was not there for them being born because I wanted
people to keep listening. Keep listening to my music. Maybe that’s why I kneeled before those
votive candles. Why when I lit one another went out. For in my want to be heard I was not
heard. And if someone listened it was not of my own doing. It was a wind, a wind from the
outside, and a candle going out… And so maybe my prayer was also my judgment. In what I
already knew, the knowledge of my firstborn. Maybe even why I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there for
his birth. And when I received word, when I crossed the Sabine River I was already done
mourning my own words, a candle lit forgotten, and I just wanted to hold them. I wanted to hold
my children in my arms…
--David Threnody, on prayer—from his journals 1948 to 1955
It was the copyright. That’s why David returned to New Orleans as Bethany was fullterm. Piety wanted the copyright. Otherwise it would be shelved. His record would be shelved.
The songs archived. The only way they’d spend the money to produce more copies was David
relinquishing the copyright. Making the songs public domain. Piety, of course, getting a fair
share of the profits—ownership.
And as David Threnody was crossing the Sabine River over into Texas, his signature in
New Orleans all that was needed, he was thinking about the dream. The dream of the night—the
day his sons were born. A dream he had on that extra day of the year, before being awoken to
the news that Bethany was in labor, before receiving word Bethany had birthed twins, but one
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was sick… Funny thing about dreams is when you wake up from them you think you dreamed
them alone. The meaning you find in them only your meaning. And the first thing you do, if the
dream was powerful enough—the meaning of it—you preach. Because like a gospel to your day
you saw something, some answer, some sign, and you must convince others of what you saw.
You want to tell it on the mountain that you’ve seen. Never considering that maybe you weren’t
the only one, that other people too find meaning in those little things of a day, a dream, the
seeming connections that make it all important—special—like you’re in touch with something,
some incomparable harmony to the universe. And so we become choirs preaching to each other.
Some even isolating themselves with their dreams, becoming sick with them. We become choirs
of earth telling others our dreams without hearing theirs—the mysterious fact that maybe we’re
all having the same dream. Just the details maybe a little different in that diversity of givens, that
same story told in a variety of backgrounds.
You know David’s background—you’ve read that already—and he was thirty years old
now. In his prime. The father of sons, but one sick like it had been foretold. The foretold that
he’d been looking for as only his answer. The answer to all his questions. And what’s funny
about David’s dream was he wasn’t dreaming about himself. It was another’s shadow he saw.
The story told in his sleep going back, back to the story of Papa Frenchie and Bridgette,
Bethany’s grandmother, maybe even inspired by that candle being lit and that candle going out,
that selling away of his copyright, but it wasn’t until he returned to Hemphill, holding his
newborn twin sons in his arms, did he get the news that confirmed his dreams, that his dreams of
the night before meant something. It seemed like confirmation, but he had no one to convince.
He was an artist, and he had to convince himself first, about the origins. And the news that Papa
Frenchie got beat up by his own sons and jailed for carrying a concealed weapon, this after
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violating a restraining order placed by his second wife—well, it just seemed to David that his
dream had come true. He heard it—the music of that incomparable harmony. But he told no
one. Not even his wife. He would wait. Wait to see.
It was the umbilical cord. Benjamin Threnody was gripping it when he was born a few
seconds after Richard. Richard born with it around his neck. Marie Toussaint knowing, but able
to do nothing because she knew. She just waiting as well. Maybe just waiting for the father to
arrive. For David to arrive after his business in New Orleans. Richard born alive, but the lack of
oxygen in those few moments of waiting what killed him—his brother killing him.
And it was then at that time Papa Frenchie was waiting as well. The twins born in the
middle of the night, just after 3am. Frenchie in a jail cell. Not sleeping. Not dreaming. Waiting
on his arraignment. His bail to be set. The infirmary where he was first sent doing what it could
do—Frenchie badly beaten, his right eye swelled shut. A permanent loss of vision incurred.
Frenchie would never see out of that eye again. And as he sat in that jail cell, bruised and
bandaged, the injuries to his head inflicted by his own sons, sons from his second marriage, the
only one dreaming, the only one asleep—Bridgette—Bethany in labor pains, her parents awake
and waiting outside the door, Marie Toussaint pouring rum on bloody rags, spitting it on her
hands, speaking an indecipherable French in the Haitian dialect of her origins, and David
Threnody taking a ride, another ride through the night after receiving word in New Orleans,
perhaps even crossing the Sabine River as the clock turned three, his sons being born, one
already a killer, beneath the water of that river, that river David Threnody crossed, the body of
Pete Southhouse, entombed by rocks and chains, David crossing that river in the other direction,
the opposite direction which led Bethany’s first lover, Denny, to disappear... The only one
asleep was Bridgette, an old woman now, who perhaps dreamed of that night when she and her
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son from her second marriage buried that body, remembering what she saw being born and dying
in the union of eyes between Bethany and David that fateful night in the 9th Ward after a drug
deal gone bad. The night Popovitch died and Johnny Tribout’s music with David ended.
Perhaps she dreamed of looking out that window the day Bethany was born. She saw that
rooster again, crowing atop a cow’s back, and when she woke up she woke up to hear the news.
The news of twins being born and word that her first husband was in jail, word that that horny
old devil who’d knocked her up three times had been beaten while she slept, and incarcerated.
They weren’t really his sons—Papa Frenchie’s sons—biological, blood relatives. They
were his stepsons. His second wife’s sons. From her first marriage. But his daughter was there,
Nora—Valerie’s sister. She watched as Frenchie was beaten—she lived there—not in the same
house, but on the property, Frenchie’s property. He built her a house on his land, near the house
he bought with his second wife, this just outside of Hemphill. The money coming from a fire.
Frenchie’s first house burned down, along with the barn, where the fire started. The fire
questionable, even delaying the insurance claim. Folks in the area wondering if in fact it wasn’t
Warren Bloodwood’s doing, William’s father—Bridgette’s second husband. Some even
rumoring Frenchie paid him, this before his philandering in Sissy Walker’s garden was found out
leading him to the knife, maybe in the motive not just the money, but Wishbone Walker hearing
the news, and not from Bridgette. That being said the insurance claim finally paid out, and
Frenchie got married again, but not forgetting his children. Nora wed to an out of work pipe
fitter for the gas company and too fat to work for herself, glad to live on Frenchie’s land in a
house he built with help from Nora’s brother, Harold, also out of work and set up in a trailer
down by the Sabine with Frenchie’s assistance. Other than Valerie, neither of them talked to
Bridgette. Robert Lebeau handed the duties of taking care of her now after her days in the bar
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were over, after her time with a Bloodwood and that time spent in the 9th Ward were over—alone
now with her own memories, her own dreams of crossing that river—the Sabine River.
You know a little bit about the family now. Bethany’s family. And David’s. Nothing
mentioned of Bethany’s siblings yet, and other than Dewey and Gerald, nothing mentioned of
David’s other brothers. But you know a little of Duke and Cleota, their origins, maybe even
some of their passions, their dreams, and now you’ve heard stories told by Robert Lebeau and
Valerie, of past beauty contests at Mardi Gras time, and Robert’s own insights into what
happened between Warren Bloodwood and Sissy and Wishbone Walker shared with his daughter
while feeding the pigs. That river, the Sabine, crossed many times already—both ways.
Intertwining their lives—Bethany and David. Intertwining the families. One the history of
sharecroppers, slaves migrated north to East St. Louis. The other with Creole and Cajun
ancestry. New Orleans in the background of East Texas. And Bridgette may have been asleep
that night, the night David and Bethany’s twins were born, dreaming, but she and Cleota perhaps
the matriarchs of it all—the mothers—the mothers to this story of Bethany becoming a mother.
So maybe they should tell it. How two families become one in law. The matrix of it. Those
variables at play in human behavior, in the dynamics of a relationship. That relationship of
blood mixing with blood. The incompatibilities. And the typing of the cord blood. That cord
Marie Toussaint cut to lessen Ben Threnody’s grip on the noose wrapped around his own
brother’s neck.
And a mother should tell it. A son’s birth. The land and the church, the justice, of an
unwasted womb awaiting the labor storm (man coming from woman, that circumambient
regeneration where opposite comes from opposite, a meditation of law proclamating rebellion,
the very focus bringing about all the discarded and disregarded effluvium of afterbirth, the
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forewith pretentions of a “let there be”, what it is was but a bud, sexless and innominate, and
only after that first cry of I Am over the breaking waters of identity do the witnesses search the
girded loins of truth and say, “Yes, he is. He is a man born of a woman…”) and in that woman’s
cry, the mother, in that pain that is desire and thus not alluded to evil—the curse, the tease of rain
to the perpetual drought, the cooled aridity of browed sweat, the seed taking root in the broken
up soil, the furrows, animation of emanating electricity, like charges like and nothing of covalent
bonds, no shared anonymity—and the promise, earth’s gift of water in the eternal replication
telling it, the let there be, the I am... And this, this was Benjamin Threnody’s birth as a mother
would tell it wounded in love and murder, in blood loss, in the keeper of brothers that say,
“There will not be for I am not…” Before words. The not-words of tears, first tears, the no
furthers than your own birth—the first song—David’s son first song. He was that stranger unto
himself, the visage occluded, opaque, the not-seen in the seeds of fathering’s—the man of man
drunk on placental immunities, maternal protection (his rage, his first cry, not to the dying of the
light, but the night-morning dawn’s awakening, the candlelight of Marie Toussaint’s attendance
a lambent and horrid interference to his first deed here on earth, prying his cherub-chubbed
fingers loose the cord that he held like a rope in a tug-of-war, his strength not enough to escape
his entrance to this world and his role, the old cyclops of a mid-wife spitting rum on his eyelids
to clear the amniotic muck…) yes protected, immune from his father’s judgment, a not-here but
nonetheless precursor to his form taking form, while his brother blue, choked, took his first of
few remaining breaths, his cry a weak plaintive to his stolen birthright. The mother, Bethany,
pallor almost white with bloodless dry chapped lips asking to see them, and in seeing them
naming them, giving them order, a first and last not precluded by the father, then crossing a river
and its dead beneath, his and his wife’s sins buried there, with no end and no beginning, meeting
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only heaven’s raindrops on mountains in its cycle of starts and meeting only the devil in its no
end feedings to the sea—the deal made on all their surfeited secrets born there, that night, under
an old voodoo woman’s (motherless) tutelage.
And a joy was taken. A joy was taken away that night, made exempt, expunged in some
cavernous archive where memory is reminded by only other memories—the past’s insatiable
appetite eating away at its own frozen flesh with no seasoning, just cold preservatives that never
lived but hold what lived in stasis, halting the act of decay. Maybe while David Threnody made
that drive across the Sabine, his copyright sold, while Papa Frenchie waited in a cell blind in one
eye, beaten by wife and sons, Bethany in labor becoming as a mother to Marie Toussaint’s
toothless curse to push, there were spiritual advisors ministering to each of them, hovering as if a
joke of Cupids with broken arrows, the nitrous oxide toxins on their tips some star gate opening
to time as it was but not is, and if each of them could see the sky the portentous clouds gave only
an acid rain of flashbacks, insane laughs, eating away at what it cleansed, dissolving the sad
silent secret to happiness, the quietude not peace in air chasing after thunder, the flashing light of
an epiphany already dissipated, the sound following and rolling in ever smaller muted waves
merely a footnote to a passage already read in their lives ‘til it was dry of meaning, crossreferenced and the connotations sucked into the thirsty cracks of the earth, trickling deep and
even further down than the roots in the soil needed, to the bedrock, to the empty and dead
aquifers, and leaked into some unknowable core—that first thought, that first memory, where
fullness, existence, is measured by what is empty, what does not exist, what no longer exists.
David was a boy again in church, listening to hymns, listening even before his hands knew the
proprioceptive feel of his guitar. Frenchie was a young man calling at Bridgette’s door with
roses, his hair just right. And Bethany was a girl hearing the sound of those records, those
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records Sissy Walker played out of her kitchen window. Jeremy Bloodwood waiting to walk
with her and talk of hearts big enough to hold Jesus. They were all innocent. Maybe even Marie
Toussaint as she pried Ben Threnody’s fingers off the cord wrapped around his brother’s neck.
They were new. Each with their own small joys. Their secrets to happiness trapped in some
nexus where they could dance and mean it. Where they could laugh and mean it, and not some
insane remembrance of reason. The routines they’d created to greet each new day not dulled into
some submissive acquiescence, and as they went about them their inner voices singing. Singing
thankfulness. Singing praise. They each had their lust, their nervous systems still sympathetic to
it… But that night, that night the twins were born, David Threnody returning from New Orleans,
Frenchie too bruised and beaten to sleep on the cot in his cell, Bridgette dreaming—that night led
to an extra day—a day none of them needed. Happening once every four years. And another
day would follow it. And another day. Each one building on the heartache and loss of God.
And yet, still, their inner voices talked to them, and they forgave. They forgave the meaning of
the loss of meaning. This their nobility. Their beauty. Even as they forgot the beautiful. Even
as the words associated to it seemed trifling and mundane. For they could still dream. And
David was recalling the dream before he was awoken with the word Bethany was in labor. He
was thirty now, and in his prime, and as he crossed the Sabine, as Frenchie attended to his
wounds in a jail cell, as Bethany cried and raged, Marie Toussaint offering her help as she
concentrated her one eye’s focus on that first head crowned, as Bridgette herself dreamed, they
were all measuring it—their existence—by what didn’t exist, what no longer existed. They were
all trying to find it. They were all trying to find their joy again.
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March 22nd, 1948—She is a mother now—my son’s wife. She has felt life in her belly as
I have. The laughter there. Thirty years ago I gave birth to him, my last child, and now he’s a
father. But he does not see it. The truth in opposites, the synthesis in antithesis. Bethany does,
for she had sons, but he does not, for he had sons. This where one parent sees truth and the other
does not. In the progeny of another gender, the gender not your own… I have written now for
years. Years of thoughts in these journals. Journals I know my son keeps. Journals his wife
keeps. I have written my thoughts and feelings, my observations on events in my life, but I have
come up with no answers. No perfect ending to the story. The story my mother started and had
me end as a child. On that hero that was an anti-hero, and the truth in it—what I’ve learned of
urgency. I have absorbed what I’ve read of others, but if this is to be my words, my story, I
know what I must do to make the readers of it laugh, laugh to what I hold important in the
message of it. I must interpret the dream so that my interpretations are as theirs. I must make
my dream the same as his, my son’s—David.
She was not impressed by him as if she did not know it was her that needed to impress.
At least that’s my opinion as his mother. I did not like what she came from, her family history. I
did not like her mother’s mother, who told not stories for me to finish. And this not about money
and God, necessity, but about upbringing—values that come not from either country or city. I
did not like the sordid details of her grandmother and what David told me of their Bloodwood
past. What happened with Bethany’s first husband and what she allowed in her adultery with my
son, knowing better, even in the contrived death of Pete Southhouse for which my son took the
blame, never once questioning the impulses, the seeds she planted which led to this. And I heard
about what happened to him—Francis Duvette—or Frenchie as they called him. The distaste
and ignorance of that restraining order his second wife put upon him and how his own stepsons
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beat him and had him jailed for carrying a concealed weapon, in trespass of his own house—
what he paid for. There is no delineating fact to describe it—that ignorance—that lack of
fortitude, nobility. The best way it can be expressed, the ignorance, their denial of it. Their lack
of respect for their betters. Their very denial of it. The farce that what you don’t understand is
the other person’s fault, what you don’t understand about them making them no better, but in fact
reasons for your disdain, your interruptions in what they try to communicate, as if their
intelligence is the very lack thereof, and their culpability, their deference, a weakness that gives
you the upper hand—control… This is the only way I can describe such ignorance with grace,
for in paraphrasing Mark Twain you should never engage with stupidity. You will not win. You
will only be brought down to their level and beaten by a long history of experience.
He should have never married her, or been hurt when she wanted a divorce. The death of
Richard, their firstborn, at the very hands of his brother, not really his responsibility though she
made it his. Accusing him, putting him on trial for not being there. I am a woman so I know
what a woman does when she does not want to take the blame. The best defense always putting
the other person on defense—this manipulation a woman knows very well, being the weaker sex.
It is the gift of the weak to do this, and the strong in being strong must do as they do, as the one
injustice to their strength. The age-old drama that ensues the dream, the interpretation of the
dream, just as in my ending to the stories to that joker Alias, and that parade in the dream of
Momus—what’s in our hearts always revealed, always a door to truth.
I know my son has a weakness for drink. For marijuana. He had it before he met her.
From another girl, a girl he met in Mississippi, and this she used as a doorway to his heart. For
the strong are always preyed upon until a weakness is created—found. I created it in sheltering
him. In giving him a Christian upbringing. The truth, the door to our hearts, always this
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antithesis that leads to a synthesis. For if you pray and meditate on the Bible day and night you
will inevitably do what adheres not to your prayers, what’s not in your meditations. And if you
revel in your desires what naturally follow are acts that do not adhere to this concupiscence.
This is the why of hypocrisy. The truth in opposites. This is why the way of sinners is flowered
with acts of kindness and benevolence. Why the righteous do unspeakable sins. For we are a
duality. And the balance must always be kept… And so now I pray knowing the answers to my
prayers will come in what I do not pray for. I pray for his son, the one who lives. And in this I
seek my answers, my ending to a story for which I’ve created many endings, starting as a girl
with my mother and now again as an old woman. For I know what my son, David, needs, as an
answer to all the darkness that if he meditates on reveals the light, the knowledge of the light he
sees only a confirmation of the darkness once existing. I pray for the completion. The wisdom I
own from having him. I pray that he does not have another child. But if he does, I know it will
not be another son. It will be a daughter…
And these are Cleota’s words. Her raised eyebrow to her daughter-in-law’s past. To her
station in life. A mother’s view on two families becoming as one. Her origins coming from
New Orleans as well, her mother—Amelie—a Creole… And you can see it before it happens, in
a child’s origins mirrored in their parents, their education, their economic condition, the
environment in which a child is raised—the supposed cleanliness which leads to godliness—how
clean a child’s house is.
New Orleans has a reputation for being a dirty city. And so does East St. Louis.
Children raised there in poverty—black—fit a certain idea of society we still see today. A father
perhaps absent. A struggling single-mother. Fighting to pay the bills. Fighting eviction from
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slum lord tenements. Children raised in filth. Not even given the chance, the opportunity, for a
good life, and they know it. In the nice cars that go by from better neighborhoods, better streets.
School systems in these low income districts destined to fail. And the people, the people that
live in such conditions know—they know what the price of milk is. They know the price of
getting the money to pay for it. The hustle that starts every morning. The looks and judgments
they get for it. No air of culture. No books being read at bedtime with fantastic stories where
children can come up with happy endings before they go to sleep. Crime their teacher. Just the
sound of gunshots through the night and the sirens of police cars and ambulances. Condemned
buildings where in the moist decay of stagnant basements drug dealers and whores do it standing
up, for small change in the need of a fix, and knife blades threatening no escape. The churches,
the churches there—well, if not marked with the graffiti of gang territories, the hard-working
blue collar families trying to keep their jobs congregate on Sundays to sing, to forget the gutted
automobiles on jacks abandoned outside, and when they come outside they must walk on
sidewalks glittered with the broken glass from beer bottles, the refuse of trash, past lots with
broken fences, the cracked pavement of tall weeds growing up.
This the inner cities. This a portrait of a 9th Ward in New Orleans we see today,
devastated by a hurricane, where of course they didn’t have insurance, insurance against the
canals built just for them. This is East St. Louis as you go down Bond Street… And the
country, the country outside these cities—well, it too really no better, no different. The small
towns just smaller versions of what you see of this. So many on food stamps. On disability. On
Medicaid and TANF. Outside the fancy subdivisions, the new realty lots of constructed all alike
big houses with back decks and gas grills, the trailer parks, the poor side of town, huddled
apartment complexes with bad roofs never fixed from hail damage—the homes of white trash
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and black folks alike looking for a better life bringing down the equity of corporate property.
And if you go inside, if you go in to see where the children live, you see kitchens stacked with
dirty dishes, infested with ants, windowsills lined with moldy old fountain soda cups from gas
stations, seen from the outside of curtain-less smeared windowpanes, the filthy smell and hair
left behind from neglected pets, dirty clothes strewn everywhere, the ruined carpet floor unseen
in the hoard, the stained upholstery on sunk-in furniture hidden by the mess. Even the
bathrooms, the bath tubs (no showers in most of them) stacked with dirty plates, the trash never
taken out.
And this, this is where the children live. Their rooms, their beds, covered with scraggly
stuffed animals from Good Will, hand-me-down clothes and toys. This is what they grow up in.
With drunken fathers and mothers sitting at kitchen tables in front of overflowing ashtrays, the
pupils of their eyes showing the juice of snorted diet pills and energy drinks. Their parents just
replicas of their parents. A college education a joke. A good job a joke. That joke of what you
serve in God and money… And they are supposed to understand. To respect their betters. And
those on the outside looking in are never supposed to engage this, engage this stupidity, never
once questioning who made this, this outside, this inside—the stupidity in not understanding
understanding.
Two black families became one when David Threnody and Bethany Lebeau wed. Duke
and Cleota tried to live a respectable life above their pawn shop in East St. Louis. Robert and
Valerie Lebeau struggled to make a good life in the country outside of Hemphill, Texas. And
they really weren’t that different—the two families. Perhaps education separated them. Their
environment. But their history, what they came from, this a distinction not made in love, that
subtle raise of an eyebrow to what we see different than us, to what we judge. The rift truly seen
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when Bethany wanted a divorce. A story only a mother can tell. And you’ve heard Cleota’s
words, and now maybe you should hear Bridgette’s, that imagined raspy voice not unlike those
first recordings we have of David, echoing her daughter Valerie and what she would say wins
beauty contests—what Bridgette would say after waking up from her dreams, that night Bethany
and David’s twins were born, the night her first husband Frenchie was beaten and jailed, the
night David returned from New Orleans after selling his copyright, crossing the Sabine where his
and Bethany’s past sins lay buried. Maybe you should hear her interpretation, the interpretation
of the dream where perhaps she remembered hearing that rooster crow again, where perhaps she
had her own hero to that parade of Momus. That dream that maybe we all have that urges us to
go tell it, go tell it on the mountain. When we see ourselves as the underdog—the story (and
perhaps ending) to Benjamin Threnody’s birth.
… and you already know I have a temper. And now I’m mad. I’ve awakened cursing. The
dream ending now that I’m awake. My eyes opening in that awareness of what lives and what
dies. And I’m sick of that smug patronage which in idle comfort judges the godless, what’s
assumed as godless in the poor’s slavery to money and the death of a dream. Like they were
even given that choice, the choice which those that judge judge, as if they were burdened with
that responsibility… My granddaughter’s husband had a choice many don’t never have, and
making it a choice between serving God and money is a denial of his privilege. And he says he is
an artist—hah! He is poor and making my granddaughter poor by a choice that’s not his right.
That’s why I find it strange when we’re given a choice we choose to take that choice away. It’s a
slap in God’s face as far as I’m concerned. For many are born without a choice, only having
faith, the imagination to dream, dream that their limitations will one day be lifted, to not harden
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their hearts to possibilities seemingly out of their reach, to take what little is given them and
make the best of it, to believe that one day they will be given a choice and will be ready to make
it, make the right choice… and I don’t know the bible that well, I ain’t no God-fearing woman
chasin’ the devil’s tail, but I think it says for whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he
will have an abundance, but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from
him, for there is a balance—a balance to all our talents, our understanding, and rich or poor
has nothing to do with money (though the same laws apply to it—how the rich get richer and the
poor stay poor), but being happy with your time has nothing to do with where you live and the
availability of your education, what’s in your house—it’s your spirit, and those without a choice
have the most understanding of it is what I’m sayin’. They know how to fight for what they have,
cherishing what they got. They know how to fight for what they don’t have. This I believe God’s
gift to those that are born poor, born without anything, for blessed are the poor in spirit…
Without a choice they have so much more. They don’t have the consequences of choosing to take
that choice away. They don’t have the burden of making the wrong choice… As far as I’m
concerned he’s a fool. Bethany was the best thing to ever happen to him. She forgave him. She
forgave him of his past and gave him the promise of redemption, redemption in his children. She
banished him of all his naiveté, his ignorance to how people are, how a woman is, so he didn’t
talk retarded. And if he won’t take his choice now maybe I will. I’ve been given another chance.
For when I heard my old man, my first husband Frenchie was in jail I was given a choice. I was
given the choice to love him again. To look in his eyes like Bethany looked in David’s eyes the
night they brought Pete Southhouse’s body home and mean it. To let him recognize. Recognize
my soul… And that’s one thing I’ve learned. Learned from all my intemperance, my runnin’
around, what I learned from my mistakes, marryin’ that Bloodwood. The children. I learned
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how your children are an extension of yourself. How it all seems so easy. How death can seem
easy to handle, divorce, all the stresses in life, how time just seems to take care of it while it’s
happening, and how yet time gives you the pain in retrospect, remindin’ you when it all seems to
draw out slow, when you’re all alone with it—alone with time. Rememberin’ if you succeeded or
failed—you bein’ alone makin’ all the successes seem like failures. But the children—in the
children you’re given a choice, cuz you see their successes are your successes, their failures are
your failures, and they make you happy or hurt more than any of your own doings—they are
your treasure and all your buried secrets… So when I woke this mornin’ I woke up mad. Mad
that my children, my children’s children, were makin’ the same mistakes I made. And if that boy
dies, my firstborn great grandchild, I can’t just be mad at them. I have to be mad at myself.
Because I can’t go back. I can’t go back and do it all over. I can’t go back and talk to myself—
talk some sense into myself. It’s too late for that. That’s one choice ain’t none of us have. We
can’t go back into the past and change it, though it forever lives with us, never ceasin’ to flow
back to us, borne ceaselessly back to us, comin’ back to us in our children… So I guess I’ll just
remain mad. Mad and thankful. Thankful to that ol’ dog—Frenchie’s dog—cuz that’s what
woke me up the day Bethany’s twins were born, and not some rooster. I heard that dog howlin’.
Howlin’ for his master… I guess he couldn’t help it none. He had no choice. The poor thing.
He couldn’t help none when Frenchie stumbled onto his own property drunk, brandishing a gun,
mine and Frenchie’s daughter Nora watchin’ while that bitch’s sons beat the tar out of him and
were within their right cuz of that restraining order, but he could go back, run back to the
Lebeau house, the lights on in the window (candlelight) as Bethany suffered in labor, that ol’
voodoo woman still around, still spittin’ her rum, that ol’ Bluetick Coonhound (they are a very
loud, constant, and howling barker) could make it back to my window, could hunt me down, and
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howl, a spirited howl, stirrin’ me from dreams. And it gave me a choice. And maybe that’s what
heaven’s all about—being given that choice to make the choice. And so I woke up thanks to that
ol’ hound. Glad. Glad that he gave me somethin’ to curse. Cuz curses means their blessings.
And that old dog barkin’ gave me the chance. It gave me chance to help my old man, that horny
ol’ devil who knocked me up three times so that what happened that night with Bethany and
David could happen, so that Benjamin Threnody could be born. It gave me the chance to help
Frenchie locate his dog…
And so I guess you can’t keep a good dog down. Like a dream. A dream you find hard
to forget. Even though if you try, if you try to put it in words it’s like a cat’s got your tongue.
Maybe it’s a shame. It’s a shame a dream can tell a story better than you can. And what David
dreamed, in his prime, what Bridgette dreamed before Frenchie’s dog woke her with his howls,
maybe it was better than any story they could come up with awake. For the story here is of
Benjamin Threnody’s birth, an ending composed in it. And maybe the best stories have their
endings in beginnings, their beginnings in endings—how dreams are when we try to remember
them. It’s just when we wake up time takes over again. With all its reasons to our poor minds.
To why dogs are dogs and cats are cats. To why we need translations, interpreters to translate
our language in the dance and prayer for rain, our fasts, in the drought of our dreams mornings
after.
This story is simple enough. David Threnody returned to New Orleans to sell his
copyright. So that people could keep listening. So they could hear those first recordings. What
he sold allowing me to hear it nearly sixty years later at a crossroads in the American Bottom.
The mystery of dreams, their interpretation, attempted in David’s meeting with the Indian
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Franklin Meeks there, in that walk David took with an old homeless man down in the Quarter
and their talk of seeds, in Bethany tossing chicken bones with Marie Toussaint and her toothless
incantations—what reason and time can’t decipher—a puzzle, the pieces of it lost in waking.
What maybe connected it all the crossing of a river—the Sabine—and a date, a date on a
calendar. David dreamed and awoke to the word that Bethany was in labor. His thirtieth
birthday ending at midnight, and just about three hours later Marie Toussaint cutting the cord
Ben Threnody held around his brother’s neck. This on an extra day that only happened every
four years, for it was a leap year. It’s a story of the death of David and Bethany’s firstborn—a
prophecy. A story of a first love dying. The other piece of the story the elders, Papa Frenchie
and Bridgette, an old love being renewed—she being awoken from dreams as well by that old
hound, receiving word that her first husband was in jail. All this jumbled together, but in a
waking mind determined by time, each fact allotted its place. So that a picture of the puzzle
formulates which we can communicate in a language we all understand—what happened at the
same time not seen, not heard, at the same time, yet somehow grasped in dream time—what’s
real about time in dreams. Just as we add a day to the calendar to make sense of it all. Our
universal movements. Our definitions of life relative to these motions. This the one dream. The
dream where you’re in mine and I’m in yours. Our time, our movements—at play with each
other.
So maybe the truth is in what we reject. In what our waking minds can’t fathom. And
out of this so many stories are created. Stories only mothers can tell. A father mourning. The
stories of children. The contradictions revealed in two families, two people, coming together and
split into symmetrical sides, different colors, frequencies of sound, refracted light. Our history
told every time someone wakes up and tries to tell what they saw, what they heard. This maybe
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what I have done. Making a story of a story. A story of David. What his voice made me feel.
The richness of the patterns—the range of it. Those coincidences that aren’t coincidences when
you reflect on them later—the words of his songs. And I don’t know what else to call it but God.
What the heart hears when it's broken…
… and David pleaded with God for the child. He fasted and spent the nights lying in
sackcloth on the ground. The elders of his household stood beside him to get him up from the
ground, but he refused, and he would not eat any food with them.
On the seventh day the child died. David’s attendants were afraid to tell him that the
child was dead, for they thought, “While the child was still living, he wouldn’t listen to us when
we spoke to him. How can we now tell him the child is dead? He may do something desperate.”
David noticed that his attendants were whispering among themselves, and he realized the
child was dead. “Is the child dead?” he asked.
“Yes,” they replied, “he is dead.”
Then David got up from the ground. After he had washed, put on lotions and changed
his clothes, he went into the house of the Lord and worshiped. Then he went to his own house,
and at his request they served him food, and he ate.
His attendants asked him, “Why are you acting this way? While the child was alive, you
fasted and wept, but now that the child is dead, you get up and eat!”
He answered, “While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept. I thought, ‘Who knows?
The Lord may be gracious to me and let the child live.’ But now that he is dead, why should I go
on fasting? Can I bring him back again? I will go to him, but he will not return to me.”
Then David comforted his wife, and he went to her and made love to her…
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“And you know what I’ve learned? I’ve learned to be mean for you to be nice to me…”
Then there’s his look. A look if incredulity. And hers—a blank expression. A moment
of reverse. A trip of the tongue. As he thinks: Maybe it’s not what I thought. What I dreamed.
I am thirty, and now maybe it is not what I thought. The coincidences. I am not dreaming them.
They are dreaming me. And I not lost. But like I know the puppeteer… I am not lost. What I
once remembered, what I saw in her eyes when she loved me—I am there. I am there in that
unfinding unrealizable quest that is love. I am in her eyes just as she is in mine. And she will
find no other man like me…
Maybe at that same time in times, as Bethany speaks to David. After he comforted her.
Richard born already dead. Benjamin Threnody in a cradle next to their bed. At the same time
she’s remembering. Remembering the face of Marie Toussaint, her one good eye focused,
saying:
“Go on now. Get your divorce. You’re right. He ain’t never gonna make you no money.
Let him be alone in it. And maybe you can—you can be new again with all the memories you
were born and raised with.... Free to come and go as you please. You don’t have to remember
nothin’. Leastways none of the guilt, which you never owned to begin with cuz I’ve known
since you were a little chil’, and you ain’t never felt guilty, which is a good thing, a good way to
survive the poison… But promise me this. I’ve seen my days now, and I ain’t got many nights
left. But let me birth one more. Let me birth one more of your children. Let me see your
daughter…”
And another voice. Maybe also in that time of times. Perhaps the echo of the howl of a
hound like Laelaps in the background. Bridgette attending to Frenchie’s wounds. Bailed out of
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jail now, patched up in the prison infirmary, but still the loss of vision in one eye. They have
come home from the funeral, but the body to be buried in New Orleans. David already having a
plot there. And Bridgette thinking: I can’t believe she just watched. Our own daughter. She
watched as he was beaten… Funny how it all fades. Even my temper—it lasts but a short while.
He still looks handsome. Handsome for an old man all battered and bruised. And it just seems
like it was yesterday. Those summer nights when he came callin’ to my door. But that too—it all
fades. And I guess what I’m left with now what I want to wake up to, what I want to see in my
bed of a mornin’. Whether I wake up cursin’… or see a best friend…
He dreamed it in his prime—David did. But maybe his voice doesn’t matter anymore.
Not even the richness of the patterns—the range of it. No, his story and Bethany’s not over, just
the children now. What follows now the words of Marcus. The grandson of Bethany’s niece.
He died in 2007, just a year before I heard that voice—David’s voice—those first recordings of
him. He died at the age of nineteen—he hung himself in the shower room of the Alton
psychiatric ward—but not before leaving his bible. A bible his mother gave me. And it shows
the family tree. The chronology of what started as the Lebeau family and how it merged with the
story of David Threnody’s son Ben. It was a rather funny looking bible. Most of the pages were
torn out. Replaces with folded papers that held the words of his memoir—a retelling of the story
his grandmother told him—Gabrielle, or Gabby—Bethany’s niece. The story of what happened
between Ben and her brother, Aaron. How it involved Bethany and David’s daughter. For when
he comforted her she conceived. They still divorced—that goes without saying—they merely
made it legal, and after Richard’s death, Bethany stayed in Hemphill to raise Ben and follow
through with her second pregnancy. David returned to New Orleans for a short while. Visiting
the headstone of his firstborn every day. He didn’t return to his father’s pawn shop. He didn’t
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return to East St. Louis. The apartment he and Bethany had in Soulard emptied out when they
filed the paperwork at the courthouse, most of it going to Bethany and David taking nothing
from it. And after a while David moved to Austin, where he could play his music, where he
could still play the Blues, and still be close to his children. For even though their divorce was
finalized before Bethany gave birth, David still spent much of his time with her—they remained
friends, like it or not because of the children they had to be friends. And in November 1948 she
was born—Bethany and David’s daughter, Ben Threnody’s younger sister. They named her
Dulcinea.
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24
Well, now, there's two, there's two trains running…
--Muddy Waters
Now Bethany Lebeau had a brother and he had two children about the same time
Benjamin and Dulcinea Threnody were born. One was named Gabrielle but folks called her
Gabby. The other named Aaron. Gabby was my grandma and I write this (in quiet to hear the
one voice sane I focus on inside the other voices that tell me to fear worry and have regret) to
give my time purpose here so when I listen to her voice as I remember it I can still hear it now
and I know it’s a war because what’s rational in me sometimes gets my clear attention and I
don’t think about what makes me afraid what makes me hate myself and what I came from what
I hear in her voice now—the high pitch almost a nasal whine which though it grates on my
nerves makes me think of a child just learning words with its sing-song quality that adjures you
to them and that lets me know where I came from and I don’t hate it—I don’t. Even the way she
said my name almost as if it was a question the accent on the last syllable… Mar-cus!
And the way she sits the way she was when she had me call upon her after she moved
from Texas a widow I fifteen then and her son my daddy moved here to East St. Louis before I
was born for a job working the river and the railroad and almost out of job twice nearly when the
water was down down too low for the barges to navigate making business hard just like when the
water was up flooding like it did in 1993 when I was five and she told me (my grandma Gabby)
how her folks remembered the flood of ’27 and how it was so much worse and even songs about
it. Worse than even a drought which dries up all the horse corn and food prices going up because
there’s nothing to feed the chicken and cattle the earth just one jumbled up dry brown mess and
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roadways crumpled on their foundations. But it was the way she sat in her pink floral house
gown all folded up between her legs her blue veined hands on her lap tightening the folds like
she was afraid of something getting in there and the knee-length panty hose falling down to
slippered feet her skin light in color a high yellow all the varicose veins exposed. How she asked
me if I wanted black coffee though I was just a teen and never tried nothing bitter like that yet
and not even alcohol and its taste. Always a cigarette dangling from her puckered lips making
her skin like paper wrinkle round her mouth underneath and her cheeks mottled with dark age
spots her eyes squinted too like there was sunlight in them even though she had all the windows
drawn shut with tasteless curtains in that trailer park she lived in in Cahokia my daddy buying a
home for her for her to live in her old age. The sound of the one window unit she had on in the
living room above the faded alabaster-colored love seat where she sat whining with red ribbons
flapping but undaunted to the fixed coiffure of white curls in the wig she wore like that of her
voice having to talk over it louder because it sounded just like the intonations of the story she
told me—an expelled frosted wind. Me across from the way she sat and the coffee table sitting
in a wood chair one of the spindles in the back missing making it hard to sit unless I leaned
forward and rested my elbows on my knees. And that’s how we sat when she called my daddy to
ask me come visit so she could tell me a story ‘bout her father’s family. ‘Bout Aunt Bethany and
her ex-husband and their children. How they played as children and what happened thinking if I
heard it I might write it down because my daddy told her I like to write down things and she
figured since I was young I’d understand. Understand an old woman rememberin’ the way she
was being young as if I was old enough to understand she was remembering which to my
reckoning I don’t because for now I just feel like I’ll live forever blessed with no memories of it
for it’ll die here with me.
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And so I hear that sane voice strangled by the hindrances of temporal emotions saying no
you don’t you don’t understand her remembrances and it would be rhetoric if you did even
though you will remember her voice and you will write it down. You will write it down for this
is your way of winning over time. Your way of making peace with it. For time is you in the
measure of your consciousness and only treating it like a stranger do you become a stranger and
then you don’t know yourself and are afraid taken all kinds of places in your mind and no
sanguine future but that spurious enthusiasm dreaming your past and the lies it wants to tell you
on a second and third look as you keep looking in a place that cannot find you for this I that I am
here is not here. This how I remember her voice in the ventilated dusk of a dry summer where
even the dead flowers she left in vases about her darkened rooms gave no scent of potpourri not
even I thinking to stop to smell them in the mix of the musty air of her hovelled quarters with the
memory of all that is dead just as her voice went on saying: “Yes. An old woman is prey when
she ain’t got no man. Where you can’t sleep at night with no fear of thieves at your door and
even your last coin as an offering ain’t seen by the just and rewarded a place of esteem in heaven
for all your tears… because don’t you know we all just want to be loved. I wanted to be loved.
And you too listening hoping that what you listen to will be heard that someone will listen to all
your confidences in my confidences what you perceive out of what I tell you today becoming
your own story in how you tell it and who you tell it to not circumspect of why you’re telling
them recognizing you in your eyes naked and vulnerable saying ‘Yes yes and a thousand times
more Yes…’
“But then maybe I should begin at some sort of beginning and tell you about my brother
and what happened with Dulcinea this some thirty-seven years back when all I got now is time to
look back to when I had a man’s perception of me knowing my grace and beauty added to his
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world and he no fool as to what I was giving him what I deigned to give him in the bathos of my
pleasure. How I know as an old woman this nadir this paradox of disgust in temptations when
you give in to what is tempted and this I see now in my brother Aaron’s aversion after he got
what he wanted in his play of Hamlet succoring her into his room alone with his threats and
sorrowful pleas of suicide for the gift of her love when even I know a suicide ain’t pleased or
threatened by nothing except the thought of hell afterwards… None of us knowing time after but
what we know of it before creating our holography of the future and what we will see based on
what we’ve seen with no promise of a fourth dimension. For you can see the future and not
change it. No. This I say no and a thousand times more No. I will have no man and his empty
promises the same promises you will make I’m sure when you seek some girl’s adoration but just
let me tell you what an old woman feels so that maybe one day you will understand and to your
reckoning of youth close the final door to time shutting out those wolves to what to you now is
sacred but one day you will see how it’s got nothing to do with it how love’s got nothing to do
with it. How if it’s time at all it’s better to pay it no attention the negation bringing forth its full
fruit. The negation giving you what’s needed and what’s not wanted at all—a time without
desire a time you’re not conscious of—what you become aware of when all the Yes’s and No’s
don’t mean a thing to your happiness. Your happiness not asking for these answers at all.
“But as to Dulcinea herself what her name given exudes as a true and perfect love an
illusion worthy of any and all knight-errantry she was like my sister friend who told me all kinds
of secrets innermost secrets and confiding them while I confide this in you so you know you
ain’t the only one who wishes adventure who wishes to be special… Yes. She told me when we
were just kids not much younger than you how she still believed in her folks her mom and dad
though divorced before she was born how they still loved each other somehow someway because
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they were still good friends who confided in one another spending time together with the
children she and her brother Ben and even there together that day my daddy finished the tree
house for us. The tree house that when you climbed it you could see the Sabine running in the
distance and now when I see the river here it calls back that time when we were young children
of East Texas revolted by kissing one another something you may not understand since now
kisses don’t seem so revolting and you’ve never been outside Illinois and no trips across the river
here across that ol’ man the Mississippi encapsulating what was once revolting and what ain’t
revolting no more all of it there in its fixed course and always changing—No, no amount of
times you traveling across that river in drought or flood into the city on the other side gives you
that feeling the feeling of the big thickets there and how that tree the tree my daddy chose for our
tree house don’t grow here leastways… But Dulcinea she still kept the faith that though her
parents lived their lives separate now they still were as one in her and Ben and though she told
me they had horrible fights where they said and did horrible things to each other not because of
some other love (well maybe her father David loved something else) but because of money her
father an artist a musician didn’t make on his guitar a guitar I remember seeing not the electric
one he played in shows back in Austin city limits but that acoustic guitar with a capo and a dollar
bill in the strings giving it the sound of a snare drum and that hollow sound from a bullet hole in
it and even now nearly forty years later I still remember the sound of it when he played for us
children—Dulcinea loved her father and even for a time wanted to sing like her momma did who
told her, ‘I just got burnt. I got burnt by him too many times…’ but Dulcinea believed somehow
someway in their heart of hearts they still remembered just like I remember the sound of that
guitar. They still remembered memories that had both of them in it in years back where when
you think about them you even wonder if they were the best times the good times of your life
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never to be repeated like how you as a young man may feel now going to high school and maybe
even off to college one day… Yes. Times never to be repeated but Dulcinea in her heart still
beating dreaming her momma and daddy had those memories both of them in them and that’s
what you learn about time and wanting to be loved in it because maybe all those memories of
good times better times they ain’t lies when you recall not what you got out of them but what
you gave to them what you gave to the past maybe all the love that ain’t got nothing to do with it
somehow someway eternal remaining un-decayed even in dying because it goes back to what
inspired it in the first place and that’s how it’s a circle a river is a circle in what she Dulcinea still
held in her heart as true existence when she thought about what she came from and experienced
her first kiss for she and my brother Aaron kissed for the first time there in that tree house…”
And so yes maybe in a way I did understand as I looked at an old woman almost seeing
her in the flower of her youth just as I looked at young girls before coming here lusting at those
curves in the way that they walk and talk and almost hearing it in her voice with its nasal singsong quality that makes me think of first words and me being young before I was young and am
young now as her eyes almost tell me talking of how young men used to look at her then maybe
even as she nibbled on a piece of fruit a strawberry perhaps her lips puckered not around some
cigarette with paper wrinkles underneath and that shade to her eyes a woman gives talking to you
without words but in the flutter of eyelashes as if saying, “Come to me come talk to me and I’ll
make it worth your while because you see you’ll be able to taste of what I taste of…”—that I
could understand and almost see and hear because even I know what a first kiss feels like. For in
being young before I was young and am young now I know what it’s like even in that reckoning
of but a few years with the experiences of such the magic the wonder of discovering for the first
time something some sound some light the spark of a soft touch that touch which where when
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you feel it makes you think you are wise to the whole world by your admittance to these first
things that you’re wise to nothing and you want to go about and ask of others, “Have you seen
heard felt these things too?” and see that’s the joy of youth being youth and what we call being
corrupted by it because of the insufferable need to share it share the perception of your world
before with age and time and many shares such as this you are corrupted made corruptible in the
joy being gone and the lack of no surprise in the answer to seeing hearing feeling those things
these first things that are like a treasure stripped of their golden glow their importance the value
of them depreciated every time you ask of it ask of others their knowledge of this wisdom which
in essence nobody really espouses through the wear of use and soon you even stop you stop
asking that question, “O where is a wise man so that I might emulate his habits? Where is the
woman that I might taste of her fruits…?” So in a way I did understand because I do know
what’s it like and I too can remember the excitement and forbearance of worry strife and feeling
small to something so much bigger than myself in those first things a first kiss and what you see
hear feel when something ends and something begins like that like when I first checked in to
check out like how a child feels on their first day of school…
And that’s how she mentioned it how she broached the subject of the day her brother
Aaron and Dulcinea kissed for the first time in the tree house her daddy built David Threnody
and his ex-wife Bethany present because it was a late afternoon in late summer and Dulcinea
herself a year older than Aaron was off the next day off to kindergarten. This no remonstrance
no act of repentance on what was done or not done but how my grandma Gabby a first grader
that year herself remembers a late afternoon in late summer that light in August as only a woman
with memories can paint it maybe even casting off the colored remark not knowing how I would
write it down in my own worry and strife to somehow wrestle the feeling of getting with it
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getting with the times my time and her time one matchless time where when at noon you know
the morning’s over and how afternoon leads to evening and how in the summer dusk the bugs
come out the mosquitoes looking for first blood the katydids singing in the bushes as the
darkness pervades giving you that sense that you need to get with it get with the times how all
your worry strife are but a small economical speck to a mechanism not quite mechanic as you
sense and smell in that summer air an inexorable process summoning what must be and is the
coming of the fall as leaves on a tree know it as the leaves the flowers and seeds on that tree
house Gabby’s daddy built knew it when the school bells ring and the children come together
opening their books cracking them open the sound of it that first time to read their first lessons.
Books a present that can be opened and opened again but when closed the seal of it you know is
broken the story where it was left off not quite new again but like an old friend waiting for you at
the corner like a schoolmate waiting for you with you for the bus calling you to where it wants to
take you and you at a loss for words in those first words you learn as a new reader and Dulcinea
didn’t know how to read yet nor Aaron or Gabby or Benjamin Threnody for that matter but they
did know how to tease and Ben teased his sister to kiss him to kiss Aaron in their new makeshift
home of the tree house the parents watching and smiling to see their children at play knowing
that school awaited them the next morning with all its cherishment of learning as they were
learning too in teasing each other playing the roles of family in their new house Aaron and
Dulcinea the husband and wife and Ben and Gabby though the older ones acting as their children
and I don’t know if it was her mentioning it that light in August and what it alludes to in me as to
my own recollections of starting school but sitting there in that trailer park listening to the sing
song quality of voice remembering being at play as a child made me also think of my first book
what I first read the book I first opened and read on my own with no predilection of a teacher
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The Call of the Wild by Jack London and how I know now as a young man the Martin Eden
prophecy he made about how the words were already long written down before they were read
and recognized by a reader and I somehow knew even as a child before this how maybe even
Gabby and Aaron and Dulcinea and Ben knew in their play-acting as children in their last day of
summer freedom before starting school how your imagination destroys what caused it to imagine
how it is dulcified into some reality like a colored remark on the light in August to be not the end
not the end of some world our world getting with it getting with the times but an evolution a
process by which what made you imagine is no longer imaginary thus losing its power to inspire
and I remember now even as I remember my grandma’s voice telling me this story how when I
read the back cover on the author’s life Jack London’s life before I even finished the first chapter
the fact that he committed suicide a celebrated writer not even lost in obscurity but a success
monetarily at least even if it was later after the words were long written down and how when I
read he committed suicide I got with it—my own time—and I sensed a commingling a
communion of sorts of my spirit in recognition an omen if you will and I felt it the fear of seeing
the future but being unable to change it though later I was to learn it was uremia caused by acute
alcoholism and an accidental overdose of morphine for the pain at least that’s what biographers
say of him now along with the occidental accusations of plagiarism. And this—to me—is what I
imagined as I listened to my grandmother talk talk of a light in August and a kiss before
kindergarten how it alluded to coming a far piece but there is so much farther to go and how that
kiss Dulcinea received was merely a foreshadowing of the rape that would happen the temptation
of rape and the child that would happen in 1966 their school days just about over some twentytwo years before I was born and the burning of it. The burning of David Threnody’s journal by
his own son of that time period the period of 1955 to 1966 and how I had only my grandma’s
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voice as recollection of it the only book to be opened the seal broken and that period that story of
Dulcinea and Ben Threnody and how Ben sought revenge against my grandma Gabby’s brother
Aaron and how he rose up against his father her voice and my voice the only imagination of it.
The only voice telling of it out of this the common dark of all our death.
“It’s an ordering of the mind leastways I tell myself in accordance with nature and what
seems the desultory pride of being a woman our ability to weep what I remember of that last
summer day before school began in the vita farce of our play in that tree house the Sabine River
running in the distance our parents looking on my Aunt Bethany and her ex-husband assembled
there with my daddy after he put the last nail in and though the sun went down late they let us
play to wear ourselves out I guess because none of us would sleep in the summer light even if we
was tired. And it was Benjy. Dulcinea called him Benjy in her preschool language and it stuck
with him and it was him that after our interposed roles of family at play that evening decided he
didn’t want no girls in the house and I suppose now nearly forty years later telling you so you
may understand and write it down how I know now that tree house was like his family my daddy
answering me questions later about his sister when I was a young woman after Benjy died after
Aaron died at his own hand and Dulcinea like some desolate Niobe hers and Aaron’s child a
secret how I learned of how her momma and daddy Bethany and David Threnody were wed
Benjy with an older brother choked by the umbilical cord held by him by his own small hands so
that blood was on his hands even before he could let out his first cry of rage and consternation
that I suppose consummated all his contrary ways because you should know what you boast is
what you ain’t never going to get just like how water how all the rivers flow to what is lower so
what is lower receives all of it the same with all stations in life and even then in that summer
light before school began before Dulcinea started kindergarten and Benjy and I a grade higher
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Aaron but to wait another year before his first lessons on appearance and reality that role the role
of all that is contrary in comparisons how you can travel the whole wide world and still not know
more than a man who’s nary looked out his own window the fact that if you state you are better
you are no better and if it be the fame and praise you wish to receive by man all you will receive
is torment for you will see how soon everything is forgotten even when I learned Bethany had a
husband before David and that folks say or least my daddy said my great grandmother buried
him in that river the Sabine we could see from the height of that tree and how on the day Benjy
was born the howl of a hound woke her my great grandmother Bridgette leading her cursing to
that first husband Papa Frenchie beaten by the restraining order of his second wife and stepsons
and jailed the night Bethany was in labor (I just born as well and Aaron to follow a year later) his
sufferings even losing sight in one eye bringing about the pity which feeds the past with love in
fact them getting back together the same time David and Bethany sought their divorce this again
speaking of that contrariness and how your ancestors look at the chaos of infinite time on each
side of the present so you can see and put that in the words you write down the emptiness of any
applause you think you might get out of it the very changeableness of what judgment pretends
and how less is so much more… But it was what Benjy said in that lambent glow a light of
August after he kicked us girls out of the tree house after Dulcinea answered to his teasing by
giving Aaron a kiss and the parents left gone inside to sip coffee and wait for us to play how he
told Aaron and Aaron told me in his little boy words that I paraphrase to you now my
contrivances to truth the very contrariness I speak that what you do you don’t want to do and
what you don’t you do even though what’s done has was and always will be done so that when
he (Benjy) said: ‘When I grow up I won’t be like I am now I won’t be like my father and I won’t
remember my brother I never knew in the first place and I’ll put away childish things and I won’t
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tease you to be kissed and I won’t cry when I don’t get the things I want for I’ll be contented
with what I have and what bothers me now will instead be left to a tranquil mind having what it’s
got and I can look back on all this and how those silly girls don’t belong with us here in this tree
and see the universe is but transformation and life is opinion…’ I can say Yes—be free—and
look at things as a man…
“So maybe I suppose words true are necessarily paradoxical to see truth without envy but
pity just like my great grandmother Bridgette seeing her old man Papa Frenchie with pity as a
seed of love old love in time lost and regained in remembrances of things past and how if you
want to be happy free sometimes you have to start with nothing which don’t come from nothing
no prospects no hope and you have to walk the streets with an empty stomach losing the pretense
of any privilege for it opens up the door to deliverances that I guess just can’t be seen in America
now the American South or here for that matter what’s left along rivers for black folks like us in
East St. Louis and New Orleans and the happy man the free man can go tell it like how maybe
Dulcinea’s parents my Aunt Bethany’s ex-husband David Threnody could tell it being a
musician what I heard in that guitar of his when he sang that paradox that true fact that poverty
ain’t necessarily shame and moral terror—it could be just a case of bad luck. No in fact maybe
we should see there ain’t nothing wrong with you not some sort of vagrancy to walk the streets
on an empty stomach our betters with privilege castigate as a badge of dishonor because nothing
really is proved by it nothing can be substantiated added or subtracted by anyone’s existence
they did not ask for which is why maybe Dulcinea in her sister friend confidences to me thought
somehow someway she could sing like her mother did and her father wasn’t some kind of failure
but in fact everyone else was ridiculous because they wanted something they wanted something
from somebody in that esteemed caste system we have in place which we don’t question just as
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Bethany didn’t question it of her man and I saw this conceit in Dulcinea too just a black country
girl like myself from a small town who I think got from her father this idea of freedom that an
artist knows and suffers from but dogged by Bethany’s idea that comes from the docile stupidity
and ignorance of petit-bourgeois living Dulcinea listening to it that a man should do this or that
for his wife and children should provide against that fear of walking the streets on an empty
stomach with no hopes no prospect denying what could be that serene detachment that
deliverance that what may also be true what may also be just around the corner the truth that just
as the lilies of the field are clothed God made lamb and wolf both and called it good… I heard
later from my father after Aaron was shot after Dulcinea hid herself in shame that Bethany was
just a pothead in love with herself anyway (something David quit after their firstborn died) and
that’s the strange conceit of ignorance thinking it’s wise when truly the wise know they know
nothing at all and fear thinking they know it—the equality lost—the equality gone in this form of
self-love for you are supposed to love yourself that’s true but like how the Cherokee blood I
found in my momma’s ancestry and how other Native Americans say it in their prayers and not
be tempted otherwise as it is in the Lord’s prayer to be kind and love your neighbor as yourself
but I think in Dulcinea’s confidence mirroring her mother who being a pothead thought her
duties were strictly limited to raising the children in that atmosphere that form of self-love loses
this that equality and that strange paradox arises where no one is better than you but in this
chipped shoulder indignation you act better than everyone else who might in your secret
jealousies just be better for even Dulcinea’s father David told her and she remembered him
saying, ‘No matter what in any endeavor you choose to pursue there is always going to be
someone better…’ this not some disheartening fact some cynicism he wished to convey to his
daughter perhaps even thinking of his son Benjy but a reasoned loving yourself a humility in
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wisdom of fear towards pride and if not even esteemed as that a very law of nature a laissez-faire
let it be of our certain competition—for someone always wins the race.
“And it was that tree that Texas mountain laurel of our youth—that tree house—which
like Daphne and Apollo reminds me of it that race the race between love and not-love and how
we all have to take it take our rest under it and swallow this our medicine. Because sometimes
that serene detachment to deliverances the fact that when if when you go all the way when you
run the race as an artist just as Dulcinea’s father David did judged as a shameful deadbeat by all
who know the earth the emptiness you feel to it is not just that in your stomach but the true
feeling of being alone in your heart alone with the gods the nectar the ambrosia the medicine of
this aloneness for it is a poison to mortals and not just the losing of all hope with time for once
tasting it you are starved by the degraded humiliation of choosing the choice between
companionship in mediocrity with its dulcet wanting to belong to something and all its
innumerable books of pulp political fiction taking sides in order to belong to a time in times and
the choice that when climbing that mountain of laurels that abode of the gods to climb but a bit
further where no man has a friend you hear it you hear the voice of it the voice of the mountain
where when you hear it hear the mountain cry in all its vast silence its necessary silence to
belonging to a time the affected seriousness the serious defect of all artists and you hear in that
cry the laughter the en masse laughter of the primordial strain the side-splitting laughter that
brings tears to your eyes and it the mountain the gods saying, ‘Don’t be silly but be as us like
unto us and imitate our faces shadowed in the clefts of that which you climb and follow the
graves of the ones that went before you and tried as you tried to be alone with it us your covenant
broken and your eyes blinded by the laughter of even trying in the trials to even make that
covenant that hubris leaving you only to feel those soft impudent pillars of our immortality your
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death a happy death for in not knowing what is after except in what came before no evil will
befall you you O good man and what you don’t know no man will ever know so take your rest
under this tree of laurel its seeds a narcotic a hallucinogen of something you can’t have and
remember to remember the deal you once made and just be human…’ and yes Dulcinea told me
and now I tell you a youth how his David’s own children destroyed him how yes he could play
that guitar real good but he sold his soul for it for wisdom feeling he wasn’t using it for nothing I
guess so he gave it to us all for a price and the covenant the deal was seen in his children in the
ingratitude of an inconsonant wife who bore him these children who no longer loved him and
saw what he scraped and clawed out of his existence in those songs the songs he played for us all
like on some magic lyre meant nothing gave him nothing but the vast silence that followed them
and his children his firstborn killed by the second and his daughter raped by a cousin my brother
in the foreshadowing of a kiss before kindergarten and Benjy rising up against his father just as
he did that day at play in that laurel tree under the end spell of summer light making us girls
unwelcome the story which I’m telling you now an old woman remembering to remember after
marriage children widowhood my virginity in your virgin ears the satire the story of an artist’s
satire of how at the end of the race between love and not-love the earth opens up to enclose us
and we all return as to that tree for you see the lineage continued as a continuation in Dulcinea’s
son who was not really a secret but given the name of son not grandson to David and Bethany
raised as such and not the spawn of incest but the hapless late conception of two once lovers out
of wedlock naming him—of course—Solomon.
“And as an any reconciliation getting back together going back to what once was like the
reconciliation Dulcinea wished of her parents every word counts every dream of it even the ones
elegiac in tone and if there’s going to be any narrative urgency in what I’m telling you you
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should know the grudge is born in the forgiven not the forgiving for even though Aaron met in
himself a state of revulsion after he had his way with her after pleading in lachrymose tears a
sickness a melancholy desire threatening suicide if but Dulcinea would kiss him once more just
as she did under the spell of that ending summer light that light in August the year 1954 we at
play in a tree with the first day of school following the next day maybe even some of the
excitement and anxiety Aaron remembered in the taste the spark of her schoolgirl lips off to learn
to write her name in kindergarten the temptation he later yearned to satisfy when she was but to
turn seventeen the year 1965 so it was with Benjy in his revolt in his revulsion at six and then at
eighteen the grudge against any reconciliation to have us girls present in that tree though we had
assumed the roles of a family in it though Aaron was like unto a brother to him (the brother he
never had except in that last grip and gasp of first pneumatic breath before birth before freed
from the cave of his mother’s womb under the cursing intonations of a voodoo woman) and
Aaron not just a cousin not just family and one thing as you know a family always does is
forgive its members be it from blood or that same pneumatic breath of life spirit which we
remember in all births of tragedies and dreams that give us our superstitions our totems and
taboos of kith and kin that veritable metaphysic truth adhered to even in desecration even in
abominable acts such as the one which in Aaron’s proclivity brought forth in incestuous son this
the horrible spire to the story I tell to you something Benjy could never forgive to be or not to be
forgiven for in that ad hominem phrase said at bedtime before such said dreams even the elegiac
ones just as it was spoken in our berth that night when Aaron and Benjy descended from our tree
house blood brothers allied to any and all feminine remonstrance the house in it of un-dying
laurels which our father built David and Bethany also looking on (David traveling from his
wandering whereabouts in Austin as a playing musician there to see his daughter off to her first
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day of school) all this transpired so that after Dulcinea and I in our tattletale cried the regret of
our expulsion spoken and sung by us in our little girl voices so sweet then in our infallible purity
our feline attractiveness to trees though getting stuck in them we held no grudge but in fact
forgave we folded our hands and bowed our heads and spoke the words to forgive our brothers
and we prayed yes prayed for so they say a family that prays together stays together… But no
now I tell you be not gullible to these prayers the prayers of children. You Marcus be not naïve
to my words spoken to you now as an old woman with so many dreams gone and not
remembered except the fact I know I’ve dreamed them even the elegiac ones showing our
inevitable exit from cave dwellings of birth where the play of shadows on the wall are not reality
at all for everything I’ve shared with you told you so far are but the shadows of things passing in
front of a fire a fire behind you the same fire as the one Benjy started when he burned it down—
the tree house—he burned that Texas mountain laurel down we played in as kids and which he
expelled us from as yet not women the same fire where he burned the copy of his father’s journal
of that period in time 1955 to 1966 the period in time between Aaron and Dulcinea’s first kiss to
when he my brother Aaron lay with his cousin and bore a child taken as son not grandson
between David and Bethany—Yes Benjy burned that tree down after he hung his blood brother
his cousin Aaron from a branch from it an effigy after he shot him in anger this when he learned
the truth and not just the play of shadows on a wall when Dulcinea in her own lachrymose tears
wept the truth to him and he rose up against his father for telling lies for not telling him the true
ideal form from which his nephew/brother Solomon came. And yes let me tell you this not all
for David had a mistress then which in most folks there and about Sabine County should have
relegated the doubt that he and Bethany would have another child David being gone most parts
of the year anyway as a wandering musician and Bethany already in her early forties so as to the
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tree that tree of laurel in which we played in as kids at four five and six the same tree Benjy at
eighteen would burn down was but the ash and cinders of his own untimely death for you see it
would be a tree a mulberry that would see his own hanging end what he crashed into in a fiery
automobile accident in fleeing the chase the race of pursuers an angry lynch mob of white men
not trying to justify Aaron’s death (to that effect they could care less) but the fact of his own rape
of a woman David’s mistress for you see she was white…”
Now let me get this straight Marcus said. Your Aunt Bethany and her husband who she
divorced and who had two children Benjy (as his sister called him) and Dulcinea both born in
1948 Dulcinea just born late in the year. And Benjy had a twin his brother dying at childbirth
some seven days after a leap year on the calendar after he Benjy choked him with his own
umbilical cord a voodoo woman the midwife present. Then you (Grandma Gabby) and your
brother Aaron grew up with these said children. David the ex-husband and father a musician a
Blues guitarist whereabouts unknown except that he was from East St. Louis as we are now and
who addressed himself in Austin after said divorce to be close to his children and Bethany the
mother who used to sing with him those antithetic parallelisms the trademark of his songs but
who gave that up for said children your cousins so that you and your brother Aaron grew up with
them Benjy and Dulcinea and so that you had a tree house to play in near the Sabine River near
the town of Hemphill where Bethany and her brother your father were born and raised. That tree
a Texas mountain laurel your father built in it by hammer and nail this house in among the
laurels a tree house in which you (Gabby) and your brother Aaron and cousins Benjy and
Dulcinea could play and you did you did play you played house Aaron and Dulcinea playing the
roles of husband and wife and you and Benjy though older their children roles in which Aaron
and Dulcinea planted together their first kiss on one August night at twilight before school before
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Dulcinea’s first day of kindergarten and you and Benjy’s first day in first grade Aaron but four
and another year before he started school. And this play of house in that tree eschewing her
Dulcinea’s own wish to see her parents reconcile get back together for Bethany your aunt lived
there in Sabine County after the divorce in a house afforded by a man known as Papa Frenchie
her grandfather who in fact reconciled with his first wife Bridgette your great-grandmother this
at about the same time Bethany gave birth to Benjy and his twin divorcing David Threnody
changing her name back to her maiden name Lebeau and after Papa Frenchie in a restraining
order placed by his second wife was beaten at the hands of his own stepsons a hound howling
which led Bridgette to renew the tryst of this first marriage some fifty years back. This same
Bridgette involved in doing away with the body of Bethany’s first husband in the Sabine which
you could see from said tree house. And then this then as you’ve told me this same tree house
which marked kissing cousins Dulcinea and Aaron’s first touch of lips you all just children four
five and six at the time this then in it you saw Benjy’s aversion after playing such said house
coaxing your brother Aaron after said kiss to chase you girls you and Dulcinea out with sticks
perhaps an indication a foreshadow a play of shadows on the wall in front of a fire behind which
later at sixteen seventeen eighteen extrapolated Aaron’s own errant proclivity who perhaps
remembered that said first kiss pleading sickness and suicide to woo his cousin your cousin
Dulcinea into his room to have his way with her and after this the same said aversion Benjy felt
to playing house leading to his affirmation of manhood. All when you were but children that not
all as you (Grandma Gabby) have said for a child a son was conceived David and Bethany
seeking not to ruin the reputation of their daughter taking their grandson as a son and naming
him Solomon… This is the story you’re telling me. But I guess I don’t understand. I can’t
understand. Perhaps because I am young and I don’t have the wisdom and the who what where
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and how of memory that recedes after the oblivion of a dream only to return in stable fixtures
eyes and ears perceive when opening again as does the heart after slumber this my youth and
inexperience do not understand—I don’t understand him—I don’t understand Benjy. For his
aversion as a child yes after playing house in that tree and wanting no girls there after seeing his
mother and father at war yes this I do understand as well as his affirmations to be a man that the
universe is but transformation and life is opinion yes this I understand—but why? Why did he
burn it? Why did he shoot Aaron hanging him from a branch of that tree where you all once
played house and setting fire to it burn his father’s journals of that time period that period of
1955 to 1966 that time between Aaron and Dulcinea’s first kiss and the rape which conceived a
child? Why did he Benjy blame his father for it and taking his mistress David’s mistress a white
woman predestine his own death in a fiery car crash? Coming to his own hanging end a lynch
mob of angry white men chasing him racing him—a tree also his death—a mulberry? Do I have
it straight? Do I have the story straight?
Yes Gabrielle grandma Gabby said. But the story is in the father—David. To
understand the son you must know the father. You must know of revenge. You see David had a
dream and I guess his son was how it was answered. Because have you ever looked at people? I
mean really looked at them? Like how you look at me now—your grandma—hearing how my
voice sounds and maybe even hearing in the way I’ve told you this story what it doesn’t say and
what you see of me just an old woman living in a trailer park sitting here across from you in
house gown and slippers you see maybe what I look like in private what I do in the dark with no
one watching no God even watching because you see that’s how the seed gets planted. The seed
of revenge. And you say as God says in the silent dark recesses of your heart Vengeance is mine.
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Don’t be gullible. Don’t be naïve boy to your own mirror. For then your questions are
just rhetoric answered for yourself and by yourself only. For what do sinners really look like?
You pass them in the streets. You passed them by on your way here to hear this story I imagine.
You got to see beyond the surfaces of people’s eyes where you just see you. For there’s public
appearance and then there’s how people look when they think nobody’s watching. Benjy now—
he was nice on the eyes. Just as Dulcinea was. When you looked on them you felt you could
trust them. And that’s the sign to all naysayers of idiocy. Don’t be fooled by appearances
because I’ll tell ya that boy was born with a hole in him some sort of hunger thirst that no matter
what he did or didn’t do left him empty with that hole still inside him. And he wanted revenge—
revenge for being born… And I don’t think that hole came from him started with him but there
immutable from the life force of his father David. Because you see David wanted something and
I don’t think he ever got it not even after and he died the year you were born some fifteen years
ago some twelve years before this our new millennium and it now even three years past—he
didn’t even get it in his death—that recognition and not the recognition of his guitar playing for
that goes without saying because his voice his songs will always be with us. No he never got
called a professional and that was his dream. Not the money nor the fame—the praise of man.
But to be deemed a professional—a master of his art—for to be that to become that you soften it
you sugarcoat it your talent. See? He wanted it exposed full force like some adagio metaminutiae where every thread to his chord-making every treble and pitch to his voice was
examined and appreciated—by what or whom he could not say. But you see that’s not being a
professional because a pro knows all this knows their craft well but this is downplayed for the
narrative the story for even if it be a hymn to heaven the instruments the voices are but the tools
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to a much greater story and this is what David did and didn’t do to entertain entertain us with the
thought of it for what would be heaven if there wasn’t a hell?
You see? Do you see now beyond the appearances of the senses? Beyond even the
conceptions of good and evil? For Benjy was not bad nor good not beautiful nor ugly not to be
trusted nor distrusted—he was just a tool. He was like the hand of God forgetting it be but a
hand that says to itself says those words Vengeance is mine unaware the words were planted the
seeds were planted long before he was born and would not be taken as his own words even so
shortly after his death let alone with eons of time years that go by just like it’s been nearly forty
years since Aaron raped Dulcinea and Benjy shot him. Do you see now? Revenge ain’t just
some cold dish because what’s beyond the appearance of the strangers you meet and your
wonderings of what they really do in private you find the best of it the best of revenge is making
your life something someone everyone else wants. That’s a professional the sign of a pro—
making your life your story what everyone else wants and they’ll pay you for it pay dearly—not
inspiring pity but envy in you even being born and having been born with it—a story that entrances—tantalizes... And that’s what David wanted what Benjy wanted—David wanted
something he would never get in his life without forsaking his life and Benjy wanted his father’s
life because David loved it more than his mother. And that’s it. That’s the story beyond the
story and what a pro doesn’t even attempt or try. That’s why David and Bethany divorced and
why as a boy Benjy didn’t want us girls in that tree house. Why he teased Aaron to kiss
Dulcinea as that first temptation that led to what happened eleven years later all this what I’m
telling you happening some thirty-seven years back. And maybe that’s also why he burned it.
Benjy burned that tree house down Aaron’s body hanging from it and he burned his father’s
journal of that period in between. Maybe because that’s all he could get his hands on. And the
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woman—the white woman—well, perhaps being David’s mistress wasn’t such an easy task an
easy role to play. And all Benjy did all he tried to do was be as his father and in doing that have
the same mistress—don’t you see? And art is a cruel and intolerable mistress.
I don’t want to write it—I don’t. I will not entertain the price of a whore. None of this
should be written down this you tell me what I came from. I think it should all burn Marcus
said.
No Gabby said. You tell it. Tell it the way I’ve told you for then you’ll know what it
means to be a professional. The price of it. What’s sold to make it something. To make their
lives something—the story of the father David the story of his children. You’ll know the driving
madness in what he David could never have in what he thought he sold but didn’t. Because you
see now—you see don’t you? You understand. Revenge? Revenge for being born? In all the
words it can’t be communicated. Maybe even in your generation you’ll find you won’t need
words and it will be like all this was in another language the story of it like being told to a
foreigner. In fact imagine it as such. When you go away from here when you leave this trailer
park where you sat with your grandmother hearing this story go tell it go write it down like you
have to convey it in another language. Let your eyes tell it. Create a sign language with your
hands and your body. Find symbols something to point to so that they you tell this story to can
look and see the inestimable landmarks left by the earth left by a tree that once was… Because
what burns can never be destroyed. The fire quenches it not. Water is the death of earth and air
is the death of water this on which the fire feeds all of it reversible and as one and you see and
understand that now. So shorten it. Shorten your days if you are an artist if that’s what you are.
Shorten the story to your own needs. Always run the short way—run the race that I have shared
with you the short way the distance between two points like two trains in a mathematical
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equation invariable as to their separation as this is natural. And so find what’s natural in what
I’ve told you—what changes. Maybe then you will know why you want to burn it—why Benjy
burned it—that tree house where we once played as children. Why as you want to he burned his
father’s journal his father’s words on that time thinking those words could never return could
never come back to him. Like in some religious fervor repenting. Attempting to hide not a
proud artifice but what is shameful what is done in the dark what you don’t want brought to
light—an inadequacy a lack… But you see now you know now and understand these first
things. How all words return to their owner. And the interval is small. Just like it’s but a small
interval a short distance between birth and death between a train coming and going a train to
catch what is infinite what’s left out of it. And I’ve left so much out for in all that’s been said
you still know very little about my Aunt Bethany and the husband she once had David Threnody.
How he fell in love with another man’s wife and what brought us to this the story I now have
told you about what you came from. You know little about their children the twin Benjy and his
sister Dulcinea my brother Aaron. And you’ve heard nothing yet of Solomon… Time is like a
river made up of these events which happen and as soon as they happen are carried away and
another event takes its place. So remember. Remember now a time and place I’ve told you
about and tell it. Tell it in your own words. Go tell it as a play a stage for actors the method to
their roles. Go to meet your train that will take you home to your father my son. Take you home
to what you came from. For in the end that is all that’s left you…
… so now I’m pretty sure not what to make of it. This last chapter. What I found in a
bible. A memoir of a boy named Marcus the grandson of Bethany Lebeau’s niece. He wrote it in
the hospital—the Alton psychiatric ward—where he hung himself in the shower room this in
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2007 the day after Christmas just a year before I heard those first recordings of David Threnody.
I’m not sure what to make of it, but then since I don’t have David’s journals from that time it’s
mostly what I have to go by. Through the story of Gabrielle, Bethany’s niece, I have the only
indication of what Ben and Dulcinea Threnody’s childhood was like and what happened in 1966
that led to Solomon being born. And as to those words maybe I should go back. I should try to
fill in what’s been decidedly left out. I should go back and tell it as Gabrielle indicated it should
be told. I should tell it like as to a play with a stage and actors on it—a play in a foreign
language. And so what follows is such a play—a screenplay again a mind movie the third and
last of a trilogy—what began in Biloxi in Mississippi with David and a flower with captured
roots. The characters the actors you already know. Their debt what all men pay…
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25
The future’s uncertain and the end is always near…
--The Doors
EXT. SABINE NATIONAL FOREST, TEXAS—TWILIGHT
Focus as if prostrate flat on your back looking up into the
rays of sunlight falling through the branches of a tree,
a Texas Mountain Laurel.
You hear the song of katydids.
Now follow up through the branches into the direct sunlight
a horizon that pans away from the sunset to the Sabine
River flowing in the distance.
The river comes into focus
and then a close-up of the water’s threads over submerged
rocks like you’re standing on the shore and you hear the
water the current over the rocks mixed with the song of
katydids the croak of frogs.
distance—a train bridge.
You see a bridge in the
You hear a far-off whistle.
INT. ALTON PSYCHIATRIC WARD—CHRISTMAS DAY 2007
You follow a hallway from the day room where tables are
strewn about with half-finished puzzles and playing cards
some face up and some turned down a TV in the corner with
bad reception of an afternoon soap opera.
You pass doors
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the rooms some of them empty two beds in each and some
occupied by patients in hospital robes and slippers each
peek into these rooms revealing a different dementia.
A
different sadness to each of them like no God that answers
like all the dead Christmas trees of the world and you know
it’s Christmas for there are decorations up.
In the
hallway and in the rooms and in the day room—a Christmas
tree there.
And then a regression.
Like a peek into the inhabitants of
this place is a regression.
You not in a psychiatric ward.
You’re in New Orleans at night in a torrential downpour on
Rampart Street—a slow hurricane moving over.
And then you
see Marcus, just a boy black with frail hands and something
broken in his eyes in a room back in the ward Christmas
music playing on the radio at a table and chair a bible
opened before him.
hear a chorus.
He’s tearing out pages.
And then you
Not from the radio playing Christmas music,
but a Greek chorus like in a lament to the House of Atreus
and what began with Tantalus.
Marcus in fact drawing on
the torn pages from his bible an image of his torture—a man
standing in a pool of water a fruit tree the branches ever
out of his reach the water receding from his thirst from
his fear of drowning. The word Tantalus written in bold
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across a page from Jeremiah heavy with ink.
chorus on stage in a Doric setting.
You see this
In marble.
They wear
purple and white robes with gold ribbons and hold masks to
their faces.
Like Mardi Gras masks.
Then again you see a
levee breaking in New Orleans at night—the water first but
a trickle in close-up and then a torrent over the crumbling
earth.
CHORUS
He stole the ambrosia and the nectar too.
sire and a mortal one.
sharecroppers.
A divine
Descendants of slaves then
This the house of David.
An artist
but a poor lover in the reenactment as artists can
only love themselves and see as what they see fit.
For it takes two to look on a thing.
And three to
divide…
Two CNA’s two black girls in floral scrubs enter the room
where Marcus sits with his bible.
his roommate—an old white man.
at his hands.
CNA 1
That’s when you notice
He sits on his bed looking
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Time for your shower, Willie…
It’s Tuesday.
WILLIE
I’m not dirty.
CNA 2
Don’t matter, Willie.
On Tuesday you shower.
WILLIE
See my hands?
See?
There’s no dirt.
underneath the fingernails…
No dirt
Is my wife coming?
She
never liked it when I had dirt underneath my nails.
Said it reminded her of her grandfather and she’d
always laugh…
Is she coming today?
I want to show
her my nails.
CNA 1
You’re divorced, Willie.
the papers?
Remember we helped you sign
Remember the lawyer came to visit?
You’re with us now.
Come on get up—it’s time for your
shower.
You hear a ringtone.
CNA 1 pulls out a cell phone.
has long fingernails—painted.
She
But you don’t focus on her
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hands the way she has to tap her fingers on the cell phone.
You focus on her eyes looking at the phone.
Every time she
blinks you notice the flutter of her false eyelashes.
CNA 1
Girl… it’s my daughter again.
She poked me.
because I posted on her wall.
For her birthday…
Willie’s hands are shaking now.
Probably
He’s been looking at them
too long. He crosses his arms and hides his hands under his
armpits.
His gown untied his hands underneath the gown.
CNA 2 is trying to lift him from the bed into a wheelchair.
She grabs him from behind by his hands his arms crossed.
It takes a rocking motion for him to stand on wobbly legs.
His feet without socks in his slippers.
She guides him to
the wheelchair.
CNA 2
You gonna see her after your shift?
It is Christmas.
CNA 1
Girl you know she’s up her boyfriend’s ass.
all she talks about on Facebook.
on her wall.
That’s
That’s why I posted
It’s hard enough having a teenager born
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on Christmas Eve.
but she never does.
She always says she’s coming over
Not since she moved in with him.
And as far as I know she still ain’t talkin’ to her
father.
fault.
Not since he kicked her out.
But that’s his
He should know she’s just a teenager and in
love for the first time like he don’t remember how he
used to come to my window and keep me out all night…
CNA 2
What was your comment?
CNA 1
Oh girl, let me just read it to ya—this is what she
said yesterday for Christmas Eve for her birthday:
It’s a wonderful life.
the clarity of it.
Maybe just one day one moment
This making all the other times
their just sacrifice for a moment that you remember a
hope of the future…
CNA 2
She’s just young, Rasputia.
was all you need…
Lord knows I thought love
498
Marcus has not looked up from his bible.
ignoring him anyway.
The CNA’s are
His shower day is Wednesday—tomorrow.
This the day he plans to kill himself.
This the word you
see come in focus as you see the pages torn out of the
bible and the papers he’s replacing them with, papers handprinted with an exact and scrupulous scrawl—the word he
made heavy with ink at the bottom of the page he’d drawn
the image of Tantalus—Tomorrow.
CNA 1
Well now here’s what I wrote back today:
counts.
Every moment
Live each moment each day that way.
Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
remember I’m the woman that squeezed you out…
you think, Medea?
And
What
You think my hypocrisy knows no
bounds as a mother?
CNA 2
Girl, how you supposed to remember yesterday?
She’s got Willie in the chair.
his armpits.
His hands are still under
He walks the chair without the help of the
CNA moving his slippers. He makes his way slowly in the
chair towards the door towards the hall.
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EXT. HEMPHILL, TEXAS: BETHANY’S HOUSE—NIGHT 1954
It’s Texas Indian summer.
The dog days near the end of
hurricane season. Rain is falling.
window.
You see a light in a
Forms moving behind curtains.
CHORUS
This
is
not
progression.
the
house
of
David.
Time
seen
as
a
Halted in the moment of reflection and
losing its truth, its allusions to a tragedy.
This
home along the Sabine not the home of the husband to a
granddaughter of a man called Papa Frenchie.
Frenchie’s house.
But yes,
Paid for by hurricane and fire—the
home of Bethany, divorced, and her children.
David
the shadow of who was once overseer now just the payer
of support and visitations.
The Tantalus drawn by
insane descendants the lubricious hum of laments once
sung at slave funerals—the generation of his, David’s,
the Threnody name—Tantalus that faceless and unknown
slave the father of Demetrius the father of Horace the
father of David.
with
providing
Destroyed by the horror that comes
what’s
needed
to
eat
and
sleep
in
America, by that irresistible power of the past, and
500
brought back to life by the hopes of their offspring—
the grandfather born in slavery a migrated rail yard
worker dying of a blood infection, the father a cook
at fish fries awakening his children in the hunt for
worms,
and
Blues.
then
David—a
Psalmist—a
singer
of
the
Demetrius Threnody losing his hand and his
life to a train. Horace known as Duke wishing the sun
would move backward in the sky so that he could stay
fishing.
Black
men—a
family—lost
Dream, lost in David’s dream.
in
the
American
And yes, infanticide
and incest and blood-lust followed them, instilled in
this family line.
David the killer of Goliath and
Bethany’s husband—his sons the seeds of adultery—and
he the father of a daughter, Dulcinea, who loved him.
David playing both the role of father and grandfather
to Solomon.
who
must
His brother and nephew, Benjy, the one
work
out
the
curse
on
this
vengeance and pay with his own ruin…
the house of David.
other songs.
house,
exact
But this is not
For it is told of elsewhere.
In
In a long line that leads to Bethlehem—
that leads to Marcus, the grandson of Bethany’s niece
and his Christmas tale inside a psychiatric ward.
It
is in another lament—in the cry of, “O my son Absalom!
O Absalom, my son, my son!
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INT. BETHANY’S HOUSE—NIGHT 1954
The children are at play under their feet.
David sitting.
Bethany and
A glass of tea between them.
A damp ring
of condensation has settled on the wood of the lamp-stand
where the glass of tea rests.
This the light you saw from
the window.
DAVID
I’m dead now.
You know that—don’t you?
BETHANY
Don’t be so dramatic.
DAVID
You know what I came from and you know where I am
going.
BETHANY
I don’t want to argue in front of the children… and no
I don’t know what you came from.
You’ve told me
nothing of your mother’s family.
I know nothing of
your father.
I just sat at the dinner table
502
sometimes.
Saw you argue with them.
Saw where you
worked in his pawn shop…
DAVID
My father was a fisherman…
My mother came from New
Orleans—where I met you.
BETHANY
Did your father have a brother like you have brothers?
A woman before your mother?
father?
And what about his
What am I supposed to do?
Look for answers
in some bible like your momma does?
I ain’t gonna
find no answers in a bible about us!
See you know all
about Papa Frenchie and my grandmother, but your
family is like some secret.
Why?
Are you ashamed?
DAVID
What matters is I love them and I cannot revenge them…
I won’t turn my back on my own family.
just admit it?
Why don’t you
You never liked my mother’s prayers.
You never talked to my father—I did.
must hate them to love you.
think you’re right.
You make it so I
And if I hate you you
503
Dulcinea is trying to put on shoes.
been ignoring her.
David and Bethany have
It’s bedtime but she wants to play in
the rain.
She has the shoe on the wrong foot.
coloring.
He’s drawing a picture of his father.
on his stomach at David’s feet.
Ben is
He lays
David sips the tea.
Bethany fingers a necklace—a silver cross hanging from it.
She pulls on it like she’s going to yank it off.
DULCINEA
Daddy I want to go outside!
tree!
I want to go back to the
And this time Benjy can’t kick me out!
BETHANY
No going outside!
up.
Lord knows when this rain will let
It’s been dry for so long.
can hear it.
for your bath.
I can’t see it but I
I can hear it on the roof…
It’s time
You have school tomorrow.
BEN
Can Daddy sleep with us?
I drew a picture of you,
Daddy.
BETHANY
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That’s up to your dad.
He can stay ‘til after your
bath.
DULCINEA
I want to sleep with Daddy!
BETHANY
Then you’ll have to put away those shoes.
going out in the rain.
You ain’t
You got to play today.
The
puddles will be there after school tomorrow.
DAVID
You have to listen to your momma…
talkin’ to momma right now.
Daddy’s just
I’ll stay ‘til you’re in
bed…
BETHANY
Your daughter needs new shoes…
DAVID
I gotta show on Friday.
I can have you some money
then…
BETHANY
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You just don’t get it.
My daddy just don’t get it.
He worked 16 hour days days in a row and provided for
my momma my sister and two brothers.
You live
wherever will take you—whether it be your momma,
friends, or section 8 housing cuz you’re a veteran.
You got your hand out and look where it’s got you…
DAVID
Yeah I know where it’s got me.
a guitar picker.
You don’t get it.
Always have been.
I’m
There was a time
when you once supported it even if you wasn’t workin’…
You think only about what affects you and you say it’s
the children.
Never once thinkin’ how it affects me…
BETHANY
No you just don’t care.
to.
You can you just don’t want
You don’t think I haven’t given thought to how it
affects you?
I’m here right now.
here right now.
least of all you.
Your children are
No one’s gonna care when you’re dead
Your music’s not gonna love you
back.
DAVID
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It’s just time, Angel.
a bargain.
And we give it away.
We make
We answer alarm clocks and make money for
somebody else and are asked to be grateful for the
opportunity.
It’s not harmony.
Time is all we got
and money beats soul every time—I know that—but
without ambition a man is nothin’.
ambitions.
I don’t have no
All I have is my time and what helps to
pass it and even that depends…
BETHANY
Depends on the woman you’re lovin’…
DAVID
Is that why you changed your name?
your maiden name?
Changed it back to
Who do you love the most?
BETHANY
I ain’t your wife no more.
I’m doin’ what I have to
do to love myself now and if anyone don’t like it—too
bad…
DAVID
And you just do what you gotta do to survive…
507
BETHANY
Always gotta get the last word…
You’re such a woman.
DAVID
No…
I’m a man.
And suddenly you see a previous fight.
tableau of them.
You see a whole
In a progression from when Bethany’s
belly is swollen to the children at the age for school. You
hear David’s music in the background.
His first
recordings.
Some at day.
Some happening at night.
different rooms with different shades of light.
In
In cars.
Curses thrown at each other as David’s driving—the children
in back.
Bethany back-handing him.
David threatening to
do the same.
And then you see a tree not a Texas Mountain Laurel but
that old familiar tree standing at a crossroads on a
highway in Mississippi.
A lone tree silhouetted with the
moon over it and then you focus on a sign post.
A road
sign weather-beaten and dirty in the moonlight that says:
Highway 61 South.
CHORUS
508
It could be some brilliant scheme or someone’s
mistake. The role is how you play it as you take what
you learn from coincidence.
The effects that make you
happy what you feel when a lover’s gone. And without a
voice you begin to hear the other voices the chorus of
the children.
What follows in what was asked of them
to be born and see love.
David no longer mattered to
himself in what he came from and the songs he wrote
for posterity— this how strangely men act.
As though
we grieve those that lived before us for not knowing
us and we forget those of our own time to be praised
by someone we haven’t seen or ever will see.
have is a tree.
All we
A tree not far from Bethany’s home
this house that is not David’s.
In it a house a tree
house in which the children played as it was told to
Marcus some fifty years later in the bible in which he
replaces the pages—the story his grandmother told him.
It’s Texas in Indian summer, the dog days of 1954, and
school is about to start.
kindergarten.
Dulcinea needs shoes for
She hears her father and mother fight
and before she can even write her name she knows how
simple it really is when you draw as her brother Benjy
draws his picture the perfection from your
imperfections.
How even under the strictures of a
509
form in rhyme and reason some of your greatest lines
can be told.
She’s seen her daddy’s guitar the one
with a hole in it in fact it’s in a case beside the
door for when he leaves.
She’s heard his songs he’s
played his songs for her and Benjy and she wants to
tell him tell her mother why she wants to play in the
rain why she’s putting on her shoes even if on the
wrong foot and too small as they ignore her in the
argument they can’t let go.
She wants to tell them
what happened that night before the rain started
before they came inside and became forms behind a
curtain.
She wants to tell them about Aaron and his
sister Gabby—cousins Bethany’s brother’s kids—that
story relayed to Marcus an unhappy descendent of all
this sadness.
She wants to sleep with her daddy and
tell him about the boy she kissed in that tree. How it
couldn’t be all just a mistake a mere coincidence of
the role in how she played it.
EXT.
HEMPHILL BAPTIST CHURCH—SUNDAY MORNING 1954
The Sunday before Labor Day—the date.
It’s written on the
marquee in front of the church in black lettering below the
words:
Change is for tomorrow.
Repentance is for
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yesterday.
in.
You focus on the parking lot.
Big cars—Fords.
Gas guzzlers.
The cars pulling
And one of them—a
station wagon—you see the doors opening and Bridgette
getting out with the help of her great-grandson, Ben.
A
car parking next to them with Cleota getting out, her son
David giving her a hand.
You see the two families walking
up to the church doors, the ushers there to greet them.
David Threnody and his mother.
dressed in their Sunday best.
The whole Lebeau clan
Bethany’s parents, Valerie
and Robert, and Bethany’s brothers and sister are there.
You see Gabby and Aaron awkward in their stiff church
clothes.
BRIDGETTE
I don’t know why if her husband can stay and Frenchie
can stay why I have to come.
I’m too old to be
fumblin’ about with this nonsense.
no Yes or No here.
it.
Ain’t gonna find
Problems and ends don’t come with
I done settled that account a long time ago.
VALERIE
Cleota came all the way down from St. Louis.
She
bought your great-granddaughter shoes for school.
know her husband ain’t farin’ well—got the lung
You
511
problems.
And Frenchie’s worse than you when it comes
to God fearin’ folks—he’s gotten stubborn in his old
age and don’t remember when he used to take us.
we could do is come to church with her.
here in ages.
Least
I ain’t been
Church looks the same as when Cecily
Bloodwood won that beauty contest—remember Robert?
My
how things have changed yet Sunday mornings still make
people act like what used to be… They may not be
married no more, but church is good for the children…
BRIDGETTE
Yes the children—‘spose you should tell David that.
That boy’s worse than a hemorrhoid.
or get off the pot.
some money…
He needs to shit
Boy needs to do right and make
Smell that?
Smells like somethin’ died…
BETHANY
(guiding the children in and greeting the ushers)
You’re just used to the way I smell when I come to
visit…
That ain’t reefer it’s reverence.
It’s the
lacquer on the church pews…
BRIDGETTE
Did I ever tell you you’re my favorite, darlin’?
512
BETHANY
I’m everybody’s favorite…
INT. HEMPHILL BAPTIST CHURCH—SUNDAY MORNING 1954
It’s hard to distinguish anyone’s voice now.
greeting and finding their seats.
People are
The inside of the church
is diminutive, but well lit from windows lining each wall—
not stain-glassed.
in the back.
Hardwood floors and wooden pews—hymnals
The altar has red carpet—two steps leading up
to the pulpit and behind that the seats for the choir
partitioned off by a banister.
There’s a piano on the
right and chairs for the other musicians on the left—metal
music stands for their liner notes.
No one sits or quiets down when the pastor and choir enter.
Only when a woman shouts out a number and begins playing on
the piano the other musicians joining her do the mixture of
voices coalesce into an opening hymn—“A Mighty Fortress is
our God”.
As the final notes are sung the pastor stands at
the pulpit.
congregation.
He lets a moment of silence fall on the
Then he speaks.
513
PASTOR
Church, what’s done is done the old things pass away
and all things become new.
did.
No you can’t do what you
Don’t matter if it was good or bad.
want or don’t want to keep.
did…
A habit you
You can’t do what you
That hymn you just heard that hymn we just sung
was about a reformation.
It’s about happiness in a
change not in what you did or what you’re gonna do,
but how you look to your faith as a foundation for it
because church look for a moment.
Look at yourself
yesterday and what you want for tomorrow.
When it’s
just you all you have is your pride and your shame.
Pride in the things you want to keep on doing and
shame in the things you don’t.
paradox in that?
doing?
And can you see the
Because what do you want to keep on
And are there things in it that you don’t?
You see people want to talk about habits like there
are good ones and bad ones, but isn’t that in a frame
of reference?
Look at the history of the church.
What’s good for you today may not be good for you
tomorrow, and what’s bad for tomorrow might seem good
for today…
single.
Some of you might be married.
Some of you
Is what’s good in a marriage good for the
single man or woman?
I see children and I see old
514
people.
Is what’s good for the old good for the
young?
Or is what’s bad for the old good for the
young?
Time has its seasons and each day has its
routines, but in our ways of doing things some changes
are a matter of a direct choice and some just kind of
happen.
We grow and we fall apart only to come
together again—beautiful in how our hearts mend.
see you can’t stand outside it.
outside yourself.
You
You can’t stand
You can’t stand outside this church
and know what’s good in it.
Just like those outside
know what’s good outside right now and see what’s bad
about being in here—because it’s a beautiful Sunday
outside these walls right now.
and outside.
But see God is inside
God is in here right now and in you.
And God is outside in what you draw into yourselves to
be happy—God is in all of it—do you see that church?
In all we take a pride in and even in the things we’re
ashamed of because you see God uses that too—to give
us opportunities…
You can’t do what you did and
always expect the same happiness, and what you will do
and have done are not what’s gonna make you happy—it
isn’t what’s made you happy and it ain’t gonna make
you happy.
For the body they may kill, but God’s
truth abideth still—can I get an Amen?
515
CHURCH
Amen!
INT. ALTON PSYCHIATRIC WARD—CHRISTMAS DAY 2007
You see Gabby’s son—the father of Marcus—James.
aren’t frail like his son’s.
His hands
They’re workingman hands
tough with calluses, and his eyes don’t look broken they
just look sad.
He sits at a chair in the day room.
He’s
brought a plastic bag—things for Marcus—some toiletries, a
few candy bars, and a CD—a Miles Davis CD.
Marcus enters
in his hospital gown and sits down across from his father.
There are other patients at the tables.
cards.
Some playing
Some doing puzzles, and some watching TV—A Charlie
Brown Christmas is on ABC.
JAMES
You’re momma couldn’t come.
She’s workin’ her job at
Shop’n Save, but I brought you some stuff…
Look here
here’s some music—something to listen to while you
write…
Alton…
You know he came from here.
He was from
516
MARCUS
So what?
JAMES
Why don’t you come home?
It’s been two years and
you’ve been in and out of this place—you need to
forget about it—forget about the girl…
Come home,
son.
MARCUS
(looking around)
Why?
I’ve made a lot of friends.
JAMES
You can’t be a man here…
Be a man!
Talk like a man.
Come home and complain about a job.
Bitch about your
boss and the mechanic that screwed you on an auto
repair.
A car with thirty-seven payments still left
on it and a mortgage haunting you and your kids that
need shoes and who each drink a quart of milk a day…
Bitch about a woman—a girl you’ve fucked over a
thousand times so you can relax—even that girl…
been two years, son…
It’s
517
MARCUS
I’m in the middle of something…
I’m writing a story—a
story your mother told me—remember?
you told me to go listen to her…
I was fifteen and
Well, I listened…
JAMES
All that happened over fifty years ago.
Those people
are dead now.
MARCUS
It’s teaching me something…
It’s taught me something
about life and death.
JAMES
You’re only nineteen years old!
about life and death?
What do you know
Their blood is not on you.
It’s in you, but it’s not on your soul…
MARCUS
I’ve had time to read in here…
religion.
Maybe I’ve found God…
Maybe I’ve found
This man—this man
you tell me I should be—what is it?
tool and I probably never will…
I don’t own a
518
JAMES
You’ve read too many books.
I always wanted you to
get educated like I wasn’t, but books don’t tell you
about life so you really hear it and understand and
you put’em down because they don’t tell you nothin’
about what you already know except a yes I can relate—
the good ones—and as for death, well, they can only
lie about death…
You’re still a black man so be a
strong proud black man, a boy from the streets of East
St. Louis—that’s why it happened—what you don’t want
to let go of.
that.
What happened with her.
Don’t forget
Don’t forget what you came from…
MARCUS
That’s what she told me.
me—to not forget.
That’s what your mother told
Not forget what I come from…
JAMES
Yeah but you’re not there.
That’s not where you’re
at—you’re here and you need to be either all there or
all here—do you understand what I’m sayin’?
Some men
are only ten percent there or twenty percent and
that’s what a woman notices that’s what my mother
would tell ya and even your mother.
You need to
519
either be all there or all here and here’s not where
you need to be.
You need to be a man.
Be a man,
son…
MARCUS
I have to finish it.
JAMES
Finish what?
MARCUS
It’s something I have to solve and when I solve it
I’ll find peace…
JAMES
Jesus…
what are you gonna do?
EXT. HEMPHILL, TEXAS—TWILIGHT 1954
You see the tree house.
Not far from Bethany’s house—the
one owned by Papa Frenchie—not far from her brother’s
house, the man who built it, built the tree house, in fact
most of their homes are close together connected by dirt
roads along the Sabine River.
You see the girls at the
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bottom at the base of the tree looking up—Gabby and
Dulcinea—and the boys, Aaron and Benjy, in the house
looking down.
You see the boys poke each other in the ribs
with the sticks they used to beat the girls out.
The rope
ladder pulled up into the house so the girls can’t climb up
again.
The girls gather dirt clods and throw them up at
the house.
And then you see Benjy lean over the railing.
He clears his throat and then lets a wad of spit dangle
from his lips.
By the force of gravity it slowly
stretches, threatening to finally break off and fall on the
girl’s heads.
But this after for you see before.
You see before the
girls were expelled from the tree house—the song that was
sung.
By Gabby—teasing…
GABBY
Aaron and Dulcy sittin’ in a tree.
K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
BENJY
Kiss him!
Kiss him, Dulcy!
And you see the kiss.
You see Aaron and Dulcinea succumb
to the peer pressure.
Two children with their eyes closed.
521
They’ve been holding hands both hands twirling in a circle
inside the tree house the centrifugal force pulling them
apart though they still hold on.
song.
To Benjy’s imperative.
holding their hands.
They stop to Gabby’s
They stop facing each other
And slowly they lean their heads
towards each other bending at the torso—that image like a
picture in black and white—knees locked and torsos bent
their heads leaning in with eyes closed Aaron with his lips
puckered and Dulcinea’s lips pursed shut.
The touch just
but a moment and then like a reaction to an electric spark
their heads bounce back and they let go of each other’s
hands their eyes opening their faces unsure as Gabby stops
singing and starts giggling as Benjy laughs facing away
from them for a moment looking out beyond the tree house to
the Sabine running in the distance the stick he’s been
holding whipping through the air making it whistle.
BENJY
Kneel!
Benjy turns and holds the stick as a sword and as Aaron and
Dulcinea step back from each other as Aaron looks at Benjy
and follows his command in an awkward and unsure movement
522
Benjy raises the stick over his head and rests it on
Aaron’s shoulders as if knighting him.
BENJY
Now stand a man!
Aaron stands up and smears the back of his hand across his
lips.
AARON
Yuck!
And you must see this as children do.
over four feet tall.
None of them are
Aaron but just four and Dulcinea
five—Gabby and Benjy just a year older.
You must see so
their words aren’t out of character for they’ve all been
playing roles inside this tree house the before this after
children playing house—Benjy and Gabby the children and
Aaron and Dulcinea the parents.
play this anymore.
But Benjy doesn’t want to
In fact the kiss allowing him to step
out of character for now he is king this role reversal
sudden and alluding to their short attention spans
following the impulses of each other in the mad play of
their imaginations that to children at play doesn’t seem
523
like madness but the uncontrollable voice of emotions
piling on each other free and in the moment without any
discernible consequences—Benjy the oldest assuming the lead
in the game they will play next—all of it happening fast
and without indication or words in reference to any
disbelief.
GABBY
(to Aaron)
You’re not my Daddy no more…
Who is my father now?
DULCINEA
I’ll be queen!
I’m queen!
BENJY
No, you’ve been kissed by my knight.
Gabby is my
queen, but she’s not true—she’s sung you to kiss…
AARON
(to Benjy)
I thought I was father, but your father is a magician…
GABBY
A magician? Dulcy, is your father a magician?
524
DULCINEA
I don’t know what my father is…
Benjy is king now!
BENJY
Yes… and as king I say no girls!
There’s no kissing
here!
GABBY
But I’ve heard him.
has a guitar.
I’ve heard your father play!
It has a hole in it.
He
He does magic on
it.
BENJY
You mean musician—he plays music… but magician is fine
too.
Out with you!
grab your sword.
No kissing in my kingdom!
You’ve been betrayed!
Aaron,
Betrayed by a
kiss!
Benjy hands Aaron a stick and for a moment they play at
sword fighting before turning on the girls.
That’s when
you see what happened after—the girls expelled from the
tree throwing dirt clods up at the boys and Benjy leaning
over the rail letting spit dangle from his lips.
You hear
525
the whistle of their sticks slicing through the air, and
mixed with it—from far off—a train whistle as it crosses
the Sabine.
Then you hear Bethany’s voice—calling them—
disembodied and out of the picture.
BETHANY
Come in children!
bath!
Come in now!
And it looks like rain…
It’s time for your
You have school
tomorrow!
CHORUS
How time is sorrow in recapitulation!
For the old and
wise say how time is fleeting, but this not true when
you know it!
Women seem evil in their silence, and
men are deemed good in their work.
more than one at one time?
And can you love
Yes, children see a first
kiss differently than as a man or woman, and to
neither does it seem like more when more will come—the
last always a betrayal.
And yes boys become separated
as men by the women they love all this fair in war.
The truth about time fleeting to fleet with it and
hold on only to oneself as your one truth.
Children
in their madness must play their stage the roles
inherent and so enough of it.
Enough of who they are—
526
who they really are—for outside that tree the soul
does not find its composite truth.
Outside the tree
where children once played as a family, where Aaron
and Dulcinea once kissed, where Benjy played king and
Gabby his queen—a story told down through the ages.
Reflected in their fathers and mothers and refracted
into some unnamable future—the nobility of their human
race—in encapsulation of all our nobility.
To
progress to make goals and better ourselves when at
each and every moment what we love can be taken away
that it will be taken away at some set and future time
and there’s nothing we can do about it—this denial our
denial our nobility—the virgins trimming their wicks.
This our faith and acquiescence to our indelible fate.
To love anyway.
To kiss anyway.
Even if it be our
last…
EXT.
BETHANY’S HOUSE—DAY 1960
The front porch.
One of those that run along the entire
length of the house and that even extend to the side.
White with rocking chairs and flower bins along the
railings and hanging plants—a porch swing on one end hung
from the ceiling.
You see Dulcinea, twelve now, sitting on
527
the steps.
She’s drawing.
With pastels and charcoal—the
view from the house—the view of the tree house and the
Sabine beyond.
You hear music—David’s music.
player sits in the kitchen window.
A record
Bethany sits on the
porch swing listening to the music and watching Dulcinea
draw.
She’s smoking.
Dulcinea is somewhat of an artist.
that bad.
Her rendering isn’t
She’s working on the tree—the rendering of it—
the Texas Mountain Laurel with tree house nestled in it
more than six years old now—the wood dis-colored with age
with the rain and dry seasons—some of the two-by-fours and
nails loose and part of the railing disappeared.
And then
you see what Dulcinea is focusing on—the portion of the
portrait she’s outlining with the pastels and charcoal and
you see the before this again—the twilight of when they
were first at play in it as children and after Bethany
called them in for their baths to ready for their first day
of school.
When Benjy and Aaron lowered the rope ladder
and descended to where the girls were and you see the
pocket knife Benjy takes out—what he etches there in the
tree trunk the alphabet of a child—the focus of Dulcinea’s
drawing—a heart with Aaron and Dulcy’s name inside.
You
see Benjy etch it quickly into the wood and then run with
528
the others to answer Bethany’s call.
another flashback.
That lone tree at a crossroads in
Mississippi along Highway 61.
of its branches.
Then for a moment
You see a bird land on one
It’s building a nest.
BETHANY
You know I used to do this as a girl.
When I was your
age I used to sit on Sissy Walker’s porch and listen
to music coming from her kitchen window—her old man’s
music…
I used to listen to the birds.
DULCINEA
I like listening to Daddy.
BETHANY
Can you hear it?
turnaround…
now.
The twelve bars and then the
Guess this is his fourth—his fourth album
I think he recorded it this past summer.
in Texas.
Here
At a studio in Austin…
DULCINEA
Do you think he’ll make any money from it?
us?
Money for
529
BETHANY
Lord knows, child…
He hasn’t before.
needs a benefactor.
make it.
Your father
I guess that’s how most artists
How they become known or lost in obscurity—
doesn’t matter how good they are…
‘Bout the only
benefactor your father’s had was some old man he met
at a crossroads.
the Army.
told me.
Down in Mississippi before he joined
Before the war.
Leastways that’s what he
How he got that guitar.
That electric
guitar you’re hearin’ now…
DULCINEA
Was that before you and he met?
BETHANY
Yes…
we met after the war—in New Orleans.
first recordings.
After his
I was married to my first husband
then…
DULCINEA
Do you think it’s good?
His music?
BETHANY
530
That’s hard to say because I know him.
Hard to say
what you feel about somethin’ knowin’ the person who
made it.
Hard to say about any art form really.
don’t know what his music makes me feel.
things I guess.
bad.
All kinds of
You can’t say whether that’s good or
What his music makes me think about.
some people like it and some don’t.
judge.
I
I ‘spose
Music’s hard to
Guess what matters is what makes you listen.
Don’t seem like someone tellin’ you they think it’s
good or bad matters, but it does.
dry answers.
Ain’t no cut and
Put money into somethin’ and I guess
people will listen though…
DULCINEA
Is that what Daddy needs?
Someone to tell others to
listen?
BETHANY
Well I guess it’s just like what you’re drawing there.
If you like it that’s all that matters.
true to it it’ll be true to you…
DULCINEA
I think I’m finished.
If you’re
531
BETHANY
You are?
Let me see it.
Dulcy stands up with her drawing.
That’s when you notice a
trickle of blood running down her leg below her white
gingham dress.
BETHANY
Land sakes, honey!
You’re bleedin’!
DULCINEA
Momma what’s wrong!
BETHANY
Don’t you worry none.
There’s nothing wrong.
get a wet rag and clean you up…
a woman, Dulcy.
DULCINEA
Momma I want Daddy!
BETHANY
Hush now!
You’re alright.
Let me
You’re just becoming
532
Bethany runs into the house and comes back out with a rag.
She kneels where Dulcy is standing on the porch steps her
drawing hanging from her hand the tears flowing and begins
to wash away the blood.
BETHANY
(washing)
You hear that?
music.
You hear the birds and your Daddy’s
You’ll be fine now.
The turnaround in the song.
Listen to the turnaround.
You hear it?
That’s how
time goes forward and then comes back on itself.
Time’s just goin’ forward with you, child.
can go back on it and remember…
be alright…
mighty fine!
But you
See that now?
Let me see what you’ve drawn…
You’ll
Now that’s
That’s a fine picture!
INT. ALTON PSYCHIATRIC WARD—CHRISTMAS DAY 2007
Marcus is sitting on his bed eating a candy bar.
Miles Davis is open.
He’s taken the cover out.
CNA’s enter with Willie—fresh and clean.
The CD of
The two
They wheel him to
his bed and while one props him up the other goes through
his dirty clothes—Willie has on fresh pajamas.
533
Rasputia has on gloves.
into a bag.
She throws Willie’s old pajamas
She pauses for a moment then holds up Willie’s
colored boxer drawers to the light from the window.
You
see white stains.
RASPUTIA
Willie what you been doin’?
Medea has Willie positioned and looks up at what Rasputia’s
holding up to the window.
MEDEA
Oh no he din’t!
RASPUTIA
Umm Umm Umm, I swear…
Willie what’s we goin’ to do
wit ya?
Willie grins as the two CNA’s shake their heads and leave
the room.
He looks over at Marcus eating his candy bar.
WILLIE
534
Now you know why I’m in the bathroom so long…
Can I
have one of your candy bars?
MARCUS
(handing him a Twix)
Sure.
WILLIE
How long we been roommates?
Two weeks?
And you never
once asked me why I’m here.
MARCUS
You never asked me neither.
WILLIE
I used to work as a bus driver.
worst.
People shoppin’.
So much on their hands they
couldn’t hold on to nothin’…
crazy.
Holiday’s were the
People don’t want to go
That’s what it’s all about—the work.
Most
people don’t want to know more than what’s beyond
their calendars.
And they want to fill it the time so
they don’t see the horror.
join them or stay here.
laugh.
Our idle lot…
You have to
You have to learn how they
535
EXT. BOND STREET EAST ST. LOUIS—DAY AUGUST 2005
You see a pawn shop with a TV turned on in the window.
You
pan out from the street the litter in the gutters the telltale sign of used cars parked there to the pawn shop
window.
A news report—the Doppler map of weather patterns
over Louisiana and the Gulf.
A weather man at his desk
holding papers where you don’t know what’s on them.
Katrina has hit land.
Then from up above you see a car
driving by the pawn shop window.
A Gran Torino.
Marcus is
driving—you see him from a dashboard shot behind the wheel.
A girl sitting next to him.
INT. GRAN TORINO—DAY
Marcus is holding the wheel with a beer in his hand.
You
see him in profile the sunlight just right through the
windshield to create a glow about him as you see him the
way the girl sees him.
Then you see her.
She has one leg
crossed under her and the other with her foot up near the
dash and the window cracked open.
open in her lap.
She has some lip balm
The visor is down on her side and she’s
using the mirror to apply the balm to her lips.
They could
536
be anyone driving together.
They could be anyone looking
for America.
MARCUS
Where is the someone you know?
THE GIRL
Just up here on the corner…
I know the corner.
MARCUS
Yeah it’s always a corner, but always something bigger
than that too… It’s bigger than that, but it makes you
feel small wondering about it—where someone you know
is right now…
I mean what business is yours? Ours?
You meet someone a stranger that knows your neighbor.
You have a friend that knows this place.
mean they know you?
We’ve gotten clever.
Does that
The more
data we can compact into the least amount of words and
letters and numbers we call intelligence because we’re
using less storage seeing how it’s all connected.
Maybe because we think we can hold more that way—more
information…
THE GIRL
537
I think it’s three down to the right from here…
don’t know anybody that doesn’t know me.
with anything.
dog.
I
It’s like
Doesn’t matter if it’s you, me or a
You do it for them they won’t do it for
themselves.
people.
It’s the same with what you know about
It’s all in your eyes.
What you know is
behind them…
MARCUS
Yeah but does someone know you that you don’t know?
Are you a story?
Like where we got this fountain soda
and the beer and where we’re going now. That gas
station.
Maybe the same people come in each day.
attendant knows their stories.
The
And just because we
came in only today doesn’t mean they don’t know ours.
Maybe there was someone before us.
Someone after.
That knew us while we were all standing in line.
The
connection family or a friend because when you know
somebody you always know somebody else. But now they
know what we’ve bought just like we can know what they
buy.
And maybe even the reasons why…
THE GIRL
538
Do you really pay that much attention?
Does anyone
pay that much attention?
MARCUS
Maybe it’s a short attention span, but it’s attention…
In the eye contact—like you said—that moment and all
that’s behind it.
things.
The small talk.
In the little
Like having your money ready.
Your items
turned so it’s easy for the barcode scanner.
question—debit or credit…
tell.
And that
It’s like that story we all
And maybe it’s a story too big for all of us.
We tell where we were at when another story happened—a
story we all know a story we’ve all heard about.
Just
like New Orleans is in the news now, or New York in
September…
right?
And I’ve never been there…
Is it this
Do you have the money ready?
THE GIRL
No that’s not the corner.
It must be the next one.
MARCUS
Guess there ain’t no sign on the door.
THE GIRL
539
No… nothin’ that says: Pot in the Box…
CHORUS
It’s better when the story is just yours.
we make every story ours.
grandeur aren’t lost.
That’s how
So that the sweep and
Lost in short attention spans.
Lost in our fast needs.
Lost to the next sensation.
The next thrill to keep us in suspense.
Our children
becoming addicted to Ritalin from watching SpongeBob.
Our clever codes entertaining us with a certain pride
of omniscience, but really we’ve grown restless—our
character becoming flat—two dimensional.
So that yes
we fit easily under doors yet our message never
benefiting time—for you never see the reach.
never see what’s reaching out to you…
must have faith.
and what’s not.
you.
And then you
That you cannot lose.
know how the universe is controlled.
You
You don’t
What’s absent
You don’t know how many people know
And you really can’t say their fate.
can do is try to remember the song.
All you
Your part in it—
what’s working in you and what’s working outside.
Remember your nature fits and thus you create your own
harmony…
Yes it’s better when the story is just yours
still yours for then you know why all our expressions
540
fail, what makes every story ours—where we were when
it happened.
The purpose of any story to sell it.
Whether it’s good or not whether you buy it.
can put a sentence or two together.
why do you want to sell.
Everyone
The question is
What do you want to sell.
A
musician just knows their turn. And that’s how you
know your part.
The audience what it always was—the
consciousness of your creation and how it all comes
back around…
INT.
AARON’S ROOM—NIGHT 1965
You see a crisp shadow.
On the floor from the bed.
Aaron,
a teenager, is sitting with a journal in his hands his
elbows resting on his knees.
A flashback to how it was
given—Dulcinea handing it to him under the shade of a tree—
the laurel tree with a heart and their names etched in it.
Her saying:
Take it.
It was my father’s.
Her eyes what
you want to look into with no thought of your own.
you see Dulcinea at his window.
is it on her face.
Then
A questioning look of what
Aaron lets her in, and now there are
two shadows from the floor to the bed.
AARON
541
I had a nightmare.
About the story again, but in the
dream I was in it.
I didn’t know where I was.
I
didn’t know if I was there or here.
DULCINEA
It ain’t real.
when it fits.
At least life don’t act that way even
Even when the dream fits.
Was it the
same one you had before—‘bout when you started school?
The same story great-grandma Bridgette told you?
Was
that what you was dreamin’ about again?
AARON
She died soon after she told me it.
before Papa Frenchie.
She died a year
They never did remarry…
told me ‘bout never making breakfast in bed.
She
She
cried and I hardly ever saw Mama Bridgette cry.
She
cried like it was her own child…
DULCINEA
It’s just a dream, Aaron.
What makes it real is if
you regret something in it.
What we hear others tell us.
We are what we read.
Sometimes dreams just
make us read into things too much and we think the
price is too high—to read it read into it all the
542
wonderful and horrible things about ourselves and be
done with it.
How everything is nothing.
It just
makes sense to know when the story’s over when the
dream is done.
happened.
It’s common sense really.
Your dream already happened.
It already
The story in
it.
AARON
Yeah but you can go into your soul all kinds of ways.
You can spend an eternity there…
climb up on the stove.
breakfast.
She told me to never
Never try to make my parents
And I can almost smell it the smell that
haunted her.
That smell of burnt hair.
Burnt flesh…
A little girl not much older than you when my daddy
built that tree house.
when the stove lit.
Hungover.
Mama!”
But she didn’t wake up
Mama Bridgette spending the night
there after drinking with her.
Her nights in the bars
before Aunt Bethany your mother was born…
just the smell the sight of it.
her hair on fire.
bone…
Caught fire
Running up to her mama’s bedroom
on fire crying, “Mama!
in time.
In her pajamas.
And not
A little girl with
The meat the skin burning off the
543
DULCINEA
Why are you holding it?
Why are you holding my
father’s journal?
AARON
Because you wanted me to read it.
and started reading it…
And so I woke up
He started this one soon
after you started school—didn’t he?
nearly eleven years now…
That’s been
Did your mama know?
Did she
know it was me when I called and hung up?
DULCINEA
No… but I knew.
I had a weird dream too…
AARON
You know what it kind of reminds me of?
journal?
Like the bully in high school that gets
someone else to write their papers.
write their story.
music.
Your father’s
Someone else to
I get that about him.
I get his
Like he takes pride in citing his sources, but
he knows he doesn’t get paid well for it…
DULCINEA
I shouldn’t be nice to you…
544
AARON
Why?
That’s when they look at each other again.
They had been
just sitting on the bed looking at their shadows.
gets up and goes to the window.
behind her.
a fight.
Dulcinea
Aaron stands and walks up
He turns her and they kiss.
Dulcinea puts up
But Aaron forces her against the wall and kisses
her again.
Their shadows are gone now.
INT. GRAN TORINO—DAY AUGUST 2005
MARCUS
Is this it?
Seems like we could have turned back
there and gone down the other street…
Shit sometimes
the shortest distance between two points ain’t always
the fastest. Sometimes you gotta go out of your way to
save some time.
You tryin’ to get me mixed up with
all these turns?
THE GIRL
Yeah… and it always changes around.
They move it
around.
Just like
Just gotta see the window.
545
sometimes you gotta hate yourself to see the truth and
once you do you find a way to love yourself again.
But not like it never happened.
That ain’t what
forgiveness is all about even when you get it.
truth is just the truth for a moment.
People just get
all hung up looking ahead or behind it…
there.
Next one up.
The
It’s between
See it in the window?
MARCUS
No… I feel like a nigger doing this.
THE GIRL
So?
Be one!
Mexican…
It could be worse.
You could be a
Just don’t be like all those other niggers
out there thinkin’ it’s gonna be handed to you.
gotta take it.
Take it raw…
You
Ain’t no one law or
promise to any given situation.
If there is it’s in
the background in the shadows of your momentary truth.
To this that’s what’s happening now.
it should stay…
It’s up here on my side.
MARCUS
Pull up here?
And that’s where
546
THE GIRL
Yeah… it’s that window.
EXT.
POT IN THE BOX EAST ST. LOUIS—DAY AUGUST 2005
You see the Gran Torino pull up to the curb.
It’s one of
those mornings after it rained all the past day and now the
sun’s out.
The trees are especially green and there’s a
tree by the window the girl indicated.
It’s grown up in
the cement a branch near the tenement housing window where
the Gran Torino’s parked.
Outdoor toys like tricycles and
bikes with training wheels, balls, and sand castle tools
strewn about what’s not really a lawn but a patch of dirt
with just a few tufts of grass squared away among the lopsided sidewalks that lead to doors not even more than ten
yards apart from each other some of them with the screens
missing.
To the branch of this tree there’s a string tied.
And that’s how you know the window.
There’s a Swisher
Sweets cigar box on the windowsill and someone always
sitting there—you see them through the dirty pane.
down comes the box.
And
The girl gets out and picks it up and
puts the money inside fastening the makeshift latch and
securing the knot on the string.
547
That’s when you see Marcus.
Not behind the wheel still
holding a beer can, but on his folk’s back porch.
gone.
three.
They’re
His daddy working two jobs and his momma working
You hear the pounding of workman’s hammers.
next door neighbor’s roof being repaired.
The
Broken shingles
falling to the ground like rain floating-like on their way
down.
Marcus has a loaf of bread that’s molded.
He’s
breaking it off into pieces and throwing it in the back
yard for the birds.
There’s a tree in the back yard and
Marcus can see the birds in it.
They aren’t singing over
the hammers and they don’t come down to feed on the bread.
Marcus waits for a moment.
He even smokes a cigarette.
But the birds don’t come down.
bread.
They don’t feed on the
You focus on it for a moment—the pieces of broken
up bread.
Lying there in the grass.
INT. ALTON PSYCHIATRIC WARD—CHRISTMAS DAY 2007
Willie has finished his Twix.
He’s propped in his bed.
You can’t tell if he ate the right one or the left one
first as he sweeps away the crumbs on his pajamas.
has decided to lay down.
Marcus
He lies on his bed looking up at
the ceiling almost wondering why they have you do it.
Why
some psychiatrists have you lay down to tell your story.
548
WILLIE
There’s a lot you can get away with, however, when you
indulge in it, in time, you don’t get away with
anything…
fill it.
talent…
I used to live.
I didn’t ask of time to
But maybe my ambition was more than my
You can run around crazy in here.
gonna care.
Nobody’s
That’s why you can get away with a lot.
The secret is people don’t really know, and if they do
you have nothing to hide…
a lot.
Yeah you can get away with
My wife oughta know.
MARCUS
I used to live too old man…
Doesn’t seem that long
ago, but when I pick a date something that happened a
month ago doesn’t seem like me anymore.
More like
somethin’ earthbound like a balloon that’s lost its
air.
But you know what it held once.
back and say I did that.
You can look
Just don’t matter here…
WILLIE
No here’s where it matters most.
don’t let you get away with it.
don’t get away with anything.
Here’s where they
They let you, but you
It’s free up to a
549
point.
It’s free up to when you realize you ain’t
free at all.
When you realize they control the time…
Look at Wilhelmina in 2B.
She won’t eat.
Anorexic.
Eighty years old and weighs eighty pounds but she
won’t eat.
Eats toilet paper instead.
her they can’t really stop her.
And they let
So she’s free.
She’s
free up to the point when she takes responsibility,
but nobody can make her do that.
more.
Not even her no
That’s as free as free can get.
That’s why
it’s here where it matters most—what they know.
Pretty soon that’s the only sane thought you have
left—what they don’t.
What you know.
What’s yours.
MARCUS
They don’t know what happened that day.
they weren’t there.
I told’em but
They only know what I told’em and
what they think they know I didn’t.
But they weren’t
there…
WILLIE
Yeah and you ain’t them neither.
You see you bring
yourself and it makes you so damn deaf and dumb you
can’t feel nothin’ less you make them somehow.
make them feel and see themselves in you.
You
And that’s
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what’s easy.
That’s what you can get away with, but
in doing it they don’t see you at all…
lose everything getting away with it.
That’s why you
That’s the
price of being free…
MARCUS
Maybe I’m just afraid.
done, but didn’t…
Afraid of what I could have
I shouldn’t have let her go in.
Just because they took the money and there was nothin’
in the box I shouldn’t have let her talk me in to
goin’ into there…
They still got away with it.
never put nothin’ in the box.
They
And we didn’t leave the
way we came…
INT. SUNSET INN AGAIN HEMPHILL, TEXAS—DAY 1965
It’s a room upstairs—a loft.
bathroom the rest open space.
The only enclosure the
A kitchen in one corner—a
make-do sink and stove and a small refrigerator.
The wall
looking out above the bar a partition of windows and a door
walking out to a narrow balcony—the painted sign for the
bar along its wooden balustrade.
The bed is in the middle—
no bedrails—the mattress and box springs on the hardwood
floor.
Benjy, seventeen now, is in bed with her—the white
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woman—her name Maddie short for Madeline.
The make-shift
sheets wrapped around their bodies as they entwine looking
up at the ceiling fan going above them.
MADDIE
Who wants to work?
our time.
It’s just a lie in keeping with
The denial reciprocal with our enthusiasm.
Because it’s never done, and that’s why it takes
charisma—to have others live vicariously through you—
to want to be you and do your work.
And not your
self-importance—God knows it’s not that—but that you
listen to them.
You listen without giving advice and
you’re willing to laugh at yourself…
It’s always been
the hustle to being born…
BENJY
Does it get better being older?
Maddie rolls away from him and looks out the window.
Her
hands up by her pillow.
MADDIE
Yes and no…
A book.
The first love is gone.
A movie.
Hearing a song.
There’s no need to share that
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anymore.
Instead you share what changes.
comes out in a smile or a frown…
you’re askin’…
And that
But I know why
You’re tryin’ to erase what’s been
between my legs.
Your daddy just tries to find it…
BENJY
I don’t know what’s true anymore.
I don’t know what’s
true to you.
MADDIE
Does it make you cry or make you laugh?
a production.
The truth is
It either takes a lot of money, or…
BENJY
Or what?
MADDIE
Art… pessimism or optimism aren’t indicators of
intelligence.
There’s as much truth in shadows as
there is in ideals.
Being on the right or the left is
all in the perspective of who’s in the middle.
Freedom is taken either way…
what puts hate in your heart.
It’s really a matter of
What puts love.
being alive is always better than being dead…
And
What’s
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the slang now?
and me?
What do folks call it nowadays?
You
Maybe it’s like that old saying that goes way
back—the hair of the dog that bit me.
Like cures
like… and you’re just like your father.
BENJY
Is that your advice?
That I should be like him?
MADDIE
I suppose so…
I guess I’m not charismatic.
BENJY
I can’t be—I won’t…
I don’t know a thing about music.
MADDIE
Neither does he really.
Maddie gets up from the bed.
He just feels it.
You see her from Benjy’s
point of view as she dons a silk robe.
She walks to the
open door that leads to the balcony and lights a cigarette.
MADDIE
Do you know why I left my husband?
this bar?
Why I stay above
A girlfriend’s a bartender and your daddy
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plays here sometimes—that explains how I have this
room.
But do you know why?
here that first time?
Why I let you come up
There a many that feign the
truth and still believe it…
I was sick.
I lost our
second child, and to stop the bleeding they had to
take my womb—a hysterectomy.
Afterward, when I was
recovering, when I laughed—he didn’t laugh with me.
That’s why I left him.
back in San Antonio.
sense of humor.
I left him with our daughter
I left him because he had no
He thought I did it because I was in
love with myself…
And that’s why I let you come up
here that first time.
Because you didn’t laugh.
didn’t laugh when I laughed.
mentioned your father…
You
You didn’t laugh when I
The truth is what you surround
yourself with, and when you find yourself surrounded
by things you don’t want to believe you have to rebel.
Thing is most don’t know why they rebel.
They don’t
know they were surrounded and they’re unhappy and hate
themselves—they hate their guilt.
The guilt that
follows any bravery.
Some people are born so they
don’t have to rebel.
They’re the lucky ones.
The
rest of us have to either accept it or change our
surroundings…
I guess I just like it.
around people who don’t laugh with me.
I like being
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BENJY
I can’t laugh at this.
Maybe because I don’t know
what you’re laughing at.
Maddie turns from the door.
poised.
I don’t think it’s yourself…
She’s holding up her cigarette
Her other arm across her robe her hand under her
elbow.
MADDIE
Don’t you have a sister?
never laugh at a woman.
Maybe she can tell you.
You
It can only lead to regret.
It’s the price of being a man if you want to be
surrounded by women.
You have to believe in things
you don’t want to believe.
You have to give yourself
up if you want to have us at all…
music.
Your father has his
What do you have?
And you go over Maddie’s shoulder out the door and over the
balcony of Sunset Inn Again.
You fly like a bird into the
Sabine forest and along the river.
To the tree house that
Texas Mountain Laurel near Bethany’s home and that of her
brother—the home of their parents and the cabin where
Bridgette once lived where she heard a rooster crow and a
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dog howl.
Down the dirt road to where Sissy Walker once
lived, and the shack back in the swamp, the big thickets,
the abode of the old mid-wife—Marie Toussaint.
In fact you
see her crooked on a cane and blind in one eye with a
toothless cackle beckoning you as a bird to fly on.
then you see that lone tree at a crossroads again.
Texas but Mississippi.
And
Not
That old Highway 61 road sign.
see that it’s you making a nest.
You
It’s you landing on one
of its branches.
CHORUS
Tomorrow is not time.
children will ask you.
wanted.
Now is not later.
Someday your
They will ask you what you
It was asked of David Threnody’s father and
his father before him.
Just as his son Benjy asks him
of it now in the arms of his mistress, and why
Dulcinea goes to Aaron’s window.
Why forty years
later Marcus the grandson of Bethany’s niece finds
himself at a window with a girl.
what they wanted…
Someday we will all be asked.
brought us to laughter or tears.
indifference.
late to answer.
Money taken for not
What
What met our
Let us hope that by then it’s not too
That you don’t have to repeat
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yourself.
For that’s only good in a song.
That’s
what we are for…
INT. ALTON PSYCHIATRIC WARD—CHRISTMAS NIGHT 2007
Marcus is sitting in the day room.
over.
Visiting hours are
He’s sitting at a table where other patients have
been working on a puzzle—a picture of a European castle.
Maybe in Germany or in France.
left to finish it.
There are only a few pieces
They lay strewn about by Marcus’s
bible—what’s left of it—he’s torn out many pages, mostly
from the Old Testament.
You see the picture he drew of
Tantalus again, on the page from Jeremiah.
Tomorrow… on the bottom.
The word:
He’s working on a fresh page now,
one that he plans to insert.
He’s writing with his exact
and scrupulous scrawl.
MARCUS
(writing)
I never wanted a passive and accommodating woman.
shrinking violet.
No
Perhaps I wanted a rose that’s not
yet faded even if it appears to be for that is the
most precious gift—the most precious gift you can give
to an artist—the feeling of an affront and betrayal…
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To have an enchantress, a seducer of men, who always
comes back to you, bearing the gifts of other men who
wish to win her time.
Doubt and mystery are what I
prefer to absolute oneness and truth.
If I thought
there were men impervious to her charm I would aid her
to ensnare them…
everything.
Yes where love transmutes
Where faults become virtues.
acts of pure devotion.
Betrayals
Lies and dissembling examples
of discretion and delicacy of feeling…
analysis vanity must prevail.
In the last
Rather to be a cuckold
delighted that of all the other suitors, though more
handsome and wealthier, I am the chosen one…
In that
wobbling angle of precession upon a spinning top I
choose that bipolar axis—to have that most lovable of
all girls who in the next moment is a wretched liar
and a weak and a perfidious mistress.
Going from
horrible rupture to the most tender rapture and back
again.
I steel myself to leave her, but so strong is
her charm I know that beyond all my convictions I will
never be bored again.
happy…
change?
I am happy because she is
And is any man afraid of it?
Afraid of
What can take place without it?
All things
are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy.
For there is one universe made up of all things, and
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one substance, and one law—one truth—everything soon
disappears into the substance of the whole, into her
wet darkness as my lover, and the memory of it of
everything is soon overwhelmed in time… Time has
swallowed me up.
She has swallowed me.
And so near
is the forgetfulness of all things, and near is the
forgetfulness of me by all.
forget me?
I suppose so.
And will she?
Will she
But I prefer to die now to
die young and be the smile on an old woman’s lips…
INT. SUNSET INN AGAIN—NIGHT 1965
It’s not much of a stage.
for musical instruments.
More just a place in the corner
But that’s okay because David
Threnody doesn’t need that much.
microphone.
Just a chair and a
His Gibson ES-150 plugged and amped.
He sits
near the door that leads to the back, to the men’s and
women’s restrooms and the kitchen—the back fire escape.
He’s the only black man up front.
Occasionally a black
busboy comes in to clean off tables.
He also serves as the
dishwasher, his only other companion, also black, the cook
in the kitchen.
She’s a fry cook.
menu in the bar limited.
A short order cook—the
For a moment you see that back
door, the back door from the kitchen and the fire escape
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that leads to the room upstairs—Maddie’s room.
You see
Benjy climbing those stairs sometimes two or three at a
time.
Coming to the door and knocking.
Maddie is sitting at the bar.
patrons are eating.
establishment.
Some tables behind her where
You see the two other employees of the
Cassie, short for Cassandra, tending bar.
And Jo, short for Johanna, the waitress taking orders from
the tables.
Maddie sits next to the waitress stand, near
the taps of the draft beer.
While the white girls have
customers to tend to, they always come back to where Maddie
sits and congregate there for a moment.
CASSIE
(looking over at David)
How long is he in town?
MADDIE
He came to see his kids.
Homecoming Parade.
CASSIE
Not the one tomorrow?
His daughter is in the
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MADDIE
No… the one for her school.
After the football game…
JO
(putting the drinks Cassie poured on a tray)
Yeah… we don’t expect to win.
CASSIE
Doesn’t it ever bother you?
The secrets?
Not from
the town, but from him?
MADDIE
He ain’t around much…
And the town already knows
everything.
CASSIE
You’re a bad girl…
MADDIE
Why? Because I know what I want and know who I am?
Jo puts the tray of drinks up on her shoulder.
white rag draped over her other shoulder.
She has a
She takes it off
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and fans Maddie as she walks away.
David’s in the middle
of a riff and lets out a low moan accented by the chords.
JO
You better cool off girl.
That man’s trouble and so
is his son.
Maddie twirls the straw in her drink.
The ice cubes
haven’t melted yet.
MADDIE
I’ll try to remember…
We got rights now.
Just like
he’s getting rights for himself and his kids.
We live
in more civilized world now—don’t you know that?
CASSIE
(dumping an ash tray)
Yeah… but what you’re doing is as old as the hills.
David is closing out his song.
His left hand moves quickly
along the lower frets.
DAVID
(singing and moaning)
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I said I… I… I… I don’t want trouble…
MADDIE
(talking over the applause she doesn’t join)
The unconfident just think the confident are evil.
And I ain’t talkin’ about the snooty fuckers.
ones with money and privilege.
The
Like some of the folks
in here listening to him play going back to their nice
homes leavin’ his tip jar empty.
And it ain’t about
city folks and country folks neither—what’s in each of
their diets.
competitor.
You’re either Christian or you’re a
Proud of tradition or enlightened by
sophistication.
But either way you can have the upper
hand—be the better one—the winner.
winner.
It’s the immediate game.
Every race has a
Don’t matter about the cards.
The bluff and fold.
It’s the look in your
eye when you don’t feel fear and you see what someone
else has to lose.
It’s about dignity.
call that good or bad—fine…
Folks wanna
I guess I am just a bad
girl…
The front door opens.
Dulcinea runs in with a look of
distraught a strap on her dress torn ignoring the faces of
the white patrons upset at her entrance.
Maddie and Cassie
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watch from the bar.
about to serve.
Jo holds a plate in her hand she’s
David puts his guitar down and steps off
the stage to hug his daughter.
DULCINEA
Daddy!
He!
Aaron!
I went to his room…
And…!
DAVID
Hush now girl!
It’ll be alright.
Let’s go back.
Come on in the kitchen and talk it over… Alright?
David puts his arm around his girl and ushers her to the
back door.
Dulcinea is crying in his shoulder.
watches them leave.
Maddie
She turns back to her drink.
She
twirls the straw around in the ice cubes for a moment and
then slowly takes the straw out and rests it on the bar.
INT. POT IN THE BOX—DAY AUGUST 2005
It’s a door and then a door.
To the left is the downstairs
apartment. In the foyer a boom box on top of a beer cooler
and some lawn chairs.
Rap music—Slick Rick—and the sound
is good echoing because of lack of carpeting.
No one is in
the foyer and the door leading up the stairs is unlocked.
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Marcus follows behind the girl.
eye level with her ass.
another door.
He’s two steps behind.
On
At the top of the stairs is
This one locked with a peep hole.
The girl
does the knocking.
The door opens and you see three brothers.
Two sitting on
an old love seat stained and upholstered sixties style in a
faded orange, and the man who answers.
His hair in dreds
his smile revealing gold, baggy pants and a basketball
jersey two sizes too big with a white t-shirt underneath.
He turns and lets them in, pulling up his pants just enough
to cover his plaid boxers below the hanging jersey.
There’s a big screen TV in front of the love seat—a coffee
table with take-out pizza boxes opened, a few pieces left
the color of the cheese telling how old it is.
sitting are playing Xbox.
at the window now.
NFL John Madden.
The two
There’s no one
The Swisher Sweets cigar box inside the
window sill.
THE DRED
What you want girl?
Why you bringin’ this homeboy up
in here?
THE GIRL
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There wasn’t nothin’ in the box.
I want my money or
my weed…
THE DRED
Girl why you frontin’?
You owe from last time.
THE GIRL
What you know I owe?
last time…
I don’t owe you nothin’ from
That was a lid you fronted for me before—I
hooked you up—remember?
I want my 28…
The dred walks over to a guitar resting against the love
seat.
He picks it up and twirls it and you see a bag of
weed taped to the back.
THE DRED
This what you want?
This here killa bud?
right—I know what you want.
Yeah that’s
Thing is… what you gonna
do for me?
He walks up to Marcus and smashes the guitar against head.
Marcus goes down and the dred punches him twice as he tries
to get up and then kicks him in the face with his unlaced
Reeboks.
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BROTHER 1
Man why you got’s to go and mess up my guitar?
THE DRED
Boy you don’t play that!
You’re always chillin’ on
your Sony at your momma’s house…
this chicken head here.
I gotta mess with
What you say, girl?
You
bring this gay bird up in here—stay down, boy!
Come on, girl.
Want to do some business?
gay bird down for me.
What you say, gay bird?
yeah!
Yeah…
Hold this
Hold this motherfucker down!
Want to watch?
Bet you do—
Stay down!
The dred lands a few more blows and the two brothers
wrestle Marcus down on the carpet.
hold his head down.
They kneel on him and
Marcus strains with his neck to look
up, spitting blood from his nose and mouth.
the girl over on the love seat.
The dred has
Marcus watches as she goes
down on him.
BROTHER 2
You know I think she likes it!
homeboy?
You like to watch?
You like it too,
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MARCUS
No…!
One brother smashes his head down.
The other gets up from
where he was kneeling on him and goes up behind the girl.
He pulls down her jeans and panties and starts taking her
from behind.
THE DRED
Yeah…
you like this, gay bird?
on your girl…
Killa bud!
Damn!
We gonna do a train
I think this girl’s
gonna earn every gram!
CHORUS
Sometimes you don’t want it to be your story, but
sometimes it is.
And sometimes you can’t say it was
just a dream—a bad dream.
Every sound.
Every sight.
You notice everything.
Every smell.
You pay
attention to everything even if you don’t want to.
And your little small world becomes big.
You are immersed deeper.
to go.
Immense.
Deeper than you ever wanted
Nothing goes by that you do not sense.
Without faith, hope, or love—no charity in this world.
569
Only a cold sense of knowing a truth that has long
been denied you.
A truth everyone else knew.
They
knew long before you, but they let you live in the
denial until the moment is right.
Until you cannot
bargain with it and your grief is no acceptance.
is the dream you awaken to.
darkness.
This
You awaken in the
And you make love to it—your one and only
cruel lover.
You make love to the night…
INT. ALTON PSYCHIATRIC WARD—CHRISTMAS NIGHT 2007
It’s after lights out.
But Willie is still talking.
You
might as well have your eyes closed because it’s in
complete darkness.
Marcus.
Just the two voices.
A story and then a story.
words meant to be the last.
Willie and
No prayers.
No last
Just two men that don’t want
to go to sleep—one older than the other—fighting to stay
awake and they don’t know why.
Maybe because it’s better
than their dreams.
WILLIE
Sounds kind of stereotypical.
Your descriptions.
Almost like you don’t want to believe it so you make
it that way.
You’ve made it unbelievable to yourself,
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but you want me to believe it.
Like a picture at an
angle so when you see it it defies gravity.
dead and it goes to God somehow…
for your trouble—7 grams?
You never gave her a name.
was lost in her 21 grams?
Like it’s
So you got a quarter
And she didn’t have to pay?
So what was lost?
What
What was lost if she didn’t
even have a name?
MARCUS
Maybe some things don’t go to God.
with us.
They stay here—
In how we want to remember it.
Maybe I told
it so a white man would understand.
WILLIE
For that you would have to have a sense of humor…
Sarcasm is the last defense of the old, boy.
bastion to the denial…
They have church service here.
Interdenominational—for all faiths…
don’t go?
The last
You know why I
Because I know I’ll cry and feel all kinds
of things and I know now that’s like any addiction an
addiction to any drug because it’s the way it makes
you think—that’s what you want—you want a cure for
your boredom… and you’re just bored…
sadness.
That’s your
Not any affront or betrayal—you haven’t been
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lied to—but that’s what you want.
to believe in your own lies…
So you don’t have
You’re a rebel to common
sense perhaps because you’ve been taught that way.
Who was your mother?
before them?
to decide.
Your father?
And what came
That’s always something the young have
And when you decide you’re not young
anymore…
MARCUS
You’re talkin’ ‘bout guilt—aren’t you?
WILLIE
Sure… if that’s what you want to call it, but it
doesn’t make you special.
when it happens.
You see nothing happens
You either go or you stay.
Either
way you have friends or at least you’re not alone.
But the only way to make it that way—make it your
story is to have no allusions.
Illusions—sure—that’s
really all we have, but don’t allude to them.
gotta make your illusions yours.
buy it.
You
Otherwise I don’t
I don’t buy your story and why you’re here.
You’re just someone else’s story—maybe even hers, and
until you realize that your story will never be your
own and it can’t go… it can’t go to God that way…
It
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doesn’t make the dogs bark.
want to hear it.
It doesn’t make me so I
Hear it and drive me crazy.
that’s what people really want.
Because
They want us in here.
So they know what’s normal… You see you ain't curin'
your boredom. You're just curin' theirs…
Naked and unafraid!
Because that’s it.
Be naked!
That’s the
only story there ever is…
MARCUS
You don’t know your bored ‘til other people come
around.
You tryin’ to help me?
sincere it never helps.
When people are
‘Bout the only time it does
is when you don’t need something they need…
WILLIE
You go to church as a boy?
MARCUS
Yeah… I got baptized.
Didn’t you?
WILLIE
There’s talk about Jesus, but I don’t think that’s
really it.
People offer it in that name—the help you
need—and that’s what matters.
It’s like any idea and
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how
you
come
to
associate
who’ll be your forgiver.
with
It has to have a name.
to be loved…
That
someone
That’ll give you the stuff
that matters—what makes you feel.
you fall.
it.
What you go to when
We have to have it
Maybe that’s why I like it just the
same—your story.
I like that it doesn’t have a name.
The girl has no name…
CHORUS
Just don’t make it harder than it is.
hear.
In time we all do that.
conscious.
The story you
We become self-
But this is not really the truth because
that’s already been lost.
A particular point of view.
If you’re gonna be into yourself be into yourself—know
who you are.
For that’s what’s really lost in those
self-conscious moments.
The sense of it.
What comes
through in waves you on the outside where someone else
takes the stage and speaks.
You see their life but
not their death and yet it’s so easy to become them—to
understand.
And so really in those introverted
moments there is no self at all but another.
Another
voice unique and identifiable and you lose yourself in
them.
What makes them angry.
What causes them pain.
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And you love what they love.
You get the jokes that
they make you laugh at even when the punch line isn’t
funny…
But don’t make it harder than it is when these
moments come.
When your own voice is quieted to
listen to another.
To see things as they see them.
For this is not self-love though we call it that of
the weak-minded.
Those easily swayed…
Look to the
root and you will find it there—the why of why you do
it.
Whether it be to love or be loved.
Whether you
take on another’s burdens, and whether it’s a heavy
load.
EXT. CRAWFISH POND SUNSET, LOUISIANA—MORNING 1966
Benjy feels weird in his waders.
The water is about waist high.
in the wind and shade.
He’s pushing the boat.
It’s a sunny day but chilly
In the reeves and rushes where some
of the crawfish baskets jut out of the water in rusted
metal.
It’s one of those days in the south where frost
might be on your windshield of a morning, but then the sun
comes out and warms the land.
can’t see below his waders.
Not the water though.
The mud from the movement of
his boots has made the water murky.
boat.
Benjy
His father sits in the
Dulcinea is emptying the traps.
David is
575
replenishing them with fish bait.
Dulcinea is showing but
somehow in that light and with what she’s wearing and how
she sits in the boat Benjy doesn’t seem to notice.
Most of
his focus in his push.
DAVID
I say we could get a hundred pounds…
cousin will be happy with that.
Your momma’s
Giving us a place to
stay for a few months.
DULCINEA
Daddy you said momma had help…
DAVID
(talks low to Dulcinea then turns back to Benjy)
We don’t need to talk about it here—tonight.
talk to ya about it tonight…
Benjy.
I’ll
You got the fun job,
Don’t have to mess with this here bait… It’s a
shame how this used to be land.
But put a little
water in it and it makes for a mighty nice crawfish
pond—used to be a rice field…
BENJY
576
I’m glad you think you’re giving me something to do
with my time.
DAVID
Time’s a weakness.
A weakness to all of us.
gotta learn to love that in others.
learn to love it in you.
to feel guilty.
Just like they
I don’t want none of you all
Not why your momma and I split up.
Why we’re here now.
You gotta love it like this here
crawfish’s gonna taste.
Ain’t no justice sometimes.
All that peelin’ but just a bit a meat…
guilty—none
of
But you
ya’ll
learn when you are.
should
feel
Don’t feel
that—you’ll
just
You gotta be at peace with that
that who you are, like this here pond as we go from
basket to basket.
own strength.
Lovin’ another’s weakness is your
The sooner you learn that the sooner
you’ll like how these crawfish taste.
EXT. HEMPHILL, TEXAS—DAY 1965
Benjy is at the tree house.
Morning hours.
before the sun with no reason.
No school.
He awoke
No work.
the day his father is taking Dulcinea to Sunset.
packed the day before.
It’s
They
Bethany and the children staying
577
with family.
David staying in a motel on a weekly rate—a
gig lined up at a local Friday night fish fry.
this because Benjy is talking to himself.
the past at the tree.
for an alarm.
He’s going over
Standing where he etched the heart
with Aaron’s and Dulcinea’s names in it.
lack of a better word.
You know
He’s tweaked for
He awoke already awake.
No need
And instead of eating breakfast he walked
from Bethany’s house—cartons and boxes not yet taped to
hold items—the refrigerator, or icebox, cleared out.
He
walked past the trash heaped for the Wednesday pick up—old
toys not played with anymore since he and Dulcinea were
children,
sits in.
clothes,
pieces
of
furniture
nobody
no
longer
He walks the dirt road that once led to Sissy
Walker’s place, the road Bethany once walked—to the land
owned by her brother, inherited, to the tree where he once
played in the house that was built in it, but this time
there’s no one cheering him on.
No fans of loved ones that
love him—more like a permanent detour—a way taken like it’s
never been taken before, the sound of a train whistle far
off.
The move has given Bethany a chance to clean house.
They are staying with a cousin in Louisiana across the
Sabine.
Until it is Dulcinea’s time.
BENJY
578
(talking to himself)
I don’t care when I hear my own voice.
if you’re really going to listen.
Maddie’s or my father—my mother.
You can’t care
I don’t hear
I don’t hear the
sadness of my past in theirs, or my sister in what
she’s expecting.
Something clicks.
It’s clicked here
in a place I’ve been, but I’m here now…
I don’t love
Maddie and now I know I don’t need to though I thought
I did—to love me.
Why do I have to love what my
father has loved?
Something must click so I don’t
care.
And what is this?
What drug is this in my
mind?
Where is my faith if it’s not in my own voice?
I am hungry but I don’t want to eat.
remember.
Not being in her bed but what led me there.
For who is the father?
father?
I want to
Who is the father to her
The truth of science is you needn’t prove
anything—an act of Nature—to this my sister is proof.
The truth that the privacy of your own head is enough
if you believe it.
What has been etched there has
been etched long ago and going over it only makes you
think there are new grooves.
That same laugh at
yourself in the mirror when you know you’re full of
shit, or full of new life.
When you know what’s on
579
your mind—what’s insured by greed.
Not the love of
money, but a happy ending…
CHORUS
Have you ever seen a spider spin its web?
You have to
see it in darkness with a light shining through.
The
light at the right angle through the gossamer threads.
Maybe on a back porch hanging from a corner to a still
wind chime.
spider.
The web not made by hands but by a small
And then you see it destroyed.
Not by the
wind of movement through the chimes, but by a large
moth attracted to the light, the light that enables
you to see the web and the small spider at work, a
moth too big to be ensnared by the web.
you know.
You know and are not afraid.
more death.
are.
Death wants
And what matters is merely how big you
For are you smaller than the web, or is the web
smaller than you?
spider
eats
Either
way
light.
This is when
its
this
And what does it mean when the
own
web
web
is
to
always
Not for you to see it.
another reason.
regain
built
its
strength?
close
to
the
Its location is for
The web is always built close to the
light to attract the moth…
580
INT. ALTON PSYCHIATRIC WARD—THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS 2007
Light through the window.
bed.
Gray light shines on Marcus’s
His feet poking out from the blanket.
is still in the darkness.
shivers under his covers.
Willie’s bed
The room is cold and Marcus
Marcus awoke before the light
not knowing what time it was, not knowing if he should try
to sleep more, but he can’t do it.
He can’t make himself
sleep and he’s been waiting for the light to come into the
window.
You
see
his
eyes
his
face
not
looking
over
Willie’s bed to the window but at his feet and it’s like
he’s tuned in to a waking dream that was never his but he’s
dreaming it like he’s the director of some other mind movie
and he’s called action the camera focused on his feet his
toes curling in the shadows of a gray dawn and you see
pictures from this other movie, a movie already made like
he saw it in some matinee long ago and in his mind he hears
the call of reveille and you see the image of a lighthouse
adjacent to the Mississippi Sound as if you’re looking up
the moon a pale orb but in the colors of Marcus’s dawn.
He’s dreaming someone else’s dream as if in an ancestral
vision though the connection faint as if he knows this is
the last day of his story, a story that always was someone
581
else’s story like he’s fifteen again hearing his Grandma
Gabby speak of a childhood and a man a father who stood at
the bottom of tree house watching his children remembering
a trip to Mississippi and then another trip and you see
faces flash before the camera and disappear in the spectral
light focused on Marcus’s feet poking out of the blanket of
his bed.
A psychiatric ward patient seeing the faces of
people he’s never met.
Johnny Tribout.
brass bed.
Popovitch’s face.
And Nina and
A portrait of a marijuana leaf over a
Rosie Soledad sweating and nude the contours of
a white sheet tight around her body in this bed and then
just an indiscriminate black man sitting playing a guitar,
an old man for you see how the back is hunched after so
many years sitting slouched over his instrument.
the
gnarled
electric
hands.
feedback.
inside a casino.
You
And
hear
then
the
the
haunting
hum
of
You see
slide
slot
and
machines
A picture of an album cover passes over
into view spinning and you see a name along with the pages
torn from Marcus’s bible—the image of Tantalus and David
Threnody’s
name.
And
then
a
lone
tree
standing
at
a
crossroads in this same dawn light Marcus sees with his
eyes open and a bird making a nest in one of the branches
and it doesn’t come down to where Marcus stands casting
pieces of stale bread.
A highway sign at the crossroads
582
that comes into focus—a road sign that reads Highway 61…
Marcus doesn’t know how much time has passed, but now the
light from the window fills the whole room and doesn’t just
illuminate his feet poking out.
He rolls over and looks at
Willie still sleeping.
MARCUS
Willie!
Wake up!
WILLIE
(stirring)
Huh?
MARCUS
Wake up!
I need to tell you something…
WILLIE
What?
Is my wife here?
MARCUS
No… but I need to tell you something.
you the whole story.
a white man.
I didn’t tell
I need to tell ya like you ain’t
I need to tell ya about my bible.
583
WILLIE
Is it still Christmas?
MARCUS
No… that was yesterday.
girl.
lie.
I need to tell ya about the
The girl without a name.
I need to tell you a
One of those beautiful lies people want to
believe because people are fools.
I want to tell you
and I want you to believe me.
Then you see it like in a B movie.
Like in one of those
movies they play every Halloween with unknown actors and
bad lighting.
Bad scripting.
But you watch it every year
and you almost see how it could have been done to make it
good.
How the camera angles really weren’t that bad and
the casting was as good as it could be for people who die
at the hands of a monster—their death scenes almost really
scary almost believable.
How the music is the best part.
How it builds as the character turns to face the knife.
Its quiet refrains.
The melody of the villain…
inside the Gran Torino again.
pulling away from the curb.
You’re
Marcus and the girl are
You see the girl looking out
the window looking up to see the Swisher Sweets cigar box
584
waiting there again on the window sill for the next
customer.
THE GIRL
Are you hurt?
MARCUS
I’ll live…
THE GIRL
What’s a matter, baby?
Do you want more?
I can give
you more…
MARCUS
No…
THE GIRL
It could be worse.
You gotta take it.
MARCUS
Where do you want me to take you?
THE GIRL
Take it raw…
585
It gets worse.
What do want me to say?
to say I didn’t like it?
I liked having you watch.
You feel like a nigger now?
And she laughs.
You want me
Here… let me help you.
She laughs as she takes a part of her
shirt that’s torn and rips off a piece to wipe his eye. She
dabs it with her tongue.
The blood hasn’t congealed yet
and his right eye is beginning to swell shut.
THE GIRL
You poor thing…
pussy!
You want your momma? Don’t be such a
You want me to take care of you?
She reaches between his legs while he’s driving.
She leans
over and purrs in his ear.
What’s the matter?
you, baby.
Can’t you get it up?
Someday I won’t love you no more…
like a dog for me!
Come on! Say:
MARCUS
Woof!
Woof!
I still love
Woof!
Woof!
Sound
586
She unzips his fly and begins jerking him off.
He doesn’t
get hard, but she keeps playing with him and purring in his
ear.
THE GIRL
You thinkin’ about it?
just saw?
You thinking about what you
You like that?
Yeah!
Come on! Say:
Woof!
Woof!
MARCUS
Woof!
Woof!
It only takes three blocks before Marcus comes.
gets completely hard.
The girl laughs.
hand on his bloody shirt.
She smears her
She leans back in her seat and
puts her leg up in the window.
again and begins to apply it.
Like a bad B movie.
He never
She takes out her lip balm
And that’s how it plays out.
You see her in profile with her leg up
leaning back and laughing as she looks out the window.
They’re still on Bond Street.
2005.
window.
It’s East St. Louis, August
Passing the pawn shop again where a TV is in the
A news report—the Doppler map of weather patterns
over Louisiana and the Gulf.
leading melody.
The music the best part.
The
That faint and always recognizable melody
587
of the villain.
And this is the story.
to tell Willie.
One of those beautiful lies.
story of Marcus’s bible.
What Marcus wants
This is the
He wants to tell Willie the girl
was white.
EXT. SUNSET, LOUISIANA—TWILIGHT 1966
You can’t tell it’s winter.
Maybe by some of the trees.
The wind is blowing, and you don’t hear it.
the wind through the leaves.
through the pines.
You don’t hear
It’s not the same—the wind
David notes the difference in the sound
as he walks with his daughter along a path that cuts
beneath many of these barren trees and leads from Bethany’s
cousin’s house to the crawfish pond where they harvested
earlier in the day.
footsteps.
belly.
You hear the wind and not their
Dulcinea walks with one hand cradled under her
There are storm clouds to the south, but the last
of the sun still casts shadows where they walk.
The
shadows moving with the wind and the passing clouds.
pauses to light a cigarette.
ahead.
David
He watches his daughter walk
She is in a shadow and then she’s not.
walking barefoot like her mother.
DAVID
She’s
588
I try to have one only after dinner now.
Dulcinea turns to look back at her father.
DULCINEA
You’re such a liar…
today…
I’ve already seen you smoke three
There’s beer on your breath too, but I don’t
mind that.
Reminds me when I was little girl and
you’d hold me on your lap.
You’d say my breath tasted
of chocolate and peanut butter and you’d ask me what
your breath tasted like and I’d say beer and whiskey
because I knew the smell even before I was six and
you’d laugh and tickle me and I didn’t mind so much
though momma always complained but you paid it no mind
and
you
were
never
mean
to
me
and
still
did
your
tricks to me like spinning me around so I paid it no
mind too and just thought all daddies smelled like
that, or at least my daddy did, and every time you
left I’d sit in the window and wave and you waved back
‘til you were gone ‘til I couldn’t see you no more and
I knew you had your guitar with you and was gonna play
it for others like you did for me and Benjy and that
made me happy even though I missed you when you were
gone…
589
DAVID
Yeah I remember…
Sometimes you’d hold onto my leg and
block the door and I had a hell of a time getting out
the door and your momma would have to threaten no
Santa Claus for you to let go…
tricks to you no more.
I guess I can’t do
You’re too big and even if you
was a little girl again I’m getting to be a an old man
pushin’ fifty and I don’t think my back can take it…
Goddamn—youth.
Sweet Dulcy…
You don’t know what you
have ‘til it’s gone, before the depth comes in.
‘Spose that’s why we have children.
see it all new again.
So we see how you
I can act like I’m a guide or
somethin’, but hell if that ain’t it.
I just get to
see it all again through your eyes now and I can’t say
I even remember how I saw it with my own.
Guess we’re
‘sposed to forget that if we’re goin’ to be any help
at all.
If it’s gonna be your youth and not mine
again…
DULCINEA
You said momma had help…
DAVID
590
Yeah…
your momma had help.
I just didn’t want to
talk about it earlier in front of Benjy.
than you but younger somehow.
He’s older
Guess because he ain’t
a father yet like you’re gonna be a mother.
need to know.
He don’t
And folks back in Hemphill can do their
talkin’ during church meetings, but they don’t need to
know neither.
is.
They don’t need to know who the father
I’m the father as far as they’re concerned.
That’s the way your momma Bethany wants it.
that’s the way I want it too.
talked to her brother.
‘Spose
Bethany already done
Let your uncle handle Aaron.
And Benjy don’t need to know…
help, but she’s dead now.
Yeah your momma had
She died in a fire.
She
didn’t want to be buried—went against her religion
someway—crazy old woman.
She burned herself up in
that old shack she lived in down in the swamp.
in the same year your Papa Frenchie died.
after your great-grandma Bridgette died.
This
The year
But not
before settin’ her chickens free—crazy old woman.
Her
name was Marie Toussaint and she gave birth to your
momma.
She gave birth to you and Benjy…
DULCINEA
Is it true, Daddy?
Is it true Benjy had a twin?
591
DAVID
Don’t you worry ‘bout that none.
You got your own
child to worry ‘bout.
It was an accident—that’s all.
Benjy didn’t mean it.
Ain’t no newborn know nothin’
‘bout love and hate.
That’s somethin’ you’re born
with but it’s latent.
Nature intends it…
It don’t come ‘til later ‘til
How do you feel?
How do you feel
about Aaron?
DULCINEA
I don’t love him if that’s what you mean.
cousin.
He’s my
I ‘spose I don’t hate him neither…
Dulcinea is still cradling her belly.
as she and her father walk.
She looks down to it
The path has led to the dock
to the boat Benjy pushed in his waders earlier in the day
when they harvested the crawfish.
The sun is setting.
Its
colors rest in pink and purple upon the shallow waters of
the pond.
DAVID
It ain’t ever even.
Love nor hate.
The balance of
both ain’t ever equal in both nor when in the feeling
592
of one or the other when it comes to two people.
No
two people love each other the same at any given time.
Someone always loves more and someone less.
hate too.
You don’t never look into another’s eyes
with a feeling that’s equal.
always looks away…
That’s why someone
That’s why there’s always the
pursuit and the pursuer.
But don’t think you lose if
you love more, if you hate less.
that.
Same with
Don’t be afraid of
You don’t die when it happens though it feels
that way sometimes.
livin’ most.
No… lookin’ back it’s when you’re
You live the most when you lose.
you lose that game.
Don’t ever be deceived by it.
How cruel it seems…
DULCINEA
Daddy why you seein’ that woman?
DAVID
What woman?
DULCINEA
That white woman…
Maddie…
And Benjy…
When
I heard at church her name’s
593
DAVID
You never mind ‘bout that.
I know ‘bout Benjy.
Like
I said he’s younger than you even though he’s older.
You let me deal with that…
Rain’s comin’.
They stand at the dock looking to the south.
The sun is
below the horizon and though it is gone some of its colors
still remain in the sky in stark contrast to the dark
clouds gathering.
Dulcinea lets her hand fall that was
cradling her belly.
She reaches for her father’s hand.
looks down and takes it.
He
Then they both stare up at the
gathering clouds.
INT. SUNSET INN AGAIN—NIGHT 1965
You can’t smell it.
movie.
That doesn’t come across in a mind
Sight and sound yes.
Even taste and touch to an
extent—they’re easy to imagine.
smell what’s in a movie.
But smell—no.
You can’t
You can’t smell grilling onions.
Maybe because it’s primitive and you can’t imagine
something primitive.
You only remember it.
It’s not a
psychological observation—a maxim if you will—and this
movie has been full of maxims.
reality.
No, a smell is concrete, a
You either smell it or you don’t.
And once you
594
do you know immediately.
Like a reflex that doesn’t even
reach the mind.
Your sense of smell is like a memory of all former lovers.
When it was new and how it became old.
letting go.
That holding on and
It becomes your sense of time and how it is
lost only to be regained.
A smell is like a dream that
takes you back years to what you were and still are because
you still dream it and you still remember.
A smell is a
broken heart and a heart that learns to love again after it
repairs itself.
A relation of yourself to the world and to
the people that come into it and then take their leave.
And you go with them only to return to yourself.
A smell
is centuries old even if the span of your life is only half
over.
You don’t need more time to know your life and what
death is in it.
You don’t need more time to remember what
a girl’s hair smelled like as you made love to her.
You
don’t need more time to know the smell of sex, what the
death of a loved one smells like.
This is how these mind
movies are tied together though spanning different times
and a different place, and that love triangle that involved
Johnny Tribout and Nina and Popovitch in Biloxi,
Mississippi in that time of David Threnody’s youth before
the war is seen again in the faces of the children—
595
Bethany’s children— in Gabby and Aaron, in the smell of
rain in the air as the wind blows through the branches of a
tree, that Texas Mountain Laurel where a tree house was
once built only to burn and you will—you will smell that.
How this movie began prostrate as if flat on your back
looking up through these branches just as Nina’s dead eyes
looked up at that lighthouse adjacent to the Mississippi
Sound.
That image of feet poking out of a blanket and what
we know feet smell like.
The image of a lone tree at a
crossroads in the moonlight—a bird nesting there—and a far
off whistle coming from the Sabine and a train bridge.
This the synesthesia.
The denouement. A smell related to a
place, a time, seen through the bullet hole of a guitar,
the felt texture of the strings and the sound that comes
from it, and that span of time of a life half over falls to
Marcus, the subconscious young narrator of all this in his
radioactive ward of pain, the taste of it, in that smell of
a hospital where the sick reside.
It falls to him to tell
the story in his own mind, the story of the children—David
and Bethany’s children—the story of nieces and kissing
cousins and the ancestry that befalls him.
For he knows.
He knows what marijuana smells like and remembers the scent
of a girl’s lip balm.
596
But that’s not what you smell now even if you could smell
it in a movie.
It’s the smell of grilling onions.
below.
From the kitchen in the bar.
Again.
The end of the year 1965.
From
You are in Sunset Inn
Below Maddie’s room.
And so now take a look at this place in a span of time in
the span of a day and night.
of passing smells.
For this too tells the story
See it in time lapse.
The light
through the windows and how it moves across the room in the
passing of a day.
In the routines of meals.
hour, lunchtime and dinner.
for these repasts.
Breakfast
In the people that come and go
Almost age specific.
How the old-
timers come in for their morning coffee and the reading of
newspapers, the teenagers at lunch off school grounds, the
families, the fathers and their wives and children after
work for dinner.
stories.
And then the drinkers at all hours—their
It could almost be a ghost story—all these
traveling souls that enter and depart, filling space and
then leaving emptiness, chairs pulled out from tables only
to be scooted in again and then after last call the busboy
wipes them down with that smell of a used wet rag and
they’re flipped over and put atop the tables for the floor
to be swept clean with Pine-Sol.
The shadows of an empty
place of business in the moonlight.
And in the corner like
a corner you’ve turned to many times you see it—David’s
597
guitar resting there upright—that old Gibson ES-150—
unplugged.
And so now it’s night.
smell of grilled onions.
Maddie’s room.
Hemphill, Texas.
The lingering
We are above Sunset Inn Again in
And David there with her.
DAVID
They do it to make you hungry.
order up.
it.
Even if there’s no
They throw them on the grill so you smell
It’s like coffee or bacon in the morning.
wakes you up.
It
It’s like how I wake up with you.
lingering distortion in my ears.
A
And memories
triggered from I don’t know where.
I suddenly think
of something years ago like it happened today like
it’s happening now.
proud of.
Sometimes it’s something I’m
Sometimes not.
When it happens I get the
strange notion I have to defend it—defend my life
somehow because I remember it—the memory of this was
as it is now.
This relation in the back of my mind,
and I ask myself where did you go?
living go when it stops?
Where does the
I have had you, but I’m not
sure I have you now, and so how do I have myself if
it’s either this or that in how I remember and what I
598
sense now.
For I have been here a guest in your bed,
but tomorrow I may walk under your window uninvited
and another may have taken my place.
And only that
smell the smell of grilling onions asking me to come
in.
To answer a hunger that once it’s answered must
wait for the hunger to come again if it's to have the
same emotional rescue.
That same victory over life a
life that’s being lived rather than being remembered
as such—something you once lived…
There’s a vanity mirror in the corner.
before it naked as David lies in bed.
Maddie is standing
She is putting a
flower in her hair, behind her ear—a violet, heart-shaped,
made out of silk.
It’s not real.
It has no smell.
But
she clips it there behind her ear as her only adornment.
She turns her head different ways to see how it looks.
MADDIE
It’s not onions.
It’s the moon.
That’s not what makes you come.
See it out there?
its light on my bed?
smell.
That’s what calls you.
See
Not some
You think there are layers to it, a wax and
wane, but there is only one.
see.
Almost full?
Look at me.
What I see is what you
Look at me as I look at myself and
599
see yourself.
It’s the only past you need.
soon as you look away.
Gone as
As soon as I turn away and we
have only our direct gaze…
Maddie turns to face him, and David does look away.
His
eyes focus not on the mirror but on her face partially
hidden in the moonlight.
light.
The silk violet there in the
He tries to find her eyes, but he fails and his
gaze falls to her breasts to the rest of her body as she
stands there for him to see knowing how she stands in what
is her room and how the moon shines in it is what is he
will see.
DAVID
Sometimes I think you’re a dispensation.
Whether or
not I see justice in it is my choice of my role in
being by your side…
But those who exalt themselves
will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will
be exalted…
How do I not know if a woman is not judge
of this?
MADDIE
You exaggerate my powers.
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She walks to the foot of the bed to where David’s feet are
poking out from the sheets.
She leans down her breasts
touching his toes and slowly crawls up his body first
putting the false violet to his lips before lightly kissing
him.
DAVID
I’m afraid, Maddie.
much.
I’m afraid I’ve asked for too
I’m afraid what I’ve mastered in this world
will only be what I’m a servant to in the next…
MADDIE
You just want to know.
But you shouldn’t.
you’re up here you should be down there.
where your guitar is.
your music…
Didn’t you tell me?
Didn’t you tell me
You can’t give it
And the sound never just goes away.
just disappear.
Down there
You should be down there with
of the man who gave it to you?
back.
When
It’s vigilant.
Maybe just in a different form.
It doesn’t
It returns to you.
A different tone.
Your music is your children…
And a look is captured between the lovers.
he below.
Her above and
Their eyes meet even if you can’t see it clearly
601
in the darkness of their bed in that fardo sense of shadows
cast about by the moonlight in Maddie’s room.
laughs.
You can’t see her face.
And Maddie
Only the fake violet.
You see its heart-shape silhouetted by the moon.
DAVID
We are going away and I’m taking him with us.
has a cousin in Louisiana.
Bethany
We’re going there for
Dulcy.
MADDIE
So?
Take him then.
His living hasn’t stopped yet,
and I’m not doing your living for you…
right.
Maybe you’re
What you master here is just service to the
next time.
The next dispensation.
In whether you’re last or the first.
continuity.
In who comes next.
All I am is
That’s what you hate about me.
That’s
what you love…
And now you’re outside.
The balcony to Maddie’s room and
the steps that lead down.
All this to a full moon.
image of David going down and then Benjy coming up.
takes one step at time, slowly.
time, in a hurry.
The
David
Benjy leaps two steps at a
And you hear a howl.
Not from a wolf,
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like in those mind movies from Biloxi before the war and
the images of Nina’s murder, but recorded, from David’s
first recordings.
The haunting slide of his Gibson ES-150
and a howl, David’s howl closing one of his songs recorded
in 1947 in the Bywater, the upper ninth ward of New
Orleans, at Piety Street Records, and for a moment you see
Bethany’s face shining in the light from the stage where
she first heard David play and their talk over an absinthe
of man and God.
dawn.
And then you see the moonlight gone to a
David crawling out a window, Rosie Soledad’s window
at sunrise, his guitar on his back.
You see that lone tree
at a crossroads shadowed in a rising sun.
smell it.
That gasoline smell.
And then you
You see Benjy dousing the
tree, the Texas Mountain Laurel, the body of Aaron hanging
from one of the branches that provides the floor of the
tree house.
You see Benjy toss the can of gasoline and
strike a match.
He takes David’s journal, the journal
Dulcinea gave Aaron, and tears it out page by page, casting
them into the flames.
EXT. HEMPHILL, TEXAS—ALL SAINT’S DAY 1965
You see a soundless fire.
but you don’t have one.
And maybe you need a calendar,
A day to refer to to know what day
603
it is now.
A date.
You need that relationship.
You need
to know when Benjy first climbed those steps to Maddie’s
room.
When David first descended from them.
know when Dulcinea came to Aaron’s window.
his dream.
You need to
To listen to
That astral projection to a time when Bridgette
saw a girl on fire.
The smell.
What haunts the haunted.
And just as Benjy was born on a leap year you need to know
the conception which as it takes its course leads to a
child born in Sunset.
Not 1965 but 1966.
Solomon—Dulcinea’s child.
The birth of
You need to know the horror of
incest and what began to end.
You need time’s linearity.
A correlation of tests to verify the functions within your
control.
What was before the Devil’s day.
playground.
The Devil’s
And if you pause to look at it it’s got you.
The insidiousness.
That time that you work to up to that
time when you are paid.
How Friday’s lead to Sunday’s. And
the day after.
For the day is Monday.
superstitious?
Maybe it all comes down to a number.
statistics of such.
The
This you need to know to know the
rules of money, and how to make it.
what haunts you.
Are you
This the aftermath of
For a camera the motion of pictures with
the sound added after only gives you so much.
give you the smell of soundless fire…
It doesn’t
You need to know the
after to understand the before because if you had a
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calendar, if you had the date and not some subtitle to what
you see what you hear looking at a soundless flame you
would know the number…
walking with David.
But all you really see is Bethany
The morning after trick or treat and
they are preparing to move to take the children to Sunset.
A bonfire the night before.
whole Lebeau clan there.
Outside Bethany’s house—the
Even Gabby and Aaron.
And David
with his acoustic guitar.
Jonathon Bonnor’s guitar—the one
with a bullet hole in it.
They are walking to the tree.
The tree where their children once played, and they are
talking not knowing the date.
The date of conception
leading to a birth, for no one knows that Dulcinea is with
child except them.
David knowing first, in her
interruption at the Sunset Inn Again, Maddie at the bar and
David on stage.
He knew in the song he could not end that
song if you could hear it if it was the sound beneath the
soundless flame.
refer to a day.
And that’s why you need a date.
A day to
For if you do the math if you follow the
motion of pictures already shown to you you would know the
day.
The day Solomon was born.
six in the morning.
He was born at six after
The day June 6th, 1966. You would know
the day after is but yet still today, and in all these
rules you would have to break your one rule.
collected the safe answer to your indigestion.
The candy
The talk
605
which follows.
Between a husband and wife of children who
are no longer husband and wife.
day.
In that day that follows a
Misguided by the rules of time.
BETHANY
You know there are things I still hate about you.
Things I remember being your wife.
brush your teeth.
I hate the way you
The way you grind down the
bristles…
DAVID
Yes, I know…
And I snored.
BETHANY
I didn’t think I could sleep with you…
knew it was wrong.
You
What made you feel guilty is you
wanted to do it again.
it was hard.
You knew.
And it was easy which was why
I didn’t have to talk you into it…
DAVID
Was it easy?
Easy to fall out of love?
of being lonely.
else’s wife.
I was tired
You were tired of being someone
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They’ve made it to the tree.
the etching.
Bethany puts her hand up to
The knife scars on the trunk where Benjy
etched Aaron’s and Dulcy’s names.
She follows the lines of
the heart with her fingers.
BETHANY
I became your mirror.
told you.
You thought it was a lie when I
When we walked along the riverfront.
was telling you the truth.
me…
My father… he once told
But it was why I crossed it.
came to you on the West Bank.
but you didn’t believe me.
But I
The river.
Why I
I told you the truth,
Because you felt my
coldness… which was only my fear…
You are just as
evil.
DAVID
But you are the one that said it… You came from it.
From my innocence.
From my Sodom and Gomorrah…
BETHANY
And you played there.
hear it.
You played there so I could
So I would listen…
DAVID
607
Our firstborn buried there.
Bethany still has her hand up to the etching.
David.
She faces
One hand on the tree the other on her hip.
Her
figure is still good though she’s past forty by just a
couple of years.
women.
She hasn’t taken on that habit of older
The over adornment of jewelry and makeup.
Her hair
is done up naturally by a brooch, a silver brooch fashioned
with the portrait of a flower, a lock of hair encased in
it.
A lock of their firstborn’s hair.
New Orleans when she was mourning.
hair back from her face.
She had it made in
It’s what pulls her
Bethany touches it absentmindedly
making sure it’s fixed in place and then she leans against
the tree and slowly slides down so that she sits.
folds her hands over her knees.
dress she’s wearing.
She
Over the simple white
She’s barefoot.
David looks down
from her smile, the surety of it fixed by her eyes.
He
looks down to her wiggling toes.
BETHANY
You know it’s not always like this.
Is it like that with her?
the bar?
Seek and destroy.
The woman who lives above
608
DAVID
Why don’t you ask our son?
Why not ask Benjy?
BETHANY
Is that what you think?
You think I sent him to her?
You still are—you’re still beautiful to me sometimes.
You notice everything except what’s crucial. You read
but you don’t comprehend.
Later.
After.
was happening.
It only comes to you alone.
What you should have noticed while it
You have the heart of poet.
You do.
Maybe that’s why the man gave you the guitar in
Mississippi.
It’s a deal you made long before you met
me, but you want me to take the blame.
you what you are.
I just showed
I gave you children…
DAVID
You knew the gift before you gave it.
and it made me lose my faith.
That I did read
That’s what you gave in
order for me to lose it.
Bethany rests her head against the tree and laughs.
BETHANY
609
You’re alone because you want to be.
because you want to be.
The response.
You’re hated
It’s the same either way.
Or lack of it.
DAVID
And you will love yourself either way.
is whether I should do the same…
I’ll go to New Orleans.
children in Sunset.
The response
To make some money
I can’t stay with you and the
There’s a band out of Shreveport.
I’ll tour with them through the winter, but I can come
back every other weekend.
I promise to be there when
the child is due, and I’ll say what you want me to say
when you take Benjy and Dulcy back to Hemphill.
BETHANY
You promise?
David reaches over Bethany’s head as she looks up.
He
traces the heart etched in the tree with his fingers.
DAVID
I can only promise what you will promise.
that.
You know
You know because we’ve both taken that ride.
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BETHANY
It wasn’t your first…
DAVID
No… and it won’t be our last.
CHORUS
It began as a mistake. The role is how you play it as
you take what you learn from coincidence.
The effects
that make you happy what you feel when a lover’s gone.
And without a voice you begin to hear the other voices
the chorus of the children…
yourself.
Now you must correct
But how does this happen?
shown the error of your ways?
blows.
A train whistle.
This the surface.
Far off a whistle
The river crossed for
unsound wisdom the Sabine.
it.
How are you
And a train bridge over
The surface of the dream.
images open to interpretation.
enter in the outer darkness.
Open to layers that
Just as a web to the
light.
A shadow large or small depending on the
angle.
The order of business not done for anything
else but to keep the mind sharp.
For what does it
mean when the spider eats its own web to regain its
strength? This is how the dream feeds itself.
It
The
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feeds on your sleep.
your pillow.
Torn and floating like gossip.
become the hymn.
no more.
The surface but the feathers of
And we
To what was done that can’t be done
You must follow it—that far off whistle
which leads to the secret.
The self-same secret
Popovitch kept from his family to protect and provide
in this one dream this one mind movie broken into
parts starved by your awakening, by Benjy’s awakening.
The awakening to a father’s mercy, and a past which
kills it.
lost.
The curse of the firstborn.
A blessing
You the moth seeking transformation.
your fire.
The light
And if it burns so are you transformed by
the soundless infinite and your wrath and indignation
transfigured by beatitudes.
And peace.
with the passing of a train.
Peace coming
The culmination of a
murder.
This Aaron’s murder by the hands of his
cousin.
Because of a conception blessed by God.
you hear it?
It is David’s guitar.
of our compiled voices.
weeps.
And weep with it.
salvation.
Hear it.
Do
In the turnaround
Hear it now as it
For this contrition is your
The blisters and blood of an eternal
covenant…
EXT. THE SABINE RIVER—THE TRAIN BRIDGE—APRIL 1ST 1966
612
You see flowers.
Flowers in bloom.
They’re on the trees.
Their roots watered by the river. Focus as if prostrate
flat on your back looking up into the rays of sunlight
falling through the branches of a tree, a Texas Mountain
Laurel.
It is too early for the song of katydids. Now
follow up through the branches into the direct sunlight
a horizon that pans away from the sunset to the Sabine
River flowing in the distance.
The river comes into focus
and then a close-up of the water’s threads over submerged
rocks like you’re standing on the shore and you hear the
water the current over the rocks mixed with the croak of
frogs.
You see a bridge in the distance—a train bridge.
You hear a far-off whistle.
There’s a north wind blowing.
you see the branches sway.
force of it.
guns.
bullet.
The flowers falling with the
You see Benjy following Aaron.
Rifles—.22 caliber.
Both carry
Very popular, using a heeled
They’re hunting squirrels.
Aaron is carrying a mouse trap.
that lead to the train bridge.
mouse.
If you look up at the trees
But that’s not all.
They’re walking the rails
Aaron’s plan to drown a
613
AARON
I’m glad you came home, Benjy…
home for good?
How is she?
When are you coming
How’s Dulcy?
BENJY
My father committed himself to a show.
home with him…
I just came
Dulcy’s pregnant.
AARON
(turning)
What?
BENJY
Oh come on—don’t act like you don’t know.
same church as you…
It took me a while.
I go to the
But I found
out my mistake…
AARON
What mistake?
What mistake, Benjy?
BENJY
There’s a woman.
She lives up above.
where my father plays…
Above the bar
You know she didn’t have to be
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the one to tell me.
You could have.
You could have
come to me with it.
AARON
Come to you with what, Benjy?
BENJY
I know you have it…
You have my father’s journal.
AARON
Oh…
They’re in the middle now.
Benjy watches Aaron to see if
he’s nervous, but Aaron shows no sign.
His hands only
tremble slightly as he opens the trap.
They both look over
the rail as the mouse falls out.
drop.
They watch the splash.
It’s about a twenty foot
The mouse tries to swim.
moves to one of the concrete abutments supporting the
bridge.
Aaron points.
AARON
Look!
It
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They see a turtle come to the surface.
water.
And the head.
The shell above the
Its legs moving it towards the
mouse.
AARON
You think he’ll drown.
Or will the turtle get him?
BENJY
I want it back.
AARON
What?
BENJY
The journal.
My father’s journal.
AARON
It’s in the tree…
BENJY
The tree?
AARON
616
The tree house.
It’s in the tree house.
still go there sometimes.
Remember when we were boys?
You know I
It’s not far from here.
We didn’t want the girls
to come up…
BENJY
Yeah…
I remember.
Why’d you do it, Aaron?
make a fool out of me?
her?
Why’d you
Why’d I have to hear it from
A woman?
AARON
Benjy… I…
BENJY
Shut up!
Just shut up!
You hear the whistle.
The train whistle.
Benjy takes his
rifle off his shoulder and aims it at Aaron.
Aaron drops
the mouse trap and raises his hands.
AARON
Benjy!
kiss!
Remember!
You wanted us!
You wanted us to
617
BENJY
I remember…
there.
Train’s coming.
You wait for that train.
right there.
You wait for it
You follow me and I’ll shoot.
Benjy begins walking backwards.
bridge.
You just stay right
He backs himself off the
He keeps his rifle pointed at Aaron.
Aaron still
has his hands raised, but he turns his head to see if the
train has made the curve that leads to the river.
It has.
You see it approaching in black smoke.
AARON
Come on, Benjy!
Quit playing! Benjy, I’m afraid!
Benjy has to speak loud to be heard over the train.
BENJY
It’s just like the tree, Aaron!
a part to play!
Remember!
You just let the girls back in!
The train is close to the bridge now.
The rails vibrate.
Aaron turns his head again and looks at it.
scared.
We all had
His face is
He looks down to be sure of his footing and begins
running towards Benjy.
618
BENJY
Stop!
Maybe Aaron can’t hear him.
safety.
Twice.
He’s just trying to make it to
It’s faint, but you hear the report of the rifle.
Aaron is close now.
He’s made it to the gravel
embankment where Benjy stands off the rails.
He’s close
enough to fall into Benjy and breathe his last breath.
Benjy holds him up his rifle in one hand.
so he stands as the train goes by.
He supports him
They look small in
contrast to the fast-moving compartments going by.
sound is loud.
Deafening.
The
You don’t hear Benjy scream.
CHORUS
Why the fear?
The fear of being ordinary?
other you should be afraid of.
an artist knows.
rest.
It’s the
What an artist being
The silence after the creation.
The hot wind after the train has passed.
stifling dust.
And the flowers don’t fall.
don’t fall to a north wind.
Make every effort.
The
The
They
They wilt in the heat…
Every effort to be ordinary.
There you will find your synchronicity.
Your
otherness in being the one to laugh at the joke.
Not
619
with the knowledge of the one making it.
yours being ordinary.
simple measures.
Time is
You’ll find yourself in its
For what’s important is found in
making it unimportant.
Passed over as trivial.
What’s given intense scrutiny in one story a minor
fact in another.
This what gives it truth.
How it is
fundamental, crucial, almost even painful in the
attention of one focus, one perspective, and is simply
ignored by another player in the same range of
discussion—in what’s North of North.
tragedy is made comedy.
This is how a
And the pressure’s off.
There’s no pressure when making light of it.
how it ends.
You can handle anything when you know
there’ll be an ending to it.
So make every effort.
ordinary.
The mystery is lifted…
Make every effort to be
Never make it your story.
yourself in the starring role.
character.
You know
Be as us…
Never cast
Be a supporting
Do this and you’ll be happy.
Do this and you’ll never be afraid…
INT. ALTON PSYCHIATRIC WARD—THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS 2007
You hear water running. Someone flushed the toilet.
black orderlies in the men’s restroom.
Two
They’re emptying
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the trash and restocking the paper towels.
toilet paper.
The rolls of
You see three urinals and the same number of
stalls and around the corner the shower room.
Open without
privacy—the shower heads lining a tiled wall.
Drains in
the floor.
Water is running in there too.
after the toilet’s done flushing.
haven’t turned that corner yet.
subject has changed from sports.
You hear it
But the orderlies
They’re busy talking.
The NFL playoffs.
Now
they’re talking about a co-worker.
ORDERLY 1
Does he owe you money too?
ORDERLY 2
Yeah… He bet the Redskins wouldn’t make it.
Fifty
bucks…
ORDERLY 1
I don’t like him…
ORDERLY 2
He does his job.
getting a divorce.
One of the CNA’s told me he’s
Only been married four months.
The
621
ORDERLY 1
What happened?
Did he owe her money too?
ORDERLY 2
They weren’t having sex…
Rasputia said.
At least that’s what
You know—big ass.
fingernails against policy.
handles the north wing.
False eyelashes.
She
She’s friends with his wife
another CNA works a floor down…
was at the Christmas party.
about Wallace…
Fake painted
You know her.
She
That’s where she told me
Rasputia must be early today.
The
Wednesday showers normally don’t start for another
hour.
ORDERLY 1
Yeah I hear the water running…
him.
I still don’t like
Married or not he owes me money.
ORDERLY 2
Guess his wife didn’t like him either.
said was he got a little excited.
the time she got her shirt off…
ORDERLY 1
What Rasputia
He would be done by
622
Is the boy too young to know how to kiss a pussy?
Smell it right it gives you patience.
you can’t get in pornography…
It’s a smell
When my wife gets mad
it helps make her forget all about it.
I might forget
to take the trash out at home because I’m always
taking it out here, but I know how to bet on my own
bed.
Sounds like Wally makes bad bets all the way
around.
ORDERLY 2
Well maybe he’ll get old enough to learn…
Takes a
while to get to like yourself and even then you forget
sometimes.
That’s what folks here need to learn.
suicides at least.
The
All of us have our moments when we
don’t like ourselves and we wonder how anybody else
can like us.
guess.
Some folks are just wound too tight I
They get so alone it makes sense.
fantasies we all have.
The
The poetic fantasies…
That’s
the demons you know.
The demons these folks have.
The demons they see.
That talk to them.
have no need for fantasies.
surprise.
God don’t
Tomorrow ain’t no
That’s what the demons don’t know.
what we don’t know.
We don’t know when…
That’s
Tomorrow is
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today when it comes to love.
When it comes to the
secret of liking yourself…
ORDERLY 1
You still hear that water running?
ORDERLY 2
Yeah…
been in there a long time.
Gonna prune up.
Rasputia must be on her Facebook.
The orderlies leave their supplies and the janitor
equipment they wheeled into the men’s restroom.
They turn
the corner to the shower room to follow the sound of
running water.
Marcus is hanging from the center shower
head by a wet towel.
Naked with his eyes open.
His arms
hang by his sides, but the way his fingers on his hands are
splayed it looks like he’s reaching for something.
On the
wooden bench that lines the opposite wall are his clothes.
His hospital pajamas folded neatly.
bible.
And on top sits his
Closed and bulging with inserted papers.
to be opened from the left.
It rests
The cross on the front cover
is upside down.
ORDERLY 1
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Oh shit…
we got another one.
Go get the nurse!
CHORUS
It is grace.
dead.
It is how you tell the living from the
The living and the dead in Christ.
It is the
grace that affects you when you deal with someone that
doesn’t have a care in your life.
once—but they don’t anymore.
you used to know.
pressure.
And maybe they did—
They were someone that
And this is grace.
Not under
How you love when you’re not expecting love
in return.
When you know someone is lonely and
whether or not you continue to instill the feeling
that they are alone.
delineating factor.
And maybe this is the
Of a good person.
In what we admire of this.
weakness.
Or a bad one.
Seeing it as strength or
In what we see of justice when we know we
all are treated unjust.
principles.
How we show our grief.
Our
Perhaps it shows what we are what we’re
truly made of better than all the things we embrace to
survive that enslave us.
It is our white noise.
we see when we try to be God.
examples…
What
And it becomes all our
This is the house of David. Time seen as a
progression.
Halted in the moment of reflection and
losing its truth, its allusions to a tragedy. It is a
625
bible opened to the left.
Torn out.
Page by page.
Inserted pages falling out.
And cast into the flames…
So soon we must return to the biography and the
biographer.
To end the stories told by children.
what they say it says before they can even read.
In
The
mea culpa of grace…
INT. SUNSET INN AGAIN—MADDIE’S ROOM DAY 1966
This is unfilmable. All of it.
It can’t be digitalized and
recorded. Would you even want it to?
Pictures in your mind.
negatives.
No edits.
Better a dream.
With the sensations unscripted in
No retakes.
The camera rolling both
before and after the word action is even said.
rehearsed.
No tape on the floor in the illusion of a set
to mark where the actors stood.
put in later.
garde.
Nothing
And the soundtrack isn’t
No kiss marks of cuts.
This is the avant
Tracing a history of Dada to the language poets.
Parataxis.
So in this the reader is the camera.
the movie in your head.
insubordinate.
You make
In what is subordinate and
The images in how you connect them.
In how
it constructs or deconstructs a conflict and a resolution.
And what is the conflict here?
escape with Benjy.
You’ve traveled up the fire
You are in Maddie’s room.
You have
626
walked through it to the balcony and so now you have a
view.
But do you remember what you passed?
remember seeing a bed?
there?
And who was in it?
Do you
Who slept
Of course this could be shown in flashing images
and how subliminal it becomes matters only to the
increments of time between images.
the mind comprehends.
All of it inverted.
Marcus’s bible opened to the left.
see all this.
What the eyes see and
You can hear it.
Such as
And the cross…
You can
Perhaps even smell it with
a cultured taste that is almost tactile making it personal.
Giving you that bond where the hair rises on your skin in
pleasure.
This a dream where when you wake up the conflict
is resolved.
But is it?
awaken this way?
Is it then?
Did you really
That is not the case with Benjy.
not awake to pillow talk.
Maddie already on the balcony
looking out in a night gown at the dawn.
cigarette without coffee.
bed.
He did
Smoking a
Benjy has awakened alone in her
And why he traveled from Sunset Dulcinea but a few
short months from birth was more than just that primal urge
to have her touch him.
More than just that dream of caress
to our genitals overpowered by a smell.
wanted to beat somebody.
Because maybe he
He wanted to beat his father.
not the first in Maddie’s bed but the last.
emasculating the former.
As
The next man
So perhaps this is the conflict.
627
As you’ve seen it so far in dialogue and images.
to be the next man that last man standing.
That need
To see in the
eyes of that former lover the surrender to dignity.
soft and vanquished in sex.
And even if you’ve been good
in bed you seek sexual peace.
venereal appetite.
Gone
The merciful extinction of
So when it’s all over you find God in
the darkness of death.
What Marcus sought…
You as the
reader must make this meaning in your own mind and so
perhaps picture it.
The meeting of a woman with a former
lover and a current one.
And who is the manlier?
Who is
taller with bigger hands more callused giving the tougher
handshake?
Greeting you with a deeper voice?
man’s man?
Picture it as Benjy wanted to picture it.
meeting with his father.
As if he owns it now.
what’s between Maddie’s legs…
Who is the
His
Owns
Perhaps this the conflict.
And as reader as purveyor on this drama shown as if on film
but yet unfilmable you yearn for a resolution.
keeps you watching.
waiting for it.
It’s what
Knowing what you want to come next and
For you—you are the designer of the plot.
The sad thing outside of this outside of movies there
hardly ever is this resolution—a focused answer to the
justice in the story you seek.
regret.
No resolution.
Only
This you must bear in the memory of each new day.
A past plot that haunts you because in its twists and turns
628
the only ending it comes to is you.
You must end it.
And
you end nothing except in how you bear what’s unresolved…
This why it’s unfilmable.
never heal.
For these are mental scars that
These are technical difficulties.
don’t go away when you close your eyes.
escape the psychology of sex.
woman’s earth.
And they
You can never
Or man’s domination of a
Your mind never stops even after the
sensations have ended.
You have become your soul in this.
And so how would you like it?
How would you like it to
end?
It is the end of March 1966.
home to Hemphill.
Benjy has come home.
Come
Ostentatiously to deliver a message.
To
the owner of Maddie’s room—Maddie’s boss—the owner of
Sunset Inn Again.
David won’t be playing at the next
Friday fish fry—April Fool’s Day.
New Orleans.
He has obligations in
But really despite this peregrination for
which Benjy volunteered what he really wants why he really
has come is more of an introspection that can’t be filmed.
He wants to feel Maddie’s earthly hands again.
He wants to
be told he is a man and by this admission by Maddie forgo
the falsification of truly growing up.
passes between lovers.
to.
Knowing what truly
In other words he wants to be lied
Something a film can’t really show by its very essence
629
a lie.
Instead we have what’s already happened that hasn’t
happened yet.
going by.
fire.
Benjy’s confrontation with Aaron.
The tree house that Texas Mountain Laurel on
And Aaron’s body hanging from it.
David’s journal being torn out.
flames…
words.
A train
The pages of
Page by page.
And so now you see Benjy reading.
Lost in the
His father’s
You’re in Maddie’s room you see Benjy in Maddie’s
bed, but then what you see is Benjy reading.
You see Benjy
standing close to a tree on fire reading from his father’s
journal the journal documenting the time period of the
years between 1955 and 1966.
He’s reading his father’s
words and you hear them.
BENJY
(reading)
You are your truth and yet it is given to you in so
many ways.
There comes a time when you realize you’ve
been lied to and you must despise them.
despise the lies.
the truth.
You must
You must despise the lies and love
And this is no easy thing to do.
and hate at the same time…
I look back now.
back and wonder if I’m a bitter man.
To love
I look
Sometimes I
still see that crossroads in my mind and that time in
Biloxi before the war.
My friend Johnny Tribout and
630
the woman he loved.
I remember the siege of Bastogne
and the children I tried to save.
defeated…
And then my time in New Orleans when she
came into my life.
worse.
The Goliath I
Making it better.
Making it
It’s been nearly twenty-five years.
Nearly
twenty-five years since I placed that electric guitar
‘Ol Scratch gave me at the crossroads against the door
of that roadhouse which led to our escape.
Nina and me.
Johnny,
How it came back through Popovitch
missing a string.
entered the war.
Our prison time before America
And sometimes the memories escape me
and other times they leave me an insomniac with
harrowing dreams…
Yes, wintertime in Bastogne and the
West Bank—how she crossed the river to knock on my
door.
Those first recordings of ’45.
heard.
bad.
Which Popovitch heard.
Which she
And a drug deal gone
Johnny wounded and moving to East St. Louis, to
my home.
Popovitch dead.
first husband—dead…
Pete Southhouse—Bethany’s
And I remember what my father
told me, on the eve of my becoming a father.
me to get righteous.
Get righteous again.
He told
How it
haunted me in my wife’s eyes when our firstborn died…
I started this journal then.
Biloxi.
Before the war in
I started writing in it back in ’41 and for
631
fourteen years I was diligent to hasten my thoughts
for the sake of losing them to my life.
This last
journal started in 1955—my children seven years old.
And now it’s nearly 1966—they on the brink of becoming
adults.
Nearly twenty-five years have passed since I
picked up a pen as foreign to me as when I first
rested that acoustic guitar, Jonathon Bonnor’s guitar,
on my lap and found my fingers on the frets.
at the bullet hole in it and remember.
I look
And I don’t
know what to tell them—my children—my son and my
daughter.
I don’t know what to tell them to love and
what to hate.
mine…
my son.
For their truth is theirs and mine is
Perhaps I’m better at loving my daughter than
For what my father told me I should tell him,
but I don’t know how.
It’s one of the horrors of old
age that a man who has no memories makes one out of
paper.
But I’m sure I shall look back on this as I
have done on past journal entries and fade to black in
what these reminders meant.
All I have is my hands.
Their proprioceptive memory.
can’t seem to get rid of.
That old Gibson ES-150 I
My confidence in reason
perhaps left there at that crossroads when I accepted
it as a gift.
good judgment…
And I feel myself losing it.
Losing my
I have become as sounding brass.
632
Tinkling cymbals.
Now I know in part, and perhaps I
shall never know even as also I am known.
given you in so many ways.
children.
The truth
The truth I’ve given my
What I’ve told them to love.
What I’ve
told them to hate.
I want him—my son—to succeed not
as I’ve succeeded.
But I know my words betray me.
He
will want what I have wanted and like your birthday
song sang to you for hours on end so comes the selfeffacement of all you’ve accomplished in your life
worthy of note.
I want to tell him to be simple.
Have simple needs.
Simple pleasures.
I want to tell
him to avoid his own edification—that fruitless chase.
But I know he will be just as lonely as I.
There are
so many voices in this world, and none of them is
without signification.
mine…
man.
I want him to hear his and not
And so I look back and wonder if I’m a bitter
Tired.
Old.
Divorced.
Passing only weekends
with my children since before they could speak.
All
for the stage and my banter there with sound and a
spotlight.
All for a tribute paid to what, for we are
attached to this world but by a few slender threads,
and without family it means nothing.
My experience.
glands.
My years no use.
The charred remains of once hot
The roots of a dead flower.
Any wisdom I can
633
bestow on them—my children—my son, my daughter, is now
but handed to them when it’s no longer of benefit.
sorrow to see them suffer as I have.
My
My prayer to
Jesus to have a daughter as my wife once was, and that
my son learns when to listen and when not to and thus
pretend.
For this is how you become a man…
And now it’s raining.
the flames.
A spring downpour has come.
Leaving smoke and the tree blackened—
smoldering ash—Aaron’s body already consumed.
tree house gone.
looking up.
David’s journal burned.
The smoke going up and the rain coming
Then a silhouette.
Maddie’s shadow as she stands on
her balcony in a nightgown at dawn.
smoke curling up.
You watch the
The last remaining flames dampened and
finally going out.
first of April.
It and the
Benjy stands
Letting the rain wash his face.
fire extinguish.
down.
Dousing
Friday’s dawn.
Her hand poised holding a cigarette.
The
The
Benjy hears her voice from her bed even
though she faces away from him looking out on the streets
of Hemphill.
It carries over her shoulder and enters into
the room to him.
MADDIE
634
You think I know more of love, and you see it as a
manipulation, but I don’t…
response.
See it as thinking of a
Not yours, but mine.
move to make next.
Then you know what
Maybe even several moves ahead.
As you see how your response has a response.
call it calculating.
You can
That women are calculating.
if we really know more of love that is it.
the response you want.
But
Inspiring
Not out of any control except
seeing yourself as malleable.
Not fixed to a fate.
That’s really all it is—your fate.
It’s the failure
to see what your response brings out as a response and
feeling trapped in it.
Powerless…
BENJY
Maybe I should think of what my father would say.
MADDIE
That’s your father’s fate.
Not yours.
Once you
realize you don’t really want his blessing you’ll feel
a lot better about the whole thing.
his blessing.
You don’t want
You want to surpass him.
It’s the only
way you think he’ll bless you, but all it does is make
your moves predictable.
Your charming manners and
insinuating ways, together with your love of pomp and
635
pretensions are meant to captivate a woman’s heart
from the beginning. I see how you act to invoke this
response, but you never think it through.
your father on stage.
he’s off it.
You’re just
You don’t know how to act when
What he brings to me here in this room
without his music.
And your jealousy is eating away
at you.
BENJY
Should I become angry?
Lose my temper?
What would
your next move be if I did?
MADDIE
Your next move should be your sister.
If you want to
get at your father it’s through her…
BENJY
Why through her?
MADDIE
You haven’t been to church much, have you?
father.
The father of Dulcy’s child…
The
636
You’ve been watching Maddie’s silhouette as she talks over
her shoulder.
But now you go over her over her shoulder
and down to the street.
You’re in Benjy’s mind now and
he’s thinking of something that happened nearly ten years
ago.
When he was nine.
You see him on Papa Frenchie’s
porch in the heart of the Sabine Forest.
before his death.
It’s a year
Bridgette has already passed on.
Frenchie sits in a rocking chair with a glass of lemonade.
Benjy is sitting on the steps playing with a Swiss Army
knife Frenchie gave him as a gift.
PAPA FRENCHIE
Your great-grandmother bought that for me after the
war.
The year you were born.
instead of gun…
He, he…
She told me to use it
You know she had to nurse me
back to health the night you came into the world.
Trouble with my second wife…
BENJY
Do you miss her, Papa?
PAPA FRENCHIE
Yes, that I do, son…
The people you love should take
all their things with them when they leave.
Don’t
637
need reminders to weep when you get old…
was there when your momma was born too.
cursin’ the morning.
You know she
Knowin’ her
She saw the same mid-wife that
birthed your momma and that birthed you and your
sister.
She’s gone too now.
down with her in it…
Her name was Marie Toussaint.
went to see her once myself.
advice.
harmony.
Burned her own house
I
To get a piece of
I guess you could say to restore marital
Though I never remarried her.
I never
remarried your great-grandma.
BENJY
What’d she tell ya, Papa?
PAPA FRENCHIE
Oh it seems silly now.
Bunch of superstition.
But I
suppose you get old enough you tend to get a little
superstitious…
You see curses are written in a book.
And in them is pronounced the ineffable name of God…
these curses are then blotted out with water, and a
woman is made to drink the water, after which she
suffers the curses if she was unfaithful to her
husband…
I guess after my second wife I didn’t want
to take no chances.
You see your great-grandma was
638
kinda wild.
Lord knows I couldn’t tame her.
I don’t
think she would’ve taken my hand in marriage again
even if I’d asked…
But like I said she’s dead now.
That old voodoo woman.
that piece of advice.
She died soon after giving me
Soon after giving birth to you
and your sister…
And so you see Benjy thinking this, remembering, as he
watches Maddie’s silhouette on the balcony.
Perhaps he’s
calculating his next move and you see this but Maddie
doesn’t.
practice.
Bethany.
He’s wondering if his father knew of this
If like Papa Frenchie he tried it on his mother,
If he put it to use on this woman speaking to him
over her shoulder.
He thinks on this almost like a sports
broadcaster giving the play by play.
Not from a woman’s
mind, but a man’s.
BENJY
Do you know who the father is?
MADDIE
The question is do you.
when you were born?
Do you remember what happened
David, your father, told me about
the mid-wife that gave birth to you and your sister.
639
He told me about your older brother.
You were cursed.
Maybe by what your father did, but it was passed on to
you.
You were a killer even before you came into this
world.
And maybe you have to kill again if you ever
want to steal it.
Steal your father’s blessing…
And then you see it again.
body but ash.
The fire going out.
Aaron’s
The pages of David’s journal dying embers
that float up for an instant before becoming soggy with
rain drops and falling.
The blackened tree.
Mountain Laurel that once held a tree house.
Benjy’s face upturned to the rain.
to it.
That Texas
You see
His hands reaching up
And so you’ve seen the before and after.
Friday the first day of April.
On this
And now Benjy has returned.
He’s returned to Maddie’s room his clothes wet, to confront
her with what he did what she had him do, and as he climbs
the fire escape a far off whistle.
Another train crossing
the Sabine.
Maddie is sitting on the edge of the bed.
gown.
She hasn’t dressed.
A guitar is on her lap and
lying on the bed beside her is sheet music.
see the title:
Still in a night
Woman on a Train.
A song.
You
640
BENJY
I’m back.
MADDIE
You’re all wet…
You caught me.
I’m trying to play a
song your father wrote.
He left the sheet music here.
Along with this guitar.
Do you recognize it?
He
On your seventh birthday.
He
bought it for you.
found it in a pawn shop, his father’s pawn shop.
It’s
the one thing he took from the funeral when his father
died back in ’55.
He said you never touched it so
when your mother packed up to take Dulcy to Sunset he
left it here…
I think I have the first few chords,
but I’m struggling with the rest…
He writes a lot
about trains, doesn’t he?
BENJY
Trains…?
I never wanted it.
I remember I wanted a
dog instead…
MADDIE
You’re all wet.
Let me dry you off.
641
Maddie puts the guitar on the bed and rises to walk past
Benjy to the bathroom for a towel.
as she passes.
Benjy grabs her wrist
He twists it and leads her back to the bed.
He twists it to an angle that makes her fall back on it.
He lets go and grabs the guitar.
He walks to the door and
braces the handle by putting the arm of the guitar through.
Then he walks back to the bed and stands before Maddie
where she sits holding her wrist.
MADDIE
You hurt me.
BENJY
You know you forgot something about moves.
the endgame.
The last move.
That’s what I see.
You forgot
What happens after.
Not all the moves it takes to win
or lose, but the last move after the winning and
losing is over.
And is it?
is there another?
MADDIE
What are you talking about?
BENJY
Is it the last move?
Or
642
The father.
The father to Dulcy’s child.
MADDIE
Oh that…
I was only teasing about that.
BENJY
Well I wasn’t…
Benjy backhands her.
Maddie raises her arm and Benjy
strikes her with the other hand.
This time with enough
force to make her fall back even further and lie prostrate
flat on her back on the bed.
She laughs as she tries to
inch away pulling her legs up to scoot away from him, but
Benjy grabs her between her legs and drags her back.
He
strikes her again two more times never letting go of his
grip.
BENJY
Is this it?
right.
Is this what you tease me with?
You’re
I was killer before I ever entered this world.
And do you know what that means?
always been damned.
I’m damned.
I’ve
For something my father did.
this is how I’ll get his blessing.
By taking it away from you.
And
How I’ll steal it.
Taking you with me… No…
643
I don’t care when I hear my own voice.
if you’re really going to listen.
my father—my mother.
You can’t care
I don’t hear you or
I don’t hear the sadness of my
past in theirs, or my sister in what she’s expecting.
Something clicked.
It’s clicked here in a place I’ve
been, but I’m here now…
I don’t love you, Maddie, and
now I know I don’t need to though I thought I did—to
love me.
loved?
Why do I have to love what my father has
Something clicked so I don’t care.
is this?
What drug is this in my mind?
And what
Where is my
faith if it’s not in my own voice? I’m hungry and I
know that now.
I want to remember.
Not being in your
bed but what led me there. For who is the father?
is the father to her father?
Who
The truth is I needn’t
prove anything—it’s an act of Nature—to this my sister
is proof.
The truth that the privacy of your own head
is enough if you believe it.
What has been etched
there has been etched long ago and going over it only
makes you think there are new grooves.
That same
laugh at yourself in the mirror when you know you’re
full of shit…
When you know what’s on your mind—
what’s on my mind—what’s insured by greed.
move…
Your next
Not the love of anyone or anything else, but a
happy ending…
No… I’m taking you with me for if I am
644
damned I won’t die damned alone.
heard.
listen.
Even as it blasphemes.
And people will
They will listen and care for the damned are
beautiful in their knowing it.
not to surrender.
bitch!
My voice will be
In their knowing and
Not to die out in a whimper…
You
I’ll do what my father was afraid to do—what
most men are afraid to do.
I will hear the grave and
how everything now is the same as in the time of those
whom we’ve buried.
I will put you in your place…
Benjy strikes her again still holding her between her legs,
and this time Maddie screams.
heard downstairs in the bar.
She screams for help.
The owner hears it.
He and a
few other men climb the stairs and knock on the door.
hear Maddie scream again.
The guitar he gave his son on
He has to break open the door and
the guitar on the other side busts into pieces.
stands with the men behind him.
Maddie in the bed.
They
The owner tries the door, but it
is braced by David’s guitar.
his seventh birthday.
It’s
The owner
He sees Benjy on top of
Holding her hands and trying to muffle
her mouth.
THE MEN
(following)
645
What is it Sean?
SEAN
Go get the sheriff.
We have a nigger here that’s
forgotten his place.
And the rest in tableau.
down to his car.
Benjy rushing the fire escape
His escape to the Sabine to cross back to
Louisiana.
To return to Sunset where his sister is almost
full term.
Back to where his mother and father are.
where David is.
To
And you see it almost in that span of
twenty-five years.
You remember and see Johnny and Nina
making their own escape from a roadhouse back in 1941.
David bracing a door there as well.
All that happened in
voice overs from the previous mind movies and what happened
in between.
David and Johnny’s time as prison guards after
Nina’s murder.
in the war.
Goliath.
After Popovitch’s abuse of power.
Wintertime in Bastogne and David defeating the
The West Bank and David’s first recordings in New
Orleans in 1945.
singing together.
A picture of David and Bethany on stage
You see Marie Toussaint’s toothless grin
as she urges Bethany to push.
Benjy being born holding the
umbilical cord around his brother’s neck.
birth.
The time
Then you see the tree house.
Dulcinea’s
That Texas Mountain
646
Laurel, and kissing cousins at play in their roles.
next day their first day of school.
fire.
The
And then that tree on
Aaron’s body hanging there and in retrospect that
body hanging from a ceiling fan by a guitar string back in
Biloxi in ’41.
1966.
But now it’s Friday, the first of April,
Benjy making his getaway.
The bridge across the
Sabine wet from a spring downpour.
He loses control.
side.
A crash into a tree just on the other
A mulberry tree.
Benjy catapulted through the
windshield and hanging there.
His neck broken.
Holding a nut.
White men chasing him.
His head caught in a branch.
A squirrel at the foot of the branch.
The tableau ended.
that fatal turnaround.
That antithetic parallelism.
repetitive whispers of a chorus.
and without color.
The only thing left
The
The voices indiscriminate
Bemoaning the house of David.
The home
of the Blues…
You see the back of a Model T Ford.
drives over the next hill.
Leaving a crossroads behind.
And the lonesome tree there.
head.
Centered perfectly.
whistle.
The back window as it
No bird.
No music.
As it and the car disappears.
CHORUS
The back of David’s
No sound.
No train
647
And I knew it wouldn’t hold them, but I did it anyway—
after seeing that car—what it reminded me of.
had already happened.
Like it
Because it had happened before…
No, I didn’t need that guitar no more.
I knew it
before I did it, and somehow I knew I knew I would
know.
That feeling you get sometimes about how time
really
works.
Your
whole
life
already
making it happen… so it can happen.
happened…
Like your death
is in your birth, and your birth is in your death.
That line we perceive in between somehow curving in on
itself—parabolic—parallels
they
begin
forever…
and
end
the
meeting
same—in
somehow
because
something
lasting
It was like I was seeing myself in a mirror,
in broken glass, but it was someone else being me, and
yet I still knew it was me, it being already a memory,
a memory of something going to happen…
Hix Calix!
FADE OUT
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26
Did you hear John Hurt play the "Creole Bell,"
"Spanish Fandango" that he loved so well?
And did you love John Hurt? Did you shake his hand?
Did you hear him sing his "Candy Man?"
--Tom Paxton
Let us go back now. Back to 1955. To the time of David’s father’s death—Horace
Threnody. The man folks called Duke. It was a strange time for David. It put a strange impetus
on his career. As an artist. As a musician. He received word that his father was dead just after
the New Year. On the catholic celebration of the Epiphany—January 6th. A Christian festival
commemorating the manifestation of Christ to the gentiles in the persons of the Magi. The
Twelfth-day. And maybe it became such as it was—an intuitive perception, an insight into the
reality and essential meaning of his life all brought about by a commonplace occurrence or
experience. This commonplace occurrence, this experience—his father’s death. Not necessarily
a manifestation of a deity, some deific, evanescent moment, but perhaps it brought him back to
that first question and the revelation of answer. For his father was going somewhere he hadn’t
been. His father, as in commonplace, was going first. And for some reason this blew his mind.
He couldn’t wrap his previous perceptions of his father around it. The unresolved question of
whether his father just sought his son’s happiness or the continuance of a legacy. Something
David had already mourned in the death of his firstborn at the hands of his twin brother—what a
divorced father sees in his children, Dulcinea, his daughter, just starting school. And it wasn’t a
long death. It was sudden. Duke Threnody already had lung problems from a chronic smoking
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habit—COPD—suffering the same symptoms as Bridgette, Bethany’s grandmother, but it was
deep vein thrombosis—a traveling blood clot, which led to Duke’s sudden death of a pulmonary
embolism in his sleep in the early morning hours of January 6th, 1955. David was in Austin
when he received the phone call from his mother, and therein are the accents to David’s
epiphany. Why we must go back to 1955 to understand David’s later career as a musician. For
he was soon to be 37 years old and he returned to East St. Louis to live with his mother.
And of course we don’t have it. We don’t have David’s journals that document his ten
month stay with her, with his mother. Any journal entries from this time were burned by Benjy
that fateful day, a Friday, the first of April, 1966. We have only a last entry dated in late
November, 1954, the day after Thanksgiving. And as luck would have it I have Bethany’s
journal, an entry from that time relevant even if written from an estranged point of view as
David’s ex-wife. But neither gives a facile understanding to what inherently can be deemed a
man’s regression. To what role he played with his mother after his father’s death and what a
wife, a former lover, sees in this under the burden of raising his children, but it must be
examined for it was about at this time David Threnody cut his third record lost in obscurity only
rediscovered a decade later when in the late sixties of Gaslight Square the beatniks and
bohemians who congregated in what is now the Central West End of St. Louis came to hear
David play the music that inspired him, what came from his youth after the flood of ’27 and
those hard years through the Great Depression—his meeting with ‘Ol Scratch at a crossroads in
Mississippi before the war. When he was nineteen at it was 1937, and what brought him back to
that crossroads thirty years later, an anniversary as such, which almost doesn’t seem coincidental
to the rediscovery of his songs. But the epiphany perhaps was there. A spiritual manifestation
and maybe even a predestined foresight that led David Threnody to write what he did, not only in
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those last journal entries we have of him in 1954, but in the songs he composed then, his third
album, what some musicologists esteem as his magnum opus now some sixty years later,
whether it be in the vulgarity of speech somehow captured in its dissonant recording, or of some
other gesture in it, or in a memorable phase of the mind itself—a light shining in David’s mind.
It was for a man of letters (as I am not) to record this epiphany with extreme care. It is delicate
and yet invulnerable. In it are the mistakes exposed in his father’s death which need not have
consequence. For they neither define hero nor villain. And good and evil are an abeyance
lightly weighed in them.
… it’s either/or with the earth. The earth is a song between lovers. A bride and a groom. A
song of birth crying out its requiem. A song of land after time at sea. What occupies it when you
take a deep breath and name it a country. Like a whore finding love. The earth is simple.
Confounded in what you seek when you are sick and sleep brings unseemly dreams that pursue
the desires only memories have the strength for. A dialectic. For you either love the earth or
you hate it. Your love a drug. Your hate a coma to the pain. A war really. A constant at odds.
To love what is of earth is to deny thrice what isn’t. A bipartisanship not on the ballot. For
there is only one common ground in this love and hate and that is in death. That is where the
two meet. What is of earth and what is not… And I feel like it’s on the tip on my tongue—what I
want to say about this. My capricious battle with the corporeal and incorporeal. How I’ve felt
one while indulging in the other. Like in itch while meditating. The memory of a woman from a
scintillating scent on a wet rag I use to wash myself. Perhaps a woman the avatar the vessel to
my understanding of this earth and what abides forever. That deliberate descent of deity to
earth. That epiphany. And transfiguration… Today is Friday. And I remember you. I
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remember you all. A token in so many forms. First loves. Those almond-scented eyes that
looked at me from a backseat window of a Ford as I left the shade of a tree in Mississippi, and I
just nineteen. Unobtrusive to an old man’s request when the day comes there are no old men
and no country for them the weight of their offer without women in the bargain. Those eyes and
those days in Rosie's bed before the war and the cold way she told me to move. To get in and
take that ride or get out of the way. That first kiss and the words I said then. The words I said
when I said I would never work again—enslaved to this earth in its rancid perspiration. So
maybe that’s the story I must tell to be with it, the earth—the story of my poverty, the number of
odd jobs I’ve held to make a living between songs on stage.
And there have been many of them.
Many in betweens. Like in that upper room in Soulard with Bethany while she was pregnant
with our sons and we waited in silence for the next song, while I tried to provide working in my
father’s pawn shop. The unanswerable silence I felt to her question of which did I love more.
The earth—her—or what I searched for in music my hands holding a guitar and the song I
wished it to play—my desire for her… And I have failed. I have not been enlightened to fear,
worry and regret. I still desire the desire and before sleep my past comes to me. The ghosts of
former lovers. The wages of half-hearted earnings. I think of Mississippi before the war, my
time as a soldier and Bethany knocking on my door on the West Bank. The end of an affair in
New Orleans. Those days without food or sleep while I waited for our firstborn son to die and
the aching echo this would have on our son that lived—Benjy—his twin. The joy when Dulcinea
was born like my curse had been lifted and I would not have to return to that crossroads a
Highway 61 revisited with my bartered soul, my hands stained with blood—the blood of
Bethany’s first husband… I have failed because all this—all of it—is of the earth, and only in
that common ground of death does the intransient torpor of my sins find its forgiver—me—
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abiding in the oneness… And I know I must give thanks. I must be thankful for my mistakes and
all my shortcomings for in them perfection is found. In that increment of time after the
increment. In that mad vision of hindsight—the time between times… My children are six. Soon
to be seven. I’ve seen them through sickness and health. In tears and laughter. I watched them
learn to walk. And my prayer of earth to what is not of earth is that my sins are remitted unto
them for what is remitted here is supposedly remitted in heaven—a dimension of being yet barely
visible through the veils, the mechanisms of our time here and how we measure it. And no one
owns it—not you, me or even God. This the fallacy in all the top slots of the corporation. Man’s
capitalism. That’s why the villains need heroes and the heroes need villains in all this our
either/or fantasy. And so I give thanks for my loss. What’s lost here gained there, and I know I
don’t have to wait. I don’t have to wait for it. I don’t have to wait on my father waiting on me…
--David Threnody, on Thanksgiving—from his journals 1948 to 1955
But I don’t know what to really say about it. How it correlates with my hero worship—a
man living with his mother, and maybe that’s not really the story. The story doesn’t end where it
began. We must go forward from the death of David’s father to the death of David’s son—what
happened in April 1966—for that’s when David lost his hearing, or at least partial hearing—his
perfect pitch. Those earth tones to his bottleneck slide. And maybe I can discern what he was
saying here, in this last journal entry the day after Thanksgiving 1954. The dichotomy he saw in
what is earth and what is not. The mediation of imperfect wills with infinite mercy. How maybe
loved soothed the symmetry and hate showed the contrast. How if you love the earth you are in
a modus vivendi the way life goes on, and in hate you exist in alienation where time is not a
friend, inexorable. What Native Americans know in their religion and why there’s no word for
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goodbye in Sioux. How every day is the same day really. Your life on repeat through many
suicides. The path to never being reborn finding your life in others and all the rest a collage of
hopes and dreams you have to give up. Along the way all the pitfalls called strategies
succumbing to desire, self-help and self-reliance, games where we’re told we can win and that
being alone isn’t so bad but by the time we realize we’ve always had a losing hand it’s too late.
We must give up aspiring to do good for the more good a person does the more likely they’ll end
up in hell. We go over it over and over again to understand our reality—a Jonathan Edwards
guilt as sinners in the hands of an angry God yet how we can still take joy in the beauties of
nature and delight in the allegorical interpretation of the Song of Solomon—what David found in
the birth of Dulcinea’s child, a child of incest. What’s sinful in one culture can be seen as an act
of grace in another. What’s praised by man in one society can send some to prison somewhere
else. Truly the matter of salvation is not consensual. For what you see as your redeeming
qualities might be dealt with harshly in someone else’s perseverance. And so we go over it over
and over again. We say someone will not die today, but someone always does. You cannot save
your father from death, and the works of your faith are always misconstrued and end in the
perception of the other’s judgment. What I want to deal with here is not linear, not rhetorical,
but two times two places at once—Duke Threnody’s death in 1955 and Benjy’s death in 1966—
what David tried to hear in both, but some of the language lost, lost in a punctured eardrum from
a gunshot, how it came out in his songs, songs he’d already written and songs he would write, his
third album recorded in 1955, the better part of that year David living with his mother…
“You broke it again…”
And he has to wait on her. David has to wait on his mother’s slow gait down the stairs.
Down from the upper room the upstairs apartment above his father’s pawn shop. David just
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wanted to go outside to smoke, but in alarm was tied by a string to the front door—a wound-up
bell. He thought he had unhooked correctly, but as he came back in the string caught in the door,
setting the alarm off.
“The string got stuck!”
“Move… move out of the way! Your father had a piece of tape to hold the string when it
wasn’t latched.”
“I don’t know why you need it. The door is always locked at night and you jam a chair
under the door knob…”
“Your father put it up. He used it so I use it. No tellin’ with robberies in the area.
Neighborhood ain’t what it used to be. And you don’t remember those riots. Those riots the
summer you were born…”
David didn’t know how to turn it off. His mother slowly uses the chair jammed against
the door to reach and turn off the bell It was wound pretty tight, but she spends the time to wind
it again. She’s in her house robe and slippers. David still hears a ringing in his ears.
And sometimes you don’t. You don’t start over. You don’t start with one. You keep
counting. And you do this because you don’t know who you are. You don’t know who you are
because you don’t know what the world is—your place in it. How death and dying is but another
start from where you left off. The affluent progeny of murmurings little in the now the ever
forward protest of the past never full insatiable always on the down low making the importunate
opinions perspectives seen where the light is blocked transmutable suzerain in all the minutes
capturing other minutes the lost found and lost again—the genesis where you read the ending
first—death bereft of sensation. All limbo you hear the translation of a caveat. A moment as you
define it. David stopped counting when his father died. But he didn’t start over with one. He
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had a new time signature to his songs. He just didn’t care… And maybe it was the seven years.
The seven years since his divorce from Bethany. A wound that wouldn’t heal that couldn’t heal
because of the children for they were still counting. Still counting up. No start overs yet. No
pause to look over past numbers. Only the encouragement the enthusiasm for the next number a
to be to look forward to and not a child forevermore. David saw his time and their time in the
time of his father’s death. The time between their birth to Benjy growing up to be his father to
Dulcinea growing up to be her mother but a small mode of numbers compared to the numbers
counting backwards before and the numbers continuing after the wake and funerals the question
from the discord and the silence of no answer when you leave the ones you love. Because you
leave but you still know them. David knew his father just as he knew his wife, and they knew
him as well this knowledge and where it passes what left David wondering and how a rational
nature a social being reflects on this our time in a world in constant change and dissolution how
praise or blame falling on your ears from people passing through your life may or may not be
remembered how it is but a changing from this to that and how little harm or good comes from
blame or praise for it is but breath that will suspire on ears that one day will no longer hear—as
David would learn from a shotgun blast a punctured eardrum in the resolutions he sought with
Maddie with Benjy’s death. And he said to himself: Why do I trouble with the perturbations of
this world I a man with perhaps Christian convictions the faith the belief that something doesn’t
come from nothing and if there be a God all is well and the troubles and opinions I think do me
harm or good come from one intelligent source and all that I see and hear will soon perish and
pass away and those who have been spectators to this will also soon perish and pass away and
even the man that lives many years into old age beyond the seventy years promised us will come
to the same condition of someone who’s died young so that all Benjy knew in his eighteen years
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and what my father knew I too will also know in my time and how in all time it matters little all
fame and honor and all disregard I gather to my reputation is but bones and dust an etched
engraving on some tombstone scratched there from one hand to another one mind to another and
in rain and sunshine which wears on it after a while no one knows what the scratches mean what
they were trying to tell and it doesn’t even matter because these etchings are on something that
was once because it can die it is corruptible and how the incorruptible can’t be is because it can
never become was—the incorruptible can’t die can’t perish and this how the knowing of love
was and never is and how they that know you but no longer love you can’t be an enemy but a
forgetting of a bed once full where now you lie still and alone and all you want is to find sleep
where in a dream it comes to you again—the knowing and the love… For then and only then can
you start with one. Then and only then do you grasp the number that comes next and that
breathless question answered elsewhere becoming declarative the words—come lie down beside
me and tell me what love is...
And Bethany said:
January 13th, 1955—It’s not what I remember. You would think it’s what bothers me,
but that’s not it. I remember fine. What I want to remember and I remember I love him because
I wanted to. For the good times. That part of the heart the seat of the emotions closed somehow
to a memory and I look at him differently now. I look at myself differently. And if I still have a
soul to lose I know because I feel myself losing it. The control I have in his presence. How I see
the before and after while he feels. This our inherent cause to subservience which any woman
teases about… No it’s not what I remember. It’s what I forget that he makes me remember.
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The mirror of his time. There were a number of days we were together, and I can’t keep
counting.
And maybe the heart has no closures. It only beats. Our children are still not
accountable, and I wish not to confuse them. I don’t know if I should ever mention his music.
They have it. In his times with them. I see other men with the same hopes the same fears what
comes out in their loneliness. And maybe one can make me a servant to the love I know I have
to give what I gave him once but somehow time rejected it into another story some other ending I
can’t say I haven’t read… And where does it come from? The trust? From me or him? All I
know in the reasons I feel is that something must be right must get right for me to remember any
day and remember it with a peace and a smile I don’t manufacture for someone else… It’s near
the time when our boy will be seven—Benjy will be seven, and Dulcinea to follow and most of
the time when I think upon them I think upon him in a rather misdirected way as in a face a smile
and what I’m sorry about is I can’t trade places with him. In what fell apart. I know his place
but I don’t know his time and this how I know the poor have but vices they can afford for their
time and money and if given the chance how would they spend their time and money and is this
so much better than the tenements in which they live with the liquor store nearby and the ground
for cigarettes and closed doors the blinds down for other private adventures in which to drag this
our holy spirit the only temple into such places, and I trying to judge that time in a place I wish
not to take myself. How my god is in you and my god is in me and how it all must be well in
love even in places where love is not there because by not being there it is somewhere ready to
refurbish the memory and forgive you—make you ready to forgive me… Yes I do remember.
For the good times. David is a man I love because I wanted to. This my own free will what he
has what we all have when we try to remember a day another remembers and our place the same
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in it. And it doesn’t matter if it’s cold. If it’s broken. It is praise just the same. And that (I have
found) is everyone’s church. And so I go to church now. I take our children to church. Because
someone has to teach them the word of Jesus and not what’s just found in his music. Because
they’re not old enough yet. And David isn’t always in Texas though his music finds itself here.
Maybe it will linger in the tree house where our children now play and what will happen... His
father just died. And he says he’s going back to New Orleans. That’s what he says, but I don’t
know what he’ll do. All I know is what I remember and I remember New Orleans. God knows
what he’ll do there again…
But that isn’t what he did. David didn’t go to New Orleans. He stayed in East St. Louis
with his mother. He stayed ten months. Most of the year 1955. He didn’t write those songs we
remember from his third album in New Orleans. He just recorded them there. After… after
what Bethany said about him what he didn’t know she was or was not saying for this is what
makes our place different, but not our time. It is little what we have learned, but it is all of it.
And it comes out in what we can’t let go of in death. No, David didn’t go to New Orleans, but
he did after Benjy died. So in the natural course of phenomena you see it backwards. You read
what’s now without having read the before first and an altered story becomes told. Told long
enough and it becomes a bad death. Because everyone wants to see you go. For different
reasons. Some personal some not. Some selfish and some not. And is this what you want to
hold onto? These opinions? In the death of a father we become as a child. In the death of a
child we become as a father. The time and place. It’s all a cartoon which is why children like
them. In a cartoon a child doesn’t see dead people. It is animated as it really is. And you can go
through your whole life without knowing this. You even become confident. David needed a
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woman to change, and it was Bethany that made him draw what he learned in the death of their
firstborn. What waited in the death of Benjy. The opinions. On the absurdity of a first cause
what a child knows in the succession of the phenomena. What is collected as a memory and how
in death you don’t see backwards anymore. You find it again. Where the sound comes from
ahead of the light… No David didn’t go back to New Orleans when his father died. He returned
home to remember what he was when he left. How a child picks their favorite cartoon character
and the story told around it. Free of anxiety and good. Without knowledge but before it. Before
too many erasures of pain. And it was after. After he lost his hearing in his right ear when
David learned the language he translated as malice and jealousy and what was now the
perishable harm he thought would follow him since that day at a crossroads on Highway 61. The
successive phenomena matter formed from the reasons in his life what led to this and then that
like the voices in a cartoon. Read from a script and not improvised. All the good stories and
even the bad ones a way to cope. A way to live with what little you’ve learned after learning all
of it. What they say after you’re gone what you never expected and owed just the same by the
imperfect justice of your love. And after dying and then dying again it can’t touch you. You are
impermeable in the movements of the drawing and all the colors come in a spectrum you can’t
see but hear in the sound ahead of the light. And your eyes become ears. What you do what you
hear… So now I must go back. I must read before to write to record the monstrous sympathy.
What David recorded in New Orleans after the drawings had already been made. I must write
the conversation. David’s conversation with his mother on the death of his father and what she
mourned in her journals—superseded eleven years later and seven years after. The divorce and
the death. How any man deals with being a man I suppose. How a man is a son and a father.
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…and you didn’t hear. We were worried. You couldn’t hear. At least not all of it. Those
which spoke in a low voice or talked fast and any kind of accent. The teacher noticed it with the
other children. When the other children spoke to you… Your father was 37 when I had you the
last the last after seven children. And I don’t know what your father would say now on a
birthday coming up that he will not see because you see it’s time that changes things and that
body now I see in memory the last memory him in a casket time does things to that as well but it
ain’t silent it can’t be for you must have already been learning it—the language—you were born
crying it when the first words were spoken. The first words you would hear. And you don’t
remember—how can you? Because that would take words the phonetic sounds. And I think
that’s what your father would say in his death. You were born without a language. And look
how strong. How strong you’ve become! What is all of it even all of it now that you’re divorced
and for a time a woman hated you what ends every sentence in itself another the beginning…
Yes, David said. And what in all of it am I to be? … What? What are you but you what you
don’t want her to be? You didn’t hear. You can’t hear you can’t remember the first words I said
to you the words you would learn to say back as your father named you. The hand on your life…
And so we prayed. You saw doctors this after after you choked in church at the age of three
when you almost died on a communion wafer you wanted without the grape wine the blood of the
earth the new covenant and even if I was a bit superstitious I’d say and I think even your father
would say we wondered if that’s what was wrong with your ears and you had so many of them so
many ear infections when you were a child… of course you don’t remember just like you don’t
remember when you said your first word in this the English language and not some other the
pantomime of tongues and as you began to read as you began to take in the sounds somehow you
made music even before you made words. So I suppose it’s my fault the fear inherent fear which
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comes from what you don’t understand what you can’t hear or you hear it but it doesn’t translate
to anything happening other than now you’re behind the time and really it was a nameless fear
because the fact is you could hear just fine. My fear what you came to accept in making children
with a woman—even you don’t want to be heard right. You would rather what you say be not
understood. For the fear this causes in what you don’t understand… and the laughter. So if I
was your father what he would have to say about Bethany and your children is just listen even
when it doesn’t make sense. It’s just like what you heard when you were born. And only God
knows if you’ll make sense of it later…
Sometimes you say words and they’re better than anything you can say later. Even if
older you come to the full realization of what you said. Maybe it’s what David realized writing
the songs for his third album. He’d come to the end of something and not his father’s death and
not even other memories of death and people he would never see again. People like Johnny
Tribout and Schultz in prison. Even Gerald, the eldest brother, who he had not seen since that
summer when he was fifteen and acquired that bullet hole in Jonathon Bonnor’s guitar. And
there were would be more people he would meet to never see again, echoes of Rosie Soledad and
Popovitch in that last meeting he had with Maddie the day after Benjy died all of these events
having dates like the day David lost hearing in his right ear—April 2nd 1966. You come back to
yourself after these meetings and parting. You come back to yourself with memories of what
you said that now you could say no better and how you make sense of it sense of what happened
is how you come back to yourself a corner where you realize you said it and now you can say
anything even if it’s nonsense because you know you already said it nobody knowing it but you
that you can’t be held to it. You can’t be held to it because you said it and you know it you know
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the glaring contradiction and that there will be more there will always be more and what you said
then is always the same as what you say now though by all extremes of logic the syllogisms
which say all this is that therefore that is also this a mere wordplay of the mind making
reasonable comparisons but you at fifteen and then at nineteen and thirty-seven talking to
yourself talking to your children at the age when they turn fifteen and then nineteen a hapless
and futile repeat of denial and reversion and no sense at all to it to tell someone tell them you
already said it and why don’t they remember for they remember other things you said that you
don’t remember at all—and what? What do you hold onto as you come back to yourself when a
meeting becomes a parting? And not just death, but life after love when someone you love takes
a contrary road like at a crossroads a deal made but they go one way and you go yours. And so
who are you to them and to you if it be love if it was love which you remember saying a long
time ago never plays the victim yet now if you look at it from their perspective what are you to
say I’m sorry if this can’t change anything? David couldn’t change her mind. Bethany. For if it
is love it can never be was love and so what was it was the question on David’s mind returning
home to live with his mother when his father died because maybe love is like counting and like
in some sequence it goes backwards and forwards in the supremacy of numbers and since you
don’t know where it begins and where it ends the patterns you make of it are but a temporal
anomaly and really what you said can’t be said any better unless you make a joke out of it.
Perhaps this God’s humor on love. And you why you are where you are now. So, in 1967, a
year after Benjy died and David lost his hearing in his right ear, he returned to the crossroads to
say something on his father’s death twelve years before. The nineteen years since Bethany
divorced him. And what he said he could never say again. He could but now there were more
numbers in the sequence. And maybe that’s why he went home to live with his mother after his
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father’s death. For a time he wanted to escape the count. Something he would have to face
eleven years later in what happened with Maddie after Benjy’s death. What he would reckon
with a year later back at that crossroads in Mississippi. A woman you have children with.
And maybe David’s life happened at thirty. That birthday he sold his copyright in New
Orleans and drove across the Sabine with word his children were being born. And what was it?
What was 1948? For he’d already sinned already committed adultery nearly two years since
Pete Southhouse was killed and Popovitch closing that story of his return to Mississippi some
four years since first coming there at nineteen. So eleven years since that crossroads and the
time of Benjy’s birth and then seven years until his father’s death and then another eleven years
when Benjy died David then forty-eight. And in 1967 he returned. He returned to that
crossroads deaf in one ear—so what was it? Maybe we need to know what happened in 1951
almost halfway between Benjy’s birth and the death of his twin and Duke Threnody’s death in
1955. We need to know what happened when David was thirty-three if his life was just anticlimactic after that this some three and half years after Bethany divorced him and some three and
half years before he came to live with his mother after his father’s death. Maybe there’s a count
to it a time signature a song. Maybe there’s a fall from grace.
What we do know as to why Bethany divorced him is he couldn’t hold a job. Sure he
tried working in his father’s pawn shop and he tried other odd jobs to offset the unstable income
from his music, which is why he made that trip to New Orleans to sell his copyright and maybe
we can’t say can’t name the victim here. Whether it was Bethany one child dead and the other
but an infant still feeding from her breast or David wondering what was just as to why his
records made no money because you see it was in 1951 that he cut his second album and
Bethany was willing to give him another chance. For if there is a victim there is a sinner. And
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this maybe more than anything why David couldn’t get his head around it why when his father
died he came home to live with his mother—a loss of faith. He was broken. They had broken
him. They some indiscriminate world where job after job hiding his music the unresolved
passion of it his royalty check from Piety Street Records just twenty-six dollars in 1950 but still
the small world after all of notoriety in the workplace like one job where he went door to door
selling venetian blinds and a woman answering with a look of recognition not interested at all in
what he was selling but that she had seen him in Soulard during Mardi Gras—singing—and she
sang too in fact she was pretty good on the guitar even playing in her church and would he like to
do a song with her… Yes, these things. Something David had to face even as a door to door
salesman that cold sell. The cold sell of his fortunes for ever having a guitar. Jonathon Bonnor’s
guitar. The Gibson ES-150 which he took out of his father’s pawn shop window the day he
signed Bethany’s divorce papers. He just couldn’t get his head around it. How if one sinned and
asked for forgiveness what happened to the other. The other partner to the crime. For if both
sinned and one asked for forgiveness did it not necessitate the other unforgiven? You see David
had to cut another deal. In 1951 he cut another deal. This time in Austin. But this wasn’t
another deal where he had to sign away his copyright again. He had to sell something else when
he turned thirty-three. He had to sell-out to the idea that hope was evil.
Because David went home in 1951 too. He saw his father for the last time alive. David
left Austin after his second record was cut by Night Owl first making a visit in Hemphill to see
his children his journals marking it around Benjy’s third birthday his birthday about at that time
of the Nashville ice storm one of the worst in history causing a complete shutdown in
transportation and power failures. Even Bethany worried wishing him safe travel and assuring
him his children needed him this possibly the opening he saw the hope the chance of a renewal in
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their relationship after three long years of hardship three years of them both scraping by Bethany
a woman with a mindset now forgetting to remember the love affair which began in New Orleans
culminated in the spring 1946 when her first husband Pete Southhouse was killed and all those
times she made it over to the West Bank to knock on David’s door how that was five years ago
now and all that happened in between when in your mind and heart with time separated you say
goodbye to a lover to a time of love and you make up your mind that it’s over now and a new life
all forged on the foundation that that one life is over and a new life has begun the person in the
old life gone and all the reasons why you’re better for it the one thing the only thing holding you
to the past with this person the children—and David’s children loved him. It was the hope the
dream of their children, of Dulcinea in particular, but David and Bethany were adults. They
weren’t born that way anymore.
So maybe to understand why Bethany and David still loved each other but they never got
back together you must go into that phrase—born that way—to know what faith is. What hope
is. And love. Bethany started reading the Bible after she and David tried to get back together.
She started taking the children to church. The same church her mother went to in Hemphill.
There are a lot of begets in the Bible. To the unobtrusive it may seem trivial, unnecessary, and
boring. But just saying you’re born that way takes away the responsibility. For why were you
born that way? History is our first lesson. Our only lesson. So when so and so begat so in so
who begat so in so you are led into those first things that are unintelligible, but they are the
reasons for who you are. And so what happened in 1951 which is a precursor for where things
stood in 1955 and later in 1966 what David returned to at that crossroads in Mississippi in 1967?
Who was David’s father? The countless lives before us that lead up to us. And Bethany too in
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how she was born and what she was born into. The intangible effects in our adult education
running in parallel to our children’s hopes and dreams.
Maybe the only way to erase a time is to see it as a mistake. How David did come home
in 1951 how he left Hemphill after seeing his children but it was before Benjy’s birthday before
his birthday and he didn’t brave no Nashville ice storm because he crossed the Sabine he went to
New Orleans instead around Mardi Gras time that year. He paid a visit to Piety Street his ties to
Night Owl and the time he spent in Austin always a hazy subject and not really dealt with here in
this account of his life not as an oversight but to David’s own reckoning from journal entries that
account for his stays in Austin his ties to it as never a home away from home but a good town—a
good town for live music. His heart was always in New Orleans. Even when Bethany moved to
Texas after their divorce. East St. Louis was where he was born and raised but he always
declared his home was New Orleans and that second album at Night Owl and even that fourth
album Bethany mentions in 1960 though recorded in Austin and much of his later life lived there
are not in this account for even these albums—his second and his fourth—were later resigned to
Piety and his final album the last record we have of David the fifth was cut at Piety in 1967 after
David made the return to that crossroads in Mississippi. And in 1951 after that second album
was recorded he did return to Hemphill—true—but according to Cleota’s journal he went to New
Orleans first catching Mardi Gras in his business with Piety and he came home to East St. Louis
just before his birthday. So he didn’t see his son turn three, and what Cleota goes on to say is
how he played for them on his birthday not on some stage in town but in the living room of that
upstairs apartment on Bond Street his father’s pawn shop closed for the day below and with
Jonathon Bonnor’s guitar he played some of those songs from his second album maybe even
some of those first songs from the album in 1945 maybe even the one I heard at my own
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crossroads twenty years after his death. And so maybe that’s the only way to erase time to erase
people and places in your time—to see it as a mistake and David was erasing time—he was
erasing time with those songs he played in his father’s living room—he was seeing it as a
mistake even the good times the love that affair on the West Bank when Bethany used to come to
his door like she was just a girl and as Cleota tells it Duke was sleeping in his chair lightly
snoring as David played and it was what he said what he said at the end of one of David’s
songs—my ears are never full… My ears are never full. According to Cleota that’s what Duke
Threnody said. And so now maybe we can go back. Back to where things stood later in 1955
after Duke’s death and what happened eleven years later on that date April 2nd, 1966. I’ll let
David end the chapter. In what he said in his journals in 1967 this twelve years after his father’s
death. I’ll end it with a PBS interview the televised documentary of David’s life aired in 1971—
an account of what happened that April in 1966 when David lost hearing in his right ear from a
shotgun blast aimed at him.
… yes and how much of it? What you’re told and what is. What is based on what’s told. No I
guess you don’t erase time. It’s like a map redrawn. The natural landmarks stay the same. The
lakes and rivers. But boundaries. Boundaries and names—these change. Telling you if you live
in one country or another. And it’s just you and the GDP—what’s on TV—who owns what and
what they want to tell you… I used to love maps. In my father’s pawn shop growing up there
was an old Atlas. Sometimes when I wasn’t strumming my guitar I looked at it. In fact when I
was nine years old when Jonathon Bonnor walked through my father’s door it was what I was
looking at. And Israel wasn’t on any map. And twelve years. Twelve years now since his death
my father’s death. What I have to get my head around now. How the maps have changed. What
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gets me to where I want to go, and when I came home that winter of 1955 I started some new
songs, but I didn’t start where I left off because it was like I could see now I could see what was
behind the curtain of why this was sung and why that wasn’t and I wanted to stay—I wanted to
stay a sinner so I always needed saving. And do you think? Do you think you don’t pay for your
sins? It’s there in who begat who and the fool disgraced—the treasure of your name… There
are guns there now. In my father’s pawn shop window. My guitar no longer graces that place
on red velvet. No it’s guns and I saw that in ’51 when I returned after cutting my second album
some three years since I took the Gibson out of the window some three years after Bethany and I
divorced and what does it say? What does the Bible say about adultery the proverbs on the
adulteress? And I said to myself she loves Jesus now taking our kids to church to teach them in
the way they should go while I’m left with guns in my father’s pawn shop window and when I
asked him when I asked my father not knowing it would be one of our last conversations because
after ’51 I didn’t come back I went down to New Orleans to be what I was because of what she
was now seeing my children sure but now outside outside their life without me and I asked him—
I asked my father why were the former days better than these and maybe it took me twelve years
to know why I asked that question and why my father’s answer was right out of the Bible the
same Bible Bethany read to give her soul peace and he said—if I love you what is that to you?
Because you see he knew it came down to who got bested. It was why there were guns in his
pawn shop window. Because you see even in what you follow you still ask who’s the greatest
and that’s why who owns you and what they want to tell you is what you’re willing to hear and
being number one is all that matters even if it means being a number one fan… And so now I
guess I’m a fan of my father—dead twelve years now. Why I remember an old Atlas with
outdated maps. I need to get where I need to go now—the past depressing the future anxiety.
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But this moment in this moment is my past where I can’t dwell and the consequences of it I yet
can’t see but I do as the future becomes the past. There are only promises and commandments.
A long life. Young men’s visions and an old man’s dream. And somehow someway I guess my
father was still proud of me even though I was a fool, and like a dog returning to his vomit I had
my fate and not a hardened heart…
--David Threnody, on repentance—from his journals 1966 to 1975
He received word just like the last time. In the middle of the night. Just like when he
was born was how he heard about his death. And he drove across the Sabine… You see
David was obscure then—nobody knew him—and I guess he kinda liked it that way.
After seein’ how it was. Because he’d played all kinds of venues by then. Up in East St.
Louis where he was from. And in New Orleans and Austin. All kinds of places
sprinkled through the South—the backwaters. That’s how he met me where I’m from
when he came to Sunset in the winter of 1966 his ex-wife staying with a cousin while
Dulcinea waited on a child. Yeah I first laid eyes on him after the crawfish season. He
came to our black folks church and when Mardi Gras came time he played at our fish fry
our crawfish boil—I played with him—it was late February that year but we still had it
outside our little picnic after the floats paraded through town the decorated trucks and
trailers with hay bales stacked up the families in the streets not asking for beads but moon
pies to go with their RC Cola—a family affair you know and the church had some land
out back so when he came to the picnic carrying a guitar case it was sorta improvised
from there… But he was a nobody then—obscure—you know. And he didn’t put on any
airs. He just saw my harmonica and found himself a chair and sat down and began
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playing. He kept himself in the shade though. I remember we was under an old live oak
the Spanish moss hanging down and it was a colorful day you know the sun shining good
weather and folks dressed up… No I didn’t realize til later who he was or why he was in
Sunset, Louisiana at the time but we played together a few more times after that and I got
to know him a little bit as we talked between songs. He always had his whiskey and a
cigarette dangling from his fingers… So I knew he’d cut a few albums. Startin’ in New
Orleans. That’s where he said he met his wife, or ex-wife, and he said he recorded a
second album in Austin, but I know him or how I remember him now leastways is songs
from that third album. He said he wrote most of it after his father died. Said he went
home back to East St. Louis to live with his mother—it was those songs he played for me
that I played with him and not his fourth album he said made no sales this some six years
after he made it and I didn’t know and maybe he didn’t either that he was making ready
for his last album the last songs he recorded a year later in ’67… It’s been four years
now and it’s funny that nobody had heard about him then I and nobody else knew who
graced our presence at that picnic during Mardi Gras. And it was only about a month
later that we got the full story why he was in Sunset and why when he received word he
crossed the Sabine again just like he did when his son was born—what he told me he was
doing then in New Orleans some eighteen years ago—selling his copyright to a place
called Piety so songs from his first album could still be heard. And it was in the middle
of the night too. The day after Fool’s Day. That’s when he received word his son was
dead. The rest sort of legend maybe. What happened when he went back to Hemphill,
Texas and confronted the white woman who’d been sleeping with them both—she’d been
sleeping with both David and his son… Yeah I guess it’s funny now. How you get
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bested in some things and in some things you best others. Because you can say you’re
better than no one and no one is better than you but that’s denying the fact that there are
always winners and losers in anything you do and you can love your neighbor sure even
love them as much as yourself and love can overcome all evil but even in this there’s no
greater love. So when he came back when I saw him there were all kinds of stories as to
why his ear was all bandaged up, but it was over a whiskey and a cigarette, after a few
songs when he laid his guitar down and I laid my harmonica to rest that he told me what
happened how he told me the woman was dead and Dulcinea was expecting in June…
He was kind of a preacher you know. And his songs were laments. Like it was all vanity
to him. A striving after the wind. Because the laws show us our death our sins you know
and David didn’t want to put up no stumbling blocks. He knew it was adultery. He told
me about it. What happened to his ex-wife’s first husband. And maybe in a way he
knew why nobody knew him though now lots of folks know about that third album the
songs he wrote back in 1955 after his father’s death when he lived with his mother. They
know him now, but they didn’t know him then. It’s almost like you have to be
disobedient to know mercy. And I think it’s mercy what he was singing about. Not for
now, but for later because he knew and I knew and everbody else knew why he was in
Sunset then and why he was going back to New Orleans. The strange nature of his
relationship with his ex-wife and rumors as to their daughter’s Dulcinea’s child. But
nobody knows the mind of God. Why you get away with some things and some things
you don’t and how there are always debts that come to collect maybe not from you but
from your children or your children’s children. It gave an inaudible sound to the songs—
a weird time signature. That’s one of things I noticed when I first played with him and
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didn’t know who he was. At first it seemed like the timing was off. But once you got to
know it once you joined in I gotta say it’s the best damned Blues I ever played…
--Alfonse Dupree, from a PBS interview, September 1971
So all this to say what was left out. David was left out. But this will change. There’s
been a lot of dates thrown around many time lapses years between things that happened over the
span of eighteen years from 1948 to 1966. And I can’t refute it. The stories behind what
happened April 2nd, 1966 for many people have come forward with different ones different
versions to the legend. Folks that saw him in Sunset before Solomon was born. Musicians in
Austin and New Orleans. What Bethany had to say about it. Cleota. And through all these
refutations I could come up with maybe it was just another deal gone bad how Maddie died and
how David was responsible just like he was responsible for the blood on his hands from Pete
Southhouse’s murder. But despite all the facts the relationships between David and his family
his father and mother and his brothers his ties to East St. Louis the relationship between David
and Bethany their memories from New Orleans and his children after whatever happened the
spring of 1966 in Texas in the end David was left physically and emotionally and spiritually
bankrupt. He was left out. Alone. Alienated from God by his sins. That’s a lonely place to be.
After the early years with his children after 1955 he was on the outside of their growth and
development—left to watch from the vantage point of visitations, but in 1966 he took an active
role again in what he mourned all through those years as a divorced father. He blamed himself
for Benjy’s death. Because Benjy went first just like his father and David couldn’t get his head
around it what maybe comes out in those songs he wrote in 1955 while living with his mother…
But all this was soon to change. For in the summer of 1966 the date you already know Solomon
was born and in the summer after David returned to that crossroads in Mississippi and not long
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after that his songs were rediscovered David later playing in venues like Gaslight Square in St.
Louis and even in New York. There’s even a KDHX interview from 1987 just a year before his
death that I heard twenty-one years later attached to those first songs those first recordings I
heard of him at my own crossroads in the American Bottom. He recorded his last album that
year in New Orleans. At Piety in 1967. Some thirty years after a meeting a deal when he was
nineteen. But that’s not all because Dulcinea also turned nineteen that year. And she met a man.
A man she would marry two years later… So the story that comes next.
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27
Don’t you let that deal go down…
--The Grateful Dead
You must remember those first things. You must return to them. Like when Dulcinea
was three. She didn’t feel guilty about what just happened. She was happy. The sense of it not
as some fleeting thing but how to love even in criticism. So in a conversation. A talk between
her and her lover. How we will return to it. What happened in 1966 and a year later and the
beginning of Solomon:
A room upstairs Dulcinea’s room dark and colorless except in shades of gray and music from a
record player. David’s first album a voice in the room like talking to a dream after you’ve had it
you’ve woken up and you know why you dreamed what you dreamed and you remember and
talk to it. You talk to the darkness and become another voice distended without a body no flesh
yet out of the flesh the voice speaks while another voice remains silent and only listens its
interruptions a mute empathy a being