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Copyright © 2017 Christopher K. Doyle

All rights reserved.

Blank Slate Press

St. Louis, MO

an imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group

Published in the United States by Blank Slate Press, Saint Louis, Missouri 63110. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without written permission from the publisher, Blank Slate Press, LLC. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is merely coincidental, and names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Cover design Blank Slate Communications

Interior design by Kristina Blank Makansi

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017952355

ISBN: 9781943075409

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To my daughter Nico

and wife Angela

(who’ve endured my singing long enough)

PURCHASE

Oh, have you seen those mournful doves

Flying from pine to pine

A-mournin’ for their own true love

Just like I mourn for mine

—Carter Family

I

Runnymede McCall and the Piedmont Pipers ~ Hemlines of the ladies ~ A cracked looking glass ~ Of Faustus ~ Bookcases and shelves ~ The words ~ Parmenides thinks not

HE HAD HEARD THE NAME WHISPERED in the shadows: Runnymede. There was music in its naming, in its repetition. A music that spilled out of the warehouses on Lombard Street, that sung from the docks lining Baltimore’s gray harbor, that hung in the placards and posters strung about the city: Runnymede McCall. Singer Extraordinaire. Lately of the Piedmont Pipers. There was a performance scheduled that night at the Peabody, and as the people waiting to enter filed up, A.D. heard in the tapping canes of the gentleman, and swishing hemlines of the ladies, a symphony already begun. Before Runnymede even took stage. It was happening, he would later tell me. The element in him had been finally raised; the excitement reaching such a peak, that he did not see himself as a derelict anymore, as a porter of detritus, wandering in his homelessness. But saw himself in the music—as the music—the music he’d hummed now for weeks outside each dance hall and soda fountain, marketplace and saloon. So that leaning up to the windowsill, he craned the cracked looking glass he’d scavenged from a trashcan just so he could see.

There were chandeliers above the stage. Green and gold confetti drifted in airy profusion. The Peabody was renowned for steeping its students in a tradition, and Runnymede certainly had his tradition down pat. Being once a student of Juilliard in New York and later the Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio, he sung from the Don Giovanni flawlessly. Then acted out a scene of Faustus with such urgency and wit that when he took a wide sweeping bow and the multitude cheered for more, it sparked such a bolt of jealousy in the boy, he suddenly wanted the life of the great man held before him. But then the Piedmont Pipers stepped from their hidden places in the wings and played a music with such pulse and feeling, the notes filtering down as if tripping from a mountain stream, that he just stood there rapt and centered, and forgot about everything else.

All the classical stuff, the high-ranging notes and lilting voice from before hadn’t moved him like these bold, bright sounds. During the previous performance he’d fixated on the lights instead. On the wide wooden stage. On the way Runnymede had of gathering in the crowd and settling them down beside him with the smooth currency of his voice. So that when Runnymede bowed again and the Piedmont Pipers—two brothers and a sister—raised their arms and waved their instruments, A.D. had to reconsider his life in accordance to this fierce new sound.

Runnymede was older than A.D., by maybe only a dozen years, but already he’d been accomplished, and celebrated as such. A.D. looked at the raggedness of his own clothing, pondered the scavenged nature of his food, and pictured a day not too far removed when he, too, might grace the boards above the crowd and serenade them with his art. Yes, his art, he muttered, for what was his art if not a singing? Or a moving forward? Moving, he thought, and listening, cataloging the complete Earth. He’d done nothing but these last four years, hearing scraps of conversation dropped here and there, picking up what others left behind. Things they only saw fit to hand him when he raised his hollowed-out eyes long enough to stare. The boy, just eighteen by 1926, learned all he could as he walked the city, pounding his shape into the solemn lines hidden beneath cotton and corduroy, denim and thread. He’d learned to become so close with his surroundings, it was easy for him to slip inside unseen as the people poured out of the performance. He wanted nothing less than to look for this Runnymede himself.

It was quiet inside the marble hall. A few stragglers purchased tickets, while still a few ushers hauled out great tattered stacks of programs with Runnymede’s smiling face on the cover. But A.D. was not interested in surveying the theater. Nor the grand arcade. Already he saw balconies in the heavens. Then he heard a single voice, lilting above bookcases and shelves with such an inflection it compelled the listener for more, holding some unutterable charm. And before A.D. could consider his intrusion, his grubby boots tiptoed his pale thin frame to the doorway to see.

It’s shit, Runnymede said, bellowing above a man whose monocle dangled to his waist.

It’s what’s agreed to in the contract. Nothing more. Nothing less.

For future returns, man. Future. Returns. In so much as to my weighted decision for returning to your fine establishment. For showcasing the prodigious vocal stylings of one Runnymede McCall. For bringing myself back to this odious establishment. The extra money is for me, my good man. How can you be so obtuse?

Runnymede was taller than A.D. thought. His rich black hair was swept up above his high pale forehead, and as A.D. looked, he couldn’t see a line or crease in the man’s whole face. It was almost as if he’d been swept and wiped clean with a mason’s quick edge. His blue suit was frosted with white piping about the sleeves, and it must have been the same one he’d worn onstage because bits of confetti drifted in the folds whenever he shook his finger in the smaller man’s face. (The Peabody’s director, A.D. would later understand, a man of much distinction in Baltimore, if not the shrewdest negotiator.)

I’ll have to check with Agnes, the man said, before hurrying past A.D. But we’ve never even had hillbilly music in here before. You should at least acknowledge that.

Acknowledge that? Runnymede turned his granite jaw to follow the man. Acknowledge that it was as transcendent as God’s green gospel? That it was more resplendent than any opera of note? That your theatergoers ate it up as if served the last supper? But the director was gone, and as Runnymede’s oratory ceased, he smiled when he saw A.D. in the doorway. The thin urchin of a boy stared at the great man and band behind, huddled in that hallowed space, the George Peabody Library. The moonlight a slight pulse in the upper windows. A frail trace of brightness and time. Something A.D. must have seen and thought upon, wondering where he might sleep that night, and if the park across the street was safe. The citizens should have that man taken out and shot, Runnymede declared. What say you about it—man? Student? Pope? How do your classmates stand that fool?

A.D.’s eyes were moist. He was so seldom spoken to—and usually only by someone telling him to move—that he suffered to hear Runnymede’s voice. How it shook the very firmament about him. How it sent up shivers in the light. Friend, Runnymede said, as he stepped closer, turning his broad-barreled chest to the boy; it’s not enough to witness the world. It’s not enough to even lead the world, I can assure you that.

Runnymede peered down into A.D.’s eyes as the air between them became close, and a scent of ash wafted up. Wind? Did A.D. hear a rush of wind stir between them?

Change, Runnymede finally spoke, as the sounds of life and death and even breathing ceased inside the room. It’s the one true force upon Earth.

Parmenides thinks not. A.D. said, and the great man fell silent. A.D. had even silenced himself. He hadn’t seen the words rising up from inside, from all the books he’d built his life upon these years, finding them at food stalls and streetcars and in the trash heaps of the city. But there they were. They flew out into the face of what Runnymede pontificated, and as the man turned to the Piedmont Pipers, as if to persuade them to his argument, they were suddenly elated. Even stirred by A.D.’s words. As if they’d found in the boy the first instance to wound the great man they’d trudged beneath for so long. The two brothers blinked at each other like stunned owls, while the girl, the one who hadn’t even looked at A.D. before, shook her gold-hued hair at him, before turning down her face. But there was more. The great man drew himself up as if to pontificate further when A.D. cleared his throat. Parmenides the Greek, he said. That which truly is has always been.

Runnymede’s mouth gaped open, his hand wavering in air. He had reared up on his lustrous, black loafers to meet this particular challenge, but slumped down now as if taken aback by the balance of the thin odorous mold before him, this boy with a complexion like bubbled wax paper and a mealy gloss about his teeth. The man’s lips clenched in a cruel and decided crease, but he said nothing as the harried director stepped back, another fistful of twenties in his hand. Runnymede grabbed the bills and, without another word, stalked out into the street.

II

The librarian ~ Ms. Mary Frick Garret Jacobs ~ My red guitar ~ Hawthorne and Poe ~ His first impromptu performance ~ Our daily bread ~ A visitation in sunlight ~ What we need and what we leave ~ Singing honey

IT WAS THE LIBRARIAN, GOD HELP HER, who saved him. Even if I did give her a nudge in the right direction, mentioning in whispers about the boy speaking on Parmenides right there in front of her, since all she’d heard was A.D. stifling the swagger of old Runnymede. She caught A.D. by the sleeve after he’d watched, silent and forlorn, as the great man burst off from the scene, followed by the Piedmont Pipers, hustling through the grand arcade with their baggage and instruments, and A.D. thought he’d been the cause for their leaving in such a hurry.

There’s a place for someone like you, she said. Programs for which you qualify, that the great philanthropist Ms. Mary Frick Garret Jacobs put in place years ago. Being childless herself, she’s particularly fond of wayward students, and I think she’ll listen to you very well. I think she’ll help.

Now, Ms. Mary Frick had married Robert Garrett in 1872, when she was but 21 years old (and then Dr. Henry Jacobs after Robert died in 1902). But before all that, Robert’s father owned that great silver line spreading out east and west across the gathered states—the B & O Railroad—and also that red sandstone mansion right up the street. And all A.D. had to do was go with her one day to see, the librarian said. She never once asked questions about his particulars, like where he slept or what he ate, for she was known to have premonitions on students in such straights. So he sloughed off his earlier inclination toward loneliness and silence, and thought about Runnymede instead. O he thought on him and wondered how else he could ever become like that man. How else could he ever sing those songs and tread those boards, if he didn’t go see? If he didn’t try? So he did. The very next day. He looked upon Ms. Mary Frick’s gray and wizened face and repeated his story of Parmenides and Runnymede until she laughed and coughed into her hand, and that was it. He found himself on a cot that very same night, right next to mine, in the Peabody’s boiler room.

Isaiah, I said and pointed at my chest.

A.D., he said and looked at my old, beat-up red guitar before setting down a grimy bag of possessions out of which a dozen books spilled around his feet. You play?

I do. I eyed him. I’d my evening mopping to do, but was told to meet the new maintenance apprentice, as he was dubbed, before starting my rounds. Though I’d not thought to see such a one as him, all scruffed up and sooted over from head to foot, from his days spent hovelling and begging and whatever else he did. I’d not thought they’d bring me one so white neither. I mean, white as to not even look white the more I spied him, the more I considered. Meaning he didn’t have that same general whiteness as all the other white folks I’d known. That same sense of authority or standing, and probably never would. Being as he’d looked up from the bottom like me for so long. Thin as a rail, the boy had a mind on him that saw every little thing, for he noticed my stack of phonographs forthwith. Even took off the blue shirt I’d hung over my bookcase so he could assess my library in accordance to his own scattered about the floor.

I do not like that Hawthorne, he said. I do not like him at all. He looked at me and blinked, his face not moving. The cunningness of his thin nose had become amplified in the fading light. The single window looked above street level to the sky, and as the clouds darkened above us, it made me pause to see him so concentrated, almost furious in his opinion. I mean, the notion of it, he continued, that a letter, a simple stitched letter might burn on a woman’s chest for all time, designating her, that it would separate her from man and child alike. Just imagine!

Taking the canvas hat from my head, I wiped my high kinky hair and trailed a hand across my whiskered cheek and thought on him. O I thought on him and leaned to one side before finally stirring enough to address him. Designating nothing, I said. Have you read his stories?

He was quiet. Shuffling in his dirty boots, he picked through another few books before he saw one he liked and lifted it. Then he shook it out as if some certain aspect of it might flutter between us. Something he alone could detect or interpret and must have thought on for some time to say to somebody and now had the chance. Now that Poe is something else, he said. That Poe means business. He don’t fuss with all that foolishness like that other Jakes there. With all that symbolizing.

Symbolizing?

Sure.

But symbols is all they is, I said and pointed to the blue stars on the flag above my cot, and to the white bird on a poster pasted to the wall, and to a delicate few notes I’d written for a song I’d just started on a treble clef in G. Stepping closer, he studied the notes and even creased his brow before pressing his skinny finger to the paper. He sort of danced along with it then, humming with the melody that I followed in my head and stomped along to with my foot. And friends, we carried on like that for a few measures, and didn’t say a word until he stopped, humming his way to the end.

You wrote that?

I looked at him straight then. I sure did, and I rubbed my hands together as if performing some magician’s rite.

What’s it mean?

Why everything, son. It’s mine. Mine alone.

He was quiet then and looked at the notes humming his own tune, before touching the lines. Almost as if deciphering some alien landscape, something written long ago and left to dust. Something renounced henceforth from other names of people in other places. Mine, was what he heard. A word he probably hadn’t spoken since before his father had started on his long decline into drinking and drugs, like his mother before him, and what ultimately spat the boy out into the world in the first place. Mine, he finally whispered, lifting his eyes. Because I could hear it was something that stirred in him some outpouring, some idea or premonition that lingered in him even after his humming had ceased. His face was red, and as he stared at me, I suppose I was meant to know this information about him entire, that I should be informed of it for all time: Who he was. What he was. And what he meant to make with his own sound, with his incessant humming. Mine. A word he took in and ate up as sustenance itself, as another rung to incorporate into the half-won ladder of his life.

Okay, I said. That’s my music, and this here’s your mop.

IT WAS ABOUT THIS TIME WE BEGAN BORROWING books from one another, me and A.D., and singing. It wasn’t easy, I assure you. He kept to himself in the beginning, and always followed at a distance, whispering some lyrics or such nonsense, humming a tune only he knew. I had to ask him about it many times, but he’d just hush up the instant I started in on him and turn his mop in the bucket, or shine another doorknob, and it was as if I hadn’t heard anything at all.

Well, I wouldn’t have none of that in my own school, mind you, where I was maintenance supervisor, so I devised one day to catch him at it. It went something like this: He filled the buckets in the utility closet with the hot water and I mopped the hallway outside it. There were a few classrooms thereabouts, and all I had to do was get him in there with a dozen buckets to scrub and inside a minute he was crooning away behind the bolted door. Well, what he didn’t know was that I had the key! And I had a way of attracting most any student with a two-step I’d sometimes do Fridays. Or before a holiday or semester break. Soft-shoeing it for the kids who thought nothing more of it than sunshine, and anyways I didn’t feel too denigrated by it. Considering I was happy to see the young people smile by my antics, for I missed that entire, the lightness of children’s laughter, that innocent charm. (Why? I’ll touch on that directly). What’s important now is the crowd I’d gathered for him, and the single key I jingled when my performance had ended, when A.D. sung out in his highest register. All I had to do was unlatch the lock and take my bow, for there he stood—singing for all his worth—before dozens of his own age, who laughed and applauded at the show.

I know, I know. It wasn’t the nicest thing to do, but it certainly wasn’t the meanest neither, and it did knock the starch out of his lonesomeness routine. For if he wanted to know everything about the music surrounding him, I did too, and thought since we were working together, it was natural enough to sing while we worked, and be friends in the process. To play back and forth with the melodies we heard in the studios and hallways that we swept through, and that ended up forming the daily ramblings of our lives. Our daily bread, so to speak. Because this was the way of the blues, I told him, when I felt he was ready. Just by looking at him I could tell he needed a good dose of the blues himself, even if he seemed to have enough of it in spades. Even if he didn’t have the first clue what to do with them.

The blues? he said and looked down queer at its mentioning, considering he wasn’t sure of my meaning, so I had to explain. I had to tell him the blues was a whispering away, really, that it was a dying down, too, and a rising up. That it was everything and nothing at once.

A dying down?

Well, sure, I said. And it’s a name you cannot speak, not entire. It’s something made of bone and ash and smoke. And it blows out your fingers and toes, from your eyes and teeth. Blowing out in song and chanting across the sad salt sea, when it first made its way here to mark us from the beginning. This is my prayer, son. And I say it every night to the darkness. And every day to the brightness. And you got it, too, I swear. You got it through and through.

Got what?

In your bones and teeth and throat. And you can go ahead and call it a song or poem or whatever you want, whatever you’re always humming. But you’ve got to make it your own one day, to deal with it no matter what.

He was silent then and not sure of any of it, and I might have lost him entire with my soliloquy, of turning him on to the blues side of life. But the universe has a way of bringing you what you need at exactly the right moment, even if it can take everything away, too. All I had to do was sit there and watch as a gaggle of girls stepped around the corner. O we were hushed then because of it, and always reminded of our place when the students happened on us in our reveries and administrations, but that was all I needed. As A.D. watched them go by, I seen a small spark flirt about his lips as a certain young thing dropped some sheet music, before bending down in a flurry of spangles and rose-printed dressings to retrieve it, and then I knew he’d got it. The blues, for sure. He’d felt it as she hurried off.

Well, now, he finally said, not looking at me in the least, not budging from his broom neither, but just watching her go. Shoot, he whispered. The blues. The boy must not have seen women his whole time roaming the city. At least, not like the ones at the Peabody—Southern belles and rich Northern ones alike—girls who might make him forget about all the troubles that had been set upon him from the beginning. Sent out shivering into the darkness as he was, after his father burned down their house with him in it. The fire. A.D. was always remembering that fire, and how he’d hid on the raw edge of it. Watching as the water wagons appeared and the folks from town mumbled about the remains of the family they’d found inside, which only filled one measly flour sack. The memory of it all, smoldering in the center of him, a moment that had both contained him for what he’d lost, a cruel and inattentive father, but released him for what he’d gained—his freedom. Considering everyone thought he’d been burned up, too, before walking the twenty miles into Baltimore, leaving behind as much as he could of his sad, damaged self. So he just stood there whispering the blues, the blues over and over, even with the sunlight falling in the high upper windows that we still had to wash. I think the word might of rearranged him in some sense. Even if I knew it was probably just that girl that had done it, moving him toward the blues side of life, toward the feelings and desires he’d hid in his smoldering shell for so long.

The blues, I said after I let him linger there long enough. That’s what that is and I need it every day to remind me. And every night to sing. We all need it to remind us.

Remind us of what?

Of what we had and want to have again. Of what we still need.

Need, he said and looked at me, but didn’t say anything as he turned to the empty hallway and seemed to sniff something. Or waft his hand up slow and steady, churning the fragrance of the girl’s departed air, before looking back as if the essence of what he wanted was out there somewhere. Just out of reach. Tantalizing him. For here he was with the luxury to ponder inside himself finally, to absorb sight and sound unseen, all at his leisure—even if he did have to push a mop for the privilege of it—and the boy didn’t know how to begin. So I just listened to him. I listened as he was quiet, and quiet some more, until finally I outlasted him and another bit of his shell came chaffing off as he cleared his throat. That’s funny, he said.

What is?

Need. Because I never thought I needed anything before this, and he nodded to the hallway, the windows, to the bucket and mop and invisible path the girl had taken, before shaking his head. I thought I just had to move. That it was all I was, that it was all I’d ever be, and he shook his boots out to show me the strength of him, for his muscles practically pulsed at the end of his long skinny legs. He was a specimen, truly, of moving, of walking miles and miles untold, of the sheer perseverance he’d made of himself (and which probably served him well later driving night after night through the mountains and farms to find his songs, all the precious songs he needed). But as he looked at his feet and relished them a moment longer, I watched as something new seemed to take hold. As if all that packed muscle and bone had flowed up inside him, spreading over his thoughts and mind and dreams—which were still bathed in blackness as far as I could tell—or streaked with the flames from living as fast and easy as he had before this. But which seemed contained now all a sudden. Caged even.

Moving’s the easy part, son. It is. For I know what you’re thinking: Where’s this been my whole life? And: Why now? and other such things as that. Well, don’t fight it. Not a bit. Fightin’s the easy part, too. It’s all anyone can do. It’s the staying and accepting that takes some doing. It’s the staying that really matters. That makes up who you are. That proves it.

That proves what?

That you’re real. With real feelings and needs. And then I watched as he mouthed the word twice for he seemed to be trying out the notion of it even as I spoke it. Even as he knew his whole life had been the exact opposite in nearly every way.

Real, he finally whispered. That’s a word I thought I didn’t need. Not a once. I just thought I’d move and always move and that’d be it. That nothing would ever take hold of me. That nothing would ever last except the moving, the freedom.

But it does last, son. It does. It lasts longer than you could ever know, and I had to turn my eyes then and wipe them, for I was thinking on my wife and baby girl then. The ones I used to sing and dance for down in Bristol, Virginia, but had to leave years past (and so of course, that was why I loved dancing for the kids here, too). But I didn’t tell him none of that. Not with him being just a boy, and one who thought his whole life would be a movement away from something, from whatever he felt was dragging him down. His sadness? His lonesomeness? Who could say? I had the same sadness in me and the moving hadn’t helped no matter how far I went. No matter how hard I tried to get it back and right the wrong I’d done, and so I just looked on him instead. I looked and thought of the only thing that might make him listen for once, that might make the idea take hold. You’ll see, I finally said, and shook my head to show him I meant it, that the words mattered, that they were true. Because it stays with you, no matter what you do. No matter how far you move. Your life—it’s always there, always watching you—that much I know.

He looked at me and nodded as if he’d truly heard it, but then sung out real soft and slow, Honey, so I knew that was the refrain I was meant to sing back. So I sang Honey in the hallway until he sang again. There you go away. There you go. Then I didn’t say nothing, because it sounded like the song was finished. And I watched instead as he mopped the same spot for the next half hour, mopping around the puddle of his life that was, and the fast glistening streaks he thought it might soon become.

III

Ms. Clara May Staunton ~ Dumbstruck in the wide rows ~ Guitar lessons and composition ~ The true chord and metronome ~ John Hill Carter ~ On the James River ~ Cataloging his affections ~ White perfect circles ~ A birdcage ~ The canaries

SHE WAS FROM NORFOLK, VIRGINIA he found out soon enough. Ms. Clara May Staunton, and I did not like it one bit, I told him, even as he changed himself so the girl might notice him when everyone else in the school either walked past or couldn’t have guessed his intentions. Each morning he stood at the sink and combed his brown hair. The same shag I’d cut after he’d first seen her, considering he’d come in all curled up and wavy and you’d a thought he was something Poseidon mighta dragged in from the salt sea to glimpse him. O he was adding all kinds of flourishes to his appearance, and even fiddled with his belt buckle too, shining it up with a tin of old Brasso I had lying about for instruments and door handles and other surfaces in a school such as that. The good old librarian even brought all sorts of hand-me-downs and holdovers from her own nephews and kin, so that in no short order he had a wardrobe that beat out mine all the way through.

Of course, he spent most of his free and working time in the library, as did I. And often, he saw her reading there or combing through the great books and stood beside her as if poised in the midst of his stated occupation—polishing up floors and tabletops or straightening the card catalog. Though more often than not, he’d succumb to a more tortuous and pressing anticipation and creep up as close to her as he could get. It was agonizing to watch, but humorous, too. He’d often hover there on the other side of the shelves, watching through the cracks. But after a spell of waiting that might of burst his young cleaving heart, he’d kind of curl his paper-thin self up closer to listen. While on the other side, she was so entranced with whatever she was reading, she couldn’t have known the drama unfolding in his soul as he stood there on the precipice of connection, of being noticed by her in the slightest. This went on for weeks, I assure you, and months—and even past his nineteenth birthday. He was so affected by the trials of worship he put to her appearance, it began to keep me from my own guitar playing, and the lessons I’d taken to teaching him each evening, even though he didn’t prove to be such an easy study as I’d hoped.

Relax, I told him. You’re young yet, son. Move your hands like you want them to. Let them flow. Let it all go. He set beside me and had gotten his own beat up guitar, a Lyon & Healy