Faith's Reckoning, page 10
It was just past six p.m. when Sylvia finally arrived in Clarksdale. She wondered if Faith’s recollection of McLeod Walker’s whereabouts was current. ‘Last I heard he was living near Clarksdale’. Sylvia decided she would look him up in the phonebook, not that she intended to call him tonight. Having made no reservation ahead of time, Sylvia needed to find a room for the night. She followed Highway 49 into the center of town, passing under a concrete railroad trestle. She turned off the main road and meandered through side streets, past houses lacking for trees or hope of renewal. The streets had a quiet, vacant feeling. There was no cozy sense of families sheltering themselves from the late summer heat or gathered in kitchens to cook supper in a humble, but beloved home. Standing out among the houses on the right was a plain red brick building, framed by a box hedge. A wooden sign reading ‘Hellbound Hotel’ swung leisurely from the porch. A smaller “Vacancy” sign hung from the right corner. Sylvia pulled up to the curb and looked it over. Not her typical digs but the spirit of the place, some faint music on the wind, attracted her.
She parked on the street and walked up the grass path to the hotel. The screen door creaked as she opened it, the front door propped open to let a breeze through the building. An office was tucked in an alcove down a short hallway. The proprietor sat behind a roll top desk, a green shaded lamp on the top. When Sylvia appeared, he stood to greet her. The bit of hair he had left was a soft gray, matching his neatly trimmed beard.
“May I help you?” he asked. His smile was genuine, amplified by the fine lines at the corners of his eyes.
“I need a room for the night,” Sylvia replied, looking around.
“Well we specialize in rooms and have one available if you want to see it.”
“Yes, please,” she said. The runner beneath her feet emitted a faint mustiness, the smell of time passing.
“This place must have quite a story.”
“More stories than I could tell you in a month of Sundays, Miss….”
“Barbarino.”
“Raymond, Raymond Jackson,” he said extending his hand. “Yessum, Miss Barbarino, this place is downright alive with stories. It has been home to some of the greatest blues players ever to gather at the crossroads. John Lee, Muddy, Sonny Boy, B.B. Even Bessie, herself.”
He escorted her down a hallway to the left and stopped at the door to room eight. He slipped the brass key into the lock. The latch opened with a clunk, the door swinging back under its own weight and the slight tilt to the floor. The room was simply appointed with a double bed covered in a chenille spread, a bedside table and lamp and small rocking chair in the corner.
“Sounds like you know some of those stories firsthand,” Sylvia said.
“Yes indeed, Miss Barbarino, yes indeed. I have lived in this house for sixty years, been running the hotel for twenty, since my mama suffered her first stroke. But she’s a fighter, God bless her. Still gets around.”
“I’ll take the room,” Sylvia said, without hesitation, not even sure if she had a private bath. “And you’ll have to tell me some of those stories.”
The old man’s smile filled his face.
“You may not want to get me started,” he laughed, then returned to the business at hand. “There’s a shared bath with room seven, but nobody’s in there tonight, so you get yourself a private bath.”
“Now that’s a luxury, id’n it?” she said, an ancestral accent slipping from her tongue.
“Pure luxury,” he replied.
As they returned to the front desk, Sylvia inquired about a place to eat, preferably brisket, and the whereabouts of the juke joint she’d heard of. The hotel owner told her about Boolie’s Barbeque, a restaurant a couple of miles out of town along the railroad tracks and Maizie’s bar another mile or so past that. He told her that the music at Maizie’s would not really get going until about ten o’clock, not ‘til night started to cool things down. He suggested Sylvia might want to go eat, then come back and rest up a bit before her night out.
She thanked him and paid in advance before heading out. She drove the short distance past the edge of town and found Boolie’s with no problem. The place was hopping, being a Saturday night, and she was told it would be at least a half hour before a table opened up. She ordered a brisket plate to go and found a small park nearby where she polished off the meal with surprising hunger. Sated and a bit sleepy, she headed back to the hotel for a bath and a nap before going to Maizie’s.
By the time she arrived at the blues bar, the sun had long relented its hold on the day and the band was warmed up and stoking the crowd. The audience was a mixed lot, some locals, and a fair number of pale-skinned pilgrims. She paid her five-dollar cover and took a seat at the bar.
“Thanks for coming out tonight,” crooned the lead singer, bending over his guitar into the microphone.
“Umm huh,” the crowd murmured back.
The drummer began a slow one, two, one, two beat. “You ready for some music?” the guitar player continued.
“Yeah.”
“You ready for some blues?”
“Yeah!”
“OK, well we’re going to start off with a little B.B. King, then see where we go from there.”
He slid into the first plaintive rift of “The Thrill is Gone” and Sylvia ordered a beer. The bartender pulled her a draft with a perfect one-inch head. She enjoyed the icy bitter taste of the first sip. She settled onto the hard wooden seat of the stool and leaned into the leather covered bar rail as the music began to swell and fill the room. A woman in her late sixties, perhaps straddling seventy, pulled up a stool in front of her. It had a padded, albeit compressed, seat atop the wooden frame.
“Lost most of my own natural cushion,” she smiled, patting her backside as she settled onto the softened stool.
The woman’s hair was as thick as winter wheat and plaited in a perfect French braid, the ample swaths of lustrous silver carefully partitioned by small colored clips. As she turned to introduce herself, her smile unmasked a much younger beauty still visible through the loosening that comes with age.
“I’m Louise,” she said, offering a sturdy hand.
“Your hair is beautiful,” Sylvia replied, returning the handshake, and wishing for a moment that her own name was Thelma, because certainly this character before her could have inspired that movie of a few years back. For a flash of a moment, Sylvia wondered what mischief the two of them might get into together. “My name is Sylvia.”
“Well thank you, Sylvia. Nice to meet you.” Louise lifted her hand and swept a stray silver strand from her forehead, patted it against her temple and on back to the crown of her head.
“It’s my trade,” she paused. “Hair. Had my own shop back in Florida.”
“Well, you are certainly good at it,” Sylvia said.
They settled into the shifting moods of the music. The lament of B.B. King gave way to a more upbeat, foot tapping rendition of Keb Mo’s “Muddy Water”, then the rambling roll of Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues”.
When the band paused to drink and retune, Sylvia picked up the conversation again. “So what brought you to Clarksdale?”
“This,” Louise replied, encompassing the entire club with the sweep of her arm. “Sold my business in Florida and bought a little place here in Clarksdale so I could discover every juke joint left in the Delta before I die. Course, most of the original places are gone, but the spirit and the music live on and a lot of the clubs have tried to keep the feel of the old spots. I end up here at Maizie’s when I’m back home, resting up from my latest road trip.”
“You mean you just picked up like that and left your life in Florida?” Sylvia was fascinated and a little envious.
“Well, not just like that. I had to give my customers almost a year’s notice, especially the old gals who came in every week for the same shampoo and set. You woulda thought they were losing their only daughter. But it was time.”
“For what? Time for what?” Sylvia sensed that Louise was closer to unraveling some mystery that Sylvia was still pursuing.
“Time to stop making excuses for not doing what I want.”
“Which is to travel the Blues Highway?”
“Exactly. And to take the music into my bones again. Most folks don’t know, but I used to play a little myself, back when these fingers could still take a lick to my old Gibson. Grew up playing piano, though.”
“My boyfriend plays piano.”
“That so? I had a few of those.”
“Pianos?” Sylvia had never known Joe to own more than his secondhand Baldwin upright.
“No, boyfriends, darlin’, boyfriends.” Louise chuckled, again displaying that bewitching smile of hers, warm enough to melt the rocks right out from under a good bourbon. Sylvia guessed that Louise had always had her pick of the litter when it came to men.
“Yeah, can’t live with them and can’t live without ‘em,” Sylvia quipped, feeling quite open with this stranger. She motioned to the bartender. “I’ll have another,” she said as she tapped the bottom of the glass on the oak countertop.
“Well, live with them while you can, darlin’, ‘cause they’ll be gone soon enough. For better or for worse.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Buried two myself. One not soon enough, crazy bastard. But the other, dear God still occupies the lion’s share of my heart. Feels like half of me is buried in a little cemetery back in Dothan, Alabama.”
The band was joined by a female vocalist, a local favorite, who started into a sultry version of “Cool Drink of Water”.
Sylvia hesitated but decided to risk a more personal question. “So which came first, the bastard or the love of your life?”
“Oh, the crazy one came first, for sure. God, what a temper he had, and it seems like I was born to bring it out in him. I can see now that a tangle like that is always a two-step.”
“What? Did he hit you or something?”
“Oh yeah, hit me hard. And I hit him back. Then an hour later, we would be up in the bed trying to bang our way back to love. It was a sad, sorry passion play.”
“Almost sounds like you forgave him,” Sylvia said with a whiff of indignation.
“After I left him, yes.” Louise’s eyes were gentle, unfazed by Sylvia’s response. “I forgave us both, once we finally realized the best way to love each other was to say goodbye. By the time he got sick, we were mended enough that I was able to visit him. I sat vigil at the end. I’ll admit it took a good bit of prayer to get there.”
Sylvia softened, thought about the families she had worked with back in Texas, the confounding complexities of their tattered lives. “So I know I’m digging in a little deep here, but may I ask how you were able let yourself fall in love after that?”
Louise caught the bartender’s attention. “Another club soda and lime, please, Mike.”
“Coming up,” he winked at her.
Louise turned back to Sylvia and met her eyes with an unfettered kindness. “You can ask, hon. I’d say a lot of humble pie, a good dose of the blues and the grace of God.”
“There is something about the blues, isn’t there?” Sylvia responded, skirting the tougher remedies mentioned.
“Well, they’ll never leave you for good, will they?” Louise laughed. “Funny thing, that so many of us White folk, having lost God, go looking for our soul in the blues. A gift from a whole family of people we still owe. Thing is you can’t take God out of the blues. It’s those early sorrow songs that gave root to gospel, which birthed the blues. And maybe when we can understand another’s suffering, appreciate another man’s blues, well maybe then we are on to something.”
“And maybe that begins at home,” Sylvia murmured, not sure if she wanted to be heard.
“Oh, it most definitely begins at home,” Louise said softly. “So who is this piano man of yours? And why can’t you say yes?”
“His name is Joe. And how do you know I can’t say yes?”
Louise shrugged. “Intuition?”
The bartender reappeared and asked Sylvia if she wanted another beer.
“No thanks, two’s enough,” Sylvia replied. “I’ll try one of those club sodas.”
“Well the night is young if you want to talk about it, and I’m all ears,” Louise said.
Sylvia proceeded to bend both of Louise’s ears for most of an hour, through several refills of her club soda. She talked about Faith at first and why she had come to Mississippi. Then she told her about Joe, that he was a musician, had been a Philosophy professor and now worked as a caretaker on a ranch outside Austin. How he was content with a simple life that included his ongoing love for Sylvia. Only problem was, he wanted kids and she didn’t. She also talked about Jack, that it had been easy, day by day, to let herself fade into the fabric of his life, until she did not even know what she wanted for herself.
Louise, as a hairdresser, had learned how to apply the therapeutic question when necessary or risk hearing the same story over and over for years. She prodded Sylvia into talking about her parents and was painted a picture of a typical 1950’s marriage, except for some elusive shadow that Sylvia hinted at but seemed to avoid.
“So your parents, Phil and Grace, right?”
“Right.”
“So you think they were happy together?”
“Well I always thought so, growing up. I mean there were no big fights. Well, maybe one. I guess they were happy, but my mother was so damn docile.”
“Docile how?”
“Just quiet. Always getting a good dinner on or ironing his clothes or bringing him the newspaper and a beer.”
“Yeah?”
“I never saw him hit her, but I have always wondered if she feared that. He had a temper. He would come home tired from the restaurant, pissed about something. The suppliers or the staff or the landlord. He could just give her a look and she’d leave the room.”
“King of the castle, huh?”
“Yeah. But he could be wonderful, too. I remember going to the state fair with him. He closed the restaurant and took all of us out for the whole day. He went on all the rides with my brother and sister and me and bought us candy apples. He won some big stuffed dog for Mom at the ring toss.”
Louise just kept her eyes on Sylvia’s face and nodded.
“I found it in the trash the next week, the stuffing ripped right out of it. I can tell you; it wasn’t my mother who tore it up. She treasured the stupid thing.”
“My guess is she treasured your father.”
“For what good it did her. She was always begging for money for groceries or our clothes or school supplies. I can’t imagine living like that.”
“And you don’t, do you?”
“And never will!”
The band was winding up the last song of the night. At almost midnight, the crowd was thinning out.
“So has Joe asked you to do that? I mean compromise any important part of yourself for him?”
“I don’t know. In a way, yes, because he wants me to have his child. I refused. Has he made peace with that? I don’t know. He also wants me to work a little less and be around for him a little more.”
“I bet he does.”
“But…”
“Yes, but. Sounds like it’s been ‘yes but’ for the last five years, Sylvia.”
Louise’s use of her name made the exchange suddenly more intimate.
“Look Sylvia, I know I’m being forward, and chances are we’ll never see each other again. And I like you. We can swap phone numbers, but you know how it goes. Life gets busy. So let me indulge in a little advice here. Go home and jazz the socks off Joe. And every time you get scared, like when he loves you even more, do it again. It will be difficult and wonderful and more complicated than necessary. But there is no nobler path to God than learning to truly love another person, for who he is, because we finally have to get ourselves out of the way. And if after all the work of loving, if the lack of a child is too much for him, then you gave it your best.”
Sylvia looked at Louise, listening, and nodded in understanding. She pulled two business cards from her wallet and handed them to Louise.
“OK, advice considered. But please take my phone number. And would you write yours down on the back of the other card? I’d like to have it, even if you are right that we won’t see each other again. Who knows?”
“All I’ve got is a landline,” Louise offered. “I don’t need to be so accessible as to have a cell phone. And I’m on the road a lot.”
“That’s OK. I’ll take it,” Sylvia said, gathering her things to go. “And Louise, thank you. Really. Thank you. Promise me you will call if you ever need help. Any kind of help.”
“Sure.” She winked and conferred the blessing of one last smile on Sylvia.
As Sylvia turned to leave, Mike came around from behind the bar to sit next to Louise. The club was closing. It was clear that Louise was beloved in this town and would not be wanting for any help, should she ever need it. Sylvia felt free of concerns for the first time in a long time, as she walked toward the parking lot where the Miata waited under the light of a lone lamppost.
Despite her late night, Sylvia woke by seven o’clock the next morning and felt surprisingly refreshed. She found Raymond at his desk in the small office when she went to check out.
“Good morning, Raymond,” Sylvia said, yawning unexpectedly then smiling. “Excuse me!”
