When Harry Van first heard the horn he was halfway to the county jail. It caught him in midstride, as if he had crossed an exact circumference into a circle of sound which had for its center the golden bell of the cornet, and though it grew louder as he drew near, the tone was no clearer beneath the cell window than it had been a block away.
He had taken the midnight train out of Memphis — the one natives called the Cannonball, in derision — south through the fields that were white as if with incongruous snow in the warm October moonlight. The trip was one hundred and fifty miles and it lasted beyond eight hours; the coach bucked and rattled, halting at every hamlet along the way and even backing onto spur tracks to make those stops that were off the main line. During the final two hours he could see the countryside quite clearly, first in the pale, misty dawn which came through slowly, like a scene on a photographic print in the process of being developed, and then in sunlight, the corrugated metal gins whining soprano with queues of mule-drawn wagons lined up for the sucker pipe, the slow willow-bordered creeks and drainage ditches with their rackety bridges, the flat, ash-gray fields where pickers moved down the rows dragging nine-foot sacks that bulged at their lower ends with the fiber which had resembled snow in the moonlight.
Van had never before seen cotton growing, and in fact, though he had made two European crossings, had never been south of Philadelphia. In rumpled tweed, with his soft hat and careful collar, Scotch-grained shoes and black knit tie, juxtaposed among salesmen sleeping on their sample cases and excursionists returning from two-day flings in the city, he was like a visitor from a future generation or even another planet; the other passengers looked at him once and then let him strictly alone. When at last the conductor passed down the aisle announcing Bristol, Van took his pigskin bag from the overhead rack and went out on the platform. He stepped down onto a graveled quay, deserted except for an old Negro who wore a dusty tailcoat and a frayed white panama.
“Pardon,” Van said, and to him his voice sounded rusty from not having used it for such a long time, “but could you direct me to the county jail?” The old man watched him curiously, puzzled by the Eastern syntax and vocabulary. “The county jail,” Van said again. “Where is it?”
The old man raised one arm, pointing. “Yonder ways,” he said at last. “Two blocks twill you sees the soldier: thats the cyote-house. Hit’s in back, behindside.”
Now it was Van’s turn to be puzzled. However, he took up the bag again and began walking down the sidewalk in the direction the old man had indicated. Behind him what was obviously the main street, lined with store fronts, ran westward into a steep, grassy sort of earthwork which he did not recognize as the levee. He had known the river was there, having heard Duff speak of it and having seen it on the map, but ‘river’ to him meant the rivers of New England, France, and Italy; he had expected to find a village sprawled along its bank, all green and peaceful, with white church spires and cottages in ordered rows, each with its brass knocker. Instead the town looked gimcrack, characterless with its false storefronts, unclean with its litter of trash and dust. He would have been even more dismayed, and perhaps alarmed, if he had known that instead of the town overlooking the river, the river — from behind its earthwork, which he did not recognize; he saw no sign of the river at all — overlooked the town. What was worse, he had left the bright, hazy riot of Indian summer, with a tinge of woodsmoke in the air, but now it was if he had traveled not only southward through space but also backward through time. It was summer indeed, and the clothes he wore were too heavy for the weather; he was sweating, wilting the careful collar which gripped him now like a damp hand at his throat.
All this was forgotten, however, even the press of heat, when he crossed the circumference of the music. He paused for an instant, then continued forward, moving now within the rich circle of sound, hearing again after all those months the proud, soaring tone of the cornet known to jazz musicians and their followers everywhere. But to Van it did not seem that he was hearing it again. It seemed, rather, that he had never stopped hearing it since a night almost three years ago, when his harmony instructor took him up to Harlem, under the arched back of that green-eyed cat.
When Duff left New York, the morning after the interview in the doctor’s office, he said he would be back within a year. Perhaps he even believed it, at the time. But eleven months later a waiter at the Black Cat told Van that Duff had been tried for a roadhouse shooting and would be executed in October. That was in late September. Van wrote and waited ten days for an answer. Then he took the train for Memphis. And now, walking along the southern street, hearing again the cornet which had become for him the ultimate expression of all music, he thought in a kind of rage: ‘There ought to be two sets of laws, one for us and another for the few like him. It’s enough that they carry the burden and the anguish of their talent and their genius; it’s not right to expect them to follow something set down and codified in books for men who dont even think the way they do, if they think at all.’
He crossed the intersection toward a wooded lawn where a marble column gleamed pale among oaks and sycamores, magnolias and elms, still wearing their dusty summer foliage. Surmounting the shaft, the Confederate faced south, his blanket-roll tied neatly across his left shoulder to leave his shooting arm unencumbered; he stood with one foot a bit advanced, both hands clasping the muzzle of his musket, and his eyes were bland, impervious, the pupils dimpled into the stone eyeballs, under the shadow of a hatbrim as stiff and unyielding as if it had just been lifted from the stamping machine; he seemed not to have gotten word of the surrender. This was the soldier the old Negro at the depot had told Van to watch for, and the ugly brownstone structure with its new cupola was the courthouse. Behind it there was a square two-story building of harsh concrete, bars slatting the windows and a heavily grilled door blocking the entrance.
It was the jail, and a man sat on the stoop. He wore khaki trousers and a faded denim shirt with half-moons of darker blue beneath the armpits. As Van approached, carrying the pigskin bag, the man looked up. His eyes were a pale green, as if they had been washed in too-strong soap and the color had not held, and there was a lax, mobile expression about his mouth. He held a knife and a whittling stick. Van halted in front of him, looking more out-of-place than ever in his city tweeds. “May I see Duff Conway?”
The man dropped his glance. Without looking up, he shaved a long curl of pine from the stick. “From up his way?” he asked. There was a big ring of keys at his belt.
“Yes.”
“Figured you were.” He looked up. Van, whose knowledge of such things was limited to what he had seen in the papers and magazines, wondered what would happen next; he had no taste for being involved in one of those ‘southern’ incidents. The man rose, brushing shavings from his lap. “Sho now. You can see him.” He swung the iron door ajar and led the way. “Put your suitcase there,” he said. “Wont nobody bother it.” His voice was not strong but it had a staminal quality. “I understand he got sick up there or something, and come down here to get well. But it dont matter now. My cousin Luke Jeffcoat is going to give him the big treatment tonight.”
“Treatment?”
“The chair — the ’lectric chair. He comes around and sets it up; calls it his old shocking chair. Sick or well wont make any nevermind then. Were you acquainted with him up the country?”
“Yes.”
“Lawyer?”
“No: friend.”
“Ah?” The turnkey looked back over his shoulder. They were climbing a steep circular staircase. “Then maybe you can bring it home to him. I’m a religious man, myself; I always have been. But I cant talk to him, seems like.” He toiled ahead, speaking over his shoulder with the same unflagging volubility. “I can talk to most of them, bring them round before the end, but not this boy. He listens but it dont get through. So you tell him. Tell him to lay that horn aside and get right with his Maker.”
‘Oral personality,’ Van thought, remembering the t
erm out of a far-off psychology classroom as he followed the faded broad blue back, the shifting khaki hams just at eye level. ‘Does he ever stop?’
“Most of them we have to kind of put the damper on, they get so wrought-up and sanctified with all their kinfolks there in the cell and two or three jackleg preachers yelling about salvation at the top of their voice. But this one cant seem to get it through his mind the time aint long. Wont see a preacher, wont even pay his mamma any mind: just sits there all day long with that durn horn, playing them honky-tonk songs like his soul depended on it. He’d be blowing it all night too, I reckon, if I’d let him.”
They had reached the second story by now; the turnkey led Van down a corridor flanked with cells. Convicts in striped trousers and sleeveless undershirts watched through the bars, the eyes of the Negroes rolling white in the gloom of the bull-pen. “Full house,” the turnkey said. “But thats all right. The long-chain man will be here a week from Monday to take them up to Parchman.” Van felt the need for a guide book and a two-way dictionary. There was a combined odor of creosote and mildew, of perspiration and urine, of rust and sweating iron and much else, anonymous and myriad. The sound of the cornet filled the jail; it was Tailgate Ramble, near the finish.
“Well,” the turnkey continued, unwearied, against the soar of the horn, “he can blow it tonight if he wants. Most of them ask for a quart of corn and a woman, but I reckon he’ll want the horn. The sheriff always gives them what they want. If it’s possible I mean, because we had one to ask us for a hacksaw. He could joke at a time like that. Last January we had a boy wanted watermelon; wouldnt nothing do but that, he said. In January, mind you. And we got it for him out of the cooler at the icehouse. Fellow that owned it had been saving it for something special, a wedding or an election, some such rumpus, but he didnt begrudge it. No sir. He never begrudged it a-tall, since that was the one thing the poor boy wanted. I think youll find the folks round here are like that, by and large, with some exceptions.”
While he told about the watermelon he stood at the cell door with the keyring in his hand like a badge of office. Finally he selected one of the big keys and fitted it into the lock. It turned with a clanking of tumblers. Then he swung the door ajar, performing a gesture of presentation with one hand. “Company, son,” he said.
Duff did not hear him. In fact he appeared too busy, too concentrated on what he was doing, to hear anything but the music. Riding out the coda of Tailgate Ramble, he was jack-knifed into the lower section of the double bunk, hunched against the wall with his knees drawn up and his heels against the bed frame. The cornet was lifted toward the window, catching the light as in a golden bowl. While the final note died away he turned and saw Van standing in the doorway. He did not seem surprised. He lowered the horn and smiled, and his teeth were white and even against his cocoa-colored face.
“Hello, Harry,” he said then. “You a long ways from home.”
At first, in the dim light from the high window, Van thought that Duff had changed very little. He did not wear convict stripes as Van had expected; he had on the peg-top trousers and polo shirt of his Harlem days. The skin fitted closer to his skull; that was all, Van thought at first. Then — either because his eyes had become accustomed to the light, or else because his mind was recovering from the shock — he saw the difference, and once he had seen it he saw little else. The skin did indeed fit close; the face was like one of those African masks, the lines of suffering and sickness grooved deep into the wood with all the exaggeration of the primitive, wherein the carver pits the force of his emotion against his lack of tools and training. Duff’s voice had sounded even lower than usual, a hoarse whisper, and now Van saw that this was because the lungs were almost gone; he breathed with difficulty, high in his throat. His arms and legs were thin as famine. Only the eyes and teeth remained unchanged, yet even so they had a terrible kind of beauty, frightening by contrast.
Van had come twelve hundred miles but there was little he could find to say. He was too conscious of the haunted mask, the sticklike arms and legs, the shallow breathing. Smalltalk was an effort, like a constant lifting of weights, yet anything but smalltalk would have been outrageous; death was like a presence in the cell. Also, though he was patient and polite, Duff was obviously waiting for them to leave so that he could return to his music. Within nineteen hours of the chair, he belonged to another world already, and now Van understood why Duff had not answered his letter. He had known it would be like this.
The three men sat in the cell for about twenty minutes, the turnkey doing most of the talking. At last, when Van got up to leave, Duff looked at him quietly and said in a hoarse whisper: “Dont be feeling bad about all this. There wasnt anything anybody could do, Harry. It’s just I ought not ever have left home. Going off like that I lost touch with everything I was born to be with. I been thinking about it, some. I ought to stayed at home where I belong.”
Standing in the corridor while the turnkey locked and tested the door, Van said, “I’ll tell them hello for you when I get back.”
“Thanks,” Duff said, and still it was as if he had to make an effort to be a part of the world. He looked down at his hands, holding the cornet; they were thinner, too. “But you better not make it hello. Make it goodbye.”
He raised the horn toward the glittering eyes and teeth. Van turned, following again the broad, faded back of the turnkey. Halfway down the corkscrew staircase he heard the first note. This made him hurry. He took up the pigskin bag and stepped out into the sunlight.
“So long,” the turnkey said.
“Goodbye,” Van said in a choked voice, not looking back.
Crossing the lawn he could hear the cornet, well into Didnt He Ramble. The vivid, brilliant waves of sound swept over him, surging past the dusty trees and the ugly brownstone courthouse, past the pale Confederate, undefeated on his marble shaft, and into the street beyond, where people on the way to work were pausing to listen, their heads cocked toward the high cell window. The power behind the music was gone yet the clarity and sweetness were still present. There was more than an hour before time for the northbound train, but Van walked fast, wanting to be out of range of the horn.
The sheriff and Hoskins brought him into the cell, walking on either side of him, their hands supporting his elbows. His shaved head glistened like mahogany. He was thin, slight and frail between the florid sheriff and the husky deputy, and his slit trouser-legs flapped about his ankles. His eyes glittered, the pupils contracted in the sudden light. His teeth looked false, too white to be true and too large for his mouth, which was drawn in what appeared to be a grimace or even a smile though it was neither; it was fright. Roscoe followed them into the cell; Dr Benson and I and the district attorney watched from the rear wall. Luke Jeffcoat, who had stood beside the chair and watched them come in, stepped forward now and took over, beginning the running commentary, the oration he supplied with every job. He spoke with the full-mouthed accent of the old-time stump orators, sometimes addressing the condemned man, sometimes the witnesses.
“All right,” he said. “Here you are for that last fast ride they promised you in court. Dont be troubled in your mind; youre in good, professional hands.” He led him to the chair. “Have a seat,” he said with grave formality; he even made a shallow bow, one hand out, palm up. Then he secured the straps at the wrists and ankles, going onto his knees for these last, and the larger strap across the chest. “Now dont you be trembling, son. Sit up straight and tall and take it cool, so when I tell all your friends how you stood it theyll be proud. Do you have anything to say?”
He stepped back, waiting, but there was nothing. Then he secured the plated cap and the hood. As he worked, the snakes tattooed on his arms seemed to writhe. “Ive had them all kinds,” he said. “Some moaned and groaned. Some didnt. But they all went, every man jack of the lot, the way youre going. So dont you fight it; dont fight back … Hey there!”
The switch clicked and for a moment there was that deep, pulsin
g hum and that odor of burning.
“Yair!” the executioner cried. “One quick bump on the road to glory and he rode right out of this world never knowing what hit him. Yair. Steady, folks; we’ll hit him again. Not because he needs it, no, but because the law says do it and the law’s almighty. Yair!”
There were footsteps hurrying through the door of the cell, and as I came forward with the stethoscope we heard the young district attorney being sick in the hall. I leaned over the chair, then straightened up and pronounced the prisoner dead.
A MARRIAGE PORTION
This was in the middle Twenties, back before the flood. Snooky said he was coming by to pick me up a little after seven, but you know Snooky; he says one thing, then he does another. Only this time he came early. “Well, just tell him he can wait,” I said, all soapy, and Buster went downstairs and told him. He told Buster, “Tell her if she’s not down by seven, sharp, I’m long gone.” So Buster came back up. Poor Buster: all those stairs. He was the houseboy, as you may have gathered, gray-haired, well past sixty, and though his bottom lip hung slack from feeble mindedness, he was very good at building fires, carrying messages, and such. He died two years later. I was just getting out of the tub; he had to talk through the door. “Tell him I’ll do my level best,” I said, and Buster went back down.
Snooky was sitting talking to Daddy; Daddy had just come in. Mother had been dead three years that month, October. He was still long-faced and of course he had those wisps of cotton all over his clothes, the way they always do that time of year. He’s a cotton man. Buster stood there, dignified in his white jacket, till Daddy came to a pause in what he was saying. Then he delivered the message. “Looks like youve bout got her tamed,” Daddy said, but Snooky didnt say anything; he just sat there looking determined, or anyhow his notion of determined. Buster waited to see was there any answer. When there wasnt, he went back to the kitchen with Louiza. She was his wife and she looked after him all those years until he died. You know how Negroes talk; “I slept true to that man,” she used to say. All the same, she remarried within the month, a strange coal-black lantern-jawed man almost seven feet tall if he was an inch, and moved straight up to Memphis. After cooking for us for eighteen years, seven days a week, she barely took the time to say goodbye. Thats how they are, thats typical; there’s never been a one of them had ulcers.