In 1912 or 1913 you could run into Caleb Peck in just about any sporting house or dance hall in the city, always propped against the piano or the edge of the bandstand, puzzled and wistful, worn down from his menial daytime job, hoping to be allowed to fill in for some musician, though no one was that eager to have him. After all he did not play any brass, and most had no use for a fiddle. As for piano, he was a musical Rip Van Winkle. He had learned from a man who left New Orleans in the nineteenth century, when jazz was still spelled with two s’s. So in 1912 and 1913 Caleb merely hung around the edges of places, with a thin strained face from so much listening, from absorbing so much, from trying to understand. But in 1914 he discovered the blues, which he understood instantly without the slightest effort, and for the next twenty years you could find him in the same small area of the Vieux Carré, linked to a blind man by a length of twine and playing a fiddle above a slippery song.
While he stared now at the streaks of detergent on the green linoleum, he could hear White-Eye’s loopy thin voice and the twang he made sliding a bottleneck down the strings of his guitar. He sang “Careless Love” and “Mr. Crump.” He sang what Caleb made up—“Shut House” and “Whisky Alley” and “Cane Sugar Blues.” Then “The Stringtail Blues,” which some people credited to Caleb too but it was plainly White-Eye’s, telling how a blind man felt leaning on other people. Caleb’s fiddle shimmered and lilted, the guitar notes thrummed beneath it. Caleb had turned shabby, and not quite clean. It took money to be clean. He was surprised sometimes when he caught sight of himself in a window: the lanky man in a grimy frayed suit. Often he bore welts from the bedbugs in his rooming house, where he continued to live alone, unmarried, year after year. He had a great many friends but they were mostly transients, disappearing unexpectedly and resurfacing sometimes months later and sometimes never. Only White-Eye was permanent. Yet you could not say that they were friends, at least not in any visible way. They hardly talked at all. They never discussed their personal affairs. But some people noticed how their two stringed instruments spoke together continuously like old relations recollecting and nodding and agreeing, and how when Caleb and White-Eye parted for the night they stood silent a moment, as if wishing for something more to say, before turning and shambling off in their separate directions. At night White-Eye went to a wife he never named and an unknown number of descendants. Caleb went to work as watchman in a coffee warehouse; otherwise he would have starved. (He took no more than a deceptive jingle of coins from the lard bucket.) For twenty years he existed on four hours of sleep a night. He did it for the sake of a single body of music: those peculiarly prideful songs celebrating depression, a state he had once known very well. He could no longer imagine any other kind of life. If you asked where he came from, or who his family was, he would answer readily but without real thought. He never pictured the city he named or the people. His mind veered away from them, somehow. He preferred the present. He was happy where he was.
The other street musicians dwindled to a handful, and Story ville was closed and the jazz players went off to Chicago or the excursion boats or the artificial bands hired by debutantes’ mothers. But White-Eye and the Stringtail Man continued, supporting themselves more or less even through the Crash of 1929. They had become a fixture. Though not famous, they were familiar; and the poorest people were willing to give up a coin in order to keep the world from changing any more than it already had.
In 1934, on a Monday morning very early in the year, Caleb set out searching as he always did for the first faint sound of White-Eye’s guitar. (Their meetings were never prearranged. You would never suppose, at the close of a day, that they were planning to see each other tomorrow.) But he had not gone two blocks when a brown woman wearing a shawl came up and touched the scroll of his fiddle, and told him White-Eye was dead. She was his widow. On the very morning of the wake she had taken the trouble to locate Caleb and break the news and invite him to the funeral—a fact that he appreciated, though all he did was nod. Then he went home and sat for a long time on his bed. He wouldn’t answer when his landlady called him. But he did attend the funeral the following afternoon and even accompanied the family to the cemetery, a remote little field outside the city. He stood at the edge of the swampy grave between two tea-colored girls who stared at him and giggled. Throughout the ceremony he kept brushing his hair off his forehead with the back of his hand. He was, by then, nearly fifty years old. It was the first time he had stopped to realize that.
Now Caleb traveled the streets alone. Since he had never been a singer he merely fiddled. (No one guessed that White-Eye’s voice still rang inside his head.) The solitary strains of his music had a curious trick of blending with street sounds—with the voices of black women passing by or the hum of trolley lines or a huckster’s call. First you heard nothing; then you wondered; then the music separated itself and soared away and you stood stock still with your mouth open. But when people offered him a coin, moved by what they thought they might have heard, they found no tin cup to drop it in. They tucked it into his pockets instead. At night Caleb would find all his pockets lumpy and heavy and sometimes even a crumpled paper bill stuck into his belt. He could not always remember where it had come from. He merely piled it on top of his bureau. But as the months passed the dazed feeling left him, and one noon when he was sitting in a café eating red beans and rice he looked up at the waitress pouring coffee and realized that life was still going on.
He stayed in New Orleans two more years, and might have stayed forever if he had not fallen in with a pair of cornetists who talked him into taking a trip to Peacham. Peacham was a small, pretty town just to the north, still suffering like anyplace else from hard times and unemployment. But the mayor had hit upon a solution: he planned to make it a resort. (Nobody thought to ask him who would have the money to go there.) He published a three-color brochure claiming that Peacham had all the advantage of New Orleans with none of the crowds or city soot: fine food, lively bars, two full-sized nightclubs rocking with jazz, and musicians on every street corner. Then he set to work importing busloads of chefs, waitresses, and bartenders, as well as players of every known musical instrument. (In all the native population there were only three pianists—classical—and the minister’s daughter, who played the harp.) References were unnecessary. So were auditions. In a creaky wooden hotel on the wrong side of town musicians were stacked on top of one another like crated chickens, venturing out each morning to look picturesque on designated corners. But there was no one to drop money in their cups. The only visitors to Peacham were the same as always—aging citizens’ grown sons and daughters, come to spend a duty week in their parents’ homes. One by one the new employees lost hope and left, claiming they had never thought it would work anyhow. Only Caleb stayed. He had landed there more or less by accident, reluctant to leave New Orleans, but as it turned out he happened to like Peacham just fine. He figured he could enjoy himself there as well as anyplace else.
Now he worked days as janitor for an elementary school, and in the evenings he played his fiddle on the corner he had been assigned. He ate his meals at Sam’s Café, where a large red kind-faced waitress gave him double helpings of everything because she thought he was too skinny. This woman’s name was Bess. She lived just behind the café with her two-year-old boy. It was her opinion that Caleb’s hotel charged too much for his room, and bit by bit she persuaded him to move in with her instead. It wasn’t hard. (He was so agreeable.) Before he knew it he found himself settled in her kerosene-lit shack, in her brown metal bed, beneath her thin puckered quilt, which smelled faintly of bacon grease. If she was, perhaps, not the one he would have chosen out of all the women in the world, at least she was cheerful and easy-going. Sometimes he even considered marrying her, in order to give her son Roy a last name, but they were already so comfortable together that he never got around to it.
By 1942 Bess had saved enough money to buy a café of her own in Box Hill, a town some twenty miles away. Caleb wasn’
t sure he wanted to go; he liked it where he was. But Bess had her mind made up and so he followed, amiably enough, lugging his fiddle and his pennywhistle and a flute and a change of clothes. This time he took a job as short-order cook in Bess’s café. He found a park to do his fiddling in, a new crowd of children and courting couples to hear him in the evenings. Only nowadays more and more of the men wore uniforms, and the girls’ clothes were too uniform-like—square-shouldered, economical of fabric—and he wondered sometimes, playing his same old music, whether people could really understand it any more. In his head, White-Eye Ramford still sang of despair and jealousy and cruel women and other rich, wasteful things. The couples who listened seemed too efficient for all that.
There was some trouble with Caleb’s fingers—a little stiffness in the mornings. His bow hand could not get going at all if the weather was damp. And by now his hair was nearly white and his whiskers grew out silver whenever he went unshaven. On several occasions he was startled to find his father’s face gazing at him from mirrors. Only his father, of course, would not have worn a dirty Panama hat, especially in the house, or a bibbed white apron stained with catsup or trousers fastened with a safety pin.
Bess’s café was close to the freight tracks, between a seed store and a liquor store. There were some tough-looking men in those parts, but nothing that Bess couldn’t handle. Or so she said. Till one evening in March of 1948 when two customers started arguing over a mule and one drew a gun and shot Bess through the heart by accident. Caleb was fiddling at the time. When he returned, he thought he had walked into a movie. These milling policemen, detectives, and ambulance attendants, this woman on the floor with a purple stain down her front, surely had nothing to do with the real world. In fact he had trouble believing she was dead, and never properly mourned her except in pieces—her good-natured smile, her warm hands, her stolid fat legs in white stockings, all of which occurred to him in unexpected flashes for many years afterward.
Of course now Caleb was free to go anywhere, but he had the responsibility of Bess’s boy Roy, who was only thirteen or fourteen at the time. And besides, he liked Box Hill. He enjoyed his work as short-order cook, frying up masses of hash browns and lace-edged eggs in record time, and since the café now belonged to Roy what else could they do but stay on?
Year by year the café became more weathered, the sign saying “Bess’s Place” flaked and buckled. Roy grew into a stooped, skinny young man with an anxious look to him. They took turns minding the business. Evenings Caleb could still go out and fiddle “Stack O’Lee” and “Jogo Blues.” But his hands were knotted tighter and tighter now, and there were days when he had to leave the fiddle in its case. Then even the pennywhistle was beyond him; there was no way to tamp the airholes properly when his fingers stayed stiff and clenched. So he set about relearning the harmonica, which he had last played as a very young man. The warm metal in his hands and the smell of spit-dampened wood reminded him of home. He paused and looked out across the counter. Where were they all now? Dead? He wiped the harmonica on his trousers and went back to his song.
Roy said they needed a waitress. This was in 1963 or so. They had the same small group of customers they always had, railroad workers mostly and old men from the rooming houses nearby. Caleb couldn’t see that they had any sudden need for a waitress. But Roy went and got one anyhow, and once he had then Caleb understood. This was a pretty little blond girl, name of Luray Spivey. Before six weeks had passed she was Mrs. Roy Pickett and there was a jukebox in the corner playing rock-and-roll, not to mention all the changes in the apartment upstairs, where he and Roy had lived alone for so many years. She covered the walls of Roy’s bedroom with pictures of movie stars torn out of magazines, mainly Troy Donahue and Bobby Darin. She brightened the living room with curtains, cushions, plastic carnations and seashells. She followed Caleb around picking up his soiled clothes with little housewifely noises that amused him. “Hoo—ee!” she would say, holding an undershirt by the tips of her fingers. But she wasn’t the kind to run a man down. She knew when to stop housekeeping, too, and sit with Roy and Caleb and a six-pack of beer in front of the second-hand television she had talked Roy into buying for her. In the café she cheered everybody up, with her little pert jokes and the way she would toss her head and the flippy short white skirt that spun around her when she moved off to the grill with an order. All the customers enjoyed having her around.
Then the twins were born, in the fall of 1964. Well, of course life is hard with twins; you can’t expect a woman to be as easy-going as ever. Plus there was the financial angle. Certainly people require more money once they start having children. Luray was just frazzled with money worries, you could see it. She wanted so many things for her babies. She was always after Roy to take a second job, maybe driving a cab. “How we going to even eat?” she would ask him, standing there scared and fierce in her seersucker duster. (Once she had ordered her clothes off the back pages of movie magazines, all these sequined low-necked dresses and push-up bras.) So Roy took a job with the Prompt Taxi Company from six to twelve every night and Caleb ran the café alone. Not that he minded. There wasn’t much business anyway and he had just about given up his evening fiddling now that the park was gone and his hands were so stubborn and contrary. (Besides, sometimes lately when he played he had the feeling that people thought of him as a—character, really. Someone colorful. He had never meant to be that, he only wanted to make a little music.) So he would putter around the café fixing special dishes and talking to the customers, most of whom were friends, and after the plates were rinsed he might pull out his harmonica and settle himself on a stool at the counter and give them a tune or two. “Pig Meat Papa” he played, and “Broke and Hungry Blues” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” The old men listened and nodded heavily and, “Now that is so,” they said when he was done—a much finer audience than any courting couple. Till Luray came down from upstairs with her hair in curlers and her duster clutched around her. “What all is going on here? Caleb, you have woken both babies when I had just slaved my butt off putting them down. What is everybody sitting here for? Shoo now! Shoo!” As if they were taking up seats that someone else wanted, when it was clear no more customers were coming; and anyway, they were having fun. There was no point to hurrying off when you were having fun.
Then Luray got back in her transparent white uniform and said she saw that she would have to start waiting tables again; men customers would leave her tips that they wouldn’t leave Caleb. “Well, naturally,” Caleb said. “They’re personal friends, they wouldn’t want to embarrass me.” “It don’t embarrass me,” said Luray, tossing her head. She would open the stair door, listening for the babies. Caleb worried about her leaving them alone but she said they would be fine. She was saving up to buy them an electric bottle sterilizer. Caleb didn’t think a sterilizer was all that necessary but he cold see that, to Luray, there was always the chance that some single magic object might be the one to guarantee that her babies would live happily forever; and maybe the sterilizer was that object. So he was not surprised when after the sterilizer was bought she started saving up for a double stroller, and after that a pair of collapsible canvas carbeds although they didn’t own a car. And he didn’t hold it against her when she started criticizing his work, although certainly there were times when she got him down. “What do I see you doing here? How come you to be using pure cream? What you got in mind for all them eggs?”
The fact was that Caleb was pretty much a custom chef by now. He had known his few patrons a very long time, and since he was not a man who easily showed his liking for people he chose to cook them their favorite foods instead—the comfort foods that every man turns to when he is feeling low. For Jim Bolt it was hot milk and whisky; for old Emmett Gray, fried garden-fresh tomatoes with just a sprinkle of sugar; and Mr. Ebsen the freight agent liked home-baked bread. The narrow aluminum shelves behind the counter, meant to hold only dry cereals, potato chips, and Hostess cream-fi
lled cupcakes, were a jumble of condiments in Mason jars and Twinings tea from England, Scotch oatmeal tins, Old Bay crab spice, and Major Grey chutney. The café appeared, in fact, to be a kitchen in the home of a very large family. It had looked that way for years, but this was the first time Luray noticed. “What kind of a business is this?” she asked. “Do you want to send us all to the poor-house? Here am I with these two growing babies and lying awake at night just wondering will we manage and there you are cooking up French omelettes and rice pudding, things not even on the menu and I don’t even want to know how much you’re charging for them …”
Luray took over his job, whipping an apron around her little tiny waist. She acted as if she thought Caleb had grown weak in the head. She sent him up to tend the babies. Caleb had never been good with children. The sight of them made him wretched; he was so sorry for humans in the state of childhood that he couldn’t stand to be near them. When one of the babies cried his insides knotted up and he felt bleak and hopeless. So he tended them as if from a distance, holding himself aloof, and as soon as it was naptime he hurried downstairs to socialize with the customers. He sat turning on a stool, talking and laughing, a little silly with relief, plunking down money from his own pocket to pay for a cup of coffee so Luray wouldn’t send him off. He would fish out his harmonica with stiff, thickened fingers and give the men “Shut House” or “Whisky Alley.” Till Luray stopped in front of him with her hands on her hips and her head cocked. “Hear that? Hear what I hear? Hear them babies crying?” Then Caleb put away his harmonica and went back upstairs on slow, heavy feet.