Jordan County Read online

  After that he began to play it for an hour every afternoon, and by the end of January he was playing it mornings too, without the quilt. But it was March, the tree budding in the abrupt Mississippi springtime, before he left the cabin with the horn. Except that now he left by the front door — Nora slept on the cot in the kitchen, having surrendered the front-room bed to Duff — it was like the nights a dozen years ago, when he would steal away to hear forbidden music on Bantam Street.

  That was where he went, this time, too. As he walked up the steps of the Mansion House he heard the piano going strong on Deed I Do. Looking across the dance room, through the smoke and around the heads and shoulders of the dancers, he saw Blind Bailey’s broad blue back and his gray head bobbing in time to the music. A young man in overalls sat wooden-faced beside him, strumming a guitar. Duff crossed the room and stood behind the piano, watching the heavy hands move over the keyboard. Some of the keys were dead or badly out of tune, from stretched strings or missing hammers, but Blind Bailey knew how to avoid them; he only struck them for special effects. Duff raised the cornet, waiting, then came in on the beat, carrying it wide open for sixteen bars before fading for the piano break, and they took it together for a ride-out finish, the guitarist straggling along as best he could.

  “Lord, Lord, Duff, it’s good to hear you,” Blind Bailey said, lifting his head. The spectacle lenses were blue disks, flat and opaque as target centers in the glare of the lightbulb. “How you been so long?”

  “Fine as fine,” Duff told him, smiling. “Just you play me some more of that mean piano.”

  At the cabin four hours later the lamp was burning and Nora was waiting. This was like the old days too. As was her custom, she had got up in the night to see if there was anything he needed. Finding the bed empty, she dressed and went straight to Bantam Street. From the sidewalk outside the Mansion House, along with a crowd of others who could not afford the twenty cents admission, she heard the cornet. Then she came home, lighted the lamp, and waited.

  When Duff had closed the door and turned to face her with the horn in his hands, she said calmly: “I aint going to try and reason with you, because you grown now and besides I learnt better long ago. But aint you got no more sense than to be at that place, blowing that thing with them wore-out lungs that the doctor his own self’s done told you wouldnt last a half a year that way?” She waited for him to answer, then said again, “Aint you?”

  “Noam.”

  “All right. Go on to bed. Satan can call you his own where I’m concerned.”

  At first he went to the Mansion House twice a week, rationing his pleasure. By the middle of April he was there every other night, and before the end of May he was not missing a session. But by that time, with spring an actuality, not a promise, and the long hot days of summer drawing in, the trees and flowers in full leaf and bloom before the press of heat made them wilt, there was more to draw him than the music. There was a girl.

  Her name was Julia, a light brown girl with a wide mouth, sloe eyes, and a boisterous manner. She had the loveliest laugh he’d ever heard. Nineteen, slim, high-bosomed, she had come to Bristol from Vicksburg when her parents opened a café on Bantam Street; their name was Kinship. She had her faults and Duff saw them from the beginning — a capacity for cruelty, for example, in any connection that clashed with her self-interest — but they were the faults of youth and were therefore not only correctible but were also as charming as her virtues, at least in his eyes. With his New York clothes and haircut and his aura of fame, Duff attracted her from the start, but the first time he noticed her was one night when he had just finished a fast chorus of Wish I Could Shimmy. She was wearing a knee-length red silk dress and suddenly, out of nowhere, she leaned forward and threw her arms around his neck.

  “Oh people, people!” she cried. “Look here at my horn-blowing man!”

  “Back up, gal,” Duff told her, almost gruffly. “Back up and I’ll blow one just for you.”

  This kind of thing had happened before—on the river, in New Orleans, and up in Harlem — but this time something in him answered. He played the Corn Crib Blues, and for the rest of the night, on into morning, whenever he looked out over the dance floor he saw Julia either watching him or performing for him, switching the red dress and preening like a bird. When the last number was over and the room emptied, she was waiting for him. After coffee at the All Nite Café he walked her home, and from the porch swing they watched the dawn come through. There appeared to be two sources of light, one descending from the sky, one rising from the earth; when they touched, joined, it was broad open daylight. He had never noticed this before.

  In the three weeks that it lasted Duff experienced much else that he had never known before. Except for his music and his illness he had never been involved in anything he could not walk away from. His mother had not held him, for all her wiles, and even at the reform school he could look forward to a time when he would be released. But there was no such assurance here. Sick as he was, his system upset by coughing fits that were growing more frequent and more violent all the time, he was conscious of his inability to hold her. Within a week of the night she threw her arms around his neck and called him her horn-blowing man, Julia began letting him know his shortcomings. Wherever they were he was always aware that he did not satisfy her wants, whether at the All Nite Café, where she expected raucous talk to impress her friends — and even strangers — with his life in the big time, or in the high back room of the Mansion House, where she would rail at him with all the passion he was unable to assuage.

  There were really only two considerations that kept her by him even for the short three weeks it lasted. One was her wanting to get full benefit of the reflected fame, which was there whether he would boast of it or not; the other was a lack of anyone to take his place. Two weeks were enough to exhaust the first, and the second was filled by the end of the third week. But Julia could not be satisfied with just leaving Duff for another man. She wanted to be won, preferably after a contest that would display her as the object of contention. The man she chose was likely to furnish whatever violence she desired.

  He was Chance Jackson, a gambler well known in the region for his instant willingness to bet on almost anything, as well as for his loud clothes, his pearl-gray derby, and the big yellow diamond studs he wore in place of buttons on his shirtfront. Born and raised in Oxford, where his mother worked in the home of the president of the University of Mississippi, he had been given his mother’s employer’s official title, Chancellor, as a first name. Faculty members and townspeople thought it a ludicrous name, until he began growing up and it was shortened to Chance. Then they realized how apt it was. While still in knee breeches he became known as a master at dice, coon-can, pitty pat, and all the other Negro gambling games. When he had cleaned out his section of the state he widened his field, and now he went from town to town, staying no longer than the winnings were good; ‘pickings’ he called them. He was nearing forty. There were men who had saved between visits for more than twenty years, awaiting an opportunity to skin him, not so much for the money — though it would have been considerable, by their standards — as for the prestige, the sake of being able to boast about it later. It had been known to happen, but the satisfaction was short-lived; they either had to face him when he returned, or decline the contest, or move outside the circle of his glory. All the same, they kept waiting, hoping, trying, and they kept losing.

  Bristol was on his itinerary; he came here twice a year. A section at the rear of the Mansion House dance room was partitioned off by an old theater curtain nailed along its top edge to the ceiling, thus forming an alcove in which two blanketed card tables and a canvas-bottomed dice table stood under steel-blue cones of down-funneled light. Whenever there was a hush on the dance floor, which was rare, the rattle of dice and the cries of gamblers came through the curtain. Foot-high letters across its center spelled ASBESTOS and there were faded advertisements of harness shops and restaurants, guns
mithies and clothing stores, whose dead proprietors had never guessed the final room their names would grace.

  Duff was resting on one of Blind Bailey’s special numbers when he saw the gray derby above the red silk dress. He watched, brooding, for Chance had a reputation for handling women that almost equaled his reputation for handling cards and dice; it was a bad sign that he had forsaken the gambling alcove for the dance floor. But when the piano stopped, Julia came to the rostrum. “Make him leave me lone,” she said. “I’m scared of that man.”

  “Whats he doing?”

  “Nothing. But I’m scared. He holds me funny.”

  “Stay away from him then,” Duff told her.

  Half an hour later he saw them together again. He could see that they were talking while they danced, Julia with her head tilted back, looking up at Chance, who was looking toward Duff on the bandstand. Though he could not hear what they were saying, Julia was telling the gambler that Duff had said he would beat her if she danced with him again. “He’ll do it, too,” she added.

  “Him?” Chance peered through the smoke at Duff. “He aint going to bother nobody. Watch here.” He danced toward the rostrum. “Hey, boy,” he said. “Was you wanting to beat on somebody?”

  It was between pieces; Blind Bailey had just finished the special, and Duff sat with the cornet in his lap. The gambler’s diamonds flashed yellow as he leaned forward, one arm around Julia’s waist. His face was close; his nose was large, fleshy and powerful-looking. “Was you?” he insisted. Duff did not answer. Chance leaned closer and spoke again. His voice was soft, almost caressing, his face less than six inches away. “I said was you?”

  “Move on and let that girl alone,” Duff told him.

  What followed happened so quickly that he was not aware of any sequence of events until it had ended. Without taking his arm from around Julia’s waist, Chance raised the other hand. Then — not making a fist, not even using the flat of his palm — he touched Duff under the chin with the tips of his fingers, lifted him gently clear of the chair, and toppled him over backward. There was a loud thump as his head hit the floor, and then, his ears still ringing, Duff heard a clang as the cornet struck.

  “Watch out there, whoever!” Blind Bailey cried. “Quit that horseplay round the bandstand.”

  Looking up, Duff saw the pearl-gray derby haloing the smiling chocolate face. “Just who was you going to give that beating to?” Chance asked.

  The cornet, on the planks beside Duff’s head, had an ugly dent in the column, just behind the bell. He saw this first; then he saw Julia. The gambler’s hand, still clasping her waist, showed dark against the red silk of her dress. She was smiling now, and Duff realized that he had heard her laugh as he went over, a laugh that had been a cry, a squeal almost, not only of nervous excitement but of delight.

  Afterwards he was to tell himself that the smile had caused what followed; the smile stayed in his mind even more than the laugh, for the smile was in cold blood. He had expected to look up and find her striking at the gambler with one of her high-heeled shoes. Instead he found her smiling. There were other factors, too. His nerves were upset from knowing the girl would not stay with him, and his music had been getting worse because he had been holding back to stave off coughing fits. All this combined and contributed, so that when he went over backward, sent sprawling not by a blow from a fist or even a slap from an open palm, but by the almost gentle lift and nudge of fingertips, when he saw the scarred cornet and then looked up to find Julia smiling approval of what had been done to him, he reached the end of misery and he knew already what he was going to do. Curiously enough, however, he felt no particular hatred toward Chance; hating the gambler would have been like hating the car with which a careless or spiteful driver had run him down. He went out, carrying the dented horn, and behind him the crowd was laughing.

  He walked fast, went up the cabin steps and into the room, crossed straight to the bureau, and opened the drawer. For a moment the cornet and the pistol lay side by side, nickel and gold, as they had done through the months he spent in bed. Then he turned with the gun in his hand and heard the canvas cot squeak in the kitchen. “Duff?” Closing the front door behind him he heard his mother’s voice again, sharper this time: “Duff!” He left, walking fast, the pistol heavy in his pocket.

  Blind Bailey was banging out Tin Roof Blues as he came up the steps and into the dance room. Chance and Julia were dancing in a far corner. Duff shouldered his way through the crowd until he was within ten feet of them. Then he took out the pistol and waited. The other couples faded toward the walls; the room was hushed except for the loud piano and the cries from the dice table beyond the curtain; “Come on, eight!” a voice shouted with all the fervency of prayer. Chance and Julia, cheek to cheek in a slow turn, did not notice any of this. The gambler’s head continued to revolve until beneath his lowered lids he saw the glint of the pistol: whereupon, the gyral movement half completed, he stopped, still clasping his partner. He moved Julia slowly aside, never taking his eyes off the pistol. It was as stylized as ballet.

  Chance had time to raise one hand, the palm showing pink in a gesture of protest; “Wait a minute, boy,” he said, maneuvering for time to reach for the pistol everyone knew he carried under his waistband. Then the gun went off — louder, Duff thought, than anything he had ever heard; he had never been that close to a shot before. The piano stopped like a dropped watch as the gambler went back against the theater curtain and slid down it to the floor. The bullet had passed through his outstretched palm, ranging upward; it entered his forehead, just above one eyebrow, and came out high at the back of his head. The gray derby rose, and now it fell, spinning on its crown to show a new red lining matching the red of Julia’s dress.

  There were hurried patters and scrabbling sounds as dancers and gamblers went out through the two doorways and the windows. For a moment the curtain billowed like a sail in a strong wind; then it hung straight, becalmed. There was silence again, and Duff and Julia and Blind Bailey were alone in the room with the body of Chance Jackson, who appeared to muse profoundly upon his shoetips. Forgotten cigarettes raised their plumes among overturned chairs and half-empty beer bottles. Julia began to back away, eyes bulged, one hand against her mouth. “Dont,” she said, looking into the muzzle of the pistol. “Dont …” Duff watched her until the end of the curtain lifted and she was gone.

  Alone on the bandstand, under the steady glare of the naked bulb, Blind Bailey sat with his hands suspended above the keyboard, the flat blue disks of his spectacles reflecting no light. “Whoever you are, God bless you,” he said. “And please dont shoot a blind old man.”

  Then there were footsteps on the porch and at the door. Dropping the pistol, Duff turned and saw the policeman at the end of the room. A sand-colored snapbrim hat cast a parabola down the top half of his face. Beneath this shadow the mouth moved steady and thin-lipped.

  “Dont try nothing, boy,” the white face said. “Just stand there.”

  He was in jail three months awaiting trial for having done violence against the peace and dignity of the State of Mississippi. It was held in early September, the hottest weather of the year. The judge sat behind his high bench, an old man who wore a black alpaca jacket and a string tie, despite the heat, and had a habit of clearing his throat with a rattle of phlegm to signal his displeasure as he watched the opposing lawyers around the stem of a bulldog pipe. The jury was out less than half an hour; the district attorney had made much of the fact that Duff had left the dancehall for the pistol and returned; here was premeditation indeed, he said, and here was the chance for right-thinking people to show the lawless element whether they intended to put up with all these barrelhouse killings or not. Duff’s lawyer, a young man just out of law school and appointed by the court, sat there helpless though he tried to earn his fifty dollars by objecting as often as possible. When the jurors had filed back into the box and the foreman had reported (“Guilty as charged,” he said, without recommendation of mer
cy) the judge leaned forward and peered at the prisoner over the swoop of his pipe. This was the last case of the term; tomorrow he would make another halt on the circuit.

  “Do you have anything to say before sentence of the court is passed upon you?”

  No one heard Duff say anything but those on the forward side of the rail saw his lips form the words No Sir. Overhead the paddle-blade fans made a creaking. The judge paused, leaning forward, forearms flat along the bench. He watched the prisoner intently. Then, seeming to gather his strength for some particularly energetic pleasure, he spoke slowly like an actor measuring up to his big speech:

  “I sentence you to be committed to a felon’s cell, and there to be safely kept until the tenth day of October in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and forty, at which time you shall suffer death by electrocution, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

  There was a sigh, a collective suspiration; then the spectators rose and filed for the door. They showed an unaccustomed politeness toward each other, having been in the presence of death, though once they were out in the hall they threw it off. A deputy led Duff down the stairway, across the rear lawn of the courthouse, and back to his upstairs cell in the county jail. The door closed behind him with an iron clang like the final stroke of a clock. But that was all right; he was used to it by now, after three months in the cell; today was not much different from yesterday. He sat looking up at the barred window, the high hot bright blue September sky.

  Next morning when Nora came to see him she carried a bundle wrapped in freshly laundered flour-sacking, the creases still crisp from ironing. Even before he unwrapped it he could feel the familiar, compressed shape of the cornet. There was no instrument repair man closer than Memphis, so Nora had taken it to a local gunsmith to have the dent smoothed out; it was her way of asking her son’s pardon for having told him Satan could call him his own. Duff played the horn whenever the turnkey would let him. The other prisoners didnt mind. They liked it, the white ones in their individual cells and the Negroes in the bull-pen. The notes were less blary now, for his lungs were worse, but the tone was as clear as ever. Every day there would be a sizable group in the yard below the cell window, sitting under trees or leaning against the weathered concrete wall of the jail itself, listening.