Those Deep Elm Brown’s Ferry Blues
I HEARD A WHIPPOORWILL last night, the old man said.
Say you did? Rabon asked without interest. Rabon was just in from his schoolteaching job. He seated himself in the armchair across from the bed and hitched up his trouser legs and glanced covertly at his watch. The old man figured Rabon would put in his obligatory five minutes then go in his room and turn the stereo on.
It sounded just like them I used to hear in Alabama when I was a boy, Scribner said. Sometimes he would talk about whippoorwills or the phases of the moon simply because he got some perverse pleasure out of annoying Rabon. Rabon wanted his father’s mind sharp and the old man on top of things, and it irritated him when the old man’s mind grew preoccupied with whippoorwills or drifted back across the Tennessee state line into Alabama. Scribner was developing a sense of just how far he could push Rabon into annoyance, and he fell silent, remembering how irritated Rabon had been that time in Nashville when Scribner had recognized the doctor.
The doctor was telling Rabon what kind of shape Scribner was in, talking over the old man’s head as if he wasn’t even there. All this time Scribner was studying the doctor with a speculative look on his face, trying to remember where he had seen him. He could almost but not quite get a handle on it.
Physically he’s among the most impressive men of his age I’ve examined, the doctor was saying. There’s nothing at all to be concerned about there, and his heart is as strong as a man half his age. But Alzheimer’s is irreversible, and we have to do what we can to control it.
Scribner had remembered. He was grinning at the doctor. I’ve seen you before, ain’t I?
Excuse me?
I remember you now, the old man said. I seen you in Alabama.
I’m afraid not, the doctor said. I’m from Maine and this is the farthest south I’ve ever been.
Scribner couldn’t figure why the doctor would lie about it. Sure you was. We was at a funeral. You was wearing a green checked suit and a little derby hat and carrying a black shiny walkin stick. There was a little spotted dog there lookin down in the grave and whinin and you rapped it right smart with that cane. I hate a dog at a funeral, you said.
The doctor was looking sympathetic, and Scribner was going to try to lie out of it. Rabon was just looking annoyed. Who were you burying? he asked. This confused Scribner. He tried to think. Hell, I don’t know, he said. Some dead man.
I’m afraid you’ve got me mixed up with someone else, the doctor said.
Scribner was becoming more confused yet, the sand he was standing on was shifting, water rising about his shoes, his ankles.
I reckon I have, he finally said. That would have been sixtyodd years ago and you’d have to be a hell of a lot older than what you appear to be.
In the car Rabon said, If all you can do is humiliate me with these Alabama funeral stories I wish you would just let me do the talking when we have to come to Nashville.
You could handle that, all right, the old man said.
Now Scribner was back to thinking about whippoorwills. How Rabon was a science teacher who only cared about dead things and books. If you placed a whippoorwill between the pages of an enormous book and pressed it like a flower until it was a paper-thin collage of blood and feathers and fluted bone then Rabon might take an interest in that.
You remember that time a dog like to took your leg off and I laid it out with a hickory club?
No I don’t, and I don’t know where you dredge all this stuff up.
Dredge up hell, the old man said. I was four days laying up in jail because of it.
If it happened at all it happened to Alton. I can’t recall you ever beating a dog or going to jail for me. Or acknowledging my existence in any other way, for that matter.
The old man was grinning slyly at Rabon. Pull up your britches leg, he said.
What?
Pull up your britches leg and let’s have a look at it.
Rabon’s slacks were brown-and-tan houndstooth checked. He gingerly pulled the cuff of one leg up to the calf.
I’m almost sure it was the other one, Scribner said.
Rabon pulled the other leg up. He was wearing wine-colored calf-length socks. Above the sock was a vicious-looking scar where the flesh had been shredded, the puckered scar red and poreless and shiny as celluloid against the soft white flesh.
Ahh, the old man breathed.
Rabon dropped his cuff. I got this going through a barbedwire fence when I was nine years old, he said.
Sure you did, the old man said. I bet a German shepherd had you by the leg when you went through it, too.
LATER HE SLEPT FITFULLY with the lights on. When he awoke, he didn’t know what time it was. Where he was. Beyond the window it was dark, and the lighted window turned the room back at him. He didn’t know for a moment what room he was in, what world the window opened onto. The room in the window seemed cut loose and disassociated, adrift in the space of night.
He got up. The house was quiet. He wandered into the bathroom and urinated. He could hear soft jazzy piano music coming from somewhere. He went out of the bathroom and down a hall adjusting his trousers and into a room where a pudgy man wearing wire-rimmed glasses was seated at a desk with a pencil in his hand, a sheaf of papers spread before him. The man looked up, and the room rocked and righted itself, and it was Rabon.
The old man went over and seated himself on the side of the bed.
You remember how come I named you Rabon and your brother Alton?
Yes, the man said, making a mark on a paper with a red-leaded pencil.
Scribner might not have heard. It was in Limestone County, Alabama, he said. I growed up with Alton and Rabon Delmore, and they played music. Wrote songs. I drove them to Huntsville to make their first record. Did I ever tell you about that?
No more than fifty or sixty times, Rabon said. But I could always listen to it again.
They was damn good. Had some good songs, “Deep Elm Blues.” “Brown’s Ferry Blues.” “When you go down to Deep Elm keep your money in your shoes,” the first line went. They wound up on the Grand Ole Opry. Wound up famous. They never forgot where they come from, though. They was just old country boys. I’d like to hear them songs again.
I bought you a cassette player and all those old-time country and bluegrass tapes.
I know it. I appreciate it. Just seems like I can’t ever get it to work right. It ain’t the same anyway.
I’ll take Brubeck myself.
If that’s who that is then you can have any part of him.
It’s late, Papa. Don’t you think you ought to be asleep?
I was asleep. Seems like I just catnap. Sleep when I’m sleepy. Wake up when I’m not. Not no night and day anymore. Reckon why that is?
I’ve got all this work to do.
Go ahead and work then. I won’t bother you.
The old man sat silent a time watching Rabon grade papers. Old-man heavy in the chest and shoulders, looking up at the school-teacher out of faded eyes. Sheaf of iron-gray hair. His pale eyes flickered as if he’d thought of something, but he remained silent. He waited until Rabon finished grading the paper he was working on and in the space between his laying it aside and taking up another one the old man said, Say whatever happened to Alton, anyway?
Rabon laid the paper aside ungraded. He studied the old man. Alton is dead, he said.
Dead? Say he is? What’d he die of?
He was killed in a car wreck.
The old man sat in silence digesting this as if he didn’t quite know what to make of it. Finally he said, Where’s he buried at?