As voodoo rituals go, this one seemed pretty tame.
The next morning Twist came down to pound on my door at six A.M. and make sure I caught my morning chat with Duckbury. When I calmed down enough to speak without obscenities, I said, "Let me get this straight. You want me to keep talking to the old bigot?"
Twist snapped his fingers a few times to set a rhythm and sang:
You must not feed the fire of intolerance if you would fight discrimination.
Judge not the evil of another man for you are not the Tribulation.
That made as much sense as any of Duckbury's war stories, so I smiled, nodded politely, considered getting out my guitar to try some busking…
This kept up for weeks. Between errands I became a regular at the meetings in the attic, and I kept waiting for someone to elaborate on the cost bit.
It never happened. So in the mornings I'd head downstairs to share beer and dire talk with Duckbury, who seemed to think some sort of battle for my soul was shaping up, and try as I might I could not disabuse him.
It was dull, up in that attic, listening, listening, listening, and hoping to learn; sometimes from Rasham, who spoke in rhymed couplets and sang as often as he spoke; sometimes from Jimmy Twist, who was a swell chap at parties and on the whole a lot more fun to be around. In time I did learn to tell who he was at any given moment, and in time I learned enough of the island patois to join the conversations.
Much of what I said amused Twist and caused him to light up another spliff; much of what I said annoyed Rasham, and as August trickled away, he grew increasingly impatient with me.
But truth to tell, I was getting impatient with Rasham, too. I'd spent weeks with him, listening to his endless prattle on life, death, and the immortal soul, and I'd yet to learn a single musical riff! One night he sent me, alone, to walk the streets of Brixton 'til dawn, just to prove that I had no need for fear. Okay, so I learned Brixton wasn't nearly as nasty a place as I'd thought, but that taught me less than nil about music.
The closest we came to music was the night he asked me to bring my guitar up to his room, only to touch it, snort derisively, and say, "This be metal, mostly, and plastic. The livingness be buried too deep. You must get another instrument."
Righty-o, no problem, I'll just write a cheque. Shall I get gold-plated tuning pegs while I'm at it? He did not appreciate the sarcasm.
When the last week of August hove into view, though, Rasham seemed to have a change of heart. "The covenant between man and the music of Jah," he said one day, "be not lightly entered into. Mister Stig, you be not yet ready." He sighed. "You may never be ready." He arched his back, looked at the cobwebbed ceiling, and scratched his head. For the first time, I noticed a sense of weariness in the way he moved, like an old horse in his last summer.
"But I can wait no longer; my time be growing very short," Rasham continued, at last. "Mister Stig, I have one last errand for you." And this time, the instructions he gave me made sense.
Until he insisted on sending Jimmy Twist with me, though, I didn't realise how serious this was to him. Taking my Fender along, we spent the entire day prowling through the guitar shops of Charing Cross Road, trying to find an instrument he approved of. I saw a few shiny new Strats I really liked and a metal-flake pink Hagstrom with pushbuttons that appealed to my sense of humor, but those he dismissed with a contemptuous snort. I looked at a variety of Gibsons as if I could afford them and in one shop actually found the box of an L20 archtop some ass of a heavy-metal rocker had sawn the neck off, trying to build a custom guitar which I showed Twist as I explained about the neck of Uncle Lewis's guitar.
I swear to God there were tears in his eyes when he laid fingers on the L20 and answered in Rasham's voice. "It be a good dream," he said, "but only the living can be healed. The dead cannot be risen by such as I." We moved on.
Toward dusk, I was getting fed up. "Let's hang it up," I suggested. "Maybe we'll have better luck on the morrow."
"No," Twist said, "it must be tonight. Rasham's time be growing very short." I argued, but in the end we tried one last pawnshop.
I was up front, trying to tune an old Harptone with a neck like a longbow, when I heard the most marvelous popping and jiving sounds come dancing out of the back of the shop. The proprietor and I walked over to find Twist standing behind a dusty old Kay upright bass, running his hands over it as a man would caress his lover. "Stig," he said, "this be it."
"Jimmy," I said, "I don't like to play bass. Front men are always guitarists."
He turned his eyes upon me and repeated, "This be it." He would brook no argument from me, but instead turned to the pawnbroker and started haggling over price.
Half an hour later, I walked out of there a bass player.
Twist insisted on taking the bass up to his room that night. I was quite tired from the day's shopping and so turned in early, but about midnight I was awakened by one of his friends pounding on my door. "Rasham say to come up," was his message. I hitched up my pants and followed him up the steps.
Rasham evidently had been preparing for this for some time. The flat was crowded with black men and women, a few of whom I'd come to know; the air was heavy with the smell of roasted chicken and prime ganja. What struck me as most odd was how quiet the people were; this night the music, the powerful and insistent music, was curiously absent.
My string bass lay in the middle of the floor, inside a circle of candles.
Rasham was kneeling, caressing its peghead, and cooing softly in island dialect. Looking up at me, he said, "Friends, it be time." Immediately, what little murmur of conversation there'd been died away. One by one, the people came to kneel in a great circle; one by one, the candles were snuffed out until at last there was but one candle burning in the center of the circle.
Rasham stood up and raised the bass to playing position.
"Friends," he began, "tonight I and I be calling together the people of Jah for to witness the sealing of the covenant. Mister Stig, come forward!" Hesitantly, I stepped up to the edge of the circle. He looked sternly at my pants and said, "You going to lose all your skin? Or just above the waist?" I must have looked quite puzzled because he shouted, "Take off your pants, mon!"
I wanted to laugh and walk out right then, but I looked at all those somber black faces and couldn't. Instead I slowly, hesitantly, and with a great deal of blushing, undid my fly and dropped my trousers. A few of the women giggled involuntarily at my lily-white bum, then hushed.
"That be better," Rasham said. "Now, take your instrument." He held forth the neck of the bass. I stepped forward awkwardly, for to take it as he wanted me to meant I had to stand with the one lit candle between my feet, and there was heat enough to notice on my more tender parts. But take it I did, and I stood there, nervous and uncomfortable, while he bowed his head and mumbled something.
"Rasham?" I interrupted him with a whisper, "is this, y'know, like magic?"
Rasham considered it a moment. "Yes," he said.
"Is this" I screwed my courage up "is this black magic?"
He smiled a wide, toothy grin. "Yes!"
"I'm not I mean, it's not like I really believe I have one, but I'm not selling my soul or anything, am I?"
Rasham's eyes bugged out, and then he burst into an incredible fit of Jimmy Twist laughter. In seconds, everyone in the room was convulsed with laughter. "Your soul?" Rasham gasped at last, wiping tears from his eyes.
"Why should I want such a sick, crippled thing? White boy, I do not try to take your soul. I be giving you one!"