“Hell,” he said, “looks like ... looks like ...”
One of the fieldhands spoke up. “Like God’s trombone.”
Doc whirled around angrily but as quickly realized that was exactly what it looked like. “That’s right. A big trombone.” And the thing in the house—it, too, was some sort of instrument. What had passed across his land during the night? “This don’t make no kind of sense.” While he wore a consternated smile, he marked the worker who had spoken—a young man. A smart, clever, and unbranded young man. Wouldn’t do to have a smart satchel-mouthed nigger roaming in their midst. Liable to foment all sorts of trouble. He would have to sublease Spangler’s Mill again. Soon. As for the mystery trombone, it was so great a mystery that he saw no point in trying to wrestle it to earth. “Drag this curlicue outten here now, and you all get back to work,” he told them. “And don’t be worrying yourselves over what it portends. It don’t portend shit.”
They continued staring at the trombone shape for a while before moving off; all save the satchel-mouthed boy. He caught Doc in his stare, and it penetrated and drew fear like a venom from the white man’s heart.
Doc retreated from the field. Back on the lawn beside his house, he grabbed Ed Rose by the arm and asked him, “Who is that boy?”
“A-which?” Ed answered.
Doc turned him around and pointed. The workers had all returned to their labors. He knew them, knew their shapes, but he could not pick out the one who had stared at him. “Where the hell he get to?” The cotton grew waist-high. Doc convinced himself that the boy was crouched down, hiding, afraid. He wanted very much for that particular bastard to be afraid. Ed interrupted his search. “By the way, Doc, you seen Curly this morning? He ain’t around. Nobody’s seen him since last night, when he went out after our little business. Said he couldn’t sleep, had some kinda tune in his head.”
“Too much booze in his head, you mean. He gets back, you send him to see me. I’m not in a tolerating mood this morning.” Curly did not reappear all day. Doc’s mood developed a razor edge.
That night, alone in his bed, he heard distant thunder, rhythmic and incessant. Jungle drumming derived from a jungle band whose members existed solely in the aether; travelers in the air, ghosts as surely as a skeleton scuffling on his grave.
The image jolted him awake. The sound of jungle thumping diminished. It rounded into words or something like words, briefly: “Juba, juba, juba,” a droned spell, which pressed the consciousness out of him. He lacked the means to fight its power, but prayed to keep the evil music far out in the bush. “Don’ ever let ’em in,” he muttered, then faded away himself like a lost radio signal.
Screaming woke Doc. Unmistakably Sally’s voice, it sawed through the ceiling below. He wrestled his pants over his long Johns, snapping up his suspenders while he ran along the hall. As he pivoted around the newel post, the screaming subsided into blubbering hysteria, and he followed it to the first floor. Such a sprawling Goddamned house, this antebellum layer cake of his.
He stormed along the hall, cursing “God damn you, Sally, shut up,” but his anger couldn’t hold in the face of the new anomaly. It overwhelmed him—as big and broad as a church steeple. This time he knew what he looked at: He had forged the musical link. It was the bell of a trumpet, and for absolute sure it had dropped from out of the sky, because it had pinned somebody beneath it. One arm protruded, nearly severed by the swept gold rim. One arm, a white arm. A familiar white arm. Bubba’s arm. His cold hand gripped tightly an equally cold branding iron. The dead idiot, what was he doing parading through the house with the fucking eye of God on a stick? Somebody would see, and some of them had surely been on the wrong end of it. A crawdad could have figured it out and put a name to it: Grand Cyclops and Son.
Doc got down on his knees to pry back the fingers. He drew the iron out of his son’s hand. Sally continued her bubbly whining. He would’ve liked to have smacked her with the iron. Instead, he struck the trumpet bell. It clanged loudly. He thought, “Music destroyed my son.” More than that, the trumpet like the clarinet was hollow.
Tossing down the bent brand, he tried to move the bell. He shoved it, grabbed onto the top and tried to tilt it up, he pushed it, climbed up the side and tried to pull it over. His bare feet squealed as they slid down the curved surface. He hung from the lip, his head back. He mewled to God, noticing abstractly that the ceiling remained intact. Yet the thing had passed right through it, must have done—the whole floor had buckled when it hit. He wiped the spittle off his lips and backed up into the counter. Lizzie stood there, struck stupid in her horror. She didn’t even notice him.
What plague had been visited upon him? For what? He went to church like clockwork, prayed to and paid the Lord. He knew about original sin, the flood of Noah and the plague of locusts, about coveting your neighbor’s wife, about the exodus. How could a man who comprehended those things be thus cursed?
He noticed his wife on her knees behind the bell. She had torn out some of her hair, and saliva foamed on her lips. Her anguish came in great heaves. Doc rushed over to her and tugged her hands down to her sides. “Calm,” he said, “Calm now, honey. Easy does it.” As if subduing a horse, he spoke. It worked for him but not for her. The strain of all she’d kept inside had broken Sally at last.
Eventually her daughters arrived at the scene. Debra reenacted her mother’s squall, but Psalmody looked on with strange contentment, like Casandra watching as the wooden horse birthed inside her walls. Debra’s screams galvanized Lizzie, and she snapped her skirts at and shooed both girls from the room, at which moment Carpy pushed his way in. He tripped over the bent iron and stopped still. Behind him came Ed Rose and a dozen field hands, but Carpy hardly noticed them. Ed ran over to Doc. The party had been on its way to move the thing in back, but trumpet or clarinet, it made little difference. Now they circled the bell. Silently, together, they bent down. They had no trouble grabbing hold of the rim; and, uttering a sharp “holler” as they often did in the fields, they lifted it all at once. Doc elbowed between them on his hands and knees to see if his son was all right. Probably the boy would have survived had it hot been for the mute stuffed into the bell. It had acted as a hydraulic press, splitting the floor. Most of Bubba had been integrated with the boards.
The dark men set the bell down across the kitchen. They gathered around the depressed circle that contained Bubba’s stain and Doc. They were silent. Their faces betrayed nothing. Doc found himself trapped like a sacrifice within them. One by one, they raised their fingers to their sweaty shirts as if to pledge allegiance, and each set of fingers carefully traced the hidden shapes of heterotopic eyes.
After the funeral, nothing was the same. The workers began to migrate, drifting away on the dry winds of August, but not before a group of them finally hefted the clarinet on the stairs and solved the mystery of Curly. Curiously, he had mummified inside the cramped space. The enormous black joint had hardly touched him. Why he had died at all became the new mystery. Ed Rose read the signs plainly enough and deserted before the sun came up on another day. The Cyclops should have mustered some terror then, but he had no Night Hawks left and his iron had disappeared. He needed guidance from a higher authority. Curly and the others had betrayed him, he felt.