The Unforeseen Page 8

  Wenonah was a maker of bows, and from the rafters of her house hung sheaves of wild-cherry arrow-woods and half-shaped bows of yew and ash, and raw limbs drying, rubbed shiny with grease. The floor was littered with wood shavings and peeled bark, the dark stains of spilled fat, fragments of feathers and twisted fiber bowstring. Wenonah cleared a space on the floor and unrolled a mat there and she and Dulce lay down together beneath her thin old confirmation quilt. They did not touch.

  After a while Wenonah said, “You must wait.” She lay on her hip and spoke the words into the darkness. “Find a place and then wait. The others will be anxious, will run to the hunt, and one will come to where you are.”

  Dulce lay on her back and looked at the long, straight shapes of the unfinished bows. She hugged her own shoulders under the quilt.

  For a long time she listened to the old woman sleeping, and later the rain dribbling against the roof. Then she went out and stood at the edge of the bluff with the hood of her shirt thrown back so the rain purled in her hair, and she waited until the thin rim of sun made a wound against the horizon. Behind her, there was a sound of a bare foot on the grass and when she turned it was Wenonah, holding a long bow and sheaf of arrows with both her hands stretched out flat and wide so the things lay across her palms like a formal offering. The bow was very pale, a smooth double curve with the short straightness of the grip between, and the ends curving back again equally, and the bow string taut and dark. The tips of the arrows were obsidian.

  The old woman sucked in the edges of her mouth. There were fine, clear beads of rain in her eyelashes. She thrust the gifts toward Dulce, pushing them hard into her hands. They did not speak. The girl made a small sound and the old woman looked away, frowning, ducking her chin. But they did not speak. And the only touch between them was the dry rasp of the old woman’s hands against the girl’s wrists as she gave over the bow and the arrows.

  The priest, Daivid, sat hunched on the crosspaths stone with the hood of his cloak pulled high against the rain. Perhaps he had drunk too much beer or gambled too long: his eyes were faintly swollen, his mouth a thin line. Dulce squatted a little way from him. Chloe was there too, sitting on the wet grass with her knees drawn up under her shirt and her arms lapping round her shins. In the thin daylight she seemed gray faced. Her eyes touched Dulce and slid aside. A bow carved of yew lay on the grass beside her feet. The three waited and in a moment the other priests came—the tall woman named Hannah and the old man, Steev. They waited together, all of them, in silence, until at last Thom came, holding a red-lacquered longbow in the tight fist of his hand. He did not quite look in Chloe’s face, and not at all toward Dulce. Perhaps it was their old childhood friendship that kept his eyes hard and narrow and turned from her. Then the priest, Daivid, stood with a little grunting sound and led them all through the rain, away from the houses.

  The sky paled a little, hanging ragged in the points of the trees, but there was no hardening into daylight, just a timeless grayness so that Dulce did not know how far or how long they walked. Often she smelled the salt water of the Sound, but the way was known only to the priests and they did not speak. Dulce’s new bow and sheaf rubbed a line where she carried them slung across a shoulder. The hem of her long shirt drew wetness up like a wick so it slapped stinging cold and gritty against her calves.

  The sky began to darken with twilight—they had walked very far—when they came finally to a ruin of Civilization, some ancient wreckage of their many wars. Among the trees there were long hillocks of bricks and broken sheets of paving hard under the moss. And there had been a gate: part of a stone arch rose into the limbs of the cedars. Daivid stood beneath it and threw back his cowl and then Dulce saw the others who were gathered already at that place, faces she did not know, or knew a little, priests and youths of other villages. They made no sound, they only crouched or stood or lay silently, separately, under the shadows of the trees and among the fine twigs of huckleberry bush and salal. Above their heads there were enigmatic symbols gouged in the granite, U NAV L RESE.

  In the darkness under the high stone arch, Dulce found a place for herself and squatted down, bunching her body against the cold. And then she simply waited for day. She could feel the others near her, crouching silent too, waiting too. Only the priests slept. She could hear, sometimes, the sounds of their dreams.

  Others came in the night—one thin boy and several girls, following their priests through the darkness. They found places under the arch and made their own bodies small against the cold. Afterward, in the stillness, Dulce heard someone make a faint sound, a sigh.

  Through high gaps in the trees, the sky seemed not to lighten but simply to clarify so that everything became easier to see but without brightness. Finally the old priest whose name was Steev came quietly and bent to touch Dulce’s wrist. She followed him into the timber of the Proving Ground. Others had also begun to scatter. She saw Thom, following the priest Hannah, turning to cast Dulce a quick white look.

  Steev led her through the darkness under the wet trees, a long walk to a small cave along a bluff with a view of the Sound. It was an old cave, Civilized, with concrete walls and unglassed windows, small and high, looking out over the gray water. They did not go into the cave’s mouth.

  In toneless weariness, standing beside the dark opening, Steev said, “Wait at this place for the call to start. And afterward, when you have been confirmed, you may go out through the gate where we were.” He was an old man, and perhaps he had attended too many confirmations. He did not quite look into Dulce’s face.

  She stood out of her shirt, stood naked with her hair cold and lank against her neck, and handed the shirt to the priest. She held Wenonah’s bow fisted in one hand, the sheaf of arrows across her shoulder, a thin-bladed knife strapped to her calf with a string. She stood watching the priest go back along the path toward the gate, and then she crouched with her hips against the cool flat wall of the cave and she waited. She could see her heartbeat in her breast.

  At dawn, above the gray mist rose a clear, distant bell-note from a horn. Irresistibly, she ran. The haft of the knife struck hard little blows against her ankle bone, the sheaf of arrows beat against her spine. She ran until the breath and the first spurt of fear were gone out of her. Then from a high ridge she rested the heels of her hands on her knees and sucked the frigid air, panting. From this height she could see behind her the gray finger of the Sound, and ahead between distant hillocks, several priests standing in the drizzle under the arch of the gate. Through the gauze of rain, standing utterly still, they seemed faceless, bodiless, like the stone phallics that stood in small groves at the edge of some of the old ruined villages of the Civilized tribes. And seeing them Dulce remembered her grandmother’s counsel.

  When she had chosen a place, she crouched among the leaves and held the bow across the tops of her bent legs and simply waited. Her chest was very tight, so she took air in through her mouth. The rain beaded on the backs of her hands, her shoulders, the crown of her head. She waited a long time, squatting silently, with her naked buttocks resting against her naked heels and the foliage dripping and the wind running cold against her back, tangling the loose strands of her hair.

  Finally, in twilight the color of pewter, between the long straps of the leaves there was a transient paleness, a shape sliding. She closed her mouth, lips tightening stiffly over teeth, and waited. In a moment it came toward her through the high leaves, moving soundless on fine, long-boned legs. She waited, crouching still, with the bow in her hands nocked, waiting too, and the straight shaft of the arrow pointing away from her breast. There was only a little shaking and it did not reach her hands.

  She waited until she could see the smooth glide of muscle beneath the skin, until even the sharp body smell was in her nostrils, and then she made only one fluid motion rearing above the leaves with the bow lifting in her hands and the bowstring drawn taut and then freed, all of it a single wholeness, complete and seamless, with only the face startling tow
ard her, the widened eyes, seeming separate and disconnected.

  She stood afterward with the bow still poised and her heart beating behind her eyes, stood very still, staring, watching the rain puddle in the folds of the body. Then a little sound came out of her on a little breath and she let the bow down and squatted where she was in the wet fronds, hugging hands to elbows, rocking back and forth on her hips, until she was done with shaking and weeping.

  It began to be dark. In a while she dipped her thumbs in the small stream of blood and marked her face and her breast with pairs of bright stripes, but in the darkness there would be no seeing the red tokens of her confirmation, so she waited for daylight, sitting alone and still. Her hair was heavy and wet and the wind brought it into her face. After a long time, she groped in the stems of grass beside the body until her hand closed on the lacquered red bow. Under her fingertips, in the darkness, its touch was cold and hard as bone—the rib of a giant. She freed the bowstring with the edge of her knife so she might tie back her hair with its stiff strand.

  When there was a little light, she took the body across her shoulders and went away cautiously toward the gate of the Proving Ground. She held Thom’s red bow in one fist, her own bow resting in a pale double curve low against her back.

  Later, in all the valleys, there were heavy palls of smoke, and ashes dusting the trees, and where a newly-made house became a funeral pyre, there would be black cinders for a while and then, in the sweetened soil, small blooms, and tall thin trees growing.

  The Presley Brothers

  Recorded at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on the occasion of the induction of Elvis and Jesse Presley into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, January 23, 1986

  [Sustained applause]

  [Elvis Presley]: Well, the last record Jesse and I made together was twenty-five years ago now, so I wouldn’t have blamed y’all if you’d forgot all about the Presley Brothers. But it’s an honor to be up here with the rest of these fellows [gesturing], all these men we sung with and admired, and the ones already passed, Bob Johnson, Jimmy Yancey, who we listened to when we were kids, and took after as much as we could. [scattered applause]

  They told me I’d have ten minutes, give or take, to say whatever I wanted, so I guess I’ll tell you a bit about our growing up, because you know we were always singing. When we were two years old, we’d be at church and we’d slide off Momma’s lap, run up the aisle to the stage so we could try to join the choir. At home, the radio was always playing—Momma loved music—and we’d join our voices to whatever we heard coming out of that Philco she kept on the kitchen table. But then I think we were ten when we gave our first public performance. This came about because one morning at school—I don’t recall the reason—we stood up and sang something for our fifth-grade class and then Miss Osborne, who was our teacher at the time, encouraged us to enter a singing contest at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show. Momma dressed us like cowboys and we climbed up on a chair together so we could reach the microphone. We sang Red Foley’s country song “Old Shep,” and I believe we placed fifth. [laughter, applause] So, for our eleventh birthday, Daddy and Momma gave me a guitar and they gave Jesse a bicycle, and we were told to share. We always had shared everything anyway, right from the start.

  When we were born, Daddy was just eighteen years old and Momma was twenty-two. They were living in Tupelo back then and Daddy was working for a lumberyard. We were born in a two-room shotgun shack he built himself from lumber cadged from that yard. Jesse came out first and I was born thirty minutes later. Jesse was blue and cold—the midwife thought he was stillborn—but she blew air into him and pinched his little cheeks and slapped his little behind and just about the time Momma had quit hoping for a miracle he took in a big gasp and pinked right up. Jesse always said he remembered it all. He remembered a string of longing tightening suddenly between him and me, and the plucked note, the sacred note, calling across space, and he said it was God hearing that note who reached out and touched him and gave him life. [sustained applause]

  Every walleyed uncle and yard cousin seems to make it into Tupelo. [laughter] It creates a peculiar culture, I will say that, but it wasn’t a bad place for kids to grow up. We lived in a mostly black neighborhood, and we heard a lot of what we used to call “race radio”—black gospel music and blues—coming out the windows when we were walking home from school or playing out in the yard or the street. At home we listened to Mississippi Slim’s radio show, which I guess you would say was hillbilly music, but we didn’t hold one kind of music above the other, we were just crazy about all of it. Hank Snow and Sister Rosetta Tharpe: we admired them equally.

  We learned how to play that birthday guitar from our daddy’s brother and from the pastor at the Assembly of God church. We watched other people playing too, and picked up a few things that way. We hung around the record shops that had jukeboxes or listening booths—do y’all remember those? [scattered applause, whoops]—and we learned to sing harmony mostly by listening to the Delmore Brothers over and over again. Being twins, we had the same voice, you know, and “parallel thirds” is not something we had heard of back then, but we figured out for ourselves how to arrange a song so each line would stand alone as a melody line, and we took turns singing the solo bits. We both of us studied and played by ear. Jesse never did learn to read music, and I was thirty-five or better before Roy Orbison sat me down and taught me the notes. [laughter, applause]

  Mississippi Slim’s little brother was a classmate of ours, and after Slim heard us singing he booked us for a couple of on-air performances. Jesse wasn’t shy but I was, and we weren’t but twelve years old. The first time we were to sing I had such a case of stage fright that I didn’t think I could go through with it. Slim said Jesse should go on the air alone, but Jesse shook his head. We had our own twin language, which they tell me is not uncommon, but ours was a language mostly without words, and Jesse that time looked over at me and he told me without words that I should not be afraid. That I was not alone in the world. And I remembered it was true: God had reached out and touched Jesse so I wouldn’t have to be alone. So I went ahead and sang, and that was the first time anybody ever heard the Presley Brothers singing on the radio. [applause]

  Then, just about the time we were going into high school, Daddy moved us over to Memphis, which took some getting used to. We were in rooming houses to start with and then public housing, and the high school kids teased us for that, and for liking hillbilly music and black music. When we pulled a C minus in music class [laughter], it made Jesse mad. He came in the next day with our guitar and tried to prove our teacher wrong. He sang a Rufus Thomas song, “Bear Cat,” and the teacher said she just didn’t care for that type of song. She said she knew better than to ask where Jesse had learned that music, or where any of it came from. We both knew what she meant: that he shouldn’t be singing black music, or listening to it. But Jesse just said to her, “Ma’am, I learned it from Mr. Thomas singing it on the radio, and where it comes from”—and he tapped his chest—“is inside of me.” [applause]

  After a while, we made some friends in Memphis and we formed a hillbilly group with a couple of other kids from The Lauderdale Courts where we were living, and we started playing around The Courts some, for birthday parties and that sort of thing. One of those boys had a washtub bass and the other had a fiddle, and Jesse borrowed a second guitar from one of the neighbors. Me and Jesse did the vocals, singing tight harmony. We knew pretty much all of Hank Snow, and we could play Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Jimmie Rogers, Bob Wills.

  We split off from those boys, though, after we said we wanted to sing some blues, some R & B and black gospel ballads, and they said we were turning colored. It was after that, we took to styling our hair with rose oil and Vaseline and we grew sideburns, which was a look we had seen on blues players hanging around Beale Street. Y’all know Beale? The downtown Memphis strip? [whoops] Neon-lit shops, jazz joints, all-black nightclubs. We met B. B. King down on Beale, did y’all know th
at? [applause, whoops] We knew him before any of us had a name. Well, he was on the way to getting a name, and it might have been him we were trying to look like.

  Everything was segregated in those days, but the blues clubs had “white nights,” and after we turned eighteen we went to those shows as often as we could. We were just nuts for the sounds we heard there—screaming, shouting, wailing, reckless. The white gospel groups had monthly singings downtown too. We figured some of those fellows must have been going into the blues clubs on “white nights” just like we were, because you could hear those white groups trying to come close to the way the black groups sounded. Some of them would even jiggle their legs around like the blacks did, and they’d wear wild, flashy suits like the ones in the windows at Lansky Brothers.

  In Memphis we were listening to WDIA, which played all black music, and then late at night we listened to Dewey Phillips’s Red Hot & Blue show on WHBQ. Dewey was like us, just crazy about all kinds of music. He mixed up R & B with country boogie, he played blues and gospel, and love songs from harmony groups. LaVern Baker and then the Drifters, Big Joe Turner, Howlin’ Wolf, then Ruth Brown and maybe an old gospel song from Sister Rosetta.

  People have said it was the Presley Brothers who opened up the door between black music and country music, but we just saw the open door and walked on through it. We never had a music lesson or a singing lesson, it was Beale Street and the radio and all, that was our musical education.

  There is a story you might have heard about our first record, how we recorded it as a gift for our mother, and how we got accidentally discovered by Mr. Phillips. [gesturing toward Sam Phillips] [whoops, applause] We told that story ourselves so many times I think we almost came to believe it, but here’s the truth: if all we had wanted was to make a record for Momma for her birthday, we could have gone on down the street to the drugstore where there was a little record-making service for a lot less money. [laughter] But we went into Sun Records and paid for studio time so we could record a two-sided acetate disc because we were hoping Mr. Phillips would hear us singing. We were hoping to catch a big break and be famous: that’s the real story. [laughter, applause]