Chapter 11

CHAPTER 11

I tried to stay awake.

I closed and locked the French doors.

I sat up in my bed with Chet, holding him close, determined to stay awake until Lovesong returned to his bed.

I wanted to see if he had mud on his feet.

I wanted to know if the sound of the distant guitar in the cotton fields was him.

I wanted to ask who the fuck had crept onto our balcony and into our room in the dead of night.

But at some stage I drifted off, exhausted, spent, in desperate need of sleep.

Not even Chet heard Lovesong when he finally crept into the room, right before he tripped on the electric guitar that he wasn’t expecting to find in the middle of the floor.

There was a bang and a twang of strings, and I woke with a fright, sitting up in my bed and blinking back the bright light of dawn.

“Who’s there? What the fuck? Lovesong, you’re back. Where the fuck did you go?”

“Me first. Why the fuck is my guitar on the floor?” He promptly placed the acoustic guitar he’d been carrying onto his bed, and on his hands and knees he felt for the electric guitar he’d just kicked across the floor.

He needed help and I jumped out of bed and knelt beside him, bringing the guitar to his groping hands. “Sorry, it’s my fault. I needed a weapon in the night, and it was the first thing I grabbed.”

He turned his head toward me, concern washing over his face. “A weapon? What the hell did you need a weapon for? Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

One hand reached toward me and rested on my bare leg, high up on my thigh.

I realized I was still naked, and his hand was alarmingly close to my crotch.

I lifted it off me, trying not to offend, and replied, “I’m okay. Whoever it was scared the fuck out of me though.”

I looked at him to see he was dressed in a pair of jeans and a white linen shirt with a harmonica sticking out of the breast pocket. I also saw there were no shoes on his muddy feet.

I glanced from his feet to the dried footprints still on the floor.

They were too small to have been made by him.

“Where were you last night? Do you know who it could have been? I didn’t see a face, but whoever it was, they were kinda slender… with big matted hair… and mud everywhere. They were screaming like a goddamn banshee at me till I grabbed the guitar and scared them off. God knows how long they’d been standing there watching me.”

He paused a moment and I could see the thoughts turning over behind his misty blue eyes. “Did you tell anyone about this?”

“No. I was too scared to leave the room. I locked the doors to the balcony and stayed awake as long as I could in case they came back. Who the fuck was it?” I had to ask again, “Where were you? Were you out there somewhere? Did I hear your guitar out there in the cotton fields? Where were you last night?”

The words made me sound like a jealous lover. I didn’t mean to. All I wanted to do was piece together this strange small town, a place that seemed to get stranger the longer I stayed.

I could see on Lovesong’s face that he didn’t want to answer my questions, that it was none of my business where he was. All he said by way of reply was, “I had things to do. Long ago I made a promise to myself. It’s a promise I’m yet to fulfill. Y’all wouldn’t understand.”

“You’d be surprised.”

He stood. “I need to get to work.”

The song of the insects was everywhere, deafening, like a plague of locusts in my brain. The heat rippled off the ground outside Earl’s Aut o, and the rusty old fan ticking in a corner of the workshop wasn’t about to make a lick of difference.

Sweat was seeping into cracks I didn’t even know I had, as I stood there watching Earl bending over Joan Collins’s engine.

“Well, you see the problem is right here… and here… and here. Starts with the carburetor and—”

“Please, spare me the mechanic talk, I don’t understand a word of it anyway. Just tell me how long it’s going to take to fix it.”

He wiped his greasy hands on the seat of his coveralls and said, “Maybe a week. Maybe less. Depends how soon I can get the parts in from Baton Rouge. Cybil’s doin’ a cotton run today, I’ll see if she can swing by and get an order placed.”

“I can’t wait a whole week. I didn’t plan on staying here a whole week. This place is… weird.” The word just came out.

Earl started laughing, a wheezing cough escaping his barrel chest. “No offence taken.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that your preacher is full of hocus-pocus, and then last night—” I stopped myself. I remembered Lovesong asking me if I had told anyone about the intruder in our room. He asked in a way that made me think he didn’t want anyone to know.

Why would he do that?

Should I be telling someone, for my own safety at least?

“Then last night… what?” Earl asked.

I shook my head. “Then last night… I had the worst sleep of my life.”

Earl nodded, as though he understood my gripe. “Bugs. Some nights you think they’re gonna eat you alive. Best to keep the doors and windows shut.”

That’s exactly what I had done before bed, but it wasn’t the bugs that worried me.

It wasn’t the bugs that might eat me alive.

A vivid image of the person—the creature—hiding behind the curtain flashed in my mind.

The mud-caked fingers.

The birds-nest mop of hair.

And that shriek.

That blood-curdling shriek.

Come to me.

My veins ran cold, even despite the heat. “Is there anywhere I can rent a car so I can get back to New York?”

“In Clara’s Crossing?”

“No, I don’t mean in Clara’s Crossing. Obviously not. I’ve seen what’s on offer in this town. If you want anything other than the Bible, booze, or a flat tire fixed, you’re out of luck.” I flapped my hands in frustration. “I’m talking about somewhere nearby. Is there a car rental office somewhere near here?”

Earl scratched at the wispy hairs on his head. “No doubt there’s something in Baton Rouge.”

“How do I get there without a car?”

“Like I said, Cybil’s headed that way today. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind you hitchin’ a ride. Hell, you could even help her load the cotton in back.”

I tilted my head to one side, as though not quite comprehending what he said. “Help her do what?”

“You grab yourself a pitchfork, like so.” Cybil speared a huge bundle of cotton inside the shed out back of the general store, where she had backed her pickup truck. “Then you stab it, like so, and get as much of it as you can on that pitchfork, which may be kinda heavy cause of yesterday’s rain.”

She grunted as she raised a dirty big snowball of murky-looking cotton up in the air, over the edge of her pickup and into the back of the truck.

“Oh Jesus, that looks like it weighs a ton. Are you sure it’s cotton, not coal? It’s kinda disgusting looking. Isn’t cotton supposed to be white?”

“This is Acadian brown cotton… white boy. Originally referred to as coton jaune . You speak French?”

“No.”

“So maybe you’re not so fancy after all. Here, catch.”

She tossed me a pitchfork and it almost stabbed me in the foot before it fell on the ground next to Chet, who scampered behind me. “Fuck! Are you trying to kill us?”

Cybil chuckled. “No. I’m just getting a kick out of watching you flap around like a stoned crow.”

“Excuse me if I’ve never picked up a pitchfork in my life.”

“Then you’re definitely not the Devil. Be sure to let Reverend Jim know. Now put your back into it.”

“Really?”

She nodded at me, then to the pitchfork on the ground. “You want a ride to Baton Rouge?”

“Yes. So I can rent a car, drive back here, pick up my things, and go.”

“Then let’s get to work.”

She heaved another fork load of cotton into the back of her pickup.

Reluctantly I picked up my pitchfork.

I impaled the bundle of brown cotton with it.

I grunted as I lifted a wad of the murky harvest up off the ground, using all my strength to guide it toward the pickup and dump it in back.

“That’s the way,” Cybil said. “Just be sure to treat the cotton with care. It bruises easily.”

“You told me to stab it.”

Cybil wobbled her head, weighing up her conflicting advice. “True. Just don’t bruise it when you stab it. Okay?”

My back was aching, and the passenger seat with the broken springs wasn’t doing much for my ass either. “You do this every day?”

Cybil sat behind the wheel as she drove her bouncy old pickup between the cotton fields toward the crossroads. “Not every day. Only every second day or so. It ain’t so bad. Once I do the drop-off at the Landry factory, I get to spend the rest of my day in the general store. It’s nice and cool in there. It’s got a big ceiling fan that Earl installed last year.”

“Is it bigger than the little fan in his workshop, because all that did was blow hot air on my sweaty neck.” I glanced down at Chet sitting on my lap, hanging his tongue out the window as his nose wriggled at every scent he could smell in the cotton fields. “Do you ever get used to this heat?”

“Hell, I got nothin’ to complain about. It’s the cotton pickers who do all the real back-breaking work, out in the sun all day.”

She pointed out to the left as we came across them now, their huge, woven baskets slung over their shoulders, hands easing the cotton buds from their branches and putting the bushels in the baskets.

It was impossible not to spot Lovesong amongst them.

His skin was slick with sweat, shiny like a bronze statue in the rain.

His back muscles extended and contracted with automatic ease and grace, reaching, plucking, placing the bushels in the basket before repeating the motion over and over.

But it wasn’t simply the sight of him that made him easy to pick in the cotton field.

It was the sound of him.

Even from where I sat in the passing pickup, I could hear the lyrics he sang floating on the hot autumn breeze.

It was another Robert Johnson song—“ Hell Hound on My Trail. ”

As Lovesong sang, the other cotton pickers provided the harmonies and joined in the chorus. Not a single word, not a single note from the song distracted any of them from their work; I suppose it was the song that distracted them from the heat and baking sun. All the while, they remained focused on the task at hand, their eyes moving from one cotton bud to the next, except Lovesong who used his fingers to feel from one bushel and branch to another.

As we passed them by, I wondered again where Lovesong had disappeared to the night before.

In the next moment, the crossroads came into view up ahead, and suddenly I uttered, “Robert Johnson.”

Cybil glanced across to me. “You say something?”

I looked ahead at the intersection we came to. “These crossroads… Clara’s Crossing.” I paused a moment, not sure I wanted to ask my next question but not sure I could stop myself. “What happened here? You told me last night that the reverend’s wife found Lovesong here as a baby. But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there.”

Cybil began to brake, and Chet and I lurched forward. “What makes you think there’s more to the story than that?”

I looked warily down the criss-crossing roads. “Call it a hunch.”

Cybil put her indicator on—even though there were no other vehicles to indicate to—and hauled the steering wheel left. “You do realize that once you hear this story, you can’t unhear it.”

“You do realize you’re stalling. Please, just tell me the story.”

A rush of air escaped Cybil’s large chest. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, and please don’t think I’m all Sodom and Gomorrah like the reverend. I’m just gonna tell you the only version of the story anyone’s ever known. If there’s another version, it’s yet to be heard.”

“I won’t judge. I promise.”

“I guess it all started with Harper and Hettie, almost thirty years ago now. They were two young girls who worked for the reverend and his wife. Harper Clementine was their maid, and Henrietta Jones was their cook. While Reverend Jim worked hard on his sermons and trying to keep the cotton pickers loyal to the Lord, his wife Adeline made certain Harper and Hettie kept an abundance of food on the table and the house pristine and clean. She refused to tolerate a single speck of dust in the house. If she did happen to wipe a ledge or run her finger over the piano to find even the most miniscule trace of dust, the reverend’s wife would inform her husband, who would call Harper into his study and dish out whatever punishment he deemed appropriate. After all, cleanliness is next to Godliness. Until…”

“Until what?”

“Until something… unclean… came into the house one day. At least, that’s how Reverend Jim and his wife have always described it. According to them, there was a traveler, a wayward soul, who took up some work cotton picking for a few weeks while passing through. He left more than just his muddy footprints in the cotton fields. One day, drunk on moonshine, he forced his way into the Valentin household while the reverend and his wife were at church. There was a struggle. He left bruises on Harper’s wrists and neck, and a baby in her belly. Hettie tried to fight him off, but he struck her so hard she barely spoke after that. Of course, Reverend Jim and his wife vowed to look after Harper and her baby. They’d always wanted a child of their own. But when the boy was born completely blind, Harper cursed the Lord for condemning her innocent son to a life of darkness. In a fit of rage, Harper and Hettie took the newborn baby to the crossroads… and there, Harper summoned the Devil himself. As soon as he appeared—tall and dark, with a hat covering his face and concealing his horns—Hettie fled into the bayou in a fit of madness, never to be seen again. Harper, on the other hand, was determined to make a deal. If the Lord wouldn’t look after her child, she was certain the Devil would provide. The Devil told her he could not undo the Lord’s curse of blinding the boy, but he could make up for it by bestowing upon him the gift of music. The price for such a gift… was Harper’s soul. And so she made her deal with the Devil, but before he dragged her into the cotton fields to consume her soul, she asked one last favor: she asked if she could leave a note in the boy’s basket, so that whomever may find him would know what happened that night.”

I was breathless, on the edge of the seat with the broken springs. “What did the note say?”

“I don’t know exactly. I’ve never seen it. But I’ve heard the last sentence of the note reads, ‘This child adores a lullaby like a… ’ Only Harper ran out of paper before the last word, so she turned it over to finish her sentence with ‘… lovesong.’ The reverend’s wife was the first person to stumble through the crossroads that night, as she and her husband had gone on a desperate search for Harper and the baby. When she found the crying newbown abandoned at Clara’s Crossing, the note was face down on top of him, with only the word ‘lovesong’ facing up… as though that was the name Harper had given him. While the rest of the town immediately adopted the name Lovesong for the boy, the reverend and his wife decided on a more conventional southern name, christening the child Lafayette Valentin… the son of Jim and Adeline Valentin… a musical genius, and a servant to the Lord. At least, that’s how they saw things. To the rest of us, he’s our Lovesong.”

The Landry Cotton Corporation was a large industrial site, with a small row of office buildings sandwiched between a large harvesting machinery warehouse and the processing mills. Vehicles and workers moved busily back and forth, all cogs in the gears of a successful manufacturing giant. Which made me wonder—

“What the hell does the Landry family need with the cotton from Clara’s Crossing?”

I asked the question to Chet, who sat with me in the pickup while Cybil had gone to fill out some paperwork in one of the small office buildings. When she reappeared, a Landry employee signaled to a nearby truck then pointed to Cybil’s pickup.

Cybil oversaw the transfer of the brown cotton into the back of the Landry truck, then closed up the back of her pickup, waved to the driver of the Landry truck, then climbed behind the wheel of her pickup.

I looked from her to the industrial-scale factories surrounding us, then back at Cybil. “I don’t get it.”

“Get what?”

“I don’t get why the Landry company even bothers with what Clara’s Crossing has to offer. Don’t get me wrong, working in that field looks like the hardest job on earth. I’m not mocking the work that Lovesong or you or the other cotton pickers do. It’s just… is it worth it? When you look at this gigantic corporate machine, churning out cotton by the ton… why keep one plantation operating like it’s 1929?”

“Because this is the Deep South.”

“Which means what, exactly?”

“Which means there are some things you don’t mess with.”

She started the pickup and we chugged off the premises of the Landry Cotton Corporation.

We made two more stops before leaving Baton Rouge, or at least the outskirts of it which was as far as we needed to go, since that’s where the Landry factory was, as well as the spare parts mechanic and the car rental office that Earl had found in a Yellow Pages so old the pages were actually brown.

At the mechanics, Cybil gave a cigar-chomping man a list of parts that Earl had given her. The guy told her he could get them by tomorrow.

After that, we stopped in at the car rental office.

“Sedan or SUV?” said the woman behind the counter.

“I don’t care, so long as it can get me back to New York.” I was distracted by the fan in the corner that was set to high speed and positioned too close to an indoor plant, shredding its leaves with a tatatatatatatatatatatat .

I kept glancing at it, desperate to move the plant an inch one way or the other, or switch the fan off altogether.

But the woman didn’t even seem to notice. She was too busy peering over the counter and looking down at my feet where Chet sat. “That your dog?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Pets are not allowed in any of our vehicles. Do you intend to take the dog with you?”

“Of course I intend to take the dog with me,” I fumed in the pickup on the way back to Clara’s Crossing. “He’s my fucking dog. He’s all I’ve got!”

“That a boy, get it out,” Cybil encouraged, taking one hand off the wheel for a moment to shake her fist in solidarity.

My anger turned quickly to a frustrated sigh. “Only thing now is, how the hell am I ever gonna get outta here?”

We were on the road back to Clara’s Crossing. Chet was sitting on my lap, panting and twitching his nose at the hot air blowing in through the open window, while dark clouds rolled across the sky, threatening to unleash another late afternoon storm just like the one the day before.

“Relax,” Cybil said. “Earl’s got you covered. He may be kinda slow. He may stand there lookin’ at your busted ass engine and scratchin’ his butt for longer than he needs to. But beneath that lazy-lookin’ exterior of his is one helluva mechanic. Have faith. Till then, you just gonna have to—”

Cybil suddenly winced in pain.

She jerked one arm off the wheel and clutched it bent to her chest.

“Cybil? You okay?”

She grunted and the pickup began to swerve across the road.

I grabbed for the wheel and turned it.

Cybil doubled over in her seat.

The tires gave a screech and the horn of an oncoming car blared at us.

“Jesus, Cybil. Hang in there.”

I grabbed the emergency brake with my free hand and yanked it as hard as I could.

The pickup slid onto the shoulder of the road and skidded to a halt.

“Cybil! Fuck! What’s happening?”

She grunted again in pain, then in short breaths she managed to say, “Aspirin. The glove compartment.”

I yanked open the glove compartment, rummaged past maps and an old half drunk bottle of water, and found a bottle of aspirin. My hands were shaking with adrenalin as I got the lid off and poured three or four aspirins into my palm.

Cybil grabbed them all and shoved them into her mouth.

I snatched the warm bottle of water out of the glove compartment and she washed down the pills.

“What can I do? What do I need to do?” I asked urgently. “I’m taking you to a hospital.”

I unbuckled my safety belt, ready to switch seats with her, but Cybil held an arm across my chest to stop me.

“No. Wait.” Her voice was croaky, but firm. “Just… Just give the pills a minute to kick in.”

“You could be dead by then.”

“Just give me a second,” she snapped.

The short bursts of breath turned to longer chuffs of air…

Then deep breaths…

And slowly Cybil straightened herself back up, blinking like her vision was returning to her.

“Are you…” My words were quiet. Timid. Wary.

“Gonna die?” she asked, trying to finish my sentence.

“No! I was going to ask, are you okay?”

She puffed out a few more breaths then inhaled deeply. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.”

“You say that now, but I still wanna take you to a hospital.”

“We’re not going to a hospital,” she said sternly. “My father had a heart attack and went to a hospital. They were supposed to fix him, but he never came home. He just left me alone to look after the general store and the cotton deliveries. And look after them I will. No matter what, ya hear?”

I paused a moment, distant thunder rolling through the sky like a rogue wave crashing on a faraway shore. “I’m sorry,” I said eventually. I swallowed and added, “My partner died. It feels like a lifetime ago now… and yet, at the same time, it was only yesterday.”

Cybil’s breathing slowed down completely, her chest rising and falling in a soft, steady rhythm. “I remember the way he taught me to stack the shelves, fastest moving items at the top and bottom, hard to sell stuff in the middle, right at eye level. That seemed like yesterday too.”

I smiled. “I remember how he would close the lid to the piano every night after playing, saying ‘shhh, time to sleep’ as though the damn Steinway was a baby. That seemed like yesterday too.”

“My dad used to braid my hair… and what a shitty job he did of it. It drove me crazy as a kid, but if he did it now, I wouldn’t care one iota.”

“Joel used to sleep with socks on in the winter and still try to warm his feet on mine, rubbing those damn itchy woolen socks on me. I couldn’t stand it. But I’d give anything to feel those old socks snuggled between my feet now.”

Cybil laughed. Then a sadness came over her. “My dad went all too soon.”

I sucked in a breath and had to hold it a moment. “So did Joel.”

The thunder didn’t seem so distant anymore.

I turned to Cybil. “If you don’t want to go to a hospital, I won’t take you. But will you at least let me drive us back to Clara’s Crossing?”

Cybil unclicked her safety belt.