Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

“You said it yourself,” Young Will told him. “It’s a scab thing.”

They were both named for dead men, grandfathers they’d never met. Men who had died when their parents were still youngsters. For all Clarence knew, it was the first thing their mother and father discovered they had in common.

The carrying on of someone’s name was apparently supposed to be an honor, and perhaps it was, but many were the times Clarence wondered if their parents had ever stopped to consider the obvious: the bigger the trophy, the heavier it was to lug around.

Clarence and Willard . . . neither quite felt like a twenty-first-century name.

As Clarence was the firstborn, Dad had gotten first crack at him, saddling him with the moniker of a man who’d succumbed in his thirties to the black lung he’d carried up out of a West Virginia coal mine. His end had come hard and early, but at least it was certain. There was no room for doubt in it, only sorrow and blame.

Six years later, with their sister Dina in between, it was Mom’s turn to christen her third child as if he were an avatar of the man who’d vanished around the time she’d been hitting puberty, and the recycled name an invitation for her father to return from whatever void had swallowed him.

The legacy of Willard Chambers was a more complicated thing for a namesake to live up to. He was restless, a roamer, but not without reason. Clarence was grown before he’d ever heard the term song-catcher , but that’s exactly what the man was.

The inability of Will Senior to carry a tune was matched only by his reverence for those who could. He had an appreciation of history, and must have known by then that he’d lived it himself. He’d come through the Second World War, three years in the Pacific, fighting toward Japan one fierce island at a time, and seeing close up the fragility of everything that lived and breathed.

Songs, too. Songs were living things and could be killed by far less than bullets and fire. All it took was for them to stop being heard. He was a city dweller who had served alongside Okie farmboys and gangly fellows from Appalachian hollers. They brought with them songs he’d never heard on the radio. Obsessed as they were with life and death and the acts that bridged the two — murders and drownings and love gone wrong — they may have appealed to him for their stark understanding that he might not see tomorrow either.

But he had. Three years in the Pacific, and he suffered no worse than a case of paddy foot.

At some point, home again, he’d learned of the Lomaxes — John the father and Alan the son — and realized he’d found a calling. These were men who traveled the country in search of songs whose roots lay deep in the earth of crops and graves: rural blues, cowboy ballads, folk tunes from plains and mountains, prison work songs, and anything else that was a jubilant or despairing cry from the heart of a marginalized life. Will Senior bought the same tape recorder that Alan Lomax was using at the time — a compact, battery-powered reel-to-reel called a Nagra — and took it on the road whenever he could. Which amounted to as much as four or five months out of the year.

For reasons that likely went back to wartime, Willard had taken a special interest in the region known during the Great Depression as the Dust Bowl . . . an arid wasteland whose great dark eye overlapped western Kansas and eastern Colorado, a slice of New Mexico, and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma. He had it in his head that songs from there were most vulnerable, since so many who would’ve sung them had been scattered by the same winds that carried away the topsoil, leaving them mostly in the care of those who’d been too sick or old to move. He saw it as a race against time.

From everything Clarence and Will had heard about him, Willard Chambers wasn’t a man you needed to worry about. He knew nearly everything there was to know about taking care of himself. His family just missed him, deeply, with the resentful ache that comes from being forced to share a man with an obsession, and counting the days until he and his ’59 Chevy would be home again.

His eighth run west became his last. Neither he nor the Chevy made it back, or were ever seen again.

At least his gear — the Nagra and a Leica camera from his war years — had found its way home eventually.

Even that had taken months.

They made it through five more towns north of Gilead, then it was the long ride south, back to the motel they’d been using for home base. Clarence took the wheel and Will took the map, looking over what tomorrow might bring. More of the same, that was obvious, only the route would change.

“One day,” Clarence said, “every town in the western half of this map is going to have a red dot next to it. Have you ever thought about what then?”

“For you and me, you mean?”

“For Mom. If she even makes it to then. Except she probably won’t.”

“You mean just lie to her? Tell her we found something even though we didn’t?”

“If it gives her some peace, finally, would that be so bad?”

“I see what you did there,” Will said. “The next square you advance to after that is, okay, now that we’ve established lying as an acceptable option, why not lie to her now and save ourselves all that future trouble.”

“I never said that.”

“It was coming. Don’t tell me it wasn’t,” Will said. “I keep telling you that you can bail any time you want. This doesn’t have to be a two-man project. It never did.”

Maybe not, but to Clarence it had always felt that way. No argument that he wasn’t superstitious was as persuasive as the conviction that as soon as he let Will do this on his own, their mom would mourn a vanished son, too.

It had begun when his brother was nineteen, a college sophomore who’d enjoyed just one year of Daytona Beach debauchery before deciding he’d rather spend spring break in Kansas. Mother’s Day was coming in a few weeks, and his idealistic kid brother could think of no better gift to give theirs than the answers she’d craved for decades.

Just like that, huh? Sure. Why not.

You didn’t let an earnestly headstrong nineteen-year-old do something like this on his own. No telling who he might run into, and his 4.0 grade average didn’t mean he couldn’t be stupid when smart mattered most. Elderly Klansmen and their ilk still protected killings half a century old, and there was an uneasy sense they weren’t dealing with anything quite so prosaic here.

That first year, Clarence had been counting on the enormity of the task to discourage him, and had never been so wrong about anything in his life. Spring breaks turned into career-era vacations, one year became six, and whatever happened to Will Senior remained as much a mystery as ever. And Clarence still couldn’t shake the feeling that, without him, his brother would meet his own bad end.

More than once, he thought of the man in the photo, the grandfather who was two decades younger than their father was now, and wanted to hear it from the man’s tobacco-seared lips: Would he even want this for them?

Go on, live your own lives and quit trying to reconstruct mine , he imagined Will Senior telling them. Have that kid you keep telling your wife you’ll get around to.

Just like that, huh?

What is it, son, you think you’ve got to wait until after you get me figured out before you do it? You think you’ll be doing the same thing to your kids that I did to mine by coming out here to the world’s breadbasket?

Something like that.

In that case, maybe you need to get clearer on your priorities.

Easy for you to say, old man. I’m the one you left cleaning up your fifty-year-old mess.