Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

Feeling like today he’s just nothing but himself. Nothing but a man.

He can only go so far before he has to go back to the beginning. Memorize it, chase after that lost word in the verse he just thought up, got it, sing it again and again. Verse, verse, verse, taking the story of the man farther and getting it down this afternoon before he forgets it.

Add the love of a good woman. A hero needs a woman. Name her Polly Ann, after her.

He holds out his hat in taverns after he sings, the coins waterfall, silver down. He’ll try this song out tonight. Somewhere he stopped feeling east. He’s been following the rails, seeing what he can get out of this town before the next calls him on. The rails lead west. But now the air has changed and he has to face it: he’s more west than east now, he’s in the Western territory. He doesn’t think he wants to go that much farther. Some fellow told him once that there’s a whole country of songs out there, the guy passing him the jug after they traded tunes. That may be true. But there’s something today about this song, about how easy it is, that maybe there’s just this song. Taps his foot along to keep the beat.

Weight of suspenders on his shoulders, where his shadow falls away from him and the leaf half in the shade. Nothing really and yet.

Maybe it’s the Lord, Lord that makes it work today. Sitting there in the verse, an anchor. Forget Big Bend. Lord, Lord is the real mountain in this song, thrown up from his bedrock and looming. It reminds him of something he knows about himself. And if he took the time, maybe he could take each of his words today and link it back to something that happened to him. His father or mother, something that happened one day. Some of the words he wouldn’t know where they came from. Might take years, might take his deathbed. To figure it all out. Or maybe it’s the whole thing together that makes it all important.

Then. Everything that collected on him has fallen away. What happened anyway? It’s like that. Exhausted half the feeling, used up half the magic and didn’t know he was closer to the end than he was to the beginning. Too busy to mourn. And now the day is no longer charged and all he has is his creation. Twigs just twigs, puddles just puddles. Spent.

Song done? Not yet. He knows that. Like a dollar bill it changes hands. Others will hear it and add a verse, goose the rhythm, slow it down to fit their mood, temperament, to fit the resonance set up in them by the arrangement of plates on the kitchen table that morning. Same thing he did: scuffed shoes, an old guitar, easy in crescentic afternoon like a layabout in a hammock, got all day for a song. He wasn’t there at Big Bend. This is his own John Henry, who he figures is a man like himself, just trying to get along. And if the man who taught him the song has his own John Henry, let him. The next man will have his. Someone else will change his verses and today’s John Henry will be gone, or secret in altered lines like memory.

He’ll try it out tonight. Next week someone who half-remembers it will sing it again. Maybe even at the same moment he’s singing his version in some other town along the rails, their Lord, Lords hitting at the same time like two steeldrivers working the tunnel side by side.

Benny said he didn’t want to go anyway, so the missing invitation didn’t disturb him and he dismissed Josie’s soundings about the so-called snub with a robotic downward wave of his hand, always the same gesture, she’d seen it a hundred times. Too preoccupied to deal with any matter these last few weeks unless it pertained to “the preparations,” unless it was keeping vigil for the UPS truck ferrying the new cartons of toilet paper or negotiating with Bob and Frank’s Hotel-Motel Supply on the issue of the replacement key chains, which had arrived as botched blue plastic diamonds with the words “Titcut Motor Lodge” etched into their faces. This last matter, with its attendant pockets of voice mail vacuum, ran up their phone bill to unheralded scale. Bob and Frank’s Hotel-Motel Supply mailed them the original purchase order for the key chains with Benny’s invalid scratches marked in yellow highlighter. It was inarguable: it did indeed look as if he’d written Titcut, and the supply company was apparently reluctant to redo their order free of charge. Benny doesn’t possess the same facility in dealing with people as Josie, and so it fell naturally and tacitly to her to harangue, nag and needle the succession of representatives from the supply company, Bob, Frank, Frank, Jr., whoever was unfortunate enough to answer the phone, about the Key Chain Affair. Benny demanded daily updates. With so many details commanding his attention, the ephemera of the preparations coursing in swift orbits, he did not have the time or inclination to endlessly debate the matter of the missing invitation, which in his mind had already been settled. He settled it himself. He talked to Mayor Cliff about it, and had been assured that the missing invitation was a mistake and no more than that; the politician even made a joking reference to the Fred Letter Office, as the Post Office had been called years before, owing to the former postmaster’s legendary scattered faculties. Mr. and Mrs. Scott were invited to the opening night banquet at the Millhouse Inn, he assured Benny; Benny and Josie had pitched in to make this weekend special and were expected. But when Josie discovered that Charlotte Cliff had helped out with mailing the invitations, she knew exactly why theirs did not make it to the battered red mailbox that stood in spinster vigil at the foot of the parking lot. Of course she could not tell her husband why; all she could do was raise the matter repeatedly and obsessively, lob it into the air of their living room and watch it fall dead to the ground, as if she were a child sentenced to desultory indoor play on a rainy afternoon. She knew exactly. And she did not want to go.

Which suited Benny fine. The start of John Henry Days went off without a problem, the guests arrived, the rooms filled, no bother except for the matter of the dirty swimming pool, oh and the lounge chairs the New York journalists had left in the parking lot, which Benny had to move back so that they would not get pulverized by an inattentive driver. Friday night: he wanted nothing more than to take his customary stool at Bucky’s and drink with his mates. He did not want to see his fellow citizens put on airs, pat themselves on the back and generally try to pretend that a plateful of lukewarm grub at the Millhouse was some high society event.

Benny drives out to Hinton and Josie stirs a packet of macaroni and cheese. No doubt the food at the Millhouse is a step up the culinary ladder from her meal, but she is happy with her macaroni and cheese and settles into her bed with a copy of a Judith Krantz romance one of the guests had left in her room. The book opens naturally to the naughty bits, neatly foreshadowing the heroine’s assignations. Josie knows how far she has to wade through boring bits, she sees the floozy pages ahead. She reads and sometimes looks at the bell above her bed, to the signal linked to the grubby yellow button outside the office. Once a pleasant pearl color, the button is now shellacked by pilgrims’ greasy deposits; from the front doors of all-night gas stations, coffeepots, circulated cash and gripped steering wheels, this substance makes its way to the motel office buzzer. But tonight the NO VACANCY sign keeps them away, and all of the guests are at the Millhouse. No one rings. She always jumps when the bell rings. She falls asleep to the theme from The Tonight Show.

Benny’s snoring wakes her hours later and she remembers the ghost.

Josie feels it is her daily circuit through the rooms that gives her insight into the ghost. She senses its comings and goings; they share a bond as lifelong (and afterlife) residents of the region. She is a daughter of Hinton and bound to the place by history and family, the ghost attached to the mountain by its mountain death. No wonder Benny cannot sense the specter; her husband is a longtime resident, but he is not of the town. He cannot see the sense of her argument that under a mountain full of ghosts, their outpost, situated between the towns of Hinton and Talcott, is a natural place a ghost will wander to and make a home. What did her husband think he was doing by choosing this tract of land? It is a solemn recess between the places people had chosen to live. How about next to the Three Rivers Bridge? she asked. Too close to the Coast to Coast, he said. How about closer to Talcott, just a little closer, not here in the damned belly button of Big Bend. Too far from the New River traffic, he said. And now they have a ghost.