Free Tiger Rag by Nicholas Christopher Page A

was the only real father he ever knew
.
    Manny said to Alice one night:
The boy is a natural—he can already hear the music in his head. I give him the rudiments, and two months later, he’s ready to teach me. Must’ve come into this world with the instrument in his hands. You would know.
    Charley took his lessons in Manny’s house, down the street. It was the only house on the street that had a small porch, where Manny sat most nights, no matter the weather. Charley liked that porch. All the rooms in the house were painted blue, including Manny’s bedroom, which Charley peeked into more than once: the hard bed with the thin blanket, the low bureau, the mirror big enough to hold a man’s face, no more
.
    On Manny’s cornet he practiced scales and arpeggios, learned marching songs, and then one day, from memory, played note for note the hymn “Yes, He Is on His Throne,” which he had heard at church that week. Two weeks later, he began improvising around other hymns as well as the work songs he heard from the stevedores on the levee. At which point Manny took him to Brooker’s Music Store and bought him a proper new brass cornet, better than his own
.
    Manny never went to church
. I don’t believe much in sin the way they teach it,
he told Charley on the way home that afternoon, his collar dark with sweat
. For me it’s like this: there are things you do that others forgive, but you can’t never forgive them in yourself. Like being born with a special gift and not using it right. Don’t let that happen to you. And don’t listen to anyone who doesn’t have the gift himself. Just blow that horn the way you hear it in your head. Keep it pure.
    That was Manny’s most important piece of advice to Charley. A month later, he was gone to Louisville, Kentucky, where his brother had opened a restaurant. It took Charley some time to grasp that he would never see Manny again. Manny hadn’t made a secret of the fact that he didn’t want to marry again, Alice or anyone else. Yet, the previous Christmas, he had given her a topaz ring—his mother’s ring—as a keepsake, and she kept it for the rest of her life. It was the closest she would come to remarrying, she told Cora, though it wasn’t really that close at all
.
    Charley discovered soon enough, sooner than most, that there was a lot more to sin than what Manny had told him. But he never forgot
Keep it pure
as he brought forth an entirely new kind of music. Others would give it a name, but he wouldn’t know about that
.

ROWLAND, NORTH CAROLINA—DECEMBER 20, 3:10 P.M.
    Devon drove across the state line with Ruby dozing beside her in the passenger seat. She told herself she was accompanying her mother on this journey because she had grown protective of her. If that was so, why wasn’t she calling Ruby on her meltdown? Did she think her own recent history denied her credibility? Was she getting off on watching Ruby lose control? Or had she rightly concluded that Ruby’s denial was impregnable?
    Trash picking eight hours a day for sixty days had focused Devon’s mind in a way peyote never could. In an orange jumpsuit she had roamed the highway shoulders with a taciturn Jamaican girl named Giselle, on probation for dealing weed, who handed her a card on her last day, imprinted with a single sentence: INSTEAD OF TRYING TO CONTROL OTHER PEOPLE, CONTROL YOURSELF . “Another girl give that to me in jail,” Giselle said. “I made it my motto—to maybe keep me from getting busted again.” Self-control had never been Devon’s strong suit,but keeping her mother from running off the rails might help her gain some measure of it.
    Ruby coughed and raised her head. “How long was I asleep?”
    “About twenty minutes.”
    “It felt like hours,” she yawned, flipping down the visor and examining her makeup in the vanity mirror. “The red meat knocked me out.”
    “But you didn’t eat it.”
    “Dessert, then. Meat, sugar—it’s all the same. Look at that!” She