Free Wolf Whistle by Lewis Nordan

or loosen the length of piano wire by raising or lowering the broom handle, and when she plucked the wire with her fingers, she made a deep and rich and metallic music of
thoom thoom thoom thoom,
to accompany her father’s guitar.
    And so that is what they did now, the three of them, while the babies watched, this family together for the next to last time. They played “Bo Peep,” the music of a black man named Blue John Jackson, who lived just a mile down the road.
    Solon started pumping his knee and stomping his foot, “One and a-two and a—” Wanda and Mrs. Gregg usually came in somewhere around seven or eight, and so now that is what they did, sooner or later, as the spirit moved them, and as Solon picked through the first high notes on theterrible old rattletrap guitar, and then countered them on the bottom end with strumming.
    He said, sang, “Bo Peep …”
    The guitar went
plink plink,
up high, went
glum glum,
down low.
    The washboard went
a-rattle-bing-bap.
    The washtub and broomstick went
thoom thoom thoom.
    Solon said, sang, “Done lost her sheep …”
    Rattle-bing-bap.
    Thoom.
    â€œDone lost her sheep …”
    Plink.
    â€œSo she come trucking
    Bing.
    â€œBack on down the line.”
    â€œBo Peep. Done lost her sheep. Done lost her sheep. So she come trucking. Back on down the line.”
    The Greggs played and sang in this way for an hour before they quit. It was the only verse they knew, maybe the only one there was.

4
    O UTSIDE THE window of the schoolhouse, the rain tap-tap-tap-tapped on the metal slide out on the playground and moistened the dust, which, through the open window, smelled like a fragrance of the sea. The children were gone now. Alice was alone in the schoolroom.
    On the metal slide the rain was jungle drums. In the trees it was incantations in foreign tongues.
    Alice considered that she had never heard anybody talk about their sad life before. She admired Mrs. Gregg for this, and for not complaining.
    Alice put on her raincoat, a clear plastic number she had picked up at the Low Price Store, the latest thing, Mr. Kamp told her.
    This would be the last big rain of the summer. The big rivers, the Yazoo and the Tallahatchie, would turn red with the iron oxide of the clay that washed down from the hills in the adjoining counties.
    The smaller rivers, Quiver and Bear Creek and Big Sand and Fear God and Yallobusha, would turn black and boil up over their banks and flood the chicken houses and the Negroes’ cabins and maybe a cotton gin or two and send water moccasins out of the swamp shallows and up thesewers. Daddies would go off and drink whiskey in the turkey woods, and mothers would say to their children, “Run to the Frigidaire, sugar, and get your ole mama a cold Falstaff, and don’t forget to open it, dumplin, they’s a church key in the knife drawer, Law, this rain is working on my last nerve, I swan.”
    Alice walked out of the schoolhouse. She was living with Uncle Runt, looking after the children, since Fortunata left. She pretended like it was a real home.
    She wished she was married to Dr. Dust. What good would that do? She didn’t know, it might be an answer.
    She was walking now, past the big field where the high school arrow-catching team practiced in better weather. Her nephew Roy Dale, Runt’s oldest son, was on the team this year.
    Raindrops formed on the clear-plastic raincoat and rain bonnet. Some of the water ran off her coat in little streams, and other drops only hung in their places against the plastic, like fat, puffed-out, transparent little crystal sparrows on a limb.
    Alice walked past the crabapple tree on the corner, the chinaberry tree on the next, the backyard where Mrs. Stowers had kept a cow when Alice was a child, and where Alice walked for glass bottles of raw milk for her daddy, after her mama left town, and before Alice went to live with her grandmama. She walked past the