Free Bone Music by Alan Rodgers

to reassure her.
    When he thought about that for a while he decided she was right, and went back to the ridge over Memphis where he’d built the home that was his new existence.
    But that was later — much later. That night when he left his grave he wandered into Beaumont, into the worst parts of town. He found a saloon there he never frequented, and it was doing a brisk business in bad liquor and painted women. He didn’t like that place at all, but he knew he had to go there. Because he knew what he would find there, and he knew he had to face it.
    And he did face it. He only hesitated a moment outside the barroom door, and then he pushed in, past the drunkards and the devil-music and the party women with their wide smiles and their hearts and eyes so full of self-contempt; through the pool-hall on the far side of the bar, into the back room where the real money was.
    He found Peetie Wheatstraw there, sitting at a table with five other gentlemen, playing cards for stakes even deadmen can’t afford.
    The gamblers glared at Blind Willie as he burst into their room. One of them made to draw his pistol, but Blind Willie waved that threat away with a gesture of his hand.
    “You woke me, William Bunch. Tell me what you want so I can return to my rest.”
    Peetie Wheatstraw threw his cards down on the table and pushed his stake into the pot. “It took you long enough, Blind Willie,” he said. “You’re a stubborn kind of man.”
    “You’re ignoring my request, William Bunch. I mean to get this done.”
    Peetie Wheatstraw took Blind Willie by the arm and led him through the back-room door, into the bar. “There’s something you don’t understand,” he whispered.
    Blind Willie didn’t answer that; instead he glared at Peetie Wheatstraw, waiting for him to go on.
    “I can’t tell you here,” he said. “We need to go where we can talk.”
    He led Blind Willie out of the bar, into the night; through the empty streets of Beaumont to the boneyard Blind Willie had walked away from not an hour earlier.
    As they went the deadman who sometimes called himself the Devil’s Son-in-Law hummed a little tune, and though it was no melody Blind Willie could name, he recognized the tune.
    Because it was the shadow of the music of the world, and Blind Willie was a part of it, same as you and me. But his part was a large one, very clear; it sang him like a refrain, some ways, because Blind Willie was a crucial bit of everything to happen.
    Before they reached his grave Blind Willie knew what lay ahead of him, and he knew why he had woken. He knew Peetie Wheatstraw hadn’t been the one to wake him at all, but only a deadman come to greet him; he knew that he was damned to life on Hell and earth, no matter how piously he’d tried to live his life.
    And he accepted all of that, because he had the Grace and Faith to accept the fate he never meant to find.
    “Tell the King he knows where he can find me,” Blind Willie said. And then he walked away to find the wreck of his subsistence on the surface of the world.



Spanish Harlem
    The Present
    As the summer wore on it grew hotter and hotter in the tenement — hotter than any Harlem summer Emma ever lived.
    The heat went bad on Lisa.
    Her skin drew chalky, greasy; her hair fell away in clots. Her eyes shriveled in their bony sockets until they hung free, trembling as she moved. The ichorous mound that once had been the cancer in her belly swelled and bloated till Lisa’s tiny desiccated form became a caricature of a pregnant corpse.
    When the rot had all but consumed her, Lisa had a dream. In the morning, she told her mother about it.
    “The Lady came to me last night, Mama,” Lisa said.
    Emma Henderson frowned. “What lady is that, Lisa?”
    “The Lady from my dream, Mama.”
    Emma didn’t like it, not one bit. “What did she say, Lisa?”
    “She told me not to be afraid, Mama.” She looked out the window. “I’m going to die again, aren’t I, Mama?”
    Emma pursed her