Free Bone Music by Alan Rodgers Page A

lips, set her teeth. When she spoke she spoke carefully, trying not to show how scared she was. “I’m not going to let you die, child,” she said. “Don’t you worry about that.”
    Lisa took that in, but she didn’t look like she believed it.
    “The Lady took me through a city,” Lisa said. “She held my hand and showed me all the stuff along the River. Factories and dockyards, old houses with the rot. One place there was a well covered up with stones, and she said it went so deep they drink from it in Hell.”
    Emma rubbed her temples. She didn’t want to think about dreams like that. She didn’t want to know about them.
    Not that she had a choice.
    “By the well there was a man with a guitar,” Lisa said. “He played music so beautiful it made me want to cry.”
    “Tell me,” Emma said. “Tell me what he sang.” She didn’t want to know the song, no more than she wanted to think about the dream. But she knew she had to hear.
    “He sang about Damnation,” Lisa said, “and all about the Eye of the World. But before he told it all he stopped, and the Lady said his song was Judgment Day.”
    She said that like her mother ought to know just what that meant, and Emma did know, of course, because everybody down home in the Delta knew there was a song called Judgment Day. But Lisa hadn’t ever gone down home, and Emma couldn’t figure where she could have heard of such a thing.
    “Don’t you ever sing that song, child,” Emma told her daughter. “I don’t care why you think you need to. I don’t want you dreaming about it, neither.”
    As if there was any way the girl could stop a dream.
    “Yes, Mama,” Lisa said, obedient as ever, no matter how her mother asked a thing no child could deliver.
    “It isn’t right, you growing up like this,” Emma said. “We’ve got to set this house in order.” And that wasn’t right, because the house was tidy as could be, no matter how the stink of Lisa rotting overwhelmed the air. “You need a normal life, child. School and play, Girl Scouts in the afternoon. You need to go to church on Sundays, and get right with the Lord.”
    Lisa laughed when her mother said those words, get right with the Lord.
    “I’m serious!” Emma said. “If we were home I’d take you to a revival tent!”
    Lisa laughed and laughed, and after a while Emma started trying to think about the churches here in Harlem, and wondering if there was any of them that weren’t full of politics and welfare, and maybe it really was time to find religion.
    But then Emma realized how wonderful it was to hear her daughter laughing, to see the girl’s dead-eyed face alive with sunshine and delight, and the thought of church got lost in the beauty of the afternoon.
    By the time Emma found it again it was too late for any preacher in the world to help them.
    Because everything went to hell early the next morning, and by the time the dust had settled nothing was the same. It started when Emma gave her girl a kiss on the cheek, early in the morning. It never really ended.
    “I love you, darling,” Emma said, and she stooped and braced herself to give her putrefying girl a kiss. And she did it, too — but when she did it went all wrong. Big oozy flakes of the girl’s cheek came away on Emma’s lips, and before she could make herself be still Emma screamed and screamed again. It was too much, too damn much, and the faith that’d given her the courage to tell Mama Estrella to go away the day before evaporated in a binding moment made from terror —
    And Lisa looked so hurt.
    So hurt.
    Then Emma got a grip on her heart, and she made herself be silent as she wiped the liquefying flesh away from her lips.
    “We need to do something, baby girl,” Emma said.
    “I know, Mama.”
    Emma bit her lip and tried to think, but all she could think was how they had to clean her daughter up. The moment she had that thought she knew it was trouble, that it was the worst thing she could do. It ran against