Page 51 of Night Songs

And it chased her over to free’n

The voice was my mother’s at her most stripped down and magnetic, beckoning us around a fire so she could tell us a story.

When the last note died on the player, I felt my body relax, no longer frozen. I waited for the second track, my spine still tingling.

A fierce fiddle kicked up, and I checked the track list. “Duet with the Devil.”

It told the story of a woman long ago who traded her soul for a beautiful singing voice, thereby cursing every woman in her bloodline to an early death.

And then the next track played, “Black Gum Tree,” describing a pregnant woman hit by a car and thrown in a tree, saving her baby’s life with her soft, powerful body. Not just an accident, but fate. One that couldn’t be escaped.

The fourth, “Mountain Girl,” began slower, with a sense of atmosphere between the fiddle and guitar plucks, like fog was rolling in. She sang about a little mountain girl, cursed from birth, who everyone called a demon child. But she didn’t care because she had something they didn’t have—when she walked among the trees, she heard music floating down from God above. It was the thing that transcended all of the pain, the thing that made her want to live.

Next played “Let Me Out,” the song I’d heard that first night at Hess’s, and I seized up immediately, feeling the same panic start to take over. I tried to shift focus to the conversation next to me, where a girl whispered to her friend, “Have you ever heard the rumors about her?”

“What do you mean?”

“Apparently she—”

Someone shooshed her, and the girl went silent. I turned to ask what she was going to say, but then the track ended, and I was distracted by the ascending movement of the music.

“The Cursed Woman.”

Not what you would expect from a song with that name.

Belle sang in a round, hopeful voice about the girl finding release in finally accepting her fate. Then the song built to an almost ecstatic climax ofjoy, like she was having a religious awakening. She was rapturous, bathed in her own light, haunted but not chained.

She was the cursed woman. And she would live as such, chasing freedom and repelling fear.

The next track was called “Old Crone,” where the cursed woman imagined the old age she would never experience—to some, it might have sounded like a blessing, but to her it was a loss. She saw herself growing old in New Orleans, her hair going coarse and gray like the Spanish moss hanging from the trees. No longer yoked to the demands of youth, free to walk unobserved through the world and delight herself however she saw fit.

Then I waited for the instrumental opening for the last track, “Lullaby for a Demon Child,” but I heard only a delicate voice wafting through the air. It was close and quiet, as if she was speaking right in my ear:

Baby, don’t be ’fraid

When I leave too soon

Baby, don’t be ’fraid

I’ll be your moon

Another voice repeated the verse, this one so rich and deep it made my belly ache, and then another voice sang the words, this one strong and clear like rushing water.

Then the trio was singing all together, and the harmony of their voices swaddled me and held me against its chest.

Baby, don’t be ’fraid

When the white dog moan

Baby, don’t be ’fraid

You’ll nev’r be alone

I dug my nails into my fists to keep the tears from flowing. I knew without knowing,Iwas the child she was singing to.

Baby, don’t be ’fraid

When you wake at night