Page 54 of Hanging and Burning

The clarinet was headed for its crescendo, the apex of which was a single drawn-out note that, as it diminished, gave birth to a mature woman’s voice singing, “It hurts me, baby, to lie here with you, to wake up and you’re leavin’, when you come back to me too…”

“Excuse me,” Claudette said. “They’re right over here.”

The table was set next to the slightly raised dais on which stood Mr. Broadhurst. In front of the band leader stood the singer, who looked like she was living the words she sang.

Claudette’s and my destination was a round table. Seated there were Miss Mara and Mrs. Person, my father, Chief Odin Oliver, and a dark-skinned woman whose rounded features and youthful glow refused to give up an age. This woman, I assumed, was Gert Lample.

“… it aches in my chest and down to my shoes to be lost here in love with you…”

“Mr. Oliver,” Mrs. Person said. She was holding my left forearm.

I resented being kept from the song, but when I looked down into the woman’s eyes, I saw something soft and gentle. Knowing how tough Estelle was, I decided to follow that friendly gaze.

“Come have a seat,” Estelle said, drawing me toward the table and to a padded wood chair set between her and the woman who was not Twyla Mann’s mother. I smiled and nodded at Mara Macintosh and then turned away to watch the stage.

The singer was somewhere in her fifties, haggard and yet also handsome in the way a veteran of some faraway war would be. She wore a windblown blue chiffon dress and platinum jewelry. At least it might’ve been platinum, I don’t know, maybe it was silver plate. Her skin was darker than mine and only her eyes revealed the pain she felt.

“Hey, King,” my father hailed, but I didn’t respond.

It was all about the music for me. If I was scheduled to stand in front of a firing squad right then I would have asked them to wait for the end of the song, which was also the end of the set. When she finished the sad piece, the chanteuse’s shoulders slumped, and her head came down seemingly to a grateful bow, but I felt that it was more like surrender. The audience was applauding, even cheering, but I didn’t think that her obeisant stance was in reaction to them. She was responding to some inner demon, there to be appeased by her sacrifice in song.

The lights came up and the musicians walked offstage, leaving their instruments until the next set.

“That was sumpin’, huh, King?” my father asked.

“What’s her name?” I replied.

“Aurilia Fox,” Mrs. Person said to me while she gazed, almost vacantly, at my father.

All the women at the table were appreciating Chief Odin. That had always been the way. Something about his essence set up a permanent feminine drift in his direction.

“It’s like,” I said, “I just came across a jazz great that I never even knew existed.”

“You wouldn’t call it blues?” my father challenged.

“It’d be easier to get your butt outta prison than remove the blues from jazz.”

These words set up a flutter among the women. Blessing my father with the taint of prison highlighted the sharp scent of his unbridled manhood.

“You were in prison?” asked Mrs. Person.

“For a little while there,” Chief admitted humbly.

“What for?” Mara, the woman who appreciated male genitalia, added.

“They said I shot these men, and I did, but they were shootin’ at me first.”

“And that got him a minimum of a life sentence,” I appended.

“Oh my God,” Mara said. “How did you get out?”

“One of the men he shot found Jesus,” I said, relishing the act of taking Chief’s story away from him. “Or maybe the other way round. He went to the authorities and admitted that him and his friend had lied at Chief’s trial.”

Gert gazed at the two women through wide eyes, appreciating in them the same glue that kept her haplessly, happily devoted to my dad. If he had been a bad man, even just a callous one, my father would have left a string of broken hearts and broken homes. But he loved as well as he was loved and that made him proof to criticism or guilt.

I wouldn’t say that my father was a victim of his deep concerns about humanity, men and women, children and other creatures too. He wasn’t a victim, but he suffered because of his choices. He suffered and yet reveled in that misery.

Having these thoughts, I realized that it was because of the impact Chief Odin had on most people, especially women, that I invited him to join us. His presence was the alchemical spice that might help in the execution of my inquiry.