`This is my sister,’ the old barber said. `You boys woke her up, chattering.’
Then he stepped over to her. Bent down and spoke right in her ear.
`This is the boy I told you about,’ he said.
She looked up and smiled at me. It was like the sun coming out. I caught a flash of the beauty she must have had, long ago. She held out her hand and I took it. Felt like thin wires in a soft dry glove. The old barber left us alone together in the kitchen Stopped as he passed me.
`Ask her about him,’ he said.
The old guy shuffled out. I still had the old lady hand in mine. I squatted down next to her. She didn’t try to pull her hand away. Just left it nestled there, like a brown twig in my huge paw.
`I don’t hear so good,’ she said. `You got to lean close.’
I spoke in her ear. She smelled like an old flower. Like a faded bloom.
`How’s this?’ I said.
`That’s good, son,’ she said. `I can hear that OK.’ `I was asking your brother about Blind Blake,’ I said.
`I know that, son,’ she said. `He told me all about it.
`He told me you knew him,’ I said, in her ear.
`I sure did,’ she said. `I knew him real well.’ `Will you tell me about him?’ I asked her. She turned her head and gazed at me sadly. `What’s to tell?’ she said. `He’s been gone a real
long time.’
`What was he like?’ I said.
She was still gazing at me. Her eyes were misting over as she trawled backwards sixty, seventy years.
`He was blind,’ she said.
She didn’t say anything more for a while. Her lips fluttered soundlessly and I could feel a strong pulse hammering in her bony wrist. She moved her head as if she was trying to hear something from far away.
`He was blind,’ she said again. `And he was a sweet boy.’
She was more than ninety years old. She was as old as the twentieth century. So she was remembering back to her twenties and thirties. Not to her childhood or her teens. She was remembering back to her womanhood. And she was calling Blake a sweet boy.
`I was a singer,’ she said. `And he played the guitar. You know that old expression, he could play the guitar just like ringing a bell? That’s what I used to say about Blake. He would pick up that old instrument of his and the notes would just come tumbling out, faster than you could sing them. But each note was just a perfect little silver bell, floating off into the air. We’d sing and play all night long, then in the morning I’d lead him out into a meadow, and we’d sit under some old shade tree, and we’d sing and play some more. Just for the joy of it. Just because I could sing and he could play.’
She hummed a couple of bars of something under her breath. Her voice was about a fifth lower pitched than it ought to have been. She was so thin and fragile, you’d have expected a high, faltering soprano. But she was singing with a low, breathy contralto. I thought back with her and put the two of them in an old Georgia meadow. The heavy
smell of wildflower blossom, the buzz of lazy noontime insects, the two of them backs against a tree, singing and playing for the joy of it. Belting out the wry, defiant songs that Blake had made up and that I loved so much.
`What happened to him?’ I asked her. `Do yon know?’
She nodded.
`Two people on this earth know that,’ shy whispered. `I’m one of them.’ –
`Will you tell me?’ I said. `I sort of came down here to find out.’
`Sixty-two years,’ she said. `I never told a soul in sixty-two years.’
`Will you tell me?’ I asked her again.
She nodded. Sadly. Tears in her misty old eyes. `Sixty-two years,’ she said. `You’re the first
person ever asked me.’
I held my breath. Her lips fluttered and her hand scrabbled in my palm.