Song of Solomon

Chapter 15

The fan belt didn’t last long enough for him to get to the next gasoline station. It broke on the edge of a little town called Jistann, the needle trembling at H. Milkman sold it to the tow-truck man for twenty dollars and caught the first bus out. It was probably best that way, for over the humming wheels, his legs folded in the little space in front of his seat, he had time to come down from the incredible high that had begun as soon as he slammed the Byrd woman’s door.

He couldn’t get back to Shalimar fast enough, and when he did get there, dusty and dirty from the run, he leaped into the car and drove to Sweet’s house. He almost broke her door down. “I want to swim!” he shouted. “Come on, let’s go swimming. I’m dirty and I want waaaaater!”

Sweet smiled and said she’d give him a bath.

“Bath! You think I’d put myself in that tight little porcelain box? I need the sea! The whole goddam sea!” Laughing, hollering, he ran over to her and picked her up at the knees and ran around the room with her over his shoulder. “The sea! I have to swim in the sea. Don’t give me no itty bitty teeny tiny tub, girl. I need the whole entire complete deep blue sea!”

He stood her on her feet. “Don’t you all swim around here?”

“Over at the quarry is where the kids go sometimes.”

“Quarry? You all don’t have no sea? No ocean?”

“Naw; this hill country.”

“Hill country. Mountain country. Flying country.”

“A man was here to see you.”

“Oh, yeah? That would be Mr. Guitar Bains.”

“He didn’t give his name.”

“He don’t have to! He’s Guitar Bains. Gitar, Gitar, Gitar Bains!” Milkman did a little dance and Sweet covered her mouth, laughing.

“Come on, Sweet, tell me where the sea is.”

“They some water comin down below the ridge on the other side. Real deep; wide too.”

“Then let’s go! Come on!” He grabbed her arm and pulled her out to the car. He sang all the way: “‘Solomon ’n Ryna Belali Shalut…’”

“Where you learn that?” she asked him. “That’s a game we used to play when we was little.”

“Of course you did. Everybody did. Everybody but me. But I can play it now. It’s my game now.”

The river in the valley was wide and green. Milkman took off his clothes, climbed a tree and dived into the water. He surfaced like a bullet, iridescent, grinning, splashing water. “Come on. Take them clothes off and come on in here.”

“Naw. I don’t wanna swim.”

“Come in here, girl!”

“Water moccasins in there.”

“Fuck ’em. Get in here. Hurry up!”

She stepped out of her shoes, pulled her dress over her head and was ready. Milkman reached up for her as she came timidly down the bank, slipping, stumbling, laughing at her own awkwardness, then squealing as the cold river water danced up her legs, her hips, her waist. Milkman pulled her close and kissed her mouth, ending the kiss with a determined effort to pull her under the water. She fought him. “Oh, my hair! My hair’s gonna get wet.”

“No it ain’t,” he said, and poured a handful right in the middle of her scalp. Wiping her eyes, spluttering water, she turned to wade out, shrieking all the way. “Okay, okay,” he bellowed. “Leave me. Leave me in here by myself. I don’t care. I’ll play with the water moccasins.” And he began to whoop and dive and splash and turn. “He could fly! You hear me? My great-granddaddy could fly! Goddam!” He whipped the water with his fists, then jumped straight up as though he too could take off, and landed on his back and sank down, his mouth and eyes full of water. Up again. Still pounding, leaping, diving. “The son of a bitch could fly! You hear me, Sweet? That motherfucker could fly! Could fly! He didn’t need no airplane. Didn’t need no fuckin tee double you ay. He could fly his own self!”

“Who you talkin ‘bout?” Sweet was lying on her side, her cheek cupped in her hand.

“Solomon, that’s who.”

“Oh, him.” She laughed. “You belong to that tribe of niggers?” She thought he was drunk.

“Yeah. That tribe. That flyin motherfuckin tribe. Oh, man! He didn’t need no airplane. He just took off; got fed up. All the way up! No more cotton! No more bales! No more orders! No more shit! He flew, baby. Lifted his beautiful black ass up in the sky and flew on home. Can you dig it? Jesus God, that must have been something to see. And you know what else? He tried to take his baby boy with him. My grandfather. Wow! Woooee! Guitar! You hear that? Guitar, my great-granddaddy could flyyyyyy and the whole damn town is named after him. Tell him, Sweet. Tell him my great-granddaddy could fly.”

“Where’d he go, Macon?”

“Back to Africa. Tell Guitar he went back to Africa.”

“Who’d he leave behind?”

“Everybody! He left everybody down on the ground and he sailed on off like a black eagle. ‘O-o-o-o-o-o Solomon done fly, Solomon done gone /Solomon cut across the sky, Solomon gone home!’”

He could hardly wait to get home. To tell his father, Pilate; and he would love to see Reverend Cooper and his friends. “You think Macon Dead was something? Huh. Let me tell you about his daddy. You ain’t heard nothin yet.”

Milkman turned in his seat and tried to stretch his legs. It was morning. He’d changed buses three times and was now speeding home on the last leg of his trip. He looked out the window. Far away from Virginia, fall had already come. Ohio, Indiana, Michigan were dressed up like the Indian warriors from whom their names came. Blood red and yellow, ocher and ice blue.

He read the road signs with interest now, wondering what lay beneath the names. The Algonquins had named the territory he lived in Great Water, michi gami. How many dead lives and fading memories were buried in and beneath the names of the places in this country. Under the recorded names were other names, just as “Macon Dead,” recorded for all time in some dusty file, hid from view the real names of people, places, and things. Names that had meaning. No wonder Pilate put hers in her ear. When you know your name, you should hang on to it, for unless it is noted down and remembered, it will die when you do. Like the street he lived on, recorded as Mains Avenue, but called Not Doctor Street by the Negroes in memory of his grandfather, who was the first colored man of consequence in that city. Never mind that he probably didn’t deserve their honor–they knew what kind of man he was: arrogant, color-struck, snobbish. They didn’t care about that. They were paying their respect to whatever it was that made him be a doctor in the first place, when the odds were that he’d be a yardman all of his life. So they named a street after him. Pilate had taken a rock from every state she had lived in–because she had lived there. And having lived there, it was hers–and his, and his father’s, his grandfather’s, his grandmother’s. Not Doctor Street, Solomon’s Leap, Ryna’s Gulch, Shalimar, Virginia.

He closed his eyes and thought of the black men in Shalimar, Roanoke, Petersburg, Newport News, Danville, in the Blood Bank, on Darling Street, in the pool halls, the barbershops. Their names. Names they got from yearnings, gestures, flaws, events, mistakes, weaknesses. Names that bore witness. Macon Dead, Sing Byrd, Crowell Byrd, Pilate, Reba, Hagar, Magdalene, First Corinthians, Milkman, Guitar, Railroad Tommy, Hospital Tommy, Empire State (he just stood around and swayed), Small Boy, Sweet, Circe, Moon, Nero, Humpty-Dumpty, Blue Boy, Scandinavia, Quack-Quack, Jericho, Spoonbread, Ice Man, Dough Belly, Rocky River, Gray Eye, Cock-a-Doodle-Doo, Cool Breeze, Muddy Waters, Pinetop, Jelly Roll, Fats, Lead-belly, Bo Diddley, Cat-Iron, Peg-Leg, Son, Shortstuff, Smoky Babe, Funny Papa, Bukka, Pink, Bull Moose, B.B., T-Bone, Black Ace, Lemon, Washboard, Gatemouth, Cleanhead, Tampa Red, Juke Boy, Shine, Staggerlee, Jim the Devil, Fuck-Up, and Dat Nigger.

Angling out from these thoughts of names was one more—the one that whispered in the spinning wheels of the bus: “Guitar is biding his time. Guitar is biding his time. Your day has come. Your day has come. Guitar is biding his time. Guitar is a very good Day. Guitar is a very good Day. A very good Day, a very good Day, and biding, biding his time.”

In the seventy-five-dollar car, and here on the big Greyhound, Milkman felt safe. But there were days and days ahead. Maybe if Guitar was back in the city now, among familiar surroundings, Milkman could defuse him. And certainly, in time, he would discover his foolishness. There was no gold. And although things would never be the same between them, at least the man-hunt would be over.

Even as he phrased the thought in his mind, Milkman knew it was not so. Either Guitar’s disappointment with the gold that was not there was so deep it had deranged him, or his “work” had done it. Or maybe he simply allowed himself to feel about Milkman what he had always felt about Macon Dead and the Honoré crowd. In any case, he had snatched the first straw, limp and wet as it was, to prove to himself the need to kill Milkman. The Sunday-school girls deserved better than to be avenged by that hawk-headed raven-skinned Sunday man who included in his blood sweep four innocent white girls and one innocent black man.

Perhaps that’s what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?

“Everybody wants a black man’s life.”

Yeah. And black men were not excluded. With two exceptions, everybody he was close to seemed to prefer him out of this life. And the two exceptions were both women, both black, both old. From the beginning, his mother and Pilate had fought for his life, and he had never so much as made either of them a cup of tea.

Would you save my life or would you take it? Guitar was exceptional. To both questions he could answer yes.

“Should I go home first, or go to Pilate’s first?” Out in the street, late at night with autumn air blowing cold off the lake, he tried to make up his mind. He was so eager for the sight of Pilate’s face when he told her what he knew, he decided to see her first. He’d have a long time at his own house. He took a taxi to Darling Street, paid the driver, and bounded up the stairs. He pushed the door open and saw her standing over a tub of water, rinsing out the green bottles she used for her wine.

“Pilate!” he shouted. “Have I got stuff to tell you!”

She turned around. Milkman opened his arms wide so he could hold all of her in a warm embrace. “Come here, sweet-heart,” he said, grinning. She came and broke a wet green bottle over his head.

When he came to, he was lying on his side in the cellar. He opened one eye and considered the option of not coming to for a little while more. For a long time now he knew that anything could appear to be something else, and probably was. Nothing could be taken for granted. Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn’t even know your name scrubbed your back. Witches could sound like Katharine Hepburn and your best friend could try to strangle you. Smack in the middle of an orchid there might be a blob of jello and inside a Mickey Mouse doll, a fixed and radiant star.

So he lay on the cool damp floor of the cellar and tried to figure out what he was doing there. What did Pilate knock him out for? About the theft of her sack of bones? No. She’d come to his rescue immediately. What could it be, what else could he have done that would turn her against him? Then he knew. Hagar. Something had happened to Hagar. Where was she? Had she run off? Was she sick or…Hagar was dead. The cords of his neck tightened. How? In Guitar’s room, did she…?

What difference did it make? He had hurt her, left her, and now she was dead—he was certain of it. He had left her. While he dreamt of flying, Hagar was dying. Sweet’s silvery voice came back to him: “Who’d he leave behind?” He left Ryna behind and twenty children. Twenty-one, since he dropped the one he tried to take with him. And Ryna had thrown herself all over the ground, lost her mind, and was still crying in a ditch. Who looked after those twenty children? Jesus Christ, he left twenty-one children! Guitar and the Days chose never to have children. Shalimar left his, but it was the children who sang about it and kept the story of his leaving alive.

Milkman rolled his head back and forth on the cellar floor. It was his fault, and Pilate knew it. She had thrown him in the cellar. What, he wondered, did she plan to do with him? Then he knew that too. Knew what Pilate’s version of punishment was when somebody took another person’s life. Hagar. Something of Hagar’s must be nearby. Pilate would put him someplace near something that remained of the life he had taken, so he could have it. She would abide by this commandment from her father herself, and make him do it too. “You just can’t fly on off and leave a body.”

Suddenly Milkman began to laugh. Curled up like a Polish sausage, a rope cutting his wrists, he laughed.

“Pilate!” he called. “Pilate! That’s not what he meant. Pilate! He didn’t mean that. He wasn’t talking about the man in the cave. Pilate! He was talking about himself. His own father flew away. He was the ‘body.’ The body you shouldn’t fly off and leave. Pilate! Pilate! Come here. Let me tell you what your father said. Pilate, he didn’t even tell you to sing, Pilate. He was calling for his wife—your mother. Pilate! Get me out of here!”

Light exploded in his face. The cellar door opened over his head. Pilate’s feet appeared on the stone steps, and paused.

“Pilate,” said Milkman, softly now, “that’s not what he meant. I know what he meant. Come, let me tell you. And Pilate, those bones. They’re not that white man’s bones. He probably didn’t even die. I went there. I saw. He wasn’t there and the gold wasn’t there either. Somebody found it and found him too. They must have, Pilate. Long before you got there. But, Pilate…”

She descended a few steps.

“Pilate?”

She came all the way down and he looked in her eyes and at her still mouth. “Pilate, your father’s body floated up out of the grave you all dug for him. One month later it floated up. The Butlers, somebody, put his body in the cave. Wolves didn’t drag the white man to the front of the cave and prop him on a rock. That was your father you found. You’ve been carrying your father’s bones—all this time.”

“Papa?” she whispered.

“Yes. And, Pilate, you have to bury him. He wants you to bury him. Back where he belongs. On Solomon’s Leap.”

“Papa?” she asked again.

Milkman did not speak; he watched her long fingers travel up her dress, to rest like the wing of a starling on her face. “I’ve been carryin Papa?” Pilate moved toward Milkman, stopped and looked at him for a while. Then her eyes turned to a rickety wooden table that stood against the stone wall of the cellar. It was in a part of the room so dark he had not even seen it. She walked over to the table and lifted from it a green-and-white shoe box, its cover held down with a rubber band. “Joyce,” it said on the box. “Thank heaven for little Joyce heels.”

“If I bury Papa, I guess I ought to bury this too—somewhere.” She looked back at Milkman.

“No,” he said. “No. Give it here.”

When he went home that evening, he walked into the house on Not Doctor Street with almost none of the things he’d taken with him. But he returned with a box of Hagar’s hair.

She wouldn’t set foot on an airplane, so he drove. She seemed happy now. Her lips mobile again, she sat next to him in Macon’s Buick, a mink stole Reba had won wrapped around her shoulders over her old black dress. The knit cap was pulled down on her forehead and her shoes still had no laces. Every now and then she glanced at the back seat to check on the sack. Peace circled her.

Milkman felt it too. His return to Not Doctor Street was not the triumph he’d hoped it would be, but there was relief in his mother’s crooked smile. And Lena, though unforgiving as ever, was civil to him, since Corinthians had moved to a small house in Southside, which she shared with Porter. The Seven Days, Milkman guessed, would be looking for a new recruit, as they had to when Robert Smith jumped off the roof of Mercy. But there were long rambling talks with his father, who could not hear it enough—the “boys” who remembered him in Danville; his mother’s running off with his father; the story about his father and his grandfather. He wasn’t a bit interested in the flying part, but he liked the story and the fact that places were named for his people. Milkman softened his description of Circe, saying simply that she was alive, and taking care of the dogs.

“I ought maybe to take me a trip down there,” said Macon.

“Virginia?” Milkman asked him.

“Danville. I ought to go by and see some of those boys before these legs stop moving. Let Freddie pick up the rents, maybe.”

It was nice. No reconciliation took place between Pilate and Macon (although he seemed pleased to know that they were going to bury their father in Virginia), and relations between Ruth and Macon were the same and would always be. Just as the consequences of Milkman’s own stupidity would remain, and regret would always outweigh the things he was proud of having done. Hagar was dead and he had not loved her one bit. And Guitar was … somewhere.

In Shalimar there was general merriment at his quick return, and Pilate blended into the population like a stick of butter in a churn. They stayed with Omar’s family, and on the second and last evening, Milkman and Pilate walked up the road to the path that led to Solomon’s Leap. It was the higher of two outcroppings of rock. Both flat-headed, both looking over a deep valley. Pilate carried the sack, Milkman a small shovel. It was a long way to the top, but neither stopped for breath. At the very top, on the plateau, the trees that could stand the wind at that height were few. They looked a long time for an area of earth among the rock faces large enough for the interment. When they found one, Pilate squatted down and opened the sack while Milkman dug. A deep sigh escaped from the sack and the wind turned chill. Ginger, a spicy sugared ginger smell, enveloped them. Pilate laid the bones carefully into the small grave. Milkman heaped dirt over them and packed it down with the back of his shovel.

“Should we put a rock or a cross on it?” Milkman asked.

Pilate shook her head. She reached up and yanked her earring from her ear, splitting the lobe. Then she made a little hole with her fingers and placed in it Sing’s snuffbox with the single word Jake ever wrote. She stood up then, and it seemed to Milkman that he heard the shot after she fell. He dropped to his knees and cradled her lolling head in the crook of his arm, barking at her, “You hurt? You hurt, Pilate?”

She laughed softly and he knew right away that she was reminded of the day he first met her and said the most stupid thing there was to say.

The twilight had thickened and all around them it was getting dark. Milkman moved his hand over her chest and stomach, trying to find the place where she might be hit. “Pilate? You okay?” He couldn’t make out her eyes. His hand under her head was sweating like a fountain. “Pilate?”

She sighed. “Watch Reba for me.” And then, “I wish I’d a knowed more people. I would of loved ’em all. If I’d a knowed more, I would a loved more.”

Milkman bent low to see her face and saw darkness staining his hand. Not sweat, but blood oozing from her neck down into his cupped hand. He pressed his fingers against the skin as if to force the life back in her, back into the place it was escaping from. But that only made it flow faster. Frantically he thought of tourniquets and could even hear the rip of cloth he should have been tearing. He shifted his weight and was about to lay her down, the better to wrap her wound, when she spoke again.

“Sing,” she said. “Sing a little somethin for me.”

Milkman knew no songs, and had no singing voice that anybody would want to hear, but he couldn’t ignore the urgency in her voice. Speaking the words without the least bit of a tune, he sang for the lady. “Sugargirl don’t leave me here/ Cotton balls to choke me/Sugargirl don’t leave me here/ Buckra’s arms to yoke me.” The blood was not pulsing out any longer and there was something black and bubbly in her mouth. Yet when she moved her head a little to gaze at something behind his shoulder, it took a while for him to realize that she was dead. And when he did, he could not stop the worn old words from coming, louder and louder as though sheer volume would wake her. He woke only the birds, who shuddered off into the air. Milkman laid her head down on the rock. Two of the birds circled round them. One dived into the new grave and scooped something shiny in its beak before it flew away.

Now he knew why he loved her so. Without ever leaving the ground, she could fly. “There must be another one like you,” he whispered to her. “There’s got to be at least one more woman like you.”

Even as he knelt over her, he knew there wouldn’t be another mistake; that the minute he stood up Guitar would try to blow his head off. He stood up.

“Guitar!” he shouted.

Tar tar tar, said the hills.

“Over here, brother man! Can you see me?” Milkman cupped his mouth with one hand and waved the other over his head. “Here I am!”

Am am am am, said the rocks.

“You want me? Huh? You want my life?”

Life life life life.

Squatting on the edge of the other flat-headed rock with only the night to cover him, Guitar smiled over the barrel of his rifle. “My man,” he murmured to himself. “My main man.” He put the rifle on the ground and stood up.

Milkman stopped waving and narrowed his eyes. He could just make out Guitar’s head and shoulders in the dark. “You want my life?” Milkman was not shouting now. “You need it? Here.” Without wiping away the tears, taking a deep breath, or even bending his knees—he leaped. As fleet and bright as a lodestar he wheeled toward Guitar and it did not matter which one of them would give up his ghost in the killing arms of his brother. For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.