There Won't Be War

Attack of the Jazz Giants Gregory Frost

In the grain mill outside Mound City, Doc Lewis and the boys had themselves four scared black men to burn. Doc, the officiating Grand Cyclops of the Klan hereabouts, sat way back on a cracked cane chair, two legs off the ground and daring the other two to snap. The dare had weight to it because, like his daddy before him, Doc had the heft of a hogshead keg. He’d lost all but a few strands of hair in the past few years as well, and the baldness bothered him much more than his increasing girth. In his youth, he’d gloried in his golden hair. In any case, the niggers couldn’t see his features because Doc wore a flour bag over his head. His boy, Bubba, had charge of the actual branding. It was one of very few events in which the squat, pug-faced boy showed anything at all like industry.

Before he reached for the hot iron, Bubba took a tin scoop, filled it from a sack of buckwheat flour, and then slapped it over his victim. An explosion as from a colossal powder puff, and the tremulous naked man became a blinking ghost, a nonentity, and was thereby reduced further from any kinship with his tormentors. The flour was Bubba’s little joke.

Curly and Ed Rose, holding the victim by his upper arms, got powdered, too. But, half-drunk on ‘shine, Doc’s two assistant Night Hawks only laughed themselves silly and staggered a bit—two demented and pointy-headed art thieves trying to make off with a copy of Michaelangelo’s David. They did not appreciate as did Doc the gravity of their efforts here. It was sport to them, that’s all.

It was four men set to branding eight. They’d brought guns but didn’t have to brandish them. Fear, solid as the chains round their victims’ legs, kept the disguised foursome in power. They could do anything they liked, with impunity. Their victims prayed to survive or else die swiftly.

Bubba drew the iron out of the bread-oven coals, turned slowly, then drove the brand home. The flour puffed up, the black skin hissed. The man kicked and screamed and wrestled but Curly and Ed Rose had braced for that. Flour melted in a stream down a powdered thigh. By the time Bubba pulled the iron away, his victim had passed out. A fresh pink eye within a triangle adorned his left pectoral—a symbol of the magical forces he now lived under.

Bubba was a third-generation nigger-brander. He ought to have had some sense of the history behind his actions.

His grandaddy, the Captain, had maintained this tradition well after slaves had ceased to be property. At a time when carpetbaggers crawled over the body of the South like worms and the Black Codes kept shifting in their proscriptions, the identifying mark was for the black man’s own good. First, the branding reminded him how easily the world could turn over on him. Second, it ensured that he knew he had a home, a place where he belonged. Back in the days of Reconstruction, Grandaddy had been a Grand Dragon.

Since then, the family had branded maybe five hundred. There were men and women in Chicago, New York, St. Louis and Kansas City who bore the cicatrice of the Lewis family plantation. No matter where they went, if things turned around, Doc would send out his Night Hawks to round them up. Many of those branded hadn’t even been his workers. They’d been drifters, the homeless and directionless, passing through Mound City on their way to perdition. In other towns all across the south, they hanged those niggers. But his brand was known widely, so in a sense he was protecting them. He had worked this out long ago. Daddy was a man of vision, of foresight. Even those he’d branded couldn’t have foretold otherwise.

How Doc got his name was a mystery that went to the grave with his father. Daddy Lewis had been a young captain in the Confederacy and so naturally they’d all called him Captain out of respect. Doc wasn’t a medical practitioner, nor a vet, nor even a snake-oil salesman.

Somewhere before he turned ten, he got called Doc by the Captain and the name stuck. Maybe Daddy Lewis had had the percipience to know that his successor would need a nom de guerre to set him above the rest. Mystical power in names—a fact to which Doc could well attest.

He would happily have conjured something similar for Bubba, but that childish label had already malformed the boy’s behavior well past the threshold of manhood. In fact, in moments of reflection Doc wondered if Bubba had ever really crossed that threshold. His desire to take pride in his son’s actions had been endlessly frustrated, mostly by his wife, Sally.

Doc and she had two daughters as well: Debra and Psalmody. This latter name was the least likely thing Doc had ever heard, but the indomitable Sally had thought it a “beautiful, delicate, liquid word” and would not bend. Like the Captain, perhaps, she’d sensed something metaphysical about her child. At the same time, she couldn’t tell you where she’d heard or what exactly was meant by the word, although it obviously referred to the Psalms. The solid biblical link carried the day. Sally could work Doc like a pump handle back then. Even now she could get under his skin with three or four well-placed words. She ought to—she was his cousin, had known him since childhood. This might also have accounted for a good deal regarding Bubba. His given name was Ezekiel. Biblically, he resembled the wheel, maybe a small ark or the fish that ate Jonah. Nobody was looking for anything metaphysical from him.

Psalmody had revealed her uniqueness early. At five, she’d asked her daddy what radiography was. Dutifully, Doc had looked the word up in a book and still didn’t know to this day what it had told him. At six, Psalmody had wanted to know about positive rays, and at seven it had been genetics, but Doc had stopped researching by then. He didn’t know what a father was supposed to do who couldn’t offer his child the answers she sought. And, besides, he’d had a plantation to run.

It was 1925 now and Doc employed near eighty “workers.” Curly and Ed Rose watched over the work force, same as they did everything else for him. He couldn’t have imagined how he’d have gotten along without them.

Doc sensed that Curly had become enamored of Debra, his quieter daughter, his pale and delicate angel. Curly was a respectful young man, maybe a bit too fond of his sour mash but not so’s it interfered with his work. Doc hoped they would marry and take over the farm. As for Psalmody, it was Bubba who seemed to have designs on her. Just looking at her, he could break out in a lustful sweat. The boy was troubling in his unceasing obtuseness. How could the two girls be such smart and lovely pastries and Bubba such a lump of dough? Surely never before in the family’s long and proud history had there been so utterly beef-witted a child.

The morning after the branding, Doc heaved himself out of bed, and went shuffling down the hall, scratching at his butt, toward the back stairs and the door leading to the outhouse. But, halfway down, he found his way blocked.

Sticking up from the first floor stood the enormous lower joint from an impossibly larger clarinet. It looked like some sort of black sarcophagus and it jammed the entire stairwell. The banister below had popped off a couple of its balusters where the clarinet piece exceeded the stairs’ width. Doc glanced instinctively up at the ceiling but found no corresponding hole to explain the presence of the thing. The chrome pads and finger plates reflected him in his utter dismay, each one as big as his head. Who in his employ would have carted the infernal thing along the hall and down the stairs? In the middle of the night no less, and without waking him? Who would do it? An’ what kind of a joke was it supposed to be? He didn’t immediately recognize its musical disposition. All he cared was that, as incommodious as a kidney stone, it blocked his route to pee. The urgency of that need cut through his confusion, and he climbed quickly, apelike, back upstairs to the bedroom. One of the young maids, named Lizzie, had already arrived and was making up the bed. Somehow she’d known he was up—probably heard him clomping across the floor.

Doc hadn’t the time to be shy. He snatched the chamber pot from under the bed, stuck his swollen member into it and glared defiantly at the girl while the echo of his release pinged off the pot. She openly observed his tool as she might have done a passing cockroach, too disinterested to reach over and squash it. With the pressure off, Doc’s tool receded and he furiously tucked it back into his skivvies, blotching the flannel with the last remaining drops.

“Lizzie, what’s that goddam thing on the back stairs?” he demanded. Doc never cursed in the house, so he knew that she knew how mad he was.

“Thing?” she asked. Never heard of it.

“Well, never you mind, girl, you go get me Carpy, right now. Don’t say anything but that I want to see him pronto.”

She nodded dimly and escaped, the bed half-made. Doc put down the brass pot. While he waited for the household retainer, he sat back on the bed. The matter on the back stairs was too perplexing to dwell upon, and his thoughts drifted.

Outside, the field workers were singing a “holler” about not goin’ down to the well no more. Doc smiled vaguely at their singing, which brought back memories of other times on the bed: Sally on their wedding night, drunk and catty; Carpy’s mother, laid back on it, willing to let him fuck her. The halcyon days of youth—it had all been ahead of him then.

Carpy was six years older than Bubba. Not nearly so dark as his mother, he neither much resembled his squat father. Muscular, yes, but long-muscled and trim. The only obvious trait of Doc’s he’d acquired was the tendency toward baldness. Carpy’s mother died shortly after his birth. His true parentage was kept from him, from the workers, and from Sally (who found out anyway and promptly stopped sleeping with her husband). She mistreated Carpy wickedly, never with any explanation or any apparent cause.

The most Doc dared for his eldest son was to teach him to read so that he could be promoted to the highest household position, that of overseer. It paid a tiny wage, but Doc had secretly hidden funds in a bank account for Carpy. He had rationalized this to himself over the years so as not to have to face the obvious conflict with his duties as a Cyclops. Unlike his old man, Carpy treated those dozens beneath his command with utmost kindness and compassion—a gentle foreman, fond of Lizzie, but secretly, hopelessly, in love with Psalmody. She was built like a goddess. Her breasts alone stuffed his brain full of immoderate thoughts, and thank God for that or he might have zeroed in on the rest of her.

Psalmody liked to run, decades before jogging would come of age. She refused to ride in the family Ford, preferring to race it along the dirt roads, barefoot, in loose-fitting boy’s clothing. The sweat on her upper lip did things to Carpy that he couldn’t explain. Certainly he had seen enough sweat in his life. Even Bubba registered her exudence of sexuality, but his elder half-brother was way ahead of him. Rarely, after all, were women excited by the vision of a loved one picking his nose. Carpy, a man of position and responsibility, never would do such a thing publicly; whereas Bubba’s excavated mucous adorned chair arms, walls and the undersides of tables throughout the house. The thought of his hands on her would have made Psalmody faint. She was looking for someone of intelligence, of original thought, and pretty soon, too, or she would go crazy in this prison-farm. Everything that mattered to her existed somewhere else other than Mound City and its predatory environs. Although she didn’t realize it, Carpy’s gentle nature had already played upon the strings of her heart. History has a way of swinging around for another looksee.

Carpy had no idea what the monstrosity confronting him might be, nor how it might have arrived. “It’s like a big arrow was shot through the roof. Impossible stuff,” he called it. “Mr. Doc, nobody in this house can be responsible. Fact, I don’ know anybody who could. My word on that.”

Of course Doc ought to have guessed that no servant had hauled the thing in here. His mind tried to put together an explanation: Too large to have been dragged and lacking a corresponding hole in the ceiling for Car-py’s “arrow,” the odd cylinder must have been assembled in place, brought in through the back door. The cause for this blasphemy remained an enigma, but the method at least he could resolve to his own satisfaction. He ordered that the thing be removed. “Break it into little bitty bits if you have to.”

Carpy pushed hard against a polished fingerplate, which raised one of the connected pads a little ways. Deep below them, the earth seemed to belch out a flat, sonorous note. Carpy backed up against the wall. He and Doc traded worried looks. “Gonna take all the hands,” he said, “everybody from the fields just to nudge this thing.”

“Then, we gonna deal with it later,” replied Doc. “Not messing about the workday over this little damn problem.”

“Yes, sir, that seems best.” Carpy withdrew past him, back up the steps. He peered down into the sarcophagal blackness of the instrument. Was that the top of a pale head way down inside there? The thing was some kind of sign, like chicken blood or a hanged man. This was a blight upon the family.

Halfway up the stairs, Doc found himself confronted by his wife. Sally had a way of looking at him that reduced his stature. That he was standing on a lower step of the stairs didn’t help, either. He tried to take control of the situation quickly. “Damndest thing I ever seed,” he said as he leaned back over the rail. Sally gave the thing a quick look. “Clarinet,” she said sagely, “but you’d have to stand on the roof to play it.”

“What the hell kind of clarinet is that?”

Sally replied, “A big clarinet.” She moved to let him up.

Muttering, Doc stepped around her and headed for his room at full tilt. There, Lizzie had already removed the chamberpot and finished making the bed. The child did look after him well. He thought again of Carpy’s mother, but dismissed the memory as both provocative and immaterial. Sally trod solemnly along the hall. He sensed her lingering in the doorway, and he turned around. He walked over and started to close the door. “I have to git dressed if you don’t mind.”

“You’ve dripped on yourself,” she indicated, staring at his crotch.

Doc shut the door. He listened to her move off. “Sally,” he said softly, “you are workin’ my last nerve.”

Once he had finished dressing, Doc went down to breakfast. He had barely scooped up his first forkful when a cry from outside stopped him. His name upon the air brought Doc running out to the porch. Sausage in his mouth and a checkered napkin bibbing his neck, he towered over Ed Rose, who stood in a panic on the ground. Ed blurted, “You gotta come quick, Doc. You gotta see this thing.”

Doc told him to calm down. He threw off the napkin and followed his foreman into the fields. The steamy Mississippi morning pumped the sweat out of him as he waded through waist-high cotton plants. Branded workers had stopped their business to watch as the man himself strode past them. Ahead, a cluster of them surrounded “the thing.”

It had crushed rows of plants but no one had been hurt. It was a thin gold tube, far longer than the thing inside the house, and it had spread a blue stain in a band over some of the cotton. The tube stretched out twenty yards before curving back—a piece from something much larger and more grotesque. In the flattened cotton the shape of the whole instrument could be discerned, as if it had slept there overnight and then moved on at daybreak, leaving the sloughed hand slide behind. Doc walked in its rut while trying to formulate an identity for the thing. He had trouble.

“Hell,” he said, “looks like ... looks like ...”

One of the fieldhands spoke up. “Like God’s trombone.”

Doc whirled around angrily but as quickly realized that was exactly what it looked like. “That’s right. A big trombone.” And the thing in the house—it, too, was some sort of instrument. What had passed across his land during the night? “This don’t make no kind of sense.” While he wore a consternated smile, he marked the worker who had spoken—a young man. A smart, clever, and unbranded young man. Wouldn’t do to have a smart satchel-mouthed nigger roaming in their midst. Liable to foment all sorts of trouble. He would have to sublease Spangler’s Mill again. Soon. As for the mystery trombone, it was so great a mystery that he saw no point in trying to wrestle it to earth. “Drag this curlicue outten here now, and you all get back to work,” he told them. “And don’t be worrying yourselves over what it portends. It don’t portend shit.”

They continued staring at the trombone shape for a while before moving off; all save the satchel-mouthed boy. He caught Doc in his stare, and it penetrated and drew fear like a venom from the white man’s heart.

Doc retreated from the field. Back on the lawn beside his house, he grabbed Ed Rose by the arm and asked him, “Who is that boy?”

“A-which?” Ed answered.

Doc turned him around and pointed. The workers had all returned to their labors. He knew them, knew their shapes, but he could not pick out the one who had stared at him. “Where the hell he get to?” The cotton grew waist-high. Doc convinced himself that the boy was crouched down, hiding, afraid. He wanted very much for that particular bastard to be afraid. Ed interrupted his search. “By the way, Doc, you seen Curly this morning? He ain’t around. Nobody’s seen him since last night, when he went out after our little business. Said he couldn’t sleep, had some kinda tune in his head.”

“Too much booze in his head, you mean. He gets back, you send him to see me. I’m not in a tolerating mood this morning.” Curly did not reappear all day. Doc’s mood developed a razor edge.

That night, alone in his bed, he heard distant thunder, rhythmic and incessant. Jungle drumming derived from a jungle band whose members existed solely in the aether; travelers in the air, ghosts as surely as a skeleton scuffling on his grave.

The image jolted him awake. The sound of jungle thumping diminished. It rounded into words or something like words, briefly: “Juba, juba, juba,” a droned spell, which pressed the consciousness out of him. He lacked the means to fight its power, but prayed to keep the evil music far out in the bush. “Don’ ever let ’em in,” he muttered, then faded away himself like a lost radio signal.

Screaming woke Doc. Unmistakably Sally’s voice, it sawed through the ceiling below. He wrestled his pants over his long Johns, snapping up his suspenders while he ran along the hall. As he pivoted around the newel post, the screaming subsided into blubbering hysteria, and he followed it to the first floor. Such a sprawling Goddamned house, this antebellum layer cake of his.

He stormed along the hall, cursing “God damn you, Sally, shut up,” but his anger couldn’t hold in the face of the new anomaly. It overwhelmed him—as big and broad as a church steeple. This time he knew what he looked at: He had forged the musical link. It was the bell of a trumpet, and for absolute sure it had dropped from out of the sky, because it had pinned somebody beneath it. One arm protruded, nearly severed by the swept gold rim. One arm, a white arm. A familiar white arm. Bubba’s arm. His cold hand gripped tightly an equally cold branding iron. The dead idiot, what was he doing parading through the house with the fucking eye of God on a stick? Somebody would see, and some of them had surely been on the wrong end of it. A crawdad could have figured it out and put a name to it: Grand Cyclops and Son.

Doc got down on his knees to pry back the fingers. He drew the iron out of his son’s hand. Sally continued her bubbly whining. He would’ve liked to have smacked her with the iron. Instead, he struck the trumpet bell. It clanged loudly. He thought, “Music destroyed my son.” More than that, the trumpet like the clarinet was hollow.

Tossing down the bent brand, he tried to move the bell. He shoved it, grabbed onto the top and tried to tilt it up, he pushed it, climbed up the side and tried to pull it over. His bare feet squealed as they slid down the curved surface. He hung from the lip, his head back. He mewled to God, noticing abstractly that the ceiling remained intact. Yet the thing had passed right through it, must have done—the whole floor had buckled when it hit. He wiped the spittle off his lips and backed up into the counter. Lizzie stood there, struck stupid in her horror. She didn’t even notice him.

What plague had been visited upon him? For what? He went to church like clockwork, prayed to and paid the Lord. He knew about original sin, the flood of Noah and the plague of locusts, about coveting your neighbor’s wife, about the exodus. How could a man who comprehended those things be thus cursed?

He noticed his wife on her knees behind the bell. She had torn out some of her hair, and saliva foamed on her lips. Her anguish came in great heaves. Doc rushed over to her and tugged her hands down to her sides. “Calm,” he said, “Calm now, honey. Easy does it.” As if subduing a horse, he spoke. It worked for him but not for her. The strain of all she’d kept inside had broken Sally at last.

Eventually her daughters arrived at the scene. Debra reenacted her mother’s squall, but Psalmody looked on with strange contentment, like Casandra watching as the wooden horse birthed inside her walls. Debra’s screams galvanized Lizzie, and she snapped her skirts at and shooed both girls from the room, at which moment Carpy pushed his way in. He tripped over the bent iron and stopped still. Behind him came Ed Rose and a dozen field hands, but Carpy hardly noticed them. Ed ran over to Doc. The party had been on its way to move the thing in back, but trumpet or clarinet, it made little difference. Now they circled the bell. Silently, together, they bent down. They had no trouble grabbing hold of the rim; and, uttering a sharp “holler” as they often did in the fields, they lifted it all at once. Doc elbowed between them on his hands and knees to see if his son was all right. Probably the boy would have survived had it hot been for the mute stuffed into the bell. It had acted as a hydraulic press, splitting the floor. Most of Bubba had been integrated with the boards.

The dark men set the bell down across the kitchen. They gathered around the depressed circle that contained Bubba’s stain and Doc. They were silent. Their faces betrayed nothing. Doc found himself trapped like a sacrifice within them. One by one, they raised their fingers to their sweaty shirts as if to pledge allegiance, and each set of fingers carefully traced the hidden shapes of heterotopic eyes.

After the funeral, nothing was the same. The workers began to migrate, drifting away on the dry winds of August, but not before a group of them finally hefted the clarinet on the stairs and solved the mystery of Curly. Curiously, he had mummified inside the cramped space. The enormous black joint had hardly touched him. Why he had died at all became the new mystery. Ed Rose read the signs plainly enough and deserted before the sun came up on another day. The Cyclops should have mustered some terror then, but he had no Night Hawks left and his iron had disappeared. He needed guidance from a higher authority. Curly and the others had betrayed him, he felt.

Sally was locked away over in Vicksburg and not likely to be returning any time soon. Debra had taken the household helm. She intended to redecorate the whole place, telling her father, “I want to strip away the old life, Daddy. It’s surely gone.” Already, in the parlor she had installed one of those nice big Victrola humpbacks with the crank handle on the side.

Some weeks later, Doc awakened one sweltering night to the recurring thump of the jungle band. He got dressed and sneaked out the back door, careful of the crushed landing lest history repeat itself. The sound had grown in heat and intensity. It throbbed like the blood in his overworked arteries. Music. The battle hymn of a guerrilla war that had already claimed his former lieutenants.

“Oh, jass,” cried a voice. “Jass, jass, I love it.” The music slid around a wailing cornet. He knew already what that sound was—the workhouse radio, a device Carpy had brought in, arguably to keep the rest of the workers content enough to remain. But what was this hopped-up shit they were playing? “Juba,” came a reply to chill his blood.

He peered around the edge of the open door. The whole of his depleted workforce sat grouped around the big wooden box. Some of them swayed in the rhythm. Their lidded eyes rolled loosely in their sockets. He might as well have been a ghost: they had no sense of him. A frenzied announcer broke in, babbling mythopoeic names—Chippie, Bix, Kid Ory, the Duke and the King. Names of power, and maybe capable of standing up to Ghouls and Dragons? And Cyclopes?

He wanted to go in there and rip apart that radio but was frightened by the energy pulsing through the room; scared rigid by the presence of Debra, like a ghost herself, cozy in their midst. He swallowed and drew back. This must be a nightmare from which he would shortly awaken. Even the crickets chirred with the beat.

Doc withdrew around the side of his house. Awhile on the steps, he breathed in the muggy night air. Jasmine mist hung thickly about him. There was enough pressure inside his skull to blow out a suture. He stared over toward the field where the trombone had lain but could see nothing. Finally, he climbed for the security of his own house.

Inside, someone had put on the parlor Victrola. The tune sounded like a washboard and banjo accompanied by a kazoo in a tub—just more of the insane noise that was pouring out of the workhouse. Drawn fearfully by it, Doc crept into the parlor, to find Carpy and Psalmody naked on the floor between the sofa and center table. He stared, brain on hold. He couldn’t remember how to run away. The impassioned lovers didn’t notice him but the eye in Carpy’s shoulder rolled open and viewed him harshly. Doc stumbled back into the hall, his teeth clamped on the edge of his hand.

Slowly, an irrational anger took hold of him. Outmoded desire resurged in him against the invisible, the preternatural, which dwarfed him in its freedom. By God he wouldn’t just stand here quivering. He’d whip this thing. Doc charged along the hall and down into the cellar. His secret identity hung hidden there—the white linen shroud and flour-sack hood of office. And there, across a keg of nails, lay a new branding iron. Its mark was new to him: a cross with extra arms. He didn’t understand it exactly but the iron had a real heft that he liked.

Once in his guise of Cyclops, he took up his sceptre and rebounded up the stairs. At the top stood Lizzie in her nightdress. She seemed drunk or entranced. “Mr. Doc,” she said gently, with acute sadness, but he would not be undone by so obvious a ploy. He struck her with the iron and, when she withstood the blow, struck her again. Hadn’t he cared for her, hadn’t he treated her justly?

The music seemed to race; someone had cranked up the Victrola. Its noise drowned out the thunder of his passing. He would descend upon the workers, scare them into their graves, and only then punish Carpy. Oh, that thankless task would be hardest of all. He had given that boy more than anyone could ask.

Doc stumbled, half-blind within his hood, down the porch steps, music the scent he followed through the night. He’d smash the radio first. “If thine eye offend thee,” he recited triumphantly.

In the darkness, something struck him on the head. He paused. Another stinging tap—this one on the shoulder—made him spin about. What was it? Chestnuts dropping out of season? Then another, harder blow caught him over one eye. Defiant, he raised the iron, and a dozen of the pesky things hammered into him. With a grunt, he collapsed onto one knee. He snatched at one of the objects as it tumbled in the grass. He thought he had hold of a chunk of hail for a moment but it was long and smooth and carefully finished. It was, dear God, a piano key. Alert to his folly, Doc tried to get up to retreat and found that a pile of the keys had amassed around him, the hem of his robe snagged beneath them. He whacked away as the wall grew up. He whipped the iron desperately, until exhaustion and a thousand blows made him reel.

The keys showered down, hard as buckshot. Black and white, they pummeled like fists, spreading dark stains across the shroud, until all that remained was the iron, stuck out like a lightning rod with a good-luck sign at the tip. The heaped keys glistened as bright moonlight reappeared, and the music tinkled artlessly away.