Searching for Caleb

13

Eli Everjohn drank his coffee white, preferred Jane Parker angel food cake to taco chips, and was perfectly comfortable sitting on a chrome-legged chair in the kitchen. He had to make all that clear before they would let him get on with his report. “Listen here,” he kept saying. “Listen. It struck me right off—” But Justine would interrupt to ask, couldn’t she take his hat? wouldn’t he be cooler in his shirtsleeves? And old Mr. Peck trudged around and around him, thinking hard, occasionally offering interruptions of his own. “I believe I ought to fetch my notebook, Justine.”

“Yes, Grandfather, I would do that.”

“I believe that windowscreen is torn. Where else would these mosquitoes be coming from?”

“I’ll find the swatter.”

“Oh, leave it, leave it. Mr. Everjohn here has something he wants to say to us.”

But when Eli took a breath Justine halted him. “Wait, I’ve been wanting something sour all day. Don’t start without me.”

“Justine—” Duncan said.

Eli Everjohn was a patient man. (In his business, he had to be.) Still, he had been dreaming of this moment for a good long time now. He had come over on a Sunday evening expressly to bring this news, which he thought might cause him to burst if he left it till Monday: in just under three months, he had accomplished what a whole family could not do in sixty-one years. He had performed a spectacular piece of deduction, and now he wanted to tell about it in his own slantwise, gradual way so that everyone could admire how one clue had built upon another, one path led to the next, with sudden inspired leaps of the imagination to bridge them. True detective work was an art. Finding was an art. He was grateful to the Peck family for handing him this assignment. (How could he ever again settle for guarding anniversary gifts or pretending to read Newsweek in front of beauty parlors?) So he cleared his throat, and pushed his coffee cup a certain distance away, and plaited his long fingers on the table before him and began as he had planned. “It struck me right off,” he said, “that there was one thing the same in all accounts of Caleb Peck.”

“You’ll have to speak up,” said the old man.

“Oh. Sorry. It struck me—”

“Justine, I think my battery’s going.”

“Will you let the man speak?” Duncan said.

So that Eli, with the last of his patience worn away, ended up blurting it out after all and ruining the moment he had planned for so long. “Mr. Caleb Peck,” he said, “is in Box Hill, Louisiana, alive and well.”

It had struck Eli right off that there was one thing the same in all accounts of Caleb Peck: he was a musical man. To his family that was only a detail, like the color of his eyes or his tendency to wear a Panama hat just a little past the season. But to Caleb, wasn’t it more? Eli pondered, sifting what he had heard and endlessly rearranging it. He traveled a few blind alleys. He scanned the alumni lists of several well-known music schools, including Baltimore’s Peabody Institute. He checked the family’s old phonograph records for performers whom Caleb might have been moved to seek out. He inquired as to Caleb’s piano teacher — someone young and pretty, maybe? Someone inspirational, to teach him those Czerny exercises he found crumbling away on top of the piano in old Mr. Peck’s Baltimore parlor? But no, the Czerny was Margaret Rose’s, said Mr. Peck. Caleb had not liked Czerny. He was not, to tell the truth, very fond of the classical mode. And he had never had a music teacher of any kind. Only little Billy Pope passing on his fiddle lessons, and a leatherbound book telling how to play the woodwinds (which in those days were really made of wood — see the ebony flute in Caleb’s old bedroom?) and for the piano, Lafleur Boudrault, who taught him ragtime.

Was this Lafleur Boudrault young and pretty, by any chance?

But Lafleur Boudrault was the Creole gardener, not pretty at all — a scar down one cheek and a permanent wink. Long dead now. Survived by his wife Sulie. He wouldn’t have helped out anyway: a cross-grained sort.

Eli traveled once again to Baltimore and sought out Sulie, who was moving a dustcloth around and around the attic. Nowadays all she did was dust. She would not give up her cloth, which had to be pried from her fingers in her sleep as you would pry a pet blanket from a child in order to wash it. And what she dusted was not helpful at all — never the furniture, which Lord knows could use a dusting, all those bulbs and scallops and crevices; but only the hidden places that didn’t count, the undersides of drawers and the backs of picture frames and now these trunks and cartons in the attic, which she had been on for weeks and weeks. They couldn’t get her to stop. They wanted to pension her off; didn’t she have family somewhere? They were almost certain there had been a daughter. But Sulie only laughed her cracked, rapid laugh and said, “Now you wants to do it. Now you wants.” Oh, she was mad, no question about it. But Eli needed Caleb’s contemporaries and there were not all that many to pick and choose from. He climbed the narrow, hollow, pine-smelling steps to Laura’s attic, submerging first his head and then his shoulders and then his wool-wrapped body in a heat so intense that it seemed to be liquid, and at the last he was merely floating upward in a throbbing dull haze. He swam between crazed china hurricane lamps and slanted portraits, across rugs rolled and stacked like logs, toward the spindly figure briskly polishing an empty Pears soap box down where the dusty light fingered its way through the louvers. “Mrs. Sulie Boudrault?” he asked, and without looking up she nodded and hummed and went on polishing.

“Widow of Lafleur Boudrault?”

She nodded.

“You wouldn’t happen to know where Mr. Caleb Peck has got to.”

Then she stopped polishing.

“Well, I thought they wouldn’t never ask,” she said.

She settled him on a china barrel, and she herself sat on a stack of St. Nicholas magazines with her dustcloth clutched daintily in her lap. She was a very small woman with stretched-looking skin and yellow eyes. Her manner of speaking was clear and reasonable, and her story proceeded in a well-ordered way. No wonder: she had had over half a century in which to arrange it.

“When first Mr. Caleb had left us,” she said, “I told Lafleur, ‘Lafleur, what do I say?’ For I know where he had went to yet I would hate to give him away. ‘Lafleur, do I lie?’ ‘That ain’t never going to come up,’ he say. ‘Them folks don’t think you know nothing.’ Well, I was certain he was wrong. I waited for old Mrs. Laura to fix me with her little eyes. She the one to watch for. Mr. Justin the First couldn’t do nothing, maybe wouldn’t have anyhow, but he had that Mrs. Laura so scared she would do it for him and more besides. She was one scared lady, and it had turned her mean and spiteful. Watch out for Mrs. Laura, I told myself, and so I watch and waited and plan how to answer what she ask. But she never do. Never once. Never even, ‘Sulie, do you recollect if you served Mr. Caleb breakfast that day?’ Never a word.”

Sulie set her skirt out all about her — a long draggled white eyelet affair that hit halfway down her skinny calves, with ankle-high copper-toed work shoes swinging below them. After thinking a moment, she dug down into her pocket and came up with a handful of Oreos, mashed and limp. “Have you a cookie,” she said.

“Thank you,” said Eli.

“She never ask. Nor none of the others. Took me some time to see they never would. ‘Why, looky there!’ I say to Lafleur at last, and he say, ‘Told you so. They don’t reckon just old us would know nothing,’ he say. So my eyes was opened. That was how. I made up my mind I wouldn’t tell till they say straight out, ‘Sulie, do you know?’ And Mrs. Laura I wouldn’t give the time of day even. I never did. She live forty-six years after Mr. Caleb had went and I never spoken to her once, but I don’t fool myself she realize that. ‘Sulie is getting so sullen,’ was what she say. Even that tooken her five or so years to notice good.”

Eli finished the Oreo and dusted off his hands. From his pocket he took a spiral notebook and a Bic pen. He opened to a blank page.

“Now,” said Sulie.

She stood up, as if to recite.

“Mr. Caleb was a musical man,” she said.

“I had heard he was.”

“He like most music, but colored best. He like ragtime and he copied everything Lafleur do on the piano. He like stories about them musicians in New Orleans, which is where Lafleur come from. Lafleur had got his self in a speck of trouble down there and couldn’t go back, but he would tell about the piano players in Storyville and what all went on. Understand this was back long time ago. Didn’t many people know about such things.

“Then times got hard and Miss Maggie Rose left us. I had to move on over to Mr. Daniel’s house and tend the babies. I was not but in my teens then. I had just did get married to old Lafleur. I didn’t know much but I saw how Mr. Caleb was mighty quiet and maybe took a tad more to drink than was needed. But I never thought he’d leave. One night he come down cellar to our bedroom, me and Lafleur’s. Knocks on our door. ‘Lafleur,’ he say, ‘this fellow down at the tavern is talking about a trip to New Orleans.’

“ ‘Is that so,’ say Lafleur.

“ ‘Wants me to go along.’

“ ‘That so.’

“ ‘Well, I’m thinking of doing it.’

“ ‘Why, sure,’ Lafleur tell him.

“ ‘Permanent,’ Mr. Caleb say. ‘Unannounced.’

“But still, you see, we didn’t have no notion he was serious.

“He ask Lafleur was there someplace to go, to stay a whiles. Lafleur mention this white folks’ boardinghouse over near where his sister live at. Mr. Caleb wroten it down on a piece of paper and fold it careful and left. We didn’t think a thing more about it. Come morning he arrive for breakfast, sometime he would do that. Eat in Mr. Daniel’s kitchen. ‘Fix me a lot now, Sulie,’ he say. ‘Can’t travel far on an empty stomach.’ Well, I thought he meant travel to town. I fix him hotcakes. I set out his breakfast and when he had done finished he thank me politely and left. I never did see him again.”

She considered her fingernails, ridged and yellowed like old piano keys.

“Could I have that boardinghouse address?” Eli asked her.

“Yes, why surely,” she said, and she gave it to him, slowly and clearly, having saved it up on purpose all these years, and he wrote it in his notebook. Then she faded off, so that Eli thought she had forgotten him. He rose with care and tiptoed to the attic steps. He had already dipped one ankle into the coolness below when she called him. “Mr. Whoever-you-are!”

“Ma’am?”

“When you tell how you found him,” she said, “make certain you put in that Sulie known the answer all along.”

So now he had an address, but it was sixty-one years old. He knew he couldn’t expect too much. He caught a plane to New Orleans that night. He took a cab to where a boardinghouse had stood in the spring of 1912. All he saw was a supermarket, lit inside with ghostly blue night lights, hulking on an asphalt parking lot.

“I reckon there’s no sense hanging around,” he told the cab driver.

Eli registered at a small hotel from which immediately, despite the hour, he called every Peck in the telephone book. No one had an ancestor named Caleb. He went to bed and slept a sound, dreamless sleep. On the following day, he set out walking. He picked his way past suspicious-looking hidden courtyards and lacy balconies, secret fountains splashing, leprous scaly stucco, monstrous greenery and live oaks dripping beards of moss, through surprising pockets of light where the air seemed to lie like colored veils. In various echoing buildings, archives both official and unofficial, he wandered gloomily with his hands in his pockets peering at yellowed sheet music, clippings, menus, and sporting-house directories under glass, as well as cases full of dented trumpets and valve trombones that appeared to have come from the dime-store. In the evenings he attended nightclubs, where, wincing against the clatter of brass and drums, he sidled between the tables to stare at the curling photographs on the walls and the programs once handed out during Fourth of July celebrations. There was no Caleb Peck. There was never that stiff, old-fashioned white man’s face or Panama hat.

Eli’s wife called, sounding lank and dragged out with the heat. “But it’s hotter here,” he told her. “And you ought to see the bugs.” She didn’t care; she wanted him home. What was he doing there, anyhow?

“I’ll be back in another week,” he told her. “In a week I’m going to have this thing wrapped up.”

It was August eighteenth. Although he did not have a single new clue, he was beginning to feel excited.

Now he started shadowing the gaudy, sunglassed tourists, who seemed to know something he did not. They were always in possession of secret addresses: the lodgings of palsied old saxhornists, clarinetists, past employees of the Streckfus Excursion Lines and granddaughters of Buddy Bolden’s girlfriends. (Who was Buddy Bolden?) Eli slipped in behind them through narrow doors, into dingy parlors or taverns or bedrooms. Sometimes he was ushered out again. Sometimes he would pass unnoticed. Then he introduced questions of his own, all of them out of place:

“You wouldn’t know a jazz cellist, by some chance.”

“Any good musicians out of Baltimore?”

“Whereabouts were you in the spring of nineteen twelve?”

Ancient, dusty eyes peered back at him, but never ancient enough. “Nineteen twelve? What kind of memory do you think I got, boy?”

By imperceptible degrees the Pecks had altered Eli. He had begun to ignore the passage of time, as if it were somehow common. He felt irritated that ordinary people could not do the same.

Days were tiresome, yes, and hard on the feet, but nights were worse. The string of clubs, bars, cafés, dance halls, and strip joints went on forever, and all the music sounded the same to him: badly organized. Eli slipped into a place and out again, into the next. He ducked away at any mention of cover charge, waved off waiters and hostesses. When pressed, he ordered Dr. Pepper; mostly he left before things had gone that far. The scent of success discouraged him. He wanted failure, spooky little hole-in-the-wall cafés. For surely, he was thinking now, Caleb himself was a failure. Whatever he had ended up doing, it had not left any mark upon this town.

He entered bars that smelled of mildewed wood, that had names like The High Note or Sportin’ Life, where a few musicians played raggedly and without much interest. A black man sang above a guitar:

Eli shook his head. He slid past a drunkard and returned to the sidewalk, where he milled among the tourists in a greasy, neon-lit, garlic-smelling night.

The following morning, he was up unusually early. He ate breakfast in a coffee shop near where he had been the night before, and he strolled past the same bars, but they were closed now. Farther down, an aproned man was sweeping the entrance of a strip joint that looked cheerful and homely by daylight. “Tell me,” Eli said to him. “You know that little old bar back there? Easy Livin’?”

The man squinted. “What about it?”

“You know what time it opens?”

“Most likely not till evening,” said the man. “You got a wait, fellow.”

“Well, thank you,” Eli said.

This morning he did not delve any further into the archives of jazz. He bought a paper and read it in a park. He had a second cup of coffee and a glazed doughnut. Then when the movies opened, he toured the city catching Jimmy Stewart films. Eli very much admired Jimmy Stewart.

At six o’clock he had a plate of scrambled eggs in a diner, followed by another cup of coffee and apple pie à la mode. Then he set off toward Easy Livin’—on foot, since it wasn’t far. He took his time. He nodded soberly as he walked and he looked about him with a well-meaning expression such as Jimmy Stewart might have worn. When he reached his destination, he straightened his string tie before stepping through the battered door.

Easy Livin’ was dark even now, when it was barely twilight. There was a bar with a brass rail, a few scarred tables, and at the end of the room a raw wooden platform for the entertainers. At the moment, there were no other customers. Only a boy behind the bar, and on the platform the black man who had sung the night before. He was squatting to hitch up some sort of electrical wire. He didn’t even look around when Eli came up behind him.

“Say,” said Eli. “Could I ask about a song?”

The singer grunted and then rose, brushing off his dungarees. He said, “This here is not one of them jazz joints, baby. Go on up the street.”

“Last night you were singing,” Eli said.

“Only the blues.”

“Ah,” said Eli, who did not see the difference. He pondered a moment. The singer looked down at him with his hands on his hips. “Well,” Eli said, “you were singing this here song I was wondering about.”

“Which.”

“Song about a train.”

“All songs got trains,” the singer said patiently.

“Song about Whisky Alley.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“You recall it?” Eli asked.

“I sung it, didn’t I?”

“You know who wrote it?”

“Now how would I know that?” the singer said, but then, all of a sudden: “Stringtail Man.”

“Who?”

“The Stringtail Man.”

“Well, who was that?”

“I don’t know. White fellow.”

“But he’s got to have a name,” Eli said.

“Naw. Not that I ever knew of. White fellow with a fiddle.”

“A fiddle,” said Eli. “Well — I mean, ain’t that a little peculiar for jazz?”

“Blues,” said the singer.

“Blues, then.”

“Now I don’t know a thing more than what I told you,” said the singer. But he hunkered down, anyway, getting closer to Eli’s level. “This fellow was away back, long before my time. He was lead man for White-Eye, old colored guitar man that used to play the streets. Now White-Eye was blind and the fiddler would lead him around. But whenever he fiddled, looked like the music just got into him somewhat and he would commence to dancing. Old White-Eye would hear the notes hopping to one side and then to the other and sometimes roaming off entirely if the music was fast and the fiddler dancing fast to match. So White-Eye hitched his self to the fiddler’s belt by means of a string, which is how we come by the Stringtail Man. Any body roundabouts can tell you that much.”

“I see,” said Eli.

“How come you to ask?”

“Well, there used to be this tavern in Baltimore, Maryland, called Whisky Alley,” Eli said. “Close by the waterfront.”

“So?”

“You don’t recollect where this Stringtail fellow was from, by any chance.”

“Naw.”

“Well, how about White-Eye?”

“Him neither.”

“No, his name. Didn’t he have a name?”

“White-Eye. White-Eye. White-Eye — Ramford!” said the singer, snapping his fingers. “Didn’t know I could do it.”

“I’m very much obliged,” Eli said. He dug down in his trousers pocket. “Can I buy you a Dr. Pepper?”

The singer looked at him for a moment. “Naw, baby,” he said finally.

“Well, thanks, then.”

“Nothing to it.”

By noon the following day, Eli had contacted every Ramford in the telephone book. He had located White-Eye Ramford’s great-granddaughter, a waitress; from there he had gone to see a Mrs. Clarine Ramford Tucker, who was residing in the Lydia Lockford Nursing Home for the Colored and Indigent; and from there to a Baptist cemetery in a swampy-smelling section outside the city. The sight of Abel Ramford’s crumbling headstone, a small Gothic arch over a sunken grave obviously neglected for years, smothered by Queen Anne’s lace and chicory, brought Eli up short, and for a long time he stood silent with his hat in his hands, wondering if this were the end of his road. Then he took heart and went to see the caretaker. He learned that Mr. Ramford’s site had no visitors at all, so far as was known; but that every year on All Saints’ Day a bouquet of white carnations was brought by Altona Florists, a very high-class flower shop with lavender delivery trucks.

And Altona Florists said yes, they did have a standing order for that date: a dozen white carnations delivered to this little colored cemetery way the hell and gone; and the bill was sent to Box Hill, Louisiana, to a Mr. Caleb Peck.

That was Saturday, August twenty-fifth. It had taken Eli exactly eighty-one days to complete his search.

Because he had been warned not to approach Caleb in person (“I want to do that much myself,” Mr. Peck had said), Eli came home without that final satisfaction. But it was almost enough just to tell his story in Justine’s kitchen and watch the old man’s astonishment. “What? What?” he said, even when he had clearly heard. He started circling the table again, kneading his hands as if they were cold. “I don’t understand.”

“He’s in Louisiana, Grandfather.”

“But — we never did go anywhere near there. Did we, Justine?”

“We didn’t know.”

“We never thought of it,” said Mr. Peck. “Louisiana is one you forget when you’re trying to name all the states in the Union. What would he be doing there?”

“Eli says—”

“I always suspected that Sulie was no dum good.”

“Now Grandfather, you didn’t either, you know how you used to rely on her.”

“She took advantage,” he said. “Why, if we somehow missed asking her — and I don’t believe for a minute that we did — it was an oversight. Just chance! How long are we going to be held accountable for every little slip and error?” He frowned at Eli. “And you say Caleb is a—”

“Fiddler.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Fiddler.”

“Yes, but I don’t—” He turned to Justine. “That doesn’t make sense,” he told her.

“You always did say he was a musical man,” she said.

“It’s the wrong Caleb.”

“No sir!” said Eli, lifting his head sharply. “No indeed, Mr. Peck.”

“Bound to be.”

“Would I come to you if I wasn’t sure yet?” Eli fumbled in his breast pocket, brought out his notebook, and turned the curly, gray-rimmed pages. “Here. I checked this man out, listen here. Caleb Justin Peck, born February fourteenth, eighteen eighty-five, Baltimore, Maryland. Who else could it be?”

“How’d you learn all that? I told you not to go near him.”

“I called and spoke to a nurse at the Home.”

“Home?”

Eli flipped back one page in his notebook. “Evergreen County Home for the Elderly, two fourteen Hamilton Street, Box Hill, Louisiana.”

Mr. Peck felt behind him for a chair and sat down very slowly.

“If you say a word,” Justine whispered to Duncan, “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

Eli looked from one face to the other, confused.

“But of course he’s not in the Home,” said Mr. Peck.

“Why, yes.”

“He just lives nearby. Or visits some acquaintance there.”

“He’s a resident.”

“He is?”

“Room nineteen.”

Mr. Peck rubbed his chin.

“I’m sorry,” said Eli, although previously he hadn’t felt one way or the other about it.

“My brother is in a Home.”

“Well now, I’m sure it’s—”

“My own brother in a Home.” His eyes flashed suddenly over to Duncan, spiky blue eyes like burs. “You will want your bottle of bourbon or whatever.”

“Forget it,” said Duncan. He looked somehow tired, not himself at all.

“Why!” said Mr. Peck. “Why, Caleb must be old!”

Nobody spoke.

Mr. Peck thought a moment. “He is eighty-eight years old,” he said at last.

Telling the news was not as much fun as Eli had expected it would be.