The Sweetest Hallelujah. Elaine Hussey

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СКАЧАТЬ you out of prison? Lord have mercy, tell me they didn’t let your low-down hide out of jail.”

      “Got out last week. I can’t wait to be with you.”

      “I’d rather eat cow shit. Where are you?”

      “Memphis.” It was too close, only a hundred miles away. Betty Jewel thought she might faint. “I’m fixing to make a comeback. I’m putting together another band, found some great guys on Beale Street. I want you to sing the lead.”

      “I’m not ever singing with you again. You hear me? Not ever.”

      “Aw, Betty Jewel. Don’t be like that.”

      She heard the oven door slam shut, knew the pies Queen was making for Tiny Jim were cooking, knew her mama would be washing the dough off her hands and would soon be coming to the den to stretch out on the flowered chintz couch and watch Milton Berle on Texaco Star Theater.

      “Can you hold on a minute?” Betty Jewel eased the door shut. When she picked up the receiver, her hands were trembling so hard she nearly dropped it. “You stay away from here. I mean it.”

      “We were good together, sugah.”

      In more ways than one. Her legs wouldn’t hold her up anymore, and she sank onto the arm of the old couch. “Don’t you sugar me. You couldn’t pay me enough money to sing with you.”

      “You and me, we got a little girl. What’s she like?”

      Betty Jewel bit her lip so hard she brought blood. If she screamed, Queen would come running. And Billie. Tiny Jim would have told Saint about Billie. Musicians stick together. “Don’t you ever call here again. You hear me? If you dare show your face around here, I’ll have you arrested. I’ll say you’re trying to sell me cocaine.”

      “You wouldn’t do that.”

      She heard Queen’s slow shuffle in the hall. “I swear on a stack of Bibles.” Betty Jewel hoped God was not listening. She hoped Queen was not. She’d wash her mouth out with soap, and her a dying woman. “If the cops don’t get you, I’ll shoot you myself.”

      She slammed the receiver down and made it back to the rocking chair, but all she could think of was Saint coming to get Billie and Sudie trying to fend him off.

      “Pies’ll be ready in twenny minnits.” The old couch springs groaned under Queen’s weight. “Lord, my feets is killin’ me.”

      Years ago when Betty Jewel left Shakerag, who would have believed it would all turn out this way—Queen getting ready to bury her only living child, Billie searching for the truth through keyholes, the Saint resurrected from the awful past, and her sitting in a maple rocking chair with cancer cells eating her alive.

      But then what twenty-year-old ever imagines herself dying right at the height of middle age—or any age, for that matter—when all she had on her mind was a man who was fixing to set the world on fire? That was the Saint. Lord, that man was the most dazzling person she’d ever laid eyes on, him all dressed in white up on that stage at Blind Willie Jefferson’s juke joint in the Delta, the lights turning him red and blue and green. Like Christmas tree lights. Like one of those chameleons you’d never guess from one minute to the next what color he was going to turn.

      Saint Hughes. With his silver tongue and his silver trumpet. When he put that horn to his lips and commenced playing, she’d swear the angels wept. And when he started in on her with his glib talk, there was nothing she wouldn’t do for him, including throw away her college education and her blossoming singing career and say I do to whatever he asked.

      The wedding dress he bought her was white silk. The real thing, he’d said. It wasn’t till years later she’d learned it was cheap imitation.

      Her ring came from a Cracker Jack box. By the time she’d met him, the once-great jazz legend was already on the skids.

      “Someday I’ll get you a ring with diamonds big as golf balls,” he’d said, and Lord help her, she’d believed him.

      She’d believed everything he told her back in those days, including that he was going to reclaim his fame and be rich. It wasn’t riches she cared about, though, but the dazzling future he promised.

      “I’m going to buy an antebellum house bigger than any high-and-mighty cotton plantation. Miz Queen can sit on a blue velvet cushion and drink tea from a china cup and brag to all her friends that a white woman is gonna be scrubbing her floors one of these days.”

      Back then, Queen had believed in Saint Hughes, too, but that hadn’t kept her from crying her eyes out when Betty Jewel married him. Still, she stood in the door way and waved as her only surviving child climbed into the old school bus the Saint had painted black with his name in foot-high red lettering on the side. Betty Jewel had thought she was on the way to fame and fortune.

      “Baby, I’m gonna take you on a ride you’ll never forget,” the Saint promised. He’d made many promises, but that was the only one he ever kept.

      Betty Jewel closed her eyes and could still see Queen standing by the front porch swing, wearing a yellow voile dress calling out, “Ya’ll be pa’tic’lar now, you hear?”

      It was the only advice Queen had offered when Betty Jewel left Shakerag, and it wasn’t till years later that she wished her mama had offered more. How to stretch two dollars over two weeks without having oatmeal three times a day. How to conjure up a dream when the only hope she had was the Saint, and the only hope he had was the bottle.

      Then, later, the cocaine. Demons clawed at that man’s back, demons she’d never even seen till the jobs got scarce and the music started going sour.

      “Someday we’re gonna live on easy street, baby.”

      It was uneasy street she remembered. That and the long journey that finally brought her back home.

      Now she was on another journey, only this time the road she was traveling was fixing to peter out. Already she could glimpse the end. She’d praise the Lord if she was all by herself, but she’s not…

      She looked over to see Queen staring at her.

      “What’re you thinking, Mama?”

      “I’m just tryin to remember that recipe for molasses cookies. I’d make some if I had me some good black-strop molasses and half the sense God give a billy goat.”

      Need makes liars of us all.

      Still, she smiled at her mama’s white lie. And that was a good thing. It was hard these days to find something to smile about, any little thing to take her mind off the future.

      For Betty Jewel time had become a pink damask rose, the petals dropping one by one, the fragrance fading till the sweet rich smell of living was only memory. Sometimes an urgency ripped through her like a tornado, and she’d go to the bathroom and stuff a rag in her mouth so Billie and Queen wouldn’t hear her scream.

      She eased out of her chair and walked over to the window. It was too dark to see the bus, let alone a stick-figure child sitting on the rooftop.

      “Maybe I ought to go out there and get her, Mama.”

      “Leave СКАЧАТЬ