Shreveport, Louisiana

train

kind vagrants

strippers

still living with their dazed parents

I haven't turned the TV on in 30 days next door in 311

a Landman named Stuart left me a note

about how he came to be a cowboy

even though he's not anymore

he's a Landman now

hunting for Natural Gas

he said he hoped he didn't bore me with it

(in the note)

a bottle of fancy Italian wine

with a blue ribbon

sits unopened on the kitchen counter

I have no idea

who even knew I was living here

Casey Moan

I thought I heard that Casey when she moan

I thought I heard that Casey when she moan

She moanin' just like my woman was right on board

John Luther Jones was born in a far-flung corner of southeastern Missouri. At the raw age of thirteen he and his family moved to Cayce, Kentucky, a town I can't even locate on my Rand McNally road map. Evidently, it was directly across the rolling junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers from Cairo, Illinois, the most important port town for the transportation of Union troops during the Civil War; one of only four gateways between the northern railways and the Deep Southern slave states. Its strategic location, according to one account, made Cairo "like a loaded pistol aimed down the Mississippi at the throat of the lower Confederacy." More than twenty years after the end of the war, the young Jones sat entranced on the banks of the wide river watching the comings and goings of the Illinois Central locomotives as they loaded and unloaded the flat white ferryboats heading down to New Orleans. Their long feathery plumes of steam seemed to hang forever above the dark water, beckoning him toward an irresistible destiny. Soon, he became a fireman on the Illinois Central, stoking the raging stoves of the engines as they carried huge crowds up to Chicago for the World's Columbian Exposition at Jackson Park. Before long the kid had picked up the moniker "Casey" from his hometown in Kentucky and his frame had grown as tough as the cordwood he fed the voracious boilers. In February of 1890, while not quite twenty-six years of age, Casey Jones was promoted to engineer and became famed for being able to play a fancy tune on the locomotive's six-tone calliope whistle. His favorite was the Stephen Foster classic, "My Old Kentucky Home." Early in January of 1900, Casey was again promoted to the Memphis-Canton run, aboard the fastest passenger train ever built: The Cannonball Express. Shortly before midnight on April 29, 1900, Jones and his trusty fireman, Sim Webb, were asked to take the southbound Cannonball out of Memphis, even though they had just finished a regular northbound run into the city, and were dog tired. When Casey pulled out of the Memphis station for the 188-mile run back south to Canton, Mississippi, the six-car passenger train was already ninety-five minutes late. Jones was not a man to be tardy and he urged Sim Webb to feed the dragon in earnest. As they rocketed through the night, down through the deep hardwood forests of Mississippi, the Cannonball soon devoured the lost time. Just outside Vaughan, a tiny outpost fourteen miles north of Canton, a strange combination of fates was awaiting them: the wide-open throttle of Casey's engine, a broken air hose on a freight train stalled on the track up ahead, and the total absence of block signals on the southern line. As Casey went to the brake, he yelled at Sim Webb to jump clear. The screaming flanged steel wheels showered sparks through the dark woods. Casey stuck to his post. Sim Webb jumped to safety. No other crew member or passenger sustained more than a minor injury. But Casey was gone.

Mr. Williams

I'm telling you, he was dead standing up. Stone dead. I was there. Room #17, Andrew Johnson Hotel, Knoxville, 1953. I was right there with him in the room. Me, propping him up on one side and that driver-guy, that chauffeur of his, on the other. Believe his name was Carr, that driver. Charlie Carr. I remember all that. Don't ask me how. Can't even remember what I had for breakfast but I can remember all that back then clear as a brass bell. Sticks in your mind. A thing like that-dressing up a dead man in a fresh suit of clothes. I'm telling you, like a rag doll he was. And, all the time we're putting the clothes on him that driver-guy, that Carr fella, thinks he's still alive. Even called a doctor up to the room to give him a shot of morphine and B12. On top of all the beer and whiskey he had in him already-pills and whatnot. Man was a mess. I think it was that doctor killed him, tell you the damn truth. That's what I think because he was sure as shine dead when we was putting that fresh suit of clothes on him. Dead as a post. Made a noise, though. Kind of a rasping sound came out of him like wind rustling dry leaves. That's probably why Carr thought he still had some life left in him. But all that is is the death rattle. That's all that is. Air escaping the corpse, like some ghost getting the hell out the door before it slams shut. I've heard that sound before, believe you me. You see lots of comings and goings being a porter in a hotel like that. You see it all. Whores knifed in the face. Suicides. Had two young kids jump right out of a window once, on the eighth floor. Jumped right out the damn window, holding hands. Boy and girl. Must've been nineteen, twenty years old is all. Girl was pregnant too. That's the shame of it. But Mr. Williams-laying there like a stick. Never forget that. Got him all decked out in that new suit; bright blue with a fresh white shirt, yellow tie-little green palm tree embroidered right in the middle of it. All this stuff gets imprinted on your mind, for some reason. Shiny black boots made in Ft. Worth with musical notes and little gold guitars stitched into the leather, dancing all across the toe and heel. His cream white Stetson we set crown down on the bed beside him after we flopped him over on the mattress. That's when that sound came out of him. He was flat dead, though, so help me, God. You could tell by the way he landed. But that driver-guy, that Charlie Carr, keeps saying he's got to get him back in the Cadillac downstairs. He's got some gig to make in Canton, Ohio, somewheres-some roadhouse or theatre or other. I don't know. Had about two hours to make the show, he said. So we haul him up off the bed and prop him up again; throw his dead arms around our shoulders, squash that Stetson down on his head, and off we go, out the door, down the stairs, boots dragging and banging down every step till we get to the lobby. Desk clerk cracks wise as we go past about how Mr. Williams may have had one too many. We laughed about it, me and Carr, trying to make it all slide by; go along with the game. But I regret that now-that laugh. Man was dead after all. Dead in his boots. We got him out on the street through the revolving door and I remember how the streetlamp lit up that bright blue suit of his. Blue must've been his favorite color because that Caddie was blue too. Kind of a light powder blue like a robin's egg. Carr opened the back door with his free hand and we slid Mr. Williams in, gentle as we could and here comes that awful sound out of him, one last time. I remember thinking then, that's a terrible sound to come out of a man, like that. Man who spent his whole short lifetime singing like a beautiful bird. That's a terrible, terrible sound.

Five Spot

I studied Eric Dolphy nightly, very close up, front row sometimes. 196364; something like that. Watched his listening; ramrod straight spine on a tall oak stool, like a monk, like a regal jaybird; black bass clarinet (or was it soprano sax?) hung between his knees, hung from a loop around his neck; eyes pinned to the bandstand floor, seeing right through it while Mingus mashed away with his meaty fingers, cruel smile. Jaki Byard, Dannie Richmond; "Fables of Faubus." Dolphy's Egyptian pharaoh goatee, long with a knob at the end, hieroglyphic, staring into the next phrase; seeing it coming up, seeing right into his death, in a matter of days. The dismay on Mingus's face on return without him. Leaving Dolphy's body behind in Germany, on tour; failed blood, medical inattention. The disbelief, the vacancy, the awful hole where he used to lift his licorice horn to the heavens and sail away, past the old Five Spot cafe, which is now a dumb-ass Pizza Hut.

Knoxville, Tennessee

(Highway 40) How do you "teach" yourself anything? Assuming one part of you knows something that another part of you may not; some magical suspicion. In matters of the voice (aside from purely physical limitations like the size of the windpipes or the shape of the mouth and nasal cavities), is there possibly some territory of the imagination which might "inform" the singing of a song; shaping it to fit the timbre and character of a more legendary voice, such as Dr. Ralph Stanley possesses. Not an imitation of Ralph Stanley but a kind of incantation. I've been driving down through the mountains of Tennessee, below the Cumberland Gap, ripping my throat out trying to sing just like Dr. Stanley; repeating the track of an ancient recording he must have made on the back porch of his cabin in Virginia. In the background you can hear screen doors slapping, a baby cry, a distant dog, and intermittent blasts of cicadas. The song itself is far more ancient than the recording; an a cappella hymn called "Poor Pilgrim" that must have come across the great ocean with the first wave of Scotch-Irish immigrants. These are the haunted lyrics: I soon shall reach the bright glory

where mortals no more complain

The old ship is approaching

the Captain is calling my name

Sometimes I'm tossed and I'm driven

and know not where to roam