“I know.”
“The child.”
“I know.”
“The mother.”
“I know.”
“Even if we’d gotten here before it begun, I don’t know as it could’ve gone about otherwise.” The two men looked away from each other. “Had you and the missus given your child a name? I need it for the certificate.”
Our husband kept so quiet. At plain sight of the doctor and his midwife, one removing his sleeve garters in dire need of a wash, the other spreading muslin cloth atop a willow basket, Robert stumbled down the front porch’s creaky steps wrought slantwise with lost-head nails, caught his breath, walked among crickets whose chirping foretold the approach of dawn, hung his head, and stopped in tall grass overrun with nut sedge, foxtail, and coffee weed. He held himself against the cold. He sank his gaze to a low spot. Whatever his thoughts were throughout the night—we do not know for certain if he cursed God, but we do know he had ample provocation—Robert Johnson’s son remains nameless to this day.
He knew it was the end, but he could not end it. At Scotty Jay’s Rumpus Room near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, one of the roughest honk-a-tonks within legal distance of the parish limits, a whorehouse with no whores, a pool hall with no pool, where men came to drink and gamble but nothing much else except be men, Robert Johnson was dealt a string of hands that put him $157 in the hole. All that was left to whatever name he was going by at the time sat on the worn felt of an old card table in the dark parlor. Two white chips at twenty-five cents apiece, one red chip worth five dollars, two blue chips at a dollar each. Anybody of sound reason would have called it a night.
“Praise the Lord almighty above if Robert isn’t my new favorite player,” said Ferris Thurgood, cardsharp and hothead, who’d once cut a priest’s vestigial tab clean in half for fobbing his excess chips in the manner a cheat would some stray ace. He said, “Feel free to sit your raggedy ass across from me anytime you want.”
“Ain’t that wit.”
“I can’t feature why Robert here always got that guitar with him,” said Woodson Potter, yards of rye in his gut, sideiron on the table, plug of chaw in his lip, whose minacious smile drew attention from a face ugly with pox scars. He said, “Hasn’t played a lick since I known him. Must be his lucky charm.”
“Just you wait.”
The evening’s game was five-card stud. Although he would eventually curtail the progress of such a low habit, Robert could never fully quit his compulsion. We know from experience. Around about the time of their introduction, he taught Claudette a standard game variation, “Follow the Queen,” whereby every card dealt face-up following a queen becomes wild until the appearance of another queen. During their courtship, he gave Tabitha lessons in community card play. During their engagement, he gave Betty lessons in cards-speak split pot. Around about the time of their marriage, he told Mary Sue how the king of hearts is often known as a suicide king and how the queen of spades is often known as a bedpost queen. We never gave it much mind.
On the night at the bar, still a few years from his proposal to the first of us, Robert Johnson, strung on all sides by railbirds anonymous in their numbers, played Ferris Thurgood and Woodson Potter in a type of five-card stud called “Dr. Pepper Poker.” The popular soft drink’s slogan, “Drink a bite to eat at 10, 2, and 4 o’clock,” inspired the special variant in which the ten, two, and four cards were wild.
Each of the players placed their ante of fifty cents at the center of the tabletop. Woodson was on the button. First he dealt a card face-down, and next he dealt a card face-up. At sight of his ace of clubs and eight of spades, Robert tossed five dollars worth of chips into the pot, a goodly portion of his final stake, and at third and fourth street’s advent of a queen of diamonds and an ace of spades, he raised the pot by another fifty cents in chips, leaving him with only two dollars. The others called him each round. Robert felt there must be a cinch hand somewhere in his draw, but the deck would not oblige him beyond the nut. His next card, lest he come a cropper, surely had it. Thus, on fifth street, his pulse slowing near to a crawl, his palms going dry as goofer dust, Robert was dealt an eight of clubs to complete his two-pair hand of dark suits.
“Look at him now, I tell it, look at him now,” either Ferris or Woodson said as both of them raised the pot higher than their opponent’s last two dollars. “Robert got the malaise. He got the malaise like he never been to Louisiana.”
He’d been to Louisiana all right. Since our predecessor’s death less than two years back, Robert Johnson had passed transient throughout the counties and states and townships of the South, never once arriving without the same intention in mind, never once leaving without failure to achieve it. Much can be told of a man by the way he goes about killing himself. Robert stole at the glint of his knife every kind of transportation along the Natchez Trace, steam railcars to phaetons to horseless carriages, each vehicle’s Klaxon bell scaling the pitch of his mad laughter. He was known then as Carter. Robert committed acts of congress with a host of slatterns from Storyville, mulattoes and high browns and darkies, only some of whose standards of hygiene involved the protection of a pessary. He was known then as Jones. Robert kissed the dainty hand of a plantation owner’s beautiful daughter outside of a Woolworth’s Store and provoked a lynch mob into searching every alley of Frontage Street for “the sambo who raped a debutante,” only to escape their howls for mortal retribution by putting on white face along with a black hat and kvetching Yiddish polyglot in mimicry of a minstrel show remembered from his Memphis childhood. He was known then as Goldstein. Robert was arrested once in Georgia for expectoration on a public sidewalk and was found guilty three times in Alabama for collusion to vagrancy and was sentenced twice in Florida for public intoxication. He was known then as Smith. Robert Meriwether commandeered an Oldsmobile Curved Dash over the side of a suspension bridge straight into the shallow chop of the Black Warrior River. Robert Simpson stood in a pasture of Yalobusha County during a thunderstorm with a steel railway sleeper raised high above his head. Robert Boswell stenciled zigzag scars on his thin wrists with a Sheffield straight razor pinched from J.P. Nettle’s Shaving Shop on Fat Tuesday. All the same, despite the many signs of providence—his unconscious body burping from the brown waters due to buoyancy from a geological salt inclusion, lightning bolts melting rivets on a distant barn’s tin roof, his blade cutting but scratches because its previous owner was a barber compulsively frugal with his tools—our husband considered his own survival to be nothing more and nothing less than the hardest, worst, dumbest luck.
“How far will this get me?” Robert put his guitar in the pot. “I’m feeling fortunate this evening.”
Between piles of chips worth about thirty dollars, the Stella concert guitar, later sold at Sotheby’s for $8,450 not including tax, sat at the center of the table, kerosene light reflected in its varnish, cheroot smoke wafting over its strings. Ferris and Woodson exchanged a look of confusion on the mend. At the moment one of them was about to speak, a voice from the back of the crowd said, “It’s a damn sight for a bluesman to gamble his guitar.”
Robert couldn’t believe it from make-believe. That voice cured by cheap whiskey, those wrists stained in black powder. This man could not be his brother. The dim bar did not allow for easy sight, but this man could not possibly be his brother. Robert told him as much.
“I should say the same,” said Leroy, only two months, three weeks, and five days from his induction to the country’s worst hoosegow, where decades later he would join a group of inmates, “Angola’s Heel Street Gang,” who cut their own Achilles’ tendons in protest of the poor conditions. “I think we’re both about close to bottom.”
“What’re you—”
Robert’s words were cut short by the realization he had accidentally laid all of his cards face-up on the table. Woodson and Ferris in turn laid down their own cards, two at a time and then one at a time, the former holding