In Search Of Chopsticks.
Part Three
I open my eyes and see sunlight edging towards me through longleaf pines. I’m on my back. The ground beneath me is bumpy, unforgiving. My head’s sore. I can hear the nagging chatter of cicadas, smell the harsh clasp of campfire smoke. I slowly sit myself up. Pain everywhere. You know that Johnny Winter song, ‘Be Careful With A Fool’? I can hear that coming from behind me, try to turn towards it. I cough, cough again. My chest’s tight, crushed. I’m finding it hard to breathe. I feel consciousness fading. I try to keep my eyes open but I can’t, slump back onto the ground and disappear into the dark, locked library of my mind.
‘I rapped on the office door and asked for God.
The manager was bald and apologetic.
The manager told me God was out.’
On Suicide Hill, in 1937, 375 members of the British Battalion of The International Brigade died fighting Franco. Christopher Cauldwell was one of them, brave poet-boy from Putney. Nelson’s song, ‘Kingdom Of Heaven Blues’ mentions Cauldwell by name, alongside MLK and Thaddeus Stevens. In my Carolina dreams, I can hear that ringing opening A7 chord, the chord that first wrapped me in Nelson’s magic, the chord that beckons us each toward some messy redemption, the chord that set me on this journey.
I wake again. I feel like I used to when I’d drunk too much the night before. The man with the beard is standing over me, smiling. ‘Get up,’ he says, holding his hand out for me to grab. He starts pulling me up. I feel sick, dizzy. I push his hand away, clamber to my feet, swaying a little. I look around. We’re in a clearing. There are derelict farm buildings on three sides. I look the man with the beard in the eye. ‘Where’s my car?’ ‘Over there.’ I see rusty red tailfins poking out from behind an old barn, start to walk towards the only home I still have. ‘Go back to High Point,’ he says. ‘Right,’ I say.
The keys are in the ignition. The bowler hat’s still on the passenger seat. I stick the gearshift in reverse, ease out. The man with the beard’s standing, proud and taunting, in the middle of the clearing, looking like a Confederate Hagrid. He wants me to run him down, I know. But I drive slowly past him, onto the track and into the forest. I breathe. The radio turns itself on. It’s Magic Sam, the man I share a birthday with, doing ‘Black Magic Blues’. I think about Jump Off Rock and I feel glad – glad with a rush of love – I never went there. It’s not too late, it’s never too late, but my soul isn’t ready. My soul was never Cherokee, my soul was never American.
Candor. Erect. Liberty. Climax. With each small, mocking town I drive through, I feel smaller, more distant, more… unhere. I read once that 10% of the blues came from English folk music and I always wondered about the strange arrogance of giving it a percentage, wondered too if there was any truth in it. I can hear the hope of my parents’ hymns and the pains of the famine and the fears of the trenches in the blues but I can never hear the old voices of the English, except perhaps as a low, low murmur of threat and rage.
I head west, pass through High Point. In a few hours I’ll be in Tennessee. I’m tired. And I know I’ll probably never find Nelson: even the ghosts of his ghost have been elusive here, hinting themselves into awareness, then winking away in a moment. I wonder – not for the first time – if he was ever real. But I have to keep searching.
Miles pass. The news comes on. They’re tear-gassing kids down at the border. I turn the radio off, sure it will turn itself straight back on again. But it doesn’t. There’s just a cold, marshy silence; even the sound of the engine has gone. All I can hear are the twisting arguments of my thoughts. Miles pass. And then the thoughts slip away too. There’s a stillness, a half-holy, half-immersed stillness. I let myself float, let myself be.
Miles pass. Just beyond Asheville I hear Nelson’s harmonica playing, sweet and tough, quiet at first, then louder. The music’s here now, suddenly, right here in the car, alive and filling the world. My heart jumps. I smile, turn, thinking for a moment he’s sitting there next to me. And, just for a moment, he is.
