Them Old Mountain Stories Ch. 02

This is Chapter Two of a five chapter story. Each chapter will feature some of the main, framing story of a bartender and a girl in a bar in modern times and also a full fantastical tale that one of them tells the other about one of their relatives. Both of their families are from the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky, so the stories are told in the style of those cultures. The stories they tell are more than just tall tales - they'll be important to the bigger plot as well. In Chapter One, "The One I Love the Best," Jolene won a bet with bartender John that she knew a story he'd never heard before. Now it's his turn.

*****

Don't Sing Love Songs

"Stories are what I really love the best." Jolene was standing, leaning back against the bar on both freckled elbows. Even the wan February sun streaming in through the front window could set her hair afire. It glowed the color of fine bourbon in the bottle and the actual bourbon in her glass, what little was left of it, turned gold.

"You sure about that?" I walked to where the jukebox hunched against the wall and started looking for the song I needed. "Looks to me like you're enjoying that bourbon an awful lot. If you're expecting a story that can stand against that pleasure, well, I'm not sure I can deliver. Been a while since I had Buffalo Trace, might be better than any story I've got."

"You wanna taste to be sure?" Ice clinked in her glass. I cast a quick look over my shoulder, just an instinct, like a rabbit peering around to see a hawk bearing down. She was holding one of the ice cubes from the glass to her lips. Her pink tongue darted out underneath it to catch the watered-down bourbon drip before the whole cube disappeared inside her mouth and she crunched it apart. "Looks like you're either going to have to come have it off my lips or pour another we can share."

My laugh came out as an uncertain wheeze on the front end before catching. Her red lips, her pink tongue were enough to wobble my orbit a touch, but it was the realization that they'd never come without the snap of her teeth that set me along my edge. I turned back to the glowing screen of the digital jukebox and found the song I needed. It would play next, enough time for me to get back behind the psychological safety of the bar.

"Are we gonna dance?" Jolene didn't bother to turn her body towards me. She looked over her shoulder as I had just done, but that was where all similarity in the movements ended. Her turn was deliberate, almost languid. Her arched eyebrow was a challenge everywhere it wasn't an invitation.

"I sure hope we will," I answered, "but not to this song. It's not really for dancing." That was the very moment those first few notes of guitar started, the ones instantly familiar to anyone who's ever listened to a Golden Oldies radio station or owned a Casio keyboard. She turned to face me full then, understanding that I had shifted it all. I stood in my place behind my bar, I'd reset the mood with the song, and I had a secret she suddenly wanted but couldn't get without letting me speak my piece. The singer laid into the lyrics with the kind of well-bottom sadness you'd never believe a British guy with a terrible haircut could muster.

There is a house in New Orleans, they call The Rising Sun.

"Yeah, you're right. This is no dancing kind of song." She settled back into her stool.

It's been the ruin of many a poor boy, and God, I know, I'm one.

"You know that song, don't you? Sure you do." I wanted to pick up a glass and a towel to polish it with to give my hands something to do, but it seemed to on-the-nose for my role as tale-spinning bartender. I poured myself a Coke instead.

"John, everybody with ears knows that song."

"Bet I know something about it that you don't, though."

"Bet what?"

"Another drink." I tipped my Coke too fast and the ice shifted, gracelessly soaking my mustache in a cold line just above my lip. "If you've ever heard this story before, I'll pour you another bourbon."

"How will you know I'm not just saying I have?" She set her crossed arms against the bar, under her breasts. I thought about running my tongue just under the edge of her tank top, from one strap to the other.

"I'll just have to trust you. Same way you trusted me to own up when I'd never heard your story before."

"It's not balanced, though," she frowned at me. "You tell me a story I've never heard, I win. You tell me a story I've heard before, you pour me a drink, I win. Where do you win in this, John?"

"If I tell you something you've never heard before?" I leaned close to her ear across the bar, close enough I could feel the trimmed hair of my beard compressing against her cheek. I brushed her earlobe with my mustache and raised a reflexive shiver from her that was in no part due to my mishap with the ice. "You'll dance with me to a different song when I'm done."

"I'm listening." It was near a sigh, the sound of her settling in as my audience.

This was the story I told Jolene that made her dance with me.

*****

This song's been scrubbed into the walls of every blues club from here to Seattle, been belted in every rock arena. It's being broadcast out into space now in long loops of radio waves; in a thousand years, alien civilizations will have heard this song and wondered the same thing as almost every man who has had it work into his ears. Why would anyone go to The House of the Rising Sun?

What they don't know any more than they know the answer to that question is that song started spreading in the mountains where I'm from. My great-great-grandmother sang it when people would gather around the woodstove in the general store on a cold night, and it caught quick as fire. My great-great-grandmother, she had a knack for that, for finding a melody that would stay with you. She would craft one to wrap around your thoughts until they turned to nothing but hearing that song sung and played and sung again. Her name was writ down in the family Bible as Colleen O'Dell on the day she was born and Colleen Kelly on the day she was married, but this is a story from between those two days, when all alive and dead and in-between called her Colleen Six-String instead.

New Orleans is a city where all the crypts are built above the ground. The living and the dead, they have their doors on the same level, so a doorman must bear extra care there for what crosses his threshold. The doorman at The Rising Sun was trained to guard against far more than most, to look for silver quarters dropped in the jamb or trails of white ash from gris-gris bags snaking from an entrant's hand to the scrubbed mahogany of the front hall. What he could not guard against was Colleen Six-String and his love for her wild red hair.

She came to him at the front door of The Rising Sun brothel alone one night with a beat up guitar case in her hand. Her plain cotton dress was fifteen years out of fashion and her boots were more fit to a laboring man than a lady turning a fine ankle under a row of buttons. She was pale and pretty as the moon, though, and no number of braids, combs, or pins could hold her red hair in place for more than the length of a song.

"May it please your charity," she asked, humble as a whetstone.

"It may please my eye and yet please my heart as well. But take a care to leave before the night is out if you'd have another day."

"I'd have the next and many more beside. But tonight I want only to play my guitar for Madame Marianne LeSoleil Levant and I hear this is her house."

"Then enter in peace and go in the same," he opened the heavy door for her, but caught her by the arm halfway to the parlor and whispered against the trailing curls working loose from the side of her bun. "Please, Miss. Leave before the night is out if anyone loves you. If anyone might."

Colleen Six-String favored him with her smile and tugged free of his hand to walk into the parlor. It was a room less draped in velvet than it was sculpted from it, from the flocked floral pattern on the wallpaper to the heavy hang of burgundy curtains, two-deep across every window. The only light came from the flickering tips of candles, caught and amplified in the facets of a dozen chandeliers and crystal candelabras. Where any other home would have mirrors hanging to throw light back into the room, the parlor had oil paintings. Landscapes, rearing horses, bowls of fruit - none of them cast anything back but a shadow. Save for the people inside, the whole room could have passed for an art gallery built inside the dim chamber of a living heart.

Oh, the people, though! The men in their evening suits and sack coats rolled cigarettes and drank Sazeracs when their hands weren't occupied cupping the full breasts of their companions. Each woman was an armature of pale elegance, wrapped in a stylish dark velvet dress that dripped so low off her shoulders it threatened to reveal the nipples thrust up by her tight corset. Some of the men did not have the patience to see the threat make good of its own accord and tipped the soft edges of their companions' bodices down to feed their eyes, their fingers, their searching mouths. Each woman wore a black velvet choker with a cameo portrait, the smoky profile that of Madame Marianne. A man could buy a woman's company for the night, have her do everything he'd never dared to ask before, but he could never buy what was already owned by one who never gave anything freely.

In the center of it all, on a red velvet settee the size of a wagon, sat a thing as elegant as an Elgin marble and near as white. Madame Marianne LeSoleil Levant wore her French Creole name like she did her soft swooping dress and glittering garnet choker, a fashion to drape across herself that fit this time and this place. Not even a drunk man could mistake her for a full-living thing, if his notice fell to the stillness between her graceful movements. Notice hardly ever did, for though Madame was delightful for a man's eyes to come to, they never lingered long. Their gaze slid off her like she was too smooth to get purchase. She had sat for a hundred portraits and not a one looked anything like her.

Madame Marianne was up in a flurry of white skin and velvet layers before Six-String's second boot hit the plush carpet of the parlor.

"I know what you are," she hissed, because she came from a hissing sort of people, "I can smell what's in in your blood, even if my useless doorman couldn't. What makes you think I'll let you stay in my house? What business could you possibly have here?"

The party suspended around them, caught in the clear amber of a sudden social curiosity. Madame Marianne had been at The Rising Sun for a long time, longer than made any sort of sense, worked out on paper, but none had ever seen her turn a guest away. Her hospitality was as legendary as her discretion.

"I've no business here but to entertain you for the night and to gather more stories," Six-String said, setting down her guitar and loosing her wild hair from her bun. She looked at Madame square and steady. "I've roved wide and am running out of new stories from my own people. I tire of the same old battles and loves and tragedies."

"So you've come for bordello stories?"

"I've come for your story, Madame. From one like you, I'll hear something I've never heard before." Madame Marianne knew from the smooth-moving blood in Six-String's throat-vein there was no lie in what she said.

"I am not in the business of giving pleasure away, no matter what it may be. There is a price on such a thing."

"A fair price, aye, I intend to pay. Perhaps I can start by showing you something that even one such you has never seen before." Six-String knelt and opened the scuffed clasps of her guitar case, folding the lid open before Madame Marianne. Inside, the moth-eaten felt lining held a guitar that was even more raggedy than Six-String's faded dress, the varnish worn off down to the dull wood in spots from being played so often. Where six strings should have stretched across the frets were strung but five, but each one shone like the first light of the sun breaking across Lake Pontchartrain; each one was made of silver, not of gut. Madame Marianne forgot to blink when she looked at the guitar for some long, silent minutes. Such a thing was an amazing sight, even to one as old as an Araby crypt.

"Where did you get silver strings?" Madame's mouth was dry, which was a familiar condition but not often from it hanging open in astonishment.

"An Aos Si lord strung my guitar with them in thanks for singing him a song he'd never heard before. Perhaps I can do the same for you."

"He gave you only five?" Of all terrible things Madame's people were and might have been, they were curious and detail-oriented. She was as drawn to that missing string like you or I would be to the sound of a deer running through tall grass.

"There were but five on it when I played him the song."

"But where is your sixth string?" Madame knew nothing anymore of fear, but her hand hovered over the case, long fingers daring not to dip into the place where the sixth string should be.

"My father, he was a gambler," sighed Six-String, pulling her guitar to her lap and testing the tone of her strings with a few soft, warm notes. "He won this guitar playing at dice against a Spaniard on the boat when my parents crossed over the Atlantic, before I was born. It had five strings then and he thought that was how it was meant to be. I grew up playing it with five. Don't know what I'd even do with a sixth string now." The sound out of those silver strings was like jumping into the creek in July - warm as the sun across the top, snapping cold and clear most of the rest of the way down. "It is your insurance of my good behavior. I believe you're fast enough to get one of these strings off and strangle me with it before I can stop you, Madame, and then my fine guitar would be yours. It is the only thing I have of any value and it is my own death under my fingertips, should you choose."

"Very well. If I find you adequately entertaining, you may stay. If not," Madame Marianne's smile, tuned fine to winning favors and pleasing customers warped to wicked, "you may stay just the same."

Madame called for a chair to be brought for Six-String, one set across from the settee so she could watch the woman's fingers slide and pull at the five silver strings. With the Madame pacified, her guests continued their evening as they would have without the strains of Six-String's guitar winding in and out of their booming innuendos and whispered propositions. Men called for more drinks, they made their choices. Money was discreetly passed to waiting footmen who then held the door to the mansion's upper floors open for the long-necked creatures and their besotted companions. Few men came back to the parlor when done, preferring the second staircase that led directly to the courtyard and out to the stables where their horses were snorting for the familiar, living smells of home. The women returned refreshed and ready to entertain what new gentlemen had passed through the front door.

Six-String played on into the night, taking requests from men and women both. None could find a song she could not pick out and set to shining with her five silver strings. Six-String, for her part, was a fine attraction beyond her playing, goading the room into singing along to the choruses of drinking songs and sad ballads alike. She played songs that were old-fashioned before the last war, even songs that had not often been heard before the other war, the one when the British blockaded the port. No one remembered those except Madame Marianne and one ancient Creole woman who came in from the kitchen, dabbing at her eyes with her apron when she heard the songs she'd danced to as a girl sung out by the myriad voices in the parlor.

Madame Marianne requested nothing, sang nothing, but watched Six-String all the while. When the hall clock struck one, she motioned for the music to stop. "I'm well entertained, and so are my guests. You've done a fine enough job to stay a while longer, but I must ask: to whom do I owe my thanks for such a pleasure?"

Names are a powerful thing. None of Madame's whores kept their own names after entering her house, just as she had not worn her own in many lifetimes. Most of her patrons did not bother to hide who they were, though they were entered in Madame's account ledgers by their mother's surnames, not their own. Six-String knew better than any of them, even Madame, how powerful the knowledge of a name could be.

"Among my people, I'm called Six-String."

"Six-String? But you've only got five!" Madame Marianne laughed and her girls all laughed the same way, like a tree full of crows and dry leaves in harmony. Some of the long-time patrons had picked it up, too. "Where is your sixth string?"

"Since I always played with five, some say the sixth string is my voice." Six-String played and sang a simple song, from the mountains of her home, one that showed the shimmer of her fine soprano.

"I've got a new game, since the night's young and you've decided to let me live for now. I want to see if I can guess how old you are, Madame." She lowered her voice, letting a hint of that mountain growl seep in with her meaning. "Really are."

"How do you propose to do that?"

"That'll ruin the game, won't it?" Six-String answered back Madame Marianne's archness with an open smile. "If I guess what year you were born within two years, you'll tell me the story of how you were born again, born into the night. If I can't, then I'll willingly stay here until you decide to let me go."

Well, that was a prize Madame Marianne couldn't turn down. She sat as still as before, with a cat's smile, a Mona Lisa smile. For her part, Six-String paid no notice, only played and sang, one song bleeding into the opening notes of the next, watching the Madame's painted lips and lineless eyes for twitches of recognition. She told stories in short bursts over the chords, about the battles and loves the songs netted up in their verses, asking Madame sometimes if it was a song she'd heard as a girl.

When the hall clock struck the hour, Six-String was still playing, back and back, to find a song Madame Marianne knew from her first life. She paused and cracked her fingers against each other. "I've still so many songs to sing, but I fear I must rest my hands and voice a short spell. Can I trouble you for a cup of chicory coffee, Madame?"

"Yes," Marianne blinked for the first time in ten songs, "I want to continue our game and you have to be awake for that, I suppose." She jangled a silver bell and told the answering footman to bring them both refreshments.

Now, that parlor was filled with bowls overflowing with apples, figs, and pears, dripping with fat clusters of grapes. Even peaches and dimpled oranges were piled around, and the pineapples of hospitality were arranged on the mantle between swags of glossy magnolia leaves. Not a single one was real. Madame Marianne surrounded herself at all times with these careful creations of wax and silk and with her hundreds of paintings of shepherds, dancing maidens, hunting dogs, and fine horses at English race tracks because she loved life and longed to possess every part of it. There was nowhere in the parlor one could look without seeing a simulacrum of a living thing that no blight could wither and destroy. It was at once as teeming as a market square and as still as a tomb.

The footman returned with two women. One, the wizened cook who had cried to hear the songs of her youth, proudly carried a silver tray set with a cup of chicory coffee and a small pitcher of cream beside a plate piled with pillowy, sugar-dusted beignets. The other was young, her dark hair cropped off roughly and her flour-sack shift hiding little about the bruised skin that clung to her bones. The darkest of the marks were pooled beneath her glittering, ravenous eyes. The cook set the tray down on an end table for Six-String with a grateful bob of her head before turning to leave. She paused in the doorway before disappearing into the dark of the house to look back at the young musician, her eyebrows pulling the rest of her wrinkled forehead together into a momentary mask of regret. Then she was gone.