one, than man’s.
“God will punish him,” she said.
She said the man would pay for his sins, all his sins, and his punishment would be much more terrifying than anything that would happen to him in the hotbox or forced labor of a prison farm. The police took their handcuffs from the man’s wrists, and he staggered off, free. It is said that Mamie walked into the yard and wept and screamed. Jerry Lee cannot remember that. If his mama did show weakness, he is sure, it was not for long.
The Lewises, Calhouns, Herrons, Swaggarts, Gilleys, Bateys, and the rest of them assembled in black, most of the men in their one good suit of clothes, some with an ancient suit coat covering their patched and faded overalls. The women carried wildflowers; almost all of them, like Mamie, stood with babies or toddlers on their hips.
The extended family had already all gathered around the grave when the prison truck rolled up and two armed guards helped Elmo out. He was in street clothes, but bound in handcuffs and shackles. They walked him to the graveside, Elmo taking baby steps because of his restraints, and left him with his wife, still in chains. The guards stood just a few feet away, their 12-gauge shotguns pointed at the ground. Elmo tossed a white flower onto the casket of his oldest son and wept. Then, with his second son in his arms, he stood with Mamie and the members of his tribe, and sang of the King of Kings.
Will there be any stars, any stars in my crown?
When at evening the sun goeth down
When I wake with the blest in those mansions of rest
Will there be any stars in my crown?
Then the guards linked Elmo’s handcuffs and shackles with a piece of chain, and hustled him into the prison truck and drove off to the federal pen in New Orleans, Mamie begging them to let him stay, just a little bit. And the toughest man in Concordia Parish, the snake killer, went back to the sweltering cells and the dark and dragging days. Mamie’s children would sometimes wonder if she let the drunk driver go free because she knew what it was like to live with a man in prison, knew what it was like in the quiet of the nights. Years later she would get a letter from the man, telling her how he had suffered since that day, begging her forgiveness. She threw it in the trash.
The headstone, when it was finished, was a simple one, but Elmo would not see it for some time.
ELMO K. LEWIS, JR.
NOV. 11, 1929
AUG. 6, 1938
Budded on earth to bloom in heaven.
The stone would never tilt, never lean, a rare thing in the unsubstantial dirt of Louisiana.
Lee Calhoun had purchased a place for his people to rest, in a community called Clayton, in one of the most peaceful places on God’s earth, under lovely trees, with the fields stretching off in the distance. Clayton was good, high ground, a place where the river could not rise up out of its channel and wash them out of the soil. Home from prison, he paid for everything, even paid for the stone in a time when the babies of other poor families were buried under crossed sticks and rough piles of rock. Death had not much visited the extended family by then, and the grass of the small graveyard was not yet crowded.
The child had been a kind of antidote to the worst of what was out there, plugging the gap of her missing husband with his voice. It was a family that could almost live on songs. Jerry Lee would carry his one recollection of his big brother around with him all his life, Mamie’s call to the boy, and the boy’s answer; he always liked that idea, how a brother was watching over him. It is not enough to grieve on, barely enough to hold to, to keep a person from slipping away altogether.
“Sometimes a memory ain’t enough,” he says, thinking of a song.
Most people have to wait years and years before they can even guess at their purpose in this life; some never do. In 1940, when he was not yet five years old, Jerry Lee found his reason for being born. “I was walkin’ through my Aunt Stella’s house. I saw it, and I just stopped, cold.”
He cannot remember wanting to touch anything so bad. He had studied pianos for quite some time, but only at a distance. He had looked on them in great curiosity, these big wooden boxes so heavy you needed a truck to haul them around, so complicated that if they went out of tune it took a mad scientist to make them right again. He did not even fully understand how they worked, that you tapped a thin key of ivory to make a tiny steel hammer strike a steel wire, sharp and clean, eliciting a sound so sweet and pure and resonant it seemed more magic than machine. He studied them in thrown-together churches and tent revivals where silver-haired old women, hair buns so high and tight it looked like a B-movie spaceship had landed on the top of their heads, banged out “Victory in Jesus” like they were mad at it, stiff fingers jerking, marching across the ivory. He watched fat men in loud suits and dime-store diamond rings slap ham-handed at the ivory as they hollered a jingle for liver tonic or cough medicine that was 90 percent alcohol, till it was clear, from the way they played, they had been having some liver trouble themselves. And he had spied them, just a flash, through the doors of the jukes on Fifth Street, as sharp-dressed black men with cigarillos in their lips pumped the pedals like they were kicking at the devil himself rising up from beneath their feet, hands moving and crossing in the shadows. What a wonderful box, to hold so much. But you almost never saw one like this, unattended.
That day, he and Elmo and Mamie had come to visit his Uncle Lee and Aunt Stella, to talk of crops and children and other unimportant things, leaving him unsupervised, to roam the big house. “I just kept lookin’ at it,” he recalls. “I just had to get at it. It was just an ol’ upright piano, but I had to get at it.”
His fingers closed and unclosed and he made baby steps, sidling and creeping.
“I wasn’t hardly even walkin’ around too good—I was just a baby,” he says. Still, “I kept gettin’ closer and closer.”
Funny that he did not think he would try and play it.
“I knew I had to play it.”
In those days, a child, even a treasured and somewhat spoiled one, did not just jump onto a piano in another person’s house and play it, any more than he would take out the fine china and start spinning it on a stick. He waited till he could not stand it anymore, as the grow-nups just kept yapping.
“And I reached up and, for one reason or ’nother, it just come to me.”
He touched a single key, pushed it sharply down.
Cool fire.
He has always had a hard time describing what happened that day, in that moment, as he heard that music come out of him. He does not want to make too much of it, but at the same time he is not sure he can exaggerate it, any more than a man could exaggerate standing under a skinny tree in a lightning storm, at the precise moment the world around him turned a smoking blue.
“I don’t know what happened. Somethin’ strange. I felt it in my whole body. I felt it.”
Musicians, great ones, often claim that when they touched an instrument their hands knew where to go. The sound of the first key leaped into his head, ringing, ringing, and told his fingers which key to hit next, and it just kept happening, a cascade, and before he even knew what he was doing he had played a song, or at least a part of one.
Silent night, holy night
“Can you believe that?” he says now. “For a four-year-old kid, to walk by and just reach up and play it?
“Now I know what it was,” he says.
“It was deliverance.”
He laughs at himself then, a little self-consciously, at talking this way. “A talent e-merged,” he says, his words exaggerated, “and not a bad lookin’ kid, either,” as if it is too important to him to take seriously for long. But it was the day that changed everything,