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Cold man, hard man, Booker knew that’s what his father was. Knew it in the way the man’s hands landed on him, the way the man’s hands knocked his mother, left her arms and face in green and yellow. Knew it in the knife-sharp sound of the man’s voice spitting at her, saying those things that gnawed her so, the things that made her cry behind the house in the dark until Booker came looking for her. Booker could see this truth and he cringed from it, but only on the inside, only on the inside, never let him see.
But the man with the green glass eyes so like Booker’s own could soften sometimes, just at the edges where hardly anyone could see. Booker only saw it now and then, when he looked hard for it; his mother saw it more, or maybe he just hoped she did. Mostly it happened when the man’s strong hands stopped forming a fist and instead curled around the neck of a guitar, one hand fingering the strings like another language.
The man sang, sometimes, voice raw and gruff, the sharpness falling away as he did. He only sang in English, never the Sioux songs Booker’s mother sang in her throat and with her hands and her smile. But they were songs that moved Booker anyway, making him think thoughts bigger and wider than the endless prairie or the long, long skies above them.
When the man sang Booker’s mother sat beside him, and sometimes she added her voice to his, her soft accent filling out the rough spots in his words, and for a little while they moved together in a way that made Booker’s eyes sting and his chest hurt. And he knew then in those rare times, those strange times by the fire in the long dark, that they were happy, and he was happy too.
Sometimes Booker sang with them, his piping voice like the call of the little white birds in the sea of the prairie. He never felt like it was enough, his voice so small against his father’s, but when Booker sang, now and then he saw what might have been a smile hitch the cold man’s face, looking foreign there but somehow beautiful.
One day the cold man, the hard man, pressed the guitar to Booker, his knife-voice telling him how to use it and how to move his hands upon it. His hands closed around the guitar, fingers fumbling nervously at this thing strange and new. His father watched him and the green eyes were keen and eager, and Booker tried haltingly to bring music out of metal and wood, out of a hollow empty box.
The sounds sputtered out, nothing real like the sounds his father made, but the little cringing noise it did make wavered there before them.
“Again,” said the knife-voice. “Like this.”
And he showed Booker again, again and again, tender in this one thing only, and the days passed. And one day Booker sang, in his small sweet voice, fingers nimbly moving over the strings, “Will the circle be unbroken?”
***
Scrawny boy he was, raw-boned, gangling like a court-jester. He hated and loved the way his soldier’s uniform scratched the back of his neck, the way it bagged in the waist and shoulder. The men — the other men, because he wasn’t a boy now, not really — circled up by the fire, feet aching, boots off while they cooked cornbread in cast iron skillets and laughed obscenities into the night smoke.
One of the men, hulking, arms bulging in a too-small uniform, had a guitar. He played camp songs, God songs, lady songs, fighting songs, anything that felt right. One night the man saw the way Booker looked at the guitar, nodded his head at him like a code, like a secret. Booker went to the man, sat down beside him, and closed his eyes when he felt the weight of a guitar again. He played and the men laughed, and after that night they always let him take a turn, let his aching shoulders sink down from the way they’d knotted themselves so that he could reach down properly to pull at the strings.
After that night they laughed with him, until the day the sergeant fixed him with a stare like some wild thing, all white-eyed and pinched-nosed, and swore up and down about teepees and tainted blood. And Booker stood there, his face flushing dirty red and his belly aching, trying to say the right words to make the man take it back, take it back, it isn’t true —
But his mother’s voice whispered Sioux and he heard the way she sang, and the men saw it on his face, and after that the hulking man kept his guitar packed away.
One day they bivouacked, and thick in Booker’s nostrils was the smell of smoke and burning horsehide, a stench of blood and earth. He was shaking and ravenous and sick, deep on the inside where he wouldn’t let them see. Under his fingernails were dirt and blood-stickied hair. They were not his hands, not his hands, not his hands.
The men laughed. They cheered, they whooped, they hollered. Shreds of skin and hair were in their hands and when Booker looked down at his belt in dizziness he saw them hanging there, chunks of flesh tied up to leather with tangled thick black hair pooling against the uniform, and he knew what he was. He remembered screams instead of songs, fingers twisting in hair instead of on strings. They were his hands, after all.
That night the man brought out the guitar again, and the men in the circle clapped and sang, voices slurring with victory. Booker’s mouth twisted like a wire tangle and he kept it shut, kept it screwed shut so the sickness in him would not get out. The men clapped him on the back — the other men, because he wasn’t a boy, never again — and the men laughed in the shadows. He smelled something thick and foul, and when he looked up he saw the sergeant grinning. The man nodded at him, then pressed a flask into his trembling hand. “To victory,” he said.
Booker drank it, choking at first on that bitter burn, and his Adam’s apple bobbed in time with the clapping and the singing. It was all he could do. His hands were too filthy for anything else.
***
Booker could not say what made him pick up the guitar. It stared at him, a baleful thing looming there in the dim light. He saw the way Elizabeth looked at it so, the yearning heavy in those blue eyes. He saw the way she fought back tears, seeing those little children with their thin faces and their rags, the people stretched out like animals in the streets. She was not made for this world, he knew that, knew it where it bit him hard and deep. She was better than all of this, deserved more than all of this. The taste of whiskey fouled his mouth. This was all he could give.
So he picked up the guitar and it felt wrong and right both, like so much of his life, and he set down in the chair and his fingers walked. The girl’s face, then, was something beautiful, something fine. And her singing, it made him feel — like he was real, maybe, like he hadn’t been in a long time but here, here, he was.
But he did not sing. His throat did not know what to do anymore and his tongue tasted ashes and he kept quiet, fearing that if he opened his mouth, there would only be the sound of knives.
***
The baby cried in the crib, fists clenching, legs wheeling, face red and anguished and perfect. Booker stroked the dark hair curling at her temples, tried to soothe her with little nonsense noises, tried to tell her it would be all right.
But Anna wept like a wound and Booker felt some old pain, a throbbing headache, made it so he gasped to move. He shook it off, whispered to the baby, but she cried and cried.
He remembered — what did he remember — he remembered what she liked. What she’d always liked, since she first came. He steadied himself, one hand on the crib, reached out with the other. Wrapped his hand around the guitar neck. He sniffed, his nose tickling. When he rubbed it a streak of coppery blood painted his hand, and he stared at it before wiping it on his trousers. That had been happening lately. He didn’t know why. Didn’t care why, long as it didn’t keep him from doing right by her.
The baby caught sight of the guitar and hushed slightly, her breathing falling away to raggedy hiccups. She kicked helplessly, bringing her hands together in an accidental clap.
Booker smiled at her. It was a real smile. It felt as if he was having to practice it; felt as if he’d forgotten, somehow. He whispered to her, “Anna, let’s have a song.”
A shiver, a twitch of his bloody nose, and he thought for just an instant I miss her. But the thought was disconnected, flotsam in a mind’s river, and he let it go, let it fall away back into hazy half-memory. There was something missing, he knew that much, but how could he worry when that baby looked at him like that, with those blue eyes?
His fingers fell into familiar places, sweet and sure on the strings, and he felt a rumble in his throat he’d forgotten. It didn’t feel like knives. It felt like a man lost, a man wandering, a man sorrowing… a man found.
He played, his fingers growing raw, but the burn in his fingers reminded him he was here. Here with this child, with his child. And the something missing receded into the background, faint teasing deep in his memories, a girl who asked him to dance, a woman who brought down the world. It all faded until he saw only the baby before him, her sweet round face finding a smile, tears drying on her cheeks, a sound of laughter instead of pain.
And he sang to her, like he hadn’t since he was a boy, shyly at first, then more openly. He could tell her. He could show her. His gruff voice wove around her with the notes of his guitar, softening the edges so the baby could see, so she could know. And she smiled, and the guitar and the song felt just right, just right.
“You remember songs of heaven,
Which you sang with childish voice,
Do you love the hymns they taught you,
Or are songs of earth your choice?
Will the circle be unbroken
By and by, by and by?
Is a better home awaiting
In the sky, Lord, in the sky?”