It’s five in the
afternoon, and the old black man
plays his twenty-seven-dollar guitar on
the front porch
that sags a little deeper as he makes the
lyrics ache.
The shotgun house is loaded with memories
of a gravel voice, majors and sharps and
flat-out Cs.
As axemen are fond of saying, he can
really bend the strings.
The air smells like the muddy Mississippi
five blocks away,
and the calliope on the steamboat pipes
circus music
to a cirrus cloud that looks like a bow
tie floating
above a Mardi Gras ball where Comus and Rex
swap wives.
Mudfoot, as he is known, has a recording
contract
with his neighbors, who wear wifebeaters
and fix their own cars.
He played backup for Chuck Berry in
nineteen-fifty-six
and cut a demo at Sun records called “Two
Below in Tupelo.”
The sky grows a deeper blue as a buxom
black woman
balancing fruit on her head like Carmen
Miranda calls out
“Blackberries! Watermelons! Fruit on the
vine!”
The old man goes inside to eat a plate of
red beans and rice.
On Saturday it will be crawfish and a
bottle of beer.
He shares a bed with the ghost of his wife
Mabel,
who still whispers sweet nothings in his
ear
as he turns in his sagging hall of fame
and dreams of how he and Chuck set the
crowd on fire
with a little mojo and a taste of the twelve
bar blues.
He grins and says, “I’m the happiest man
this side of Sunday,
and when I die, I ain’t even gonna make
the six o’clock news.”
~William Hammett
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