Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil Part 4

"It looks like X-ray fish."

"Yuck!"

Luther would not be consoled. "I don't care," he said. "It doesn't matter. I just don't care." He kept repeating "I don't care," over and over. In response to any question-Do you want another drink? What should we do with the goldfish? Are they radioactive?-he gave the same answer. "I don't care."

Luther was in no condition to drive. So, after we left Serena calling out "Nighty-night!" on her doorstep, I got behind the wheel of his car, drove him home, and deposited him in the living room of his carriage house-the living room that looked out on the Dumpster instead of the garden. The night air seemed to revive him a little.

"I don't know why I ever fooled around with goldfish," he said. "I should have stuck to what I know best. Insects. It doesn't pay to try to change. I've often thought of changing my life completely, but it never works. I moved to Florida once, but I came back. I've got too much Savannah in me, I guess. My family's been here seven generations, and after that long a time I suppose it gets into your genes. It's like the control insects at the laboratory. Did I ever tell you about them? Well, we keep a lot of insect colonies in big gla.s.s jars out there. Some of them have been breeding for twenty-five years. That's a thousand generations. All they know about life is what goes on inside their jar. They haven't been exposed to pesticides or pollution, so they haven't developed immunities or evolved in any way. They stay the same, generation after generation. If we released them into the outside world, they'd die. I think something like that happens after seven generations in Savannah. Savannah gets to be the only place you can live. We're like bugs in a jar."

Luther excused himself and asked me to wait in the living room. He walked upstairs unsteadily but with exaggerated care, negotiating the false step without mishap. I could hear him cross the floor overhead. A dresser drawer opened and closed. When he returned, he was carrying a brown bottle with a black screw cap. The bottle was filled with a white powder.

"This is one way out," he said. "Sodium fluoroacetate. It's a poison. Five hundred times more lethal than a.r.s.enic." Luther held the bottle up to the light. It had a handwritten label that read: "Monsanto 3039."

"This is the same stuff the Finns dumped down their wells when the Russians invaded in 1939. The water in those wells is still undrinkable. I could kill d.a.m.n near everybody in Savannah with this bottle. Tens of thousands of people anyway." A smile played across Luther's lips as he gazed at the bottle. "I was in charge of burying a lot of this stuff out on Oatland Island where we closed down a laboratory years ago. I kept some of it for myself, though. More than enough."

"Ever thought of using it?" I asked.

"Sure. I've always said I'd use it if n.i.g.g.e.rs moved into the house next door. Then n.i.g.g.e.rs did move in next door and made a liar out of me."

"Isn't it illegal to have it?"

"Highly."

"Then why do you keep it?"

"I just like the idea of it." Luther spoke in a taunting way, like a boy with an extra-powerful slingshot. "Every so often I hold it in my hand and think ... poof!"

Luther handed me the bottle. As I looked at it, I held my breath for fear that the slightest leaking fumes would be lethal. I wondered what went through Luther's mind when he held this bottle and thought "poof!" Then I thought I knew. He probably saw the people of Savannah dropping dead one by one: businessmen sitting on benches in Johnson Square, young revelers carousing on River Street, slow-moving black women holding umbrellas aloft against the hot summer sun, butlers carrying silver trays in the Oglethorpe Club, wh.o.r.es in hotpants on Montgomery Street, tourists lined up in front of Mrs. Wilkes's boarding house.

He took the bottle back. "It's an odorless, tasteless poison," he said. "It kills without leaving a trace-just a slight residue of fluoride but no more than you could attribute to the use of fluoride toothpaste. The victim dies of a heart attack. It's the perfect murder weapon."

Luther went to the front door and opened it. I took this as a sign that the evening was over. But as I stood up, he grabbed hold of the door and pulled it sharply upward. The door lifted completely off its hinges. Luther laid it down flat on the living-room floor. "This is more than just an ordinary door," he said. "It's what's called a 'cooling board.' Cooling boards are for laying out corpses and preparing them for burial. It's a typical feature of old houses. The front door doubles as a cooling board. My family's houses have always had them, so I had one made for myself. When I go, they'll carry me out on this."

Luther sat cross-legged on top of the cooling-board door on the living-room floor with the bottle of poison in his hand. Yes, I thought, and when you go, how many others will you take with you? Luther closed his eyes. A smile spread across his face.

"You know," I said, "some people in Savannah, or at least some people in Clary's, are afraid you might dump that poison into the water supply someday."

"I know," he said.

"What if I were to grab that bottle out of your hands and run away with it?"

"I'd go back to Oatland Island and dig up some more, probably," said Luther. Whatever his intentions, Luther clearly relished the speculation about his sinister power.

"When you were a kid," I said, "were you the type who pulled the wings off flies?"

"No," he said, "but I caught June bugs and tied balloons to them."

The next morning at Clary's drugstore, Ruth set Luther's breakfast in front of him-his eggs, his bacon, his Bayer aspirin, and his gla.s.s of ammonia and Coca-Cola. Then she went back to the end of the soda fountain and took a drag on her cigarette.

"Ruth?" Luther asked. "Do you think you can live without glowing goldfish?"

"I can if you can, Luther," she answered.

Luther ate a mouthful of eggs and then some bacon. He took a swallow of c.o.ke and proceeded to finish his entire breakfast. He had a mournful but peaceful air. Luther ate, he slept, and the demons within him were still. His deadly bottle of poison would remain a harmless curiosity. At least for now.

Chapter 6.

THE LADY OF SIX THOUSAND SONGS.

The stream of people going in and out of Joe Odom's house seemed to pick up tempo in the weeks after I met him. That might have been because I had joined the flow myself and was now viewing the phenomenon from midstream, so to speak. I often dropped in after breakfast, by which time the aroma of fresh coffee would be gaining the upper hand over the smell of stale cigarettes from the night before. Joe would be clean-shaven and well rested on three or four hours' sleep, and among the a.s.sorted company (bartenders, socialites, truck drivers, accountants) there would generally be at least one person who had spent the night on the sofa. Currents of activity swirled about the house even at this early hour. People entered and exited rooms, crisscrossing one's field of vision like characters in La Dolce Vita. La Dolce Vita.

One morning, Joe sat at the grand piano in the living room having coffee, playing the piano, and talking to me. A fat man and a girl with braided hair walked through, completely engrossed in their own conversation.

"She tore up her mother's car yesterday," the girl said.

"I thought it was the TV."

"No, the TV was last week...."

They continued out into the hall, whereupon a bald man in a business suit poked his head in.

"The meeting's at two," he said to Joe. "I'll call you when it's over. Wish me luck." Then he disappeared. At that point, Mandy came in from the kitchen, wrapped in a white sheet and looking like a voluptuous G.o.ddess. She plucked a cigarette from the pack in Joe's s.h.i.+rt pocket, kissed him on the forehead, whispered, "Draw up the d.a.m.n divorce papers!" and then skipped back into the kitchen, where Jerry resumed cutting her hair. In the dining room, a young man hooted with laughter as he read Lewis Grizzard's column aloud to a white-haired woman who was not finding it at all funny. Overhead, the sound of high-heeled shoes clicked across the floor.

"Well, it's nine-thirty A.M.," A.M.," said Joe, "and I ain't bored yet." said Joe, "and I ain't bored yet."

Joe was talking not just to me, but to a person at the other end of the telephone, which was tucked under his chin. Joe often engaged in split conversations of this sort. Sometimes you knew who the other party was, sometimes you did not.

"I woke up this morning at seven," he was saying, "and there was this big lump next to me under the covers, which I thought was strange because I had gone to bed alone. Mandy was in Waycross for the night and not due back here for an hour or so. So I lay there just looking at the lump, trying to figure out who or what it was. It was very big, bigger than anybody I knew.... What? ... I was sure it was a human being and not a pile of laundry, because it was breathing. Then I noticed something strange about the breathing pattern: It was coming from two different parts of the lump. Finally, it dawned on me that the lump was two people, which meant I was odd man out, so I yanked the covers back, and sure enough, it was a boy and a girl. I had never seen either one of them before. They were both completely naked."

Joe paused for a moment to listen to the person at the other end of the telephone. "Heh-heh, you know me better than that, Cora Bett," he said. Then, speaking to both of us again, he continued: "Anyhow, before I had a chance to say anything, the boy asked me, 'Who are you?' Now, I'm pretty sure that's the first time I've ever been asked that question in my own bed. So I said, 'I happen to be the social director here, and I don't believe we've met.' I wasn't sure what to do next, but just then the telephone rang, and I learned that I had a busload of tourists coming at noon-forty people-and that I'd have to make lunch for them because the caterer is sick.... Yup, lunch for forty! ... They're all members of a polka-dancing social club from Cleveland. Heh-heh." Joe smiled as he listened to the voice on the other end.

"Anyhow," he went on, "my two newest naked friends got dressed. The boy had tattoos on his arms-a Confederate flag on one arm and a marijuana plant on the other. He put on a really swell T-s.h.i.+rt. It had 'f.u.c.k You' printed on it. At this very moment, both he and the girl are in the kitchen helping make shrimp salad for forty polka dancers. Jerry's in there too, cutting Mandy's hair, and that's why I say I ain't bored yet."

Joe said good-bye and hung up the telephone, and as he did a large blue caftan floated into the room. The caftan was topped by the round, smiling face of a woman of about seventy. She had powder-white skin set off by bright red lipstick, rouge, and mascara. Her jet-black hair was wound into a huge bun that sat on top of her head like a turban. "I'm off to Statesboro to play for the Kiwanis Club," she said, waving a set of car keys, "and then I have a beauty pageant in Hinesville at six. I should be back in Savannah by nine. But in case I'm late, can you get to the bar early and cover for me?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Joe, and with that the woman floated away in a rustle of silk and a jangle of keys.

Joe nodded at the spot where she had been standing. "That," he said, "was one of Georgia's greatest ladies. Emma Kelly. Come with us tonight and you'll see her in action. Around these parts she's known as 'The Lady of Six Thousand Songs.'"

For the past forty years, Emma Kelly had spent the better part of her waking hours driving across the landscape of south Georgia to play piano wherever she was needed. She played at graduations, weddings, reunions, and church socials. All anyone had to do was ask, and she would be there-in Waynesboro, Swainsboro, Ellabell, Hazlehurst, Newington, Jesup, and Jimps. She had played at senior proms for every high school within a hundred miles of Savannah. On a given day, she might drive to Metter to play for a ladies' fas.h.i.+on show, then on to Sylvania for a retired teachers' convention, and then to Wrens for a birthday party. Toward evening she would usually drive to Savannah to play piano at one of several nightspots. But no matter where her engagements took her, she would always be back home in Statesboro-an hour west of Savannah-to play at the Rotary Club lunch on Monday, the Lions on Tuesday, the Kiwanis on Thursday, and the First Baptist Church on Sunday. Emma played old standards and show tunes, blues and waltzes. She was a familiar sight with her flowing caftans and happy coats and that towering turban of black hair held in place by two lacquered chopsticks.

Emma was descended from the earliest English settlers in Georgia and South Carolina. She had met George Kelly when she was four and married him when she was seventeen. He was a sign painter, and by the time he died Emma had borne ten children, "not counting five miscarriages," as she would always say.

Being a devout Baptist, Emma never drank. But once, after playing at the Fort Stewart officers' club, she was stopped on suspicion of drunk driving. The M.P. who s.h.i.+ned his light through the window told her she had been weaving all over the road for the last three miles. That was true, but the fact of the matter was that Emma had been trying to undo her corset and slip out of it at the time. She squinted into the glare of the flashlight, clutching her unfastened clothes about her and wondering how on earth she was going to step out of the car in this condition and convince the young man she was sober. It was Emma's good fortune that she had played piano at the M.P.'s senior prom years before. He recognized her and knew she never touched a drop, and in a moment she was on her way.

In fact, most of the highway patrolmen knew Emma's car, and when it zoomed past them late at night doing eighty or ninety, they generally let it go. Emma had the greatest compa.s.sion for the occasional rookie cop who would unknowingly pull her over, siren blaring, blue lights flas.h.i.+ng. She would roll down the window and say softly, "You must be new." She'd be thinking ahead to the browbeating the young man was about to receive from a groggy sheriff. It would go something along the lines of: "What in blazes you think you doin', boy, draggin' Emma Kelly off the road! Tell you what you gone do now! You gone escort this fine lady all the way to Statesboro! See she gets home safe! A million pardons, Miss Emma. It won't happen again."

In Savannah, Emma's fans followed her from nightspot to nightspot like a cheerful caravan-from Whispers to the Pink House to the Fountain to the Live Oak Bowling Alley to the Quality Inn out by the airport. She was good business. Bar receipts always picked up sharply for the duration of her stay and fell off when it was over. For years, Emma's children had pleaded with her to open her own piano bar and cut down on the driving. After she killed her ninth deer on the highway, they stopped pleading and just plain insisted. "It breaks my heart," said Emma, "because I love animals so much, not to mention the damage it's done to the car." About opening a piano bar, she promised she would think it over.

Joe Odom, who had known Emma all his life, often came to hear her wherever she happened to be performing. At some point after his arrival, Emma would play "Sentimental Journey," which was the signal for Joe to come up and take over at the piano so she could rest a few minutes. Joe would happily oblige.

The night Emma collided with her tenth deer, she drove to Whispers and played "Sentimental Journey" as soon as Joe set foot in the door. "Go out and see how bad the car is, Joe, will you?" she said. "I can't bear to look at it myself." Six months later, she and Joe opened a piano bar in an old cotton warehouse overlooking the river. They called it Emma's.

Emma's was a long, narrow room, cozy as a book-filled den. Its tiny dance floor was nestled in the curve of a baby grand piano. A picture window looked out on the river and an occasional containers.h.i.+p gliding by. Dozens of framed photographs of family and friends lined the shelves along one wall, and an alcove by the entrance was decorated with memorabilia of Johnny Mercer. It was Mercer, in fact, who had nicknamed Emma "The Lady of Six Thousand Songs." That was how many songs she knew, according to Mercer's calculations. He and Emma had paged through a pile of songbooks, Mercer checking off the songs Emma could sing from start to finish. After three years of checking off songs, Mercer made an educated guess as to the store of lyrics in Emma's head. He put it at six thousand.

The first time I came to Emma's, I was just taking my seat when Emma looked in my direction and asked, "What's your favorite song?" My mind went totally blank, of course. As I looked at her helplessly, a huge freighter came into view over her left shoulder. "s.h.i.+p!" I said. "My s.h.i.+p has sails that are made of silk!"

"Oh, that's a lovely song," said Emma. "Kurt Weill, 1941." She played it, and from that time on, Emma always played "My s.h.i.+p" whenever I came into the bar. "Bartenders know customers by the drinks they order," she said. "I know them by the songs they ask me to play. Whenever regulars walk in the door, I like to play their favorites. It tickles them and makes them feel they're home."

Emma had many regulars. There were the four ladies from Estill, South Carolina, who drove in several nights a week with or without their husbands. There was the retired bank clerk Abner Croft, who walked his dog every night before going to bed and more than once kept walking until he got to Emma's, where, dressed in pajamas and bathrobe and accompanied by the dog, he was shown to his regular table. Just as he was sitting down, Emma would play "Moments Like This," which was his favorite song. There was Wanda Brooks, a self-appointed greeter-hostess who wore rakish hats and a rhinestone brooch that advertised her telephone number in glittering numerals an inch high. Wanda had been a majorette in junior high school; now she sold tanning beds to suntan parlors in South Carolina and coastal Georgia. She would call out "Hey!" to perfect strangers, show them to a table, engage them in animated conversation, dance with them, and then move on to chat with others. Wanda was forever foraging in her purse for a lighter, swaying and leaning into the person next to her as she babbled amiably. Inevitably, her ever-present cigarette would tumble from her lips or slip out of her fingers in a shower of glowing ashes, sending the people in her immediate vicinity leaping to their feet and flailing at their clothes. Wanda had platinum-blond hair, and her entrance into Emma's was always accompanied by the playing of "New York, New York," which was her favorite song.

Though Emma's was a popular nightspot, it fell short of expectations in one respect: It failed to keep Emma off the road. She went right on making appearances from one end of south Georgia to the other and driving on to Savannah afterward to play until early morning. Occasionally, she spent the night in Joe Odom's carriage house after closing, but most of the time she found an excuse to drive home to Statesboro. On Sat.u.r.day nights, she would drive home no matter what, because her Sundays in Statesboro started very early and ran very late, as I discovered firsthand. Emma invited me to join her one Sunday at church and stay with her throughout the day. This is how it went.

Emma pulled into the parking lot of the First Baptist Church in Statesboro Sunday morning at twenty minutes past eight. She was wearing a purple silk dress, a blue cape, turquoise eye shadow, and a touch of rouge. "Let me see," she said, "we closed Emma's at three o'clock last night, and I got home about four. I would have pulled off the highway and taken a fifteen-minute nap under the Ash Branch overpa.s.s, like I usually do, but there was a big old truck there ahead of me and it took all the room. So I got to bed by four-thirty, and then at a quarter past seven, Aunt Annalise called to make sure I got up in time for church. She's ninety." Emma adjusted the two lacquered chopsticks that anch.o.r.ed her bun. "I can keep going with just a couple hours sleep, but sometimes you can tell. My eyes get puffy." We went inside the church.

The preacher delivered a sermon ent.i.tled "Temptation and Decay from Within." A deacon then read a report on the forthcoming revival week, the theme of which was to be "Wake Up, America: G.o.d Loves You!" The deacon thought too many people were still very much asleep in regard to this message. "There are one hundred and eighty million people in America who do not claim Christ," he said. "Two million in the state of Georgia. Thousands in Statesboro alone."

The preacher then addressed the gathering. "Have we got any guests among us today?" Emma whispered that I should stand up. All heads turned. "Welcome," the preacher said heartily. "So glad you could join us."

After the service, Emma and I walked to a smaller chapel where the older people were to attend their weekly senior a.s.sembly. We were slowed a bit by the dozen or so people who came up to welcome me personally to the church and to ask where I was from. "New York!" a woman said. "My! I had a cousin who went there once." In the chapel, Emma slipped off her high heels and played the organ as the others came in. Each member of the senior a.s.sembly stopped at the organ to greet Emma and then came over to me to say how pleased they were that I had come. Mr. Granger was the first to address the gathering. "I tell you, my wife is doing great," he said. "I knew last Sunday it was malignant, but I couldn't tell you, because the doctor had not confirmed it until Tuesday. I really have a heavy heart, but everything is being taken care of as far as I can tell."

From the rear of the chapel a woman said, "Ann McCoy is in Saint Joseph's Hospital in Savannah. She's havin' back problems."

Another said, "Sally Powell's sister died."

Mr. Granger asked, "Is there anyone else?"

"Cliff Bradley," several people said at once.

"Cliff went home yesterday afternoon, late," said Mr. Granger. "He seems to be doin' great."

"Goldie Smith needs our prayers," another woman said. "There's something the matter with her stomach. She's being fitted with a prosthesis."

A woman with pink lipstick and gold-rimmed gla.s.ses stood up to give a testimonial. "Me and my family weren't doing too good until I looked down and saw I had a G.o.d hole in my chest. We all have a G.o.d hole in our chest. You should all do what I did: Turn it over to Jesus."

When the a.s.sembly was over, Emma went to a small room off the chapel where she and a dozen other older women had their Sunday school cla.s.s. Emma introduced me all over again, and the ladies chirped and mewed little h.e.l.los. The leader of the cla.s.s said she would give a talk about G.o.d's People in a Changing World, but did anybody have any important announcements first.

"Myrtle Foster's incision is still draining," said a woman with gla.s.ses and a light green suit. "I talked to Rap Nelby last night, and they do not know when she will be able to come home."

"We'll have to put her on our prayer list," said the leader.

A woman with her hair in rows of small blue-white curls said, "Louise saw Mary at the beauty shop on Friday and it seems the two others are not doing well either, so we need to keep them on our list too." For the next few minutes, the health of several other members of the congregation was discussed, and the prayer list grew by three more names.

The leader then began her talk-"Jesus will never ask you to do anything he wouldn't do himself"-and Emma reached into her pocketbook and took out a small manila envelope with "Emma Kelly: $24" written across the top. She stood up quietly and put the envelope into a carton with the other ladies' envelopes. Then, motioning for me to follow, she tiptoed into the hall with the carton. I felt a tug at my jacket. "I hope you enjoyed it," a lady by the door whispered. "Come back and see us again."

Emma led the way down the hall. "Now we go to the little children two floors up," she said. First she went around to a windowless room and handed the carton to two men who were sitting behind a table piled high with little manila envelopes. "Mornin', Miss Emma," they said.

Upstairs, about twenty children were seated in a semicircle around an upright piano waiting for Emma. She accompanied them as they sang the t.i.tles of the books of the New Testament to the tune of "Onward, Christian Soldiers"-"Math-thew, Ma-ark, Lu-uke and John, Acts and the Letters to the Romans...." Then she played "Jesus Is a Loving Teacher" all the way through twice. "We can go now," she said, and we went back down the two flights of stairs and out into the parking lot.

"If the other lady who plays piano can't go to the nursing home, I go there now," said Emma. "But she's there today." So instead we drove directly to the Forest Heights Country Club, where Emma went to the buffet, put two fried chicken legs on her plate, and sat down at the piano in the dining room. For the next two and a half hours, she played background music and chatted with the diners who came up one by one or in family groups to greet her and pay their respects.

At two-thirty, Emma got up from the piano and said her good-byes. We walked out to the car and drove fifty miles into the bright afternoon sun to Vidalia, home of the sweet Vidalia onion. Emma had been hired to play for a wedding reception at the Serendipity Health and Racquet Club. Upon arriving, she went directly to the ladies' room and changed into a flowing black-and-gold kimono. The owner of the health club, a large lady with a bouffant blond hairdo, took us on a tour of the spa and showed us the new indoor-outdoor swimming pool and underwater grotto of which she was very proud. The wedding guests began to arrive from the church, but the bride and groom were late. Word had it that they had stopped at a 7-Eleven to get plastic gla.s.ses for the champagne they were consuming in the car.

When the wedding couple finally arrived, Emma found out that the name of the groom was Bill, and she announced she had a special song for the occasion. She sang, "Big Bad Bill is Sweet William now ... married life has changed him ... he washes dishes, mops the floor...." The song was greeted with laughter and set everybody to dancing except the little boys who went out and put a bottle of champagne under the hood of the wedding couple's car next to the engine block so it would heat up and explode when they drove away.

At six-thirty, after Emma had played for two hours, we got back into her car for the drive back to Statesboro. If she was tired, she did not show it. She was not only wide awake but smiling. "Someone once wrote that musicians are touched on the shoulder by G.o.d," she said, "and I think it's true. You can make other people happy with music, but you can make yourself happy too. Because of my music, I have never known loneliness and never been depressed.

"When I was growing up, I used to put the radio under the covers with me at night. That's how I learned so many different songs. In fact, it was because I knew so many songs that I got to know Johnny Mercer in the first place. We met over the telephone twenty years ago. I was playing at a dinner party in Savannah, and a young man kept requesting Johnny Mercer songs. He was kind of surprised when I knew every one. Then I played some he hadn't heard before, and he was astonished. 'I'm Johnny Mercer's nephew,' he said. 'I want him to meet you. Let's call him now.' So he called Bel Air, California, and told Johnny he'd met this lady who knew every song he'd ever written. Then he put me on the phone. Johnny didn't even say h.e.l.lo. He just said, 'Sing the first eight bars of "If You Were Mine."' Now, that's not a well-known song, but it was one that meant a lot to Johnny. I sang it without any hesitation, and we were friends from then on."

The sun was beginning to set. "To me, the words are as important as the music," said Emma. "Johnny and I liked to compare our favorite phrases. We both loved the lyric 'Too dear to lose, too sweet to last' from the song 'While We're Young' and the line from 'Handful of Stars' that goes 'Oh! What things unspoken trembled in the air.'

"Johnny's own lyrics are the best, though. It's hard to think of anything more beautiful than 'When an early autumn walks the land and chills the breeze and touches with her hand the summer trees....' That's poetry. And 'Like painted kites the days and nights went flying by. The world was new beneath a blue umbrella sky.'"

It was because of Johnny Mercer that Emma started singing. Until she met him she played the piano and that was all. Mercer kept telling her, "Go ahead and sing." But she was afraid. She told him she had no range. "That's all right," he said, "just sing softly. You don't have to hit every note. Sing low and skip and cheat a lot. If you can't reach it or don't know it, skip it." He showed her how she could change keys instead of going up an octave for the second verse of "I Love Paris." He even helped her cheat with one of his own songs. She was having trouble with the line "I wanna be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart"-she could not drop down for the second syllable of "somebody." Mercer told her to sing the same note for all three syllables.

She was still dubious about singing, though. Then one evening she started an engagement at the Quality Inn and found a microphone and sound system all set up. "Oh, look," Mercer told her, "you've got a mike. Now you can sing." And she did. Years later she found out that Mercer had arranged for the mike to be there and paid for it too.

Emma recalled how over the years she had played piano for plain folks and dignitaries, for three presidents, twenty governors, and countless mayors. She had jammed with Tommy Dorsey and accompanied Robert Goulet. She recalled the day, years ago, when playing piano every day of her life had become a necessity. It had happened on a Sunday morning when her youngest son, upset about having broken up with his girlfriend, dropped Emma and her husband at church and then drove into the woods, set a rifle b.u.t.t against the floorboards, turned the barrel to his chest, and fired. He collapsed on the steering wheel, sounding the horn. Someone heard the horn and came running. The boy lost a lung, but his life was saved, at a cost of $40,000. Emma had to work day and night to pay the bills. The near tragedy only served to intensify her faith. "What if the bullet had gone just a fraction of an inch to the left or right? What if he had not fallen on the steering wheel? The Lord must have been with him," Emma said. "I have to go on believing for that reason alone." Even after she had paid the hospital bills, Emma continued her nightly appearances. It had become her life.

We arrived back in Statesboro shortly after seven-thirty. Before going home, Emma stopped at the home of her ninety-year-old aunt to bring her a box of food she had taken with her from the country club. Her aunt came to the door in her nightgown and nightcap; she'd been listening to the radio broadcast of the evening sermon at the Baptist church. Emma went inside for a few minutes and tucked her in bed. Then, more than twelve hours after her day had begun, she drove home.

"There's another wonderful thing about being able to play music," she said. "It's something Johnny Mercer told me. He said, 'When you play songs, you can bring back people's memories of when they fell in love. That's where the power lies.'"

On the basis of attendance alone, Emma's piano bar was an unqualified success. Financially, however, the bar did not do very well. Joe's inclination to give people free drinks was one reason. In addition to that, many of Joe's old creditors saw the bar as a chance to recoup some of the money he owed them. They would come in for an hour or so of drinking and then leave without paying. But even so, Emma's should have made more money than it did. Joe sought the advice of Darlene Poole, who knew the bar business inside out.

Darlene had worked as a barmaid in a number of local saloons and was engaged to the owner of a successful club on the southside. She and Joe sat at a table having a drink. "You got a nice setup here," she said. "The blue-rinse-and-foxtrot crowd finally have a place to go. Can't hardly go to the Nightflight, can't go to Malone's, can't go to Studebaker's. You got 'em all to yourself, honey. Nice going. Plus I see you've got Wanda Brooks coming in here. Broads like Wanda are what I call insurance. With her b.u.mping into everybody and knocking drinks over left and right at three bucks a shot, you can't help but make it work. Now, if you can just keep the freeloaders out and stop giving away the liquor, you should do all right. Just make sure n.o.body's gla.s.s stays empty too long."

"Maybe that's the problem," said Joe. "Gotta get Moon to pour drinks faster."

"Moon?!" Darlene whirled around and looked toward the bar. Then she looked back at Joe. "s.h.i.+t, Joe, you didn't tell me you had Moon Tompkins tending bar!" Darlene leaned closer to Joe and lowered her voice. "Moon's your problem, honey." Darlene whirled around and looked toward the bar. Then she looked back at Joe. "s.h.i.+t, Joe, you didn't tell me you had Moon Tompkins tending bar!" Darlene leaned closer to Joe and lowered her voice. "Moon's your problem, honey."

"Why do you say that?" Joe asked. "He seems okay to me. Maybe a little slow."

"Moon Tompkins has done three years for bank robbery," said Darlene.

Joe laughed. "Yeah-yeah," he said.

"And it wasn't just one bank, either. It was two."