Side B was not a song. The grooves ran out in a ring of silence, and on the paper label, in the slanted blue ink of my husband, were three lines I could read without my glasses. Lije is alive. Gary, Indiana. Ask at Mount Zion. And below that, smaller: Faye, I am sorry I never told you. Tell Otis when the time comes. I sat on the cold floor of the garage with the deep freeze humming behind me and the record in my lap, and I read the lines until the letters swam. Fifty four years of Saturday night dancing, and the man had kept this one thing from me.
I did not sleep. At dawn I called Brantley, who answered on the first ring like a boy who had also been awake. I said, “Honey, put on a clean shirt and come get me. We are going to Indiana.” He asked if I had lost my mind. I said I had found something, and I read him the label over the telephone. There was a long breath on the line. Then he said, “Mamaw, I will bring the van. And I will call the detective. He is going to want to come.” I did not argue. I put the record in a shoebox with a dish towel around it and packed a bag with my church shoes.
We drove north through the long green country, the three of us, with Mr. Otis Pruden in the front seat in his pressed suit with the gold shield still clipped to his pocket. He was eighty two years old, and he sat with his cane between his knees and his hat on his lap and did not say much for two hundred miles. Near Paducah he asked me to read him the label again. I did. He nodded, and his jaw worked, and he said, “Forty years on the Memphis police force, and the only case I never closed was the one in my own family.”
Sometimes a man hides a thing for sixty years, not because he is ashamed, but because he promised.
The whole story came out on that road, a piece at a time, when Mr. Pruden finally decided to trust me with it. In October of 1962 his little brother Elijah, whom everyone called Lije, had a voice like warm honey and a notebook of songs. A man named Delmar Voss, who owned the little studio on McLemore Avenue, took him in. Voss also had friends in the office of the sheriff and a habit of cheating his singers. The night they pressed the record, Voss tried to keep the master and the pay. When Lije refused, two men took him to the car.
My husband, Mr. Pruden said, was a nineteen year old bread truck driver who happened to be delivering rolls to the diner next door. Buddy saw them drag a boy to a sedan. He did not think. He drove his truck straight across the front bumper of the sedan, jumped out with a tire iron, and shouted until a crowd came. The men let go. They drove off. Lije stood on the sidewalk shaking, with one copy of the 45 clutched to his chest, and Buddy said, “Get in the truck. They will come back.” They did not stop until they reached Gary, where Lije had a cousin.
“Why did he never go home?” I asked. Mr. Pruden took a long breath. “Because Voss swore to the police that Lije stole the master, and the sheriff swore to my mother that if the boy ever came back to Memphis, he would be arrested and worse. He was eighteen years old, Faye, and Black, in 1962, in Tennessee. Your husband told him to stay gone. Lije took the advice. For sixty years, my mother cried herself to sleep, and I never found a thing.” He turned to look out the window. “And your husband drove a bread route on Highway 70 and never said a word.”
I wanted to be angry. I rolled it over in my mind for a hundred miles, like a pebble in a shoe. But I kept coming back to the boy in the bread truck. Nineteen years old, and he had put his own body between a frightened singer and a carful of men, and then he had kept a promise to a friend longer than most men keep their vows. At the Illinois line, I told Brantley to pull over so I could breathe. I stood by the side of the road with my hand on my chest. I said, “Buddy, you old fool,” out loud, and I laughed.
Mount Zion was a small brick church on the south side of Gary, with a stained glass window of the Good Shepherd and a hand lettered sign that said Choir Practice Thursday. An elderly sexton answered the door. When I said the name Pruden, he put down his broom. He said, “Lord have mercy,” and took off his cap. He said, “You will want to speak to Brother Elijah. He is in the sanctuary. He plays the organ every afternoon at four.” Mr. Pruden did not move. Brantley took his elbow. And together we walked down the center aisle toward the sound of an old hymn.
The man at the organ was eighty one years old, small and silver haired, in a cardigan the color of oatmeal. His hands moved over the keys like water. He did not turn around until the last chord had faded, and then he did, slowly, on the bench, and looked at the tall old detective in the aisle. For a moment nobody breathed. “Otis,” he said, in a voice that had not changed at all. “Little brother, you got old.” Mr. Pruden made a sound I will never forget, and the cane clattered to the floor, and they held each other in the aisle of that church for a very long time.
We stayed three days. Lije had a wife, Naomi, who made me a pound cake, and four grown children who had never known they had an uncle with a gold shield. He had taught music at the high school for thirty years and had played the organ at Mount Zion since 1964. On the second night, he took the 45 out of the shoebox and held it in both hands and told me he had been waiting sixty years to hear it. He cried at the label with my name written on it. “Buddy wrote to me every Christmas,” he said. “Every year. He told me about you. He said you were the best thing that ever happened to him.”
The following Saturday, at the senior center on Lane Avenue, I plugged in the jukebox with Lije and Mr. Pruden and Naomi standing beside me, and Brantley dropped a nickel in the slot. The bubble tubes glowed pink and orange. The needle came down on a record that had waited sixty one years, and a young voice of honey and smoke filled the room. Forty old people stopped dancing and listened. Then somebody started to clap, and they all clapped. I looked at the empty place beside me, where a man with a black comb in his pocket would have been, and I swear to you, I felt him there.