Ballad of Thomas Diggs (Part Two)

The sheriff took one look at him, as though he were an American portrait of the son of God, and said, “My God, he’s bee-utey-ful,” and adopted him and had the boy baptized and had him join the church choir.

The boy quit school and nobody noticed. He spent his days stealing tobacco from the liquor store and selling it to older kids and spent his nights listening to Mister Fallen Angel’s Midnight Blues Hour on a radio he found in a dumpster.

At fourteen, he was asked to perform a Protestant Hymn in front of the entire church, and he had already stolen his first cassette-tape and listened to it religiously, practicing the guitar at night in the cemetery beside the tombstones of his birth parents, singing the Gospel according to Blind Willie McTell and Blind Connie Williams and Blind Willie Johnson, asking who’s that writing. Playing the harmonica until his lips dripped with blood and he’d have to spit as it were tobacco juice and playing the guitar parts so the strings would strike a spark that would catch fire and smoke swayed there before him where he made music with blood raining from his fingers.

People who drove by the graveyard in the cold fog could hear him and thought it to be haunted by ghosts. The squirrels and white-tailed deer and hawks, red foxes and beavers from the riverbank came to hear him and the mockingbirds and robins sang back-up vocals, digging up the graves of his parents and their bodies rose and their spirits sang with him too.

The day he was to perform the Hymn in front of the church he stood in the left vestry sneaking pulls from a bottle of wine he stole and had hidden under his robe, and the sheriff put his hands on his shoulders and bent his knees to look him in the eyes.

“Boy, the whole town comes to this here church and is here today to hear you sing the Word. Do not let me down.”

He said Okay.

When he walked to the pulpit they started in with the organ. He began to mumble the words which he never learned and heat bolted from inside his face. He vomited some and wiped it on his sleeve.

They booed him off stage and screamed at him with disgrace and cursed his name.

The next Sunday the sheriff had arranged a chance to have his name redeemed with a second performance to make up for the previous.

The boy was nearly in tears when he said Okay. The congregation was whispering and chuckling and he bowed his head and was drinking whiskey this time and put back a whole pint and looked up, peering down the pews and the organ repeated the opening verses three times. He took off his white-cloak robe and was wearing a blue-jean shirt with Indigo pebbles and the emblem of a buffalo skull on his bolo tie and slid out of his shoes so that he was bare-footed and he held a harmonica to his lips and sang for them some Sonny Terry—Old Lost John, wailing sexually and crying with fervor lungs a moan that had been scorned and beaten by the world’s belt. He slid to his knees and rolled on his back and for the first time was totally taken by the spell of song.

Some folks screamed in horror and others fainted, and some went down into the spell with him, shaking their hips, and it is said that one poor old man up-and-died there on the spot, and almost all ran out of there acting as they’d just been seeded by Satan.

He was kicked out of the sheriff’s house that day. “What the hell is wrong with you,” the sheriff said.

“I just done what I know. I only did what I wanted to.”

“You disgraced your Lord and Savior. You embarrassed me in front of the entire town son. You put shame to your family name.”

“My name ain’t the same as yours.”

“You’re gawddamn right it ain’t. Now take your devil music boy and gee-it. Jesus Christ can’t even do nothing for your awful soul.”

The boy whispered, tailing off at the end of his sentence while he gathered his tapes and was interrupted. “You don’t know nothing…”

“—What’d you say to me? Huh? You fucking loser.”

Before the boy could speak the sheriff was already beating him with a bullwhip across his shoulder blades until blood was smeared across his back as it were a canvas for blood and only blood.

When the sheriff finished he had worked himself to near death and had his hands on his knees and was panting and the boy stood above and his blood stained into the carpet an outline of red wings and he said, “I said—you don’t know nothin’ about Jesus Christ.”