Words Change Everything
Blue Summer
An Excerpt from the award winning novel written by Jim Nichols
Bouldac Correctional Facility, 1997
See, I’d about decided to bring the old curtain down.
I’m not exactly sure why it had come to that. I mean, I’d been a recent guest of the Pinellas County Jail, which wasn’t what you’d call a real morale booster, and I was also drying out, which can do funny things to your head. But I’d been way low-down before without thinking it might be time to jump off a bridge.
It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s just that that’s where things stood when this stubborn little melody showed up, and that’s a big part of my story: that I was at a low point, maybe a bottom, and then “Blue Summer” came along and started to turn things around.
Baxter, Summer, 1964
So, we’re talking thirty years. That takes me back to age ten, which is when everything started to go sideways. The Fourth of July that year, to be precise, although the day itself started out all right.
When I rolled out of my bunk and headed downstairs for breakfast we were a normal, small-town family—mom, dad, three kids—with no real worries about anything. We lived where Shaws had always lived, except for a few years after my grandparents moved to Bath during the war, so my grandfather could work in the shipyard.
We went to church like everybody else. We sat down to supper together and my father asked us questions about our day. We were expected to answer thoughtfully; he was the boss. We had chores to do and music lessons to practice –my father believed firmly that music lessons were a necessity—and we were supposed to mind what he and my mother said. My father, John Shaw—known as Jack—was a former high school sports hero and current town selectman, a man who’d survived several battles in the Pacific Theater during World War II, who still wore the St. Christopher medal my grandmother gave him when he left for boot camp. After coming home he parlayed his veteran status and all-around good name into a decent living selling cars at the local GM dealership, and as a result, we were fairly comfortable middle-class.
My mom, Betty Flint Shaw, grew up in Palo Alto, but was pretty and smart enough to mostly overcome that handicap with her Maine neighbors, although there were some reservations because she wasn’t all that friendly, and had never learned how to small talk. In fact, she was something of a cold fish even with us. But that wasn’t her fault, according to my father. When I wondered one day why she wasn’t as friendly as my friend’s mother, he said, “Well your mother has never been able to figure that kind of thing out.” And when I said “Why not?” he said, “You’d have to ask her parents.” I must have looked unsatisfied, because he grinned and tousled my hair. “None of us is perfect, right, Old Cal?” Besides you can’t say she doesn’t try.” And it was true, on rare and unexpected occasions she would plant a kiss on your cheek or reach an arm around you and attempt a tender squeeze.
Baxter, Summer, 1964
“What’s going on?” Julie asked me.
“Somethings happened to Daddy.”
“What?”
“I’m, not sure.”
…My mother was out before Uncle Gus could come around to her door, but had to stop to cover her mouth. Then she was moving again and he met her in front of the car. He took her arm and they walked across the damp road, past black tire marks that cut sharply toward the weedy ditch.
Lying in the ditch was a young spike-horn deer, midsection caved in, eyes glazed. They stepped past the carcass and came opposite a gap in the roadside brush.
It smelled like gasoline; they saw the Dodge overturned against a thick white pine. My mother pulled loose from Uncle Gus and stepped down into the ditch, hands out for balance. He followed, reaching, but she was already scrambling up the other side. He trailed her across the ripped ground and through the gap in the brush to the wagon.
The gasoline smell was stronger. My mother knelt and yanked at the buckled, inverted door, but it wouldn’t budge. She pulled her jacket sleeve down and with the covered heel of her hand knocked chunks of glass out of the way, but she couldn’t reach him because he was on the other side, upside down, knees to chest. He was scrunched up like a kid, not a grown man, and his eyes were slightly open.
…The ambulance came then, its siren growing louder until the red light flashed on the treetops along the roadside. It stopped on the shoulder where the Dodge had sailed off the road, and two men jumped out and hurried past my mother and Uncle Gus to the station wagon.
…Uncle Gus and my mother waited to hear that they’d been wrong, somehow. It was a last feeble hope, and they knew better because the tall man wouldn’t be walking so sadly toward them, and besides, they’d seen Jack’s eyes. But they held their breath anyway until the man said, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Shaw.”
My mother shut her eyes and turned her face into Uncle Gus’s chest. Betty Flint Shaw never cried—had grown up tougher than that—and she didn’t cry now. Not quite. But she held tightly to Uncle Gus and grieved. She was grieving for my father, of course, but I think that without knowing it she was also mourning that small, generally hidden tenderness that she had sensed trying to grow within her since she’d known him, and which was bound to sputter and die now that he was gone.
Tampa, 1995
I sit down on my bed and dig a blank music sheet out of my old portfolio, so I can set down the melody that’s back in my head again. I take out the Olds, play a couple of bars, and score it. Then I play a little more, muting so that no one will come thumping on my door because their afternoon siesta has been interrupted.
I cross a section on the sheet and rewrite it. Then I put the sheet away and just blow for an hour, warming up for Henderson’s. I play scales and a few easy pieces and work my way into “Blue in Green,” trying to make it sound like Miles, and then I mess around in different voices: Clark Terry, Chet, Lee Morgan, Dizzy. (I was always pretty good at imitation; it’s an important part of how I learned to play back in those days when the trumpet was all I had, after it seemed like I’d lost everything else.)
Afterwards I go back to my new melody and fiddle with that until I have to stop, because without meaning to, I’ve conjured up something weepy and raw, something that has to do with Julie, or maybe her ghost. (I know I haven’t told you much about Julie yet; I just haven’t found the right moment to be direct about it. But trust me, I’m working up to it.)
I hold the cornet in my lap as the old emotions rise; for the sake of the music I let them knock around inside, dark and lumpy and mean as can be. Bent over the horn with my elbows on my knees, I feel the old cruel scenes play themselves out; I hold them in my mind until my stomach twists and I remember about the barn and what happened there and how unfair it all was.
I hold my breath against another fierce desire to drink, then exhale and tell my sweet sister that maybe pretty soon we’ll be together again, and we’ll be able to talk as much as she wants. But that doesn’t help; she wants to talk now. And I can’t stop her. It’s like another melody has come along that has to be heard—only I know where this one goes, and there’s nothing I have to do but let it play.