It's fare you well, my own true lover...
This is her song in the weeds behind the Blue Moon Motor Hotel; this is her song beneath the moon.
I'll never see your face again...
It's Odetta Holmes at the apotheosis of her life, and Mia isthere! She sees it, feels it, is lost in its glorious and some would say stupid hope (ah but I say hallelujah, we all say Gawd-bomb). She understands how being afraid all the time makes one's friends more precious; how it makes every bite of every meal sweet; how it stretches time until every day seems to last forever, leading on to velvet night, and theyknow James Cheney is dead
(say true)
theyknow Andrew Goodman is dead
(say hallelujah)
theyknow Michael Schwerner - oldest of them and still just a baby at twenty-four - is dead.
(Give up your loudest amen!)
They know that any of them is also eligible to wind up in the mud of Longdale or Philadelphia.At any time. The night after this particular hoot behind the Blue Moon, most of them, Odetta included, will be taken to jail and her time of humiliation will begin. But tonight she's with her friends, with her lover, and they are one, and Discordia has been banished. Tonight they sing swaying with their arms around each other.
The girls singmaid, the boys singman.
Mia is overwhelmed by their love for one another; she is exalted by the simplicity of what they believe.
At first, too stunned to laugh or to cry, she can only listen, amazed.
Nine
As the busker began the fourth verse, Susannah joined in, at first tentatively and then - at his encouraging smile - with a will, harmonizing above the young man's voice:
For breakfast we had bulldog gravy
For supper we had beans and bread
The miners don't have any dinner
And a tick of straw they call a bed...
Ten
The busker quit after that verse, looking at Susannah-Mia with happy surprise. "I thought I was the only one who knew that one," he said. "It's the way the Freedom Riders used to - "
"No," Susannah said quietly. "Not them. It was the voter-registration people who sang the bulldog-gravy verse. The folks who came down to Oxford in the summer of '64. When those three boys were killed."
"Schwerner and Goodman," he said. "I can't remember the name of the - "
"James Cheney," she said quietly. "He had the most beautifulhair. "
"You talk as though you knew him," he said, "but you can't be much over...thirty?"
Susannah had an idea she looked a good deal older than thirty, especially tonight, but of course this young man had fifty dollars more in his guitar case now than had been there a single song ago, and it had perhaps affected his eyesight.
"My mother spent the summer of '64 in Neshoba County," Susannah said, and with two spontaneously chosen words - my mother - did her captor more damage than she could have imagined. Those words flayed open Mia's heart.
"Cool on Mom!" the young man exclaimed, and smiled. Then the smile faded. He fished the fifty out of the guitar case and held it up to her. "Take it back. It was a pleasure just to sing with you, ma'am."
"I really couldn't," Susannah said, smiling. "Remember the struggle, that'd be enough for me. And remember Jimmy, Andy, and Michael, if it does ya. I know it would do me just fine."
"Please," the young man persisted. He was smiling again but the smile was troubled and he might have been any of those young men from the Land of Ago, singing in the moonlight between the slumped ass-ends of the Blue Moon's shacky little units and the double-hammered heatless moonlight gleam of the railroad tracks; he could have been any in his beauty and the careless flower of his youth and how in that moment Mia loved him. Even her chap seemed secondary in that glow. She knew it was in many ways a false glow, imparted by the memories of her hostess, and yet she suspected that in other ways it might be real. She knew one thing for sure: only a creature such as herself, who'd had immortality and given it up, could appreciate the raw courage it took to stand against the forces of Discordia. To risk that fragile beauty by putting beliefs before personal safety.
Make him happy, take it back,she told Susannah, but would notcome forward and make Susannah do so. Let it be her choice.
Before Susannah could reply, the alarm in the Dogan went off, flooding their shared mind with noise and red light.
Susannah turned in that direction, but Mia grabbed her shoulder in a grip like a claw before she could go.
What's happening? What's gone wrong?
Let me loose!
Susannah twisted free. And before Mia could grab her again, she was gone.
Eleven
Susannah's Dogan pulsed and flared with red panic-light. A Klaxon hammered an audio tattoo from the overhead speakers. All but two of the TV screens - one still showing the busker on the corner of Lex and Sixtieth, the other the sleeping baby - had shorted out. The cracked floor was humming under Susannah's feet and throwing up dust. One of the control panels had gone dark, and another was in flames.
This looked bad.
As if to confirm her assessment, the Blaine-like Voice of the Dogan began to speak again. "WARNING!" it cried. "SYSTEM OVERLOAD! WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 40 SECONDS!"
Susannah couldn't remember any Section Alpha from her previous visits to the Dogan, but wasn't surprised to now see a sign labeled just that. One of the panels near it suddenly erupted in a gaudy shower of orange sparks, setting the seat of a chair on fire. More ceiling panels fell, trailing snarls of wiring.
"WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 30 SECONDS!"
What about the EMOTIONAL TEMP dial?