WHEN HE FINISHED relating his dream, he looked over at her. It didn’t seem like she understood a word of what he was saying. Maybe he didn’t, either. He passed her the box.

  SHE SAID THERE are many versions of the song, as many versions as there are people who sing it. Passed between work gangs and families and friends in the old days of folk music, on record, on the radio. You could split the song into so-called official versions, her father used to say, the ones made by established singers and put on vinyl, cassette, and CD, and then there were the songs of the people, entirely different, the mis-sung versions, belted out by people who misremembered the lyrics and supplied their own haphazard verses. Like when you sing in the shower, she told him, and if you can’t remember the right words you make up your own to fill in the gaps. Her father used to say that what you put in those gaps was you—what you inserted said a lot about you, what you grabbed from your personal dictionary and stuck in there was you. You mix it up, cut a verse or two and stick to the verses that you like or remember or mean something to you. Then you’ve assembled your own John Henry, and maybe it’s only the chorus, or a single line, C&O railroad’s going to be the death of me or A man ain’t nothing but a man and you just sing that. That’s all there is to the song for you.

  IN SOME VARIANTS, she said, his wife Polly Ann is a big figure and gets the last word. She picks up John Henry’s hammer and becomes a steeldriver herself. Polly Ann says, I’m going where my man fell dead, and then she picks up his hammer and goes, I’m going to die with the hammer in my hand, I’m going to drive steel just like a man, and it ends there. She picks up where he left off. In those ones, she usually wears a red dress, since red rhymes with dead and it fits. Then some versions end with John Henry’s last words to her, John Henry told his woman, Never wear black, wear blue. She said, John, don’t never look back, For, honey, I’ve been good to you, Lord, Lord, For, honey, I’ve been good to you. Blue and you. In some—probably made up by the more family values-minded of the singers—-John Henry has a daughter. It goes, John Henry had a little daughter, The dress she wore was blue, She followed him to the graveyard sayin’, John Henry I’ll be true to you, Lawd, Lawd, John Henry I’ll be true to you. In the ones where he has a son, it goes, John Henry had a little son, Sittin’ in the palm of his hand, He hugged an’ kissed him and bid him farewell, Oh, son, do the best you can, Lawd Lawd, Oh, son, do the best you can. In the silence of the road and the morning she was suddenly startled at how loud she sang. Each time she sang a new bit of lyrics it was louder than the time before. Her throat and heart knew more than she did about this enterprise. She looked away from him. He took the box from her hands.

  She said her father had come down here three times. She and her mother were not invited along, nor did they wish to accompany him. He took a train and was gone for almost a week. He came back with lots and lots of stuff for his collection, of course. He said the place was beautiful, and of course it was. He said Talcott was nothing like he thought it would be, it was tiny, no real stores but just residents, an unincorporated town. And Hinton was a neat little outpost wedged in between the big river and the mountains. It was like on one side of the mountain people were living scattered all around and then once they got to the other side there was a whole town, so that on the one hand you had nothing and once the mountain was beat you got into a civilization. You had achieved a society. He brought back a lot of pictures and old railroad equipment and a jar full of soil.

  THE SECOND TIME he went he said he wanted to interview the residents to see what he could come up with. Neither she nor her mother probed this statement. They were past caring. Who could he talk to. They were all dead, anyone who could have provided insight or tidbit. What little there was to be found had been gathered by other researchers over seventy years before. The second time he did not stay too long, and when he came back, he didn’t really go into what he found here.

  THE THIRD TIME he went she and her mother were gone. Her mother had moved to Arizona to live near her sister’s family. They weren’t divorced, but they had half a country between them and a lot more. As for herself, she was living on her own in her first apartment in the city and saw her father only on holidays, and she did not stay long. She visited him on his birthday one year and he told her he had gone down to Talcott one more time, to find the grave. She didn’t ask if he’d found it, and left as soon as she could. It smelled bad in there.

  WHEN THEY GOT to the monument the place was empty. The food stand was closed up and the door of the caboose was locked. All the people were gone.

  INSTEAD OF PROCEEDING down the hill to the tunnel as they had the day before, they turned in the opposite direction up the mountain. She consulted her father’s map, interpreting his lines. She found the road. It was overgrown but people had parked there the day before, reassured by the ratchet grind of the parking brake, and wheels had chewed the weeds to the ground. Snapped back slim branches, exposed white marrow and bits of chewing gum foil gleamed like quartz among the ruined green shoots. A black fly dogged them for yards. They left the asphalt and walked up the slope of the jagged road until the mashed-down section stopped being mashed and wildness took over. The road was unpopular, overlooked to wallflower, and seeds and spores had sidled in to seduce the dirt. In tire grooves, yellowish weeds stunted by periodic molestation streamed in parallel lines, between which lithe grass dipped and curtsied, only occasionally assaulted by undercarriage. Then the road simply ceased. He said it’s always funny when you go walking in the woods following a path and then it just stops. You wonder who made it, and why, because there’s never any destination, it just stops. She looked at the map, strode over to an unremarkable pine and moved the branches aside. There was a little footpath. She stood there with her hands on her hips and tilted her head. He was holding the box at this point.

  THE BRANCHES OF pine trees flailed at them with delicate points. He said he was glad he was wearing sunglasses. The path maundered and feinted, avoiding inclines and whole clans of rock. It hopped over prostrate trunks and the footing argued for better shoes.

  SHE FOLDED THE map and slipped it in the back pocket of her jeans. What she called the graveyard was a clearing of level ground. When they stepped out of the gloom of the woods into the tall, wild grass the susurrations of the insects ceased. He had expected tombstones, but there were none. She said this is where the black workers buried the men who died. The company would tell them to bury them in the fill and then at night the men would exhume them and carry them up the mountain and give them stone markers and proper dispatches. The legend had it this is where John Henry was buried. That’s what her father had been looking for the last time he came down here. But they did not see any graves. They waded into the field, into the green and brown lagoon. They found nothing but burrs and then he tripped. He spread apart the thin blades and crouched. He had tripped over a long flat rock with initials carved into it and he realized he was standing on a grave. With a fingernail he scraped out the dirt so he could read the intials. She came over to see this.

  THEY FOUND A dozen graves scattered across the field. None of them bore the initials J.H. It was possible they missed it, in all probability they missed more graves. The grass and weeds were too high, the field too large for them to cover completely. It might have been a minefield for the care of their steps. Anything might erupt from there. When one of them discovered a marker, the other would scramble over and they would kneel down among the brambles and the hardscrabble flowers and scrape the dirt off the dead man’s marker. After that even dozen, she said there was no telling how many men were buried there. The map did not indicate the locations of graves and did not mention John Henry. Just the rough line to this place. They might as well get on with it, she said. Her choice of words, the timbre of her voice, startled him. But he decided he was in no position to judge her after all.

  THE URN WAS not handsome, coming up into the sunlight from the box. The brass grabbed the sunlight and turned it into a greasy sheen along the simple curves of the urn. He asked a question about how she wanted to spread the ashes, after wondering for a time on how to phrase it, and she told him she didn’t want to spread them she wanted to bury it, the whole urn, in the ground. She hadn’t spoken to her father about it and he hadn’t left any instructions. It wasn’t his idea, this assignment. After the funeral she put the urn in storage with his collection and turned out the light and locked the door. He might have preferred that his ashes were scattered, she didn’t know, it just made sense to her once they got up there to bury it. She walked out into the middle of the field and without an overlong consideration of where the perfect place would be she stopped and said, Here.

  FIRST THEY TUGGED weeds and grasses, there was always this resistance and then the roots gave in, soil dripping from their whiskers. When he realized they didn’t have anything to dig with he thought it was going to take forever and he hadn’t eaten yet. At least he wasn’t hungover. She said, now’s your chance to move up to pick-and-shovel man. He grunted. On their knees trying to figure out how to make that hole.

  AT LEAST IT wasn’t a whole body, he thought. She told him that the mayor or his staff had left the plans for the museum at the motel the afternoon before and she had passed hours looking over them. They had obviously spent a lot of time on it and put their hearts into it. She explained about the inventory she had sent them, and they had even marked on the proposed plans where some of her father’s things might go. He had the biggest collection of John Henry in the world, and there was no reason why the town shouldn’t have it. She had tried to find other people, colleges, who might have wanted it, but had no luck. And then something had happened where it seemed like the worst thing to give it away and she couldn’t bring herself to get rid of it. And then last night after all this resistance she gave in.

  HE FOUND A slim rock to stab at the dirt with and that helped. She continued to talk. He would hear a crack in her voice and expect to see her weeping, but it was just a series of cracks. The dirt crawled under their fingernails and pained but they made progress. She said whenever she went to visit him he was so disheveled. He had sold his store to devote all his time to the museum, which no one ever visited. Who would go up to some creepy stranger’s apartment. He always wore the same clothes, he’d had them for years, and on this one pair of pants the fly was broken and he walked around with his fly open, not caring. You couldn’t see anything, so it wasn’t a spectacle, but she was embarrassed by him. On Father’s Day they’d go around the corner to a restaurant and there would be all these families in their best clothes, and her father would be this shambling homeless man.

  IT WAS STRANGE to sit there in the dirt. Their hands moved and moved. He was tired out from this one simple task, and in the same dirt he was feebly scratching into lay dead men who did more back-breaking work in a day than he had done in his whole life. And the legendary John Henry, nearby or not nearby in the ground. He tried to think of what the modern equivalent would be for his story, his martyrdom. But he lived in different times and he could not think of it. He dug some more.

  SHE SAID SOFTLY,And when she got to where John Henry fell dead, She fell down on her knees, And kissed him on the cheek, and these are the words she said, Lord, there is one more good man done fell dead and her voice got that crack in it again.

  SHE SAID THERE was another interesting thing about the song. Before it came into ballad form, the men used to sing it as a work song, to keep the rhythm of their strokes. And in those early songs, they’d sing, This old hammer, killed John Henry, Can’t kill me, Lord, Can’t kill me. They sang it like a song of resistance. They wouldn’t go out like John Henry. But maybe they were condemning him instead of lamenting him. His fight was foolish because the cost was too high. Are they saying they’re not as arrogant as John Henry, or are they twice as arrogant for thinking themselves safe from his fate. You could look at it both ways. You could look at it and think the fight continued, that you could resist and fight the forces and you could win and it would not cost you your life because he had given his life for you. His sacrifice enables you to endure without having to give your life to your struggle, whatever name you gave to it.

  SHE ASKED HIM if he had to die to bring this weekend into being. All his life he wanted something like this weekend, a celebration of John Henry. His collection would have been a star attraction, he could have made speeches. Get the key to the Presidential Suite at the Talcott Motor Lodge. The crowds finally would have come to his museum. She asked him, would this have still happened, the fair, the museum, if he was still alive. Or did he have to give up himself for this to happen. The price of progress. The way John Henry had to give himself up to bring something new into the world.

  THEY FILLED UP the hole and scratched his initials into a gray stone. She scratched them, he found the stone. They stood over it and it seemed enough.

  FROM THE MOUTH of the path, they could not see where they buried him. The brown tips of the dry grass left no sign, huddling back to cover the brief paths they had made. There was no sign to mark any of the dead men in that field. It was an accidental clearing on a mountain that ridged upward. He hooked fingers into the empty box and they started back down the mountain.

  As he did every morning to prepare for crowds, he turned the sign in the window from closed to open. The landlord had refused his appeal to hang a larger sign, something more grand and appropriate to the venture, for what he had assembled behind that sooty unassuming brick. The landlord was trying to spruce up the brownstone, people were returning to Harlem, new vigor in the streets of Harlem, and the schemes of the tenant ran counter to the schemes of the landlord. If the landlord had been less busy, he’d have looked up zoning regulations re the legality of running a so-called museum out of a residence. Surely there were laws. But he never got around to it. For now he let the old man put the sign in the window, and figured it was only a matter of time before the old man died and plaster and drywall split the first-floor apartment into two rental units.

  At the head of the crimson stoop, up those steps, next to buzzer number one, he had replaced the name of his family with THE JOHN HENRY MUSEUM. The modesty of the sign in the window and the southern exposure’s shower across the panes of that window conspired to dispatch the sign to obscurity. Alternately the sign hid in glare and shadows. Over time the sun drained the lettering, leaving it to specter. Seasons of rain fostered layers of black partic-ulate on the panes. Only from certain angles at certain times of day was the sign completely visible to passersby and its message observable. Thousands walked by the sign, which sat patiently in its roost on the sill of the center window, tilted against the glass for leverage. The vagaries of peripheral vision sorted the people into categories. Percentages did not notice the sign and progressed to corners; smaller percentages noticed the sign and tossed it in mental bins to join the rest of the city’s non sequiturs. A smaller percentage wondered for brief seconds what the sign might mean, but did not stop, progressing to corners and other streets.

  In the front hallway on a small table the pen lay aslant, tumbling through the perfect white void of the guest book. There were the names of no one in there. Admission was free but a slim blue dish accepted contributions. He left a dollar bill in the dish to indicate procedure to crowds. On occasion he needed the dollar bill for an errand, leaving the blue dish empty for hours until he replaced it. One day he used the dollar and never returned it. For a while each time he passed the table he felt a pang but as the months passed the pang disappeared. Sometimes the doorbell rang and taking it for crowds come at last he opened his doors discovering a man or woman looking for someplace else.

  Depending on the time of day the music for crowds came from one of many sources. In the morning he played the earliest recorded versions of the song on a tape deck. These songs were distinguishable by the faraway cast of the singing and strumming, emanating as if from deep within a pit or tunnel. Music historians had recorded the songs on primitive equipment while they sat on porches, in backyards, in parlors, in country regions, and indeed he had on his excursions recorded some himself, from old men he had sought out. Around noon he switched to heavy 78s, sliding them carefully from yellow flaking sleeves. He cranked up the Victrola and let the needle etch the songs into the air. And so on, through a short history of home music technology, a 33 rpm turntable, an eight-track tape player for the novelty of the gawky machine, more cassette tapes and CDs on their respective playback machines. Through the rooms of the museum work songs, folk songs and the blues resounded, dead voices pinioned across an array of instruments.

  It had been his original scheme to present the song to the crowds in concordance with how it shambled through the decades, hopping off a boxcar in this place and reappearing with new boots in that place, but of course it was impossible. Some of the oldest versions in his possession existed only on cassette, throwing off the chronology. A few specialty houses had released versions of compilations of regional folk music, and these he was forced to play on his CD player. He didn’t have a piano, let alone a player piano, and thus could not represent the contributions of sheet music and music machines to the transmission of the ballad except as pieces of paper behind glass. The replacement of one form of technology by a superior form was an exhibit in itself, and he wished he could have presented it to crowds in a better way. Over time as he waited for crowds the accumulation of aches in his body put an end to his daily hustle from switch to switch, machine to machine, and he recorded a master tape that simply and conveniently played the songs in chronological order. He lined up the music devices in a row, with little tented slips describing their impact on the dissemination of the John Henry legend, displaying the stillborn e’s of his typewriter as a subexhibit. In his speech he could elaborate on the theme of the march of technology and the march of progress and the prices paid. In the end what was important was not the machine but the man.