It was his idea. Seemed like a good one at the time.

  Still did. It was different. Dark, moody.

  Maybe, he thought, it’s the COPD. Maybe it’s that good old death-sentence telling me I’m as good as croaked and might as well just lie down, already.

  His first three CDs were solid hits. By jazz standards nowadays, big ones. At the moment he was the critics’ darling. There was something to be said for quitting while you were ahead, he knew that. But he had bills to pay. And he wasn’t quite ready for the piano-bar circuit, not yet.

  He wasn’t ready for that kind of applause.

  Probably he should talk to somebody. Anybody. He hadn’t. Not a soul.

  Nobody in the band knew. During the sessions his Advair and Ventolin inhalers had the cough under control. Hell, they were all smokers. They all coughed, he no more than the rest of them. His producer didn’t know. His agent didn’t know. He’d hidden away the inhalers from Maddie well enough so far, usually in the piano stool, where neither she nor his daughter Leslie were likely to go.

  The thought of his thirteen-year-old daughter digging around in his sheet music made him smile.

  That would happen on the day that bears started reciting iambic pentameter and the menu at Le Bernardin offered up a side dish of Cheese Doodles.

  Leslie used to love to listen to him play. She’d sit on the bench beside him. He taught her Chopsticks. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. For Christmas, Deck the Halls. But that was years ago. She was hitting her teens now. And he was not Beyonce or Justin Bieber and certainly no Lady Gaga.

  His little girl was growing up.

  Last month she’d wanted a tattoo. Maddie was furious at the very thought. Actually screamed at her. He asked her what kind of tattoo. She said a rose. A red one. With thorns. She pointed to the back of her left shoulder. Right here, she said.

  Well, he said to Maddie, at least she’s not asking us permission to pierce her tongue.

  He thought he was being funny. Maddie missed the joke.

  But basically he agreed. He was not about to let her deface her body.

  No way.

  When he considered it now though, he thought that her choice of said adornment had been appropriate, at least. A rose. A blossomed rose.

  Because she was blossoming too, wasn’t she? From skinny little kid to young woman. Her hips had begun defining themselves in graceful waves depending from her waist. Her breasts slowly building beneath her skin.

  Another coughing fit set his nose to running and sent him headed back into the bathroom. Respiratory disease invaded not only the chest but the throat and nasal passages as well. He wondered if Maddie had noticed that they were going through a whole lot more toilet paper lately.

  Maybe I should talk to somebody, he thought. A shrink. I’m pretty certain all this is depressing me.

  He sat down on the toilet and blew his nose, wadded up the paper and tossed it into the tank. Blew it again. He was quiet about it. He didn’t want to wake Maddie. He sure wasn’t ready to talk to her yet. He didn’t know if he’d ever be.

  There were problems with the marriage.

  That’s what Lambert and Georgie called them. Problems. Because they’d been having them too. Of the four of them only Kovelant seemed to have escaped the grim net of marital woes. But then Kovelant didn’t fool around on the road or after sessions either.

  Fahner wondered how he managed it. Jazz, when it was good, left you horny as a goddamn rabbit. It went with the territory. Jazz just…jazzed you up. The operative word being up.

  But twice now Maddie had found out about it. Twice wasn’t too many times, all things considered. But he guessed it was sufficient. A good day for them now was a day in which they were cordial to one another. Not openly hostile or aggressive.

  But not exactly friendly either.

  He didn’t want a divorce. A divorce would devastate Leslie.

  And he loved his daughter with all his heart. All his body and soul. He loved her as much as he loved his music and maybe even more.

  He couldn’t hurt her. Not in a million years.

  In the hallway he gazed at her open door.

  Maybe he should see somebody.

  She lay awake thinking about what she was about to do.

  There was a grim satisfaction to it, almost a sense of pride, now that it was in motion. Doing it this way. So many times she’d thought about it. Only she always seemed to falter, her nerves seemed to fail her at the last minute. But over the past few weeks she’d heard him noodling that goddamn song often enough, pointing the way.

  And the idea had simply harpooned her. The song had harpooned her. Her anger had harpooned her and now she was finally pulling taut on the line.

  It was one thing to screw around behind her back. There was a reason that she’d always considered the word groupie a diminutive. She could live with that. Had for many years now.

  But this was another thing.

  This was a dull muted rage in her that had been with her for so long she could barely remember when it began. She never spoke of it. She simply accommodated it as the Christian thing to do. She had her faith. Even if he never had his own.

  Phil Fahner was a pagan through and through.

  She’d loved that about him once.

  She thought back to their first days together. The thoughts should have been sweet ones but they weren’t. She’d been working as assistant to a painter, famous and prolific in the ’60s but quietly losing it now that he was well past seventy — and sometimes losing it not so quietly at all.

  It was an appointment-book and go-fetch job. Far beneath her talents and abilities. Get him into the town car on time. Take his strange, worried, sometimes furious calls at two or six in the morning. Pick up his paints and supplies at Lee’s Paints on 57th Street. Deliver his paintings or sketches or lithographs.

  Even shop for his wife for god sakes! Jesus! What she’d been through!

  He was a rough, erratic taskmaker.

  There were many, many times that she needed a drink after work and since she didn’t drink alone — her father had, and look what happened to him — there was a quiet little bar on 68th Street not far from her apartment which was like those bars in Greenwich Village where you walked a few steps down off the street into dim lighting and some good quiet jazz and could sit among well-mannered upper-middle-class New Yorkers, and a woman could have a glass or two of Chardonnay and talk with the other customers without feeling like some tramp looking for a pickup.

  He and his bassist Lambert and drummer Georgie did get to chatting her up, though. And they were smart and fun to talk to, so when the three of them got off their barstools to have a cigarette outside and asked if she smoked too — she did in those days — they invited her to join them. It was a warm spring night, just getting on to dark. At some point Lambert and Georgie faded back down into the bar while she and Phil Fahner — the Phil Fahner — lit another smoke and talked further about her job and her own painting and she felt this attraction. This magnetism. So that when he asked her out for dinner the following night she accepted.

  Drinks and dinner, that was all it was for a couple of weeks and then it was drinks and dinner and bed and he was a very good lover, very attentive to her.

  And she thought, he was attentive all right. He played her like a full-sized upright. All the keys.

  So that when he asked in bed one hot sweaty August night why she didn’t just dump the fucking job and marry him and do her own painting she said yes, and two months later they were at the City Clerk’s Office.

  And about a year after that she was pregnant.

  Thirteen years ago, that was. Thirteen years was a long time. The good and then the bad. Then the very bad.

  Thirteen years, to this.

  There were far too many more years ahead of them for this family.

  It had to end.

  She could almost cry but she had stopped crying. She had always hidden the crying well, she thought. She had her makeup. Or else she had a cold, just the sniffles. But it finally stopped entirely only weeks ago when she heard him practicing for the session, playing that song over and over, and she recognized the lyrics within the melody from a record she’d owned in college, the harpoon deep into the body of the whale.

  Tonight she would set the whale free.

  Her daughter Leslie had awakened to her touch slowly, as though drugged. She’d always been a deep sleeper, a bed-wetter in fact from the ages of seven through nine.

  And that had been her first clue. The bed-wetting beginning so late.

  She should have seen it years ago.

  If she had, they wouldn’t have been here now. Here in this bed.

  Her daughter rubbed her eyes as she woke and said whaaa? and she pressed two fingers to her lips. Lips warm with sleep.

  I want you to go into our room, she whispered, and get into bed.

  Huh? she said.

  Don’t ask me any questions, she said, just do as I say. I love you. We’re trading places. You understand?

  She watched as her daughter’s eyes went gradually wide. Then after what seemed a very long time she nodded. Just the smallest nod of comprehension, of something that had passed between them. But it was enough. She slipped off the bed and started across the room.

  Be sure to close the door in there, she said. And turn off the light.

  She waited until she heard the door click shut and then reached for the stainless steel kitchen knife she’d honed early this morning which lay beneath her scarf on the night table beside her, lay down and pulled the covers over her and turned her back to the hall and the open door.

  The song ran ’round and ‘round in her head. An old Appalachian folk ballad. It was a comfort to her. She heard Joan Baez, her sweet thin soprano. She heard her girlhood.

  “Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother.

  She's sleeping here right by my side.

  And in her right hand a silver dagger.

  She says that I can't be your bride.”

  She didn’t know exactly what she would do with the knife but breathed easily for the first time this long day and night and waited for him to come.

  On…Silver Dagger or Katie Dear

  As with so many beloved ballads, The Silver Dagger, Roud #711, has been shaped and changed by people as they sing and interact with it. Even though it’s termed a Murder Ballad, the only death that takes place is a suicide. Like Romeo and Juliet, it deals with young love thwarted.

  To look at three versions can give us a taste of how people change it to suit themselves. A version recorded by the Smithsonian has as its plot a ‘comely youth’ who courts ‘a lady fair and bright.’ Desperate at how her parents do their best to separate the lovers, the girl wanders out of the city, pulls out a silver dagger and stabs herself through ‘her own true heart.‘ Dying, she calls on her act to be a warning never to part ‘young true love.‘

  As she lies dying, her true love finds her. She bids him farewell, saying that they will meet on Mount Zion. Her lover then uses the dagger to kill himself. (1)

  The theme of two daggers held by the girls’ disapproving parents, silver for mom and gold for dad, is also common. In a ballad collected by Byron Arnold, Mrs. Hester—from whom he collected the ballad, couldn’t bring herself to kill the young lovers. In her version of ‘Katie Dear,’ Mrs. Hester has the lover request that Katie ask her mother whether Katie can be his bride. Katie refuses, saying her mother has a silver dagger with which to stab “my true love’s breast.” The same request transferred to Dad is answered the same except his dagger is gold. Rather than end with a stabbing, Mrs. Hester rather confusingly has Katie say, “Oh, won’t you be glad, my own true lover, When you and I become as one?” (2)

  The Louvin Brothers version of Katie Dear includes both daggers and death. As with Mrs. Hester’s version, the lover’s request for Katie’s hand in marriage is met with assurances that her parents keep daggers nearby for just such occasions. Heart-broken, he stabs himself with the golden dagger. After saying good-bye to her parents, Katie uses the same dagger to end her own life. (3)

  Other than the Louvin Brothers, this ballad has been recorded by Joan Baez, Ian and Sylvia Tyson, Gillian Welch, and the Chieftains on the album Down The Old Plank Road, The Nashville Sessions.

  1) Smithsonian Folkways. 2013. 10 October, 2013.

  Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.

  2) Arnold, Byron. An Alabama Songbook: Ballads, Folk Songs, and Spirituals. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2004.

  3) Bluegrass Lyrics. 2013. 9 October, 2013. .

  JOHN HENRY, THE STEEL DRIVIN’ MAN

  By

  Jeff Strand

  It happened in West Virginia, or maybe Alabama, around 1869, or maybe a decade later. This ain’t a story about facts.

  They say that no man alive could drive in steel like John Henry, and I believe ‘em. With a hammer in his hand, he’d pound those spikes into the rock like you or I might stick a toothpick into freshly baked angel food cake.

  Oh, he’d had muscles to spare when he was a slave, but he’d gotten even stronger after he was freed. He wasn’t building the railroad all by himself—that would be crazy—but he was doing more work than any other steel-drivin’ man, that’s for damn sure. And believe me, the steel-drivin’ men were not lazy people.

  Too bad they all were gonna lose their jobs.

  That’s because some enterprising fool had invented a steam-powered hammer. How could a human being compete with such a machine? These poor workers and their families were gonna starve to death, all on account of “progress.”

  Well, John Henry, he put forth a challenge: he would race that mechanical hammer, and prove that a man could beat a godless contraption. And if he won, the workers would keep their jobs.

  The race began, and oh, how the other workers cheered him on! Not to mention his wife, Polly Ann, who not only cheered louder than the steel-drivin’ men but looked better doing it. John Henry’s hammer, it came crashing down over and over, sparks a-flying, drivin’ those steel spikes with the power of a god. Now, John Henry was a God-fearing man and would not have made that particular comparison himself, but to the outsiders watching the whole spectacle, it seemed appropriate.

  Thing is, that steam-powered hammer was doing a mighty good job. I suspect that when John Henry put forth that challenge, he’d secretly hoped that the machine would break down after six or seven spikes and he’d win by default, but nope, it was pounding in those spikes at a rapid pace. Despite his muscles and his passion, John Henry was falling behind!

  “Keep driving in that steel!” the workers shouted. “We believe in you! Don’t let us lose our jobs!”

  By now, John Henry had worked up a sweat of such quantity that more perspiration emerged from his pores than a normal man had of all body liquids combined. Oh, he was feeling the ache all the way down to his bones. His vision was starting to get kind of blurry at the edges, and that damn steam-powered hammer was generating so much dust his lungs burned with every breath.

  But if you think John Henry gave up...well, you don’t know John Henry.

  He doubled his efforts. That’s right, when any other man would have quit, John Henry hammered in those spikes even faster than before! I wish I’d been there to gape in amazement. He hammered and hammered, and though you might think that a couple of those spikes were crooked or not quite in all the way, you would be wrong. Every one of those spikes would have passed the railroad owner’s inspection. John Henry was not a man to do slipshod work.

  And then he caught up to that steam-powered hammer.

  And then he passed it.

  That’s right, he passed it. Technological advancement was completely pointless when John Henry’s hammer was at work. He was suffering, suffering bad, as if his arms might rip right off his torso at any moment, but John Henry was going to beat that infernal machine!

  Yet with only three more spikes left to hammer, John Henry thought that he was going to die.

  “Don’t die!” shouted the other workers. “You’ve only got three spikes left!”

  John Henry was so exhausted and he’d sucked in so much dust that for a moment, he wasn’t sure that the voices of his co-workers were going to inspire him enough to finish the task. But then he heard the voice of his beloved Polly Ann making the same general point that the workers had made, and he knew that he could pound in those last three spikes.

  Slam! Two spikes left.

  Slam! One spike left.

  John Henry, he raised his mighty hammer, and he let out the loudest grunt any human being had ever grunted up to that point in history, and he swung that hammer down and drove in that last piece of steel.

  He’d won the challenge! He’d beat the machine! The workers were going to keep their jobs!

  And then John Henry, with every ounce of energy in his body used up, dropped his hammer, fell on the ground, and died.

  * * *

  “John Henry, wake up!”

  John Henry opened his eyes. “Huh?”

  It was Polly Ann, crouching over him. Her beautiful brown eyes were filled with concern. “We think you may have been dead, but we resuscitated you!”

  “I saw a bright light,” said John Henry. “I was floating toward it, and some angels were beckoning, and then suddenly I was right back here. I think you did bring me back to life. Thank you, Polly Ann.”

  Charles, who was a steel-drivin’ man just like John Henry but not as efficient, patted him on the shoulder. “We’re glad you ain’t dead, John Henry. Because we need you.”

  “Why?”

  Charles pointed. “They’ve done invented an even bigger and faster steam-powered drill! They say it can do the work of twenty men! We’re all gonna lose our jobs if you can’t beat it!”