Hard Time Killing Floor - Part One: The Auction

Skip James was sixty-seven when he died. The cause was cancer, but the body had been failing for years before that — diabetes, blood pressure, the long attrition of a man who had spent four decades doing farm work and sawmill work and being a Baptist preacher and the things Black men in the Mississippi Delta did when no one would pay them to play guitar professionally.

He had recorded for Paramount once, in 1931 — eighteen sides, Devil Got My Woman and Hard Time Killing Floor Blues and I'm So Glad among them — and then he had stopped. He had been found again, in 1964, by three young men driving south on a long shot. They put him on the stage at Newport that July. He sat in a chair. His voice was already partly gone. His hands still did the strange thing they did.

He toured Europe in 1967. He recorded two albums for Vanguard. By the time he died, on the third of October, 1969, in Philadelphia, he had earned almost nothing from any of it. His widow, Mabel James, did not have the money for the funeral. Friends took up a small collection. He was buried at Merion Memorial Park in Bala Cynwyd, on the western edge of the city, in an unmarked plot.

The estate dispersed across the winter. A 1932 Stella guitar went to a collector in Hamburg. Two boxes of 78s were broken up among three Philadelphia dealers. A short-brim brown fedora, soft wool, the leather sweatband stained dark, came across the Atlantic in February 1970 in a lot consigned to a Soho memorabilia shop on Brewer Street. The shop was run by a man named Reggie Coombes, who had been buying American blues effects since 1956. He knew what he had bought. He did not advertise.

The hat sat in his basement for nine days before anyone asked to see it.

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Lesley walked the length of Brewer Street with her left hand pushed deep in her overcoat pocket and her right hand turning over the four-pound note she had folded into eighths in her trouser pocket before leaving the flat. It was a quarter past two on a Wednesday in February. The pavement was still wet from the morning's rain. The pubs had not opened. Two men in suits stood smoking in a doorway opposite the cinema and did not look at her.

Coombes's shop was three doors past the Italian restaurant. The window was a clutter of brass trumpets and framed sheet music and a phonograph horn rusted to ornament. The hand-lettered sign in the door said OPEN in red ink. Below it, in smaller letters: NO BROWSING. RING BELL FOR ENTRY.

She rang.

He buzzed her through without coming up from the basement. She knew the steps. Past the curtain, past the ground-floor counter that he never used, down the narrow stair with the single naked bulb at the bottom. The basement smelled of old leather and pipe tobacco and the particular mildew of London cellars in winter. Coombes was at his desk in his green cardigan, going through a ledger, the desk lamp pulled low.

He looked up. He had not shaved that morning.

"Heald," he said. "Took you long enough. Had something for you."

She unbuttoned her coat without taking it off. The basement was cold but not as cold as the street. She set her bag on the corner of his desk. "What kind of something."

He turned a page in the ledger and made a small mark in pencil. "American. Came in a fortnight ago. Sold the Stella already — Hamburg fellow, paid in marks. The seventy-eights went separately. I've a fedora left, and I thought, that one I'll hold. She'll come by."

"You thought I'd want a hat."

"I thought you might."

She did not answer. Coombes had been selling her things for two and a half years. A slide, the heavy brass one with the worn end she still used. A bound copy of Patton transcriptions she had paid too much for and had not regretted. A harmonica that was supposed to have been Big Walter Horton's and which she did not believe had been his but which she liked anyway. He had a good eye. He had a better mouth, the kind that could sell what he knew without saying any of what he knew, and she had learned to trust the eye and discount the mouth.

He stood, slowly. His knees made a sound. He went to the back of the basement, behind the curtain that separated his desk from the stockroom, and came back with a hatbox of soft cardboard the colour of old tea.

He set it on the desk. He did not open it.

"American bluesman," he said. "Recently deceased. Family needed cash."

"Whose family."

"Doesn't matter to the price." He smiled briefly, without warmth, and lifted the lid off the box.

The hat was inside, sitting on a square of brown paper. A short-brim fedora in dark wool, almost black in the basement light. The crown had been pinched and re-pinched many times. The grosgrain band was faded to charcoal. The leather sweatband, when she leaned over the box, was dark and shaped — there was a head still in it, faintly, in negative.

She did not pick it up.

"How much."

"Nine pounds."

"Nine."

"It's not a collector's hat. It's small. Most of my customers have bigger heads."

She looked at him. He held her look without expression.

"Try it," he said.

She took it out of the box. It was lighter than she expected. The wool was soft, almost greasy, the way a hat gets when it has been worn for years against hair that was not always clean. She turned it. The interior maker's mark had worn off long ago. She could see where it had been — the ghost of a stamp on the lining.

She put it on.

She had never owned a hat that fit. Her head was small and the milliners sized for men, and women's hats since the war had been mostly things to perch, not wear. This hat fit. It fit as though it had been blocked for her. The brim sat exactly where she would have wanted it to sit. The band held without pinching. She did not have to push it back from her eyes.

She caught herself in the small mirror on the wall above Coombes's desk. The hat made her face longer. It made her jaw look set, which her jaw was. It made her eyes look like she had been somewhere.

"It's nine pounds," Coombes said again, and now there was something in his voice that was almost careful.

"Whose was it." She did not turn from the mirror.

"Heald."

"Whose."

He waited. Then: "I told you. American. Recently deceased. Family needed cash."

She watched her own face under the brim. She could feel him watching her in the mirror. She could feel the weight of the question she had asked sitting in the room between them, and she could feel him deciding not to answer it, and she could feel herself deciding not to ask again.

"Nine pounds," she said.

She took the four-pound note from her pocket and unfolded it on his desk. She had five more pounds in her bag, two notes in a tobacco tin she had been saving toward a new amplifier. She counted them out on the desk. He did not help her count.

He put the hat back in the box. He folded the lid down. He did not put the box in a paper bag for her; he did not have one to spare. She carried the box under her arm out of the basement and up the stairs and out onto Brewer Street, and the rain had started again, light and cold, and she walked back to the Tube with the box held against her ribs under her coat to keep it dry.

On the Northern Line going south, a man across the carriage looked at the box on her lap and said, "Christmas come late, has it?"

She did not look at him. "A hat."

"For your father?"

"For me."

He looked at her then with the kind of look she had stopped noticing, mostly. The carriage rattled. He went back to his paper. She held the box on her knees and did not put it on the empty seat beside her, where there was room.

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The flat was off Lavender Hill, on the second floor above a fishmonger's. She climbed the stairs two at a time. She put the kettle on. She set the box on the kitchen table and sat down on the chair across from it and did not open it for a long time.

When she did, she took the hat out and set it on the table on its crown, the way she had been told as a girl never to do, because it bent the brim. The hat had been set down that way many times. The brim showed it. She turned it slowly with one finger. The sweatband was the colour of strong tea where it had been clean and the colour of a bruise where it had not. There was the faint smell, when she put her face near to it, of something she could not place at first — kerosene, maybe. Woodsmoke. River water.

The kettle whistled. She did not get up.

She had a gig at the Hopbine at eight o'clock. Pete Bayliss had booked the Combo for the new Wednesday residency, which paid three pounds and a pint each and which they had needed badly. Two sets, eight to eleven, slow blues and the Memphis stuff and the one Skip James song Pete liked her to sing because it was easier than slide for her on the small stages. Devil Got My Woman. She had sung it for two years. She had never thought, before, about whose woman the devil had got.

The kettle whistled itself empty. She got up at last and turned off the gas and stood at the counter with her back to the table and her hands flat on the formica.

She thought: I could put it on tonight. Pete won't mind. He will say something the way he says everything, and he will laugh, and I will play the set in it and see what it does or does not do, and I will know.

She thought: I could leave it here. Sit with it for a week. Wear it in the flat. Wear it while I practice. Get used to the weight of it before I take it anywhere.

She turned around. The hat was on the table where she had left it, on its crown, the brim slightly bent.

She did not yet know whose head it had been blocked for. She did not yet know she had walked into Coombes's basement on the ninth day after the hat had crossed the Atlantic. There was a great deal she did not know. She knew what she had bought, and what she had not asked, and what she could still feel against her ribs from the walk back to the Tube — the small, settled weight of the hatbox under her coat, like something that had been waiting to be carried.

She looked at the hat.

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What should Lesley do?
 

A. Wear it tonight at the Hopbine.

B. Set it on the dresser and look at it for a week.