Last evening I watched two aging African-American musicians give a concert. The piano player, once heavily recorded, required assistance to the piano bench. He's blind, I thought. Then I watched him play. His right hand frozen in a strange configuration—the fingers arced back towards his wrist. The key intervals it struck were fixed. Yet his left hand drove the melody.
     A tenor saxophone accompanist intermittently sang with a deep timbre that crescendoed to a brassy wail. Within the first minutes of the opening number, there was hardly one audience member who didn’t believe he was in for a sermon this night. 
      One I’d never expected.
      Swing low, sweet chariot, Comin’ for to carry me home. I looked over Jordan and what did I see? A band of angels Comin’ after me, Comin’ for to carry me home.
      The pianist’s phrasings were muted and sweet; he sang his lines. The saxophonist blew earthly rumbles and breathy sibilants. Then he’d screech: Yes, God almighty, Comin’ for to carry me home. 
      God? Not why I’d come to hear jazz. 
      Yes, it was coming with a band of Angels, coming for to carry me home.
      Home?
      Looked over Jordan and what did I see? 
      Youngstown. Scranton. West Pittsburgh, maybe. But I knew no Jordan. 

I’ve listened to hundreds of jazz concerts over the years, but this night I didn’t hear the music. The pianist played with the quiet conviction that the chariot would any hour arrive outside the club. His hand already had begun to assume the shape of a bird’s talon. 
      Better get right with the Lord, Daugherty. 
      Band of angels comin’ after you, comin’ for to carry you home.
      It wasn’t comin’ after me. 
      We’re going home.
      But I came to listen to your music. 
      You’re hearing it, man. Look over Jordan and what do you see? We see a big band of angels comin’ after me, coming for to carry us home. 
      Where’s home, man?
      It ain’t Sewickly. Or Scranton. And that big band of angels—who the hell are they, Mama Rose? Who would ever be comin’ after me?  Comin’ for to carry me home. The sax man wailed, gesturing mightily. Look over Jordan and what do you see?
      Off to the nightclub’s side . . . strangers fixed on bar stools. Every face unfamiliar . . . save one. Comin’ for to carry me home. 
      My father. 

It was only fitting. I’d carried him home countless nights. Was his car idling outside with my deceased mother and brother James sitting in its back seat? Waiting for to carry me home? ’Cause when you ain’t singing of going home, you ain’t singing. D’ya dig?
      But he wasn’t even looking at me. 
      A day earlier I’d spotted him leaning against a telephone pole, his hat cocked back on his head, smiling at passersby. It was a cardboard facsimile of Frank Sinatra. But that’s how I remember my old man. Even when he was seventy. “Come fly with me, Son. Top down. Women in the back seat. Booze in the glove compartment. Great tunes coming out of the Delco. What more could you want?” 
      Look over Jordan and what do you see? A big band of angels comin’ after me. 
      Except his chicks wore tight shorts and halters, had waterfall cleavages, and sunny dispositions. All in the back seat, Comin’ after me and my old man. And Jordan was always Youngstown—the city of whorehouses and burlesques. Chariots galore, long black ones with mohair interiors. The church bells rang so frequently in our hometown of Hebron a person couldn’t ignore his own mortality. He had to journey to Youngstown to forget about it. 
      Look out the back window, Son. What do you see? The old man used to say. A big band of worries fallin’ off me. Like newspapers caught up in our draft. The city of vespers fogged by our exhaust. Seraphim chewing Spearmint gum, their lips glossy as bing cherries, perfume rising out of magnolia thighs . . . Comin’ for to carry me and my old man home.
     But he wasn’t catching my eye this night. Sitting there icy, staring at the pianist. Watching that hand metamorphose to a claw. 
     You comin’ for to carry me home?
      Father?

“Floor the damn accelerator. Get out of town, Son.” Isn’t that what you said? “Crepe hangers back there. Watches all synchronized to Saint Mary’s bells. City of dirges, requiem flowers, and black-frocked priests. Ain’t Jordan, that’s for damn straight. Floor it, boy. Floor it!”
      Pap, why are you holding your glass of Seagram’s so? 
      Big band of angels Comin’ after you? 
     Why is the chariot’s exhaust pipe dragging? Why are all the women in the back seat hacking like they got consumption?
     Dammit, speak to me!
     Comin’ for to carry me home. Looked over Jordan and what did I see?

And my brother, James—have you seen him? 
     I fancy you’ve come back from Jordan with a sackful of stories—the kind you used to tell us when the Hebron carillons pealed. Mother in her laced shoes, pill-box hat with the veil screening her china-blue eyes, heading out to vespers. You causing James and me to laugh because we were afraid. “Boys shouldn’t ever be afraid of bells,” Mother said, “for those are the necklaces of angels. Comin’ for to carry you home.”
     But James and I didn’t want to go. Flour-pocked women and men of the cloth who preached hell fire and damnation resided there. Instead, you took us to where we gazed cyclopean at the firmament, and parroted the stars falling out of the sky by rocketing dreams out of our shooters. Our Jordan, Pap. While Mama Rose sang of eternity at eventide.
     Did you see her, Pap?
     She still wear black undergarments? Did you ever slide them off her chalky ass?  Or would she only unveil for the priests. And what did they see? 
     Big band of angels Comin’ after me. Comin’ for to carry me home.

And why did you return?
     Or could it be that you never left . . . that we frequent these ginjoints for eternity? Speak to me. Why don’t you look in my direction, for Chrissake? 
     Father, is there no damn home?
     Will you always be over there, and me over here? You always forty. Me twenty. And James dying somewhere between Hebron and Youngstown—between the bells and the women. 
     Oh, God. The pianist’s hand metamorphoses further each bar. The fingers arcing backwards, the tip of a black man’s wing. 
     A neon pilsner halos your smokey reflection in the mirror. I recall your warm embrace about my boy shoulders, bullying me out of the land of tintinnabulation. The hollow saxophone wail of eternity that sucks marrow out of my drumstick bones. 
     You taught me not the dirge of mourning cloth—but the melody of cornmeal soles, ganja loins and milky dreams. You taught me, Laughing Dancer, never to hold my breath in the face of God; and how to sneak out of the Valley of Death, for you were with me—waiting in the saffron convertible, top down, all the Dorseys of the earth waawaaaing out of its chromium dashboard. We’d pick up my brother, James, along the way. And the rosy-lipped woman you had sitting in the front seat, sidled up angel-close alongside you, wasn’t Mama Rose.
     Who was home in her mercerized stockings pulled tight to her chalky thighs by inner-tube garters, lighting our house with her breath of death . . . waiting for Jordan to appear on the red horizon.
     You and I, Father—and the angel of lust who loved pumping the accelerator to the chariot’s floor.

But, Christ, where was James? You promised we’d pick up James. He was to be waiting for us alongside the road outside Youngstown, waiting there with his cardboard valise. You said it would always be us men. “The men go one way to Jordan, the women another.”
     But you and she, the rosy-cheeked one with the wisteria breath rising out of her crinoline, it wafted clear in the back seat, causing me to swoon. We forgot about James. And laughed while she jerked us up a highway, dropping the black lace veil covering her breasts.
     Comin’ for to carry us home. 

It was dark now. 
     The old man couldn’t see me. Too, he was worrying about the change he’d begun to observe in his whiskey hand. Women wouldn’t take too kindly to that abnormality.
     “What kind of bird are you, Mister?”
     Even my star shooter was now a mockery of what it once had been. No gizim dreams. Instead a plasma-like substance, more watery than viscous—eye drain. Christ, it was all rather humorous.
     Mama Rose praying for the old man and her boys, while opening up her black skirts for the winds of eternity to sail her over the rooftops of the city of bells. Father haunting all the boarded-up roadside taverns and street bars searching for my brother James. 
     I knew where he was. 
     He was out in the cornfields of Iowa, his cardboard valise with the Great Lakes decals roped about his neck with clothesline, groping his way back home. Hitched out there hunting for the old man. 
     And myself, seeing Pap, tracking his shadow, his song. Hunting for himself, my brother James, and me.
     Comin’ for to carry us home.