What if your childhood harbored a dire warning about your future? What if your life and the lives of dozens of others, including your future child, depended on you deciphering that warning before it is too late?
Mother Blues is about the maternal relationships we never knew existed, the evil we never expect, and the redemption we never think possible. Subversively feminist and environmental, this is a novel about mothers: those we have loved and lost, those we have never known, and those who have always been there for us whether we have realized it or not. And while this is not a novel about blues music, the blues is everywhere in this story, both grounding it in history and pushing it forward in a slow, rhythmic ache.
If there is one maternal presence that binds together the characters of this novel, living and dead, it is the blues itself. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Etta James, Big Mama Thornton, Mahalia Jackson, and all the timeless mothers to that quintessentially American genre are here, a soulful Greek chorus singing from the shadows, warning and imploring, offering hope, and bearing witness to lives adrift and in danger of capsizing.
It is a plain dusted thrasher of some kind. Or a thrush. Sheldon is not sure which. It alights upon the broken blue door lying in the road.
Too big for a sparrow.
It grooms its brown feathers and twitches. One way then another.
Oblivious to what is coming.
Quiet out here on the midday road, cutting through the arid Texan scrub like an old scar. A carpet of hot sound registers as a buzzing from every direction. A sonic pastiche of insect, foul, reptile and rodent woven together into a single vibration as easy to ignore as the air itself.
The earth, too, grinds on its axis. But we do not hear that either. We tune it out, listening only for the sounds on top of that sound.
Sounds of the pertinent.
Sounds of the new and the different and the deadly, letting the background – all of the constancy of the world – drop away into the oblivion of irrelevance.
And then we listen.
All is quiet.
Except that the black metal belly of the thing he had been pursuing, pops and hisses its dying soliloquy.
There is a slow dripping, too, which Sheldon knows cannot be good.
And then … fa-woomph.
Fire.
It seems to stab up from the hot asphalt, as if up through a fissure, a puncture wound in the mantel that taps down into the molten core.
Only seconds left now. The bird, no longer oblivious, is gone. Back into the cosmic vibration.
He grabs both of her wrists. Squeezes his hands closed. Pulls her across the glass-strewn ceiling of the burning Civic.
Her boot catches on a contortion of mangled frame. He curses. Yanks. Her left arm pops. Sickeningly. As if it were merely a rope of putty.
Yanks again. It lengthens in his grip.
He pulls her, now bootless, through the passenger window and out onto the road. Her dark hair hangs. Drags. Smears red across the yellow line. The left side of her face is a mess.
He does not perceive the Jeep decelerating in a waft of dust, nor its driver fumbling for his phone.
He breathes. Tries not to see the blood. Pulls hard.
He drags her in one unbroken effort for the ditch behind his own car, a sleek silver splinter glinting in the sun.
The man is out of the Jeep now. Running. He yells into his phone.
A sudden rending of air shreds the peace, scattering it like birds, dissolving the solid flock into a panic.
Sheldon reacts without thinking. Covers Olivia’s body with his own.