THE BEATLES

By

CL Bledsoe

I keep the Beatles in a jar on my mantle. Only two, so far, but I'm patient. My Mammy taught me patience. Mammy Henny. Her family's been raising my family for generations, since back when we owned them. She taught me how to use the jars to catch them. You need bait. I used a bit of song magic. Stuck it in, just on the other side of the glass, so to speak, and they crawled right in. Like trapping an animal, which we all are, Mammy says, some more than others.

They're happy. It's no mean spell, that song magic. It'll keep them happy for a long time, trying to catch it, trying to tame it. Like Odysseus with the sirens. Except Mammy says it wasn't like they said in the story; it wasn't their voices he was interested in. A man on a ship, like that, for years. He'd have took to anything, whether it could sing or not; he'd make it sing.

Mammy taught me how to catch spirits to keep me out of trouble. Before that, I was all over the place, living it up in Mud Town (that's what she calls Memphis—cause it's muddy, of course, but also cause you get covered in it when you go there) working as a lawyer and living high on the hog. I'd always been into Beatles memorabilia. Around here, most folks are into Elvis, which makes it hard to find rare items. Mammy says he just took black folks' songs and made them white. I didn't mention that Carl Perkins was white. I know what she meant. Besides, the Beatles wrote their own songs. I thought about trying to catch Elvis, you know, just to have or maybe sell or something, but Mammy said somebody had him in a jar long ago, and not to worry about that one.

Mammy found me, there, in Mud Town, convinced me to come back to the family estate down on the river in Helena. She'd fallen on hard times since I left. First thing I did was open the old plantation house up for her and her family. I figured I owed it to them, like a kind of Faulknerian family debt. Mammy never read Faulkner, but when I tried to explain it to her, she said he sounded something like that old Elvis, and she wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't in a jar somewhere because of it. I wasn't sure what she meant by that, but she just patted my head and told me not to worry about it.

I took the living room, with the fireplace and the mantel. I keep it closed off and sleep on the couch.   Mammy comes in to check on me every day, and brings me food and cleans up a little. One of her sons put in a closet for all my clothes. Sometimes I wear my suits like I used to in Mud Town. Sometimes I sit all day in my skivvies until Mammy comes in and yells at me for bruising my backside up from not moving enough. Then she makes me run around the room to get the blood flowing. Says a young man like me shouldn't be going flabby, yet. Says she wants me to live a long time.

Most of the time, though, I spend watching my jars. They're very pretty, I mean aside from what's in them, on a purely aesthetic consideration. They glow, sort of like they're full of fireflies, or the spirits of fireflies. The glow is fluid; it's ever-changing. That's what makes it interesting to watch. Mammy went with me to catch them. That was the second thing she did. Said it was her first time on a plane, but pretty soon the stewardesses all knew her name. She put the jars on the mantel herself, just for me. Said I was lost, before, but now I'm found.

Sometimes I hear them outside and it sounds like they're living it up, not partying, per se, just lively. It's quiet in here. The jars make no sound at all. They sort of take away the sound. But I don't mind. I'm waiting to complete my collection.