“It’s my way of saying I hope you’ll both stay close to me.”
The banjo and Val, or my father and Val? She didn’t ask. With immense care, she took the instrument from its case, placed it in her lap, began tuning. “This is amazing. I don’t know what to say.”
The fingernail of her second finger, striking down, sounded the third string, brushed across, then dropped to the fourth for a hammer-on. Between, in that weird syncopation heard nowhere else, her cocked thumb sounded the fifth.
L’il Birdie, L’il Birdie,
Come sing to me a song.
I’ve a short while to be here
And a long time to be gone.
Val held the banjo out before her, looking at it. I had forgotten, or maybe I never fully understood until that very moment, what a magnificent thing it was: a work of art in itself, a tool, an alternate tongue, blank canvas, an entire waiting and long-past world. Lovingly, reverentially, Val set it back in its case. “I don’t deserve this. I’m not sure anyone deserves this.”
“Instruments should be played. Just as lives should be lived.”
She nodded.
“Come with me.”
“Where?”
“A special place.”
Off the porch and fifty steps along, the woods closed around us, we’d left civilization behind. Trees towered above. Undergrowth teemed with bustling, unseen things. Even sunlight touched down gingerly here. We paced alongside a stream, came suddenly onto a small lake filled with cypress. There were perhaps two dozen trees. Hundreds of knees breaking from the surface. Steam drifted, an alternate, otherworldly atmosphere, on the water.
“I grew up next to a place just like this.”
“You’ve never told me much about your childhood.”
“No. But I will.”
I reached for her hand.
“I spoke to my sister this morning. The one who raised me. I was thinking about going to see her, wondered if you might consider coming with me.”
“Arizona? Be a little like visiting Oz. I’ve always been curious about Oz.”
“My grandfather-the one who owned the banjo? His name was John Cleveland. He spent much of his life wading among cypress like this. Made things from the knees. Bookends, coffee tables, lamps. Most of my favorite books I first read in the shade of a lamp he’d made for me. He’d carved faces on the knees, like a miniature Mount Rushmore, even drilled out holes so I could keep pencils there. He’d come back from the lake and head straight for the workshop, stand there with his pants dripping wet because he’d come across a new knee that suggested something to him. Walk into that workshop, all you’d see was half an acre of cypress knees. Like being here, without the water.”
“It’s all but unbearably beautiful, isn’t it?” Val said. “I feel as though I’m standing witness to creation.” Her arm came around my waist, heat of her body mixing with my own. “Thank you.”
Shot with sunlight, the mist was dispersing. A crane kited in over the trees, dipped to skim the water and went again aloft.
Speechless, we watched. Sunlight skipped bright disks of gold off the water.
“Guess we should get to work, huh?”
“Soon,” Val said. “Soon.”
“Sallis is back in the mystery game with Cypress Grove, which features another complex protagonist and a story brimming with Southern atmosphere… A mystery that demands to be savored… Cypress Grove should attract an even broader audience for the authors visually tantalizing, astute observations on crime and the human condition.”
– Los Angeles Times
“As Turners memories are unlocked, so are his feelings-and his language-Although he went out to find a killer, Turner earns his redemption by finding his own lost voice.”
– The New York Times Book Review
“Turner is a complex, likable character who should have legs, and Sallis is a writer worth discovering.” – San Antonio Express-News
“Sallis writes some of the most intelligent mysteries out there today.” – The Charlotte Observer
“James Sallis crafts a beautifully written tale of murder and redemption in the South.” – Rocky Mountain News
“Sallis might be one of the best writers in America… almost every page produces a sentence, phrase or paragraph so deliciously right that readers will want to reread it. Sallis fans will pounce on this one. If you’re not acquainted with his work, this is a fine place to start.” – The Plain Dealer
“Sallis’s quirky sense of plot rhythms and careful prose (he’s also a poet) make this an outstanding and unpredictable literary thriller” – The Seattle Times
