Joplin's Ghost Read Free

it made them feel little bursts of electricity dancing across the hairs on their arms, or made their feet itch. That piano didn’t want to be played by anyone except Scott, so with their blessing, the piano grew a coat of dust.
    When Scott Joplin died on a spring morning, he was in bed, not at his piano.
    The start of the Great War buried the news of Scott’s passing, even in the few circles where his passing would have been news. At his funeral, Lottie remembered her promise to her dying husband, but how would it have looked to have a song as gay as “Maple Leaf Rag” played on a burial day? Lottie would regret her decision the rest of her life, but on the day Scott was put to rest in his pauper’s burial plot, no one so much as hummed her husband’s most beloved song.
    Lord knew she’d done right by the man in every other way.
    Lottie Joplin hadn’t been able to understand her husband’s last words to her, so she had comforted herself by imagining tenderness in Scotty’s weak murmurings. She had known his heart had private spaces the minute he told her he was a widower, but she liked to think his dying words might have been Lottie Joplin, you’re the only woman I ever truly loved.
    Or something gentle like that. Just not angry, for once. Not afraid.
    Lottie was no child of God, truth be known—being in the sin trade, she’d had to let go of Jesus to make ends meet—but she prayed her dear husband’s last words were happy. Scott never got what he deserved, not a single day of his life. Lord, give him peace at last, she had thought, imagining calm surrender in the mangled whisper Scott had breathed into her face.
    Scott’s last words to Lottie weren’t peaceful, calm or loving, and they would have surprised her if she had understood him—because his last words were an admonition.
    Find the kerosene, Lottie. Burn that piano to Hell.

II.
    1991
    Phoenix Smalls was ten years old the day she nearly died.
    Years later, distant relatives and forgotten schoolteachers would claim they’d always seen a special spark in Phoenix, That Certain Something proclaiming she was going to make a deep groove in this world somehow. For the most part, these were lies. Until she nearly died, Phoenix Smalls had never done a single remarkable thing.
    Phoenix got good grades, but her schooling hadn’t caught afire. She’d always liked to sing, but she had what her chorus teacher called a Fourth-Place voice, never likely to place in the top three. Phoenix studied violin, but with only enough diligence to keep her lessons from sounding like catfights. She’d been playing the piano her grandparents bought her since she was six, and she’d made it a good way through the Robert Whitford course, but her recitals weren’t inspired or impressive.
    Phoenix’s father thought she could do better. He turned practicing the piano into a military exercise, with a timer. First twenty minutes, scale drills. Second twenty minutes, practice a required classical piece from her study book. Only in the third twenty minutes did she have free time to play what she liked from the sheet music in her E-Z Hits of the ’80s book (that had Madonna and Whitney Houston songs in it). Under her father’s arrangement, Phoenix hated practicing the piano more than she hated anything else in life. Phoenix had called her father Sarge by the time she was eight, and the nickname stuck. Sarge could take the fun out of anything.
    Phoenix felt cursed to have been born into a family where both parents loved music: Her mother was a former ballet dancer who played piano and still owned the Silver Slipper, the jazz club Phoenix’s grandfather had opened on Miami Beach in the 1950s. Phoenix’s father occasionally played the piano one-handed, humming to himself, or he played his trumpet to old jazz records in the garage, in sporadic bursts and peals both on-key and off. He also managed musicians and bands, which kept him on the road more than Phoenix or her mother