LITMIR.BIZ

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knew,” Jerry Lee believes.

      Mamie almost fell out as she heard her son play. She brought her hands together and praised God.

      “Oh, Elmo,” she said, “we’ve got ourselves a natural-born pianist.”

      “Well, Mamie,” Elmo said, “we might have a piano player.”

      Jerry Lee smiles at that. “Like there was a difference,” he says now.

      “He’s a prodigy,” Mamie said. Such words had rarely even been used.

      “Probably is, Mamie,” Stella said, that look still on her face. “Probably is.”

      It must have seemed to Elmo and Mamie like answered prayers. They had lost one prodigy; the good son slept safe in the high ground. But now they had seen delivered unto them another one—more or less.

      The wild son, seven or eight years old now, barefoot, dirty faced, and grinning, climbed the iron girders of the Mississippi River bridge till he stood swaying in the hot wind at the height of the span, then walked it like a circus rope, one step, two steps, more, as the little boys below, cousins and such, stood slack-jawed and trembling at the rail. Jerry Lee had scared them to death, again, and if the yellow-haired imp fell to his doom in the river below, surely their mamas and daddies would find a way to blame all of them and beat them unconscious. He waved at them, taunting, as the wind sucked at his shirt and almost lifted him off the iron beam as the tugboats and great barges passed beneath his feet, as the drivers of the passing cars wondered which asylum had let that boy slip out. He walked the span over and over, skinny arms akimbo, like a crow on a wire, not even looking at his feet but leering, jeering at the boys below and mightily pleased with his little self.

      “Are you conquered?” he shouted.

      “Please, Jerry Lee,” they begged, in a chorus, Jimmy, Mickey, Cecil Harrelson, David Batey, others. “Please get down.”

      He laughed in their upturned faces.

      “Get down!” they wailed.

      “Come and get me,” he said.

      It had started that morning as all mornings started then along the dirt streets of Ferriday, in an ever-swelling migration of scamps and urchins and ne’er-do-wells, aimed at no place in particular but intent on doing no good when they got there. One of their favorite games was called Conquer, which was basically a game of double-dog dares. One boy would do something dangerous or asinine, anything as long as there was at least some chance of bloodletting or broken bones or bug-eating, and the other boys had to do the same or admit they were just big fat sissies and sing out, “I’m conquered.” It might be anything from jumping off a railroad trestle into a murky creek to taking a punch to hollering at a big girl, and nobody—nobody—conquered Jerry Lee. “I never was afraid. . . . I don’t know why. I just never was scared of nothin’,” he said, which is an easy thing to say but hard to live. But his cousins would stand in amazement at the things he did. Cousin Mickey would say he believed most geniuses were crazy, and his cousin was a genius for sure. But the stunt on the bridge, 150 feet above the big river, was off the scale.

      “Are you conquered, or not?” Jerry Lee asked.

      The boys looked at the river below. They shook their heads.

      “Are you conquered?” he shouted again.

      They nodded.

      “Say it!” he shouted.

      “We’re conquered! We’re conquered!”

      Jerry Lee leaped up, grabbed a crossbeam, and hung there, laughing.

      “Oh,” he says now, “they begged me to come down, but I didn’t pay ’em no mind. I guess I could’ve fell, but I didn’t.”

      He remembers coming back to earth in triumph.

      The little boys crossed their hearts and swore not to tell.

      “But somebody told,” he says.

      His mama had a good cry and wondered what she had done to have God punish her this way.

      “I’m gonna have to kill you, boy,” Elmo said, then just walked off, shaking his head. Mamie would not let him whip the boy.

      The bridge incident was hard to eclipse, but sometime later he tried. One day, as the cadre of boys stood on an overpass, a long freight train appeared in the distance.

      “I’m gonna jump on it,” Jerry Lee said.

      “No you ain’t,” they said.

      “Yes I am,” he said.

      Jerry Lee climbed up on the rail and crouched there, like a hawk. The train had seemed to be lumbering along, but now, so close, it shook and clanked and rumbled, and the steel wheels moved in a blur. But he’d said he would do it. He picked a boxcar, one with a flat roof.

      Well, he thought, you’ll probably make it.

      He leaped into space.

      

      He landed, slid, and came to a stop.

      Hah.

      Most boys would have let it go at that. But in the cowboy matinees, he had seen the heroes and bad men jump from one boxcar to another on a moving train, and he decided to give that a whirl. Besides, he was not altogether sure where this train was headed or when it might get there, and he might have to jump all the way to the engine, to tell the engineer to Please, sir, my name is Jerry Lee Lewis, and will you please stop this thing and let me off. It already looked like he was halfway to Baton Rouge. The other boys just stood in the far distance, wondering if they would ever see him again, and half hoping the train did not stop till it got to Canada. But then things would sure be dull around here, without Jerry Lee.

      He walked to the edge of the boxcar and looked down at the coupling, at the crossties going by faster than he could count. Then he walked to the other end, got a running start, leaped and made the gap, easy, sliding on his belly. But this car had a more rounded roof. It occurred to him, in one sickening second, that there was nothing to hold on to. “I just slid off.”

      He hit the big gravel at the trackside with an awful oomph, and the sound of rending clothes. The other little boys, watching in the distance, ran for home.

      “They just left me there, the others, left me laying there like an old shoe,” he says. He was bruised all over, and skinned alive, but not broken, at least not that he could see. “I dragged myself up to the road and got a ride home with this rich guy.” The man looked him over.

      “I slid,” Jerry Lee said.

      “Oh,” the man said.

      Mamie was without words. Elmo breathed fire and threatened, but there was nothing he could do. It was Elmo, in that deep backwater, who had taught the boy not to let fear own him. But this boy had no limits. Southern men like to think of people, sometimes, as machines so they can understand them, and they know that most small engines, like lawnmowers, have a tiny mechanism on them called a governor, a kind of safety device that keeps them from running wide open all the time and burning up. In people, it’s fear or common sense that serves as the mechanism. This boy, Elmo quickly figured out, didn’t have one. He was buck wild and strutting and had been since he was walking around good, determined to get away with as many transgressions as hours in the day would allow; he would not read a book on a bet and ogled all the pretty girls on the big yellow school bus and pretty women in town when he didn’t even know what he was looking at. He put one of his cousins in a cardboard box and set him in the middle of the road, and walked the parish with a perpetual smirk, like he knew even as a boy that he was the stud duck around here and people might as well get used to it.

      They might have done more to rein the child in if they had not heard him play and sing.

      The first time he really sang, when he was not yet even in school, it struck Elmo and Mamie hard in their hearts, because

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