LITMIR.BIZ

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all you could get of a good life was what you could see floating just out of reach, till it disappeared around a bend in the river or vanished behind a veil of flood-ravaged trees. And sometimes, hauntingly, even when a boat had passed them by, they could still hear the music drifting down-river as if there was a song in the water itself, Dixieland or ragtime or, before they turned away to their lives in the colorless mud, a faint, thin scrap of Jolson.

       Down among the sheltering palms

      Oh, honey, wait for me.

      He was still a boy then. One day, when he was nine or ten, he stood on the levee beside his mother and father as one more party boat pushed against the current, well-dressed people laughing on deck. Safe in the middle of the Black River, they raised their glasses in a mocking toast to the family ashore. “They tipped their mint juleps at us, tipped ’em up,” he says, and smiles the faintest bit to prove how little it matters to him after so much time. But it mattered to the man and woman beside him. His daddy was indestructible then, gaunt, six foot four, with big, powerful hands that could squeeze weaker men to their knees, and a face that seemed drawn only in straight lines, like Dick Tracy in the funny papers. As the drunken revelers lifted their glasses of bourbon high in the air, Elmo Kidd Lewis pulled the boy to his hip. “‘Don’t worry, son,’ Daddy told me. ‘That’ll be you on there someday. That’ll be you.’” He does not know if his daddy meant it would be him up there with the rich folks, the high and mighty, or if it would be his songs they played as the boat passed by. “I think maybe,” he says, “it was both.”

      Elmo knew it the way he knew wading in the river would get him wet. He had seen it, he and his wife, Mamie, when his son was barely five years old, seen a power take over the boy’s hands and guide them across a piano he had never studied or played before. For the boy, it was . . . well, he did not truly know. His fingers touched the keys and it was like he had grabbed a naked wire, but as it burned through him, it left him not scorched and scarred but cool, calm, certain. Only God did such as that, his mama said, and his daddy bought a piano for the boy, so the miracle could proceed.

      Finally, something worth remembering.

      He rests now in the cool dark of his bedroom and lets it draw at the old poisons in him like a poultice. He is a swaggering man by nature, but for a moment there is no strut in him.

      “Mama and Daddy,” he says, “believed in me.”

      He tried to pay them back, with houses and land and Cadillacs. “‘Money makes the mare trot,’ Mama always said.” But the debt will never be settled. The piano, the weight of it, tilted the world. He still has it, that first piano—the wood cracked and buckled, deep grooves worn in its keys—in a dim hallway in a house where gold records and other awards pile like old newspapers or lean against a wall. He pauses before the ruined piano now and then and taps a single key, but what he hears is different from what other people do.

      The boat that taunted them is a ghost ship now.

      The old songs sank beneath the water.

      Elmo’s boy, scoured by a worldly hell and toasted by kings, is still here.

      In the summers of 2011 and 2012, I listened in the quiet gloom of his bedroom as he told me what was worth remembering. He told me some of the rest of it, too, when he felt like it, for as long as he felt like it. He remembered it as it pleased him. That does not mean he always remembered it the same way twice, but day after day I was reminded of a line I once read: it was like any life, really, but with the dull parts taken out. It was odd, though, how he could see the boy on that levee so much clearer than he could see all the long life in between, like he was looking across that wide river again, at himself.

      Before he rocked them, before the first piano bench went hurtling across the stage and first shock of yellow hair tumbled into his snarling, pretty face and the first spellbound, beautiful girl stared up from the footlights in unmistakable intent, he played Stick McGhee songs for Coca-Cola money from the back of his daddy’s beat-up flatbed Ford and sang Hank Williams before he knew what a heartache was.

      Before Memphis, before he took them from the VFW and convention halls to a place they’d not been even in a fever dream, before preachers and Parliament damned him for corrupting the youth of their nations, before he made Elvis cry, he listened to the Grand Ole Opry on his mother’s radio, the battery she saved all week till Saturday night finally fading to nothing at the end of a Roy Acuff song.

      Before bedlam, before he stacked money and hit records to the sun and blazed up, up, to come smoking to earth only to rise and fall and rise and rise again, before he outlasted almost all of his kind and proved on ten thousand stages that no amount of self-destruction could smother his voice or quiet the thunder in his left hand, before John Lennon knelt and kissed his feet, he performed his first solo in the Texas Avenue Assembly of God, then hid under a table in Haney’s Big House to see people grind to the gutbucket blues.

      Before any of it, before the first needle and first million pills, before the first coffin passed him by, he walked a high bridge rail like a tight-rope between the bluffs of Natchez and the Louisiana side, laughing, loving the scare it threw into mortals below. A lifetime later, he rode across the same bridge and looked down to the muddy water of the Mississippi, to barges long as a football field; from up there, they looked like toys in a bathtub.

      

      “I must’ve been crazy,” says Jerry Lee Lewis, but if he was, it was just the beginning.

      The weather seems different now from when he was a boy, the air so hot and thick the sky looks almost white. The afternoon thunderstorms that have shaken this land across generations now hang hostage in that cotton-colored sky, leaving the air wet and steaming but the fields dry as parchment for weeks, a thing the old people attribute to the end of days. But the end of days has been coming here for a long, long time.

      “I wonder what it’s like to die? I guess they give you shots and stuff, to help you with the pain. I don’t really know,” he says, softly, as Ida Lupino and Beware, My Lovely roll across a muted television screen. “Probably, you just drift off to another world. I don’t know what that world will be like. I like to think it’s Heaven. Can you imagine me in Heaven? Imagine the orchestra we’d have.” He tosses a macadamia nut in his mouth, unscrews an Oreo, takes a long swig of purple soda, and ponders that. “Oh, man, what a band. I’ll want to go twenty-four hours a day . . . won’t never get tired. Won’t never stop.”

      He has never believed the grave is the end of a man, and that has been his torture. The greater part of a man walks in Glory or burns; there is no real in-between, not in the Assembly of God. Across his life, he has proclaimed on a rolling basis the kind of man he considers himself to be, shifting from world-class sinner to penitent, sometimes in the space of a single song. Now his choice seems finally made. I am warned by members of his family, before I even enter his presence, that he abides no cursing, no blasphemy. He will live the rest of his life, he hopes, without offending God. He tithes. He blesses his food and prays at night the Lord his soul to take. He knows the Holy Ghost is as real as a pillar of fire. He believes, as always, in the God of Texas Avenue, and knows he has sinned greatly, deeply. But his God is a God of miracles and redemption, and in this case that might amount to about the same thing.

      

      “I did a lot of thinkin’ about that. . . . Still think about it, real heavy. I sure don’t want to go to Hell. If I had my life to live over, I would change a lot of things,” he says, not for the approval of man, but for the grace of God. “I believe I would. I’d probably not do a lot of things that I’ve done. . . . Jesus says, ‘Be thou perfect even as my Father in Heaven is perfect.’ But my Lord, I’m only human. And humans tend to forget. I don’t want to die and my soul go to Hell.

      “There is a Hell,” he says. “The Bible plainly speaks of it, very big-time. The fire never quenches, the worm never dies. The weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. The lake of fire.”

      But he can bear that, he believes, better than the rest of it.

      “I just

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