You're my high-tone girl / With your high-tone curls / You're my heart's desire / Come and go with me. Put on your dancin' shoes / Got nothin' to lose / Put the paint on your face / There's a roadhouse rumble tonight. Four aces beats a king / The dealer's doin' his thing / They say the deuces are wild / At the blackjack table tonight. Now Uncle Curtis is a fool / Drinkin' Jack and shootin' pool / He'd pick a pocket for a dime / He'll roll with the devil tonight. Secret writing on a wall / Kisses stolen in the hall / You know I love you plain as day / Catch a midnight raider tonight. Come away with me / To a cottage by the sea / We'll write our names in the sand No more roadhouse rumble tonight.

    It's 1955, and I'm at Mount Olivet Funeral Parlor in Nashville, Tennessee. He was 94 and I am 9. And I'm standing before the corpse of my great-grandfather Pa. And I'm thinking that when you become dead you must lie very still for a long time. You can't move at all. If a fly lands on your nose it can stay there as long as it wants. People can say whatever they want about you in your presence, and you can't take issue. This is what was running through my head as I viewed the body of Jimmy Jones Blair who lay there in his coffin, dead as a bag of bolts. When I was sure that no one was watching, I leaned over and touched his forehead, to see what it was like. The skin was very cold, but still moveable over his skull. His eyes remained closed. He appeared to tolerate this well, and invited me to continue. I turned round for a quick check. My mom was engaged in conversation with her brother. My grandmother Mon was off alone, staring at a pediment that supported some sort of planter. I returned to the corpse before me. I tried to lift the right arm of the hand that lay uppermost, crossed over the left protecting his breast, in turn covered by a shirt and brown jacket, with a fake handkerchief in the pocket. The arm refused to give. He had resisted. I had overstepped my bounds. I covered up, and pretended to admire the rubber gasket on the edge of the lid of the casket, then the warrantee on the inner surface that guaranteed against seepage for 25 years. I receded backward from the casket, with my left hand flagging the air in the small of my back, searching. In this way I found my mother, whereupon I turned round and pressed the front of her dress up against my nose and mouth until I could no longer breathe.

    After the wake, as a reward for being brave my parents took younger brother Peter and I to a diner for cokes. "What kind of coke you want?" the waitress asked. I ordered a Dr. Pepper. The jingle says drink 3 a day at 10, 2, and 4 - it was a little before 2. Peter ordered a Coke. The little boy with the bottle cap for a hat sings "50 million times a day... there's nothing like a Coke" - but that's a lot of Coke. After lunch, we all pile back in the car for the long drive back to Durham.