Prologue

Sometimes, when the wind was just right, she could hear the blues.

Once the rainy winter passed into spring, she liked to sit on her porch late at night, held in a kind of wonder beneath the moon and tall pines. She rocked in a cane-bottomed chair, smelling the green and copper moisture coming off the water, and she listened, nodding in time as cicadas and crickets whistled their song to the night. From the dark trees sometimes came the whirring, nearly silent beat of wings, followed by a swallowed screech of death, a sound not everyone could hear, but she did. She heard everything.

What she liked best was hearing the blues. The music sailed down the channel made by the river, ghostly guitar and haunted harmonica, even the hint of a man's ragged voice. It came from Hopkin's juke joint, upriver a mile or two on the Louisiana side of the Sabine River, and spilled with yellow light and blue cigarette smoke into a forest as dark as sin, as w

Prologue

Sometimes, when the wind was just right, she could hear the blues.

Once the rainy winter passed into spring, she liked to sit on her porch late at night, held in a kind of wonder beneath the moon and tall pines. She rocked in a cane-bottomed chair, smelling the green and copper moisture coming off the water, and she listened, nodding in time as cicadas and crickets whistled their song to the night. From the dark trees sometimes came the whirring, nearly silent beat of wings, followed by a swallowed screech of death, a sound not everyone could hear, but she did. She heard everything.

What she liked best was hearing the blues. The music sailed down the channel made by the river, ghostly guitar and haunted harmonica, even the hint of a man's ragged voice. It came from Hopkin's juke joint, upriver a mile or two on the Louisiana side of the Sabine River, and spilled with yellow light and blue cigarette smoke into a forest as dark as sin, as warm as a lover's mouth. It floated toward her over the stillness hanging above the water. Sometimes she imagined they were playing it just for her.

She'd close her eyes and let that music creep under her skin, seep into her bones. She let a part of herself get up and dance while she rocked steady in her chair. Every so often, she let that ghost of herself sing along while she silently nodded her head to the beat. The slow, sexlike rhythm filled her with memories of a man's low, dark laughter and a baby's sweet cry; with the song of Sunday-morning church and the blaze of morning over the east Texas pines.

She rocked and danced, nodded and sang, and thought as long as she could die with the blues in her ears, everything would be all right.

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Excerpted from In the Midnight Rain by Wind, Ruth Copyright © 2004 by Ruth Wind. Excerpted by permission.
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