Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

When I was finished with my hunt, I leaned back in my chair (her chair)

and looked at the little framed photo on her desk, one Icouldn’t remember ever having seen before. Jo had most likely printed it herself (the original might have come out of some local’s attic) and then hand-tinted the result. The final product looked like a wanted poster col-orized by Ted Turner.

I picked it up and ran the ball of my thumb over the glass facing, bemused. Sara Tidwell, the turn-of-the-century blues shouter whose last known port of call had been right here in TR-90. When she and her folks—some of them friends, most of them relatives—had left the TR, they had gone on to Castle Rock for a little while… then had simply disappeared, like a cloud over the horizon or mist on a summer morning.

She was smiling just a little in the picture, but the smile was hard to read. Her eyes were half-closed. The string of her guitar—not a strap but a string—was visible over one shoulder. In the background I could see a black man wearing a derby at a killer angle (one thing about musicians: they really know how to wear hats) and standing beside what appeared to be a washtub bass.

Jo had tinted Sara’s skin to a card-all-lair shade, maybe based on other pictures she’d seen (there are quite a few knocking around, most showing Sara with her head thrown back and her hair hanging almost to her waist as she bellows out her famous carefree yell of a laugh), although none would have been in color. Not at the turn of the century. Sara Tid-well hadn’t just left her mark in old photographs, either. I recalled Dickie Brooks, owner of the All-Purpose Garage, once telling me that his father claimed to have won a teddybear at the Castle County Fair’s shooting-pitch, and to have given it to Sara Tidwell. She had rewarded him, Dickie said, with a kiss. According to Dickie the old man never forgot it, said it was the best kiss of his life… although I doubt if he said it in his wife’s hearing.

In this photo she was only smiling. Sara Tidwell, known as Sara Laughs.

Never recorded, but her songs had lived just the same. One of them, “Walk Me Baby,” bears a remarkable resemblance to “Walk This Way,” by Aerosmith. Today the lady would be known as an African-American. In 1984, when Johanna and I bought the lodge and consequently got interested in her, she would have been known as a Black. In her own time she would have been called a Negress or a darkie or possibly an octoroon. And a nigger, of course. There would have been plenty of folks free with that one. And did I believe that she had kissed Dickie Brooks’s father—a white man—in front of half of Castle County? No, I did not. Still, who could say for sure? No one.