Jimmie Rodgers' Last Blue Yodel

Christopher Chilton

The day before he died Jimmie Rodgers went to Coney Island. It was his final song, and it went like this.

The week before Ralph had him put up at the Taft like usual, a room for him and a room for the nurse, Cora. This time Ralph had arranged a driver for him, a little Mexican named Castro. Castro wasn’t staying at the Taft but he was always in the lobby first thing in the morning saying, Where we going today, Mister Jimmie. But all week Mister Jimmie never went anywhere but the studio.

They did six numbers in two days. They did I’m Free From the Chain Gang Now and they did Blue Yodel No. 10. They gave him an easy chair to sit in with pillows behind his head. Jimmie was so tired after he slept for five days and poor Castro waited all the time in the lobby. Then Jimmie went back to the studio and did four more. He lay on a cot between takes and on the way back to the hotel he had to lie down in the back seat of the Mexican’s Chevy.

But the next morning Jimmie was full of that music again. He was full of the levee and the pale moonlight, the muddy water in the shoes. A stripe of sunlit river between buildings was a snowy field of distant cotton. Take me somewhere, Castro, he said.

By the time they arrived he was feeling tired again. On the boardwalk faces chugged past him like the faces of the traqueros and the gandy-dancers along the Mobile and Ohio, and even the jingling change in their hands as they strolled was like the jangling of the train cars. But no wind was blowing and the faces failed to make him feel what they did then. Castro said, Let us go somewhere out of the sun, Mister Jimmie. So he’d seen it on Jimmie’s face.

The sign in lights: SEE THE MIRACLE INCUBATORS. The driver paid ten cents for each of them and led Jimmie into a dark long room like a stable and the walls lined with white machines. Jimmie thought they were iceboxes at first but when he looked through the glass windows he saw each one held a baby, no bigger than a tousled greaserag, and some of them held two or three. Milagros, the driver said. The machine, it keeps them alive. Jimmie leaned on the metal bar and considered.

When they were out again in the grinding sun Jimmie turned and said, Why’d you take me here? What’d Ralph tell you? The driver put his hands in his pockets and said, I love to see the babies, Mister Jimmie.

Jimmie felt ashamed of his anger then. Of course the driver didn’t know about the oxygen tent back in Texas, the long black pall that fell over you like a shroud. He didn’t know how it was to be bagged up like a piece of fruit. Come on, Castro, Jimmie said. Let’s go see what’s so wondrous about this wheel.

Castro said he would wait below for Mister Jimmie.

The seat whined like a fiddler tuning up as Jimmie rose. He was lifted over the boardwalk and there was the ocean, a long blue yodel out before him, the longest blue yodel there was or ever could be. His cap was in his lap and if he tossed it from the car it might become another white distant bird. His spirit flying out like a bird.

He was already so far above them, above the many-colored faces white and dark like watermelon seeds. Above the Mexican driver and Ralph in his studio and Nurse Cora napping in her cool room in the city at his shoulder like a broken line of corn. He was leaving them all. He felt almost ready, until his breath slammed against the latch of his throat.

Whenever his breath was stuck, Jimmie sang. If the words came out he knew the breath was coming too; he knew he was still living. He sang quietly to himself: I’m getting tired of the big city’s lights. Tired of the glamor and tired of the nights. Then the yodel unspooled odelay-ee like sea-colored ribbon from his heart.

Above him a voice laughed and said, Listen to that, Doris—we’ve got Jimmie Rodgers down there! The Singing Brakeman! But it was only a joke. They didn’t know; nobody knew.

Later the Chevy got caught in crosstown traffic so Jimmie walked the last three blocks to the Taft. The lobby was a harbor green and cool but the bellhop had to help him climb the stairs. By the time he fell into bed his cough was so powerful he could scarcely choke down Cora’s satiny laudanum.

That night Jimmie began to die. He was coming out of himself in red strings; pieces of himself stained the butter-colored linens. Cora ran to find the hotel doctor but she was gone a long time. Would Ralph come? And what about Castro? He had a strange desire to see the little Mexican driver again, who loved the little babies so. To hear him say again, Where we going today, Mister Jimmie.

But no one came and he kept on dying. You never imagined it happening that way: alone.

The black tent was falling over him. The oxygen tent, the revival tent. On the other side a lantern was burning and the voices of the crowd were woven with voices of the cicadas and the katydids. They were waiting for him; he’d better get on with it. Open the flap and up the guitar and sing: Roaming the wide world over. Always alone and blue, so blue. Odelay-ee, odelay.

Christopher Chilton lives and teaches in New York City. His work has been published in A Public Space, The Masters Review, Bayou Magazine, and elsewhere.