Laying his fingers on the keys, he started with “Blues in the Night,” rolling his right hand with a feather-light touch. Then he gently twisted the melody inside out until it became “Blue Skies,” despite not having felt smiled upon in quite a while. It was times like this that Albert wished his wife had lived. Lilly would always sit at his side while he played, or on the floor behind him, leaning against his lower back, and sing over the notes he coaxed from whichever piano they had at the time. Sometimes she’d sing the way Billie Holiday sang on the radio, other times she crooned in a language all her own, improvising over whatever Albert did with the keys. Tonight he’d give all the money he had in the bank to have recorded the songs his wife had made up on those nights. But he never did.

And then she died.

Lilly had passed when he was thirty, she twenty-eight. Albert had never remarried. He’d passed the last twenty years with various girls, none more special than the last, and he’d stayed away from white women as much as he could, despite considerable pressure from some of the housewives whose homes he visited to tune their pianos. He always tried to make his calls when the husband was home, and he worked hard to make a good impression. That was how you survived in cotton country. From one corner of the parish to the other, every white man of property knew Albert Norris as a “good nigger.”

Albert stopped playing in mid-measure, like a walker in mid-stride, and listened to the suspended chord fade into silence. It took half a minute, and he knew that a child could probably hear the sound waves decay for another thirty seconds after that, the way he used to when he’d sat on the floor by his mother’s old Baldwin. Age took those things from you, though—slow but sure.

In the haunting silence, he heard a muted thump from the workroom. A few seconds later, the sound repeated itself. The trapdoor had closed. Pooky Wilson was slipping out into hostile night, like a thousand black boys before him.

“Godspeed, son,” Albert said softly.