The Battle Hymn Blues

By Baker Lawley

Stoney Nix can play anything, from Beethoven to the Blues, on his old rattletrap piano. It's just a gift, and a good one. Music is his ticket out of Pinewood, Alabama, his ironic, dying hometown, where they reenact the Civil War but cancel marching band because it's too small. Then Sadie Green, the hilarious and beautiful new girl (and Stoney's major crush), convinces him to fight in the fake Civil War battle. What happens there will haunt Stoney forever?and only through voices of the past, struggle, friendship, and his music, will Stoney find himself. A young adult-paranormal-gothic-comedy-romance, The Battle Hymn Blues is a story filled with ghosts and pranks, music and mystery. It?s a love song to the blues we all share, how the past and the future and happiness have the strangest ways of finding you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Lawley
• Release date: Jan 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301017072

Baker Lawley

When I was about six, I defaced my copy of Stuart Little. I didn't like the ending, so I rewrote it, right there in pen on the last page. I've been a writer ever since--and I still have that copy of Stuart Little.I've worked as a septic system tester, a lifeguard, a school uniform salesman, an editor, a freelance writer, and currently I'm a Professor of Creative Writing and English, and every one of those jobs taught me a lot about writing.I write young adult novels, a Southern Gothic paranormal series, short stories, and writing guides, and I've had stories published in literary journals like Copper Nickel, The Cream City Review, Eleven Eleven, and The Southeast Review. I've been fortunate to receive grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Minnesota State Arts Board.You can see all my books and read excerpts on my website right at http://www.bakerlawley.com/booksAnd you can get FREE EBOOKS from me, too! Just sign up for my newsletter at http://www.bakerlawley.com/contactYou can find me on the web at:Website: http://www.bakerlawley.comTumblr blog: http://blog.bakerlawley.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/bakerlawleyFacebook: www.facebook.com/BakerLawleyAuthor

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The Battle Hymn Blues

by Baker Lawley

Published by ECRH Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Baker Lawley

Discover other books by Baker Lawley at his website, www.bakerlawley.com.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author or publisher except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, places, businesses, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, actual events or actual locales is entirely coincidental.

STONEY NIX: THE SOUNDTRACK

WHEN MY MOTHER carries three cupcakes to the dinner table on the night of my sixteenth birthday, singing Happy Birthday while my father sits mute as a statue, I don’t hear that song. Instead, I hear a song in my head that sounds like a bulldozer raking its claw against a mountain of chalkboards while a flock of blackbirds attacks a deer carcass.

But I swear I’m not crazy.

I am not the kind of guy who should be on meds or in an institution, but I do have to admit something. I have a constant soundtrack playing to my life. And it’s not from an iPod or anything. It’s just there. Music. In my head. I even dream in music. I can’t explain it—the music’s just always been there. It took me a long time to figure out that not everybody has songs going all day without the help of earbuds. Just me.

And it’s a schizo, wicked mix, too. I am one of those guys who listens to anything. I can go from Beethoven to the Blues, an old folk fiddle jig, a gospel choir on fire, and Chuck Berry back to Tchaikovsky, and I know every note of every song. There are even some melodies that come that I make up out of nowhere. When I’m happy, I hear a crashing high of a symphony, all fireworks and trumpets. And when I’m down, it’s a slow sad cello, moaning in a minor key.

And when I’m really down, which I am today, my sixteenth birthday, I hear impossible music. It doesn’t sound like music, or anything. It sounds horrible. It sounds like cats at war with monkeys inside a dumpster full of empty beer bottles. Nobody wants to listen to it.

But that’s the point. That’s how life goes sometimes.

My birthday falls around the beginning of the school year. And with classes starting up and the first football game and marching band practice, it usually gets overshadowed. Which is fine by me.

This year, like every year, my mother asked if I wanted a party. And like every year, I said no. It’s this ritual we have. I say no because, except for my best friend Clyde, there aren’t a lot of people I’d want to invite from this town. Even if there were, I wouldn’t want people to see where I live. I wouldn’t want them to see how my dad decorated the front room of our house as a shrine to Dead Confederates.

Mom means well and does the best she knows how, and I appreciate that. She’s lived her entire life here in Pinewood, Alabama.

My wish is that I get out of Pinewood as soon as I can. I blow out the candle.

While we eat our cupcakes, my mother tries to connect with me.

How was band practice today? she asks.

Good, I say.

Are you ready for your first show tomorrow?

Yes, I say.

And that’s the way it goes—one of those parent/kid going-nowhere talks, but at least she tries. My dad doesn’t say anything, as usual. Every year at my birthday I’m reminded why, because of the presents he gives me. Manly things, he thinks. An old-fashioned open-blade straight razor for shaving, last year. Cowboy boots the year before. One time I got a bullwhip.

I’m sure he was ecstatic to have a baby boy sixteen years ago, and I’m also sure he hasn’t known what to make of me for the past ten years. I preferred Ludwig von Beethoven sonatas to Smith and Wesson firearms at age five, and he’s been in shock about his son ever since.

Which is why I’m dreading the moment that comes next.

My father pulls out an enormous shoebox from under his chair and shoves it towards me. He’s got his eyes in a stern gaze of Meaning. I know this is the moment when things could go better, when the day could make a miraculous change to a major key and finish with a triumphant crescendo and maybe I could avoid a full-on emo blues jam session in my brain. But it isn’t going to.

Because. It’s my birthday present in the box. I’m instantly depressed and thinking of impossible music, since I know it isn’t what I want. Of course I want a car, like everybody when they turn sixteen, but there was no way my parents could afford that. Clothes might be nice, but I want to pick them out for myself. What I actually want is simple, and pretty cheap, even. I want a tuning for Ol’ Blue, my rattletrap upright piano that is the only thing that keeps me from bolting out the door and just walking until I get someplace, anyplace that is a place.

My dad is looking at me like this is supposed to be momentous, with one eyebrow cocked up and a grim straight line of a mouth. I know it’s not a pair of shoes in there either, which I also don’t want, but I can’t think of what it could be. I take my time reaching for it, trying to think of how to fake react to whatever it is.

Then he says, This is very special. He makes a clicking noise with his mouth. This means I’ll actually hate whatever it is, so I just go ahead and open it.

And for my birthday, I get—not a car, not clothes, not a piano tuning.

I get a pistol from my dad.

It’s a silver one, old-looking, with a barrel as long as a ruler and a fancy white handle. It gleams like a disco ball inside the shoebox. My father must have shined it up for hours.

It’s a family heirloom, he says. He speaks in C-sharp major. Belonged to your great granddaddy and your granddaddy and your daddy, and now you. I started shooting that when I was eight. Figured it’s high time you took up the family arms. And then he hitches his thumbs inside his suspenders.

Yes, my dad wears suspenders. When he dresses up like a Civil War soldier.

Yes, my dad dresses up like a Civil War soldier.

He does reenactments, where he and other grown men put on old-timey uniforms and run around shooting blanks at one another with antique rifles.

So for my sixteenth birthday, I want my piano to play in tune and instead I get a pistol that I’ve never asked for or had any interest in. And I’m twice as old as I should be in getting it, apparently.

I guess it could be worse. I guess life could be more impossible. At least I have Ol’ Blue. I’ve got music to save me, over and over.

THE FIRST OPUS OF SADIE GREEN

BY THE TIME I make it through math and English and get to band the next morning, I’ve decided that the pistol will be hilarious in a day or two. And anyway, it gives me one hell of a One More Reason. To leave Pinewood, that is. Clyde and I have been collecting One More Reasons for a couple of years, and we’ve got plenty of them.

ONE MORE REASONS: THE GREATEST HITS OF ALL TIME

Track #327: The most thriving business in town is The Gryphon. A funeral home.

Track #599: At every athletic event our school is in, the opposing school misspells our name on its banners, accidentally on purpose, as Peniswood.

Track #812: For a football fundraiser, the coach lined the marching band practice field in a grid and people bought a ticket for a certain square.

Then they gave a cow a bunch of laxative and let it loose on the field. Whoever owned the square where the cow dropped its load of shit was the winner and got a prize. They called it Cow Patty Bingo.

Track #813: Clyde’s mom won Cow Patty Bingo. Then somebody claimed it was rigged.

Track #1,068: In government class the other day, Mr. Hester asked, Y’all all know what a quota is, don’t you? and Ray Jacob said, Yeah! Twenty-five cents!

We’ve lost count—we’re somewhere around fifteen hundred One More Reasons. And we’ve still got a couple more years to go until we can actually act on them and get out of here.

But for today, third period starts like normal. We come in and get our horns set up and take our seats. I play trumpet in the marching band because we need the volume. It’s not a bad instrument but there’s no hot mad love affair between us. We are warming up, goofing off and playing whatever we want while we wait for the bell to ring. I’m starting to tell Clyde about my antique pistol birthday present when Doc comes into the band room, sweating.

We call him Doc because he’s the only teacher at Pinewood High School who has his Ph. D. I don’t know why he teaches here, but I don’t ask, either. Because, if I do, I’m afraid he’ll look around and realize what a pile this town is, and leave. And then I’ll really have no reason to stay here. He’s an amazing musician—piano, slide guitar, every single horn, drums. And a great teacher, the only one that has made a difference to me in high school. And he wears his hair in this sweet giant wispy feathered pompadour, like Beethoven.

But today he sits down up front and stares at his sheet music for a long time. So long that we all sit there in silence after the bell rings, just looking at him. I feel sorry for him. Behind him on the walls are pictures of the bands in his glory years, when there were a hundred kids in it. Pinewood had more people then. Now the town has shrunk so much, we don’t even use the second floor of the high school. And here we are, only eleven of us. We’re a little rinky-dink troupe, a marching band barely big enough to make a sound the people in the stands can hear. No wonder he can’t look up at us.

Ahem. Okay. Band, Doc says. Finally he raises his eyes. I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. First, Justin Cambpell’s family moved earlier this week, so he’s no longer here in Pinewood. So we’ll need a new Drum Major.

I hadn’t noticed Justin was absent. So that makes ten of us in the marching band now. I wish I could feel surprised, but this happens all the time. Somebody’s family can’t take any more and they bolt out of Pinewood in the night since there’s nothing going on here, no real jobs and nothing to do. It’s not even that pretty to look at here. It’s just pine trees everywhere you can see. Justin’s dad probably found work someplace else and his mom jumped at the chance to get out of here.

But to lose your Drum Major the day before your first halftime show of the season? That’s a new one. No wonder Doc is sweating—the Drum Major is the director’s leader on the field, and we ten are now suddenly without one.

It’s tricky—the Drum Major has to be a good, precise musician, but doesn’t have to be the best player in the band, either. You need your best players playing their instruments. You need your drum major to be a leader.

Doc says, I’d like to ask Sadie if she’d be able to step up and take the drum major position.

And this is a curious choice.

Sadie. The new girl. The only new kid we’ve had come to Pinewood in five or six years.

She showed up at band camp and during our first marching drill I tripped right over the tuba because I was staring at her. She was new, she had red hair, and she wasn’t the kind of mousy girl I always thought of in the flute sections. It was instant the first time I saw her—I started to understand how a woman’s body can be magical, her knees and ankles and the way they worked together, like jazz or something, and the way her curves sang all the way up her tall frame. I’d been in school with girls all my life, and I’d never seen anything like her.

Since you’ve been a drum major before, I hope that in this situation you wouldn’t mind stepping up? Doc says.

None of us are saying much because I think none of us knew she’d been a drum major at her old school. I hadn’t had the courage to say more than a dorky Hi! to her one day. So, of course I have no idea where her old school was or that she was the drum major there.

I spent all our summer practices playing as loud as I could trying to get her attention. And never actually having the guts to walk up to her and use things normal people use to speak one another, like words or something. Not everybody thinks in music—I keep reminding myself of that.

Yes, Sir, Sadie says. She smiles a little smile but gets serious again.

Okay then, Doc says.

Then, again, he looks down at his music stand and doesn’t say anything for a long time.

A long, long time. I count a 68-beat rest in 4/4 time.

Then he looks up.

I’ve just gotten word that the County Board of Education is cutting the funding for music next year. It’s drastic. It’s asinine. Doc kind of shrinks before he says what he says next. It means there won’t be any more marching band at Pinewood High School after this season, he says. You are the last of the Pinewood Marching Miller bands.

This takes a second to register. I have to keep telling it to myself: they’re cancelling band on us for next year. Band is cancelled. No band during senior year. By the time my brain gets it, I don’t even bother with disbelief, like a lot of the other kids who are asking What??

I’m not surprised. One Thousand More Reasons. I go straight to anger.

My first reaction is to break my trumpet in two over my knee, but I don’t. Barely. I ball up my fists to go punch the Board of Education people, but I don’t know who they are and don’t think they’re hanging out at Pinewood High School. Then I want to cry but don’t let myself. Then I feel like projectile puking at the back of Betsy Riggs and her clarinet. Not because of Betsy. Or clarinets. Because: without band how can I get a music scholarship and get out of here?

What’s funny is that I don’t hear music. When I feel the most scared or trapped or threatened, that’s when the songs usually come. But now, when I need them the most ever, they’re not here.

Then I remember that I’m not the only person in the world. I look around. The five remaining seniors since Justin left are kind of shrugging it off—they’ll be gone next year anyway. But they’ll probably still be living in Pinewood somewhere, coming to the football games on Friday nights for the rest of their lives. The people that don’t leave ASAP after graduation never leave.

They’ve been threatening this for years, Doc says. Everything he says is a half-sigh mixed with a yelling whisper, like he’s playing piano with saw blades laying over the strings. They almost took it away last year, but I asked for one more year, to build the band back up. Instead, we shrink another five students and our Drum Major thinks it’s okay to transfer schools the day before our first show.

Clyde speaks up. We can just do it next year, too, even if they cancel it. We can just do it if we want to do it. Just go out there at halftime and march. Who’ll stop us? That’s my best friend, and that’s his whole attitude about the world. I write impossible music when everything clamps down on me and there’s no hope and there’s no way I’ll ever get out of this town. Clyde just does the things that he wants done anyway.

Clyde is probably part of the reason they think they can cancel marching band. He’s the best saxophone player we’ve had in the last ten years, Doc says. But he’s also the quarterback and an all-around stud who would score three touchdowns running and throw another one.

Then, at halftime, instead of resting and listening to the football coaches, Clyde comes out in his shoulder pads and dirty pants and marches the halftime drill with us. This year he even has a solo in one song. Then he’ll play the second half of the game.

He is also the best player on defense, at linebacker.

Nobody else on the team is big or fast, and we come close but usually lose most of our football games, because it’s Clyde against the eleven guys on the other side. That’s how good he is. We come close every time because of him alone.

I wish it were so, Clyde. I’d almost direct this band for free. But it’s all tied up in insurance and budgets and salaries and there’s so much bureaucratic red tape that they can’t see how stupid they are. I’ve never seen Doc so mad. He keeps running his fingers through his hair so his Beethoven wings fluff out wider and wider. I would love to call up the Board and have it out with them. He picks up his baton and gets ready to lead us but none of us feel like playing. We’ve got nothing to play for.

Doc? someone says. I have to look because I don’t recognize the voice—it’s a gorgeous slide up from an E-flat to an A, but even more, it’s full of some kind of life that nobody else in the room seems to have. It’s got a spark in it. It’s Sadie. Why don’t you go do that? Go call them and tear them a new one. Let me practice leading the band for the show tomorrow night, she says.

Doc says, Thank you. It’s almost instant, like it’s the best idea he’s ever heard. He hands Sadie his baton and heads back towards the principal’s office.

Sadie takes the seat at the head of the nine of us. She still has her flute in her hands.

Band! she says. And damn, she’s got it good. It’s her first word to us as our drum major and we’re all ready to follow her through a brick wall. Or maybe it’s just me. Horns up!

Our instruments all go to our mouths.

This is bullshit! Sadie says. She knocks over Doc’s music stand and the scores splash across the floor. Screw the Board of Education. Play the longest, loudest, shittiest noise they’ll ever hear!

She motions with the baton for us to play and every one of us, all ten, blast as loud as we can. We make a horrible screech and wail that roars in my ears. Even Sadie is playing her flute up there with us. Some of us make chicken-yard trills and others do low-down growls or high-up squeals. The tuba blats and farts, the trombone rollercoasters up and down, I hurt my own ears with my trumpet so loud and play until I can feel my face turning deep purple and my eyes bulging in their sockets.

It sounds awful and terrible—and perfect.

When it’s over, we all feel ten times better. And my crush on Sadie is a hundred times heavier.

SONG OF SOMEPLACE

I SPEND FIFTH period pissed off then sixth and seventh periods feeling helpless. When the bell rings to let school out for the day, I’m on to cynicism and jadedness toward this town, which I am very good at. But this is a whole new level. Stratospheric Cynicism.

The rest of the school doesn’t seem to know that band is cancelled, or if they know, they don’t care. It’s Friday afternoon, there’s a football game, la-de-da, life is wonderful. For them.

Pinewood is a dying town. It wasn’t always like this. Years ago there was a huge lumber mill here, because the town is surrounded by a thick pine tree forest which they proceeded to cut down. But the forest has grown back as good as new since the mill burned down decades ago. The men who built the mill also built houses for all the millworkers near the factory. They’re little houses in a planned subdivision off Main Street, and every house is identical except for the paint they’ve had put on them over the years. But now that the mill is gone, a lot of the houses are empty.

Sometimes kids break into one of the houses and throw a party, and there was a meth bust in one a couple of years ago. But this place is so small, they always get caught. We’re all up in each other’s business because there is no other business.

This year there are three fewer kids in the junior class. That makes twenty-five of us in the little pod of students I have studied with for the past eleven years. Families, the smart ones, anyway, move away from here so often, my so-called social life mostly revolves around going-away parties. But my parents are encamped here, ignorantly blissful in a

Reviews for The Battle Hymn Blues

[rincey_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I downloaded this as a free Kindle download and read it during my free time and breaks at work.

I don't know, I just didn't get this book. The first half seems really interesting, I was really intrigued by the characters [especially Clyde] but then the big climax of the story happens and everything seems to fall apart from there.

***minor spoilers**

Ghosts??? Seriously, there were chapters of just the main character and ghosts. I understand that they were hallucinations, but what was the point?

I guess since it was free and helped pass the time then no harm, no foul.