The Drummer’s Beat

It was an unforgettable sound–subtle and quaint. At least it had been.

Rodney felt chills down his neck. He was nervous, but he squared his shoulders to appear calm. A moment passed before he described what he’d heard with words like strong and steady. He felt that he was expected to say this, though he wasn’t certain of what he expected himself. His wife, Jillian, enjoying blissful thoughts, would say the sound was delicate and fast. Perhaps a more sentimental way to describe it: it was the sound of the greatest gift that life could afford the pair. And it wouldn’t be long now before the gift arrived into their warm and loving family.

“We have a heartbeat!” Doctor Sullivan announced to the expecting parents. “It’s a healthy fetus.”

Rodney reached for Jillian’s hand and they listened carefully. As it had seconds before, a rapid succession of rhythmic thumps sounded through a small speaker as the doctor maneuvered the doppler over Jillian’s bare stomach. He positioned the device below her navel and the sound seemed to crescendo. The beat grew alive and struck Rodney’s ear with an authority that demanded movement; pushing, tugging him toward it. Like a marionette under the strings of a puppeteer, his fingers twitched–first one, then the others. His mind submitted to the rhythm. But that, of course, wasn’t the first time the beat had moved a person in such a way.

Since he was a boy in Harlem, back when the East Side was full of Black and brown faces and before gentrification had rid the sidewalk and subway stations of its truest musicians, Rodney had a peculiar way of identifying sounds. Even then, the city’s distinct tones–clanging noises, humming ones, banging, clashing, strumming, bopping, buzzing–were so much more than simple sonic vibrations. And though others seemed incapable of detecting it, sounds were not just noise. Rather, they were types of musical instruments. A tugboat’s bellow across the Hudson–a tuba. A perched bird’s whistling–a piccolo. The shrill banter of the cool cats in front of the bodega–competing trumpet blares. And of all the glorious sounds that filled the boroughs, that of the heart, sixty quarter notes per minute, was the foundation of the jazz drummer’s swing.

It was a crisp morning and the sky was the type of gray that cloaked the building tops like a thick blanket when Rodney and Pop caught the Number Six subway at 125th street. Below the bustling traffic along the street, the six sped through the belly of the city, wailing and bridled, weaving through the murky tunnels. Among the groggy men and women that crowded the train, Pop stood tall and slid through them, silent and sullen, before sitting beside a dingy window. Dim tubular lights stretched overhead and cast an auric glow on the travelers’ weary faces, making them appear older and withered. It seemed to provide just enough light for Pop’s eyes to traverse the sports page of the TIMES paper.

“The Mets lost again,” Pop muttered. Rodney oftentimes wasn’t sure if the things that came from Pop’s mouth were directed toward him or not. During these trips to Nana’s, unless told otherwise by Pop, Rodney forsook the grime-covered metallic seats and preferred to stand alone. A dozen feet away, Rodney stuck his hands in his jacket pockets and leaned against a rail. Among the passengers, he lowered his eyebrows, suave and adult-like, but remained within eyeshot of his father. Of course, one could never trust the loonies and fiends that took to the subways. Still, he casually stood far enough away from Pop to maintain an air of independence that boys his age possessed. Besides, standing allowed him to feel the motion of the train. Its sturdy wheels labored down the steel tracks, vibrating through his knees and chest with the rumble of a marching band. It was like a drum line, setting the tempo for the march of the early risers.

Their stop arrived quickly. After they departed the subway and ascended the station’s steps, streaks of sunlight parted the clouds, warming the melting snow along the concrete but not Rodney’s shoulders and forearms beneath his jacket. Pop exhaled deeply and small plumes of breath frosted beneath his nostrils. Like Pop, Rodney withdrew his hands from his pockets and allowed the brisk chill to bite his bare knuckles. He had once heard Pop say that real men don’t wear gloves. Nana’s apartment was only a few short blocks away, and with Pop stepping beside him, Rodney didn’t dare put his hands in his pockets, even when they numbed.

They strode lazily, almost at the pace of someone with nowhere in particular to go. “The DOW is down,” Pop said before crumpling his newspaper and tossing it in a can along the sidewalk. It was not until then that Pop’s pace quickened. Rodney strode swiftly behind, the frigid air sweeping across his face. They approached Nana’s apartment building, a drab fortress of brown brick among a slew of identical housing complexes that lined the street. Inside, cigarette smoke draped the stairwell and each step seemed narrower and steeper than the last. It was the type of stairwell that invited injuries among the hurried. After Pop rapped on the hallowed door of apartment 228, she opened and greeted her son and grandson with as much warmth as she would have for two mutts that moseyed to her door in search of scraps.

“I called,” Pop said.

“Didn’t hear it,” she mumbled.

While most grandmothers (at least the ones in storybooks) spoiled grandchildren with warm cookies and even warmer hugs, Nana surpassed them and all others in a spectacular way of her own: she was a collector of sounds. Bebop, swing, hard bop, fusion. She had the most fantastic sounds of Harlem, Chicago, New Orleans, and Kansas City in vinyl record sleeves. She stored them all in plastic milk crates along the living room’s far side wall; arranged, not in alphabetical order or by genre, but according to some logic that only she seemed to understand. She woke to these sounds, she sang with them, danced to them. She’d put a record on nice and loud, and, with her eyes glowing, she’d summon Rodney to her side and point to a name across the front of the sleeve. With a piano melody sounding from the record, or a trombone tootling, she’d fondly speak of the musicians as though they were lost relatives who had yet to return from a distant trip. She’d recall a man who had a satchel for a mouth. She often spoke of a Duke who ruled a kingdom of brass horns, and a lady who was called Day but blew breath into the night. Nana had said these people had been born in a place not far from her apartment–the Cotton Club, she called it. Rodney imagined a building with walls formed from the soft blooms of cotton fields, the roof and floor as fluffy and white as a new pillow. Who would be crazy enough to construct a club made of cotton? He wondered how something like that could stay grounded with the cold wind gusts during winter but supposed the weight of the people inside would keep it from blowing away.

“Rodney,” she said, commanding; it frightened him. She sat on the sofa, its wide cushions nearly swallowing her frame. “I have something for you. Go wash your hands first.”

“Yes, Nana.” She couldn’t have finally succumbed to gifting cookies, could she?

Nana’s bathroom was porcelain white with a thick green shower curtain that stretched nearly to the ceiling. He stepped towards the sink but eyed the curtain, an abysmal cloak of forest green plastic that swallowed light and could maybe swallow him if he veered too close. It was not that he feared the curtain, no more than one feared deep shadows and funeral hearses. But he certainly did not trust what may lurk behind it. It covered an eerie noise–a wretched dripping that never ceased. He supposed it could’ve been a leaky faucet, perhaps, but he dared not look. Every so often the pipes seemed to groan in pain. It made such a noise then. He gasped and turned. Under the sink’s water, he scrubbed his hands hurriedly with Nana’s pumice soap that always left beige suds in the sink and his palms smelling of elm wood.

He rushed out to her side and, with Pop watching, she extended a foot long box wrapped in blue butcher paper. Cookies and honey buns couldn’t come in rectangular boxes this narrow, could they? His fingers tore through the paper.

Beneath the cardboard lid, two wooden sticks lay side-by-side.

“I used to play the drums when I was a girl,” she said, a slight smirk gracing her thin lips. “My daddy couldn’t afford the set, but drumsticks and a pail will do the same. You take good care of these, yuh hear?”

“Yes, Nana.”

“He’ll break ’em Ma,” said Pop.

“He won’t,” said Nana.

Over the next few months Rodney banged the sticks on every type of surface imaginable: overturned buckets, basketballs, and mattresses. He used his bedroom wall until the neighbors shouted words through it that weren’t allowed in church. Pop forbid him to use the kitchen pots as an instrument, but allowed him to practice on the stoop until his arms were tired and drained.

During their weekly visits to Nana’s apartment, which couldn’t seem to come soon enough, she’d play a swing record and tell Rodney to sit. After placing a heavy dictionary on his lap, she’d tell him to play along with the music, inspecting his hands as he struck the book’s sturdy cover with the drumsticks.

“Flam! Paradiddle! Roll! It’s in the wrists,” she’d say, taking the sticks from him and positioning her hands over the book. “Like this.”

“Ma,” pleaded Pop. “Your arthritis.”

“Hush,” said Nana.

Her hands, frail and wrinkled like skin after a summer’s day in the Rec center pool, moved rhythmically as the drumsticks seemed to blur before Rodney’s eyes. Tapping like a woodpecker, the sticks moved rapidly, keeping a steady rhythm, faster and faster until the sound was that of fine grains of sand pouring into a pan.

They practiced together. She hovered over Rodney while he banged recklessly. She’d bark and pop his wrists until his rudiments were refined and precise. And as Rodney grew taller so did her expectations.

In high school, he joined the jazz band and became “the best drummer in the school district,” according to what his teacher told Pop. Nana would visit the school for his performances every once in a while. In the auditorium, several rows from the stage, she sat alongside Pop, dressed in a violet dress the color of orchids with her best wig and pearl earrings. When the brass horns and the woodwinds sounded and Rodney swung the sticks along the high-hat and the snare’s rim, Nana stood entranced, humming the melody and flicking her fingers along with the rhythm.

Between semesters in college, Rodney would often catch the six train to Nana’s and they’d sit, listening to the feats of Ella, Cab Calloway, and Coltrane. One evening, the music already as loud as it would go, Nana complained that the volume wasn’t high enough, and that Rodney should speak up and stop mumbling.

“Méniere’s disease,” Pop said to Rodney. “There’s nothing the doctors can do for it.”

One morning Rodney went to Nana’s and knocked on her door. After several seconds the silent stillness that answered unsettled him. He pulled her spare key from his jacket and opened the door.

Nana was on the couch, her shoulders slouched as if they bore an invisible weight. Her eyes, full of pain that he hadn’t seen in them before, were fixed on her crates of records. A pair of hearing aids rested in her open palm.

“These don’t do me any good no more, Rodney,” she said. He sat beside her, placed her hand in his, her fantastic sounds but a memory.

As her strength waned through the years, so did Rodney’s desire to play music. The sounds weren’t the same anymore. Rodney had soon taken interest in other things more serious and practical things, like accounting, and a mortgage, and marriage, and reading the morning paper.

One dreary morning, Nana’s heart played its final note. Pop quietly wept at her funeral. With the other pallbearers, he carried the casket with cotton gloves over his hands, the fabric as white as porcelain.

It had been years since Rodney had heard a rhythm so magnetic and full of life. Now, he and Jillian listened to the baby’s drumming heartbeat. The fetus was only nine weeks old and growing by the second. For days prior to the appointment, Rodney had scoured through their growing collection of magazines and journals for expecting parents. It seemed as though every week held an exciting milestone to look forward to: the development of the central nervous system, the limbs, the eyes, the brain. But none as exciting as this. The sound of its beating heart was sort of like first contact–the first time actually hearing the life growing inside of Jillian.

“What can we do to ensure she has a safe term, doctor?” asked Rodney. “And that the baby comes out healthy?”

“Other then helping to keep Jillian’s stress levels down and reminding her to eat a vitamin-rich diet, there’s not much the father can do at this time. It’s still early in the pregnancy.”

“Thank you for everything, Doctor Sullivan,” Jillian said, smiling. “See you in a couple of weeks?”

“You’re welcome.” He turned away from Jillian’s stomach, placed the doppler above its machine, and fidgeted with several knobs. As he did, Rodney’s eyes ascended above Dr. Sullivan’s shoulder and honed in on one frame among the plaques mounted on the wall. Behind the glass, a gold vinyl record sat beside an autographed sleeve.

“Miles?” Rodney said, squinting and pointing toward the frame.

Sullivan glanced from the machine. “I beg your pardon?”

“Miles Davis. That record–how’d you get it?”

“Oh,” said Sullivan, smiling and looking toward the frame. “I delivered one of his grandchildren, believe it or not. It was a gesture from the parents. Cool, huh?”

“Yeah! He’s a legend.”

Sullivan turned from the frame. “Yuh know, Rodney,” he said. “Studies have shown that even in the womb, the fetus can detect sound. And sound, especially music, can help parts of the baby’s brain to develop.”

Rodney eyed the vinyl record’s sleeve, his mind on the collection of milk crates stored in his garage. “Music, huh?” he said, nearly in a whisper. Just then, his fingers twitched–first one, then the others. “I like the sound of that.”