“I was lucky,” I say. “My folks treated me decently.”
“And you deserved it.”
“Everybody deserves to be treated decently,” I tell him.
“Well, sure.”
We grew up in the same building before my parents could afford a larger apartment down the block. My mom used to feel sorry for Alex’s mother and we’d go over to visit when Crazy Eddie wasn’t home. I’d play with Alex and his little sister, our moms would pretend our lives were normal, that none of us were dirt poor, everybody dreaming of moving to the ’burbs. Some of our neighbors did, but most of us couldn’t afford it and still can’t. Of course the way things are going now, you’re not any safer or happier in the ’burbs than you are in the inner city. And living here, at least we’ve got some history.
But we never thought about that kind of thing at the time because we were just kids. Older times, simpler times. I smile, remembering how Alex always treated me so nice, right from the first.
“And then, of course, I had you looking out for me, too,” I say.
“You still do.”
I hadn’t really got around to thinking what he was doing here in All Souls at this time of the morning, but now it makes sense. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to ask him not to follow me around. It gives some people the creeps, but I know Alex isn’t some crazed stalker, fixated on me. He means well. He really is just looking out for me. But it’s a weird feeling all the same. I honestly thought I’d got him to stop.
“You really don’t have to be doing this,” I tell him. “I mean, it was kind of sweet when we were kids and you kept me from being bullied in the playground, but it’s not the same now.”
“You know the reason the dealers leave you alone?” he asks.
I glance toward the iron gates at the other end of the graveyard, but there’s no one there at the moment. The drug market’s closed up for the morning.
“They never knew I was here,” I say.
Alex shakes his head and that’s enough. He doesn’t have to explain. I know the reputation he has in the neighborhood. I feel a chill and I don’t know if it’s from the close call I had or the fact that I live in the kind of world where a woman can’t go out by herself. Probably both.
“It’s still not right,” I say. “I appreciate your looking out for me, really I do, but it’s not right, your following me around the way you do. You’ve got to get a life, Alex.”
He hangs his head and I feel like I’ve just reprimanded a puppy dog for doing something it thought was really good.
“I know,” he mumbles. He won’t look at me. “I . . . I’m sorry, Lillie.”
He gets up and starts to walk away. I look at his broad back and suddenly I’m thinking of the boy from the garden again. I’m seeing his sadness and anger, the way he dove off the wall into the fog and out of my life. I’m remembering what I said to him, that I would never hurt him, that I’ve never hurt anyone. And I remember what he said to me, just before he jumped.
That’s what you think.
I’m not stupid. I know I’m not responsible for someone falling in love with me. I can’t help if it they get hurt because maybe I don’t love them back. But this isn’t anyone. This is Alex. I’ve known him longer than maybe anyone I know. And if he’s looked out for me, I’ve looked out for him, too. I stood up for him when people put him down. I visited him in the county jail when no one else did. I took him to the hospital that time the Creevy brothers left him for dead on the steps of his apartment building.
I know that for all his fierceness, he’s a sweet guy. Dangerous, sure, but underneath that toughness there’s no monster like his old man was. Given a different set of circumstances, a different neighborhood to grow up in, maybe, a different father, definitely, he could have made something of himself. But he didn’t. And now I’m wondering if looking out for me was maybe part of what held him back. If I’d gotten myself out of the neighborhood, maybe he would have, too. Maybe we could both have been somebody.
But none of that’s important right now. So maybe I’m not in love with Alex. So what? He’s still my friend. He opened his heart to me and it’s like I didn’t even hear him.
“Alex!” I call after him.
He pauses and turns. There’s nothing hopeful in the way he looks, there’s not even curiosity. I get up from where I’ve been sitting and go to where he’s standing.
“I’ve got to let this all sink in,” I tell him. “You caught me off guard. I mean, I never even guessed you felt the way you do.”
“I understand,” he says.
“No, you don’t. You’re the best friend I ever had. I just never thought of us as a couple. Doesn’t mean all of a sudden I hate you or something.”
He shrugs. “I never should have said anything,” he says.
I shake my head. “No. What you should have done is said something a lot sooner. The way I see it, your big problem is you keep everything all bottled up inside. You’ve got to let people know what you’re thinking.”
“That wouldn’t change anything.”
“How do you know? When I was a kid I had the hugest crush on you. And later, I kept expecting you to ask me out, but you never did. Got so’s I just never thought of you in terms of boyfriend material.”
“So what’re you saying?”
I smile. “I don’t know. You could ask me to go to a movie or something.”
“Do you want to go to a movie?”
“Maybe. Let me buy you breakfast and we’ll talk about it.”
9
So I’m trying to do like Lillie says, talk about stuff that means something to me, or at least I do it with her. She asks me once what I’d like to do with my life, because she can’t see much future in my being a bouncer for a strip joint for the rest of my life. I tell her I’ve always wanted to paint and instead of laughing, she goes out and buys me a little tin of watercolors and a pad of paper. I give it a go and she tells me I’m terrible, like I don’t know it, but takes the first piece I do and hangs it on her fridge.
Another time I tell her about this castle I used to dream about when I was a kid, the most useless castle you could imagine, just these walls and a garden in them that’s gone all wild, but when I was there, nobody could hurt me, nobody at all.
She gives me an odd look and says, “With old castle rock for the walls.”
10
So I guess Alex was right. I must have been looking for ghosts in All Souls—or at least I found one. Except it wasn’t the ghost of someone who’d died and been buried in there. It was the ghost of a kid, a kid that was still living somewhere in an enclosed wild garden, secreted deep in his grown-up mind, a kid fooling around in trees full of grackles, hidden from the hurting world, held safe by moonlight and vines.
But you know, hiding’s not always the answer. Because the more Alex talks to me, the more he opens up, the more I see him the way I did when I was a little girl, when I’d daydream about how he and I were going to spend the rest of our lives together.
I guess we were both carrying around ghosts.
In the Pines
Life ain’t all a dance.
—attributed to Dolly Parton
1
It’s celebrity night at the Standish and we have us some line-up. There are two Elvises—a young one, with the swiveling hips and a perfect sneer, and a white-suited one, circa the Vegas years. A Buddy Holly who sounds right but could’ve lost fifty pounds if he really wanted to look the part. A Marilyn Monroe who has her boyfriend with her; he’ll be wearing a JFK mask for her finale, when she sings “Happy Birthday” to him in a breathless voice. Lonesome George Clark has come out of semi-retirement to reprise his old Hank Williams show and then there’s me, doing my Dolly Parton tribute for the first time in the three years since I gave it up and tried to make it on my own.
I don’t really mind doing it. I’ve kind of missed Dolly, to tell you the truth, and it’s all for a good cause—a benefit to raise money for the Crowsea
Home for Battered Women—which is how they convinced me to do that old act of mine one more time.
I do a pretty good version of Dolly. I’m not as pretty as her, and I don’t have her hair—hey, who does?—but I’ve got the figure while the wig, makeup and rhinestone dress take care of the rest. I can mimic her singing, though my natural voice is lower, and I sure as hell play the guitar better—I don’t know who she’s kidding with those fingernails of hers.
But in the end, the looks never mattered. It was always the songs. The first time I heard her sing them, I just plain fell in love. “Jolene.” “Coat of Many Colors.” “My Blue Tears.” I planned to do a half hour of those old hits with a couple of mountain songs thrown in for good measure. The only one from my old act that I was dropping was “I Will Always Love You.” Thanks to the success Whitney Houston had with it, people weren’t going to be thinking Tennessee cabins and Dolly anymore when they heard it.
I’m slated to follow the fat Elvis—maybe they wanted to stick all the rhinestones together in one part of the show?—with Lonesome George finishing up after me. Since Lonesome George and I are sharing the same backup band, we’re going to close the show with a duet on “Muleskinner Blues.” The thought of it makes me smile and not just because I’ll get to do a little bit of yodeling. With everything Dolly’s done over the years, even she never got to sing with Hank Williams—senior, of course. Junior parties a little too hearty for my tastes.
So I’m standing there in the wings of the Standish, watching Marilyn slink and grind her way through a song—the girl is good—when I get this feeling that something is going to happen.
I’m kind of partial to premonitions. The last time I felt one this strong was the night John Narraway died. We were working late on my first album at Tommy Norton’s High Lonesome Sounds and had finally called it quits sometime after midnight when the feeling hit me. It starts with a hum or a buzz, like I’ve got a fly or a bee caught in my ear, and then everything seems . . . oh, I don’t know. Clearer somehow. Precise. Like I could look at Johnny’s fiddle bow that night and see every one of those horsehairs, separate and on its own.
The trouble with these feelings is that while I know something’s going to happen, I don’t know what. I get a big feeling or a little one, but after that I’m on my own. Truth is, I never figure out what it’s all about until after the fact, which doesn’t make it exactly the most useful talent a girl can have. I don’t even know if it’s something good or something bad that’s coming, just that it’s coming. Real helpful, right?
So I’m standing there and Marilyn’s brought her boyfriend out for the big finish to her act and I know something’s going to happen, but I don’t know what. I get real twitchy all through the fat Elvis’s act and then it’s time for me to go up and the buzzing’s just swelling up so big inside me that I feel like I’m fit to burst with anticipation.
We open with “My Tennessee Mountain Home.” It goes over pretty well and we kick straight into “Jolene” before the applause dies off. The third song we do is the first song I ever learned, that old mountain song, “In the Pines.” I don’t play it the same as most people I’ve heard do—I learned it from my Aunt Hickory, with this lonesome barred F# minor chord coming right in after the D that opens every line. I remember cursing for weeks before I could finally get my fingers around that damn chord and make it sound like it was supposed to.
So we’re into the chorus now—
In the pines, in the pines,
Where the sun never shines
And the shiverin’ cold winds blow.
—and I’m looking out into the crowd and I can’t see much, what with the spotlights in my eyes and all, but damned if I don’t see her sitting there in the third row, my Aunt Hickory, big as life, grinning right back up at me, except she’s dead, she’s been dead fifteen years now, and it’s all I can do to get through the chorus and let the band take an instrumental break.
2
The Aunt—that’s what everybody in those parts called her, ’cept me, I guess. I don’t know if it was because they didn’t know her name, or because she made them feel uneasy, but nobody used the name that had been scratched onto her rusty mailbox, down on Dirt Creek Road. That just said Hickory Jones.
I loved the sound of her name. It had a ring to it like it was pulled straight out of one of those old mountain songs. Like Shady Groves. Or Tom Dooley.
She lived by her own self in a one-room log cabin, up the hill behind the Piney Woods Trailer Park, a tall, big-boned woman with angular features and her chestnut hair cropped close to her head. Half the boys in the park had hair longer than hers, slicked back and shiny. She dressed like a man in blue jeans and a flannel shirt, barefoot in the summer, big old workboots on those callused feet when the weather turned mean and the snows came.
She really was my aunt. She and Mama shared the same mother except Hickory had Kickaha blood, you could see it in the deep coppery color of her skin. Mama’s father was white trash, same as mine, though that’s an opinion I never shared out loud with anyone, not even Hickory. My daddy never needed much of a reason to give us kids a licking. Lord knows what he’d have done if we’d given him a real excuse.
I never could figure out what it was about Hickory that made people feel so damn twitchy around her. Mama said it was because of the way Hickory dressed.
“I know she’s my sister,” Mama would say, “but she looks like some no account hobo, tramping the rail lines. It’s just ain’t right. Man looks at her, he can’t even tell she’s got herself a pair of titties under that shirt.”
Breasts were a big topic of conversation in Piney Woods when I was growing up and I remember wishing I had a big old shirt like Hickory’s when my own chest began to swell and it seemed like it was never gonna stop. Mama acted like it was a real blessing, but I hated them. “You can’t have too much of a good thing,” she told me when she heard me complaining. “You just pray they keep growing a while longer, Darlene, ’cause if they do, you mark my words. You’re gonna have your pick of a man.”
Yeah, but what kind of a man? I wanted to know. It wasn’t just the boys looking at me, or what they’d say; it was the men, too. Everybody staring down at my chest when they were talking to me, ’stead of looking me in the face. I could see them just itching to grab themselves a handful.
“You just shut your mouth, girl,” Mama would say if I didn’t let it go.
Hickory never told me to shut my mouth. But then I guess she didn’t have to put up with me twenty-four hours a day, neither. She just stayed up by her cabin, growing her greens and potatoes in a little plot out back, running trap lines or taking to the hills with her squirrel gun for meat. Maybe once a month she’d head into town to pick up some coffee or flour, whatever the land couldn’t provide for her. She’d walk the five miles in, then walk the whole way back, didn’t matter how heavy that pack of hers might be or what the weather was like.
I guess that’s really what people didn’t like about her—just living the way she did, she showed she didn’t need nobody, she could do it all on her own, and back then that was frowned upon for a woman. They thought she was queer—and I don’t just mean tetched in the head, though they thought that, too. No, they told stories about how she’d sleep with other women, how she could raise the dead and was friends with the devil, and just about any other kind of foolish idea they could come up with.
’Course I wasn’t supposed to go up to her cabin—none of us kids were, especially the girls—but I went anyways. Hickory played the five-string banjo and I’d go up and listen to her sing those old lonesome songs that nobody wanted to hear anymore. There was no polish to Hickory’s singing, not like they put on music today, but she could hold a note long and true and she could play that banjo so sweet that it made you want to cry or laugh, depending on the mood of the tune.
See, Hickory’s where I got started in music. First I’d go up just to listen and maybe sing along a little, though back then I had less polish in my vo
ice than Hickory did. After a time I got an itching to play an instrument too and that’s when Hickory took down this little old 1919 Martin guitar from where it hung on the rafters and when I’d sneak up to her cabin after that I’d play that guitar until my fingers ached and I’d be crying from how much they hurt, but I never gave up. Didn’t get me nowhere, but I can say this much: whatever else’s happened to me in this life, I never gave up the music. Not for anything, not for anyone.
And the pain went away.
“That’s the thing,” Hickory told me. “Doesn’t matter how bad it gets, the pain goes away. Sometimes you got to die to stop hurting, but the hurting stops.”
I guess the real reason nobody bothered her is that they were scared of her, scared of the big dark-skinned cousins who’d come down from the rez to visit her sometimes, scared of the simples and charms she could make, scared of what they saw in her eyes when she gave them that hard look of hers. Because Hickory didn’t back down, not never, not for nobody.
3
I fully expect Hickory to be no more than an apparition. I’d look away, then back, and she’d be gone. I mean, what else could happen? She was long dead and I might believe in a lot of things, but ghosts aren’t one of them.
But by the time the boys finish their break and it’s time for me to step back up to the mike for another verse, there she is, still sitting in the third row, still grinning up at me. I’ll tell you, I near choke right about then, all the words I ever knew to any song just up and fly away. There’s a couple of ragged bars in the music where I don’t know if I’ll be finishing the song or not and I can feel the concern of the boys playing there on stage behind me. But Hickory she just gives me a look with those dark brown eyes of hers, that look she used to give me all those years ago when I’d run up so hard against the wall of a new chord or a particularly tricky line of melody that I just wanted to throw the guitar down and give it all up.