I rocked back and forth, grinding my heels into the red dirt, my fists into my stomach, crooning into the dark night and the reflected glow from the tent. I cried until I was dry, and then I laughed. I put my head back and laughed until my voice was hoarse and the damp fog came in to cover the lights from the revival. If Aunt Ruth had come out to me then, I would have apologized for everything, for living and not loving her enough to save her from the cancer that was eating her alive. I didn’t know. For something, surely, I would have had something to apologize for, for being young and healthy and sitting there full of music. That was what gospel was meant to do—make you hate and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified. It worked on me. It absolutely worked on me.
10
The gospel revival tent had been a revelation, but the “Sunrise Gospel Hour” became an obsession. Every morning, before Aunt Ruth and Uncle Travis were up, I’d go sit close to the radio in their parlor to listen to the “Sunrise Gospel Hour.” In the stillness of the early dawn, I would lean into the speaker and practice my secret ambition, cupping my fingers next to my chin and tilting my head back to whisper-sing so no one could hear me. I sang quietly along with everything, not just the gospel shows but the country hits that followed—Marty Robbins, Kitty Wells, Johnny Cash, Ruth Brown, Stonewall Jackson, June Carter, Johnny Horton. I sang so quietly I could barely hear my own voice, but in my imagination my song soared out strong and beautiful.
Aunt Ruth would always smile when she saw me with my head pressed close to the radio. “Turn it up,” she’d say. “You an’t the only one likes a little music.” Sometimes she’d even start humming along. One weekend she got Earle to bring his record player over and we spent two days listening to her favorite songs. It turned out Aunt Ruth had a bunch of her own records in a box under her bed, an original Carter Family set, Patsy Montana singing “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart,” the Clinch Mountain Clan doing Hank Williams’s “Are You Walking and a-Talking for the Lord,” Roy Acuff’s “Wabash Cannonball,” and Roy Acuff singing “The Wreck on the Highway.” Her prize was a copy of Al Dexter and the Troopers singing “Pistol Packing Mama.” Every time the chorus came on, she’d pound her hand on the couch and sing along, waving at me to join in with her. We’d yell it out, “Pistol packing mama, lay that pistol down,” until we drove Uncle Travis out to sit on the bumper of his car with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
He came in once to get a hunk of cheese for a meal and stopped in to complain. “You’re scaring off the dogs. Give it a break.”
“Leave us alone, old man.” Aunt Ruth’s face was pink and happy. “We’re full of the spirit.”
“But you sound terrible,” he told us sadly. “You just can’t sing. ”
“Oh, hell, Travis, we know.” Aunt Ruth looked too pleased with herself to take offense, but I was shocked. I thought we’d been sounding pretty good. “We know and we don’t care. It’s just so much fun. Why don’t you join us? Come on. Bone, put on that one Earle loaned us. You like Stonewall Jackson, don’t you, Travis?”
“Oh, no. You an’t gonna get me started. I an’t no singing fool.” He backed out the door like he was afraid something was gonna jump on him. I shrugged and put on the Jackson song. If I squeezed my neck down tight I could almost mimic Stonewall’s deep sad sound. My voice came out rusty and dark as his, like a man singing up from the bottom of a coal mine.
Aunt Ruth beamed at my attempt, laughing until she almost strangled. “Oh, God, Bone! Good God, you are something. You are just about more than I can stand.” She fell back weakly, her fingers still keeping time to the music. “Lord God, you are. You are. Lord God, play it again.”
The weekend before school was supposed to start, Mama said I had to move back home and leave Aunt Ruth to the care of her daughter Deedee. Deedee had agreed to come home only after Travis promised to make the payments on her prized Chevy sedan, and she delayed her arrival until the night before I was to leave and showed up irritable and complaining of having to come back at all. She acted like her mama’s illness was her personal cross to bear. I was appalled.
“She could die any time,” I told Deedee the next morning. “Don’t you ever think about that?”
We were out on Aunt Ruth’s porch waiting for Mama to come for me, Deedee sitting in the rocker while I leaned against the rail. Deedee just smirked, lit another of the Chesterfield cigarettes that Aunt Ruth hated, and tossed the dead match back at me. “She an’t gonna die, not yet anyway, not till I’m out of my mind with boredom and ready to kill her myself. You don’t know, Bonehead. You don’t know how long Mama’s been dragging around. I been picking up after her and my lazy-assed brothers all my life. People always whining at me what a tragedy it is, Mama so sick and likely to die. Uh-huh, right, I say. First it was female trouble and she couldn’t lift nothing, then it was bad lungs and nobody supposed to smoke in the house. Never could play the radio or make no noise after sunset so she could get her rest. Never no boyfriends could come by and honk to take me out. No new dresses ’cause her medicine cost so much. Nothing but wheezing and whining and telling me what to do.”
Deedee’s face was hateful, her eyes flinty and piercing. She reached up and grabbed my forearm, pulling me down close to her. “You don’t know what it’s like, Bone. Getting out on your own and then being dragged back home. Wait a few years, get yourself a sweetheart, a job that pays you your own money, stuff you like to do that your mama thinks is silly or sinful.” She let go of my arm and kicked the rocker into motion. “Hell, just about everything I like in this world is silly or sinful. Silly sinful Deedee, that’s what they call me. Well, damn them, I don’t care. I got my car and my own plans, and when that car’s paid for, you can bet your ass I’ll be gone again. Next time I get out of here, the devil himself an’t gonna be able to drag me back.”
The hair on the nape of my neck stood up. I didn’t know what to say, what to think. Earle had finished painting the porch last weekend, and now the white boards shone in the sun, throwing the noon light up into Deedee’s dark eyes. I remembered Earle leaning against the porch rail shaking his head, his voice hoarse and sad as he complained that he just didn’t understand how things could get so messed up. The simplest things, I thought. I went down the stairs and squatted on the bottom step with my fingers templed on my knees as if I were praying. Deedee sounded like she hated her mama, wanted her to die. I couldn’t understand that, couldn’t stand to think about it. I watched for Mama’s car and sang over and over in my head, “Sun’s gonna shine, sun’s gonna shine, in my back door, someday.” Song was prayer, prayer was song. What could I sing that would touch Deedee’s heart or my own, comfort either one of us?
Every afternoon after school I was supposed to go stay with Reese at Aunt Alma‘s, but instead I started going over to the West Greenville Cafe on the Eustis Highway. The jukebox had as many old songs as new—Loretta Lynn, Teresa Brewer, Patsy Cline, and Mama’s favorite, Kitty Wells. The truckers loved that music as much as I did. I’d sit out under the cafe windows and hum along with those twangy girl voices, imagining myself crooning those raw and desperate notes. Everybody knew that Opry stars started as gospel singers. All those women singing about their unfaithful men sang first about the certain love of God. Half asleep in the sun, reassured by the familiar smell of frying fat, I’d make promises to God. If only He’d let me be a singer! I knew I’d probably turn to whiskey and rock ’n’ roll like they all did, but not for years, I promised. Not for years, Lord. Not till I had glorified His name and bought Mama a yellow Cadillac and a house on Old Henderson Road.
More than anything in the world, I decided, I wanted to be one of the little girls in white fringed vests with silver and gold embroidered crosses—the ones who sang on the revival circuit and taped shows for early-morning television. I wanted gray-headed ladies to cry when they saw my pink cheeks. I wanted people to moan when they heard the throb in my voice as I sang of the miracle in my life. I wanted a miracle in my life. I wante
d to be a gospel singer and be loved by the whole wide world.
Jesus, make me a gospel singer, I prayed, while Teresa sang of what might have been God and then again might have been some black-eyed man. But Jesus must have been busy with Teresa, because my voice went high and shrill every time I got excited, and cracked hoarsely if I tried to croon. The preacher at Bushy Creek Baptist wouldn’t even let me stand near the choir to turn the pages of the hymnal, and without a voice like Teresa’s or June Carter’s, I couldn’t sing gospel. I could just listen and watch the gray-headed ladies cry. It was an injustice I could not understand or forgive. There had to be a way to stretch my voice, to sing the way I dreamed I could. I prayed and practiced and stubbornly hoped.
Driving from Greenville to the Sunshine lot on Highway 85 past the Sears, Roebuck warehouse, the air base, the rolling green and red-mud hills—a trip we made almost every other week now that Daddy Glen was working for his father—we would sometimes get to singing like some traveling gospel family. While I was sleeping somebody touched me, while I was sleeping, Oh! Somebody touched me ... musta been the hand of the Lord ...
Full-voice, all-out, our singing filled the car and shocked the passing traffic. Reese howled and screeched, Mama’s voice broke like she too dreamed of Teresa Brewer, and Daddy Glen made sounds that would have scared cows. None of them cared, and I tried to pretend I wasn’t that bad. I put my head out the window and wailed for all I was worth. The wind filled my mouth and the roar obscured the fact that I sang as badly as any of them.
Once I got so carried away that I went and sang into the electric fan when we got home. It made my voice buzz and waver like a slide guitar, an effect I particularly liked. Mama complained it gave her a headache and would give me an ear-ache if I didn’t cut it out.
“What the hell is she doing?” Daddy Glen acted like I was singing just to make him mad. “She trying to take the paint off the walls or just sour the milk?” He reached past the fan for me with one of his big hands.
“Glen.” Mama’s voice was soft, but it stopped him. He looked at her like she had stuck a needle in his heart.
“You shouldn’t encourage her,” he told Mama. “Gonna have her thinking she can do any damn thing she pleases, and then where will we be? Hell, she’s out running the county every afternoon as it is.”
Mama put her arm around Daddy Glen’s waist. “I know you worry, but trust me, honey. I know where Bone is every minute. I wouldn’t let nothing happen to my little girl.” Daddy Glen relaxed under Mama’s touch until he was almost smiling.
“Bone, get your daddy some ice tea,” she told me. “And put some extra sugar in it like he likes.”
I got the tea and then a washcloth so Mama could cool Daddy Glen’s neck while they sat together. Mama didn’t look at me once the whole time, but Daddy Glen did, his eyes sliding over me like I was a new creature, something he hadn’t figured out yet how to tame. It had been a long time since he had caught me alone, and sometimes I could almost convince myself that he had never held me tight to his hips, never put his hands down inside my clothes. I pretended it had all been a bad dream that would never come back, but I was careful to stay away from him.
I ran off before Daddy Glen could ask for anything more and took the fan out on the back porch. I sang to myself as softly as I could, humming into the motor, thinking about how gospel singers were always on the road. Even if I didn’t get to be the star, I might wind up singing background in a “family”—all of us dressed alike in electric-blue fringed blouses with silver embroidery, traveling in a big bus, and calling home from different cities. But it would be better to be a soloist and be in demand all the time. All I needed was a chance to turn my soulful black eyes on a tent full of believers, sing out the little break in my mournful voice. I knew I could make them love me. There was a secret to it, but I would find it out. If they could do it to me, I would find a way to do it to the world.
“Bullshit and apple butter,” Granny laughed cruelly when I finally told her about watching the morning gospel singers and wanting to be like them. “You got to be joking, Bone! You can’t sing, girl. You can’t sing at all.”
“Not now,” I admitted grudgingly. “But I’m working on it. I’m gonna get better. And think about it, Granny. Think about what it would be like.”
“Oh, I know.” Granny’s expression became gentle, her voice careful. “I know the power of gospel singers. Some of these Christian women will believe anything for the sake of a gospel singer.”
“Anything.” I loved the way she said that. Granny’s “Christian women” came out like new spit on a dusty morning, pure and precious and deeply satisfying.
“Anything,” I echoed, and she gave me her toothless, twisted grin. We were sitting close together in Mama’s lawn chairs in the backyard. Granny always complained about Mama not living in houses with porches and rocking chairs, but she liked Mama’s reclining lawn chair. Now she reached out, put her hand on the back of my neck, squeezed, and laughed.
“You got a look like your granddaddy sometimes.” She pinched me and laughed again. “Bastard was meaner than a snake, but he had his ways. And didn’t I love his ways? Lord Christ!” She leaned back and rolled the snuff around in her mouth.
“Man had only two faults I couldn’t abide. Wouldn’t work to save his life and couldn’t stay away from gospel singers. Used to stand out back of revival tents offering ’em the best homemade whiskey in Greenville County. Then he’d bring me that slush they cleaned out of the taps. Bastard!” She stiffened and looked back over her shoulder, afraid Mama might be listening. Mama didn’t allow anybody to use that word in her house.
“Well, shit.” She spit to the side. “You got a little of that too, don’t you? A little of that silliness, that revival crap?”
“Cousin Temple says you a heathen.”
“Oh, Temple, huh. Temple’s a pure damn fool.”
I said nothing. Granny wiped her chin.
“Don’t you go telling your mama everything you hear.”
“No ma’am.”
“And don’t go taking that gospel stuff seriously. It’s nice to clean you out now and then, but it an’t for real. It’s like bad whiskey. Run through you fast and leave you with a pain.” She wiped her chin again and sighed like she’d taken to doing lately. I hated that sigh. I liked her better when she was being mean. When she started sighing, she was likely to start crying. Then her face would squeeze down on itself in a way that scared me.
“I an’t no fool.” I rocked back and forth in my chair, pushing off hard with my bare feet. Granny’s face twitched, and I saw the light come back into her eyes.
“You know how your mama feels about that word.” It was true. Mama had given me one of her rare scoldings for calling Reese a fool. She hated it almost as much as “bastard.”
“An’t no fool and an’t no bastard.” I rocked steadily, watching Granny’s face.
Granny laughed and looked back over her shoulder nervously. “Oh, you gonna be the death of your mama, and won’t I be sorry then.”
She didn’t look sorry. She looked better. I said it again.
“An’t no fool and an’t no bastard.”
Granny started laughing so hard she choked on her snuff.
“You’re both, and you just silly ‘bout that music just like your granddaddy.” She sounded like she might strangle from laughing. “And goddam, he was both too.”
My gospel thing did get on Mama’s nerves after a while, but Aunt Alma reassured her. “It’s obnoxious but normal, Anney, and you know it. Every girl in the family gets religion sooner or later.” Mama nodded absently. She wasn’t so sure it was that simple. Mama almost never went to church, but she took God and most issues of faith absolutely seriously.
“Oh, Anney’s a Christian woman,” Uncle Earle told Aunt Alma the morning after the night Mama threw him out for puking liquor on her kitchen table. “But she wears me down being so stubborn all the time. You’d think she never took a drink of whis
key or chased no good-looking man in her life.”
“She’s just as stiff-necked as she can be,” Cousin Deedee agreed. She was supposed to be with Aunt Ruth but seemed to be over at Alma’s or Raylene’s more than she was home. “You know, Bone, your mama’s the kind gets us all in trouble to begin with. Like something out of one of them stories they tell in Sunday school, supposed to be a lesson to the rest of us.” She smirked at me. “Ask for nothing, trust in God. Do the right thing. Right! And he’ll send you bastards and rabies before he’s through.
“I hate,” Deedee swore, “the very notion of a Christian woman with her hard-scrubbed, starved-thin, stiff and scrawny neck!”
“She hates herself,” Mama told us when Reese repeated what Deedee had said. “And I don’t know that God has much of anything to do with it.” She gave me one of those sharp, almost frightening looks she seemed to have developed over the summer. “People don’t do right because of the fear of God or love of him. You do the right thing because the world doesn’t make sense if you don’t.”
I no longer accepted everything Mama told me as gospel, but I knew what she meant. Doing the right thing shouldn’t have anything to do with like or love or goodness or Jesus, though most people swore Jesus had something to do with everything. I knew Mama believed in Jesus well enough, even though she wouldn’t talk about it, and I decided that deep in her heart she understood exactly what I was doing. I gave myself over to the mystery of Jesus’ blood, reading the Bible at the kitchen table after dinner and going to the Wednesday-night services for young people. Mama said nothing, Reese teased me, and Daddy Glen sneered.