Once Upon a Farm

by Rory Feek

  Now, here it is a couple years later, and I see Russdriver almost every day next door at my brother-in-law Keith’s house . . . he’s been in the big barn working on a bus. A new old bus. And not just any bus.

  Our bus.

  He found one for us that he’s been fixing up. Like me, it’s got a bit of history (to put it mildly) and could use a new story to tell. It was rusting out and deserted in a parking lot when Russ found it—nothing much to look at—but it was actually quite famous at one time.

  She was the old Girls Gone Wild bus that you may have seen on TV twenty years ago, going from town to town, picking up pretty girls that, well . . . went wild.

  But by the time Russell found her, she was broken down and abandoned and not worth much of anything. Russ being who Russ is . . . bought her and is fixing her up. Actually, a couple weeks ago he moved her out into the bus barn here at the farm. He and his buddy Ray spend the days sanding down the rust and peeling paint, getting it ready not just for new paint but for a new story.

  A couple months ago, when Russ first told me about this bus, I thought it was crazy that he bought one with a sordid history as this one had. But not long after that, Aaron and I spent an afternoon with Russell ripping out the old carpet and listening to him dream about what the bus could be, and his excitement about it moved me, and I sat down that evening and wrote this:

  I was young, what can I say? I didn’t know any better. My family wanted me to do something respectful for a living . . . maybe drive around from college to college filled with important medical equipment, like my ol’ man did. Or drive a nice couple and their dog around, like my grandfather, the Coach, did. But I was rebellious, like all youngsters are. I wanted to take my own road.

  His name was Joe, and he was a smooth talker. Said he’d show me the world and make me famous. Even put me on TV. How could I refuse? So I went with him, and for a while I felt pretty. People saw me coming and pointed and stared. Man, I was something. But life in the fast lane started to catch up with me. And some bad things happened. Things I’m not proud of. I didn’t mean for it to. I just got caught up in the money and the drugs and the sex. Pretty soon I was old before my time. Used up and tossed to the side of the road. I felt so ashamed.

  Joe moved on to someone else. First, a fancier Prevost, then a Leerjet, and then God-knows-what after that. Last I heard, he lost it all and was in hiding somewhere. In the meantime I was abandoned and forgotten. I ended up in an empty parking lot in Tennessee. For years nobody even looked at me. And if they did, they just made fun or threw rocks at me. I wanted to die. I almost did too.

  But then, a few months ago . . . this nice man Russell came to look at me. And he saw something that no one else did. Through the rust and filth, he said, he saw something beautiful. And so he picked me. Out of every other one in the world, he picked me. Can you believe that? Not just that . . . he fought for me. He had to get a lawyer and fight to get custody of me.

  And now . . . now he’s fixing me up. He’s making me feel brand-new again. I thought I was done . . . one step away from being scrapped and never heard from again. But, instead, he’s making me a whole new bus. Or at least he’s making me feel like I am. I’m still pretty rough if you look at me, but I’m getting there. I’ve got some new carpet and some blinds, and I’m even gonna get a fresh paint job soon. Who would do that for somebody like me? I know, it’s crazy, right?

  I’m so lucky. And the other day . . . I heard him say that I’m gonna get to drive around a man and his little baby and some other friends of Russell’s. Wouldn’t my mom and dad be so proud if they could see me now?

  Who would’ve thought . . . just when all hope was lost. I get to start all over. We all need a fresh start. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

  It’s silly, but that story made me cry when I wrote it. Just imagining what the bus might say if she could talk. But as much as it moved me, what moved me even more is Russ’s plan for her. He wants her to be an angel bus.

  Yes, we’re gonna spend some time taking her out as a family. Maybe we’ll even take her on a book tour next spring when this book comes out. Russ and the baby and me, going from town to town, like we used to do with Indy’s mama. And we’ll probably play some music and some shows at some point, but Russell’s real hope, and mine too, is for it to help people who need it. To be a blessing to some kids and some adults who could use a blessing in their lives.

  You see, when Joey got sick—really sick—since we had sold ours, Russell would borrow buses from other entertainers who owned them to pick up my wife and take her where she needed to go. Whether that was to the Cancer Treatment Center or home to Indiana to stay. And when Joey could no longer travel and hospice was brought in, Russell brought up a busload of Joey’s friends from Tennessee to say goodbye to her. And after Joey passed and we had the funeral here at the farm, Russ took Indy and me and some of our family back up to Indiana in one of those buses to speak at a memorial service where a thousand people had gathered in her high school gymnasium to honor her and her life.

  Russ blessed us greatly. And his hope is to keep that up and bless others in the same way.

  That, in time, the new old bus could be used to take sick children and their families to and from the hospital. Maybe take someone home when they can’t travel by car anymore and a million other needs that could be met. And, who knows, maybe that one bus could start a movement and turn into a dozen others doing the same thing all across the country.

  You never know what might happen. Right now, I just know it’s a beautiful thing that Russ is doing. Giving that old girl a chance to be part of a better story. And by doing that, it’s giving us a chance to be part of a better story too.

  Speak Love

  Tell people you love them . . . use words if you have to.

  They say there are five love languages, and we all don’t speak the same one. I believe that’s true. At least it always has been in our house.

  My wife’s love language was “acts of service.” It was how she said “I love you” and how she heard it also. Mine, on the other hand, is probably “physical touch.” Maybe because I’m a boy, and boys are just wired to put a little extra emphasis on the language you speak when the lights are off. But it’s more than that. I’m a hugger, and you’d be hard-pressed to find any moment of any day that you were around us when I didn’t have my wife’s hand in mine.

  Joey’s hand, on the other hand, was fine all by itself. But she loved me, and so hers reached for mine all the time too. I also said “I love you” to her a dozen times a day. She probably didn’t need to hear it, but she knew I did, so she would say it back to me. Say it before I said it to her. She was telling me that she loved me in the languages that I understood.

  She, on the other hand, needed to see the trash taken out and my dirty socks put in the clothes hamper. They weren’t things that meant much of anything to me, but to her, when I did them, I wasn’t just marking them off a to-do list that she had for me, I was saying “I love Joey.” And so I became pretty good at saying “I love you,” without saying “I love you.” I tried to figure out what she wanted done that day, and I would get to it before she asked me. Before she even thought of it sometimes. And her smile made the work so, so worth it.

  Our children spoke other love languages. And when you’re a teenager, it’s hard to see outside the little bubble that you’re in . . . and early on in our marriage, Heidi wasn’t feeling loved by Joey, and Joey wasn’t feeling loved or respected by Heidi. I remember a time when Heidi was about sixteen, it all came to a head.

  They were struggling to build a relationship. Joey and I had been married a year or two, but time hadn’t made it better, only worse. Heidi needed Joey to be a friend more than a mother. Someone who would listen to her talk about her day at school and the girls who had said this and boys who had done that. But those were all trivial things that didn’t appeal to Joey. There was so much to do around the house and in life, she thought that they were a waste o
f precious time. It’s funny. To one person that is precious time, and to the other it’s a waste of it.

  We were all sitting in the living room—not talking—with a heaviness hanging over the room and the whole house. I had recently read the book The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman, and, for some reason, it clicked inside of me—what was going on, what was really happening. Joey and Heidi were both screaming, “I love you!” to each other, but neither could hear it. Because they spoke completely different love languages.

  Joey was cooking amazing dinners for us and keeping the house beautiful and doing laundry and a million other things . . . that to her said “I love you” to Heidi and Hopie and me. All she needed in return from the girls was for them to make their beds. To keep up their rooms and to pick up after themselves around the house. Heidi’s room was a mess, which translated to “I don’t love you” to Joey.

  But Heidi couldn’t hear the words that Joey’s actions were saying because she didn’t speak that language. And when she would try to pour her thoughts and feelings out to Joey, and Joey didn’t respond by sitting down and saying, “Tell me all about it” . . . what she heard was Joey saying “I don’t love you.”

  I told them about the book I read and how it seemed like there was a serious language barrier. Though they both listened, neither responded or changed anything right away. But in time they did come to realize what the other person wanted and needed, and they started talking the same language.

  From then on, I don’t remember Joey and Heidi having any real relationship issues that were insurmountable. They still had their moments, but, for the most part . . . they were both on the same page . . . still speaking other languages . . . but at least being aware of it and trying to bridge the gap between them.

  With Hopie it was much the same. Though she’s never told me, I feel certain that her love language is “words of affirmation.” She longs to hear that she is doing a good job, words of encouragement, and that we approve of her. Unfortunately, again, at times that was very difficult for Joey and me to give Hopie. She always struggled with her organizational skills. And it is easy to withhold your approval if someone can’t or doesn’t do things the way that you think they should do them. I wish we had been more encouraging to Hopie through those teen years and into her early adulthood. It is something that I am working hard on today. Letting her know that I love her and support her, no matter what choices she makes or down what path she decides to go. And it’s been so good for me to learn to speak her language. Giving love unconditionally creates the best condition for love to grow. It’s just the way it works.

  Miss Congeniality

  She lost, and she won.

  When Heidi was in the ninth grade, she entered a local beauty contest. It was held on the theater stage at the middle school and Joey and I showed up to support her. We had no idea what we were in for.

  A few minutes into it, Joey and I realized that the pageant was rigged. Not by the parents or the judges. But rigged in the way that life is rigged.

  What suddenly became clear to us was that everyone isn’t created equal. At least when it comes to beauty. I’m not sure what I thought or even if it had occurred to me until then, but it turns out that beauty isn’t in the eye of the beholder. It is in the genes. It became clear that if your parents had high cheekbones and olive skin and a bunch of other characteristics that the world says are beautiful, then you just won the beauty contest lottery. Everybody else is screwed.

  Strangely, there in that auditorium full of parents and kids, I became highly aware of myself. My freckles and fair skin and my difficult childhood . . . and as beautiful as Heidi and Hopie were, I didn’t want them to be judged by something that I wasn’t able to give them. Something inside of me wished that we weren’t there. That Heidi wasn’t there.

  But my worries were for nothing. It turned out that Heidi didn’t care at all about the beauty contest. The contest had a talent portion of the show, and she said she was there only to sing. For her, it was as simple as that. She wanted the chance to get on a stage and perform the song “What If God Was One of Us?” Which, it turns out, was the perfect song for that situation. What if God was one of us? . . . was a good question in the midst of a bunch of parents and kids worried about who is the most beautiful and who isn’t. A great one, actually.

  As Heidi stood on stage singing, Joey and I couldn’t have been prouder.

  In the end, our daughter walked away with the title of Miss Congeniality, which is funny because if you look congeniality up in the dictionary, it says, “the quality of being pleasant and friendly.” Which was easy for Heidi to do since she was there only to sing.

  So even though she didn’t win, in her mind and ours, she won the whole thing.

  Hymn and Her

  She and hymn were a powerful combination.

  There’s a Grammy Award sitting on our mantel downstairs. It has both of our names on it, but it’s there because of Joey.

  My wife had dreamed of recording an album full of the hymns she grew up singing in church as a little girl. The songs her mama sang to her. That her grandmama sang to her mama.

  And in the summer of 2015, we went in the studio and recorded that album. It was called Hymns That Are Important to Us, and we recorded the whole thing in one day. Every track and every overdub of the instruments happened that day at Larry Beaird’s studio in Berryhill, a small enclave of houses and studios on the south side of Nashville.

  It wasn’t one of our best albums. Not by a long way. The arrangements were simple and the tracks weren’t that unique. If you compare it to our album Life of a Song that Carl Jackson produced or His & Hers that Gary Paczosa produced, this one lacks something . . . well, pretty much everything. Those records are masterful. The production, the playing, the arrangements, the mixing . . . all of it. I can listen to them for days and days and never hear a flaw, not one.

  The Hymns record, on the other hand, was about as flawed as they come. But in another way, it was filled with a magic the other albums didn’t have.

  Some of it is luck. Bad luck, to be exact. Though we had gone out on endless radio and marketing tours for the other albums we made, hoping that they would get traction and the songs would get some airplay and the stores would carry them and people would buy them, this one had none of that. We just made it and shared it. That’s pretty much it.

  Instead of trying to sell a record, we were busy trying to save a life. And sharing the whole thing with the world as we went through it. In the end, we sold a gazillion of the Hymns record. A half million of them, actually, and it has been a tremendous blessing for our family. For our family’s family. And in February 2017, I found myself, along with my father-in-law and our coproducer, Joe West, standing on a stage at the Grammy Awards being handed the greatest honor a musician can receive. It was surreal, to say the least.

  And now that award is on the mantel, and my wife’s photos line the walls of our home. Only the hymns remain. Just as most of them have done for the past hundred and some years. They are timeless. Each one of them. “I Surrender All,” “It Is Well with My Soul,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” and almost a dozen others that are listed on the back of the CD jacket.

  Those songs have moved mountains for us. And God knows how many other mountains for others. They comforted my bride as her precious life slipped away and they comfort the baby and me as we drive down the road to school each morning, wondering what lies in store. The CD has basically been in our truck for eighteen months nonstop. I listen and think. And the baby sings along. At first only a word or two . . . that’s all she knew. Not of the songs, but in general. But here lately, she’s singing a lot of the words. She knows them, like her mama knew them. They are getting inside her, just like they were inside her mama.

  Like they’re inside me now.

  Most of the songs I was only vaguely familiar with, if at all, before Joey came into my life. I wasn’t raised around hymns, being a child of a Catholic mother who only really we
nt to church on Easter when it fell on a leap year. Not really, but that’s about how often we went. At first glance the songs are simple. Not much to them. Boring, actually, or so I thought. But being a songwriter, the more I heard them, the more I read along in the pew as my wife sang them, the more I started to realize that they aren’t simple at all. They are profound. Profoundly profound, actually.

  I am a word guy. Mostly a lyric man when it comes to songwriting. And the words in most of the hymns that have stood the test of time have stood that test for darn good reason. Because they’re amazing. They say so, so much, with so few words.

  For years my wife would sit in the pew at church and cry along. She’d be singing, but tears would fill her eyes as she did. I understand why now. That’s how I sing them. I cry along just as she did. And they wash the pain away. And the hurt and the worry, and they leave something else. Hope. Hope that there’s more than what we see. Than what we can understand down here on earth.

  And hope that I will see my beautiful bride again someday. Some heavenly day. And the angels will be singing her hymns. And together, we will cry along and keep an eye on our sweet girls below.

  Uncle Dale

  My three-thousand-dollar free guitar.

  We call it Uncle Dale.

  It’s a 1963 Gibson Southern Jumbo guitar, and it came to me just as dramatically as it left me.

  We named it after my father’s younger brother Dale. He, like my dad, played guitar and sang—mostly songs by Merle Haggard, his hero. I didn’t know Uncle Dale well, and I only remember being around him once, when I was young. Dad and I made a trip to Colorado to visit him and some other family that my father had there. I’m not exactly sure what year that would have been . . . the early 1970s, I think. I must’ve been around eight years old, and I don’t know why it was just us on that trip, but it was.