Guests on Earth: A Novel

by Lee Smith

  And then they both were gone.

  DR. SCHWARTZ AND I followed more slowly, Phoebe and Karen staying to straighten up and turn out the lights.

  “You know what I wish?” I said, on impulse, turning to Dr. Schwartz. “I would give anything if Dixie could be here, if she could be in this dance, too. She would just love it, wouldn’t she?”—as Dixie had such a gift for fun. “I miss her so much. Have you heard from her at all? Because I haven’t, not a word. I don’t understand it. I keep thinking about her.”

  Dr. Schwartz hesitated, looking down. Finally she put her hand on my arm. “It’s so strange that you would mention Dixie to me right now. You are very, very perceptive, Evalina—maybe you’re psychic or something.” She smiled to show me that she was just kidding. “Because the fact is that Dixie has been upstairs in the Central Building for some time now, but tomorrow she will be moving down to the second floor, and urged to participate in the life of the hospital again. So she might well be one of the ‘hours’ in this performance, if she wants to. In fact, we have saved the last spot for her, just in case. This was my own little secret. She can start on Monday. What do you think of that?”

  I gave Dr. Schwartz a hug. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” I said—my first reaction. But of course I knew it wasn’t wonderful for Dixie. “What happened, though? She looked so happy when she left for Christmas. So did Frank—remember?”

  “The short answer is, we don’t know what happened. And we may never know. All we can do is treat the illness, which is depression, as best we know how. And our knowledge is very limited, pitifully limited.”

  “But you would think,” I pursued, “on the face of it, that she’s got everything—a husband who loves her, two children who love her—and she’s rich, too. She can go back to college like Richard said. She can do anything she wants or have anything she wants—except get that baby back, I guess. Do you think that’s the problem?”

  “I think it may have been a factor, certainly, but most people get over such loss, or grief, or even traumas we can’t imagine. In fact most people will experience periods of depression in their lifetimes, and then they will get better eventually. There is the question of the body, which insists upon life—the organism itself wants to get better—the body always chooses life.”

  “So you’re saying that Dixie—”

  “I’m saying that the problem is that there’s no problem. No single cause. That question is not even relevant when we are dealing with clinical depression. This is what people don’t understand. Nobody understands it—especially not the relatives, or the people that love them, like Frank Calhoun. Everybody keeps thinking that there’s a reason, something that can be changed, something that can be fixed, and then the patient will be fixed, too. I’m saying that Dixie suffers from recurrent bouts of immobilizing clinical depression—a serious illness which we know virtually nothing about, except that there seems to be a genetic component. It does run in families. Someday medical science will learn much, much more about it. But personally I believe that some particular chemical is missing in the brain—rather like diabetes—and that once we figure out what it is, perhaps we can replace it. For now, all we can do is tranquilize them to take the edge off their pain, give them a more orderly routine for a bit, a sympathetic ear and a respite from their own troubling lives, and jumble up their brains in a way we do not really understand, which may be completely irresponsible, for all we know.” She sounded grim.

  “Shock treatments,” I said.

  “Yes, and Dixie’s got only two weeks to go on them, so there’s no reason she can’t participate in this dance if she wants to,” Dr. Schwartz emphasized. “We’ll see. Anyhow, she’s better.”

  So was Mrs. Fitzgerald, clearly, outside sitting on the top step of Homewood’s stone portico, smoking a cigarette and laughing like crazy at something Jinx was telling her. What? I felt a bit jealous. I had known Mrs. Fitzgerald for years, and never had such rapport.

  We went down the steps past them.

  “You’d better get out of this cold,” Dr. Schwartz called back. “It’s time to go.”

  “We will when we finish these smokes,” Jinx hollered out after us. “Bye now.” Though she was the youngest of us all, Jinx treated everybody—even the doctors—as equals.

  Then the lights went off abruptly and all we could see of them were the fiery red dots of their cigarettes, glowing in the chilly dark.

  FOR THE FIRST time, I thought I could feel spring in the air as I left Homewood at the end of the day. It had not snowed for almost a week, and the sun had shone all day long. Despite the continuing cold temperature, patches of grass were emerging everywhere, as rivulets of melting snow coursed down the slope, along the sidewalk. Rehearsal had gone well again, and I realized how much I enjoyed this kind of accompaniment, especially since Dixie had joined us. She struck me as very much her old self, friendly and laughing, interested in each person. Everyone seemed to light up while she was talking to them. No stranger, watching her in conversation, could ever have guessed that Dixie was a hospital patient in the middle of a course of shock treatments for clinical depression. Anyhow, I was overjoyed to have her back among us, as one of the “hours.” If I were not so grown up, I might have skipped down the hill, heading back toward Graystone—while keeping an eye out for Pan, of course, as always, though he was nowhere to be seen.

  Instead, I rounded the corner and was surprised by an unfamiliar sight. A big old mud-splattered red truck pulling a silver hump-backed trailer with a long dent in its side, battered but shining in the sun, with yet another, smaller trailer hooked on behind, were parked right in front of our house. These vehicles looked as if they had escaped from the Dust Bowl, or from some Western movie set.

  “Evalina?” Suddenly the passenger side door of the truck burst open and here she came running up the sidewalk, Ella Jean in a long leather coat with her black hair swinging below her shoulders, high-heeled cowboy boots slipping on the melting ice. She grabbed me up in a tight fierce hug.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said, when I could speak. “Flossie told me you’re a star, and now you even look like one!”

  “Flossie—Lord!” Ella Jean rolled her eyes and gave me her jack-o’-lantern grin. “Flossie is crazy as a coot, taking after Mama if you ask me. Still yet, she’s the one that told us you was back up here again, or I never would of knowed it. Told us where you was living, too. Lord, we’ve been about to freeze out here, waiting on you to get back from wherever you been keeping yourself all day.”

  Who was us? I looked over her shoulder to see a big, gangly boy wearing a cowboy hat jump out of the driver’s seat, stamping out a cigarette and grinning from ear to ear. He came forward to greet me. “Bucky Pardoe,” he said, “pleased to meetcha.” His name made me laugh because he had the biggest, whitest buck teeth you can possibly imagine, along with straight yellow hair that stuck out from under his cowboy hat like straw. Though Bucky Pardoe was the opposite of handsome, his sky blue eyes were sharp, and I could tell instantly how smart he was. He had a sort of “go get ’em” style.

  “I’m Evalina.” I stuck out my gloved hand.

  “I know it, honey. I know all about you. That’s why we’re here. “

  I looked at Ella Jean.

  “Come on along with us,” she said, “and we’ll tell you. Just throw that book bag up on the porch and come on.”

  “But don’t you even want to come in and see where I live?” I asked.

  “Hell no, we don’t, we want you to come out.” She laughed. “We’ve been driving all night, we’re plumb wore out and now we’re starving to death. We’re going over to Fat Daddy’s and eat us some barbecue. I been telling Bucky how good it is. So you come on with us. You know you want some barbecue.”

  I did not hesitate, sticking my bag inside the door without even telling anybody at Graystone where I was going. I ran back down the steps to the truck where Ella Jean had already taken her seat.

  “Wake up, Jesse,” Bucky ho
llered as he opened the door on the driver’s side, and to my immense surprise, yet another man sat up in the smaller backseat and blinked at me through his long black hair.

  “This here is Evalina,” Bucky said.

  “That I was telling you about,” Ella Jean added. “The Cajun girl.”

  “I’m not Cajun.” I turned to look at her in surprise.

  “Well, I’m not really Cherokee either.” Ella Jean was laughing.

  “Honey, in this business everybody has got to be somebody.” Bucky helped me up into the cab and handed me over to Jesse with gentlemanly finesse.

  “How do,” Jesse said, taking my hand as if it were something precious. He had fine, thin hands with long fingers, hands that looked as if they had never done one day’s manual labor in his life. In fact, Jesse’s features were aristocratic, too—prominent nose and chin, long thin nose and heavy dark brows. “You sure do mean a lot to that one,” he nodded toward Ella Jean up in the front seat, “and she sure does mean a lot to us. It is a privilege to meet you.”

  Most people picked up off the street in front of a mental institution do not receive such treatment. I smiled and settled back on the sheep’s-wool rug that covered the cracked leather seat as we drove down the mountain into town. The floor of the cab was crammed with boxes, boots, bottles, parcels, and sacks of every sort.

  “Are you from the South, too?” I asked him. Somehow I didn’t think so.

  “Very acute,” Jesse said, smiling at me. His eyes were a sort of dark violet color, with shadows around them. “No, I grew up in a number of different places around the world. My father was based in Washington. Then I went to school in Boston.”

  “Where in Boston?”

  “Harvard University,” he said. “Believe it or not that’s where I got interested in music, this kind of music. I came to the mountains to collect it, and started playing myself, and just never left. Never went back up there.”

  “What did your family have to say about that?”

  “This is my family now,” Jesse said, looking out the window.

  We were pulling into the parking lot of Fat Daddy’s Bar-B-Q, where Ella Jean had taken me years before. Bucky finally found a space along the fence that would accommodate us. The ramshackle restaurant meandered along a hilltop north of town, with a giant wooden pig out front and smoke rising from the long cookers out back. Not a single thing had changed, that I could see—not the heavy wooden booths with the red cushions and red-checked linoleum tablecloths, or the wooden floor with sawdust on it, or the neon beer signs along the mirrored bar. The raised dance floor, empty now, shone behind a brass railing. Autographed pictures of country music stars covered the walls. “See, looky here.” Ella Jean pulled Jesse over, pointing at a skinny, grinning Jimmie Rodgers, the “Singing Brakeman.” “He used to live right here in Asheville,” she said. A photograph of Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys hung next to Uncle Dave Macon, the “Dixie Dewdrop,” in his double-breasted waistcoat, high wing collar, black felt hat and bright red tie. I guess it was true what Bucky had said, that everybody had to be somebody in country music.

  “Can I start you off with some beer, hon?” The waitress wore a short red dress and a white ruffled apron, her plump breasts peeking over the top. Her ponytail swung side to side as she sashayed off to get the pitcher of beer Bucky ordered, along with a Coca-Cola for me and a “couple of shots” for Jesse, which turned out to be little glasses filled with—what? “Bourbon,” Jesse told me, downing one while sipping his beer more slowly. Ella Jean had ordered pork barbecue plates for everybody, along with slaw and rolls and hushpuppies and five or six vegetables and sides.

  A silence descended as they all chowed down. “Appetite must be catching,” I remarked, eating ravenously myself. “I told you, didn’t I?” Ella Jean said, sitting back. “Lord that corn pudding was good. My Aunt Roe used to make corn pudding.” Before I could have imagined it, all the plates were empty. Bucky got up and played the jukebox: Bob Wills’s “San Antonio Rose,” Ernest Tubb’s “Walking the Floor Over You,” which even I knew was very popular, and some Roy Acuff. I finished my Coca-Cola and started drinking beer myself. It tasted pretty good, too. Almost empty when we came in, the restaurant was filling up now with big solid mountain families, couples out on the town, groups of both men and women. The waitresses swished back and forth with platters of food. The noise level rose. Bucky ordered another pitcher of beer and a pan of banana pudding which I was sure I could not eat a single bite of. It was gone within minutes.

  I felt like I was in another world, a secret world filled with delicious food and wonderful smells and vibrant colors and catchy music that existed deep inside the Asheville I knew. I felt like Alice, fallen down another rabbit hole.

  “Thank you so much for bringing me here,” I told them.

  “Oh, we’ve got an ulterior motive,” Jesse said.

  “What does that mean?” asked Ella Jean.

  “It means you’re up to something.” I smiled at her and she smiled back.

  This was Bucky’s cue. He leaned forward, blue eyes bright as buttons. “You got it, Sugar,” he said. “You know Ella Jean and me have been together ever since we met up with each other two years ago on a National Barn dance show out in Tulsa, Oklahoma.”

  “Love at first sight,” Ella Jean said.

  “Joined at the hip,” Bucky said.

  “Where’d you get him, then?” I pointed to Jesse, who grinned.

  “San Antonio. I’m a yodeling fool,” he said. “Just wait till you hear me.”

  “So now we’re the ‘Kissin’ Cousins,’ ” Bucky announced, “and we’re headed over to Kentucky where we’ve got a great job waiting on us at John Lair’s Renfro Valley Show in Mount Vernon, about sixty miles from Lexington.”

  “John Lair knows more about folk music than anybody in America,” Jesse put in.

  “ ’Cept maybe you,” added Bucky, chewing on a toothpick. I could see why Ella Jean loved him—he exuded good will and confidence. Son of a piano man, he’d grown up in southwest Virginia, playing every instrument there was.

  “But we’ve got one big problem,” Bucky went on. “We’re doing the show this coming Saturday night and we need us a keyboard player. Bad.”

  It was already Thursday.

  “What happened to the keyboard player you had?” I asked.

  “Pregnant. We just got done delivering her back home to Danville, Virginia, where her mama wasn’t none too happy to see her.”

  I looked from Bucky to Jesse, who held up both hands. “Not me,” he said. “Act of God.”

  “I see.” Now I looked at Ella Jean. “Whatever makes you think I could actually do that? Play keyboards for a country band, I mean? I went to Peabody,” I said to Jesse, who nodded.

  But Ella Jean said, “Evalina can play anything. All she has to do is hear it one time.” I knew she was right. I could do it. And then I could sleep in a truck and eat in places like this one, with people like these, and travel all over the country, playing music every night. My palm itched furiously as I thought about it.

  “Come on and go,” Ella Jean said. “You know you want to.”

  “I do,” I said. “But I can’t. I just can’t. I’ve got some things here to take care of. Some things to finish up right now.”

  “You’re going to regret it,” Jesse said, looking at me. I thought of Matilda Bloom telling me I’d better grab that brass ring, that it ain’t gonna come around again. And I had a feeling this might be my last chance.

  But I also knew I had no choice. I couldn’t leave them now, my people, my kind.

  “Cousins, I thank you,” I said, standing up. “Thanks for a wonderful, wonderful evening. But I guess you’d better take me on back now.”

  Which they did, though I still dream of what might have happened had I gone with them, all the highways we would have traveled, and all the things I would have seen. Jesse became famous, of course, while Bucky and Ella Jean got married and stayed on in Renfro Valle
y and had five children. I own several of Jesse’s albums, and I have saved that copy of Life magazine with his picture on the front of it.

  “Where you been?” Jinx slit her green eyes at me as I slipped quietly back into Graystone.

  “Just out with some old friends.” I hoisted my book bag.

  “Who?”

  I didn’t answer, but followed her over to the window as she peered out between the venetian blinds at the messy, empty street.

  BY REHEARSAL TIME the next afternoon, I could hardly believe that Ella Jean’s visit had really happened—it seemed like a dream, disappearing more and more throughout the day. I didn’t mention it to anyone.

  This was an important rehearsal. Satisfied that the hours had finally “got” the first part of the dance, which was quick, fanciful, and even humorous—as keyed by the spritely music—now Mrs. Fitzgerald was leading them into the slower middle section, where the mood turns to doubt. The movements she showed them were somber and slower; I played softly. A beseeching tone crept into the music as each group searched a different section of the stage, peeping and bending, then extending their arms in an attitude of loss.

  Ruth stopped right in the middle of it. “So what’s going on already?” she said in her most aggravating voice. “I hate this! The first part was fun, but this is making me nervous. We don’t have to do this. I’m not going to do it if it makes me nervous, if it’s not fun.”

  “Me neither,” Amanda said. “This is stupid. It’s depressing.”

  “Y’all need to shut up,” Jinx spoke flatly. “You just shut up and do it. Or maybe Dr. Schwartz needs to give everybody another pill.” Some of the hours laughed, but Pauletta, the new girl, covered her face with her hands and started to cry. Mrs. Morris’s daughter looked confused.

  “Now, girls.” Mrs. Fitzgerald appeared entirely unperturbed as she turned gracefully to address them. “I am impressed by your sensitivity to the music and your understanding of this dance. Yes, the mood has changed. We are entering the middle phase of life where one often gets lost in a dark wood. We must go through the darkness to find the light. Of course you would understand this, you of all people. For this is art, and you are born artists, ballerinas every one of you! And now you must become frantic, running in a circle, just so—” She nodded to me, and I played spiky arpeggios while she led them to form the great circular clock again. Miraculously, not a one had dropped out. “And now the clock strikes six.” Again she nodded to me as I struck the slow, sonorous minor chords. “And now you all must run off the stage—you four to stage right, you four to stage left. Yes, run off! Quickly! Run, run, run! That’s it.”