Sacred Country

by Rose Tremain

  People think of the night as a time when nothing’s going to happen to them unless death happens. They say ‘Goodnight, see you in the morning.’

  I knew something was going to happen that night. I knew that what was going to happen was the telling of Pearl’s secret, but I didn’t know what the secret was or what it was going to do to me.

  We ate the Mulligatawny soup with bread and butter. I took some pills and the pain went away but I knew that it was in me, lying in wait. We played Beggar My Neighbour but my mind wasn’t on the game; it was on the night, coming closer.

  Pearl helped me get up to wash. Then she straightened my bedcovers and got into her white nightdress and we lay down, me in the bed, Pearl on the sofa cushions on the floor. I turned out the light. I did not say: ‘Goodnight, Pearl, see you in the morning.’ I waited, hardly breathing.

  When it came, it was like a rat, this secret. It sprang into the room and terrorised me. I lunged out for a weapon. I felt the stitches in my chest tear.

  I grabbed everything that was near me: my book, my lamp, my invalid pillows, the vase of cornflowers. I hurled them all, one by one, at the rat. And I screamed. Louder than any of those other night-screamers out there in the black well. Louder than on the day when Sonny tore off my bandages.

  The word I screamed was NO!

  Part Four

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  1973

  Doodle-ei-dip

  In the fall of ’72 Walter Loomis arrived in the town they call Music City USA.

  The word ‘fall’ had haunted him since the age of sixteen. A season to dream in, Pete had said. Autumn-known-as-fall.

  He wasn’t dreaming. He’d had his boots re-heeled. The Tennessee ground was solid underneath him. But he felt stunned by the brightness of the air. He found it difficult to look at the sky.

  A bus had taken him from the airport to downtown Nashville. The bus sounded strange, as if it had an engine room in it somewhere and should be travelling on water. He was the only white person on it except for the driver. The black passengers fussed and fidgeted. They put things into their old pieces of luggage and took them out again. They talked in low voices, like people complaining about the price of bread. One of them whistled.

  The bus stopped a few times on its way to downtown. Some of the black passengers got off and walked towards a line of little low houses. The houses were made of planks and every one had a plank verandah and a swing seat and a yard full of junk, as though junk were what grew here beside the highway instead of flowers. Walter remembered that the American word for earth was dirt.

  It was early afternoon. In England this particular day had already come and gone and turned into silence. Walter imagined the Suffolk winds rocking Pete’s bus and Grace in her upstairs room wearing her Viyella nightdress, sleeping without moving. The distance between himself and these imaginings felt very large.

  He was very tired but couldn’t allow himself to feel it. He had a schedule of things to do. This schedule had been worked out for him by the members of the Latchmere Country Music Association. Only one of them had been to Nashville but all the rest had read about it and heard about it and dreamed about it so often that they believed they knew their way around. They told Walter: ‘What you do when you arrive, duck, is the following: Number one, buy a local paper and find a room. There are places called rooming houses, run by families or widows and all the rooms in rooming houses are cheap.

  ‘Number Two, head for Lower Broadway known as Lower Broad. This is the street where all the little bars and honky-tonks are and people are kind to would-be singers here because would-be singers make up about one half of the population, so they know the kinds of things and the kind of help you’ll need.

  ‘Number three, introduce yourself to people all the time. Say, Hello, my name’s Walter Loomis and I’m from England and I’m hoping to get a break here in Nashville. Remember to say here in Nashville, not just in Nashville because “here” is what everyone likes to add in there, pet. They like to emphasise the now. It’s as if they’re in Heaven and they want you to marvel at it so they say, here in Heaven. You see what we mean, Walter?’

  He saw. He felt he was in a kind of heaven because of the colossal shine on things and the flame colours of the trees. When the bus arrived at the depot, he carried his guitar and his suitcase to a bench and sat there, blinking. He thought, I will follow the schedule, but it’s going to take time. First, I have to acclimatise my eyes.

  He found a room in a big house on Greenwood Avenue. It was known by its number, 767. The owners were called Mr and Mrs Pike. When he’d been there a month and the dry fall was over and gone, Mrs Pike said to him: ‘I expect you noticed, Walter, we’re formal in the South, but Mr Pike and I have taken to you, dear, and we’d be happy for you to call us by our first names which are Audrey and Bill C.’

  Oh,’ said Walter. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Certainly. We talked it over.’

  ‘Audrey and Bill C.’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘What does C. stand for, Mrs Pike?’

  ‘Audrey, Walter.’

  ‘Oh yes. Audrey.’

  ‘Well C. stands for Clement, dear. William Clement Pike. But those names never set right with Mr Pike. He was always Bill C., ever since he could talk.’

  Walter’s room was on the ground floor at the back of the house. It looked out onto a vegetable garden where Audrey Pike grew watermelons and peas. Beyond the peas were three chestnuts always referred to as the shade trees. Walter formed the habit of sitting at the small table in front of his window thinking up songs and staring at the shade trees. Sometimes he saw scarlet birds flying into them. The first time he caught sight of one, he thought it must have escaped from a theme park.

  ‘Why no, dear!’ laughed Audrey Pike. ‘That’s a cardinal. You can see them ’most every place you go. You keep a watch out, Walter.’

  He kept a watch out. Not just for cardinals. He watched everything that moved, everything there was. He knew that his life had begun, years too late, but at least it had started before it had ended. So he had to notice things. He went to sleep late and woke early. He couldn’t afford to miss too much time.

  Bill C. was a roofer. His favourite season was winter when the storms and gales arrived. He told Walter: ‘You can make a good living out of roofs in Nashville, son, and we don’t need to let out rooms. But Miz Pike likes to do that. She takes a pride in the quality of room we offer and she likes the company, since the Lord didn’t bless us with children of our own. And you, Walter, being from England, that’s made her happy. She never went to England, but those Jeeves stories made her die laughing. And she wants to help any way she can.’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ said Walter.

  ‘See, in Nashville,’ explained Bill C., ‘’most everything is done word of mouth. This town is a small big town. You know?’

  Audrey found Walter a job in the neighbourhood, raking leaves. He worked the mornings only. When the leaves were all raked and burned the neighbourhood women discovered other tasks for him. He chopped wood and mended fencing. He cleared garages of their old plastic trash. The women brought him coffee and slices of pineapple upside-down cake. Some of them wore their hair in curlers all day long. Some were older than all their lifetime’s trash, but still feisty, with their feet in rubber overshoes and their fists gnarled and clenched.

  In December, it sometimes snowed in the night, a soft dusting. Then the mornings would be bright and the sky a monumental blue and Walter’s eyes, still not acclimatised, would water as he began work. On this kind of day, he could no longer see Swaithey in his mind. It was as if a winter fog had come down and covered it. Now and again, however, while he was tearing down creeper from walls or taping leaky hoses or standing still on the snow drinking sweet coffee, he was visited by the image of his father, Ernie, wearing his white butcher’s coat and his jaunty hat and smiling as though his face were going to burst.

  He mentioned this to Pete in the first
airmail letter he had ever sent in his life. He wrote: ‘I now and then see Dad in my mind. He looks very happy. Like I remember him looking when I was a boy.’

  Of the ghost of Arthur Loomis there was no sign.

  About Walter’s dream of becoming a singer, Audrey had said: ‘We’re with you, Walter. Only don’t forget you can die from a dream. Remember the forty-niners? We’d be sad if y’all died.’

  Bill C. hadn’t mentioned death. He mentioned a person called Fay May. He said: ‘Listen, Walt. I know Fay May. I did her roof for just about nothing ’cept plates of lunch. You go talk to her and mention you’re a friend of mine. And you hang around her place and listen and talk and watch out and something’ll turn up. She turns no one away.’

  It was a small, grimy bar with oilcloth covers on the tables and sawdust on the floor. In neon was written Fay May’s Lounge. On the walls were thousands of signed photographs of the stars of the Grand Ole Opry, half of them dead. There was a poster advertising Hank Williams’s last concert, the one he never lived to give. It told his fans he would be there to sing for them ‘if the Good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise’. A blackboard over the bar listed ten different types of beer. Above this hung a threadbare confederate flag. The place smelled of spilt beer and cigars. Fay May herself stood behind the bar, smiling.

  She had fleshy arms and dyed brown hair piled up on her head. Walter guessed she might be the same age as Grace, but Grace was growing old watchfully, and this woman looked as though the passing of days was of no concern to her. Walter sat down on a bar stool. He had never heard of any of the ten types of beer advertised. He chose one at random and Fay May opened a bottle and set it in front of him next to a heavy glass.

  ‘Here y’are, Sir,’ she said, ‘and welcome to the Lounge.’

  Walter decided to wait awhile before mentioning Bill C. Pike. He looked along the bar. It was two-thirty in the afternoon. He saw a line of men smoking and chewing and passing a bottle of Jack Daniels back and forth. They talked in slow voices. One of them wore a spotted scarf over his head like a pirate. The others were dressed as cowpokes. They looked past their prime, sad around the eyes, as if there had never been a prime to be past.

  The one closest to Walter who looked younger than the rest turned towards him and looked him over and asked: ‘Tourist, is ya? Canadian?’

  Walter shook his head. He wasn’t wearing his fringed leather coat or his stetson; he was wearing a tartan work jacket with a fleece lining belonging to Bill C.

  ‘Alaskan?’ said the man. ‘I went to Alaska one time. Nearly died.’

  ‘English,’ said Walter.

  The man’s features settled into a freeze-dried smile and stayed that way. He shook his head from side to side.

  ‘England!’ he said through the smile. ‘You mean to tell me England’s still there?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Walter. ‘It’s still there.’

  The man slapped his thin thigh. ‘Well I’ll be darned!’ he said.

  Walter couldn’t decide what to say. Part of him wanted to tell the man that for him, too, England – or the only bit of it that he really felt was his, Swaithey – had disappeared from sight. In the end, he said nothing. He shrugged and smiled.

  ‘Have another beer?’ offered the man.

  Walter wasn’t enjoying the beer but he remembered one of the Latchmere people saying to him: ‘Accept hospitality whenever it’s offered. Southerners love to give. It’s their pastime. We make tea. They make friends. Unless you happen to be black.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Walter, ‘thanks.’

  ‘And by the way,’ said the man, ‘I didn’t mean no disrespect. I laugh easily. Most every darn thing under the sun makes me smile. I’m made that way.’

  ‘It’s a good way to be,’ said Walter.

  ‘Don’t know ’bout that. But let me introduce myself: Bentwater Bliss. Born Illinois 1920. Named for my home town of Bentwater. Still alive, just. Still solvent. Still singing!’

  Bentwater stuck out the hand that had been holding on to the bottle of Jack Daniels and Walter shook it.

  ‘My name’s Walter,’ he said, ‘Walter Loomis. And I’m hoping to – ’

  ‘Welcome to Nashville, Walter. And what’s your line of business?’

  Walter cleared his throat. ‘I was in the meat trade,’ he said.

  ‘In the meat? Well, there’s a coincidence. There’s nothin’ I don’t know ’bout meat. Worked in a stockyard from the age of twelve to the age of thirty-two. My name was Bentwater LeQuaide back then and when I got over here to Nashville I done changed it. I chose “bliss” ’cause that was the word I was in the minute I sat me down here at Fay’s an’ someone started singing. I ain’t joking. I was purely in bliss from that day!’

  He laughed the laugh that had been coming on ever since the mention of England. When he recovered from the laugh he called Fay May and ordered Walter’s beer. He said to Fay: ‘This is Walter from England, Fay. And he was in the meat like me once upon a time. You take care a him while I go and sing now, okay?’

  ‘Okay, Bent,’ said Fay May. She smiled at Walter and shook his hand. ‘You’re welcome to the Lounge,’ she said again.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Walter.

  She winked at Bentwater, who was climbing down from his bar stool. ‘You don’t gotta listen to Bent singing if you don’t want to. He sings like a live hog boilin’!’

  ‘How come I make me a living, then?’ said Bentwater.

  ‘Heaven knows!’ said Fay May. ‘’Less it’s only from kind hearts.’

  There was a chair and a microphone in the window of Fay May’s Lounge. Walter had noticed these. Bentwater picked up a guitar and sat down on the chair. He coughed a bit, tuning the guitar. The talking and laughing in the Lounge faded like sound turned down. The line of drinkers at the bar refilled their glasses and sat still. Walter noticed that on a little table near Bentwater’s chair was a sweet jar half-filled with dollar bills. A sign propped against the jar read: SINGERS SING FOR TIPS. THANK YOU.

  Bentwater had one long pointed fingernail. He used it like a plectrum.

  ‘He picks good, whatever you say,’ said Fay May.

  He had a high, nasal kind of voice. He started with a Louvin Brothers’ number, ‘If Only I Could Win Your Love’. Beyond him and beyond the window, the afternoon was fading to blue. Then he introduced a song he’d written himself. It was an old sad ditty about the poor of the fields and hills, the kind of song that used to squeeze tears out of Pete Loomis’s meandering eyes. The Lounge fell quiet. Bentwater sang on:

  Ask me where my hope and fortune lie;

  They lie below me in the rushy river

  And above me in the bright blue sky …

  Walter went home to 767 and told Audrey and Bill C. that he’d met Bentwater Bliss. In the evenings, Audrey and Bill C. sat in front of a wood-burning stove playing Pinochle.

  ‘Oh my!’ said Audrey. ‘Tell ’im, Bill C.’

  ‘That one,’ said Bill C. ‘He’s been around a long time.’

  The Pikes had been playing Pinochle together for so many years, they could play and carry on a conversation at the same time. Bill C. told Walter that Bentwater had come to Nashville in 1959 in a stolen meat truck. He resprayed the truck purple and parked it by the river and lived in it for a year. Then he had to sell the truck just to live and he slept in a pile of sand. They said: ‘He paid his dues all right – and how – and now they have him on the Opry ’bout three times a year. He had a good voice when he came here but just gently he drank it to almost nothing.’

  ‘Don’t hang around with Bentwater, Walter,’ said Audrey. ‘He’ll wind you up drinking.’

  ‘Well,’ said Walter. ‘He said he’d introduce me to some people.’

  ‘That’s true, Bill C., isn’t it?’ said Audrey. ‘He knows just about everyone on Music Row.’

  ‘He knows ’em,’ said Bill C., ‘but that don’t help him none. They know he ain’t reliable. They know he’s reliable as the wind.’
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br />   Walter went to his room and sat down at his table in front of the window. It was pitch black. He couldn’t see the silhouette of the shade trees. It felt so quiet, he thought it might be starting to snow.

  He remembered his afternoon. He and Bentwater had walked down Lower Broad past the bars and the clothes stores and the pawnshops to the river and watched a riverboat full of tourists dock below them.

  Bentwater had said: ‘The founders of Nashville came in two parties. One came overland and the other came hundreds of miles up the Cumberland River, all the whole way pushing against the current. And that’s how it is in the music business, Walter. Every man starting out’s got the current against him and what that current is, is all the people who made it already who either want to keep ya out or else steal your songs or do you down somehow.’

  ‘I knew it wasn’t going to be easy,’ said Walter.

  ‘Not only is it not easy, pal,’ said Bentwater, ‘it’s also friggin’ hard. And there’s another thing.’

  Walter could smell salt coming off the river, like the sea. He thought, everything here is different from how it is in other places. ‘What other thing?’ he asked.

  Bentwater turned towards him and gave his arm a squeeze. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the thing is, Walter, in your case you’re an innocent, right? You don’t know First Avenue from the First Commandment, right? You’re a country boy, but from the wrong country. To summarise, you know d-e-d about it.’

  Walter looked up at the sky, fading to mauve. ‘What’s d-e-d?’ he asked.

  Bentwater laughed. His laugh turned quickly to a wheeze. ‘Doodle-ei-dip!’ he said. ‘Or in other words, nothing! See what I mean?’

  Walter had felt foolish. He’d felt foolish for a good few minutes. Then he’d remembered an extraordinary thing and he’d told this to Bentwater while the riverboat tourists tramped past them and at their backs the neon signs of Lower Broadway came on.

  He said: ‘Years ago, I went to a fair and had my hand read. By a woman named Cleo. She had plastic teeth. There were spangles on her spectacle frames. I got to know her quite well before she died.