by Lee Smith
Nonnie learned to testify movingly to the amazing curative powers of Dr. Harry Sharp’s Celebrated Nervine, stating that she had been completely incapacitated by nervousness, prostrate between the bedsheets for three long years, until just four bottles of Nervine had restored her to herself.
Accompanied by Harry on guitar, she learned to sing “The House of the Rising Sun” in a soulful way, never connecting the words with her own downfall as she sang, “It’s been the ruin of many a poor girl, and God, I know I’m one.” For this number, Nonnie wore a low-cut red velvet dress with black net stockings and gloves, in order to create the proper illusion, as Harry said. Nonnie learned fast that nearly everything about the medicine show was illusion, including the medicine itself, which Harry mixed up as needed. Once, in Knoxville, she watched as he made up an entirely new product before her very eyes, using flour and water to form a paste which he colored green somehow and rolled into hundreds of tiny pills. “These Vital Sparks pills, derived from an amazingly virile Oriental turtle, have proved to be a remarkable remedy for male weakness,” Harry announced. He said that they “rescued the Chinese from the threat of extinction when their manhood had lost the strength to perpetrate the race.” Nonnie, behind the curtain, giggled and giggled the first time she heard him pushing the Vital Sparks pills, but they were all gone in a week’s time. There was a lot of male weakness out there. Soon, rolling up the Vital Sparks pills was a regular part of her job.
When she questioned Harry, ever so tactfully, about the ethics involved in selling his medications to the gullible public, he just laughed. “Honey,” he said, “since the public insists on being poisoned, we may as well give them a good time too.”
It was impossible for Nonnie to argue with Harry, since he could talk rings around her, or anybody. Nonnie couldn’t get enough of his talking. Those first months, they’d sit up late into the night in a rented room in whatever town they were in, smoking cigarettes and drinking rye whiskey and talking, talking, talking. Nonnie never knew she had so much to say. She told him her whole life, which grew in the telling until she found herself going on and on about things she never knew she’d noticed. Talking to Harry, Nonnie became more and more interesting; Nonnie became her own story. Harry’s story was more tragic and more complicated although it too involved his mother’s early death . . . then his stepfather’s terrible cruelty, Harry’s running away, his life on the road, a job in a Baltimore whorehouse, an early stint in vaudeville, time spent on a riverboat, many passionate though unwise affairs of the heart, many misunderstandings and unfair accusations. . . . Harry talked on and on into all those hot southern nights. Nonnie didn’t mention it when he contradicted himself. She didn’t care if all of it was true or not, or if any of it was true. She had been starved for talking. Harry was such a talker! Why, it was plain to see that he could have done anything, been anybody—politician, actor, lawyer, president. And he knew the biggest words, and he never used just one of them when six would do.
They worked Chattanooga, Scottsboro, Huntsville, and Decatur, then headed down toward Birmingham through Hartselle and Cullman, for Nonnie had taken it into her head to see the ocean, and Harry had promised he’d take her to Mobile. But Dennis O’Grady’s tuberculosis worsened in Birmingham and they had to leave him there, and Nonnie was not comfortable with the promises Harry made to Dennis when they left him in the hospital charity ward. He looked like a mouse lying in that bed, she thought, with such great big eyes. She knew she would never see him again. One of the Barnett Sisters was swept off her feet by a rich widowed store owner in Prattville and stayed there, so they took on a new girl, Dottie Ballou. She was a plump young thing with a big voice and a kind of sparkle and recklessness about her. Charley Stamper found her singing at a café in Montgomery, and she was happy to leave there—anxious, so she said, to see the world.
For some reason, just about the time Dottie Ballou joined the show, Nonnie suddenly began to think about Grassy Branch. She thought about Durwood’s funny lopsided grin and Lizzie’s rosy red cheeks, and a lot of silly little things—the way the mist clung to Cemetery Mountain in the mornings, the twining ivy pattern on the oilcloth that covered the old kitchen table. She could close her eyes and trace that ivy with her fingers, even in Mobile. When Harry drove her out to see the ocean, it was not much, finally, just a lot of water. “I don’t know what the hell else you might have been expecting,” Harry said angrily. By then he was beginning to get short with her.
Nonnie was not really surprised when she came back to the hotel room early one afternoon and caught Harry in their bed with Dottie Ballou. Dottie Ballou’s white thighs were real fat. “Excuse me!” Nonnie said, slamming the door. When she came back later, Dottie was gone, but nothing was ever the same again. Harry couldn’t talk his way out of this one so fast, although he made a damn good stab at it, deriding monogamy as contrary to nature and stating that his inconsequential dalliance with Dottie Ballou was pathetic in its insignificance, and had only made him appreciate Nonnie all the more. Nonnie still loved the sound of his voice, but she listened with half a mind now, knowing—in that way she knew things—that another change was on the way. She hung out over the ironwork grille of their window in Mobile, smoking cigarettes, wearing a red Chinese silk robe with nothing on underneath, watching the bustling, brawling life in the street below, and wondered when it would happen, and what it would be. The night the hotel burned, Harry wasn’t even with her. Nonnie woke up with the sheets on fire. The last thing she saw before she lost consciousness was the wide blank gaze of Ezekiel’s blue-blue eyes as he led the high cold singing in the church at Chicken Rise. “Oh God,” Nonnie said. “Oh God,” for she really had loved him. Then her mouth was full of dirt and she was dead.
2
Down by Grassy Branch
The cuckoo she’s a pretty bird,
She sings as she flies,
She brings us glad tidings,
And she tells us no lies.
She sucks all the pretty flowers
To make her voice clear,
And she never sings cuckoo
Till the spring of the year.
1
R.C. Bailey
When Mamma run off with the medicine show, I was working days at that lumber camp out from Holly Grove, old man Beady Nolan’s outfit, and fiddling someplace nearabout every night. I could fiddle all night and work all day and never think a thing of it. I was wild as any young buck, but I never let on to it when I’d go back over there on Grassy Branch and see the folks. Why, I’d go right along to meeting with the rest of em, and sit in a row on them old hard benches, and sing them old high hymnsongs. What Daddy and Mamma don’t know don’t hurt em, I figured then, for Daddy didn’t hold with fiddle music nor with dancing, and I didn’t have no intention of running up again him iffen I didn’t have to.
Nor Mamma neither, for I helt Mamma up in my mind as a flat-out angel in them days, her always so nice and sweet and pretty and all, not a thing like them other old women around here. Why, you could of knocked me over with a feather when she run off.
Durwood was the one told me. He come over to the camp a-purpose to do so, and then me and him got good and drunk, and I laid out of work the next day while Durwood went on back home. Somehow I couldn’t go over there just yet, I couldn’t look Daddy in the face, and I had to play for a dance in town that night anyhow.
I reckon I had been drinking some when I got there. I was bad to drink back then. Well, they was this purty little redheaded gal that caught my eye. She was dancing up a storm. And I could tell that she was cottoning up to me, making eyes and such, so when me and the boys took a break, I says to her, “Let’s you and me take us a little walk, honey,” and we done so.
We walked off from the hall a little ways, and we was just commencing to get acquainted good when I felt of somebody a-grabbing me around the neck, liked to choke me. “What the hell air ye a-doing?” I heerd and hit turned out to be this great big old boy that was that little redhead
ed gal’s regular feller. Right then I knowed I wasn’t going to fight him, for he would of made two of me.
“Now Lonnie, now Lonnie,” she was a-crying. Her name was Shirley Hash. “He didn’t know no better,” she said to Lonnie, and I’ll give her credit for it, so then he let go of me and grabbed her, twisting her pore little arm up behind her back.
I was not too drunk to say I thought he ought to turn loose of her.
“I reckon you do,” he said, “and just who the hell might you be, anyhow, over here a-rubbing on my girl?”
So I said who I was, and then Lord if he didn’t start up laughing. “Oh, so you are that Melungeon feller,” he said. “I reckon I know about you.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I axed him, and then he liked to bust a gut laughing. They was some several fellers gathered up about us by now, a-listening to all of this.
“Shirley, this here is a woods colt that don’t even know it,” he says, and at least he lets go of her arm. “My grandma was Missus Rice that used to run the boardinghouse in Cana, the one that stood where the lumberyard is now,” he goes on to say, “and she tole it for a fact that yer mamma done tuck up with a Melungeon man that was staying up there in her boardinghouse, and yer mamma tried to run off with him too, but he wouldn’t have her, and then she had his baby. Hell, it weren’t no big secret at the time. Everybody around there knowed it.”
“Liar,” I hollered, and I lit into him, and he liked to change my looks afore they pulled him offen me.
Well, it seemed like I couldn’t work no more after that, or do nothing afore I got to the bottom of it. We was paid two days prior to this dance I am telling you about, so what I done, I just tuck my pay and lit off from there, and the firstest one I went to see was Tom Kincaid that taught me to play the fiddle, and knowed me since I was a boy. He was some kind of a cousin of Daddy’s. He run the dry goods store in Cana.
I reckon I looked pretty rough when I come in there, for Tom jest laid down this roll of oilcloth he was a-measuring, and said, “R.C., let’s me and you go in the back here and eat us some lunch,” and he tuck my elbow and brung me back there, where he doctored up my face some and give me some hoop cheese and crackers to eat and got us some sweet milk to drink, and said, “Son, it’s a mighty hard thing, I’ll grant ye,” for he thought I was all in a swivet over Mamma running off with the show.
Then I told Tom what all that old boy had said about Mamma and the Melungeon, and his thin face got kind of a cagey look.
“Well, is it true or not?” I axed him pint-blank, but he jest shook his head. He tuck off his glasses and polished em and then he put em back on. He had these little bitty gold glasses.
“I heard something oncet to that effect,” he allowed finely. “But if you live long enough, you are likely to hear anything oncet.”
“I reckon I could jest an Daddy,” I said, but Tom said he didn’t believe I ought to do that, that Daddy had moren plenty to bear and there wasn’t no reason for me to ax him nothing about that Melungeon. Tom said this real forceful.
“So you are telling me hit’s the truth,” I said, for even if I was a fool, I wasn’t a tee-total fool.
“I am not telling you nothing,” Tom Kincaid said. “I am not telling you but what’s the God’s truth, you had best fergit this whole business, and get on back home and help yer pa,” he said.
“I can’t do that, Tom,” I said. “I am bound to go around here axing some more folks, I reckon, iffen you won’t tell me.”
“You will do nothing of the kind,” Tom said. He was getting all riled up. “Listen here, boy. Hit is best to leave well enough alone. Hit is best to keep yer goddamn mouth shut, if you foller me.”
“Well, I don’t foller you,” I said. I stood up, I was fixing to go.
Tom kept pacing back and forth in his little office there, with the door shut. “All right,” he said. “All right, Goddamnit. I tell you what. If you are bound and determined to ax somebody, go up there on Cherokee Mountain and ax old Willie. Tell him I sent you up that to ax him.”
“I will,” I said, and I done so, fer I was bound to get the straight of it oncet and fer all. I got up there about dark the next day.
I found old man Willie Malone a-setting out on his porch all wrapped up in a quilt, and hit August. But old folks gets cold real easy. He was so little and dried up he put me in mind of a grasshopper a-setting there.
“Howdy,” I said, and said who I was, fer I knowed he couldn’t see nothing there in the dark.
“Zeke’s boy?” he said, and I said, well, that’s what I had come up that to ax him about, and I allowed as how Tom had sent me up that. I knowed him and Tom used to be running mates, and my daddy with em afore he got religion so bad, for many’s the story Tom had told me about them and what all they used to get into. I had knowed Daddy weren’t no saint, but I had never knowed no such of a thing about Mamma.
So then Uncle Willie Malone told me what folks said about Mamma and the Melungeon, and by then it had growed so dark that it was like I wasn’t talking to a man atall, jest a old voice coming from noplace, from the night and the mountain itself. “And now, if I was you, I’d fergit the whole thing,” Uncle Willie said when he had got done telling it. “Fer yer daddy raised you as hisn, and used to trot you on his knee and walk you of a night and play with you by the hour,” Uncle Willie said. “They is not many men that had a daddy to set so much store by a baby as yourn done you,” he said.
But I was young and hotheaded then, and three or four days drunk on top of it. I had heerd what I’d come to hear, all right, and I splunged off down that mountain hollering in the middle of the night, I didn’t give a damn. I went over to the camp and got my stuff and then I went over to Grassy Branch and gathered up what I had left there, and told em I was leaving for a while.
They said that that strawberry-face ugly old sister of Mamma’s had come around wanting to stay and help out, and Daddy had run her off. I reckon I was still drunk, for when Durwood told me this, I says to Daddy, “Daddy, if I was you, I would of let her stay on here, I would of just put a bag over her head,” I says, “for hit’s all the same in the dark. I bet she wouldn’t of felt no different from Mamma,” I said.
Well, Daddy whupped me good then, and after he whupped me, he gone to praying over me, and I raised up long enough to say, “Quit that praying over me, for there ain’t nothing to it. Hit ain’t nothing to Heaven, nor nothing to Hell. Hit ain’t nothing, period,” I tole Daddy, for it seemed to me like that was the bare-bone facts of it all. Then I passed out finely and slept all that next day through, and woked up to see Lizzie thar by the bed crying. “What are you looking at?” I said.
Then I left. I didn’t never mean to darken that door again. I went over around Bluefield, then up in West Virginia, doing first one thing and then another, fiddling here and there and drinking steady. Best I can recall, my thinking run kindly along these lines. Mamma is a whore, and I am a bastard, and so by God I set out to prove it. It seemed like a great storm was raging in me. I figgered I might as well get out there and fuck my brains out or do whatever the hell else I could think of, for it wasn’t no pleasure in this life nor nothing beyond it, nothing, nothing, nothing.
I didn’t want nothing but pussy. I’d tell a girl anything just to get in her pants, and you’d be surprised how easy that is, iffen you go projecting around with nothing but that on your mind. They’re all whores, I says to myself, and I proved it pretty good too.
I stayed gone for some several years, drunk moren not, beat up frequent, in jail a couple of times too. Then come a pretty spring morning when I woke up in a woman’s bed in Huntington, West Virginia, and didn’t have no memory atall of who she was, or how I had got there, or where we was. Hit looked to be a room in a cheap hotel, or may be a boardinghouse. I could hear somebody walking overhead, and then I couldn’t hardly hear nothing, fer the sound of this little old baby that started up crying to beat the band. It was in a dresser drawer over there in the corner,
I reckon it didn’t have no crib. And Lord, it could holler! It just cried and cried.
I rolled over and looked at the woman that was laying there in the bed with me. She didn’t look too good. Matter of fact, I couldn’t tell if she was breathing or not. She had dried vomit all over her face and was laying on her back with her mouth open. She was a curly-headed blond woman, vomit in her hair too. She looked awful. I felt of her arm, which was warm, but I swear I couldn’t see her breathing. I don’t know to this day if she was dead or not. I don’t know if she was a whore or not. I don’t know how I got there. I couldn’t remember nothing about the baby. I couldn’t remember nothing about the whole week prior, in fact. I got up and pulled on my pants, I was shaking so bad all over I couldn’t hardly buckle my belt. The baby had set into a hard thin wail, like it was hopeless or something. The room was a wreck, liquor bottles and drinking glasses and cigarette butts and clothes throwed all over the place. They was a gun on the floor by the bed that was not mine, it did not look much like a lady’s gun neither. The woman on the bed was not moving. She was a big woman. I reached down and got something to cover her with, or part of her anyway. Then I got out of there. I remember standing on the street in the blazing sunshine and looking back up at that window. I could still hear the baby wailing, but it sounded real far away, like a baby in another world.
Then I heerd my mamma speaking to me, plain as that blazing sun.
“Go on home now, son,” she told me, and so I did.
I got back to find that Daddy had had a stroke and couldn’t say a thing, nor move his left leg. He would walk after while, he got some better, but he dragged his left foot the rest of his life. Durwood and Lizzie and me figgered out later that Daddy had had the stroke just right about the time that I had heerd Mamma speaking to me up in West Virginia. Somehow it didn’t surprise me none to learn this.