The Devil's Dream

by Lee Smith

  “I cannot say at the present time how many of these numbers the Victor Talking Machine Company will release as recordings,” he announces formally. “The final decisions always involve factors beyond my control. But I can certainly tell you that this has been a productive session here today, and I feel that we have gotten some fine tunes out of it. I will be contacting you shortly.” Mr. Peer shakes hands with R.C., then with each of the women in turn, except for Lucie, who is walking the floor with Bill.

  Head down under pretext of tending to the baby, Lucie cries softly. For it seems to her that they have just given up something precious by singing these songs here to these strangers, and she feels a sudden terrible sense of loss. She knows it’s silly to feel this way, but somehow that doesn’t help. Mr. Peer notices and comes over to pat her, awkwardly, on the back. “Artists are real temperamental,” he says to R.C. “I’ve seen it a million times.”

  R.C. nods. He puts his arm around Lucie and the baby and steers them out the door, saying he’ll come back in a minute for the rest of the instruments. Mr. Peer nods. He takes a swig of excellent brandy from a silver flask the minute they are all out the door, then hands it over to the engineers, then to R.C. when he comes back up alone. R.C. tilts his head back for a long swallow. The liquor goes down fiery but smooth. He has never tasted any liquor like it. “Mighty fine,” he says to Mr. Peer, handing the flask back, and Mr. Peer says again that he’ll be in touch.

  It’s already thundering by the time R.C. gets his instruments and women packed back up into the Model T; it’s already raining by the time he finds Durwood exactly where he thought he might find him, in Bull Boyd’s saloon down by the railroad tracks, dead drunk. Bull is happy to help R.C. load Durwood into the car. The thunderstorm has passed by the time they start for home in a gentle rain, with the windshield wipers beating time to R.C.’s thoughts. The women are first talkative, then querulous, then sleepy. R.C. doesn’t pay them any mind. He’s too busy thinking over the events of the past few days.

  R.C. first learned about these recording sessions nearly a month ago as he sat reading the newspaper in a Bristol barbershop, waiting to get his hair cut. The advertisement was small. It stated merely that Victor would have a recording machine in Bristol for ten days commencing in late July. Interested acts and persons were urged to apply in writing. An address was given—the same address that is printed on the letterhead at the top of the contract now in R.C.’s pocket.

  At the time, R.C. tore the advertisement from the paper and took it home to show his family, but only Virgie was interested. “It’s too far to go,” Lucie said flatly, and even Tampa called the plan a “wild-goose chase.” Both women were mad at him anyway. They reminded R.C. of the money he had just lost on a disastrous land speculation involving a gold mine in North Carolina. R.C., chastened, gave up.

  But then on July 28, with the Victor sessions already in progress, R.C. came across a reporter’s account of watching Mr. Ralph Peer record local star Ernest Stoneman and Eck Dunford singing “Skip to My Lou.” The article read: “The synchronizing is perfect. Ernest Stoneman playing the guitar, the young matron the violin, and a young mountaineer the banjo and mouth harp. Bodies swaying, feet beating a perfect rhythm, it is calculated to go big when offered to the public.”

  The last paragraph, the one R.C. kept reading over and over, revealed that Pop Stoneman was paid a hundred dollars per day; his sideman, twenty-five. It further stated that Stoneman had received thirty-six hundred dollars in royalties the year before.

  R.C. read this article while sitting at the soda fountain in Sutton’s Drug Store in Cana. He rolled up the paper, put it under his arm, and went to the back of the store, where he used Homer Sutton’s telephone to call the number given. Mr. Peer would return the call in an hour’s time, he was told. R.C. smoked and paced while he waited, refusing to tell the curious denizens of Sutton’s soda fountain what he was up to.

  Finally the phone rang. R.C. rushed to answer it. The appointment was made. Then all R.C. had to do was convince the women, but this was accomplished more easily than he’d thought. Tampa was impressed by the amount of Pop Stoneman’s royalties; Virgie was ready to go anyplace at the drop of a hat anyway. Lucie had been feeling bad because she’d been so hard on R.C. about the gold deal (after all, he was a good man; he was a good provider; he did take care of them all), so a little sweet-talk did the trick there.

  Now, driving them all back home, R.C. is still full of excitement. He feels like he might explode. He doesn’t see how in the world they can all be asleep, in spite of the fact that they left home before dawn. How can they sleep like that? R.C. rolls the window of the Model T down. The night air is cool and mysterious, full of possibility. The rain comes in on his face. R.C. drives them home through the rainy night, on fire with thoughts of the future.

  3

  Flowers in the Meadow

  I’ve been gatherin’ flowers in the meadow

  For to wreathe around your head,

  But so long you have kept me a-waitin’,

  They’re all withered now and dead.

  I’ve been gatherin’ flowers on the hillside

  To bind them on your brow,

  But so long you have kept me a-waitin’

  The flowers are faded now.

  Oh, many a mile with you I’ve wandered,

  And many an hour with you I’ve spent,

  Till I thought your heart was mine forever,

  Now I know hit was only lent.

  Now I will seek some distant river,

  And there I’ll spend my days and years,

  I’ll eat no food but the green willow

  And drink no water but my tears.

  1

  Rose Annie Bailey Rush

  Well, I know Gladys was only trying to help out and clean up around here, I know she didn’t mean any harm by throwing it away, and I just jumped all over her anyway—I swear, sometimes I don’t have no control over what I do. And now she has took off mad in the car. I don’t blame her. But Buddy’ll have a fit when he hears it. “Just don’t be mean to Mamma,” he always says. “You know how much she does for us,” he says. Well, I do know it, and Lord knows I’m thankful. I can’t stand how I act half the time. But I swear, I can’t seem to do much better, no matter how hard I try. I do go to church, and I read the Bible and The Upper Room and Good Housekeeping and the Reader’s Digest, I try real hard to be as good of a wife and mother and citizen as I can (Buddy is in the Toastmasters), but things get away from me somehow. I’ll be washing the dishes one minute and crying in the garage the next. It is like a black cloud comes up out of noplace and smothers me down to the ground.

  And poor Buddy—Buddy’s so good about it all. If he sees that I really can’t get up sometimes, that I just can’t take the kids to school or to church or go down to the ceramics shop or do whatever it is that I’m supposed to do that day, he just does it himself and doesn’t say one word about it either. Buddy is a modern-day saint. He’ll do it himself, or he’ll call Gladys if he can’t. Of course now Gladys has got some things to say, believe me! But at least she does it and she’s got the decency not to say them to my face. Don’t you think I haven’t heard her, though!—telling everybody that I’m just spoiled. I’ve heard her say this to Buddy a million times too, and worse, but Buddy is just so good, he’ll say, “Now Mamma, I’ve always told you that Rose Annie is real delicate. You know how artistic she is.” Buddy is proud of this!

  Why, he still tries to get me to sing sometimes, even though he knows I don’t have any heart for it now. I feel like it is somebody else that used to sing, and not me. But Buddy grew up right down the road here, the other side of Holly Springs, so he knew all about my family and the Grassy Branch Girls—why, Gladys still has these scrapbooks, you ought to see them. She’s got one on Virgie and the girls too—Mamma Rainette and the Raindrops, excuse me! Gladys is more interested in the Raindrops than she is in her own grandchildren, if you ask me. Of course she’s got a Hank Will
iams scrapbook too, and never tires of telling how she saw him in person at the Armory in Knoxville in 1952, “not a year before his death,” she always says. She’s got an Elvis scrapbook now too, she particularly likes Elvis because he’s so good to his mother, who is also named Gladys.

  Gladys is a lot more interested in music than Daddy is, even though it used to be his whole life. He don’t have no more heart for it either. I don’t know if he just can’t stand it since Mamma died or if he got pitched off at Virgie going off like that without so much as a by-your-leave, not asking him no advice. Daddy always ran the show when it was the Grassy Branch Girls, you know. It was him that thought of it being a sister act in the first place, and him that found the songs. Now he won’t talk about those days at all. But he’s still got that old record player from the Sterchi furniture store out in the shed, in what he calls his office, and you can hear him out there sometimes all night long, playing their old records—“Melungeon Man” in particular—over and over.

  The Grassy Branch Girls made nineteen recordings before the Depression brought it all to a halt, and they could of kept on if they’d been willing to pick up and move someplace else to be on the radio, like the Carters went down to Del Rio, Texas, and got on that border station. But Mamma didn’t want to leave home—she loved this place so—and Aunt Tampa wouldn’t leave Uncle Durwood, and that was that. But Virgie was always hot to trot, so nobody was surprised when she done so. I was glad when Virgie left, she used to give me a headache trying to boss everybody around. Of course back in those days I used to have a lot of headaches anyway; this was part of my nervous breakdown which I don’t remember too much about, to tell you the truth.

  To this day Buddy tells me he doesn’t want me to overdo, he thinks I might have another nervous breakdown. He knows all about my nervous breakdown, but he doesn’t know anything about the baby, of course. Nobody did but Daddy and Aunt Freda, and Freda’s dead now.

  Actually Buddy has always seemed kindly proud of my nervous breakdown in a funny way. He never knew anybody else to have one, so he says. He thinks I’m special because of it.

  Sometimes he still takes my hands in his big old hands and says, “Looky here, how little you are! Looky here how little,” and he likes to run his big old finger real gentle along my collarbone. “You are like a little doll,” he says, “a little old china doll,” and since he has done so good in the contracting business, he just keeps on giving me things like I am a real doll—two diamond rings and a diamond lavaliere, a cashmere sweater set, a whole lot of fancy underwear and negligees, a nutria coat, that big white Buick out there in the drive. He loves to give me clothes. Then he likes for me to get dressed up and model them for him, while he sits in the recliner of an evening, taking a drink. I don’t mind. I haven’t got anything better to do.

  Buddy is real good to me and I know it. I can’t imagine what would of happened to me if he hadn’t come along and married me when he did. It saved my life, I reckon, and God knows I’m grateful, and I try to be the best wife I can, as I said, but I swear there’s this black empty place right down inside me ever since Johnny left. I don’t say anything about it, ever, but I know it’s there, and sometimes I think Buddy knows it too.

  I believe Buddy thought a baby would fix me right up. Well, a lot of men think that. And when it didn’t, when I had the postpartum depression as Dr. Baxter called it, he said it is common as dirt, why, Buddy just couldn’t take it in for a time.

  Then he said, “What we need around here is a little girl,” and so we had Sugar right away. There is fifteen months between Buddy Junior and Sugar, her real name is Lucie, for Mamma, but that didn’t do it either, pep me up I mean, although I go to great pains to raise my children the best I can and I do love them, and I do love Buddy. I do. I love how smooth and feathery his crew cut feels on the top and how he takes such good care of a car. I love that line which comes up between his eyebrows when he’s really concentrating, looking at somebody’s house plans on a table. I love how excited he gets over a ball game. Buddy was picked “Most Likely to Succeed” in the high school yearbook, and he has.

  I was not in that high school yearbook because of my nervous breakdown, but that’s also the year that my cousin Katie was Miss Holly Springs High. Buddy could have had her, or anybody, for his girlfriend, but instead he went in the army and then came back here and married me, all of it real deliberate the way he does everything, like he is following a blueprint.

  I know I’m lucky to have him, and our two children, and this lovely brick home. I’m lucky that Gladys lives right down the road and doesn’t mind helping out so much.

  Buddy is the one that insisted on setting me up in the ceramics shop too, after Dr. Baxter told him I ought to have something to do, and get out more. I must say it’s been a real big success, no thanks to me in particular. Everybody else around here needed something to do too, it looks like. I believe about half my customers like to come in to talk and gossip just as much as they like to make Christmas trees or frogs or mushrooms or whatever. It’s kind of like going to the beauty shop, I reckon. And when I don’t feel like going down there myself, why, Tammy Burnette runs it just as good as I do.

  Tammy Burnette is my business partner and was just ahead of Buddy and I in high school, only she’s never married and keeps house for her brother, he never married either, so she’s glad to get out and do something too. She ran the shop by herself last summer when me and Buddy and Gladys took the kids to Florida. When we got back, Tammy had washed the windows and took in a hundred forty-five dollars and started making these little clay animals to use in macramé wall hangings, she got it out of a magazine. Everybody just went wild about Tammy’s wall hangings. “These are great!” I said. “I wish you would do us an orange and brown one for the family room.” But at that, Tammy started crying. “I wish I had a family,” she said, and she just cried and cried and cried. Her mascara ran all over my white shell top.

  “You just don’t know how lucky you are,” Tammy said to me then.

  People tell me this all the time. Whiny old Aunt Alice won’t shut up about it, for instance. “If I had me a new ranch-style house on top of a hill with a General Electric kitchen and a nice husband like you,” she says, “I believe I would be able to get up out of the bed.” Lord, there’s times when I miss Mamma so much! For Mamma would of understood. I can’t hardly stand to think about Mamma as it puts me in mind of the old days, which I generally try not to think about either, since I get so blue.

  But it’s hard, you know, still living right here where we all grew up.

  When I stand in this living room and look out this picture window, everything I see reminds me. Everything. Of course, Daddy was real generous to give Buddy and me this big piece of land to build on, and it’s real nice to be up here on the ridge, where you catch every little breeze and can see for miles all up and down Grassy Branch bottom, clear to the fork where the P.O. and the store and the Pure Oil station and my ceramics shop is. Right down there is the house we all grew up in. Daddy has put that nice new aluminum siding on it now; Buddy gave him a good deal on the siding. And there’s all the outbuildings, and Daddy’s office, and the barn where we played on rainy days, and the burning bush by the gate, and Mamma’s hollyhocks which come up every year along the fencerow. Mamma used to love those hollyhocks.

  There’s Durwood and Tampa’s house down the road, and then that little house that Daddy gave Aunt Alice and Uncle Ray, and then Robert Floyd and Ellen’s place, and then that A-frame that Clarence built for his first wife.

  Everything I see reminds me of everything else.

  I see the road where I learned to drive a car, and setting up there on cinder blocks back of Daddy’s is the car I learned on. There’s the field where I kept my pony, there’s the clothesline where Sally stood when she died. Mamma told it again and again, how Sally died. Seems like I remember everything that happened to me, and everything that happened to the rest of my family too. Seems like I am a walking memor
y, sometimes.

  There’s the creek where we played and the swimming hole Robert Floyd made by dynamiting the sycamore tree—that is where Johnny taught me to swim. Oh Johnny. Johnny, Johnny Johnny, I see him everywhere I look, I reckon this is the problem. Maybe if I had got away from here somehow, things would of been different. But as it is, when I stand here and look out this window, it is like I am looking at myself and Johnny, at a hundred little mes and Johnnys all up and down this valley. I can’t get away from me and Johnny. Maybe I’d go crazy if I did. I don’t know.

  Back when it all happened, I did what Daddy said, because I couldn’t think what else to do. Then when he said, “You couldn’t hardly do no better than Buddy Rush,” I said, “Yes. Yes, Buddy. Yes,” because even I knew that was true. I had to marry somebody, didn’t I?

  Now Buddy knows some of this, but he don’t know all of it. He is not even real interested in the past; the past don’t drag on him the way it does me.

  For instance, when I look out this window and see my children—there’s Buddy Junior now in the driveway on his little bike with the training wheels, and some neighbor kids from down in the bottom too, they all come up here because it’s the best place around to ride; Buddy is right when he says you can’t put too much concrete around a house—when I see all these kids out the window, what I really see is me and Johnny and Georgia and Katie, oh we ran these hills around Grassy Branch like little animals, wild and free. We didn’t have any concrete then—nor any grownups watching us out the window.

  See, in those years the grownups were gone so much, off singing someplace, that many’s the time we children were left to our own devices, and many is the game we played.

  Now, Aunt Virgie was Johnny and Georgia’s mother, but Johnny never did know his father, who was nothing but a voice in the night anyway, according to her. Aunt Virgie was actually married to Georgia’s daddy, though, for six months, and had a piece of paper to prove it. When she left him, he set their house on fire. This is true. Burned it to the ground. Virgie came back to Grassy Branch for good after that, and here she’s been ever since, except for the occasional excursion, as Daddy calls it, such as the time she went off to Arkansas for a while with a married man.