by Lee Smith
“Well, good Lord!” Georgia said when she got a good look at me. “It’s not like we’re going away forever!”
Virgie handed me a Kleenex and a cigarette and a silver lighter. “Here you go, honey,” she said. Then Mamma went back into the house, and I hauled off down the road with my cousin Georgia and my wild Aunt Virgie, a high school education and a rhinestone tiara and not a clue as to what lay ahead.
But before I get into what all befell us as Raindrops, I feel a need to go back for a minute and tell how we got to this point. I chalk it up to biology, myself. I think it’s in the genes. Me, I never wanted to do anything but sing. I used to read those early clippings about the Grassy Branch Girls over and over. . . . I used to wish I was them, that I’d been born twenty years earlier, so I could have been one of the Grassy Branch Girls too, and lived in a simpler time. At the very least I wished I’d been born into the other side of the family, and got to live in the big house and have lots and lots of brothers, and stay up late singing on the porch, and drink as many Nehi orange drinks as I wanted to out of the old red cooler R.C. kept in the barn, a cooler just like they had at the store. I thought this was wonderful.
But our life was different from that. Now it seems to me like Mamma was all the time going around the house turning off lights, to save electricity she said. When I think of home, I think of darkness. Mamma also saved every scrap of food, so that our refrigerator was full of little jars covered with tinfoil. Every now and then she’d go through and clean them out—they’d have gray stuff growing on them by then. Daddy used to kid her about this habit, saying, “Now who in the hell is going to eat those three tablespoons of corn, Alice?” but she’d spoon the corn into the little jar anyway, and he’d wink at me. Mamma saved string, pieces of tinfoil, buttons and ribbons and rubber bands. She even saved the inside cardboard part of toilet paper rolls. I bet she still saves them. “You’re a pack rat, Alice,” Daddy’d say, winking at me.
Mamma was crazy for washing dishes, too. When we were through eating, she couldn’t let a dish set on the table without jumping up to wash it. Then I’d have to jump up, too, because Daddy would say, “Katie, help your mamma.”
Actually, Daddy seemed real fond of Mamma; even the things about her that drove me crazy were okay with him. I never heard him say a word against her in my life. But it was like he wasn’t quite up to Mamma somehow.
Here’s what I mean. This happened about a year before Daddy died. He had been out on a drunk for a week or more, which was not uncommon, for after Grandaddy Durwood passed away, Daddy just cut loose. It was like he’d been holding back in order to please Grandaddy Durwood. Anyway, Daddy had been off someplace for a while. Mamma and Mamma Tampa were squabbling in the kitchen that morning over how to cook an egg (Mamma Tampa liked hers fried hard as a rock, Mamma always gave it to her runny, then Mamma Tampa said that Mamma was just trying to torment her and run her off). Well, I heard this discussion every morning of my life, every morning! And that day I wasn’t even hardly listening to it, I was going over the multiplication tables in my mind, for we had a big test in Miss Bell’s class. I grabbed my books and sweater, hollered, “Bye!” and set off down the hill early to catch the school bus down by Grassy Branch. It was a pale misty morning in early spring.
I had not gotten but about a hundred yards from the house when I saw a man’s legs sticking out of the brush by the side of the road. Mist was all around me, nobody else on the road. At first I thought it was a dead man, of course. A body.
I dropped my books and screamed.
Then Daddy set up and said, “Hush, Katie, you’ll scare your mother to death!”
“You scared me to death!” I said. I was crying and laughing both. “What are you doing over there, Daddy?”
“I was just taking me a little rest,” he said with a lot of dignity under the circumstances. “I’ll be going on home shortly.”
“Mamma’s been real worried about you,” I said, which was a lie—Mamma never said one word about his disappearances.
“She has, has she?” Daddy peered out at me from under his bushy eyebrows and his beat-up hat. I could hardly see his face. Then all of a sudden he gave a huge, deep sigh, as if all the life was going right out of him. “Well, she’s a good woman,” he said sadly. Daddy sat in the brush staring out through the mist on the road, looking like he’d lost his last friend, and I stood there holding my books and looking at him.
“Come here, honey,” Daddy said after a while, and so I went over and held out my hand and he took it and got up. He had a hard time getting up. Then he leaned over and kissed the top of my head. “You better get on down the road, doll,” he said—he always called me “doll”—“you’ll miss the bus.”
“No, I’m early,” I said, but I went on, while he turned toward home.
As I walked down the hill, mist swirling all around me, I felt like I was all alone in an uncertain world, and like the last thing on earth I ever wanted to be was a good woman.
Still, it was easy for me to see how Mamma got that way. In her own family, Freda was mean and Virgie was wild, so Mamma was good. Everybody has got to be something, and it was the only thing left to be. Mamma grew up as the kind of little girl who’d cry if you said “Boo” to her. But she loved her father, my Grandaddy Durwood, with all her heart, and so it fell to her to take care of him a lot of the time when he was sick, while Mamma Tampa and Virgie and the others were on the road. Freda’s job was to do the housework. Mamma’s job was to nurse Grandaddy, and she went about it like an angel, keeping it up even after she got married and I was born. Often she’d take me over there with her, and oh how I loved to play on the log-cabin quilt on the brass bed where Grandaddy stayed—they had put the bed right out in the sitting room so he could see everyone that came by, for Grandaddy loved people, he loved a joke or a song, right up until the last. After he got so thin, Mamma used to make him boiled custard all the time and get me to carry it over there in a mason jar. Her boiled custard was about the only thing he’d eat.
Now I wonder if my own daddy didn’t resent all that attention Mamma lavished on Grandaddy—and on me, and on our church, too, the little old church on Chicken Rise, for honestly she was the most church-loving woman I ever knew. She has a beautiful voice still yet, even though the only songs she’ll sing are the old church songs. And Mamma was home-loving to a fault. Didn’t want to go anywhere else, or do anything else, the complete opposite of Virgie. Mamma wanted to stay put, and for everyone else to stay put, too, and for everything to always stay the same.
Of course, that is the one thing that never happens.
Grandaddy died in 1941, Daddy drank himself to death in 1943, and I left home in 1947 with Virgie and Georgia, heading for bright lights and hard times, only I didn’t know about the hard times yet.
You know, in my whole entire life I have never heard Mamma say one word about drinking, Grandaddy’s drinking or Daddy’s, either one. Mamma believes that if you don’t mention something, then it’s not happening. I do remember one time, in about fourth grade, I came home from school and repeated something I’d heard on the school bus, that Tillie Dew said her mamma said that my grandaddy was an alcoholic. I asked Mamma what that meant. She just looked at me for a minute with her blue eyes blazing. Then she slapped me so hard across the face that I fell against the wall. I had the marks of her fingers on my face for a week afterward. “Don’t you ever, ever let me hear you say such a thing about your grandaddy again,” Mamma said. “It is bad manners.”
And as for Daddy, I never even saw him take a drink, because Mamma wouldn’t allow a drop of liquor in the house, and it was her house after all, the little old dog-trot house that Grandaddy gave them after they married so young without a penny to their name. I still can’t figure out why they did it, got married I mean, since Mamma wasn’t even pregnant. One time I asked her, and she just said, “Well, Katie, he asked me,” in her whiny way, but a funny little smile played around her lips. So I give up! You can’t tell
what goes on between people, you can’t figure it out in a million years. By the time I got old enough to think about it, my mamma was certainly not what you would call an object of desire. But Daddy was no prize, either. I spent my childhood being generally embarrassed about one or the other of them, and sneaking over to stay as long as I could at Rose Annie’s or any of my other friends’ houses—anything to keep from sitting in the dark in my own house and acting like I felt sorry for Daddy laying in bed with the flu when I knew better all along. So I got real good at covering up things, and not letting anybody know how I felt.
I learned to lie like a rug.
I remember one time when Mamma had a bruise on her upper arm, and I knew how she’d gotten it, and she knew I knew, but of course we had not discussed it. Well, there was a Ladies’ Circle meeting set for our house, and Mamma was determined to have it anyway, and so she wore a long-sleeve dress and acted like she wasn’t even hot, in the middle of August.
We were sitting out on the porch with the women from the church, rocking and fanning, and Mamma was passing around a tray that had ice tea with lemon and mint in it.
“Now where’s that Ray?” Mrs. Branham asked, and Mamma answered smoothly that he was working on a construction job in West Virginia, which was the first I’d heard of it.
Then, “Alice, aren’t you just burning up in that dress?” my Aunt Freda asked.
“Why, no,” Mamma said, beads of sweat standing all along her upper lip. “I think it’s right pleasant out here.” Freda and some of the other women were peering at Mamma’s face.
“I don’t think it’s a bit hot!” I said real loud, rocking my chair so violently that I broke a geranium pot on the porch, and then we had to clean that up, and the moment passed. I got good at things like this, and in a funny way I didn’t even mind so much. A person can get used to anything, you know, and also I loved Daddy. I did. I loved him more than I loved Mamma. I know this is hard to understand. I felt guilty about it, too. But when Daddy died, I just couldn’t quit grieving—nor could Mamma, to be honest.
Mamma and me did not have near as much in common after he was gone, it was like our sad secret had held us together, and with him gone, there was not much left between us. Oh, we tried. We both tried.
But even the way I walked around a room bothered her. She just didn’t know what to do with me, as I said. Then when Mamma Tampa came to live with us, it all got a lot worse. Now Mamma Tampa was never what you would call sweet, even before she went crazy, so she was real hard to deal with. Everybody said Mamma was a saint for putting up with Mamma Tampa, and I reckon this is so, but I just went straight up the wall. I’m no saint and never have been. I felt like I’d never get out of that house, like I was going crazy, like I’d die there. I believe I would have died if I’d stayed any longer.
I felt like we’d always be sitting in the front room, just the three of us, watching the night come on. In a funny way it seemed like the men had never really been there at all, Daddy and Grandaddy, like they’d been just passing through and only this was real, the sunlight fading on the old flowered carpet, the shadows growing under the furniture until I felt that something dark was hiding under everything, just waiting to come out and get me, absorb me into that room, those lives.
I left.
Even then, I knew it was a turning point in my life. Sometimes you can see a turning point when it comes, sometimes you can’t. Sometimes it is only later, a lot later, that you realize what was important and what was not. I know Mamma didn’t understand that it was as hard for me to go as it would have been for me to stay. It hurt her, my leaving like that. She thought I was picking Virgie over her. I wasn’t though. I was just doing what I had to. But it would never be the same between me and Mamma again, for she was bound to disapprove of what I was bound to do. Riding around the bend in the big white car with Virgie and Georgia, I did not look back. I took a long hard drag on my cigarette and rolled down the window to let the wind blow my hair.
2
I Have a Baby
If I thought I was hitching my wagon to a star when I hooked up with Aunt Virgie, I was dead wrong. It was more like getting soldered onto a comet. Aunt Virgie didn’t really have a great voice, nor any particular skill on that old gutbucket guitar. What she did have was energy, I mean electricity just sizzling out of every pore, enough to turn on every light in the whole city of Richmond. There’s something real attractive about energy, pure and simple—it took me a while to catch on to the fact that nobody else took Aunt Virgie quite so serious as she took herself, nor have quite so high a regard for her talents as she did.
Why, back home on Grassy Branch, we all thought she was a big star, and read over and over those clippings and programs she sent back to us from the faraway places she was working, places like Texas and Iowa and the state of Washington. Now I know praise is cheap. Paper is even cheaper, and advertising is the cheapest thing there is. Those posters and programs didn’t mean as much as we thought. Anybody can go to a printer, or hold a show. But back then, we thought Aunt Virgie was a big star, and that big white car she drove every time she came home proved it.
Come to find out, but this was lots later, that a man who turned out to be married had given that car to Virgie, to keep her from paying a call on his wife. Come to find out, too, that Virgie left Grassy Branch because R.C. made her, after he had to go over to Big Al’s Café in Bristol and bring her back home one time too many, Big Al calling up real respectful on the phone to say that he knew Mr. R.C. would want to know that his kin woman was laying drunk in a room upstairs. R.C. and Virgie really got into it after this, and she finally left home in a pickup truck with a man that none of us had ever seen before or would ever see again, hanging out the window calling R.C. names.
But then she won some kind of a talent contest over in Kentucky, and first thing we knew she was on WHAS out of Louisville, and somehow ended up on the Renfro Valley Barn Dance, which was mighty high cotton indeed, with the likes of Red Foley and Aunt Idy Harper and Little Clifford, and the Coon Creek Girls. Virgie never sang solo on there, but she did have a little comedy act she’d do with the rest of them, and she sang in the cast, and on the Sunday Morning Gatherin’ show too. Virgie hated Lily May Ledford, though, one of the Coon Creek Girls, and she got to telling tales about her, and eventually John Lair fired her.
Virgie bounced around from one radio station to another for a while then, not staying anyplace long, until she decided that an all-girl comedy act was the way to go, and came back to get me and Georgia. By this time she had got a reputation in the business as being difficult, which is the kiss of death, as there is always another girl from up in a holler somewhere just waiting to take your place, with a big country grin all over her face. She’s nicer than you. She can sing better, too. So it don’t do to be difficult. But Virgie was, and she was known for it, although me and Georgia didn’t know it for a while.
At first we went right along with all of Virgie’s ideas, since we surely had none of our own. Mamma Rainette and the Raindrops really was something different in the world of radio right then, I’ll say that for us. For her role as Mamma Rainette, Virgie wore a funny hat with a huge black feather on it, a fancy red and black satin dress pinched in at the waist to where I didn’t see how she could even breathe, red leather high-heel boots with silver toes, and a ton of makeup, including the longest false eyelashes you ever saw. Her dress was cut real low. The running joke in the act was that Virgie was trying to marry us (the Raindrops) off, so she could get a man before she was too old (not such a joke!), but our role was to be too stupid for marrying off. In fact we were supposed to be just short of retarded, and our act consisted mostly of telling dumb jokes to each other, such as the knock-knock jokes and Little Moron jokes that were real popular then. Our radio names were Bitty and Elvira.
ELVIRA: Bitty, do you know why the Little Moron threw the clock out the window?
BITTY: Why, Lord no, Elvira, I can’t imagine nobody doing a dumb thing like
that! Why did the Little Moron throw the clock out the window?
ELVIRA: Why, shoot, honey, he jest wanted to see time fly!
In all the Little Moron jokes, the Little Moron came off smarter than we did! There was a couple of skits that were right funny, though, one in particular that got us in hot water with the station. It featured me and Georgia as Old Farmer Brown and his Old Wife, and it went like this. (We were supposed to be sitting out on the porch talking.)
FARMER BROWN: Well, wife, I paid off the mortgage today. Now we own this here farm free and clear.
WIFE: (Sounds real mournful) Well, that’s good, I reckon.
FARMER BROWN: You reckon! Why, what in tarnation’s the matter with you, woman? Hit’s what we always dreamed of, ain’t it? Ain’t you happy?
WIFE: Hit’s jest hard fer me to be happy about anything when I think about our two daughters a-layin out there in the cemetery.
FARMER BROWN: Well, wife, ain’t it the truth! I know I oughtn’t to say it, but to tell you the truth, sometimes I’d a heap rather they was dead!
We were country as they come. At first, I didn’t know any better. Later, I came to hate it, wearing those crazy getups she made us wear, straw hats and bloomers and big black clodhopper lace-up boots, our red-checkered dresses buttoned up wrong.
But I had to admit, the crowds at the Old Dominion Barn Dance just ate us up, and I do love applause as much as anybody. We were a big hit. The Barn Dance even took a bunch of publicity photos of us to promote the show, and put up four big billboards with our pictures on them twenty feet high, grinning like the fools we were. Georgia and me made Virgie drive us out Monument Avenue in Richmond every day to look at ourselves on our billboard, we just couldn’t get over it! We were as big as General Lee, and lots more important!